A Book of Death and Fish (28 page)

‘Is
he
still alive?’ I asked.

‘I think so,’ she said.

I already knew Gabriele’s father had gone missing in strange circumstances somewhere around Rügen Island, long after the war. But no-one in the family spoke about it much.

It seemed strange, not looking up his best friend. But of course that whole situation was so delicate. I didn’t ask any further. But we did see the big Magnum Photographers show. See that photo – you’ve seen it printed all over the place. It’s a billboard with the big Chevy or Buick or whatever it is, guzzling the gas with the happy white family that dreams are made of, driving into the sky, over the backs of the blacks looking at the poster from the street. We’re on the move, it says.

And we fucking were, that day. I’m back again to our family move to the better life on the Mainland. This Bordeaux beats shit. It’s transported me back to the new motorway. We’re right under this window but back about one quarter of one century. Along that tarmac or maybe a layer of it that’s now under a renewed surface. We were proceeding along the new road to the new life in the Central Belt. South to us. Maybe not a new Chevvy but a reconditioned ‘A series’, four-cylinder, 998cc design classic, under our green bonnet.

Torcuil, won’t you join me in a glass of this fine red, courtesy of BA, which we don’t own any more either. Wasn’t there some dirty tricks there too, by some former Cabinet member? BA were still managing to squeeze out that upstart entrepreneur from certain routes. Just look at that beard, these clothes. He may be a credible example of Thatcherite values but he had to learn it was to everyone’s advantage to operate on certain routes only. Lack of schooling, really. The things that shouldn’t need to be said.

Torcuil,
a bhalaich
, we bought our LPs off that guy Virgin Branson for a while. Before he got airborne. This is pretty smooth stuff, but we can handle it. I should call up the other guy who got stranded. Didn’t get a note of the number of the room he’s in. Thought I might see him in the Carvery. There was an American lady, a lecturer in literature, judging from the conversation you couldn’t help hearing, at the next table. She was talking to another lady. I was about to ask them if they wanted a glass and ask what she thought of this Bradley guy. Some writer, man.

I read his novel, on the holiday. Full of hot toddies and backwoods, trails and history – Civil War to Vietnam. Pointed out to me with missionary zeal by Mairi Bhan, my near-colleague in the Fisheries Office. She even trusted me with her library ticket. The most personal history, that’s what the novel’s about. What you’re carrying when you think you’re naked.

But I didn’t have the guts to move across and engage the professor in a literary discussion. I mean I don’t even have the terminology. I only did a module.

Feel bad about that stranded guy, though, Torcuil. People placed in situations, even in Stakis joints, should stick together. We were the two
teuchters, stranded in the Central Belt. And you taught me how to cast a fly. Could go down and find what room he’s in but maybe he just wants to crash. Coming up from Sunderland. Tornabloodysunderland. Worse than the Clyde. It’s all dead sheds down his way so he thought he’d just take up the offer and visit his Island relatives. He hasn’t seen them since he was a kid.

And yourself? You don’t have anyone left, by Loch Broom. Shit, anyone would think you can hear me just because I’m up here, a few metres of altitude. You might be in London. You might be under the ground.

This Sunderland guy said he just mentioned it on the phone as a possibility, the idea of visiting the relatives on Lewis. Next thing these tickets arrived in the post. ‘They must be desperate to get their peats home,’ I’d told him. ‘Must be a bag-them-out job. Better than getting bogged down.’

I knew about that.

Here’s the scenario. One tractor goes down to the axles with the last big load on it. You can’t budge it even when you get the load off. You can’t support the trailer to unhitch it. You have to send the young lads down the track for jacks and planks. These are brought to the scene of desolation by another tractor which gets bogged when it gets near. You risk a third, just skirting the danger area. That bit too close. Shit, another one down. Have you got the score so far? It’s not looking great. There’s one more neighbour and before you know where you are you’ve the Island record for the biggest number of tractors bogged down at the same time. Four down and resources are getting scarce. That was the last year we went over to Lochs to cut peats.

Gas central heating – the way of the town. Nearly as good as cooking on it, man.

Maybe all that kind of excitement has happened already and our Sunderland friend is on his way to help manhandle all these bags out of the wet area. After the monsoon. All these fertiliser bags. Now it’s fish farm bags. Fish farms – looks like we’ve blown that one too. A sound idea rushed to viability. There’s been a couple of scares with chemicals. So what do you do? Easy. Change the name of the chemical. Have you come across this way of dealing with a problem somewhere before? Windscale/
Sellafield? Give it another year and there’ll be another layer in the design of piles of bagged peat. All these graphics, logos, colours getting bleached under the attack of ultra-violet. Most people don’t have a clue how strong the light can be, up our way, once it gets through the clouds. Rays of light, shooting like howitzers, over the Lewis moorland.

