A Book of Death and Fish (43 page)

Gabriele and me were at the settlement stage. That’s another way of saying we were arguing.

She cut across the discussion of practical matters, ‘You couldn’t let go of your need to be part of a congregation until you’d found another relationship. And you couldn’t admit you wanted to break from me until you knew there was the possibility of somewhere else to go.’ A neat analysis. Worthy of a devotee of the mistress of irony, Jane Austen.

Guilty as charged. Maybe I didn’t need advice from the blone in the leather breeks after all.

Gabriele and me should really have had the argument of the two Janes. Maybe it’s already been fully explored but excuse me, I couldn’t get into reading interpretations of interpretations. I got to the end of
Pride and Prejudice
but I found the certainties of the moral framework pretty offensive. All these manners. But that Jane Eyre, she’s some character. Charlotte Brontë brings you into passion and banter and a fight for justice. I never read it at Uni. It was the daughter, educating me. I felt I was being drawn into a female mind.

But I can hear Gabriele’s counter-argument. If I’d learned to know my own true self, I’d have found ways of expressing it earlier. Aye, as long as these were prudent ways. Jane Eyre’s expression is not always that prudent. Thank the Lord or anybody else you deem appropriate. And I can also hear the daughter’s warning about trusting unreliable narrators too far.

There is a radio ‘pro-word’ or convention, ‘Prudonce’. In the context of radio traffic during a distress, a vessel can remind other vessels to keep other transmissions off the distress frequency.

But we had not really admitted, out loud, that our marriage was in distress. Maybe Gabriele and me always did have a different way of looking at things. That worked well enough for long enough.

You know in yourself when it’s time to shoot the crow. Maybe my thinking is still coloured by Westerns. When it’s time to go, these guys go. There might be an ‘
Adios amigo
’ and that’s about it. But when you’ve been building up property it’s not that simple. And when you’ve made a child together, it’s impossible.

I had the vasectomy soon after the birth of our wonderful daughter because we were both sure this was plenty of responsibility. Knowing the dangers of spoiling the only child but also knowing that so long as we in the West think that people in other countries should restrict themselves to one, but we ourselves are exempt, then the planet won’t hold us. And it’s an easier op for a man than a woman. So they say. I’m only one guy and have only ever had the one op. So this is not a very scientific bit of data but I can tell you now it wasn’t that painless even though the local policy was to give you a general anaesthetic rather than a local.

It’s all going woozy and you recognise the orderlies from the sea-angling club. One of them is whispering quite loud to the other, ‘Is that the bit we cut?’

The other says, ‘Not sure. Maybe it’s that bit.’

So you just get it together to say, ‘Thanks, guys,’ in appreciation of the double act.

It was bloody sore for a few days after. Make your own considered decision, gentlemen, but don’t believe all the propaganda.

I can’t plot for you the graph which would indicate how a couple had the security to build so much up together and then reach a point where separation was inevitable. The duration of the niggles which become arguments. The shockwaves of said arguments as measured on something you could call a Richter scale. The length of the sulks, the frequency and duration of love-making. The incredible difficulty in doing anything spontaneous.

It’s easy to be analytical afterwards, even if the history is your own one. But something in my inner workings took charge, at the time.

I would wake and it wouldn’t be due to my wife’s snoring.

I was troubled and didn’t know why, at first.

Then I began to tune in to the signals coming from New York. That’s just down the road from Leverhulme Drive. You swing a right at the first roundabout then take the next left. Take the West Side road and stop before the sea. It’s out there and I was hearing a whistle from Emily. One evening and the following afternoon, I’d fallen into the deepest of conversations with that Irish-African-American blone. But we didn’t fall into either of our hired beds, please note.

I’d got a grant to attend a diesel engine maintenance course. My thinking was this – if the bottom falls out of the Scottish Fishing Industry, there could be a lot more berths for sailing yachts. These now come with pukka lightweight diesels. They get hardly any running so they need more maintenance and repairs. That’s an opening.

