A Book of Death and Fish (6 page)

Gartmorn Dam was sided by pines. They’d probably been planted in a post-war panic, anticipating the future demand for pit props and wood pulp. They kept most winds off the water.

The pier had standing room for three anglers. It led out away from sloping walls to the flooded area. A rusty steel cylinder was linked to the concrete bank by an iron walkway. The whole construction must have been there to monitor the supply, or pump it, when the water, captured here, had served the area. You reached onto the pier by stepping round a locked gate and going out onto the lattice of metal.

From there, you could catch the reflection of a real island, forested and about half a mile out. The picture in the water was something worth looking at, in the algae soup of insects, collected here. That’s probably why the shoals of small perch also gathered around the pier. The smaller fish would chase the sticklebacks and perch fry that chased the insects. In turn, bigger solo perch and long pike would come up from deep water to take their fill of the intermediate-sized fish.

It was like looking into the diesel film in Stornoway harbour. You could catch the first dimples of disturbance. Could be just a breeze escaping through branches – until you saw fry break the surface. Maybe you’d catch the chrome glint of an accelerating fish below. I leaned over to watch all this and could have been looking at mackerel chasing sandeels.

I took my first pike long before I took a salmon. I was well prepared. A big reader then. Everything from
The Old Man and The Sea
(because of the leaping fish on the cover) to all the comics. I had a paper-round – newspapers in the morning and magazines after school. I read all the
comics before I delivered them. Some customers complained they were getting their papers late. I’d read anything but I liked fishing books best. Manuals and stories. Salmon weighed sixty-four pounds and were taken on long poles of greenheart by a Miss Ballantyne, in tweed, wielding gear over swollen water. Monks bore witness to pike, snapping at water-fowl.

I would sit in the Public Library, between buses back from school, turning the pages of
The Manchester Guardian
till I came to the hot bits. The angling column was by Anthony somebody. He could be casting for sea bass, from storm beaches in Atlantic Ireland. That was another fish with a spiny dorsal like a perch but a silver bar, foreign to me and so pure and strange.

The paper-round money would get spent, between the blue-painted Sports Shop and the Co-op fish shop across the road. Wire traces with treble hooks didn’t come cheap, even if the white-haired lady knocked a penny or two off because of your ginger hair and soft voice. Herring fillets made bait that shone and sent a message of oil into the non-tidal water. That catch must have come from the Clyde or Canada. The boned bodies were so clean that they didn’t smell of fish. They might have been netted from the chlorine waters, inside the sandstone Public Baths, the other side of the junction.

It must have been New Year’s Day because I had no papers to deliver. It could easily have been the first day of the Seventies. I was stocked up with gear, between Christmas and Hogmanay tips. These came from the first few parts of my territory, up from Main Street, before the railway line. These were all council houses.

Further up the hill, there were too many people like us. Refugees from council schemes in other parts of Scotland and now saddled with mortgages they couldn’t afford, for a bungalow with at least one dormer window or porch to make it different from next door. Further up the hill again, was the real money. Some of them got
The Times
. There was a lot of
Scotsman
s for every
Record
.

You didn’t expect anything, that far up, except for a polite directive to stop using the short cut between gardens and start going the long way round. Please. That was when there were semi’s which didn’t really want
to be connected. My part of Hungry Hill was the place where people went into the Spar grocers for two ounces of cheese. Up the hill, they had the money because they hung on to it.

I was beginning to realise that I now lived in a reservoir. Maybe we were all near enough the same species but there was a pattern of territories. If you walked all the way around the silver birch to find a quiet clearing, at The Dam, you could ledger a worm all day and hope that a survivor of the stock of brown trout would take it. These had been bred to be angled for with Greenwells’ Glories and Bloody Butchers. The survivors were forgotten about when the pike and perch took a hold. Rowing boats were removed.

Attempts to control the angling were abandoned. It became free to all. These trout could be bottom feeders or they could snap at smaller fish of several species. The perch territories encouraged float-fishers. But all these areas intersected around that old pier. All substantial fish gravitated towards the small fry.

