A Book of Death and Fish (27 page)

For every story there’s a lighter and a darker version. My uncle Andra, fae The Broch, talked about plucking the geese. They were in Italy in the war and the lads had done a deal. Jock Rose, the tinker, showed how it was done. He plunged the carcasses into near-boiling water and then the feathers just flew off. But first you had to kill your goose. They’re big birds and none of the squaddies ever managed to do that twisting the neck thing. Except Jock.

So it was all done, in the right order, and they made a proper dinner. Invited their new friends and colleagues in the trade fuelled by British Army petrol to eat with them. The squaddies told their new mates to bring wives and daughters. The table was set. But Jock Rose arrived pissed. He’d got hold of a horse and cart and there were two hoors from the brothel, sitting one on either side of him. The guests evaporated. Some of them grabbed food, as they legged it out, stuffing it in the pockets of their good clothes. These were hungry times in the villages and the towns of Italy.

But Andra also told me about the dysentry. How no-one was reporting sick. If you did that, they wouldn’t let you on the train. No-one wanted to stay on that continent any longer than he had to. You were so desperate to get home that you’d shit in overflowing buckets for three days and nights. That was the only hint that something had happened inside the minds of all these men in tin hats. Not just those with a story like my own father’s – his escape from a tank. An armoured vehicle that had been mobile, just seconds before, became a steel coffin. A smouldering target. A hatch clanged shut for the last time and he was outside of it. By a whisker.

We kept hens for a while. Out the back. The daughter, Anna, and me had fun, building the housie with the nesting box on the side and the run out front. Long before that, I remembered my grannie just lifting a corner of the coop and grabbing a black one. She disappeared into the shed with it and we got it to take home in a bag. It might not be worth roasting but there would be good soup there.

I killed hens after making sure Anna really was somewhere out of the way. First I listened to advice then I did the twist thing just as I’d been told, so I thought. But you might as well have been doing the other kind of twist, chasing it round the garden when it came back to life. So I put an edge on the hatchet after that. They still quivered and moved more than you could think possible but you knew they were dead in most senses.

We kept two geese for a while. This was pushing it, even in a back garden stretching out for half an acre. The neighbours all had projects too. There was no hassle. We thought our geese would breed but one day we found two eggs. We phoned a man versed in these matters. When are you in town, next?

So my uncle’s mate, Angus from Garyvard, officially sexed our stock and neither was a gander. But they were very protective about their fine eggs – it took a single one to make the richest omelette or scrambled egg you could want. I’m tasting them now, creamy without the addition of cream. I felt bad, keeping one goose off with a stick while I stole the egg they were jointly guarding. I knew I couldn’t carry on doing this. So the deal was done – two live geese for two live lobsters. At least I knew how to do them, courtesy of Mrs Beeton. As per crab. That diagonal thing with the skewer through the eyes.

The latter days of the barter system in the Coastguard Service. I broke the news as gently as I could to Anna who liked to stroll down the urban allotment to throw grain in their direction. They were going to a good home.

‘But I wanted to eat the gooses,’ she said.

I don’t think I could have swung the hatchet at one of those arching necks. And I didn’t know any relative of any Jock Rose who would do that favour.

It was my Lewis uncle, Ruaraidh, arranged mattters, out on the croft. I must have been very young because they didn’t want me in there at the time. I could catch some of my grannie’s yarns for a change. It might even have been Angus, in there with him. In the villages there was usually an expert, in at the killing.

But I remember being proud when my uncle gave me my share to take back to town. ‘You earned it,’ he said, ‘you’ve hardly missed a fank.’ And the olaid was proud of me too, not just because there was a whole pile of chops and a gigot, shoulder and everything. Maybe my sister was scowling. It wasn’t fair. I got to go driving about in the van and take part in all these things while she had to help my mother in the kitchen.

Ruaraidh was at the hospital when I saw him for the last time. I wasn’t so good at reading the signs – he didn’t give a lot away anyway, asking after everybody. He had cancer of the stomach. They say that’s one of the most painful. But I was there in uniform, on the way home after the day-shift. Her Majesty’s Coastguard, he said. That was maybe enough. He knew I was in a job that needed doing. That’s all he would say about his own years in the war. Except for one new year’s visit, a rare exchange with my olman.

‘Aye, we were there when they were needing them. Not when they were feeding them.’

