A Book of Death and Fish (17 page)

I couldn’t go back up the stairs after that conversation in the phonebox. A good healthy whiff of exhaust down my lungs might help. I walked along the road first, not sure why. I’d got used to the traffic noise and lights. That was before the bypass. Sharp night.

The shadow of the swimming pool – it was closed in winter. Remember outdoor pools? Spaced along the east coast, Tarlair, Stonehaven, Arbroath, Eyemouth.

The olman had driven us from one to the other, one summer holiday, since we’d learned to swim.

And, of course, that night I took the path away from the bridge, the one that led round to the sea. Heard the sifting of pebbles down the shore. Heard a Gaelic song in my head. A tune I never knew I knew.

Coming by the breakwater. The smaller trawlers were landing. A few boats still worked longlines. Then there were smaller boats still, ones that could take the ground, as they say, fall over on one side when the tide dropped, keel in the mud.

Amongst them I saw the
Fidelity
. PD. Registered in Peterhead. But when you said the two letters it could be peedie, as in the Shetland way of saying wee.

She was half-decked, rigged with a bowsprit. The details, again. I was seeing with a close-up lens and the focus was sharp. When you’re fucking hurt, guilty to the core, the perceptions burn bright.

A man in a fishing gansey and a Hamburg or Breton-type cap was checking her running mooring, taking up slack. There was a bit of a blow coming in.

When I admired the boat, he said I was from Lewis, had to be, from the voice.

‘You’re not, though. Northumberland? But how come you caught on to my accent so fast?’

Well, how had I caught on to his? Pretty fair stab, that.

‘I went to hear some guys play tunes. Tapped along with them. The small-pipes player, he was Northumberland.’

‘Aye, and so were his pipes. But I lived on Lewis enough years, to recognise a voice from SY. Well, I’ve started all over again here. New family. Come on up to the house.’

James led me, one street back from the harbour. Wilma was an artist; graphics, drawings, mainly. His boy played the piano. Electric one, though. They just called it playing keyboards, these days. Mostly jazz. One of his girls had made a career of music – clarinet. We could put a record on later. On the high-fidelity.

We talked about fishing boats.

The shape of the
Fidelity
was a forerunner of the decked drifters, great black smooth ships that carried a massive dipping lug forward and a standing lug aft, not much smaller. This was a little craft, maybe nineteen-foot six. The scaffies had often been built to thirty-foot or more. He didn’t know of any of those which had survived. Being open to the skies, a lot of them were lost in famous storms. Government Inquiries recommended a move to decked boats.

There was a toddler and a baby. A large fish tank. Oriental rugs on the walls and on the floor. The hangings all had a twist to the warp or weft and the colourings were something.

The wee girl led me up the stairway to see the trains. We bypassed a blue painted spar with a white cotton sail bent on it. Aye, I’ve a very understanding wife.

‘A wife as flipping crazy as himself, more like,’ Wilma said.

The trains seemed huge to me. I forgot what gauge they were but many of the locomotives and trucks were handmade. Wilma came up and got it going and showed me photos she’d done where the speeding engines looked huge.

We usually spoke about boats. Now and again tunes were mentioned.

‘Wait now, here’s something you’ve got to hear. A new pibroch, off the radio. I been working on it all week.’

‘Aye, tell me about it,’ Wilma said.

But it was me glancing to the clock which said ten o clock. I thought he was going to produce a chanter or a set of Northumbrian pipes. But no, the big Highland pipes appeared from their box.

‘That wee madam will be up another half-hour yet if I know her. She had a sleep in the afternoon and we’ve trained the wee guy to sleep through anything. And the natives are pretty friendly. They like the pipes here.’

‘Just as well,’ I said.

James played the pibroch, pacing slowly all the time. Their house was amongst others, a fine group of stone shapes but sandstone, not granite. The whole swaying big music with no-one banging on the wall to interrupt.

He took me for a dram, then. There was The Ship and The Marine. And I came close to breaking the tack. Taking a drink, I mean. It was a bit difficult when it came to the pub, here. Back home it was no bother. Folk just assumed you had the
cùram
or else you had a problem with the
deoch
. So it was an orange juice and another knot in the gut. And then back to my high room, able to work on for a bit, in isolation.

The walk round the pier to their house became a feature of life in Stonehaven. Wilma tended to get the frying pan out as soon as look at me. Knowing that I couldn’t fight against eating when she’d gone to the bother. Besides, my nose would be twitching, on its own. She’d dig out stuff like lambs’ kidneys or a bit of frying liver. It was like being in
Ulysses
. I could still see that scene in the film with parts of a pig sizzling in the pan. I’ve never read the book but I read an extract somewhere and that was the bit.

Once, I stayed a day or two after the end of term, to get sailing. He’d recently installed a wee Ducati diesel. Very little vibration.