So when I could, I would catch baitfish like cuddies in a harbour, on the smallest hook you could find, tied on a handline. The trouble was you got too occupied in this and forgot you were collecting them for bigger things. And I learned not to call them cuddies. I didn’t like being laughed at. People kept asking me to say salmon and worm. Hebridean indicators in the voice. Like the way we say ‘soup’. I was ready to give way to a new accent the way all these Poles who’d settled here after the war, had dropped a syllable or two out of their names. A concession.

I cast the herring fillet from the narrow walkway and paid out line, going round the spikes to take me back to the concrete. Big guys arrived on bikes with drop-handlebars. They normally went after salmon but even on the Tay there was a couple of months closed. They had Barbour jackets and gaffs. They had reels with numbered grades of tension, worked from the back. They told me to wait for a run. Don’t hit him till he’s turned.

‘Like conger?’ I asked. ‘Like conger,’ they agreed.

One of these guys hit a fish. There wasn’t much bend in his rod because all his line was running out as he fiddled with the drag. I watched my
own nylon go out the three feet they said it would. I waited then hit it and it worked. At first it was a weight then it came in with me. I wound fast and it slashed at the surface. I remembered to give line like the books said, then, next time it surfaced, I just held on. The tension in the rod was pulling it by its wide-open mouth, a treble hook visible in a jaw. The teeth were prominent, like those of a ling, but the marblings, the camouflage, were shades of reed and waterlily. It came to the net in a strange tangle of light, bright enough to be shocking, from that thick water. It was three and a quarter pounds on their spring-balance. ‘Do you want to put it back?’ I shook my head.

Well, some of these Polish guys will take one from you. A lot of them had been airmen who got stranded here at the end of the war. Or met local women. There was a back-street shop in Alloa where you could buy salami and stuff.

But I brought it home. The olaid made an effort. She didn’t know why the book said it was an ugly fish. Mrs Beeton claimed that they were good eating but inclined to be dry and so required plenty of basting. We forked at the baked fish but no-one really liked it.

Most days I caught none but once I caught four, all of them smaller than the first one. When my mother said I shouldn’t have taken them home and my sister said it was cruel to kill fish, I said I knew someone who would take them. One of the names on the morning newspapers was foreign enough to be someone who would eat pike.

Instead, I buried them to make maggots. I’d read about this in one of the angling books, from the main library. When I dug up the rottened and softened flesh, some weeks later, it had worked. The skulls and teeth and shrunken eyes were recognisable. That resilient skin still showed a smudged print of the pattern. The maggots in between everything were smaller than the ones you bought, for trout or perch, in the tackle shop. I couldn’t get the smell from my hands.

One Sunday we went through to Glasgow. The olman had found the money to get the car tested and taxed. That bloodymortgage was now another single word in our house. He waxed the Morris so it shone like the other cars in the street. Then we were away. I remember his points
like a route to fishing-grounds: Dobbie’s Loan; Great Western Road; Kersland Street. This was an aunt-by-marriage on my father’s side. She’d lost her husband in the war. He was on the convoys.

Folk she knew, back on the Island, said, by way of condolence, ‘So you’re still in Glasgow?’ But she said she loved it, here. We’d all to come with her now, on the Underground. It didn’t go anywhere you needed to go but she brought all her visitors this way. There was talk of doing away with it so you had to grab these chances.

She bought our tickets and we sat on leather benches, holding chrome rails. The smell of the seats made me think of old books. The chrome was the pipework of our Stornoway neighbour’s BSA. The glimmer of brass was my first pike from Gartmorn Dam.

We got out at Kelvinbridge. This is near the Botanics. My mother and father were ready to get back to the flat to catch up on the news and have some tea. Kirsty wanted to walk by a few shop windows. Didn’t matter that they were shut. Better that way. Yes I could go to the Botanics on my own. I was sure I knew how to get back to the flat. My aunty said she’d write the address and phone number down on a card, just in case. My landmark was a snooker-room. Smoke spilled out of the windows. A blackboard at the door said, ‘Private Club.’ The flat was round the next corner.

