A Book of Death and Fish (33 page)

The builder pulled a fast one on me with the slate. That’s what made the roof a slow job. Guys were up there, rain or shine, day in, day out. Fragments spraying out in a sharp grey hail. He’d got hold of pallets of extra lightweight brittle shit instead of the heavy Spanish that replaces our own Ballachulish or Easdale. And my eye was off the ball. The saving must have cost him more in labour, with all the breakages.

One day it just had to get sorted. This time I got on the peat-driven telegraph system of local knowledge and located the right dude to sort out the other guy’s mess. I was guided to a man who loved the material. He took apart all the detailing over the storm-windows and another whole section that had dozens of breakages. He suggested using reclaimed Ballachulish. That would outlast us all and it would be faster to strip a complete section than to patch up here and there.

If we did these whole sections, your eye would go to them. The good slater was on another job, stripping a roof. If I got up the scaffolding, on my days off the Coastguard watch, I could get hold of decent slate, in return for my own labour. So I unpeeled the roof skin for him and the olaid had enough in the kitty to buy a small number of selected Ballachulish longs. You could find any number of short slates to nail, up top, close to the ridge. Longs were getting scarce.

Scottish slate is graded by length as you go up. Welsh, and now Spanish, is graded by weight. The heavies are fixed down close to the gutters. My new mentor told me the Visitors’ Centre, just completed near the old quarry, in Ballachulish, is roofed in Spanish slate.

The light was strong enough, the clouds were fast and it was a fine enough day between the bursts of hail. We often get that mild week or two in December but it wasn’t happening yet. The oilies were the answer. They keep the wind out. You’re sweating in them but you’ve got to keep the wind out.

The usual thing is to do a day for a day with a mate. But I knew there was no way Kenny F was ever going back to work on Mairi’s house in Garyvard. Probably wouldn’t get any other buiding project together, either. So I couldn’t repay him. Some days too, I knew he’d be a liability on a roof. And paying that cove cash-in-hand wouldn’t be doing him any favours. Physical labour beat arguing with the builder or fighting through the courts. We needed to get this house together for the olaid.

The roof was only one of the problems. The other issue was the chimney. The linings had been done. We had a neat multi-fuel stove with a dinky back boiler. One radiator ran off it and the hot water to the kitchen taps. She said she wouldn’t move to any house without a real flame in it, disability-spec or no. But when we put a match to the new installation, the smoke came back where it came from.

‘No, we tested it with smoke bombs,’ the builder said. ‘Some chimneys are like that. Must be the wind. Maybe it never worked.’

So I got it all set up outside. A pile of concrete blocks, and shingle by a small stack of ceramic liners. The dark art of chimneys. When I studied this gable, there was no way I wanted to break into it, to hunt the blockage. So I got the good slater, also a roughcaster, up to see it. He shook his head.

‘You can’t do that without a serious bit of scaffolding. Anyway, you don’t want a crack on the outside. Why the hell don’t you tackle it from inside? Where do you think the problem is?’

So this cove took the boots off in the kitchen and said hi to the olaid on the way through. She was in the high-backed chair now, telly blasting away. She was in her scarf and thick genseys. The room was like a sauna – the storage heaters were all blasted up but she didn’t feel warm since she couldn’t see a fire. I knew she’d manoeuvre her way over to the Dimplex control once we were out the door. She would sneak on the
booster switch – the expensive convector heater part of the installation, once the coast was clear.

She would also perk up when the home-help came in. Anna was parking her bike there on the way to school. The daughter said to me this day, ‘Grannie’s still got her moments.’

‘Aye?’

‘The home-help comes in to make the porridge. She says,
Thank goodness you’ve still got water, Mary. Been a burst up our way and not a drop coming out the tap
. Grannie says,
I can aye sell ye some
.’

The olaid had been dead cool about moving house to one where everything she needed was on the ground floor. As long as there was space upstairs for my sister when she came to visit. She had to have her living room fire, though. That was the condition.

‘Dinna mind movin. Ken a need a that electric heatin but I like tae see a fire in the hoose.’

