A Book of Death and Fish (22 page)

I always got on OK with Emcee. Marek Cybulski, to give the cove his full name. He was in the class above us at school but he repeated French and History so I got a yarn with him, now and again. His olman was in the Air Force and met a blone from Lewis. His number was up.

When other guys were trying to lose their cherry and I was looking for a pattern to this world, Emcee took me down the bottom of Kenneth Street. I mean all the way down, just before it joins Scotland Street and slides its way downhill, to Bayhead. You passed the copshop, next door to the Lodge, on your right, and then went up a wee close behind the priest’s house. There was a painted wooden building.

You won’t see it now. It burned down – no foul play suspected – and they built a proper church, with laminated timber beams and all that. There’s some interesting church architecture on Lewis but most of it’s out of town. Like the place on the Peninsula. Amazing modernist building in the middle of peat banks and bungalows. They say one of the elders had a cousin in the States who was an architect and wanted to do something for the old community. The plans might have come buckshee but it put the breakaway group on the map, all right. All these splits in the church have been good for the Island building industry. Unless these guys are doing it buckshee, too. In return for a pass through the pearly gates. I don’t think so.

The long, wooden hut, now replaced, was the official Catholic church. I’d been there once, with another mate, but that was just to a discussion evening. I went to a mass with Marek. It was a bit fancy for me but they were all friendly enough, after all the ritual. Can’t be any more strange than what happens up the road. On the square. Honest, I’ve never been
in any further than the bar. I only know what that guy Pierre told me, in
War and Peace
. I got asked along a couple of times, but that was much later, when I became a proper Coastguard. I don’t think you qualified, being an auxiliary out on the cliffs or in the boat team.

The thing was, I got asked back home for scoff. It was amazing. Marek’s olman was doing the cooking. That’s a thing you never saw, on Lewis, unless you were on a fishing boat. I still remember the Sunday dinner. Wee bits of dark rye bread with dried salami, strings still attached. Then there was pork. The crackling was cracking and there was something sweet and something spicy there. There was cabbage, still crisp, with fennel seeds through it. Baked onions, stuffed with cloves.

I wanted to ask about wine becoming blood. I wanted to ask about the aircraft stationed on the Island during the war. But Marek’s olman looked to his smiling wife and talked about the foxtrots they used to do, to the brass band.

A few years went by and I was on the bones of the bachoochie, not long out of Uni. I bumped into Emcee and he said, ‘Hi Caulay, what’s fresh?’ He told me they could do with a KP in the Crown. I was up for it, as long as they’d let me off whenever there was a shout for the coast-rescue team. He was the main man on the pans and I was washing them. It’s true what they say. He used every flicking one of them, every time, lunch or dinner.

I was in the Crown for about a year. All the seasons. Summer was shit, watching other guys chug by, out to the fishing. March was good, out of the wind that came from the Baltic. I felt good, putting your cold hands into water that was as hot as you could bear. Then there was the grub. Most of it was pretty plain stuff, roasts and stews and fries but Marek would do a special now and again. Word was getting around, it was the thing to go for, but if there was any of it left, that’s what I always went for, when we took the staff lunch, job done.

This day, he put me on the spot. The sous-chef didn’t turn up so I was giving a hand, stirring sauces and stuff. Then it came to our own grub and Marek says, ‘Surprise me, Westview boy.’ Flick’s sakes, the same cove would be doing potato pancakes baked crisp with artichokes in a white sauce and all that.

‘See what’s left in the box,’ he said. That was the mixed box of fish, sent over from the other end of the hoil. That time most of the hotels just bought boxes of frozen prawns and boxes of fillets, ready to deep-fry. Marek was up on the game. He was doing brill and megrim and serving up fish that looked like fish.

I was in luck. A few red gurnard pouted at me, spiny amongst the slimy stuff. The heads of monks, with their angling tackle and their wicked teeth. Marek would have kept them for the stock of his seafood soup. But he wasn’t getting these guys intact.

‘All right, you’re on, but nothing fancy. Dangler’s style.’

The new fibreglass sea angling club boat had a Calor Gas cooker with two burners and a grill for toast. Sometimes we knocked a mackerel or two on the head and threw them to the frying pan.

