A Book of Death and Fish (26 page)
Read A Book of Death and Fish Online
Authors: Ian Stephen
There’s no point in telling you lies by omission. I bumped into Kenny F again, in the Crit, when it was still more of a fishermen’s pub. Before all these Gaelic actors and journalists appeared. Nothing against them, it’s just that it’s a small pub. For a second I thought he’d be having a Virgin Mary, waiting for Mairi to finish work, round the corner.
No, he was looking like he looked ten years before. Eyes red, everything red, hair gone longer. Hair is back in fashion with Italian football stars but his was looking kind of forgotten. He held out his glass and I nodded to get another one put in it. Why not? If he was on it, he was on it. I asked for a pint of stout. We went over to a corner. There was going to be a story.
I was going to ask him to save it. If he was on the piss again, it wouldn’t be a short one. He was straight into it. No introductions.
She must have been crazy to think she could hide it. OK, it was very early on but he was pretty sure of the signs. She was supposed to be going on another course. Pretty plausible, with all that new tech and her promotion board coming up. Adapting this database programme for the office needs. Fucking brownie points.
He’d a feeling though, even before someone from the office asked how Mairi was. Real concerned note.
Click.
To him, she was in East Kilbride, on a course. She’d even phoned him. Said it was going all right. To them, she was on the sick.
It was me who was slow, taking a sip of my stout. I thought we were talking about something on the side.
Kenny knew I hadn’t got it.
I could have coped with her having a fling, he said. I couldn’t have shared her but I’d have waited to get her back. Now he could have her back but he didn’t want a blone who could do away with their baby. She hadn’t even been going to tell him. Just wanted to get back to her fucking development programme. No choice, she said, since he wasn’t working. Doing up the house. Debts building up. No choice. They’d have another chance later.
Not with me, you won’t. That’s what he’d said. He’d gone straight out the door. A woman’s right to choose, he said. Well, a guy could choose, too.
He was choosing now. He’d found a place to crash in town, wherever there was a couch. All of us too fucking old for other people’s floors. She could have the house and the croft and every other thing. It was her family croft, anyway. And she was earning the dosh. She could fucking pay someone to do the last of the finishing.
I was thinking of my own blur of shifts and snatched sleep. The things you’re not proud of, the shouting and the huffs when the bairn’s asleep.
But then there was the photo Gabriele took when I fell asleep but Anna was turning the pages for herself. She was just reading on before I even knew she could. When I was knackered from the shiftwork. And you knew then you could hold it together. Maybe not for keeps but maybe for long enough.
I turned back to the eyes of a guy I grew up with. The formative years. I couldn’t ask him back to our house. Couldn’t be that much of a bastard.
I put another dram in his glass and walked home.
We brought the olaid to Italy once. She always wanted to go there. The olman had been there in the war. There and North Africa. She wanted to go somewhere that had been a big part of his life. But she didn’t want to go to the desert. We piled into the VW. She played with Anna in the back. Read stories out loud. Nothing was a problem.
Every night she’d eat spaghetti bolognese. ‘Ah ken ah kin eat that. Ken fit it is.’
But when we were in Sienna, we found a trattoria with white painted roughcast on the inside. I asked what the local thing was and the guy said tripe. We ordered one portion of lamb’s liver with sage and one tripe, to share. I asked the olaid if she wanted spagbol again. ‘Did he say tripe?’ she asked.
I said, ‘Aye, but it won’t be like you know it, with milk and onions.’
‘Ah dinna care fits aboot it, if it’s tripe ah can eat it,’ she said.
She ordered another Tripe Sienna. It came in a tomato and herb sauce. She ate every bit and took her bread to the plate after.
The liver was seared outside. The sage was fresh, of course, and the flavour went right through the rare organ. It was the best I’ve tasted and I’ve tried to cook it like that ever since.
In the past few years I’ve thought back to that liver. Or rather to different dishes of liver and other sights of liver.
You know we eat fish livers, here on Lewis, but that’s something different. I’m talking only about meat now.
There was the time I bought a wedder from one of my watchmates. But the deal was you had to be there at the killing. It was all done on trestles.
A fellow came round. He was the man. He did everyone’s. You gave him some chops or another nice cut. I don’t think it was illegal then.