Wilma thought he’d sold out. They’d had some good cod last year. It was mostly long-lining, inshore here, which had saved the fishing. So far. I had my dinner with them and we waited for the wind to fall. Sides of cod from the freeze. Must have been a good-sized fish.

Did I like mine bare naked, like my women, or with a bit of sauce?

‘A bit of HP,’ I said.

‘Oh well,’ she said.

James and me walked as far as the seafront to check on the barograph, viewed through glass, at the corner. These were installed all round Scotland. Before outdoor swimming pools. After drownings.

It was steadier now, after a steep fall in pressure. We’d give it a go. Should moderate by evening.

‘First, these are the brails. The light lines gather the canvas and pull it up tight. Faster than lowering the sail by the halyard, if we have to. We
might need to. We should get the Ducati running and warmed up first. She’ll probably fire, first go. The dynastart is pretty good.’

She did fire up, not too much smoke. James looked proud.

‘We’ll keep her running,’ he said, ‘till we clear the pier. A bit of tide off there. OK, I’ll hold her nose in and you get that sail up but don’t lose these brails whatever you do.’

So I hoisted, hand over hand. Then I made the halyard fast. I knew not to do any locking turns. You could feel the boat taking the wind already. I was sensing her lean right over. The adrenalin was kicking in. I was ready to shift my slight weight. Coiling the slack.

Not really seeing that the heel was now quite violent. Water shouldn’t really be slopping in over an inboard engine. Even if it’s under a painted plywood hatch. Not really seeing that the skipper wasn’t looking that happy. Hearing it though, soon enough.

‘Never mind the bloody slack. The brails.’

I yanked at them and the sail gathered together to spill wind. One gunnel dipped. James lunged forward and we got the yard down together.

‘Hell’s teeth.’

Too much wind. It hit you when you cleared the breakwater. He just turned her in a wide circle then took her through the gap so I could pick up the mooring buoy we’d thrown off, only fifteen or twenty minutes before. But this small circle had done something to us. I’d only had one minor role but had played it, on demand. Maybe James was keen on testing these brails, that engine. Now he knew. The new systems could get you out of trouble.

It was The Ship. I came close to it, not only getting one for him but one for me too. But James had already ordered his Glenmorangie, my orange juice.

He’d been in a seminary, training for the priesthood. Cycled bloody miles from there to a pub. But he was serious all the same. That’s why he didn’t laugh at people’s beliefs. He’d been at the last hurdle. No, another story for another day. Enough drama for tonight, real life.

Two wives, five kids, maybe more to come, kids that was, probably not wives.

James never tried to steer me one way or the other. Get the degree, then decide. If you’d found a line you had to follow it. If anyone could make sense of the last century, they were on a worthwhile mission. But follow your own lines of enquiry, not the ones set by the other guys. You can surely jump through the hoops when it comes to the finals. Then get back to your real project. That’s all he could say. He said he’d done too many daft things to be able to advise anyone. It had worked out for him now, though.

See pibroch, most folk thought it was improvised music. Like a series of cadenzas. It wasn’t like that at all. There’s a set series of variations but they’ve been composed by a piper who’s gone before you. You don’t have that much freedom to move within them, at all.

I was thinking that percussion isn’t really that different. It’s like the timing in an engine. If it’s set right, you don’t really notice it.

The reality of the situation. As it is. One orange juice, one malt. Like the modern inboard engine in the historic boat. Like the nylon covering over the shrouds to prevent the sail chafing. Like being late with the phone call, missing the funeral.

Then beginning to see more clearly, at last. Learning the pibroch. Falling into the rhythm. So there’s a chance you can maybe keep momentum. Move on.

This is a meeting that took place in Billy Forsyth’s. That’s a bakery but I went in there for mushrooms. Everything in Prestos or Safeways, or whatever the hell Liptons was called these days, was pre-packed in big quantities. The ones on the bottom would be liquid by the time you reached them. Running away through the drainage holes in the package. Forsyth’s hasn’t changed much. Don’t go looking for that name on the sign, though. It never said that. It was always Hugh Matheson’s. Same way Calum Sgianach’s had a sign that said Malcolm MacLean’s, but you probably knew that.

You know how it is, though. You always buy something else as well and they’d started to do rye bread. But I’ve got this vice. Maybe you share it, I don’t know. Maybe these quirks you hide because you think you’re the only one and it turns out every second cove is afflicted by the same thing. I can’t avoid looking into other people’s shopping baskets.

The queue is going down, getting nearer the till and your eyes are in there before you know it. This one had red and green peppers. I was looking for a jar of olives, thinking she was going to make pizza but there wasn’t any and no aubergine, though they’d been on offer, at a price. So it didn’t look like ratatouille, either. Maybe some colour for the winter salads. That tied in with all these mixer drinks, the ginger ale and tonic and other things you wouldn’t want to drink on their own.