There was always a great wee knife handy. I put a new edge to it and attacked the heads. The cheeks take a bit of prodding out but soon I had enough. Gurnard are amazing looking things, armour plated, but I knew how to hold them so the spines in the back of the gills didn’t catch you when you were watching for the ones on the dorsal. The blade found the backbones and followed them till it whistled out at the tails. ‘Never mind that salad oil shit,’ I heard myself saying. I just wanted light oil without any taste in itself. There was parsley, dill and chives, from Marek’s window-boxes, out the back. I had these all finely chopped in the lemon butter.

You want to just sear the naked side then turn it to let the skin side fry itself till it’s just about crisp but you can still see the red. Turn it to serve that way up. Meanwhile you’ve turned the monks’ cheeks for a minute, in the oil. Let the herb butter trickle over them but aside from the red gurnard. That’s the dish, simple as that. It got me the sous-chef job.

The pace was good when we got going and I learned a lot. Scariest day was when I made the borscht for our lunch. I’d made it when I was at Uni because it fed a few folk for a few bob and it looked good in the bowl. Marek tuned it up for me. You’ve to sauté the grated beetroot and waxy tatties long enough and slow enough. And like everything else, the stock’s the secret. And that wee bit of lemon to cut the sweetness of the veg.

I went back with Marek a couple of times to catch his olman’s yarn. The food was something else and once I did taste the borscht he’d been brought up on. That made me realise I was only half a cook and I’d never be able to put the hours in to get really good. See the intensity of that shade of broth and the surprise of its flavours on your tongue. But I never did ask the question I was thinking. I couldn’t find the words to ask either Marek or the ex-airman if they really did believe that the wine became actual blood.

Me and Gabriele never did consummate our union at sea but we came close. That blone didn’t mind a fair bit of swell running. She was swaying slightly, to the motion. She’d let her hair grow but not by much. It was thick and brown and bobbed, plastered by rain on her light-coloured face. Then she’d come snuggling in closer.

Hang on, somebody’s got to work the tiller.

The more variable the wave pattern the better, for her. Off the port-hand buoy at Arnish, at Low Water, with seas rolling in from the south-east. Out a bit from the fallen old concrete beacon at the limit of the reef. The shallowing always interrupts the wave length of the longer seas and shifts the shapes of the waters.

If we made it out past the Tob and the Bo to Loch Erisort we’d meet some even more confused seas off Stac Ranais, wind against tide. Maybe we’d decide to run into Loch Griomsiadair. I never needed much persuasion for that.

I think I caught Gabriele with an unused longline. I never thought she’d stay on this Island, once her official year-off was over. It’s easy to be adventurous when you’ve a job to go back to.

But I told her how my olman’s fishing gear was past it. I wouldn’t have wanted to risk losing it anyway. But the scummaig, the wooden holder, was now filled by a replacement. Ruaraidh had a more recent one in his shed. When he’d had his retirement do, from the Poy-oy (General Post Office), one of his first moves was to go into the Lewis Crofters for a cotton small-line with ninety haddock hooks. But his mates in the Legion laughed at him. There was nothing to be caught on the East Side now.
Join the club and go west like they did in the movies. The new line would have stayed hanging as a symbol in his hallway. So he’d asked his nephew to throw it out and see if the trawlers had left anything worth buttering the frying pan about. Mind you, now he’d be claiming his share if we did.

That was a story you could be drawn into. Is that what it’s about? All our individual narratives frapping in the breezes, Baltic, North Sea, Minch, Atlantic. Finding your place in another person’s story. So the eventual and necessary touch is only consolidating that.

I think I was for dropping that strange sail that came with the boat. There were mounts for an inboard in the
Peace and Plenty
but the old petrol engine had been fussy to run. It had been lifted out by the previous owner. My hand kept going down to the space, looking for a gear lever.

Gabriele stayed on the tiller, putting the helm down while I backed the foresail against the main as instructed.

‘This is not what the new woman means,’ she said. ‘Only gaining respect by taking on the men at their own games.’

But she also said she liked this sort of thing. She’d learned it young and it had stuck.

The terms for fish flew, then. I was trying to get a ling into words. Bit like a sea-pike. ‘
Hecht
.’

‘We’ll have to catch one,’ she said. ‘A visual aid.’

This was a bo, a submerged reef that wouldn’t dry in any combination of conditions and tidal sequence we could predict. Round the corner, into the loch, there were reefs that dried and covered. These are the ones you’ve got to watch. You can’t take your eye off these devious bastards. But we set our line while we were still over deeper water. Gabriele wondered how I could tell, without an echo sounder.