Gabriele kept asking, ‘Why do you need to do this?’ She said she had enough for us both, between her scheduled hours and the inheritance. I must have had more doubts than I was admitting because I knew I needed to sort out an unspectacular little income.

It was over in Aberdeen and I was in The Lemon Tree. Emily was the support act. But we were looking into each other when she was playing. I had the idea that she’d clocked me hanging on the notes and the lyrics and she’d started playing for me in particular. I had one glass of wine with her but we just tumbled into each other’s phrases. A petrol engine has to keep sparking and exploding. A diesel is different. Once that fuel comes under sufficient pressure to cause a very fine spray, delivered by the injectors, the cylinders will fire and the flywheel has to keep turning and turning. So steady. So little strain. There was a brush of lips on each side of her face, at the door, but I’m still feeling each one.

She turned up for a coffee along at the art gallery next day, to keep that conversation going. Emily replied fast to the first e-mail. But I knew to be wary of the Send button. If you write a letter you have to make a step or two to post it.

I woke up thinking about her. I heard the tune, in my head, every night for about a year. Gabriele was sleeping a lot these days, in the afternoon, when she could, after work or at the weekends, as well as the evenings.

I wasn’t sleeping that much.

Something was happening to my memory. I realised it first, the week after the olaid’s funeral. We’d had a good week with Kirsty. I’d seen her off on the plane that morning. The sorting out could wait. The jobs on the boat and our own house had been dropped while I got the olaid’s stuff sorted, alongside the sis.

Then I returned to my tinkering. Fine-tuning the installation of the restored small diesel in the restored
Peace and Plenty.
We were soon back in commission. I was out in her, on a fine day, at the mooring. Bright sunshine with warmth on my neck, in the harbour I know well. I began to be aware that I was lonely as fuck and I couldn’t remember where the third strand of the first tuck of the eye-splice went.

This is a job I’ve done thousands of times. And I tried to be methodical and slow it all down but it just wasn’t working.

I remembered I’d still got the brick aboard. Think they’d just stopped calling them cellphones then. There was a good signal and I phoned a friend, another sea angler and said, ‘This sounds daft, I’m doing a job at the mooring and I’ve forgotten how to do an eye-splice.’

‘You’re the guy that taught me it,’ Michael said.

‘Aye, but the mooring’s half done. The rope is cut and the tide is rising. Are you busy right now?’

‘I’ll be over,’ he said but he didn’t hang up. I didn’t, either. Then he said, ‘Remember I used to be a fisher of men?’

My voice said, ‘Aye, you were the Piscie minister in the New Wave tweed jacket. Deep purple.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I was an Episcopalian priest. I think you’re suffering from post-bereavement stress and it’s perfectly normal. Can you pick me up in the dinghy?’

The former priest did the splice before the tide covered the link. The mooring was saved even if the fate of its owner was in the balance.

During the day I’d be functioning fine. Or I’d be thinking I was. At night I’d be lying awake beside a sleeping wife. I began to compose letters to a woman in New York. They were more direct than any e-mails I sent. But I never posted them. Even the e-mails petered out.

There’s a bit of luck enters everything, good or bad. You saw that often in the Coastguard Service. Some guys got away with it, others didn’t. Both Gabriele and myself lost our fathers at much the same time. Later we lost our mothers within a year or two of each other. Maybe we could have supported each other better if there had been more of a gap. To the outside world, it probably looked like we were both coping.

We kept buying bikes for each other. They kept getting rusty, outside, unused. Maybe there was a good winter’s day and she would cycle to work but the next day she might be exhausted, for no reason. I’d get my own out but salt would get into the chain and gears and I couldn’t bear the thought of all that damage. I built a bike-shed but I didn’t go cycling with her. Maybe all our sheds, in all our drives and crescents, are home to nearly new bikes, seized from lack of use.