My thinking was, this has got to be better than loading the animal into a trailer. Driving miles to town. Then it’s waiting in a pen smelling what it’s smelling and hearing what it’s hearing.
Instead, you get the village expert round. I thought back to Angus, come across the loch by boat to preside over the deed in the shed at Griomsiadair. I’d thought of asking him along on the Italian job. Himself and Ruaraidh would have been company for herself. And entertainment for wee Anna. Then there would have been a vermouth or a last cup of tea, after the wee one had turned her last page of the day.
They would have memories. It might be time to talk about past events. But Ruaraidh wasn’t keeping that great. We’d left it too late.
This time the man who was not Angus, but was like him in some ways, said, ‘Well, you boys should know about knots.’ That was a mistake. I think I went for a clove hitch with a locking turn. But see that moment when the animal struggles. The panic should only be for seconds. But that puts a jerking strain on a tie. Mine did not hold up to that test. He did the proper lashing himself then.
This time there was no mistake. There was just a tiny twist of a small sharp blade, a pocket knife really. Its eyes just glazed over and I remembered my job was to hold the basin close. Everything was clean with a trace of bleach. Someone else poured some salt in the basin and you had to keep stirring, all the time, as it filled. Otherwise the blood would congeal.
He showed us the bits we had to scrub to contain the
marag
. Black pudding. Then we left the carcass there to hang for a while and went home with the blood and offal.
Gabriele opened the Mrs Beeton edition, provided by my olaid, of course. I said, no, never, but sure enough, there was a recipe for haggis. So we made black puddings and we made our own haggis. I chopped the heart, kidneys and liver. There was a description of how to drain the fluid off the lungs so you could use them too but that sounded a bit much.
The hardest bit was scrubbing the doosh – the stomach that would contain the pudding. I remembered they used to take these to the shore
and do them in the salt water. I remembered having to go to the slaughterhouse to get one for a relation so that proved you could do the job at home too, in Westview Terrace.
We did it and everything worked out.
I loved the olaid’s own casserole but that was ox liver, cooked till tender. She hadn’t been able to do much of her own cooking for a while, with the stroke. Her balance was not so good for standing at the kitchen.
Back in Sienna, there were three clean plates and the waiter was beaming. Four, really, because Anna was always a good eater too.
I remembered frying up thick slices of deer liver, out at the estate. That was a breakfast that kept you going. The smell was kind of pungent. The cook wasn’t that happy but she had plenty to do so let us get on with our own breakfast on a corner of the Aga. You’ve to be really careful, selecting liver for eating. A lot of it is condemned. And wild deer get parasites.
After that, it was the hospital. The porter’s job. Mostly, it was routine. Now and again something would come up. You’d to keep the incinerator going clean. Burn the cardboard and stuff, a bit at a time so it didn’t get clogged up. One time a staff-nurse comes chasing out of Surgical. They were needing another oxygen bottle in a hurry. I looked to the store, and knew the trolley you used to wheel them in was at the other end of the round. ‘Is it really urgent?’ I asked. ‘It is,’ she said.
So I just let the cylinder fall onto my shoulder and ran with it, balanced there. She held the doors open for me. It wouldn’t do to batter someone on the way. Save a life and take another. Net gain nil. But that all worked out fine. We saved some minutes.
But this time, there was no urgency. I was passing the lab. A woman in a white coat saw me and said they’d been meaning to phone round. Was the incinerator running? It was.
Well, there was some samples here. They’d had to keep them for a long time. Just in case. A legal thing. But they wouldn’t be needed. Could I dispose of them as soon as possible? They needed to clear the chilled storage.
There’s this thing about authority. I was down the pecking order. She held out a small, thick, polythene bag. It was double sealed with a zip of some kind and labelled but it was still transparent. Something inside it looked like liver.
She saw my question.
A poor soul who shot himself.
There but for the grace of who or what. Maybe I’d been too eager to take my dose of the opiate of the masses but I might still be on a one-way nosedive if I’d not been given that support.
I was about to say, hold on, if it’s been here for months, what’s the hurry? I could go and get a box or another bag. But she was holding the top of the sample-bag out for me to take.
I took it.
I tried to walk as fast as I could, the most direct way to the shed where the incinerator was housed but one of the engineers saw me, holding it out a bit.
