A Book of Death and Fish (36 page)

I did speak then. I made the single point that any action had indeed to be collective, not only with the Nato seal but surely with the UN. How could you say it was OK for us but not for them? Them being Russia in Chechnya, China in Tibet, or any other occupying force.

The MP invited me to a Labour Party meeting even though I told him I was no longer a member and it wasn’t an oversight. I said nothing but heard activist after activist warn him that he could no longer count on their support unless he distanced himself from his leader on the issue of the invasion of Iraq. He did not do that. The cove may have been unusual as a politician in that his public proclamations were identical to those he made in private conversation at the gas station. He saw his noble leader’s determination to commit British forces to the second invasion of Iraq as a logical extension of the principle of collective action in Kosovo.

He lost his seat, next election, in 2005. Fast years. By that time I was looking more to our own wee shindig in Edinburgh for informed debate. It’s just possible this might have something to do with an electoral system which kind of represents the votes cast in the make-up of the Parliament. Strangely enough, this is a policy once endorsed by the unseated member when he was engaged in dialogue with Liberal Democrats. I wasn’t able to get excited about the little offered on the devolution menu of 1979 but I made sure I placed my vote in 1997.

The press put Labour’s upset in the Western Isles down to local issues – like the closure of the fish-farm in Scalpay. I’d guess that the blushing Blair’s marriage to George W Bush was a main factor. We just sensed that our then-MP was a bit uncomfortable as a bridesmaid. Thus, a promising political career died.

Interesting though, that the policy of removing the successors of the Polaris class weapons from the Clyde was a clear part of the manifesto of the winning party. Also interesting that the same policy was formerly a key part of the Labour Party’s manifesto, under Michael Foot’s leadership. Somehow this had made said party ‘unelectable’, according to many commentators.

The percentage vote and the percentage swing are documented information. The interpretation of these figures is of course a matter of some debate.

What a work is an island. What a greater work is a society of islands. A coherent group. The Monach or Heiskers, where Black John led the raiders to their own Point of Death and so became a hero. Flannans, twenty miles out from Loch Roag, where the lovers, who were not allowed to marry, made their landfall. They came ashore on bare Eilean Mhor and survived in that place, like the voyaging monks who had occupied the terrain long before them. Go down the searoad from there and out a bit and you’ll find the St Kilda group. Hirta at first appears as if it’s joined to the high stacks and Boreray. Then you come closer and each island becomes distinct.

Come home to the North Minch. You might have to run before a gale and find refuge in North Rona first, like the Steward of St Kilda and his wife. Gather driftwood to repair your vessel so you can voyage south to Stornoway in the spring and receive the greeting reserved for the few who’ve come back from the dead. And that was before the good lady gave birth to twins, conceived in that exposed place.

The Barkins in Loch Erisort. The Taransay Glorigs. The impossible Sound of Harris. When the Coastguard Tug contract was awarded, the Chief Coastguard visited and asked my colleague, a master-mariner, if he thought it was viable for a vessel of that draft to take a short cut through there.

‘I wouldn’t take a wheelbarrow through there,’ my watch-mate said.

You can remember all the green-capped islands; the reefs, submerged, breaking, drying and covering but there are still sandbars to contend with. And these shift. The tides do what they want, when they want, washing back and fore through channels and interacting with the cumulative effect of ocean swells and Minch chop.

As an archipelago, the Shiants have it. That’s what Mairi said, when she visited the new Ops Room. Management had found the cash to have a stand made for the huge Doppel binoculars, as a bit of a visitor attraction. These were a World War Two trophy that had come the Coastguard’s way, back in history. But neither of us needed these fine lenses to visualise the coastal territory from Arnish to the Shiants.

Mairi is some talker anyway but I could sense compulsion in her voice once she started to tell me about the last time she had the boat out. I usually brought the tea into the Ops Room for a visitor but I caught something in her tone of voice. This was a story you couldn’t start and stop between bursts on the radio. I got a few quizzical glances as I handed out mugs to my watchmates and brought ours to the restroom. I was entitled to my meal-breaks, on the twelve-hour watch system, though I didn’t always take them.

Some coves don’t understand about being mates with blones. And once you see through Mairi’s tough talk you can see the fine line of her features. The Lochs girl with the Hispanic brown in her eye. Even if she cut back the black mane to give a post-New Wave edge to her look.

She was reliving things, once she got going. That’s how come I can tell her story. I was content to listen. I’m not going to try to imitate her voice, just tell you what she told me.