My Piscie mate went off to try to start a new life in Edinburgh with a woman he met in the
Guardian
. His wife had already found a Lewisman with shining eyes and a Gaelic voice, from the next village. So, pretty soon, after the messy business of the filthy lucre, everyone was pretty much happy. Michael told me this was nothing really sudden. It had been on the cards for a while. There was a bit of history. And it was a good few years since he realised he had lost his faith. The usual issue – reconciling all the suffering of the innocent with the idea of a Being that still has influence over his creation. And if he doesn’t – if he just set the whole thing up with man’s freewill as a mixed blessing, then what’s the point of praying?

He called me up from his new life.

‘I’m amazed this number works. You’re not still on the brick?’

‘No, it got salted. Anna fixed me up with this new one and showed me how to do the brain transplant. The phone’s I mean.’

‘Sure. Look, Peter, I don’t know if I should be telling you this but…’

‘Aye well, you’d better, now.’

‘There’s a gig in the Jazz Café, Friday next. Chambers Street. Just round the corner. A sultry New York visiting artist. Wasn’t that when you were thinking of trying to come down for a break?’

‘Not a black Irish singer-songwriter with a leaning towards jazz but sounding nothing like Joni Mitchell. One who did a Scottish tour before, culminating in the Lemon Tree?’

‘The same.’

We had of course shared our stories.

I went down the road.

You think you’ve come to look into the eyes of another but the reality is that a real breathing person would have to conform to an impression that’s been developing inside your own head. The e-mails, back and fore, with Emily had kept up the urgency, the dangerous spark of language. This time, we didn’t flow. Maybe it had something to do with the plan to give Anna a lift back up the road. She was just finishing her first year in Newcastle. Literature and film studies. This awareness just reminded me I was not a free man.

I came out of a year-long dayandnightdream on the sitting room futon in the Drummond Street flat. Michael was holding me by the shoulders to contain the sobbing.

‘Sorry to wake you,’ I said. It wasn’t something I could control. This was a space I’d never been in. Not even in the hallucinogenic days.

I thought I was lovesick for the woman sleeping somewhere in this same city. Michael told me I’d been sobbing for hours. He didn’t want to break into something I had to do but he couldn’t leave it any longer. He’d seen me scribble in the jotter, bought to take notes for the conference. History, this time, not engines. Pity the psychoanalyst wasn’t there. Or maybe just as well. He showed me what I’d done. The pad was chock-full of intricate doodles, working it all out.

Like the splice. I was nearly there, he was sure.

‘You’re not fucking unique, you know,’ the Piscie mate said. ‘It’s just about one year after your mother’s passing. I don’t think your anxiety is about love. I think it’s about death.’

He wasn’t finished. ‘Something I’ve been meaning to ask,’ he said. ‘The Coastguard job. You must have seen a few missions with a sad outcome.’

‘Aye. A few.’

‘Did you get counselling?’ he asked.

‘Don’t think that was invented, back then. The Civil Service did welfare stuff but I never heard anyone offer counselling,’ I said.

‘Did you ever talk about them – the jobs that didn’t go well?’

‘I made reports. You got a paragraph – maybe two – to tell the story.’

‘Did you talk about them with your watchmates?’

‘One or two.’

‘One or two jobs or one or two watchmates?’

‘Both of these. Just the guys who were on watch at the time. The guys who’d been through it with you. Remember we were only the co-ordinators. We didn’t go out into dangerous situations and get cold and wet.’

‘It might have been easier if you had.’

‘I did jot down a few notes once. One night in The Broch. I was hearing the voices.’

‘Maybe you need to go back to that,’ Michael suggested. ‘Find a form for it. Just tell the story.’

We’ve talked about the number three in stories. There’s a pattern but something usually changes at the third repetition. When I became a Regular Coastguard, I had to learn Morse Code. It went off the syllabus about a year later but of course ‘dit dit dit, Da Da Da, dit dit dit’ is with you forever. That’s another one you hear on mobile phones now. And for years I’d been formulating Mayday Relays and Pan broadcasts, for exercise or a few times, for real. Even in Routine radio communications the name of the vessel is often repeated three times, until contact is established.

