Gannet chuckled quietly.
‘You see?’ Sorley Mor laughed loudly. ‘Even Gannet there thinks that’s a mad idea. No, no, you just tell Chrissie and the families of the rest of the crew.’
‘But you know fine well that Chrissie won’t let me in the house. You won’t let me on the Wanderer and she won’t let me in the house.’
‘Ach, now, you see? You’ll believe anything! Did you hear that, Gannet? I won’t let you on the boat for very good reasons, you know that fine, and Chrissie lets you in the house fine, she just shouts at you a bit, that’s all.’
‘That’s the same thing.’
‘How is it?’ Sorley Mor demanded in a bemused tone.
‘There’s no way I’m going in if I’m to be shouted at. She’s a powerful woman, your Chrissie. She terrifies me. When she comes at me I feel I’m about to be beaten up.’
‘She’s an angel,’ Sorley Mor laughed. ‘What’s wrong with you, man? A sweet, gentle wee angel is what she is!’
‘We’ll leave that to one side for the minute,’ Father Mick said, exchanging a doubting look with Gannet. ‘But why does she shout at me? That’s what I don’t understand.’
‘She says you lead me astray, you get me mixed up in all sorts of capers, and that when I go down to the Inn for a quiet game of dominoes, you get me drunk, that’s what she says.’
‘Who told her such a damnable lie?’
‘It was maybe Gannet, here,’ said Sorley Mor in a vague voice, ‘I’m not sure. But I know that I backed him up. Is that not the way it was, Gannet?’
Gannet, stone-cold sober, simply smiled, nodded and muttered noncommittally.
‘Besides, what are you complaining about? If she beats you up, that’s so many bruises towards canonisation. You’ll be suffering for your faith, after all.’
What Sorley Mor had was character, he had a presence, and he would’ve been noticed wherever he was and whatever he did for a living; but the good folk of his home port didn’t think in those terms, because he was who he was, and he was theirs. What they would say, though, was that they wondered where his good nature had come from, because it certainly didn’t come from his father. It has been said so often that it had become a mantra, but Sorley Mor’s father had no heart at all, unless you called a lump of granite swinging on a rope a heart, yet funnily enough he had died young of a heart attack. The old ones would nod to each other; now there was irony for you.
His father came from the last generation of fishermen who could, as the saying was, ‘read the sea’; though technology was already making inroads even then, he just had to look out at the waves to tell where the herring were. Some of it was commonsense, like watching for porpoises and other rorquals, the kind of creatures that hunted for herring by herding them and keeping the shoal bunched while they feasted on the fringes or took turns diving into the pack. Concentrations of gannets diving vertically were signs that herring were about, or sometimes the sighting of a basking shark – a plankton feeder like the herring – would be enough to give away the position of a shoal; or a whale would break the surface through the middle as it fed on ‘the silver darlings’. For fishermen of the old man’s era there were other signs now lost to his son and his peers, signs they only talked about when yarning to each other. Sorley Mor’s father found herring by looking out for streams of bubbles breaking the surface and oily patches, he recognised the ‘black lump’ of a shoal in dull, wintry weather, or a red sheen on the water in bright winter sunlight. He knew big shoals, ‘fields’ or ‘parks’, were to be found by the green phosphorescence of late summer or autumn – ‘losgadh’ it was in the Gaelic, ‘burning’ in English – and he could hear the noise of a big ‘play’ of herring breaking the surface of the water from miles away, skills honed to instincts that had been lost over the years, lost to Sorley Mor except in stories about his father.
So he had been well respected as a fisherman, the old Sorley Mor, but he was never as well liked as his son, who was popular even as a boy, and so it would continue throughout his life. He had something it was hard to put a finger on, people would say if asked, unaware that they had smiled instinctively at the mention of his name before relating some anecdote about him. If pushed to list his qualities they would undoubtedly have shrugged their shoulders and looked bemused before telling you that he was honest and fair, a decent man who had a generous nature and hadn’t an enemy in the world, all of which was true, but that description could easily have been used for other men in the village who weren’t thought of in quite the same way as Sorley Mor. In a less macho culture, in a less reserved community, Sorley Mor would’ve been described as well loved, but that kind of language would have embarrassed the undemonstrative folk of Acarsaid. It would’ve struck them as insincere and flowery. So instead Sorley Mor was talked of as well liked, which meant the same thing anyway.