My eyes must have lifted for clues then because the beret caught me. Decent wool, but it was the angle. You can only call it panache. It had to be Mairi Bhan. She always had style. My mates couldn’t see it. She was kind of petite but the wit was fast off the mark. Of course her hair was
nearly black which was why she had the Gaelic nickname for ‘fair’. Short and wavy. But of course she was a year or two down the school and that was called babysnatching.

I was right back there. Something in her touch at the back of your neck, under the revolving reflective ball, with
Whiter Shade Of Pale
still lingering. Getting off with her at the SY YMCA.

And Fleetwood Mac before the boy Green got fat.
Because I Need Your Love So Bad.
And the walk to the lane up by the hostel. Which could get crowded on disco nights. It wasn’t a long walk but there was that one aberration of hers, the platform soled boots, which made it kind of slow. When she lost her own judgments to the pressures of marketing.

There was also a limit, though, in how fast I could walk, arm around Mairi, towards that lane. You might think twenty-six-inch flares, bought from an advert in
Sounds,
were enough for anybody. No but you could expand them by cutting the side gussets at the outside and sewing in an offcut of something else. A flash of colour to sweep and swirl from the black cotton. Flapping like hell on a course up Church Street.

There was a lot of sighing in the lane. It was a bit distracting hearing other people’s noises and wondering how far they were going. But then her tongue would get past my teeth like it was shoving them out of the way, roots and all, and I’d hold her and hug her. I liked her. Her nose. Her earlobes out from her curly hair, not the fashion of the day.

‘Garyvard. Hell, I could just about call in and see her by boat. Get hold of the Dangler’s launch and get hold of a mate and that was us sorted.’

‘Not quite m’atal. I’m going to be in Carloway for the holidays. Staying with my grannie. We take it turn about. My mother’s a
Siarach.’

So she was a
Siarach
-Lochie cross, just like my olman.

‘Carloway. Loch Roag. Hell, that’s round the top. The Butt of Lewis,’ I said.

‘Or through the Sound of Harris’.

‘That’s worse. The Board of Trade will never let us take the boat outside Lewis Territorial Waters.’

But I’d see her at the Carloway dance all right. End of term, everything seems possible. How the hell was I going to get from town out there? I
knew a few guys who could get hold of a car. But none of them wanted to go west on a Saturday night. Buses didn’t go that way after five p.m. and didn’t come back till the Monday morning. A cab was possible. The poaching money would have stretched that far. Kenny F took a cab to Brenish, once. End of the road. Then the girl wouldn’t see him. Or her father wouldn’t let her see him.

But I’d spent my share of the salmon money on Levi’s Originals. My olman thought I’d gone daft, sitting in the bath with them on. Shrink to fit. Took me two days to get the dye off the enamel. Then he’d caught me taking the scrubbing brush to them, against the roughcast. First time he’d seen me cleaning anything, he says. Maybe he shouldn’t moan.

Should have been a perfect summer. But I was missing Mairi’s peppery lips. I still had the taste of them. It was her voice as well. Not giggling. Bantering. There was a way to get out to her territory. We could take a borrowed tent with us, out of town. Kenny had himself together at the time. He’d take a creelman’s holiday and go dangling.

We assembled the gear, together. The tent was light enough because there was no flysheet but the six-inch nails, as pegs, added up to a few pounds. The cooking stove wasn’t so bad but the gas cylinder had to be carried on a stick between us.

Ruaraidh dropped us off, between Garynahine and Grimersta. We had the word on a couple of good trout lochs. It was too early and too dry for a chance of a salmon.

We got sunburnt so we punched each other when one rolled to brush against the other’s tender form, in the short night. We caught trout in each of four lochs. Caught so many we had to start releasing them. We’d eaten trout and beans. Trout and stale white bread. Trout and black pudding looked better on the plate, the pink and the mottled brown-black.

But then my rod just stayed over when I hit a fish and it did the running. When she gasped ashore, at last, she was the biggest I’d caught, nudging the two pounds. I faffed about, unhooking her. A two-pound trout was something to boast about. Then I tried supporting her upright in the clear water till the oxygen could get through her gills. It was too late. We couldn’t waste that fish but it was a struggle to eat the lot.

There were golden eagles circling the bays between the seacliffs. Wide wingtips breaking clear skies. It was Saturday and we rose early. We moved our base-camp to a spot near the crossroads. We’d get a few casts for sea trout in the seapool, near the road, before the toffs were at their breakfast. Kenny knew one of the watchers. We were fine till about nine.