We had an alarm bell in the restroom. Part of the twelve-hour watch system allowed you breaks where you could inspect the backs of your eyes after you swallowed your soup. Your mate gave you a buzz, when your time was up, in case you’d dozed off. But if it was a job, there would be three short blasts. At sea, that means, ‘I am operating astern propulsion’. But, if I was on watch, I would lose no time getting back up the stairs.

Once or twice I entered the Ops Room with the radio pro-word derived from the French for ‘Help Me’ on the air. But this night, no Mayday was broadcast until we put out the Relay. And it was early into the watch. No-one had taken a break yet. We were all occupying ourselves, with the routines. Forecasts and working out the ephemera – like sunset and sunrise times, corrected for our location.

The red light went, on the desk. That was the ex-directory line. 999. Another pattern of three. My Senior Watch Officer tipped me the nod. I took it. He monitored the call.

It was the harbourmaster, Kinlochbervie. ‘It’s the
Siller Morn
,’ he said, ‘the FR registered
Siller Morn.
She’s on Glas Leac. She’ll need your team.
They’ll need to get a line to her.’

My form had the name
SILVER MORN
in my printing, with a ballpoint. My SWO had it down as
CILLERMORN
. Behind us, a multi-track tape recorder stored every phone conversation and every transmission on radio.

The harbourmaster was calling from his home. He had a VHF in the house and he’d heard the boat calling his mate on channel nine, just when he was thinking of turning in. Something in the voice made him listen. It was all low key but he was on the rocks, asking for a hand. Maybe a wee tow off.

I looked at the weather forecast written out on the board. Not too bad. But the tide was falling. ‘What’s it like with you?’ I asked, on the line with the red button. We were sitting the other side of the North Minch.

‘Not a terrible night but the boys are saying there’s a big enough swell running. She’s bumping. We’ll need to get something to her.’

‘Is there another boat close?’

‘The
Siller Eve.
They work together. Brothers. Sister-ships. They’re talking to each other. I’m hearing them now. They’re up close.’

The panels of switches on our desks selected the different VHF aerials so you could receive or transmit through the same set of headphones. You could never get complete coverage of all the bays and sea-lochs but my SWO selected channel nine on the aerial closest to the scene. There was a very broken transmission. Nothing you could follow.

‘Do you want me to ask them to chop to sixteen?’ the harbourmaster asked.

My SWO shook his head as he dialled up the Hon Sec, Lochinver lifeboat. That’s the launching authority. He requested Immediate Launch.

‘No. Ask him to relay everything he can. Too chancy to chop channel now.’

So I got him to pose the standard questions one by one, the number of persons on board. The life-saving apparatus carried. The weather on scene. We asked him to instruct the skipper to make sure everyone was in their lifejackets.

I could hear the harbourmaster’s voice speaking on his radio set and a crackle in response. The delay was sore. I was still holding on. Gripping that handset.

My SWO rung the team to call them out. He’d written down ‘Glas Lek’. He was on the chart table. I was drafting a Relay. ‘Pan or Mayday?’ I asked.

Right then, the voice came back to me, down the line. There was a notch of difference in the tone.

‘I’m understanding it’s difficult to get at the life-raft and lifejackets. She’s listing now. The tide’s falling away.’

‘Mayday Relay.’

I nodded and wrote it out for the Auxiliary to transmit on sixteen. We should send a telex to the Coast Radio Station so it would go out on the big-set. 2182 kilohertz. Long-range radio. But the red line was our only direct link now.

‘Just keep that line open. I’ll get a lat and long for the Relay. Might need a chopper. I’ll need to call the boss.’

I didn’t have the weight that watch. I was thinking ahead to the order of events, the procedures. My SWO was at the chart table.

‘There’s a Glas Leac, Lochinver,’ he said. Sure it’s KLB?’

I confirmed it with the harbourmaster.

‘Got it,’ he said. ‘Approaches to the harbour.’

I remembered there was also another reef of the same name, out from Ullapool. A hazard of the same name out from each of the three main harbours in northwest Scotland. If you only had the name to go by, you’d be in trouble. The harbourmaster’s voice came back on the open line. I relayed the gist of it.