What they had no means of knowing, because they had never been without him in their midst, was that Sorley Mor would’ve caught the attention of strangers even if the other fishermen didn’t encourage them in his direction. He had an unconscious magnetism, or perhaps what the young ones called an aura or a vibe; but whatever it was that drew people to him, it had little to do with his physical appearance. He was only about medium height, certainly no taller than five feet six inches, though he had the strong muscles of a man once used to working with his entire body before advancing technology had taken away much of the physical aspect of the fishing, a strength and bearing that caught the eye. And it was true that he was a handsome man all his life; like all the men in his family his hair had started to turn grey at an early age, though there was little showing from under the washed-out Dylan cap he’d bought from Hamish Dubh in the village store sometime in the 1960s. He took the cap off only when attending weddings or funeral, times when he deemed himself to be officially off-duty, and then a startlingly pale patch of forehead was exposed just below his hairline, a band of skin that had been protected by the cap peak from the wind and sun that had bronzed his features over the years, emphasising the blue of his eyes. Even as he approached his sixtieth year he was a good-looking man, but there was indefinable something more, that something special from within Sorley Mor, even if no one could quite say what that might be.
11
When young Rose Nicolson thought of Sorley Mor she always pictured his eyes, his laughing blue eyes, and smiled. Like the five other Nicolson bairns she had gone to school with Sorley Mor’s bairns, but he had been even more of a constant in her life than in the lives of anyone else in the village. It was partly because her own father, Quintin, had died in an accident at sea on a previous Ocean Wanderer, just before she was born, she knew that. She had grown up without him and, having no memories of him to take comfort from, she had decided at a very early age that, if she could have chosen a father, it would’ve been Sorley Mor. And besides, they were entwined, entangled: the MacEwans, the Nicolsons and her mother’s family, the Hamiltons, shared a common history. In old stories the names of Sorley Mor, Quintin and Gannet were always mentioned in the same breath, and more than that, it was said that Sorley Mor was the man her mother, Margo, could’ve had, only she had chosen to marry Quintin Nicolson. So to the young, fatherless Rose, Sorley Mor could’ve been her father. Even if that was stretching it a bit, what were dreams, after all, but stretched reality? Just like his own bairns she would wait by the harbour when Ocean Wanderer was on its way in, and her heart would jump as she spotted the familiar figure waving from the wheelhouse. He was waving to his own bairns, she knew that, but in her heart she hoped that he was waving to her too.
Sometimes she would hang around after the catch had been landed and sent on its way in the lorries, and Sorley Mor and Gannet would be checking one more thing on the boat before heading for the Inn then home to Chrissie and the bairns, and he would look up and spot her watching him. He’d smile and wink at her, encouraging her to come closer. Then he would produce a piece of ‘treasure’, a shard of pottery or a peculiarly shaped pie
ce of metal, things dredged up with the catch that he knew would interest her. There would be that feeling of giddy, breathless excitement that, while he was working out at sea, Sorley Mor had thought about her; with the boat pitching and tossing on the waves, he had still made time to look through the nets and pick out ‘treasures’ to bring back to her. Then, with Gannet smiling silently by his side, he would engage her in conversation like an adult. ‘And how are things up by, then, Rose?’ he would ask. ‘How’s life with yourself?’ She would tell him about school, about some fight or other with a brother or sister, childish things, and Sorley Mor would nod seriously before saying, ‘That reminds me of the time …’, a preamble to telling her stories of the old days, stories about her father. That was what she had wanted, of course; she had wanted Quintin brought to life for her. Maybe that was where her fascination with past lives came from, the need to know the father she could never know. At the time she always thought she had tricked Sorley Mor into talking about his friend, recounting their schooldays, their jokes and laughter. She had been in her twenties before she realized that he had known of her need all along, and his gentle kindness had made her love him even more.