And you’d be amazed at all the houses getting built on the more stony areas. The ground might be hellish for any sort of production, barring sheep meat, but there was now one hell of a crop of houses on it. No bad thing, either.

Houses like the one your olman built, Torcuil. It’ll be your mother’s house now. It was out along the road, a bit nearer the Devon river, a bit more sheltered than most sites you’d get on Lewis or Dundonnell. Maybe your olman could have built his house up Loch Broom way if the ferry route hadn’t shifted to Ullapool and the road link to Inverauchtin-shoochtin-glockamorra hadn’t got so developed. Crofts became worth money. Buildings in need of total renovation sold at a wild price.

And the rest of the family wanted to sell when the price was so good. Easier to share cash than fall out over land. The share that got you the electric guitar and amp, when the windfall arrived. That got you into the band scene. That got you enough session work, to call yourself a musician. I listened to the tracks you specified and even I could hear you were better than most of the accredited guys. The way of the session musician. Studio to studio. I thought you were less screwed up too, until you found your way to Lewis.

Torcuil, the chronology’s gone completely to Hell, again. It’s just wine. I can’t be properly pissed. I’m not going to try to retrace steps, sort anything out. Maybe I can say something if I just maintain the course and speed.

It’s like we’re looking out further, from this high room, altering our course and our sightline to the northwest, right over the submarine pens up the Holy Loch. The whole way north. Focusing on Scoraig peninsula for now, just in from the Cailleach. We’re wondering where the hell everyone went to, hoping it wasn’t to Tasmania or some such place to do unto others worse than had been done to them.

Some days at work, I get an insight into the colonialists’ way of speaking
to folk. Some guys go on about the Hebs – they seem to forget than I’m one of them – or a half-breed, anyway. Bit more complicated than that, of course. A fair bit of Norse bloodline in the east coast stock, too.

In Lewis and Dundonnell, Norse was filtered through Gaelic. Various systems of orthography until people like my old man gave up on the written form of his own first language as something only for those who’d been to Varsity. He accepted the majority verdict and clung only to the spoken word. He didn’t speak to me or the sister in Gaelic, though.

We’ve a few bearings, still, Torcuil, if you’re alive and awake. We’re not going back, either of us, you to Dundonnell or me to Griomsiadair. But bearings, Torcuil. Hell’s teeth, just having a few of the bastards to start with, that’s something. Let’s cross the Minch again, together, though you didn’t get much joy out of me, last time.

Still here, mate. There’s only a wee glass left but it’s yours if you want to change your mind. I’m on the tea with the UHT milk now.

I’m working on the chronology again. Since I spoke to you last, I phoned back to Germany and everything’s OK. They’re not daft though, as a species, women I mean. They see it or hear it. My mother’s the same. My Gabriele listened for one or two syllables before asking me if the wine was free.

We’re close to something now, Torcuil,
a bhalaich,
pretty close. Things not said and maybe there was a reason why not.

Getting a good bearing on your family home now. We’ve left the motorway, staying clear of Tullibody. Who wouldn’t, if they could? Some bloody kind people, mind you. More tolerant than they could have been. But we’re not crossing the Devon to these houses up Hungry Hill, Sauchie, or going out your way, to Coalsnaughton. We’re going down past Glenochil. It’s in the news again. Some Young Offender putting an end to it behind the wire. Could have been us,
a bhalaich
. Pretty close. I was losing the plot down there till my olman knew we had to get back home. The olaid was resigned to it too – the mainland wasn’t what she remembered.

We’re going along Hillfoots now. Menstrie, Alva, Tillie, Dollar and all of them with burns running down from the hills above them. You showed the way. I wouldn’t have got further than Gartmorn Dam and the Devon, where the railway crossed. You got me on to the right buses. We went up all these tracks and fished the hill burns for wild fish so you knew why they were called brown trout. Small fish with heads like bulls and only
reticent hints of red you could hardly call spots. You got one once that must have got the size it did by eating every other trout in the pool. It was a struggle that might have come to life from one of the woodcuts in your olman’s angling books. I helped pull your big fish from the gravel to the path. Rowans and resilient birch. That’s where these colours came from. Refracted on to the skins of these thin trout.