‘That’s a shit job you have there,’ he said.
So I opened the door and closed it as fast as I could. That was it done. You couldn’t hear or see anything now. I’ll tell you this though. You could smell it. And it was just like meat cooking. I thought of eating a hare or a goose. Spitting out lead shot now and again. I thought of any stray shot melting instantly in there as the liver disappeared.
Sand and gravel shift. Essential landmarks remain. Amendments, rather than corrections to your own chart, in your mind. Sounds like a thing you should be able to do. Say who you are. Say what you think. But now I don’t think that’s easy. All of us responding to moving conditions. Just a few things you can maybe be sure about.
The olaid dropped a not so subtle hint. ‘A mannie wi responsibilities noo. A wife and dochter tae think aboot. If onything should, happen, God forbid.’
All right, here it is.
Everything’s for you, Gabriele. I knew love before I met you but you taught me a different kind of love. I think we know each other’s bodies quite well now. I have these strong impressions of the shapes your body makes, in different positions. If I’m away from home, more than a few days, these images stay with me.
I hope I learned to listen to you and your body. My mother once said you were made of galvanised wire and that was a compliment. No wonder you found you could live on Lewis. A place in a state of change, like all other places on our overstocked planet. But our Island home has become dependent on fencewire, as a means of holding everything together. These temporary repairs have a habit of proving more permanent than systems designed to last for at least a millennium.
You said, a long time ago, when it came to arrangements, you didn’t want anything left to chance. You could cope with a lot in these strange islands as long as you got some bread that looked as if it might have come from a
Bible story. You missed the stout, rye bread of home. That light loaf, with a scattering of grains in it – the one we used to get from Billy Forsyth’s – it was called ‘rye’ but it just wouldn’t do.
You didn’t mind being imported, yourself, to improve the stock with a healthy bit of hybridisation. Looking at that fit daughter of ours, it seems to have worked. Suppose the question is, would it have worked the same if I’d gone to Cologne? Same genetics, another urban environment. The Rhine is wide. Barges ride down it with their loads, or slog up against the flow. They send their waves and wash to the built banks. But it’s not the sea.
It’s fitting, your mother living in prosperous Bonn – with your brother’s support. But my own mother’s offspring settled either side of the Atlantic. There’s geography and there’s language. Your immaculate English – well, it was better before you came to live here. We’ve roughened it up. But I didn’t have a word of German. Then again, look at my sister, gone Canadian, fluent in French with a funny accent. So maybe language isn’t the issue we think it is.
My job is about communication. That’s the technical word we use, for an operator of the changing technology that sends wireless signals over water – a communicator. The idea of being out there, lost, out of reach of all signals, that’s what really scares me. My mother keeps asking me if she’s still making sense. Her speech is tricky but her mind is on the ball.
So I’ve already discussed a little deal with you, my own wife. If I go gaga, before departure, I’d be grateful if you could find a way of arranging something. And I’ll try to do the same for you, if it should be the other way. Maybe all these intermittent shovels of aluminium sulphate to whiten the peaty water of the Island will have their effect. Or all these daft mercury fillings in my teeth. I got most of them the same year. You can do a lot of damage fast with McCowan’s toffee bars on a daily basis.
That’s a moral tale for you. But possibly also open to interpretation. Anyway, my point is, if I’ve lost the plot, I wouldn’t want to linger on.
I know your own menu, for your send-off, even if you haven’t written it down. Pretty sure, though, that you’ll be burying me first, somehow, barring accidents. Statistics are on your side. But you stated your wishes, just in case. In this respect, they’re dead right, all these guys in the hats who say you never know your hour.
A menu for a funeral. When you say menu now, it sounds like something that appears on the computer screen. Maybe restaurants will also be like that by the time you read this spiel.
You’ll touch a discreet screen, built in to the end of the table. Maybe the font imitates fast handwriting. You’d say, that’s typical of Westfalia, ox-tongue, served hot in its liquor. A bay leaf. An onion studded with cloves. And I’d go along with it as I told you about the tongue that my uncle Andra would still do, for the New Year, in The Broch. Maybe we’d walk into the house while it was cooling and get a slice, melting the butter on the white doorstep of loaf.