We came close to getting the real stories then. But they never came out that night. They never did, in my hearing.

It was a bit sudden when I said I’d better be heading now because Gabriele’s brother, Michel, was over from Germany and they wouldn’t eat till I got there. Something went, fast as a North Minch rainsquall, across his face. He knew that was it, even if I hadn’t faced it yet. He did say something to me though. Very low-key.

‘Don’t wait till you’re an old man,’ he said. ‘It might never happen. You tell your own stories when you need to.’

I never took the chance to tell him what it all meant to me, the runs out to fanks at Griomsiadair. An initiation into a world of blood, sweat and yarns.

Glasgow Airport doesn’t run to recycled paper, yet. At least WH bloody Smith’s doesn’t. You couldn’t fail to find the stuff in Germany. Either end of the process. Putting your shit down on paper or wiping it off you. Maybe it’s all that guilt. Maybe now that there’s signs of a lasting downturn in the industrial world over on the continent, things might change. Still plenty of new Mercs and BMs. It’s getting difficult to find used cars because everyone sells them for silly money to the East. And they say there isn’t a border any more.

There’s an abundance of borders still to be clearly defined and agreed. Constitutional Questions.

The
Independent
, picked up from the vacant business class seats of this aircraft, quotes the revamped Cecil Parkinson, adding to his serious target, right from his conscience, going for three per cent less emissions from exhausts this very year. Cool. Until you find his footnote which says this means we can now increase production of cars by, wait for it, three per cent.

Public transport went up in price as The Wall came down. Even the bloody wall itself is now packaged in wee bits for sale. Of course that’s only right. Since that system over the other side eventually corrupted itself to death, it naturally follows that the wonderful one, West of it, is necessarily correct in all its aspects. Course it does.

These wee bottles on the flight. Could they not just give you a slug from a litre into a glass? No, they’ve done the time and motion study. Modern Times in the air. The designer labels. I’m seated beside a young kid, going to Scotland, fed up with history. Fed up of all that money going to the East whether they work for it or not.

‘We worked for it. They want it right away.’

‘Hold on, you’re still going to school, as the Yanks say. You’re a college girl.’

‘Well, my father worked for it,’ she said.

Here’s a seismic sensing opportunity. A sign of a backlash. Two generations on, a move to emerge from the guilty period. Mind you, let us remember this is a random sample of one kid on one plane.

Even with a couple of the complimentary (i.e. you’ve paid for as much as you can drink on your ticket already) wee bottles inside me, I can sense that my effort at finding common ground, a propos
The Tin Drum
isn’t going to work. OK, there was the
Independent
but it seems to be all about food and where to eat it. I have another try at conversation, citing
Effie Brest
though I’m on the point of saying
Marie Braun
. The former is far enough back to be OK. She’s had it up to here with National Guilt and asking whys. Or maybe I’m just forgetting I’m pretty well an old bastard myself and there’s no reason this kid should respond to attempts at conversation just cause she’s drawn the seat next to me.

I settle in the chair and think of Gabriele and Anna who have a couple more days in Bonn while I’m back at work. At least one Lewisman is flying Tornados in Germany. That’s up the road a bit. Closer to Düsseldorf. The pilot cove was a bit vague about the location. Might soon get taken over by a budget airline anyway. It might be the Tornados which migrate norwest to plague us for a designated number of weeks in the year. That’s OK really, to justify the forty million pounds sterling Nato spent on our airport. What’s that in Deutschmarks? DMs rule these days and I don’t mean Doc Marten boots though they’re back in fashion again. That German lassie maybe has a pair though I can’t see for all the folding tables and plastic cups and stuff.

In the olden days, I remember it was four to a pound. Mention Germany to old soldiers – ones who’d come through it – and they’d tell you anything and they meant anything – cost ten cigarettes in Germany. Amongst the rubble.

I’m off the plane and I’m realising that I’m not going to get home tonight. It’s the old story of a slight delay and the Stornoway plane
not waiting for two passengers. OK, I can understand that, what’s the arrangement? So the car arrives to take me and one other guy from one other flight they didn’t wait for.

I should phone back to Germany to catch Gabriele before she phones home and gets worried that I’ve not arrived. Which bloody way does this hour go? I always get it wrong.

