A Book of Death and Fish (7 page)

If I was in the back garden when the first rumble of a train began, I'd go down to find some empty cans. They'd usually be Ind Coope or Skol. They were from Alloa breweries. Old ale was out. Even the girls on the Tennents cans were perfect. No signs of wear on their skins, hair or costumes. And the colours were pure, no fuzziness from area to area. I'd lay the beer can on the rail, bashing it down a bit so it would hold in place. Then I'd retreat into the whins. The locomotives were all diesel now. When the train had passed, I'd go to inspect the compressed steel. These clear pictures went psychedelic when the metal was pressed to follow the profile of the rails.

You could follow the line out away from the housing. That's how I got fishing. That's how I met Torcuil. I thought Torcuil was from Dollar Academy when I first met him by the Devon river. The railway line formed the boundary between public and private houses. The garden of our own house ended right where the embankment started to slide. So we were at the edge. The rails went to Dollar Mine. That sounded like the goldrush but it was on its last few seams. One or two people from higher up our hill went to school in Dollar. Tall and hairy guys walked around in flannel shorts. Their knees and their ears must have got hardened to it all. Sure he was disguised in jeans for the Saturday but I thought he'd just escaped from the Academy boundaries, to throw a line out. Maybe he wasn't much older than me but he looked it, the fair hair already well over the ears. Once I took that in, I knew he couldn't be at Dollar.

It turned out he lived just up the road from me, the next village out towards the hills. He showed me a trick. The track passed over a high steel bridge, down from Tillicoultry. We'd find a boulder that took the two of
us to roll it. Then we'd lift it by getting our weight under it and lever it over the edge. Like a depth-charge.

The splash would come all the way back to us. It would cross all that height very fast. The power of it came close to scaring you. Maybe one day we'd see a huge salmon there, stunned by us after straying up the Devon, from the Forth.

Torcuil's father was a Merchant Navy skipper. He didn't really like us following the railway line out, even if the trains were slow and scarce. But that's all navigation was, these days, he said, following rhum lines.

When you left port you followed electronic railway tracks on the water. Only thing was, you had to keep an eye out for some bastard coming the other way along the same line. These would take you out a few hundred miles. Then you steered along your course-line. That's when the sextant and the chronometer came in. You took a sun sight or a star sight to determine where exactly you were in relation to that theoretical line. Within a certain margin, of course.

I'd been nudged away from Torcuil's collection of LZ and Jethro Tull. His olman was from Dundonnell way and still spoke like it. He was pretty shocked to find I didn't have Gaelic. Torcuil had been on the move quite a bit, only going back to the northwest for holidays. He had an excuse. But someone growing up in Stornoway? That was demoralising. But did I ever go sea fishing? Aye and what gear did we use?

‘Only the
dorgh
.'

That wasn't bad for someone who didn't have Gaelic. And what was our
dorgh
like?

So I described the paternoster of bent galvanised wire. A lead weight cast in the middle, swivel above it. You'd feel the bottom and pull up half a fathom so your baits would be out of reach of the crab. Somehow the bite was transmitted, amplified by this gear so you'd feel the nudge at the line on your finger. Even at twenty fathoms.

‘Like sonar,' he said. ‘And where did you fish?'

‘The Dubh Sgeir.'

His eyebrows were a bit scary. It's amazing how many men in authority have eyebrows like that. Deputy headmasters. Just greying. Under them,
everything would be neat. Torcuil's father had a white, open-necked shirt. The V-neck looked new. I saw the Pringle label and knew that my own father might have checked it. It was mostly women seated along the line. He was the supervisor. He didn't bother with the beret any more. People called him Yul Bryner, of course.

Torcuil's olman reached for a book.
Indicus Nauticus.
It didn't go out of date like charts and almanacs. He showed me the page with about fifty rocks of the same name. Some variations in the spelling, he said. I wouldn't know the Lat and Long, but did the southern approaches to Loch Erisort sound about right?

It did.

And on the soft ground, between the hard patches, it would be mussel bait for adagan. And lugworm for leopag. I nodded. And what did we consider leopag on Lewis?

That was any flatfish, I said, the way my mother said dabs for all small flatties. My father said leopag to mean flounder, plaice, lemons or dabs.

Next he tested me on peat. I found I could go through this grammar for him, not realising where the knowledge had come from. Our own cul-de-sac in Stornoway or the sorties to Griomsiadair. The fad was just under the cep. You cut the outer one thick because it was fibrous. They did not dry so completely but were good for finishing off the cruach. Regular, even peats from the top row went to build the shell. Then creelfuls of darker peat, broken smaller, were just piled inside. Some places they did them herringbone style like tweed because they said it kept the water out better. The
caoran
was the bottom peat, cut last so it wouldn't go to smoor, which was peat–dross. These were the ones your grannie wanted to start the fire and to get heat up in the Rayburn for baking. The dampened smoor kept the fire smouldering overnight.