This autumn, her father’s marks had paid off again. She’d normally put the boat ashore, come October, but she knew she’d get twitchy later in the year when a decent frost would flatten the sea again. Of course she could get the diving-club inflatable down here, launching from the trailer. But some days she just fancied being on her own. Nuffink personal, mate.

That moment when you kill the engine and just let the boat drift in an offshore breeze. Her father’s voice kept her calm. He was always surprised at her staying power. She’d been well wrapped up but most kids her age would find the autumn fishing a bit challenging. And she knew she couldn’t come if he dug out the 303 and the ammunition.

He would have laughed at this technology she carried now. Her rods were near enough as fine as the one he had used for fresh-water fishing. He’d chase off with a bubble float and a Golden Virginia flat can of
worms to see if he could pick up a late-season salmon or sea trout. These big walks to the distant top lochs of guarded systems – ‘A bit much for my wee girl yet. We’ll give you a year or two’s growing,’ he’d said. She still bristled at the disappointment.

Maybe she’d always been a bit of a gear-freak. The record player that could stack six singles high. The control on it to vary the speed. It still had a 78, as well as the 45 for singles, 33 for LPs. But this was a new model, bought from Oxendale’s or J D Williams. The Sears and Roebuck of South Lochs. Her mother was always buying her trousers and blouses in crimplene or terylene. Any bloody ylene. Stay-Press, Drip-Dry.

The revolutions per minute reproduced your rubber soul. Norwegian wood. That’s what she was floating in right now. Wasn’t it good? Light pine. A biodegradable vessel imported, from Norway, a fore-runner of the flat-pack. Clenched together with copper nails and little caps. She’d had to back the heads of many nails with the ball from an old anchor-stock before himself had let her try the fiddly part. They’d swapped places. She was inside the growing boat and got the cap down over the projecting nail, using the hollow punch. Snug but not too hard. She hadn’t been able to snip the first point off. He hadn’t tried to take over but just showed her again, the twist you made with the snips. Not just squeezing. Then it was too easy and she was snipping too close to the cap. The rove, you called it. So there was nothing left to beat down to complete the rivet.

He’d given her the look she expected but didn’t say a thing. Just punched out the first nail and then rummaged for a slightly thicker one so it would be tight in the drilled hole. And this time she judged it right. Then you had to listen to the rhythm of the hammers because the round ball of one tool, one side of the plank, was tapping against the other tool’s light touch on the head of the nail. That one will do. Hundreds more followed. They’d swap jobs to keep the interest up. She did most of the riveting at the finish because she was light, standing in the fine boat.

After he was gone, the Rana boat needed some repairs. She knew what to do and could always find someone to back the nails. Cutting the new section of plank was scary but one of her father’s mates had been a chippy in the Merch.

Her father’s friend had showed her how to grind the rivet and punch it out. That way you got the bad bit of planking clear in one piece so it was your template for the new one. You didn’t want to bother trying to scarf them in. It would be stronger and nearly as neat if she butted old and new together and joined them with a backing plate. Riveted through. See if she could get Kenny involved. He had a good hand for the tools. When it was steady.

Now she could identify every repair she’d made since. Some of them with help and some without. Most people who came out in this boat wouldn’t spot any of the repairs. And she felt safe in the Rana because she knew every nail in it, the light, open Norwegian boat, built from a kit. She’d got the big, throaty Seagull firing and nosed out of shelter. Then she turned the small craft out, round the corner. She took it inside the Dubh Sgeir but the sea was still lumpy enough.

She might make Calbost of it but she wouldn’t get as far as Loch Shell. She was remembering the day she took the Rana all the way to Molinginish, the shore that opens up, past the south side of Loch Shell.

From there, all the small islands in the Shiants group were distinct. When you were closer, details distracted you from taking in the overall shape. That was the day she’d found the carcass of a young sperm whale, up the shoreline.

Molinginish is a boulder beach, accessible from sea but a long walk-in. An old settlement had become a seasonal bothy. She’d beached the boat on that flat-calm day and found herself drawn right up to the beast. The whiteish leather had been scored with short marks. It must have been not long dead, otherwise she couldn’t have come so close. Her strongest memory was the detail on that stretching skin. Years later she’d done Raku at the art class in the Nic and there it was, a ceramic impression, like that remembered skin but baked permanent.

