A Book of Death and Fish (47 page)

It might have been a room in someone else’s house but it was home for me, for a time. Home is where someone holds your eyes and doesn’t need to look away. And when there is that security there can be exploration and you don’t have to go out into the hail to have adventures. When one or other, turn-about, just takes as much pleasure in finding what’s giving pleasure. No-one keeping a score.

When you know most of a given territory intimately, then there’s a different pleasure in returning to the familiar.

Mairi, it was as if desire was its own fuel. No matter how much I let go to it, you would just need to look at me, or cup my balls and it would build again. But even less of a hurry. Just letting your words wash over, the Gaelic and the English and the ripe, ripe swearing. You’re the out-of-town alter-ego, and you’ve enough of the male to be a mate and you’re sex on wheels.

There wasn’t a shadow of the other mutual mate from Westview, not in that first bed. It was when it was time to get out of town, the problem was clear.

It made sense. It was your family house and set back from a fork of Loch Erisort. Not quite, up a creek. Everything including V-lining, painted in a grey-blue eggshell and bordered with the oiled beading of dense Oregon pine, reclaimed from the stripped interior of your own house. Remember he showed me it, your former paramour and joiner. All these hours of sifting and shifting and stripping paint from sufficient sound timbers to return some of the old to the renovated crofthouse.

That reinstatement of old parts of a house – it’s seldom done by locals. It’s more usual to let the old walls fall in and build the new beside it. So the blockwork gets coated in peely-wally Skye marble dash as new structures erupt from the heather by older layers of habitation. The new-build is probably on the site of the former outdoor chemical cludgie. And the rubble from the blackhouse is thrown in the found or else it becomes the basis for one of the outhouses.

I know it was your father and mother’s house. I know the market is currently depressed after a brief boom and you’ll probably never get back what was put into it. I even know that you probably have to live there. But I can’t let go to you there. Even though I just have to catch the steady blue in your eyes, so close that I’m aware that the colour also has traces of maroon and indigo. A really romantic Lewisman would say you had eyes with the hues of herring scales.

But I’m still not going down to Garyvard. Even if it does now have a nearly passable internet connection you can just about legally term broadband.

Every bastard I know would say it was a matter of time before it fell apart for you two. When Kenny F hits it, he hits it. But Kenny told me what broke him and what tore your relationship apart, long before you did. It’s like any other history now. There’s no way of knowing how it would have turned out.

Please know that our year together is replayed in my daft brain so often that it’s like there’s a tape inside my head between my ears. Do you remember, love, that line in the soulful ska rhythm of Mister Desmond Dekker. This weird memory of mine again. This is what sticks.

Fucking impressive. That’s a cove who knows where he’s coming from. He knows his grammar. It’s got its own structure and he’s cool with it and if any other bastard ain’t, it’s their own tough shit. But I don’t mind it being
your home territory. Believe me, I’m clued up on the balancing act of looking after the domestic front and earning the money to finance it all.

But the cove who did the digging and the demolishing and the salvaging and the bringing together of something more than a shelter on your family croft, happens to be the cove I prayed with, over porridge with treacle, in Westview Terrace.

That’s a guy who knows he’s got to stay in London town. For now. There are warnings. He was home for the funeral. One of our gang. Don’t think you knew him. Kenny and me talked about menfolk and about mothers. Sipping tea and scoffing salmon rolls in the County when we came back from Sandwick. You lost your own mother too, not so long ago. Maybe that was more difficult for you because you were so close to your father. You’d be bound to feel guilty about not knowing her so well. I got to know the olaid better after the olman just dropped.

I called by once, to see Kenny’s mother. She kept asking what I was up to. I suppose next time I see the cove, we’ll be burying her.

She knew I’d split up with Gabriele and all that. She’s compos flicking mentis all right and a bit more. She still didn’t see why her own son left that girl from Lochs, the one with the steady job. ‘A bit wild all right but so are we all. Well maybe not me,’ she said, ‘but you boys still are anyway. Daft with it. You don’t know when you’re well off.’