The marks told us we were at the edge of that bo. We’d lose hooks, for sure, but they were easily replaced. I’d rigged the line with a buoy at both ends to give two chances of recovery, if it snagged.

That sequence went out miraculously, sweet as my memory of it. Strips from the flank of a few expensive herring went down in an orderly fashion to the stranger strata near the bottom. Now that’s real gambling, sacrificing the nourishment a herring provides for a possible greater yield.

We’d to leave it an hour or so. So we did head into the loch. You had to recognise Sgeir Linish. See it now while the tip was dry. It would become harder to spot when the swell was breaking over it. We’d have to watch for it, both of us, when we came round, out the loch on the other tack. There wasn’t a lot of sea room. Would that be a reach in and a reach out? I deferred on sailing matters to her much greater experience.

Had I done this with my own father?

‘Only in his story,’ I told her. Suffice to say he’d been keen on the sea but something had happened. A near disaster. Sometimes you had to skip a generation. It was all magnetism, attraction or repulsion.

Her own father could be a case-study on the rebuilding of Germany. Their own house was to prove a very sound investment – a good building of structural integrity at the edges of the fast-developing city of Bonn.

There were all these evenings at the drawing board, which took over the attic area of the house. The floored loft of a converted barn. Their mother never really liked it – the obligations of her husband’s career were inescapable. Their own living space was too much part of his vision. His designs were original but not flashy. They usually had a good vernacular structure as a basis.

But when he sailed alone with his daughter, he told her of his dry baptism into navigation. It was by the pole star only but that was enough. Like thousands of the other survivors of the Wehrmacht, he was a shadow on the retreat from what is now part of Poland. It was all the Reich to them, then. Not for long. The Red Army was advancing fast. Desertion was almost certain death.

But he and his best friend whispered to each other. If they stayed, it was definite death. Just because you saw something coming didn’t mean you could stop it happening. They delayed too long. The survivors of their unit were surrounded and exhausted and starving. They were rounded up and marched. They were being taken to a central camp. He’d heard the stories. They all said much the same. Once you were driven through a gate and kept behind wire, that was it. No-one would crawl out of that.

They’d all seen what had happened in Russia before the tide had turned. The situations he had not been able to photograph. The advancing Germans had starved their Russian prisoners. It was a very efficient and cost-effective method, perhaps learned from Comrade Stalin’s own methods of dealing with the kulags who resisted handing everything over to the State. Or had they resisted handing over the food, because they were already starving?

So what could the German prisoners expect now that they were the ones behind the wire? It took a lot of organisation and resources to feed that amount of prisoners. Why should they keep Nazi murderers alive?

Burned fields didn’t yield very much food. Once they went behind the barbed wire, into the collection area, that was it.

He might not have been able to do anything to break out of the script that was written for him if he had been alone. But his fellow student from the architecture class had also survived this far. They shook hands on it. They would crawl off into the woods together and take their chance.

So they waited till the vodka ration was issued to their guards, in the evening. That took effect quickly. They listened for the drunken singing then they crawled low to the icy ground and then kept on walking. They always walked at night. Mainly through woodlands, looking through the branches for navigational marks. Their route back, a bit south of west, was in relation to that one star. Follow the line of the handle up. Fix it from there. It worked. They came out in Innsbruck.

And the rest of the regiment? Their estimate had been right. Not one of the others found a way home.

He’d picked up the pieces and, like his old classmate, worked at repairs and rebuilding. The other survivor went on to specialise in public buildings. They met in the summers, on the Baltic coast. Family men, both of them.

Your telling of your father’s story took us through the narrows into the inner loch. Now the outboard was behaving better, with its prop in the water most of the time. You could see the lines of disused lazy-beds, running down to the shore. All these ribs of ground, still showing green,
as far as the rusty kelp. The boiler from a steam-drifter lay beside the rocks. The ground here hadn’t been tilled for years. But there were a few cattle, beasts among the sheep. Maybe the village and a lot of others like it had never really recovered from the First War before the Second hit it further. How could they have known that the First had nothing to do with them? If they had stayed and others like them, East and West Coasts of Scotland, Lowlanders, Coldstreams, Welsh Guards and all – maybe there wouldn’t have been that Second? Pointless to speculate, in the peace of this inlet, with our anchor holding us over deep mud.

When we headed out again, the wind that should have been at a right angle to the boat was right on our nose. It might not have shifted much. Even if I didn’t know much about sailing, I knew it tends to funnel down sea-lochs. But I was running with Gabriele’s story as much as with the wind. And in matters of sailing I was always to defer to her. The Lewis sailors of open boats must have possessed skills second to none. And their knacks and knowledge were all lost in one generation.