First, the stairs. A better bet than lifts full of tired people, spilled from bus-tours. Forty-eight pounds a night to stay here, without breakfast, if you were paying for it. I remembered the asparagus, the pale shoots we bought direct from the farm, not the flashy green ones. There was no fridge in the room but I filled the sink with cold water. Eased them in there and hoped for the best.

Just looking out now and I’m glad of the height. Just as well I’ve been shuttled into this Stakis Glamourama. Looking out over the Renfrew boatyards. Pleasure yachts. Easier to come up the Clyde on a two-masted toothbrush than to have a ship built here now. Why exactly did we have to commit industrial suicide? Remind me.

Aye. The other guys were still massed the other side of the Steppes. Indo-China was getting weird. So it was better to build trade with our defeated enemies, Japan and Germany. And the fellows on the Clyde had created trouble before. These damned democratic socialists were all too close to the National sort of socialists. So Churchill said, in public, against advice. But he was only outvoted for a short time. He got back in office when times were hard.

Lest we forget, the technique was still worth trying again. After the Argentinians obliged with national distraction therapy, the focus shifted to the Yorkshire miners. There ain’t no enemy like an enemy within. Ask Trotsky. Did you know that Arthur Ransome, foreign correspondent for
The Manchester Guardian
, married Trotsky’s former secretary? Sailed her out of Russia in the
Racundra
, hastily launched in 1922.

Pity my old mate Kenny wasn’t still in Glasgow. Just as well he was back home. It might be me leading him astray tonight. But the conscious part of my Civil Service mentality was still sober. I couldn’t risk missing that flight, tomorrow. The whole reason I was travelling back without my
family was to make that shift I couldn’t swap. So I couldn’t venture into Glasgow proper. I had to stay where I was put.

Here I was before the wide window of my room in the high-rise hotel. Observing the rise of the Ochils. The blip of Stirling Castle, the Wallace Monument. Startling visibility.

I could navigate to Coalsnaughton, Torcuil, if I had time and you can’t navigate without that. Doesn’t have to be a brass chronometer. A five-quid digital dial would do nicely, thanks. Mind that chapter in
Swallows and Amazons,
trying to get back in the dark. Trusting to counting. Dodgy. Without accurate assessment of how long you’ve been steering a given course, or a log to tell you that distance, you don’t know where you are. Simple as that.

But Torcuil’s mariner olman admitted to me once how he’d been caught out with a younger version of my pal aboard. Visibility was down so they couldn’t find the entrance to Little Loch Broom. The pair, father and son, had been out of the loch, fishing to the north, towards Priest Island. The ship’s master on leave naturally still had the compass bearing home, in his head, but you need to know how long you’ve travelled along it.

He told me they were caught north of Rubha na Cailleach, the wrong side of The Old Woman, you could say. Or was it a witch? No, that was Loch Maree. Witch’s Point. There surely had to be a Dubh somewhere, for a proper witch. Or was that a nun? Maybe there wasn’t much difference to a good Presbyterian.

That was the point in the story where Torcuil’s olman admitted, from under these eyebrows, that he hadn’t brought the watch. Something about being on holiday. But unforgivable for all that. A lesson he’d learned often enough not to have to learn it again.

They were well on course for the entrance. He didn’t know how far he would have trusted his own judgment if he’d had no other option. Dense low cloud and pawing drizzle started to shift. A bit of a breeze but nothing silly. As the temperatures of air and sea became more equal, they could see again, as far as the cliffs and the Summer Isles. There was the brown cloth skin of the Priest. Priest Island, that is, now well astern. Just
where it should be. They now knew for sure they had plenty sea-room if they needed it. Then the distant shape was showing its rocky sides, a touch of pink in the granite in late light, as religious as Iona. That monk of a rock held on the quarter, a back-bearing and the Old Woman stood up, too tired to hide from them any longer, fed up of the game and letting them come home into Little Loch Broom.

So that’s another of your olman’s stories, Torcuil. And I’m remembering it, marooned in the Stakis hotel, just along a line from the rise to the Ochil Hills. Even if I could find my way back to your folks’ house in that street that isn’t new any longer, I might not recognise the particular box. Your father had his stroke in the house he’d commissioned. First occupant and first to die in it. He did it all quite tidily, during his leave. I don’t suppose there’s a chance that you’re in it now.