She said Kenny was working at a Citizens Advice Centre in Brixton. You could say he was well placed. He must have experienced a lot of the issues.

I’m lusting after your way of speaking, Mairi, and I’m desiring the friendship of your body next to mine. You haven’t put on an ounce. You probably never will. And I never really noticed you’d caught up a bit, in height, till you were wearing the jacket, tailored for me. But I like you too much to ask you to do things like making plans. Maybe you’ve got to stay with that house in that place. And I’ve this strong feeling in my bones that it will need to be a cove from away, that stays in it with you. May I say that I think you’ve made an excellent choice of vessel. I was very happy to inspect the machinery aboard it, with no guarantee and at your own risk, of course. But I’d be surprised if you had much serious bother
with that installation. A clinker crabber by McCaughey of Wick is built for working the Pentland Firth so it should look after you in the North Minch. That red Mermaid aboard is a marinised Ford and the spares are easy to get hold of. There’s an electric start and a heat exchanger so the sea-water cooling won’t come in direct contact with the aluminium parts in the engine block. It all looks clean and well cared for. The oil’s been changed recently.

She’s a beauty and a total bargain. If the famous personal advertisements ask for a picture of your own boat, you should do very well for admirers. You’ve even got the old Rana boat for a tender.

Logic is pointless. I know that there are formulae for deciding the value of a partner’s work and compensation for the opportunities lost while you’re slaving away at house renovations. Things that are negotiated in proper Settlements when one person doesn’t just admit quite suddenly that he’s got to get out. I know the need to stride away from all that aforementioned V-lining. Because emotion has entered between the very tongues and grooves.

And it wouldn’t do any good at all, presenting your ex-partner with a wad of digital cash as an acknowledgement of the labour he put into your project.

I’ve come up in the world again. Sold the olaid’s house and bought one right back where I started. Between the County Hotel and the Free Kirk. And there’s a low-roofed room at the top where a pile of papers and printouts is building up. But I’ve a feeling right in my weakening bones, that you won’t be able to cross this worn threshold, unless I can accept that history really is the past and it doesn’t matter who nailed planks on a wall.

But I don’t think that way.

Bits of wood have their own history. Some of that’s connected to a guy we’re both linked to. Remember, his uncle taught me the marks. Old Angus with the sellotaped glasses. Far-seeing Angus. I’ve learned something.

There are all too many camps of detention on this planet right now but let’s go back to 1945. This one was not designed as a death-factory. None of the camps within Germany’s pre-war boundaries were, though
executions took place. The most efficient death camps were all in the occupied lands. Work camps were pretty good at that too, the ration calculated to keep the captives going for a few months till they dropped. Plenty more to take their place. Death by starvation and disease was a by-product of the concentration camp, not the main purpose. Two men who knew each other, both private soldiers, stood at the entrance to Bergen-Belsen. I’ve heard it said, but not from either of them, that the stench put the fear into you even before you saw what you saw.

These men had come a long way from their communities of crofts, on either side of Loch Erisort. I don’t know if they made their own pact together or if each came to the decision on his own. There were some things you wouldn’t talk about. Angus was one of them. And my uncle Ruaraidh was the other. My father’s own experience was different but he never talked about it either. At least, not to me. Your father kept his silence, too.

Ruaraidh never told me he’d helped to liberate Belsen. Angus never told Kenny, or me, what he did in the war. It took a bit of research to find this out. I know that fact now. But there’s no way I’m able to imagine what went through their minds when the gate was opened.

In the beginning there was the Modern Mistress. In the rural areas these became dominant. The stove-pipe would be held by a score of cubits of cement and would project through roofs. And the construction of the roof would vary according to the materials available at the time of construction, or according to regulations relating to dimensions and spacings at the allotted time. And the materials of the roof skin would vary from the quarried slate of Ballachulish or Easdale to the Eternit branded tiles which no longer contained an element of asbestos, as was the practice in former times.