Shape was also important. You had to judge when to stop working at that. They hadn’t been able to fire the work down the shore, on a driftwood fire, as planned, but the teacher had linked with the techie department to set up an old oil drum as a kiln, fired by one blowtorch. Lewisian Raku. A metaphor for the fire which had produced all this exposed igneous rock. Volcanic activity, breaking from the tides, to form the Shiants.

As she grew, she was allowed to do more with the boat and more on the croft. She remembered the first time she’d been allowed to stay in the byre when a butchering was going on. ‘It’s not a proper deer, where are its horns?’

That brought out a laugh from himself and his usual accomplice. Then they’d bent back to the physical graft of skinning the hind. Later she’d seen this happen to a wedder but the colour of the deer’s meat was different, darker and without the layers of yellowish fat. Sheep or deer or whale, the animal was something different, in death.

Her father’s stroke, so sudden, so massive, they’d tried to keep the lid on the box. You don’t want to see him like this. But she’d known she had to. She didn’t care whether he was as pretty as he could be. Her mother too, she’d needed to see him. That maybe helped but she’d never really got over it. She lost her heart for living so far from town. The sheltered housing suited her fine. It was pretty social in there.

You couldn’t look towards the Shiants without thinking of the bodies washed up on the shingle bank, the shore of rolling pebbles between these main islands. Her father would explain the song.

In
Ailein Duinn
, the sea captain from Stornoway must meet Anna, the black-haired daughter of the Scalpay merchant. They were promised to each other. His slim black ship of oak sets out from Stornoway but fails to reach East Loch Tarbert.

Anna cannot bear the loss. She composes the most painful expression of grief you’ll ever hear. Then she succumbs. Her own coffin is taken for what they think will be its last journey, by sea, to be buried at St Clements’, Rodel. But they’re caught in a gale. Her brother, the skipper, decides that the living have to come before the dead. He lightens his vessel by casting Anna’s casket adrift. So Anna’s own sea voyage began out of East Loch Tarbert. Her body would be set nornoreast, which is the bearing of the Shiants.

But Ailean’s vessel was overcome, close to the Shiants. His body would have been filtered through the outlying reefs of the group of islands, never straying far because the tidal effect, there, is cyclical. He was waiting for her. His brown hair and beard moving, like kelp, in the tides.

The force of the northern set is stronger than the ebb, south of the
Shiants, so Anna’s body had to move towards him. Both bodies were washed up together on that long thin neck of gravel.

Sure enough, they often sighted whales or dolphins in the Sound of Shiants. Big fish, small fin, her father had said to imprint the shape of the diving back of a minke whale. The orca was unmistakable, and usually there would be a tall male dorsal and a rounded female one. ‘Do you think that’s them?’ he’d whispered. She could just about believe it. Anna had escaped the oak confines of her own casket.

She still heard the story in his own voice, no doubt about it. His catchphrases had soaked into the fabric of this vessel, like creosote. ‘We’ll try a jury rig.’ Any kind of improvisation. She’d tried the phrase out at Cearsiadair school, last day of term. They’d all brought in records and the old Dansette player in the building failed to drive at 48. ‘We’ll just juryrig it,’ she’d said, experimenting with a single at 78rpm. A pile left by the older pupils who were now in the Nic. The Stones version of
Little Red Rooster.
Everyone reckoned the adjustment was an improvement. Soon everyone was asking for more singles at 78.

None of them were quite as good. Then she’d hit on putting on a Calum Kennedy Gaelic anthem – the teacher’s choice, a 78 at 33. She always thought Kia-ora was a Gaelic name. The name of the ship in the song. Another success. The game was more popular than Monopoly. She could hear the speeded up riff in her ear now, above the swell. Sure enough, things just weren’t the same in the farmyard.

Calum Kennedy had missed a trick. He was the local hero. He could have recorded a Gaelic version with the rooster transformed into the proverbial cow. As in, sad day we sold her.

‘Time these bloody fish came on or I’ll be singing it,’ she thought. A passing boat would sight the drifting Rana with a demented singer giving it serious welly. They’d send the lifeboat to tow her in to protective custody.

‘Talking of lifeboats, I’d better show my face back in the Ops Room,’ I said.

‘I was forgetting. You’re running the watch now. I was wondering why you still had the tie on.’

‘Aye,’ I said, ‘but you’ll need to come back and give me the next instalment.’

She nodded. ‘Part of my own job. Liaison visit. Your fishing vessel records are still way out of date.’