Torcuil's mother, coming in with cups of tea, said it was easier to be interested in peats when you were sitting in your armchair in the south of the country, well clear of them. There was a lot of heat in peats when you were cutting them. Plenty heat when you were lifting and turning and gathering them. Only time there was no heat in peat was when you put them on the fire and tried to burn them.

But Torcuil's father was back in the
Indicus Nauticus
. Gob Rubha Usinis, not too far south from the Dubh Sgeir. A lot of people confused it with Usinish light in Uist. There, at the Sound of Shiants. Did I know that place?

I told him I knew a spot just north of there. You kept a house in Calbost open on a point. We put on bigger hooks if we had a drift off there. One day there was a thumping on the line like I'd never felt before. A big green head came to the surface and a long white full belly under it. I saw the hook, not looking so big any more, just in the skin of the mouth, above the barbel. Someone tried to get a hand in the gills but the fish rolled over and flicked a huge tail and was gone. It didn't sink. It swam. It was alive.

Aye, he said, it's the ones that got away you remember best. He had a story about that. It had happened not that far out from Calbost, out on the Shiant Banks. But when it happened he didn't know anything about it.

I could see that Torcuil and his olaid had heard this one before more than once but I was hooked.

The summer after the one when all the grandparents disappeared, the olman had to work on, get some overtime. This was a new word in our house. There was no more talk of having to earn your crust in a decent number of hours. And it wasn’t only pattern-making. The olaid said he was just a foreman really, overseeing all these rows of knitting machines. They were getting all the rest, out of him, free, gratis and for nothing.

So I’d need to go with my mother to The Broch. I couldn’t be left alone all these days and my sister had her own summer job.

They were worried about my fluctuating moods. One day I’d be hitting the glottal stop with the rest of them, the next pissing them off by saying that Stornoway ruled OK. Even if the Aths or the Rovers weren’t even in the Highland League. At least Alloa was in the second division. But I only boasted out loud to those my size or smaller.

Maybe it was just the time of life. Hair was starting to appear all over the place. At last you felt you could hold up your arms when you were diving, at the baths. But you were worried that the almost constant erection would come out over the top of the swimming trunks. So you didn’t focus too long on these older girls, swimming slowly by with the upper parts of their costumes pretty full.

That was about the time that sex started to rot my teeth. Or maybe it was the lack of sex. This science teacher had bobbed black hair. I’d study the bare part of her neck while she wrote on the board. Even now, there’s a faint hint of the erotic when you click to light the gas – the smell of a Bunsen burner. Normally distant and aloof, she hated anybody chewing in class. So you got attention. OK, you got belted as well but that was attention too.

That item of Lochgelly craftsmanship would go back over her shoulder and then she’d catch your eye before she swung it. She put plenty into the swing but it wasn’t like when a male teacher belted you. If you got even one or two on a cold morning, from a man, that was something you wouldn’t want to go through again, in a hurry.

The ritual was also a kind of status. Sometimes a female teacher would send you to be belted by a male. But the science teacher was maybe too proud for that. We kept a score. I ate a lot of toffee. I was in the lead.

Maybe I was just seasick. Defined as a growing awareness of the lack of the stuff around you. Not only sea for the purposes of floating vessels or for providing a home for mackerel whose dorsals made a zig-zag of vees in calm harbours, broken by the leaping cloud of small fry.

Your line going first one way then another in a pattern you couldn’t predict. The sheen and phosphor hints of the belly. The back turning against the source of light to show something of a crazy pattern of greens and blues and blacks.

But the sea as something on the move. Just there. So a day trip to the gritty and probably contaminated Burntisland shore beat the Trossachs. We weren’t too fussed about the Aberfeldy-Auchtermuchty Scotland where you could find the Broon’s But and Ben round the next bend in the road. Too much scenery. Bonny enough. Damp enough. Not salty enough.

So I did grieve for the loss of the harbour, the inner loch at Griomsiadair, maybe even for my grannie with the Spangles and the stories and the bloody great forearms that would wrap you all up in a wrestle just when your temper was at its fiercest. You couldn’t win that kind of struggle with your grannie. Even if she wasn’t related to Grannie Broon.

Then there were the plots across from the Toolies at The Broch. The hard wee onions that came from them and came to you from out of wide jars. The wind blowing sand between the barriers at the beach. Ice-creams from Jimmie Sinclair’s van, eaten amongst the dunes. Out along the rocks to Rosehearty and the cold blue pool, the tiles concreted in to a smoothed-out hollow, near the black breakwater.