We cast flies and watched the fins of a few bored fish follow them and flick a tail now and again. They weren’t interested in taking. They had sex on their tiny brains and wanted water to get up that stream of fresh water. It was just as well, we were stuffed with trout and if we’d scored a fish it wouldn’t be fresh by Monday, when we’d be back in the city. We could get a sleep and still have time to walk the whole way if we had to.

Karma was sound. Kudos could have been better, arriving courtesy of Massey-Ferguson. But we got there. Some of these village dances were two-bit jobs, with the accordionist propped against the back wall and fed occasionally from a half bottle. These guys had amplifiers – bass, lead with tremolo echo. I sighted Mairi Bhan’s pal first. Made a small attempt to get Kenny dancing with her. Then I was in Mairi’s smell and her wiry hair was over my burned face. Talk about ‘Be gentle with me, my darling’.

But she was and she led me away from the band who were trying to tell me that my cheating heart would tell on me. Out the door and the weight of Rayburn fume came at us in the calm air. It made the swirling smoke in the concrete hall seem healthy. Always a few collie dogs slinking by.

We didn’t go far. Down a croft, away from the road. Sad day we left it, the croft, not the road. We leaned back against the traditional backrest. A peatstack with a herringbone pattern. I could feel every hard bit of it, either side of my spine. My teeth didn’t get in her way any more and she went easy on my sunburned neck. She said she’d make it cool. I don’t know that she did but her tongue felt all right there, as well. Yes and there too. I stopped worrying about the peat-stack pattern getting embossed on my backside.

Maybe that’s another wee fetish which possesses more than one Lewisman. We all think we’re the only cove whose eyes roll at the thought of being gently guided backwards till your arse is hard up against a peat-stack.

Now, I’d know what to do, to play fair, to see her eyes smoke over. But the mind was racing with what you were supposed to do and supposed to be carrying and the only plastic or nylon in my pocket was a cast of fishing line.

If she was angry with me she didn’t show it. She led me back to her sleeping house. Cut me a doorstep from that morning’s loaf, the crust fired black. A slab of salty Anchor butter and another orange slab of Scottish Cheddar. More tea. And whispering talk and still more tea but on her lips this time, at the door. Not in a big hurry to leave.

Five minutes back to the hall and Kenny F was shaking his head. He’d had a lift arranged. No, not the Fergie. Some guys with a van were going to run us in, as far as Marybank. My mate had waited, not wanting to see me stranded and our lift was gone. There was one battered Cortina still there. How come they always had crumpled wings? Maybe these were the only ones allowed to be borrowed to get out to dances like this. Windows were pretty steamed up. That one wasn’t going nowhere for a while. So we turned two sets of heels on the district of Loch Roag.

We came close to calling it a night when we stumbled on a digger left at some roadworks, with the sliding door unlocked. Gospel according to JCB. It would have done for one, not for two. It was a long time since we’d moved camp that morning and energy was failing. But one foot follows the other and we made progress until what might have been the last roadworthy Morris Minor on the Island stopped for us. He dropped us close to our tent. ‘Help yourself to a fish from the boot.’

‘No thanks, cove.’

We slept for most of Sunday but got back out the moor, out of sight in the evening. We picked up some more trout to take home for the relations. At nine sharp on Monday, we were out on the road waiting to get collected. Angus showed up. Ruaraidh was on shift doing his best to keep the GPO on the road. Another Morris. Would you believe it? This was my olman’s Traveller, painted with the brush. My uncle had helped him with the brakes and put a new clutch in. The second engine ran like a sewing machine.

For the first time in my life, town felt strange. School went back. Word came from a go-between, older than me, that so and so, from the sixth
year, was interested but only if I considered myself unattached. She had long blonde hair, blue eyes and she was my own height. Everyone thought she was something. There was kudos in being seen with an older girl and she’d probably know what to do.

I was still in the summer clothes of rebellion, with the peace-and-love patches now sewn on to my new jeans in a pattern you hoped looked random – I had to conform. So I lost Mairi. From some far but still wakeful corner of my daft eyes, I saw her run from the YM hall. I was shuffling around it with my arms full of fair hair. Status smelled good. Until I saw the girl I really liked and desired going for that door. I was seized in my tracks. She was gone.

Until I bantered with her again at the check-out in Billy Forsyth’s. Of course, she recognised me. We’re only talking ten years. I was still reeling, just catching her words. They always had an open house. The sisters were all up as well, for the New Year anyway. I should make it out to Lochs.

You say these things. Where was she working? Glasgow again. Training to be an archivist. Park Bar was the place. And me?

‘Took some time out of Uni. Back there again but home to keep the olaid company for the holiday.’

‘Time for a coffee, across the road?’

What a forgiving lady. But there was a car hooting outside, where it shouldn’t be parked and she’d to gather up the bags and it was my turn to go through the check-out.

In another few weeks I’d be heading east. Far East this time – Aberdeen, in fact.