But, for those who ventured further out from the environs of the burgh, passing over many cattlegrids, there were to be found ranges and boilers designed to run on any solid fuel. And peat was sufficient unto the needs of the Rayburn. But not of the Aga which was installed only in the stately houses of those who could deliver silver to the merchants in return for fuel. Some of these appliances could be adapted to run on heating oil which, in the latter days, was supplied free of Value Added Tax. As was the solid fuel equivalent. The cost of peat was an annual permit, which was cheap and your own labour, which was not.

But the German process, carried out in the vicinity of the city of Essen, which burned off slag and left potent nuggets, provided in these times the potency and longevity necessary to maintain the temperature in cast iron whilst their owners and benefactors were at lawful occupations. Or at recognised institutions of education. And this was named Anthracite and Extracite and Taybrite. And these fuels were supplied in sealed plastic bags in units of kilograms measured out on scales of approved make and type. And these would be inspected at regular intervals according to
prescriptions laid down by local authorities. According to the guidelines also writ large by national authorities.

And merchants of the name of Ossian and MacIver thrived and prospered.

And the populations housed in Nicolson Road, in Morrison Avenue, in Stirling Square, these also thrived. Many went forth from there into the wider worlds of merchant navies, of hospitals, of hotel kitchens. And back out across the numberless cattlegrids, the rural populations also thrived. But the nature of the thriving, far from the city of Stornoway, varied according to a host of conditions. The furlongs of distance, out from the metropolis, being a major factor. As was war and rumour of war in the eastern extremities of the continent of Europe and in the maritime environs collectively known as the Middle East.

So every time the oil price went up you’d get a big rush for peat-permits.

Ranges and Agas, not so hot on peat, would be available for fifty quid a throw in the two-minute silence (
Stornoway Gazette
). And conversion kits for Rayburns would be available again, a grate and a riddle, for those who couldn’t remember which box they’d hidden the bits in, when the oil wick was installed after the last crises was over.

Thus the history of the late twentieth century, with particular relevance to the price of a barrel of oil, from under the desert or under the sea, could be accurately plotted by careful scrutiny of adverts for stoves in the
SY Gazette
. Sorry, OK, perhaps with cross-reference to the
West Highland Free Press
.

I didn’t move down to Garyvard. It was too big a step for a cove from town. Too big a one for me anyway and I think you know why. I couldn’t live in the house we’d done up for my olaid either, though that would have made more sense. It was in our joint names but Gabriele signed over her half-share on condition that I signed over everything at Number One Coastguard Cottages to her. That included the garage-library combo.

There was a chance of a place on Kenneth Street so I did the quick-sale thing rather than hold out till I found someone with a similar set of requirements to the olaid. The buyers probably ripped out half the alterations.

But I’m now strolling distance from the hoil and the wee Co-op. The arts centre is two minutes along the road so the movies are back in town. I might not be the only one with a desire to move back to the street I was born on. Well, I wasn’t born on the street but in a flat in a house on Kenneth Street. And I returned there.

Stornoway has the architectural integrity of the average Scottish cemetery. Dead centre of the town as they say. There are no planning requirements to install memorials which will chime with the proportions or visible finish of the neighbouring one. Therefore there is considerable interest in strolling to study the erections we’ve left behind. Down in Sandwick, you’ll find tall marble pieces with draped urns. Compact black granite slabs with a pleasing half-moon curve at the top and a gold anchor or rose. Root further back and there are horizontal slabs of slate, fenced with resilient wrought ironwork.

There’s also a few jumps in the skyline of Kenneth Street. The jail is quite classy now, with sympathetic larch or cedar cladding, left to weather. There’s plenty of glass but of course you don’t get to see the guys behind bars. It’s the upper storeys which have transparency. Like when the cannabis plants, kept as evidence in the cop shop, were lovingly nurtured by some cleaner and you could see how much they flourished and sprouted day by day as you passed them by. But you don’t get any hint of the guys in the cooler for a night.

The sergeant’s house is no longer that but it’s still there, a block along, after the intersection with the steep Church Street. It’s pebble-dashed, like a lot of the council houses. Then there’s the big car park and the big Free Church and the hall where you give blood. Next there’s a run of houses, stone under rendering. There’s a potted history of late twentieth century window design, with particular attention to long dormers in the roof.