Back to the bungalows and bookshelves again. How to cast? I’d got a cheap fly rod from the paper-round money and you were a few weeks ahead of me. You had it. Up, pause, cast. The pause was the most important bit and the trickiest. We were ready to fall out when you remembered you’d promised your mother you’d go on the bike for something at the Spar Grocers. You’d to go or you’d get shot. When you came back, I’d be casting. And I was. You probably just went round the corner and strummed the guitar, without the amp so I thought you were gone. Maybe you got the man-management technique from your olman but it worked. Get the hell out of it and leave the pupil to make his own mistakes. Gain the skill.

And what did I give you in return, Torcuil, when you made it to Lewis? One day’s fishing and two bacon rolls, not much more.

The first phone call was the biggest shock. I was looking after a place and its pets, out of town. An old guy called Angus. A mate’s uncle. An uncle’s mate. He had to go to Glasgow. For some treatment. My girlfriend had just come across Europe to see how this Islander and this Island were, outside holiday times. Gabriele picked up the phone and said, ‘It’s Torcuil.’

I didn’t get your face from the name or from the voice when I took the phone. Maybe all these years in London left their trace. If you’d said this is Torcuil who caught a one and a quarter pound trout, from the Tillicoultry burn, or, your mate who caught a twenty-two and a half pound pike from the Dam because he went round the back, near the Black Devon at Clackmannan, when everyone else fished from the Sauchie pier – well, I’d have got you right away.

You and your girlfriend and me and mine – we met in a rustified lounge in Stornoway. You know, chunks axed out of perfectly good 3 by 2s to suggest timber in a barn. I wondered if I should be drinking with you, trying to conceal the shock when I saw your hair long and lank as if
trapped in time. Thin in a way common to rock guitarists of an earlier era. Not thin as in wiry as in the tough style of hill trout. More like the reared fish now in the cages of Loch Griomsiadair, the ones in pitted chrome, with torn fins.

We mentioned some fish, some family, some recent history. Planned a day out, on the top loch. I’d get a wee permit for us both. Changed days. The Trust had made the fishing affordable. They reckoned that would cut down the poaching. They were right. Yes, my boat was still in the water. But we had to get back out of town, tonight. We were looking after the ranch at Garyvard, for old Angus. Cats, dog and hens, anyway.

You never said it first time, Torcuil, but Gabriele caught on before I did. She said she’d seen plenty like you and your friend, in the city of Köln.

And me, Torcuil, I missed that scene. Thank the Lord. Even though I don’t think I believe in him any more. As a generation, we imported plenty old shit and a tab or two of acid but, in my day there wasn’t much talk of white powders. When there was no dope around we’d try this or that. There used to be a cough mixture which still contained opium. That worked. There were yellow pills called Nembies. Didn’t do anything for me but two of my mates disappeared for two days, wandering under the rhododendrons in Matheson’s forest. Would have been more appropriate, out there, if they’d been on Dr Collis Brown’s mixture, since the Chinese opium trade paid for all the bloody plants and soil and bridges in the first place. That was still the active ingredient till someone asked why sales were going through the roof.

Then the Family song called
The Weaver’s Answer
. Guys had already caught on to modelling glue. Shoe conditioner from Woolie’s did the trick too. First there was a buzz in the ears and you thought that was it until the pulses got more rhythmical. Then you were away. You could top up the visions if you kept conscious but otherwise it was maybe five minutes oblivion on the concrete deck of a concrete hut.

That man Bosch, not the electrician, the painter. His spirit was alive and unwell and hanging out, in the old youth club, close to the Nicolson Institute. None of our lot died. The red eyes and streaming noses, going home dizzy, strange smells, found handkerchiefs. Enough clues for a small
town. The school took the head-on approach, rooting out culprits, maybe the boss just not knowing that the thing itself wasn’t illegal. He also couldn’t cope with the idea that there were no ringleaders, pushers, only a collective madness. Whatever action was taken couldn’t stop the younger guys taking over when our mania subsided. Simple exhaustion saved us.

But one of the next group died from inhaling fumes. In a confined space. An abandoned outbuilding funded by Sir James Matheson’s unlimited wealth. The end result was the same but it seemed to us very different from the accidents that happened out in the open. A wee cove caught under wheels or trapped by tide.

Now, down this way, in the housing schemes of the Central Belt, in eyeshot of this block of windows, they say the kids are going straight to the powders. No preliminaries. They tell me the dope is back in fashion up the road and across the Minch but it doesn’t stop at that. Where there’s money, there’s cocaine. I’m out of touch. Maybe I should make an effort to know, as a man with a daughter growing fast. But that’s me, Torcuil. Let’s get back to you, man. You were the session guitarist who needed to escape the scene.