From this height in a high-rise, time is variable. Maybe it’s the Saint Emillion, carried from the Carvery. Another glass.
Pourquoi pas
? I’m not going nowhere, tonight. Not in body. The mind is racing. Got to be backward. Only way to go. I’m going out of this window and along that motorway. The Stirling motorway was completed only the year before our small exodus from Lewis. My mother, the sister and myself were on the
Loch Seaforth
, calling at Kyle, breakfasting then disembarking at Mallaig. Our journey in hope to the Central Belt of Scotland. The scenic train run to Queen Street where the poor wee dog peed for half an hour solid. Half an hour liquid. Hell, you know what I mean.

My olman had a reconditioned motor fitted in the Morris Traveller and the new road was ready. The A series of Austin Morris engines went on with only minor modifications right up to the Metro. He was driving us to our own box. We were not the first owners but it was the first time they were paying a mortgage rather than rent. I can understand now, it was something for them to be proud of. It’s shuffled right up front of the memory now, that card to the front of the file. 1967.

Does everybody’s mind work this way or is this a leftover from that one damn microdot? The one that entered right into my own skull? All very virginal. Two cherries plucked in one week not so long after we’d moved back to the Island in 1970. My first fish,
Salmo salar
, spotted
and snatched quietly, out on my own. Traded for the tab of acid. Full sex came a lot later.

I dropped the tab to the Yes album saying ‘Yours Is No Disgrace, silly human race.’ But all the daft stuff was everybody else. We really were the beautiful people. And at first all the scabby faces were the others. From Bayhead to Newton, the masks were melting. Then the buildings were shaking and the harl was peeling from the seaward walls. Bad trips only happened to other poor bastards. Couldn’t be that. But some of these weird faces stayed with me for a long time to come.

I escaped the long trip, helped out by a couple of mates. Forget the fucking chemicals and get some of this down your neck. And they tilted the Lanliq. Most of it dribbled down to add a layer to the tie-dye vest but I swallowed enough to get plastered on top of the acid. Good move. Got home, stinking of the Republic of South Africa. Got hell. Got to bed. Next day was interesting.

Herself was damn sure I was going to school, whatever state my head was in.

‘I dinna care fit you wear, loon,’ she said. ‘I’m jist past a that.’ Three mugs of tea and I faced the bright. But the trip didn’t stop. You’d get a bit of respite, think you were down and then the walls would move again. Fuck. Wasn’t all bad now but you just wanted off the rollercoaster.

The flashbacks went on for a couple of years. My voice joined the gathering consensus that repeated, ‘No chemicals, man.’ But some of the rest of the gang carried on with the stuff from the Mill. We called it The Weavers Answer and we sniffed it from a hankie. Guys were going seriously bananas. Don’t ask me how he found out but my olman was aware of what was going on. He just said to me, quietly, ‘Look son, tell the boys, I used to work with that stuff. You’re supposed to have a mask. A ventilated room. You’re risking lung damage, the lot. You boys are taking serious fucking poison.’

I think it was the only time he swore when he was talking to me. OK, you can say, don’t do it, to other guys. But that’s like your music teacher saying, don’t start smoking. They’ve already set the example. At least we stopped. It’s about then I was getting quite good at smoking. Holding a
blast down long enough to let the dope work. The tobacco didn’t get me choking now. I was getting to like the mix of smells.

But I found that even the organic stuff was getting dodgy for me. Trouble was someone had got hold of some proper resin. Hell, this didn’t only smell of something. Maybe it was just that we had a bit of money now from the poaching or the Klondyking. There’s a lingering trace of alchemy in that trade. Minch herring sold to Faroese packers so providing us, the Hebridean labour force, with the ability to purchase some black Afghani.

We were blasting it from a hollowed out carrot but see some guys. Eating the fucking pipe. And then we reached a stage we hadn’t been at before. No more daft laughing, everyone going quiet. But for me it was another acid flashback and I wanted out.

So that’s a brief summary of the lowlights of what followed my Central Belt experience. My return to the gentle Isle of Lewis. Leaving Torcuil, my fellow teuchter, trapped down there, under the Ochils.

Let’s come closer to now. Back one week only, from this day of the flight that departed without me, leaving me stranded in this three-star box. We left Anna with the Bonn grannie and took a great train ride to Essen. The main mission was to see a gallery. ‘Never mind what’s on the display panels,’ she said. This building was designed by her father’s best friend. They’d been students of architecture together and were drafted together and they deserted together. And survived the war.