Andra would pick us up from Aberdeen Station. Dr Beeching had got to Fraserburgh station first. I used to mix up his name with the Dr on the
powders for colds and flu. The adverts were still new to us and we concentrated on them, still.

Andra was the oldest. Maist o his loonies and quinies were gang aboot the planet. Satellites jist. Comin back to base jist when they were wintin fuel.

Maggie let him talk most of the time, just throwing out a line when she felt he was totally off the beam. Andra loved Scotland. Loved his family, loved life. Fairly keen on the fitba as weil. Mebbe he’d jist manage to git doon the roadie tae us, next time Aiberdeen hid an Old Firm game.

Family suppers, aabody jist caain in by West Road fanivver they took a notion for’t. A ham or a tongue in the centre wi pickles aa roon aboot it. Jist lke the aul man’s.

Maybe it was these suppers gave Andra his stature. He was keeping the big family going. I thought he was a big man. So he was but eventually I noticed he didn’t have a head over me. Just big arms, big shoulders, big chest and belly. Big legs. Flicking big heart.

My Aunty Maggie wasn’t the thin woman you’d expect as the other side of the act, from all these cartoons in
The Sunday Post
and
The Weekly News
. Everything about her struck you as normal. Just as well.

It was strange staying in the Swedish house even if there was a bit more space than the pre-fab down West Road. Somebody else was in there now. I had to take a walk down, the first day. So I saw the overgrown roses. I never stepped across the low wall but was right back into that garden and through the door, smelling my Broch granma’s shreddy beef casserole and the mealy puddins.

The strawberries and sweet peas faded from the orange-red and grass-green after a few days. They just became normal. The colours stayed strong in the crates of skoosh. Back in SY this was all called lade. You got limeade and raspberryade and plain lade and any colour so long as it was bright. Round about Sauchie and Alloa, it was all called ginger. But my Broch granma called it skoosh and she was always digging out crates from cupboards that smelled of old people’s clothes. Once or twice, a gill of rum would appear from a cranny and the grampa would kind of look the other way. Evenings were best. The TV was always on but nobody ever paid much attention except when there was sport on.

The Fugitive was still tracking the one-armed man. Bitter veterans of the Korean War. Andra learned to appear when my cousin and me were deep into
Top Of The Pops
. Grampa Sandy would always join forces with the loons, in defence, whether he liked the records or not. Andra would throw out his lines. ‘Fit the hell d’you see in yon galshick? Gie me Bothy Nichts ony day o the week. Is that a loon or a quine, that ane?’

‘Leave the loons in peace tae enjoy their music.’

My granma was keen on music with a bit of get up and go. And she didn’t mind dressing up. The olaid told me how she and my grampa had been local champions at roller-skating, dancing on wheels, when it was a big thing. She was a fully dressed member of the Sally Ally and went to the kirk with the bright sound of brass ringing over grey stone. Old Sandy always wheezed a bit – he’d had a whiff of gas in the trenches but was always tense with energy. He’d never sit for long. A glass of rum helped. He’d argue with Andra just to keep things lively. But usually you saw the old man on his bike. Pedalling away on the single gear, between the plot and the harbour. Always a string of veg or a string of fish dangling from the handlebars.

My cousin Willum (Sandy’s Andra’s loon) was collecting LPs to play on the Dansette. I’d seen the same player in my mother’s catalogue but knew not to ask right then. I’d to keep the paper-round going, when I got back, that was for sure. Willum was going to be doing Navigation at the College but my cousin had his own sideline, for the summer.

He’d point the head of that old yole in towards the boulders strewn between Fraserburgh and Rosehearty, as long as the wind was taking us offshore. I’d haul up the few old pots he’d patched up, with him bumping the clutch of the big
Seagull
. A few kicks of that crazy big prop were enough to put her nose back in. I’d be dangling half over the side, looking for the first sight of a dark blue shape. Seen as a break in the block colour of the netting – a dark patch within International Orange. Willum showed me the net knot, come from his yellow plastic needle and I thought of my own olman, missing something about him for the first time, that holiday. He’d put his own flash of colour into the shuttle. It might look weird to anybody else till they saw the effect of it, against some other background shade.

So the pots would tumble back aboard, one by one. There was a transformation of that dark blue into sunburn red, shouting from a blue-patterned plate. This would be the centrepiece of the supper table, that night, at West Road. Willum had a wee contract with our grampa. A lobster in exchange for two-stroke mix, for the outboard.

I asked if it was a marrow, that strange torpedo-shaped vegetable, laid out as a centrepiece.

Even when others were laughing, our grampa was defending me. A homegrown cucumber wasn’t all neat and regular like a shop-bought one.

‘As close a relative tae a marra as you’re a cousin o Willum though ye widna ken that fae the colour o your skins.’