The last stroke left her tricky to understand and The Broch came back stronger into her voice for some reason. But she had a way of making herself understood.

So there was all that negotiating with the Disability and Improvement grants and conflicting regulations about ventilation and all. But the Morsø was installed, even if we couldn’t light it.

The big, heated kitchen gave her a change of scene, with a set of glass double doors looking right out to the open. If you’re not going to be out of the house much, you might as well see the clouds scud by. The shower had to be on Total Control, so there were safety cut-outs as part of the system.

When I made the tent of sticks and a wee hut of coal, her face just lit up. And then we were choking with the downdraft and there was nothing drawing. That’s when I tackled the builder but no, he said, remember we’d gone from one set of linings into the top one to save taking the gable apart and…

His plasterer just gave me the slightest nod. He couldn’t say anything.

That look was enough. That’s how come I was up on the roof, with the brushes and wire and sash-weights on nylon line. You could only get the
brush or anything else down a short way. You could say I was blazing. More than the flicking stove was.

You can think about it or do it. So I brought Anna along and issued her with a big magic marker to mark the spot on the inside wall. Just put an x where you can hear the brush scraping. And I got up on the roof again. Taking it canny, along the ridges, with a hard frost on. When I got down again, I found my daughter had placed her mark on the wall.

‘It’s not that far down,’ Anna said.

‘You’re sure?’

‘I’m sure.’

So she made her grannie a cup of tea and I went out to hunt down a cement-mixer.

It was borderline. I knew I could do that batch by hand. But time was getting to be a big factor in my life. And my mother’s. It was a long day for her, stuck on one floor of one house. But I was trying to fix all this between Coastguard watches.

So I took a Stanley-knife to the new plasterboard in the upstairs room. That was a space she didn’t need but then again she did. I’d to make sure the upstairs room was sister-ready. Whenever she wanted to come. Flights from Canada were getting cheaper all the time. Herself had been out there not long before the first noticeable stroke. Kirsty made the link with the Québécois cousins. The olaid came back with plenty of stories.

The taping and filling, throughout the renovated house, were the best parts of the whole job. A fine finish for show. The slates couldn’t stay on the roof and the chimney couldn’t take a fire.

So I went off round the corner with the trailer and called at Robert’s. That was another visit, long overdue. Shit, I couldn’t go in a hurry asking for a shot of his mixer. Robert had just got out of hospital. I knew he’d had tests and stuff so it might not be a good story. He lived on his own. Never mind the mixer, I knew I should just be going round there, checking out he was OK. But Robert was on another watch now and his new mate would be doing that.

So I didn’t call by. I hired a mixer because my slater friend, who was now also the roughcaster and chimney-consultant, was due to come again
that very afternoon. Everything had to be on site at the ready. That was the deal. And so I was going up the brae with the mixer in the trailer and counting off the materials. Additive to make the cement more workable, petrol for the mixer, and I was over the hill in the red estate car and everything was do-able. Then there was a noise I didn’t understand.

There was a lot of glass in the car. I felt the breeze blow through it from the back. There was a neat orange shape, wedged in nicely on the back seat. The mixer had joined me in the car. So I got the flashers going and picked up as much of the glass as I could and tipped the mixer back up and out. This time I did tie it in, well chocked, in the trailer. It was a stable-door job because I was just round the corner from the olaid’s.
More haste, less speed
. The olman’s voice in my head this time.

Anna was watching crap on the telly, the stuff she didn’t get to see at home. So it was the two girls in there together and I didn’t even try to explain what was going on. That was a pity because my olaid would have quite liked the story of the mixer getting a comfy seat.

I’d just sanded the floorboards and sealed them. So there was no carpet to roll back.

The polythene sheeting went down fast. There was plenty of that left, the new traditional Lewis garden material. No new or renovated house on this Island is complete without some. Fraying offcuts of blue polythene weathering on the barbed wire. This traditional decoration might look a bit untidy to some people but it’s a good wind-indicator. Quite decorative, too.