We both found shared ground, by the Rhine and by the Minch – and in more things than food. Where you draw the line is sin. Our daughter is full of mischief. She can be capable of hurting but also feeling sorry afterwards. Same as all of us – she just hasn’t learned to conceal it yet. She’s not evil, though, not unredeemed. So you won’t have anyone go on about sin over your dead head. Instead, you’ll have the Unst Bridal March. Keep cash in the kitty to pay the fiddler.
OK, it’s a Shetland tune but let’s face it, there’s not much of an instrumental tradition on the Long Island. Big songs, though. One of them wouldn’t do any harm. But your own only request is that one tune. There’s an understanding that friends are asked to linger for a round-the-table dinner with the menu up to myself. Trouble is, if you don’t specify things, things might get taken out of your hands when you’re in a daze.
But I didn’t set out to write your will. So here we go. Take two. Or it might be my third attempt to get practical. I’d no idea this floodgate was going to open. Where did all these words come from?
S
PECIAL INSTRUCTIONS
BEING THE WISHES OF
P
ETER
M
AC
A
ULAY,
C
OASTGUARD
C
OTTAGE
1
,
L
EVERHULME
D
RIVE,
S
TORNOWAY
No prayers, please. I don’t mind flowers as long as they haven’t been flown round the world to get here. But I want this to get read out, legal requirement or not. It’s an audience, flick’s sake. The epistle has spread off the red Post Office form it started on. It’s taken on a life of its own.
I hope there are some good conversations going round our living room. None of these hushed tones. The traditional assortment of chairs pulled in from next-door or borrowed from the school down the road, if there’s enough people to sit on them. If there’s only a few, just get everyone seated round the kitchen table. Blast up the stove but don’t dump me in it yet.
The registration plates will maybe have gone another cycle of letters. Maybe all cars will be made in Malaysia and Korea now, or in whatever powerhouse is being promoted. Or the Far East might have had its day and Romania or Bulgaria taken over any manufacturing that’s still going on. An equation of low labour costs and a population desperate for economic advancement. Or maybe everything will be made in China. Military dictatorships are going out of fashion in a lot of places but they seem to be OK if the country is a trading partner. And we’ve got to sell our electronic weaponry to someone. That’s about the only stuff we’re making now, anyway.
Never mind the random shots, what about my own code of beliefs, now that I’m dead? Well, I’m not dead yet but I should be, when you’re reading this. What were MacAulay’s beliefs, exactly?
The act of writing this wee document started something going. I can’t stop typing now. I can’t say it in one word any more. Not Christian, Bahá’í or Buddhist or Marxist. I don’t think I ever could. Just tried to do that, for a short while. My own story is tapping out into its own order now but these other complicated bits of history keep butting in. I’m nowhere near at peace with myself. I’ve missed too many chances to do something to help. Shit, sounds a bit like they’re right about sin, after all.
Best get back to practical matters.
P
RACTICAL MATTERS
I’m quite happy to leave the choice of music, at my funeral, to yourself, Gabriele, if you do indeed survive me. My critical faculties probably won’t be at their best anyway.
If we both do peg out together though, and a third party is making the arrangements, what about laying on a bit of a show? We could have your Unst Bridal March with a PowerPoint slide of the late romanticism you’re so keen on. Maybe we should have a couple of figures in misty mountains
– Caspar David Friedrich woz ere. To keep it balanced, so to speak, we could have the Reverend Whatsisname skating, courtesy of Raeburn. Even if they do use that outline on the plastic carriers of Edinburgh Galleries. And they reckon it might have been some other cove that did the painting. Oh and the pond’s not where the title says. Apart from that it’s all pretty genuine.
What about if you’re making arrangements for me? A good get-up-and-go South African-style funeral wouldn’t be bad but it might take a bit of arranging on Lewis and I wouldn’t want to give you the hassle. Who would have believed Mandela would get out alive and he’d somehow continue to inspire? I fancy one of these painted coffins but maybe there’s a simpler idea. We’ll come to that later. You might be mourning, for all I know. But if you fancy making a shindig of it, that’s OK with me.
You’d go quite a distance for a good demonstration. Never mind all this asking if it does any good. The exercise of the democratic right to speak your mind. That’s what brought us together. You were looking for a different father at that kibbutz. You weren’t ready for a lover.