I was as red as that lobster and Willum had gone black-brown. Granma or Grampa or both of them had matched the money that lobster would have fetched so it could sit here and get scoffed by folk that had as much right tae it as the toffs. Aabody kent boats hid expenses.

And now the old couple just weren’t here. Their pre-fab was that few hundred yards down the same road but it wasn’t their’s now. A mercy they’d gone, so close together, people would say.

When the olaid had to go back south to work, there was no objection to the idea of me shuffling into the back room made up there wi naebody bidin in it. Willum didn’t mind having somebody to do the hauling for the rest of the holiday. Looks like he’d be waiting forever for the hydraulic capstan that Andra was working on. Aye he kent ye couldna hurry an inventor. ‘Watt an Simpson and Curie an aa yon crood widna hae produced the goods if somebody’d been hoverin ower their shouder half a the time.’

First day with them, Andra took me to his work. He hid a big share o the responsibility o keepin The Broch alive. While Maggie was pumpin they wee bitties o history and geography an readin an rithmetic intil aa the loonies an quinies, he wis seein til his section o production at the Toolies. Hydraulics maistly.

He’d learned his engineering in the Army. The units were being finished in paint as bright as skoosh. Queueing up for export.

‘Hydraulics are simple, ken. Naethin bit oil in a tube. Jist the pressure. Bit aa your fittins, your crimps, hiv tae be up tae the job. That’s fit it’s aboot, lookin for a weak spot. Sortin it. Still I willna hae to rush that hauler for young Willum noo. He still his the teuchter cousin tae pull up his bitties o string.

‘I wis at the big Macfisheries afore this. Nivver mind the bloody Common Market. We hiv to keep oor ain fish. They Icelanders hiv the richt idea. Writin on the waa. That’s fit wye I took the job when it was offert. We’re exportin aa over the world jist. Be supplying a station on the moon next. Bit the stock tae keep the processin and smokin on the go is gettin gey tricky tae find. I’ve seen us buyin in herrin fae Canada tae mak Broch kippers. Maybe caught by Brochers or Lewis fowk wint oot across the Atlantic fan there was nithin left tae eat here. I’ve a sister oot across the pond yet. Yer ain auntie. And yer Grampa workin at the coal, barrowing it on tae the drifters and trawlers, we were nivver short o fish. Best o stuff and we’d aa be saying, nae fish again. My ain faither, he’d said it often enough like.
There’ll come a day. Ye’ll be mindin back tae aa this fish, an ae day – nae aa that far awa – it’ll be rich man’s food.’

Young Willum gave me the justification to go daily to the pier for podlies. Just big enough to be bait in his pots. The prickies were our cuddies, the same species but smaller. What they called harvesters in Kirkcaldy. I’d taken one or two there when our car was on the road. My father just smelling the sea while my mother and sister were at the shops. I watched the coming and going of the bigger boats through the gap in Kirkcaldy breakwater. They had white painted whalebacks at the bow and rows and rows of marker buoys. The last of the great-line boats.

Here in The Broch, the flags were still flying over the beach. Red for danger. The breeze was too strong today. But the miniature railway was pelting its way among the dunes.

Everywhere, I saw colour. Even the telly was colour now, as opposed to black and white, which was the only possible thing, back on the Island. The technology was no problem in the Central Belt but colour cost more ready money than we had now.

In Fraserburgh, the podlies would show an orange hint through the dense green of their backs, until the moisture burned off their skins and dark spread over the whole fish. Just the white of the lateral line, loud and prominent.

The Toolies, on the Aberdeen road, was a neutral sort of concrete colour. But, all outside the building, you’d see rows and rows of orange and green compressors, all checked by my uncle. They sat, waiting, on their new tyres. And, just across the old railway, were the boatyards. All the brushes were cleaned on the wall outside. Remnants, weakened with spirit, were brushed off against the rough-cast.

‘You tak a piece o that waa back wi ye like, loon,’ Andra said. ‘Bloody Picasso, man – naethin on The Broch, ken.’

Six of the seven weeks of the summer holidays had gone by. Just gone.

I phoned and got the extension for the last week. I’d need to get the train from Aberdeen to Stirling, on the Friday. Change at Perth. My auntie Maggie would be back at work, The Broch schools going back earlier, this year. Willum said I could tak the boat oot fan he was at the College, startin Monday.

But I wasn’t confident enough, on my own.

I got stuck into the books. There wasn’t that many in the house – no book club editions but there was a whole library of paperbacks. Twelve volumes. They had black and red covers with Churchill’s name at the top. His
History of The Second World War.
Once I started reading I was stuck in it. Things must have looked bad that first two years. Andra would come back from work to find me turning the pages.