Now, lost in her thoughts by the big window of her grand house, she wondered if that had been part of what had attracted her to his son. Had she married Sorley Og because she loved him, or to make his father as near to being her father as she could, or was there maybe something more to it than even that? She remembered coming back that summer three years ago and seeing them together, working on the boat, Gannet, Big Sorley and Young Sorley. It had struck her that Sorley Og looked so like his father when he had been younger, the image of the man who brought her back ‘treasures’ from the deep and told her stories when she was a child, his blue eyes smiling and his black hair already showing flecks of grey, though he was only in his late twenties. She had known him all her life, but that moment was fixed in her mind, captured for ever in a delicious, languid slow-motion. Sorley Mor had waved to her, and his son, slowly looking round to see who it was, had met her eyes, and she was lost. It all seemed so long ago. Had all that happened in three short years?
Standing in the living room of the house on MacEwan’s Row, where the road north ended, Rose occasionally changed her focus to stare at her reflection in the glass, hardly recognising the dark-haired woman she saw there, the one who had always been regarded as cool and calm and the only one in the Nicolson family who had inherited Quintin’s sallow complexion and large, oval, brown eyes. It had been a cruel twist of fate; all the others resembled their mother, Margo, but only Rose looked strongly like their father, and yet her father hadn’t lived to see her. When she was a child she would hear the villagers as she passed by, ‘My, but Quintin couldn’t have denied that wee one’; she hadn’t understood at the time what that meant.
She looked around the room. She hadn’t wanted this huge place, though she had never said it out loud; Sorley Og had wanted it. He had wanted it because he had been hurt by her family’s opposition to their marriage. It was a defensive thing; he wanted to show them that he would treat her like the princess they thought she was by giving her a castle to live in. If she was a princess living in a castle, then she hadn’t done too badly in marrying a simple fisherman, that’s what Sorley Og had reasoned. Though no one could ever call the MacEwans simple fishermen, she knew what was in his mind without ever having to be told. He didn’t understand the reaction of the Nicolsons, so he had been stung into making grand gestures, and her family didn’t understand either that they had hurt him; they didn’t really understand things like that. He was Sorley Og MacEwan, son of Sorley Mor, and everyone knew how laidback and confident the MacEwans were. They had money to go with their history and position in the fishing industry; there wasn’t a port that didn’t know and respect them; nothing could ever penetrate the MacEwan sense of themselves. Only something had, and despite her attempts to make him see that nothing mattered except the two of them, Sorley Og couldn’t get over the fact that the Nicolsons, people he’d known all his life, whose family had known his for generations, objected to him as a husband for their Rose.
The engagement ring he had bought her, therefore, had to be bigger than she had wanted or needed, and it sat on her finger, a sparkling and painful symbol of his confusion. The wedding had been the same. Rose’s ideal would’ve been to get married quietly, but Sorley Og had insisted on Father Mick doing the full honours with as much pomp and ceremony as he could muster, and Father Mick had even been prevailed upon to remain sober, so that he wasn’t like Father Mick at all. And there had to be every innovation that America could dream up, from tulle bags of toasted almonds, match-boxes with their names in silver, and a three-man band from a video company filming the smallest details. The wedding cake was the biggest and most ornate ever seen, but the icing on the entire occasion had been the arrival of an open carriage with two white horses to take the bride to church, though God alone knew where he’d got them from or how much it had cost to bring them all the way to a Highland fishing village. Rose had sat in the coach in all her unnecessary finery, trying not to meet the eyes of other villagers en route and hoping that if they noted her burning cheeks they would think she was just excited, when all the time she was wilting with embarrassment, her brother Dougie sitting beside her in silence, apart from a self-conscious whistling under his breath. ‘Don’t,’ she joked, squeezing his arm, ‘you’ll whistle up the wind,’ and Dougie smiled.