I was hit by the sweaty smell of the Camellia rooms. I took in all the names, going down a gear into sleepiness. Sunday afternoons were still like that, trapped near a bar of the electric fire. The olaid never bothered with the coal fire now. The olman wouldn’t let me go fishing on a Sunday but I don’t think it was religion. Just trying to get me to think of something different to do.

Still in the Botanics, I found carp. You couldn’t say they were merely goldfish. These fish were bred to bring out decorative features. One had a stark colour scheme of red and white. Another had a dorsal fin like a sail. Pectoral fins would move like orange seaweed. They were big and lazy and mouthed at any items that fell into their oxygenated pools.

‘Bet you wouldn’t mind dropping a line to one o them.’

I started because of the accuracy. It was spoken in a soft tone, a Glasgow voice but slow in pace and without the hard edges of the mining towns of the Central Belt.

‘Hold on and I’ll see if they’ll go for a Mint Imperial,’ he said. ‘Aboot your age, we used to figure oot ways to catch wan. No tae kill it or eat it or anything, jist tae get a right look at it.’

He’d have been about forty to fifty. Dressed like anybody else, in a jacket and good trousers. A cap but I think it was an open-necked shirt. Could have been a polo-neck. I don’t remember a tie.

I found I was talking. Telling him I fished for trout and pike where I lived now. Where did I used to live, then, with that accent? No, he liked it, a change. The Hebrides. Aye, he’d guessed aboot there.

‘So you’re a pike-fisher, then. Quite far up the piscatorial pecking order an that?’

I liked the way he talked like the angling books. We were out of the hothouses now. I was talking again and we were gravitating towards the Kelvin. ‘Any fish there?’ I asked. I wasn’t too keen on the laugh that was his answer.

‘Is it too dirty, then?’ I thought of the maroon colour that came on the Devon before it met the Forth. Someone else had laughed when I’d asked if it was peat, washed into the water after a spate. It was from Tillicoultry paper-mill, whatever shade was being done that day.

‘Aye, it’s dirty,’ he said, ‘but they’ve made a start on it. They’re trying to clean up the Clyde an all. Talk of the first salmon for God knows how many years. Now, if you wouldn’t mind being lookout, I’ve had one lunchtime pint too many the day.’

‘Are even the pubs open here on a Sunday?’ I asked. ‘I kent ye were a real teuchter,’ he said. ‘Well, the hotel bars anyway. Here’s the ideal place, if you would jist keep a wee eye peeled for any old dears coming along.’

It was a sort of tunnel, with the grass turfs growing over it and the path passing all the way through. It had turned dull and not many people were about. I said the coast was clear.

He carried on speaking as he was pissing, looking over his shoulder towards me. I lost the thread of what he was saying. Just hearing the tone
of his voice. Then he turned, shaking the drops off and said, ‘No a bad size o cock, eh, would you no like to have one like that, yersel, eh?’

My own fins were bristling then, ready to drive me out of the confined area, back to the light. But I didn’t try to run or anything. I would have had about two yards start, more really because he wouldn’t have been able to start running until he’d got his zip up.

I just stayed still. He said, in much the same tone, maybe a wee edge of something that wasn’t there before, ‘I suppose you’re too shy now, to show me yours.’

I still didn’t get into gear. Just backed off.

Now I can see it, instinct serving you, just keeping it slow, getting you away from the hazard. Hearing my own voice saying yes I was too shy and then getting towards the surface, out of that tunnel. Some fifty yards later, not running but walking fast, looking over the shoulder.

He made no effort to come after me.

Back at the flat, over pancakes, back in the car, back in the bungalow on Hungry Hill, I never said anything. It wasn’t exactly a big debate going on in my mind but I remember considering whether to say something. Maybe he’d be bothering someone else. Maybe it was more than bother.

It takes a while to get a focus. Now I can observe the tone, the skill in letting me do the talking, homing into my subject. It seems to me now a real tint of danger. I never did say anything though.

That afternoon went right out of my mind, till one time I was back in the West End, maybe twenty years later. Round at Bank Street, remembering the way to the Botanics. Within a mile or so of that tunnel, I saw it all again. Felt my muscles quiver like fins. Looked for the open space, people swimming by.