‘It’s definitely the KLB one and they can’t get right up to him. A hell of a swell. They need to get a line to him.’

I repeated what I heard, out loud. My SWO activated the line to RCC Edinburgh. That’s a military control centre, in Pitreavie, near Dunfermline. He requested a helicopter. Passed the position. The aircraft would normally come from RAF Lossiemouth unless the rescue chopper was already out on a job. It was peak-season for mountain rescue. I heard one end of that conversation too. But I could guess the other. I’d heard it before.

The clear night. The air temperature. The time of year was against us. The Sea King would have to go north about. There was a significant risk in going over the mountains, the direct route. The danger of icing. We didn’t
need to do any speed, time and distance calculations for that one.

We all knew it was going to take three hours plus.

‘Time to talk to the boss,’ he said. ‘We could do with a hand in the Ops Room anyway.’

It was going to be a busy night. The scramble was confirmed and the Duty Officer was coming in to give us a hand. Our Auxiliary was putting out the Mayday Relay on three different aerials. Her voice was calm and not too fast. They call them Ops Room Assistants, these days.

‘Five persons on board. Requires Immediate Assistance.’

Other vessels would not be able to offer much help if the sister-ship with a brother aboard couldn’t get close enough. But procedure has to be followed. And there’s an element of luck in what’s in the vicinity. A Fishery Protection Vessel would have a fast dinghy aboard. That could get close. My SWO was driving the telex. I was still hanging on to the handset linked to the red line. Our only link with the casualty.

The Auxiliary was handling the traffic on sixteen. The buzzer on the outside door sounded. The duty officer came through the door. ‘Just carry on guys. I’ll get the picture from the signals.’ He looked at the position on the chart.

As the name
Siller Morn
was repeated again, on our broadcasts, along with its Fraserburgh fishing numbers, I got a whiff of nausea. Fathers and sons. Willum didn’t want to make it difficult for his loon Andra. He’d a cousin who was pair-trawling and doing ‘Nae baud like, alang wi the brither.’ That’s where I’d heard the name. That’s why I’d recognised it over the crackle of the links in communication.

But the lifeboat was on its way and we could just about talk to him on sixteen, a bit broken. We’d copied his checks with Wick Radio on the big set, 2182. It was quite a steep sea. They were barely making their eight knots. It would be a couple of hours.

The
Siller Eve
tried firing a heaving-line, from a canister but it blew back in their faces.

The chopper came up on channel sixteen. ‘Rescue 137 airborne from Lossiemouth, best ETA 2 hours 55. I say again ETA 2350 GMT.’

‘Fuck. Will I pass that on through the 999?’

My Senior Watch Officer shook his head again. ‘That’s not going to help them, to know that. Just ask your man to relay that the chopper is airborne. On its way to them now.’

The Ops room settled into an urgent rhythm but under control. I was maintaining the log of actions and times while my SWO followed the procedures of information-flow. The 999 line had to stay open all the time. The radio set in the harbourmaster’s house was still our best link on scene. The boss was informing higher authority. We heard from the coast team on channel zero. It was taking a long time to lug the gear over rocks. They couldn’t get the Land Rover anywhere near. Even with the big rocket, there wasn’t much chance of getting a line out to them.

If you don’t have direct experience of a thing, history can help. The largest ever number of souls rescued by breeches-buoy took place on the Isle of Lewis, not that long after the Second World War. The
Clan MacQuarrie
tried to outrun a storm by going west of the Hebrides rather than face the short steep seas of the North Minch. She came ashore and all the crew were taken to safety on that tense hawser. There’s a big and a small rocket, to fire a line out to a ship. I was trained to rig at least three varieties of shore-rescue tackle. We’d fired the big rocket on a couple of training courses. Once it had made a sweet arc in the air and another time it had left a strange trajectory.

‘Shit, that would have taken the wheelhouse off,’ someone said.

One member of our course was stationed in Belfast. ‘I hope the boys in the balaclavas never get hold of these bastards,’ he said.

