A Book of Death and Fish (18 page)

You slept for the best part of a day. Then you woke to inform me you were ready to do some walking. You realised then, it might sound pushy, put like that, in English. It's just that you'd been sitting on trains, aircraft, ferries. Now you were ready to get out into the open.

Only if that was all right with me.

I said it would be a bit better than all right and you smiled, a bit puzzled. You were tuning in to the local lingo.

As it happened, I was free till late in the afa. I was dishwashing later on.

You asked me if that's what I did for a living. Aye, I said, I was destined to be a porter of some kind. I used to work in the hospital. Now it was the kitchens. When I wasn't out with the boys, on the cliffs or breeches-buoy training. An auxiliary Coastguard. I hadn't got the grades so the PhD was out the window.

I told you how something happened during my finals. I was staring at the papers and they just didn't seem important. They said I could plead ‘special circumstances'. The essays had been all right. They said bereavement was a strange thing. Often there was a delayed reaction.

Aye, but I'd had my therapeutic year-out and I'd even had a fishing holiday. I wasn't doing so bad.

Then you told me that's really why you were here. It was now a year since your father had been reported lost. As if it was during a war. You'd been trying to support your mother but now you needed to get away, to find time for yourself. You remembered how we could say what we liked, in our letters. We could talk.

So of course I said, no, we shouldn't talk, we should go fishing instead. That might have been the right response. We had a big event in our lives in common and that was that.

We didn't get fishing that day but we did get out for a walk.

I didn't start till late. No, your English wasn't so rusty. Better than my French and the German I didn't have.

I went across the road to the bakery for rolls and teabread. Girdle scones, fruit scones and pancakes, soft and pleasant after all the healthy real bread you were used to. We ate something and had mugs of tea.

We took the bus from round the corner – I'd checked the times. It ran past the airport, to Melbost. We'd have a couple of hours before the next one, back to town. We passed through a larch gate and we were on the marram grass under a yellow winter sky. It was August.

We passed someone with his dog. One of the regulars. They all had dogs. Working collies or the bigger breeds – the ones that needed to get out. This same man had stopped me once and told me that he remembered my uncle Ruaraidh running out here to swim, every day in the year. And he'd have the run back, ahead of him. A fit guy – he'd been big in cross-country running, in the army. Did they still have the croft? They were tough, out there, the Lochies.

‘Lochie-
Siarach
cross,' I said, but no, the croft was let out now. Sheena was gone.

He said he was sorry to hear that. Then he admired your hat. Hand-dyed and spun. He seemed to recognise that. ‘And your own father,' he said to me, ‘wasn't he a weaver? Always his own man though, whatever he did.'

And he was gone again, bending into the breeze.

I could tell you how I'd come, one term, every Friday afternoon in a long blue bus. With other swimmers, people who had something to prove, in October or February.

It was the wind that got me, sapping will. Then and today. From the northeast, not so common a wind here but the one that funnels down Broad Bay. That area of blue not looking its normal benign self.

‘You talk of a place like a person,' you said, and I said, ‘Yes.' You were amazed at the scale of these sands, at low-water springs. They stretched
from the outcrop at Melbost, broken only by the falling groynes and one more tidal island, to the more harsh rocks at Aignish. The MacLeod stones, in the old churchyard, were worth seeing. Heads of deer, hour-glasses. Skulls, of course, the markers of time. Strange weathering.

But while we were walking, you were asking, in that direct way of yours, what this bay meant to me. You sensed something. Something sad? A death of someone I knew?

No-one I knew had drowned here. Someone I used to go fishing with had lost a son. But I didn't remember it happening at the time. Not the way I remembered one of my class dying under the wheels of a milk-truck, a couple of miles up the road, the way we'd come. Closer to home. Anyway, that drowning had been further up, where the river went in, north of the town. What you might call an estuary, really. Broad Bay hadn't been too bad to me.

We looked out over the coiled patterns across the cold shallows. Lugworm casts in the muddier areas and bleached razor-shells in the cleaner ground. Rich feeding.