I knew that there was no chance of this renovated chimney drawing air in any wind direction, I just went tearing into that wall where Anna’s X marked the spot. Soon there was dust and insulation everywhere. My oilies were abandoned outside the back door and I was down to the T-shirt, hearing the telly blaring below. The olaid probably wasn’t even hearing the kango and Anna was just cool about the buzz because it was a bit quiet for her sometimes, round on Leverhulme Drive.

Sweat and dust were beginning to mingle and of course then I put on the mask I’d brought along with the Kango. After a cough or two. One day I’d sprayed bitumen on the exposed walls before the builder went in with
the strapping and stuff. Not quite sure how that got to be one of my jobs. I could have been on Old Holburn and black Afghani every hour of my waking life instead of taking that dose of tar to my lungs in one afternoon.

Now I swung the five-pound club-hammer and I was soon into the upper section. Smoke bombs, aye sure. No wonder the sash-weights, and every other vernacular device, had failed to get through this blockage.

‘Scalpel next, Da?’ Anna asked.

And then she said, ‘Good job I’ve just grown some more or you’d be sending
me
up there next.’

It was a crows’ nest. All the years of hail and seepage and slow running tar had congealed it all into a material that was tougher than wire. No weights, no brush, no smoke, no nothing could have got past that. And the skeletons of three small birds with their recognisable beaks were still tight and close in a group right in there. They were preserved in all that residue. We put the nest carefully aside. I felt it belonged to someone.

We fired up the mixer then and trapezed through the living room with the buckets of thick-mix cement. That’s what we say. ‘Traipsed’ sounds a bit flicking delicate, for the situation.

The troubleshooter was a man of his word but I knew that already. A more gradual curve of linings made the connection to the sweet, sweet airflow. The smoke could now find its sloping way up to exit over the concrete casting. Up over the other roofs of the Terraces and Avenues of all these generations of SY housing.

We packed expandable material around the liners. Then the blockwork did indeed fall into place. I did the clear-up and got the mixer and Kango back before five o’clock.

‘That’s a first for you,’ said the girl behind the office hatch. She was maybe remembering the four Kangos and umpteen blunted chisels which was the net cost of the demolition of Charlie’s four chimneys. Umpteen – that’s one of the olaid’s words – do other people say it too? Could be a title for a jig? – Umpteen Blunted Chisels. Or a Frank Zappa tune, if he hadn’t also died young, from a cancer.

I couldn’t bear to chase for the plasterwork specialist, the taper and filler. And that’s a knacky job. Too tight a timescale to take that learning
curve and I couldn’t think of a favour or skill to swap with someone in the trade. When the haddocks and herring were still about, there was no such problem. You could give out a fry of line-caught fish. But the Minch was dead.

So I asked the olaid if she was up for paying for proper V-lining. Half-inch timber, so it could get nailed, direct over the strapping. We were into the reserve, on the budget as Gabriele reminded me, more than once.

‘Is there anither air-fare in the kitty?’ she asked. ‘To git your sister hame again?’

I nodded.

She nodded.

‘Fit else am I goin ti spend it on?’ she asked.

Or stated.

She didn’t have the fire on for Christmas but Hogmanay morning that Morsø Squirrel sent her sweet smoke-signal back across towards Denmark on a more mild airstream, from the west. Just a touch of north in it.

That night I had one last mission to do, before the New Year. I didn’t have a drink till a bit after the bells. Instead I turned the key in the Type 3. Reversed her out of the garage. And navigated nice and easy towards the mansion of a builder.

I didn’t ring the bell. Just left the gift-wrapped box, nice and prominent, in the back of the works’ pick-up, in his drive. Under the stretched vinyl cover and beside the shovels. I left him something he’d missed. Something I’d found in a chimney he’d checked fully, top to bottom, bottom to top. A particular birds’ nest. He could make a New Year soup of it if he wanted.

And sorry, but I can’t leave you there. I found out a while later, Robert, my former watchmate, was lying exhausted in the house when I failed to open his door. He was back from treatment, with poor results, to find a burst pipe. Robert could usually fix everything – he’d done a spell in the building industry after the Forces and before the Coastguard Service. But he just didn’t have the energy to fix anything then. His new watch leader did come round, took one look at the situation and moved him into his own house. A system working.