But I was aware of another incident, come to me through oral history. I met up with a man I’d met as a child when the Coastguard depot was on Leverhulme Drive. We were on a search planning course, the days when you crunched the vectors of tides and wind history into an electronic calculator. Computer-assisted planning was to come a few years later. A well-run course left some space for yarns. The man who had pulled my father out from a collapsed bunk on a stranded ship was now an instructor.

As he put it himself, he was in ‘the kiss-my-ass latitudes’ on the run-down to retirement. But he could get his experience across. When he was stationed in Stornoway, a ship carrying salt grounded at Branahuie Bay. Aye, where the Nato jetty is now. He was Officer-In-Charge, on scene. The shore is shingle and the surf was breaking over everything. They could talk to the ship on VHF. He knew they’d never get the hawser tight enough in these conditions. He knew it would be dangerous to pull men through that surf if the breeches buoy was in the water. So this is what he did.

They did get a line out over the ship. Then they kept it simple, got the crew to pull out a heavier endless loop of rope. He asked the Captain, on VHF, to inflate a life-raft and secure it to that line. So it went back and fore, carrying everyone to safety. There was one casualty. It was the ship’s cook, he remembered. A big, big fellow. He’d suffered a heart attack, from the shock. The rest of the guys were fine. They only got their feet wet.

Once all the initial action is taken there’s usually some thinking time. I’d visited Kinlochbervie. I knew our team had a link to a fishing vessel working out of that harbour. If the team had gone out on that boat, with the rescue gear and the smaller rocket-gun, to fire out the light line, we might have had a chance. You could call that the benefit of hindsight.

The crew of the
Siller Morn
never did get to their own life-raft. The lads couldn’t get hold of their lifejackets. That was before fishermen started wearing suits with insulation and flotation.

Our last message to be relayed asked the crew to get hold of any bit of buoyancy they could. Anything that might help keep them afloat. Anything that would show up in searchlights. I heard the crackling from the radio, over the phone. Still on channel nine.

Then it went very quiet.

I was freed from that phone and took my turn on radio, broadcasting the search area. All communications were now on channel sixteen VHF and 2182MF, as per the book. It was still some time before the chopper and lifeboat were on scene. We went from nine-knot boats to eighteen-knot ones in a very few years. Not soon enough. And this was before RNLI lifeboats could deploy a fast, inflatable boat to get up close when the larger vessel could not.

The chopper, Rescue 137, spotted some of the fluorescent debris in the water, soon after arrival in the search area, as per the ETA. They asked to minimise communications as they sent the winchman down. After about ten long minutes they reported that they had recovered one of the crew from the water.

‘Rescue 137, Stornoway Coastguard. Do you want us to arrange an ambulance to rendezvous? Over.’

‘Coastguard, 137. Channel zero. Over.’

‘Roger. Zero.’ (Channel for dedicated Search and Rescue Units only.)

‘Coastguard, 137 on zero. Sorry but the condition of this man cannot get worse. We’ll keep searching. Conditions are not very good on scene and we don’t have that much fuel endurance. Over.’

‘Roger, 137. Coastguard out.’

A sick feeling in the stomach. You can’t let that into the voice you use on the phone or radio.

So the night went on. Between the lifeboat, the sister-ship and the chopper, all five bodies were recovered. What was left of the
Siller Morn
slid off the reef and the wreck was quickly broken up.

My SWO attended the Fatal Accident Inquiry. It was judged that all action which could have been taken, was taken.

But my first SWO and mentor, Seamus, had been returning casualty reports for years. They’d often drawn attention to the gap in helicopter coverage on Scotland’s northwest, particularly when there was a danger of icing in the winter months. A survey was commissioned, based on drawing the radius of helicopter response times with reference to probable survival times of a person immersed in water. After that, a contract was awarded, for Coastguard helicopters stationed in Stornoway, Sumburgh and in Lee-on-Solent. They are all still in place. Too late for the crew of the
Siller Morn.