The course we could sail was too fine to clear the entrance with a safe margin. We’d to dip an oar more than once to tack clear. This was when we needed a bearing to clear the skerries. We had that. This is the situation where you want a decent inboard engine. We didn’t have that and the outboard kept whining when the prop lifted right out of the water.

Wind and tide had both been on the move while we’d been tracing her olman’s navigation from the Eastern Front to Innsbruck. Stories are dangerous. Now there were white horses all across the loch. So it was difficult to see which was the warning white, breaking directly around the covered reef. And which was innocent white.

I got the sail and spars down and lashed everything tight while Gabriele held her nose in to the weather with one oar out. Then I took the second oar and we made way. With the outboard helping from time to time. Long steady pulls were the answer. First we seemed to be just holding our own but then the skerry was astern and we had sea room for a fine reach, with a reef in the sail now. Back on the tiller, she picked her moment to tell me I’d need to get a stronger outboard engine for next season. She said she shouldn’t really be rowing for much longer now.

Glancing down at the belly of her oilies and gasping. Recovering. We could call that quits for me saying we might just as well get married, when the letter from the Home Office said that she should not have been claiming any benefits. Deportation was the next step.

We were both laughing. Maybe I’d already known, somehow. And to consolidate everything, there were three ling on my uncle’s line, cast from my own olman’s scummaig. Two haddock would have been truly biblical but these would do. Not a very economic return for the man, woman, boat and baby hours expended. But we hadn’t used much in the way of fossil fuel. One for us, to share with my mother who had long since overcome the East Coast prejudice for cod. One for my uncle who gave us the line. One for a young guy we’d met on the Goat Island shore. He was doing up another clinker boat and given us some non-slip red for our tiny foredeck. It now looked sharp against the rest of the boat in navy grey.

That should have been it, a simple yarn, with a few droppers dangling off the main thread – a small-line of stories. But I showed you another ritual when we had the boat back on the mooring. This was normally done at the shore but as we were staying at the same address, it was easier to perform on the doorstep. I put down some newspapers from a pile of recent ones and separated the three ling. Laid them out on the printed sheets. You had to turn your back. Then you, as the youngest aboard, had to tell me one of the three names as I pointed to a fish you couldn’t see. So it was as fair as it could be, who got what.

But Gabriele got sidetracked and missed her cue. She’d glanced at the papers she hadn’t bothered with before. A front-page story in the
West Highland Free Press
caught her.

It was a protest from the Irish government. Yet another leak from Windscale, now Sellafield. Yes, I said, this is a British way of problem solving. You don’t reassess things, which is far too messy a process, you just change the name.

Gabriele didn’t smile because there was a map on the page with projected tidal currents setting northeast to meet with Cape Wrath and another story. This time the protest came from the Norwegian government, over the reprocessing plant at Dounreay.

‘Yes, they haven’t changed that name yet because they’re looking for international business,’ I said. ‘But they’ve changed the name of the ship that carries its waste down the Minch. Everyone got to know the
Kingsnorth Fisher
so she was re-named
New Generation
. Never mind though, a decent radiation leak from the Other Side and we could blame the lot on that.’

Like the pollution in the Elbe. The powers in West Germany said it was all from the East.

Then there was one of those far-fetched chances that happens to be true. She was looking down on the paper I’d opened up, to wrap our own ling. Her hand went down to hold it open on a page. Neither of us had noticed it before. A proposed Superquarry bringing jobs to the Bays of Harris. To maximise the potential of the site, the resulting hole could be filled with harmless waste from Hamburg. As one bulk-carrier went seaward, taking high-grade anorthosite to the West German market, another would arrive to disperse low-grade industrial silt.

An efficient idea.

‘The Elbe is one of the most contaminated waters in Europe,’ she said. Protesters in Germany made an alliance from the Rhine to the Elbe. To show that their concern was not just the local issue.

So the industrial waste she had protested against might follow her around the fringes of the continent. All these traces of metals, the ones which induce cauliflower growths on eels. From the North Sea to the Little Minch.

Invasions usually cause some deaths. Organisms are attacked by aggressive others who have to establish themselves. Some people argue that beggars can’t be choosers. The Harris Tweed industry was seriously frayed and the fishing industry was in a terminal crisis.