With all this said, Frau Richter, we come to the material arrangements and welcome back to any materialistic bastards who went to sleep during the above digressions.
M
ATERIAL ARRANGEMENTS
1. A
LL MATERIAL ASSETS.
All yours. Then you can decide what’s to happen to the stuff, when you’ve taken your own turn to pop the clogs. If you’re not around by my demise, all goes to the offspring. The property is in joint names anyway so it’s all yours, girls.
2. B
URIAL ARRANGEMENTS.
Don’t go planting me in the ground. But before I forget, let me state now – it’s OK to use any bits, best Lewis tradition of spare parts, before you get rid of the rest. That’s the only card I believe in carrying, these days. Let’s be realistic. The only way to avoid being taken over by the aforementioned men in the hats is to do the business elsewhere. I’ll be most surprised but willing to posthumously eat my words if there are women elders and ministers on this Island (Episcopalians excepted) by the time I vamoose.
Please ferry the bits to Inverness, to get burned. I would have no serious objections to a blazing gellie of driftwood but there’s bound to be legal obstacles. I know that the vultures pick the bones in Tibet but don’t feed me to the seagulls. The council wouldn’t allow it anyway and they’re fat enough on batter and chips. That’s the seagulls, not the councillors.
Better to pay through the nose, I think, and get properly cremated. But you can tell young Al Crae not to go crazy with the varnish and brasswork. The box is going to be wrapped in a certain very distinctive bit of tweed. But do like they do at sea and keep the cloth for another day. A flag of the hill. Colours of a section of our moor, shifting from wet to dry in its own light. My own father’s woven image of it, anyway. After this use, my own section of his last tweed goes to our daughter. This seems to have become unbusinesslike again. Back to the practicalities. I’ve no serious objections to a wee service at the house, with people reading what they feel might be appropriate, sacred or no.
Maybe while that’s going on, it’s a good time to get the Decca Navigator flashed up. No, I’m out of date again. That was looking good for a few more years but of course they flicked the switch on the UK’s Decca chains on the 31st of March in 2001. The midnight hour. One hell of an April Fool’s gag. I never thought they were serious. That’s all history now and the three masts, standing up from the Ness Machair, were felled. All that rigging was scrapped and I hope some of it found its way into fences or hawsers. I still have one of the last Decca receivers somewhere in the garage. I was going to have it wired up so you could observe the historical moment when the data fell from the screen. But it all happened too suddenly. Maybe the Yanks’ GPS is also as obsolete as their Loran C. They could throw the switch on that too. We’re at their mercy, unless you’ve a paper chart, a compass and an eye for transits.
You’ve got to throw the ashes somewhere so we might as well go for the weather side of the Carranoch reef. Fine, I know I should stipulate that only visual landmarks are used but I’ll be lucky enough to get thrown anywhere south of the back of Goat Island, by the old outfall pipe, without making things any more difficult.
Even if Kenny F is back on the tack (off the
deoch
) and got himself a small boat on the go, don’t trust him with the job. Better not present them to my
near-colleague Mairi Bhan either. People who are into the fishing are primitive hunters. I know about this and about the strategies they use to disguise it. Pleasure or commercial fishing, they’ll only want to get the gear down as soon as they can. Mairi would forget about the ashes till she found them in the galley sink, months later, between casts with dried up mackerel skin and used teabags. Safest bet is the lifeboat cox. Calum’s successor, Murtie, or the guy after him, if I last that long.
All these guys have a conscience, by definition. No use giving them a bottle of malt for their trouble because most of them won’t even take a dram for fear of missing a shout. Another chance to get shaken about by turbo-diesels, get sick and thrown about. Great. Give a decent donation to the cause.
I don’t suppose you can get wee self-propelled caskets, yet. One to drop a model anchor by remote control, when you’re right over the mark. You can probably get one if you send to Florida. But don’t bother. Just ask the Cox to chuck the burnt bones over, when he’s updrift of the spot.
My various greys swamped by the deeper greys of the North Minch. That’s not a bad picture to go out on.
But I hope I manage to do a bit more typing first. I got rhythm. Melody might have to take its place in the queue.