But then there’s one house with proportions which look fair and original. Two sweet storm-windows ascend from a simple but elegant roof of native Scottish slate. The nails are probably sick, of course, because few people think of fixing slates with copper clouts, which will last longer than the zinc-coated clouts which will rust before the slate has been worn down visibly by hail and frost and the gusts that sweep and probe all of our roofs.

The profusion of chimney pots is a clue to the histories of shared occupancies of this town house. It would have been a merchant’s home, with its own community of offspring, aged relatives and servants. But when I viewed the interior of the house, there was a gas fire that looked cold, surrounded by a matt aluminium sheen installed at level two.

As the
cailleach
who sold sailors the string with the three knots of wind said, you men are never happy. You’ll be wanting more breeze so you can untie the second one. You’ll get as much breeze as you can take. But don’t dare even look at the third. So you know right then they’ll let the third knot go and they’ll end up back where they started.

And I’m saying, I hanker after a real flame and the top floor could take it. You can’t live with a fire that looks cold. And these days you can’t just install gas or solid fuel stoves without reference to the rulebooks. I thought of developing a hidey hole, warm and illuminated by natural light through the sweetest windows, thinking of Anna, installed here for visits, with a developing library all to herself when she’d come here for an overnighter. Though she hasn’t managed it yet.

But when I’d broken into the painted boarding that covered the fireplace and excavated the wide aperture in the stonework, I encountered a problem. After crawling my way upward, like the early Victorian chimney-sweep before the enlightened Mr Kingsley’s fictional discourse, I found a mess of plastic bags and loose rockwool and any shite that would stop cement from falling further. When I approached the problem from the opposing angle, and got up on the roof to install the new ceramic can, I found the gas vent went through the only viable chimney. I’d been in a similar situation once before.

The small incident is of course a reminder of the main lesson of history. Are you ready for it? All I’ve learned. We take a bloody long time to learn from the past and then we have to re-learn it all again. Chimneys. Builders. Things are not always what they seem.

SY, my friends, is clearly not the environment for Smith and Wellstood stoves, of oatmeal hue, running on peat. But it is pretty damn good for kitchen-ceilidhs. We’re only one street back from the seafront. After this morning I’m an honorary member of the International Fishwives Gossip
Brigade. This distinguished unit didn’t in fact fight in Spain prior to ’39 but we certainly discussed it. And the present situation in the Congo did come up, along with a feasibility study into the installation of a wood-burning solid-fuel appliance.

So the retirement plan, if I could ever afford it, could be strolling round the hoil to pick up stray driftwood. I could build little stashes so it would get a fresh-ish water rainfall to take the salt out until the arrival of an easterly wind to dry it. And a flame is better than a telly. When it’s under control. The flame, I mean. The telly never is.

And probably won’t be, ever again. Unless there’s a return to the Westview (SY) and the West Road (FR) tradition of folk gathering in the same room, to watch the big game or the fight. Kitchens and living rooms all had flexible walls in those days. There was no limit to the number of folk you could squeeze in. I don’t think many modern homes have these, now.

But I’ll tell you what this town house does have. You don’t clock it from the outside, unless you’ve a strong neck. Let’s return to the fine detailing of the elegant storm windows. You don’t want to present too wide a span of glass to the SY elements. But there’s more to the design than a series of small panes. Above them there’s a hook, embedded into the stonework, anchored so that at the time of fixing there could be no doubt as to its strength.

The double bank of interlocking windows was at one time capable of opening right out to leave a surprising span of space. So that would be for hoisting in sails or nets for repair, in joined attics, over the domestic areas. Possibly. But it would also provide for an exit as well as an entrance. And for a situation more likely than a fire.

You see, the stairway up to this level was so tight in the turns that it would be difficult to transport certain items up and down it. Things you could bend or squeeze would be all right. But not long after you’re dead, you’ll be stiff. So that hook is to hang your coffin on. So now there’s a chance that it would be quite practical for me to die on Kenneth Street, at a (hopefully) decent interval from being born on it. Or, more accurately, to die inside a particular house on Kenneth St.