‘The best haddock came from there,' I said. You asked why it was ‘came' in the past tense and not ‘come'.

‘Bigger boats with bigger nets.' I said it all like that, unfairly. You were surprised at the emotion which you caught and I wasn't willing to expand.

We didn't hold hands. We were close, though, and left the MacLeod stones for another day. You pressed me for the story. I warned you it was easier to start me than stop me. I might not know German but I knew haddock were
schellfisch
. You recognised the word. You'd seen it on packets of frozen fish. You didn't have a picture of the fish to go with the word.

We looked again to Broad Bay. At a stretch, we could make out the tip of the Eye peninsula – Tiumpan Head. Shift your gaze from there and take a big sweep to the north. We'll start from that point, though we can't see it. We walked on and I gave you the commentary.

Running down from the Butt of Lewis, there's the harbour at Port of Ness. A class of boat called the
sgoth Niseach
worked from there but from other shores too. Steep swells rose just out of the tidal harbour and
tidal eddies swept across it. The biggest vessels were over thirty feet long and worked up to forty miles offshore. Then there was Skigersta, with a slipway of stone, tricky in any swell. Going south from there, past the abandoned Baptist Chapel, we're abeam Cellar Head. Then there's a geo at Dibadail. A natural inlet in the rock. That was a fishing station, once. You can see the ruins of fishing-bothies built into the side of the hill.

Then we come to Tolsta village with a concrete breakwater. It's tidal and it seems dead, with useless, huge bollards now. They're rusty sculptures. It could never have been much good, close to Low Water but it must have been worth developing, in its day. A big fleet of
sgothan
worked from there. Let's make this clear. The fishing, out there, used to be good. Note the tense.

My description of the stranded pier made you think of the Aral Sea in the Soviet Union, when the water dropped back. The sources had been harnessed for irrigation schemes. Trawlers, or whatever they were, lay stranded and dying like beached whales.

But on Broad Bay, it had been line fishing. Commercial longline fishing from open boats to the north and smaller scale inshore fishing down near here. The villages of Coll, Back, Vatisker on one side and Portnaguran just up there. It was never great for shelter. You'd to haul a boat right up but the harvest had been worth the risk. Cod, plaice, dabs, whitings, yes, but the haddock was the fish.

‘What does that fish look like?' you asked.

‘Like St Peter's fish,' I said.

I was shown how to tell a haddock from a whiting by that dark thumb-mark. At the feeding of the multitude, when the catch was shared, the print was seared into the grey black flank of the haddock and it's there, yet. There was more than five thousand fed from Broad Bay.

I think I grew more self-conscious then, surprised at letting go to this emotion. But you were happy with me in this role. I wasn't giving you the standard tour. You wouldn't have been interested in that. So I was away. The boat was pushed out. Small lines had only about a hundred snoods – that was thinner, shorter pieces, spliced to the main line. Each had a small hook, baited with mussel or herring-strip and worked from a smaller vessel.

There was only one line-fishing boat left. She hadn't been broken at her keel or worn to death by being winched up that geo. Even stranger, she hadn't been burned or broken up when the fishing was done. She was moored in Stornoway Harbour, the
Peace and Plenty
. A Coll man had done all right on the fish and found the capital for a shop. Became a merchant. Some say he started voting Tory.

Others did the catching but he too must have had a memory because he wouldn't let that boat go. He had a Swedish engine put into her and placed her old mast up in a loft. And there she was, like a harbour launch, with teak seating. Some might say she'd gone up in the world, like the guy himself.

Others preferred her as she'd been. Lighter. Everyone you talked to in Coll seemed to have been on her at one time or another. She had a stern like that. I drew the curve with my hand and of course you laughed because I was so passionate about a shape in wood.

Aye, if you think we get excited about sheep, watch Lewismen's eyes when they're near boats. You laughed again. Then you looked surprised at yourself.