As he waited to receive her and Dougie at the door of the church, Father Michael Houlihan had a pronounced look of resigned disapproval on his little gargoyle face. He stood barely five feet tall and had a big nose, long earlobes, thick lips and a furrow splitting his chin marginally deeper than those across his forehead. Despite a nature built for fun and more fun, Father Mick looked like an undersized Apache Chief on good days, according to some, and a gargoyle on normal to bad days. He had landed in Acarsaid many years ago as a punishment and, by one of those quirks of fate, he and the villagers had suited each other, so there he had remained. The problem that had led to his banishment was rooted in Father Mick’s short fuse. He was a man prepared to go that extra mile for anyone, a man with a wide and generous interpretation of the ways in which his God could be praised and in what locations. The local Inn, he reasoned, was as good a place as any, meeting with his fellow man to give thanks for fellowship and the bounties of fermented nature, but if he should feel in the slightest put-upon, taken for a fool or for granted, he tended to lash out in some way. All those years spent in Acarsaid had probably mellowed him slightly, in that perhaps he lashed out physically only in the direst circumstances, but when he was a young man he had often resorted to violence first.
The pivotal moment had come when he was a priest in training and he and his fellow wannabe men of the cloth had been banished to a retreat at a monastery as part of their preparation for the wider world. It was a dull, miserable place, and the twin-bedded cell he had been given was, like all the others, lit only by candle. He was partnered with another rookie who, he reckoned, did not pull his weight; the kind of individual you would meet in any area of life who perfects an affable, hail-fellow-well-met air to cover the fact that he is a waster who leeches off others. Mick had done the decent thing several times and covered up for his cellmate, but this was taken not for the kindness it was, but as a sign of weakness and stupidity on Mick’s part that was further encroached on as time went on.
Mick was a man who liked his sleep, and the worst offence anyone could commit was to deprive him of even a few minutes of his legal amount without good reason. No matter how often he complained, however, the other chap was always late in taking over from him at vigils. After it happened on what was to prove to be the last occasion, Mick’s diminishing levels of fellow feeling and goodwill were stretching dangerously thin, and when his fellow novice failed to turn up until well after the arranged time of 4 a.m., to take over for the next four hours, they ran out completely. The nearly Father Mick h
ad pounded his way angrily to their cell and prepared to exact retribution. In the darkness he looked at the lump in the bed, still wallowing peacefully in sleep, and the red mist had intensified.
‘Right, you lazy, good-for-nothing bastard!’ he yelled, and taking a good run from the door he delivered a ferocious kick at where he calculated the sleeping figure’s nether regions would be. ‘Get your fat arse out of that bed and take over!’
It was just unfortunate, and not Father Mick’s fault in any way, that the sleeping arrangements had been changed while he had been struggling to keep awake on his four-hour stint in the monastery chapel. No one had told him that he and his roommate had been moved out, and the cell, reputed to be the best one, had been commandeered by the archbishop of Edinburgh, who had arrived unexpectedly. As Mick’s foot found its mark, the figure leapt from the bed, howling in pain and shock, and hopped about the dark cell.
‘You don’t like that, do you?’ demanded Mick, as though there were some who might. ‘Well, here’s another one!’ and being unable to see the figure clearly enough for identification purposes, he delivered another direct hit to the lazy arse’s arse. ‘Well,’ said Mick, warming to his theme, ‘I don’t like having to cover up for you all the time, you fucking waste of space!’ and he continued kicking the yelling figure all round the room.
It was only when the commotion brought others running with enough candles to illuminate the proceedings that Mick realised his mistake. Though technically he hadn’t been to blame, Mick knew he would suffer. He wouldn’t be kicked out – the church was too desperate for priests for that – but the archbishop, a man known to hold considerable grudges, would make sure that Mick’s path to the Vatican and the triple crown was barred for eternity.
‘If you ever had any ambitions concerning Rome,’ the leader of the flock said maliciously after Mick’s ordination some time later, ‘you can forget them. After this passing-out parade we’re sending you to the hinterland to live among the mad teuchters, you ugly wee shite. See how you like that!’
The Last Wanderer Page 14