We failed to phone you. Failed to ask you out to the croft we were looking after. There were trout in the lochs behind it and lythe in the sea in front of it. Gabriele said she could handle you, not your friend.

We met again in town and your friend did most of the talking. She’d been on the heroin for longer. For you, Torcuil, it was the music scene. You told us the way it happened. You weren’t like the nerds who got hooked. You measured the buzz, took it when you had to get up there. Avoided it for weeks after. Then it was for days after. Then you just knew you couldn’t play so well without it. Then it got expensive. So you had a hole in your back garden and buried the deal there. People came to your back door so you got watched.

You both knew it was closing in, a matter of time. You’d seen it happen to so many. Better to go through Cold Turkey in a place you planned to be. Better than a cell. You’d planned on escaping to France. A location passed by word of mouth. No scene there. Good weather. Good busking. Cheap living.

But the girlfriend’s sister was a white-settler up here so it was a contact. She’d persuaded you, remembering that your dad was from somewhere up in the Highlands. She’d got you some gigs. There was the bar-lounge and the Indian restaurant. We went along. Nodded to the SY Pakistani proprietor. Great accent. We bought our meal. You two got yours on the house. There were no other customers that night but the word would get round. The guitar was good, really good. Singing needed work. She’d help you out with that.

She was a liability, you told me, that one time we went fishing. Casting for a late sea trout that failed to appear. You still had the knack, a far better rod arm than I’d ever have. Your line always landed lightly. Musician’s touch? She was playing the manager, kind of aggressive, pissing everyone off. What could you do? She was on edge. She had all this stuff, fucking bottlefuls, for the withdrawals but she was still getting bad spasms. It had been a big chunk of her life.

I still remember your flycasting. Best pleasure to be had that day. The three movements. Up, pause then cast. The sea trout had long since run to this loch on a spate. They’d seen it all now, this late in the season. These fish wouldn’t chase lures, wouldn’t play with us.

My last pause was too long. Your phone call wasn’t such a big surprise. Worst thing was, you were in the place at the time, sleeping next door. You’d had a few pints, just enough to get a sleep. She just went through the shaky door to the toilet. A holiday caravan. It was always shaking. You found her there, all the empty bottles around her. She hadn’t taken any chances, just swallowed everything. You made the phone calls, ambulance, police, everyone. Couldn’t go back there.

So I came in to my mother’s house, back in the town. Down the road from the caravan you had to leave. It was the only time me and the olaid fell out in years. She said to me after you left, ‘Fit kind o people are you mixin wi?’

She’d only slip back into Doric if she was really wound up. Me snapping back, out of sheer guilt because I knew I could have done more.

Torcuil,
a bhalaich
, you even gathered the mussels and moored them at Low Water, beside the boat so they’d be fresh. For bait. OK, I was on
shiftwork. And coping with the pan-European relationship. Still and all, fuck’s sake.

You waited a few tides, Torcuil, before I called you for that one day’s fishing. I was caught up, reorganising my own life. Gabriele was trying to get her bearings. Cologne to Stornoway. Quite a shift.

The formalities over, there was no point in hanging about. If you returned to London, it was back to the scene. The only option was your own mother’s for a spell. OK, she’d given up on you but she’d given up on you before and you’d always got a bed there. The numbers worked. You didn’t have to say too much. Next ferry.

We didn’t keep in touch like we said we would. I’m looking in your direction right now. Well, the direction of your mother’s house, anyway. From this hotel height. I’d like to go back to you teaching me to cast with a fly rod, in your own back garden. My lungs and liver seem to have survived the dangers of adolescence in that period of history, in that place. But I’ve hurt some other people since then. It’s not true what we used to chant at school – ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me.’

The olman used to find it difficult, biting the tongue, when he had bosses hanging over him. ‘Try counting to ten, son,’ he said once. ‘Just count to ten, nice and slow. Before you say a thing. That usually works for me.’

But usually, in my own case, it’s been by neglect. You might be in the back-room now, that house in Coalsnaughton, with the amp switched on or off. You might have driven yourself up that hill path, to get back to a place where you hunted out a large trout. But I don’t think so. A lot of people gravitate back to London, not wanting to go. I know some good musicians with good families, living down that way, don’t get me wrong. But I’m seeing you now, navigating around your own veins. Losing tracks, losing way. Putting the needle bloody anywhere, to get a fix.

I’ve gone off this wine. Don’t fancy that last glass. Changed days. Could have handled a dry white, scoffed the lot. This stuff is too red, too smooth.