I told you how I'd done some research. Chasing for the history of the boat I'd fallen in love with. She'd been built on this Island, up at Port of Ness. I'd spoken to the Fishery Officer I knew, working in the office where all the old registrations were kept. No art in the asking. I said what came in to my head. ‘Hey Joe, Where You Going…?'

Yes, he was still available for a gig. Didn't have to be Hendrix. Rock and roll was here to stay. What was I after?

He turned up the records of that boat. There she was, on a page of handwritten entries. She was built by the man who swam ashore with the rope from the
Iolaire
.

But you were cold. Even through the borrowed Harris wool gansey, worn over your own. Our first intimacy. And I was gabbing on. There was some bite in that wind. You could almost believe sleet could fall. We were lucky to catch the long and nearly empty bus at the turning place. The driver was having a smoke.

You were caught by these fish. You asked to hear more, once we were warm. You were getting used to this way of taking tea, simmered a while on a ring of the cooker. I'd to get the uniform wooley pooley on now. Borrow the keys for the olaid's Mini. I'd the back-shift to do.

You were still up when I got home. Stretched in front of the coal fire. The olaid was in bed. You said she'd organised a big pan of prawns. You said the two of you had eaten a lot of them but we've left a few for you.

In our kitchen, you opened Davidson's
North Atlantic Seafood
.

‘You know, some people are happy to read Raymond Chandler, on holiday,' I said.

You'd gone round the corner to find the bookshop I'd described. You'd asked Ian Beaver for a detailed work on sea fish and he'd reached for that one without even looking. I used to think he was called Beaver because he always tried to sell or give away books on North American Indians. But at school, a guy called MacIver became Beaver.

This was the one, he'd said. You told me that this Davidson man called these characteristic marks ‘thumb-prints' as well. This is the quote:

‘Pity all these French coves have it the wrong way round,' I said. ‘Haddock's the real one.'

You took my hook and quoted from the same work to say that John Dory was St Peter's fish to the Portuguese, Spanish, French, Swedish, Norwegians and Danish. It seemed to be Peter's fish in Gaelic too though in German it was the King of the Herring. And further, you said, wasn't the Sea of Galilee fresh water, like the Aral Sea, in Russia?

‘Don't you go talking science to me, woman,' I said. Everyone I knew who'd given me instruction in fishing, they all said the same. That print on the haddock was burned into my own mind at an early age. Anyway, the story was only mentioned in three gospels. Matthew might have made it more clear, mentioned haddock by name, if he'd remembered.

We gave up on rhetoric then. I can't remember if our fingers touched by that open book. I knew I wanted them to. We were closest when our serious sides got a rest.

I slept late in the morning, tired from that last back-shift and preparing for the change to the killer first night-shift. You'd made a salad. I tried not to look wary as you blended mustard, cream and a touch of sugar with oil and vinegar.

You were impressed by my Webb's Curlies. They'd been grown inside a fish box. Converted into a cloche by nailing a half barrel lid at each end, to carry the curve of clear polythene. You have to defeat the wind, to grow anything here. Wait till you see my crop of courgettes. One sturdy plant to a box. Cousins of cucumbers. I'd had to tickle them with a feather, transferring the pollen. If my Broch Grampa had been alive, he'd have been proud of me.

Now, I could listen to you opening up, letting go. Not so many details in what you said. But the bits that mattered came out.

You're father had never been found but he was gone, for sure. Missing presumed lost. Just like in war – but that was too long a story for now. Your mother had her problems. It wouldn't get better in a hurry.

‘And how about your studies? You had an idea for a post-grad, didn't you?'

‘Language and literature, both. Now English literature. It was difficult, towards finals, when you knew everything depended on the grades.'

She'd needed to get away from the centre of Europe.

‘But you are in the centre of Europe,' I said. ‘If you tilt the map a bit and include the maritime territories and fishing rights. But let's not talk about them.'

I can't tell you now everything we talked about but fish came into the discussion again. Strange, that. You said you'd stopped by the Broad Bay fish shop. It had to be haddock in the window and you nearly went inside. But you were shy of cooking fish for me. I seemed to be an expert.