‘The Day of Judgement’s coming,’ they muttered.
They shook their heads, wondering what they had done to merit such punishment. Murdo thought of how he lusted over the pictures of naked women a mainlander had given him. Raonaid remembered how envy had led her to pour a jugful of cow’s urine into her neighbour’s butter churn.
There was more proof of the coming catastrophe on the morning Finlay saw two crows flying away from Conachair and over his house. He muttered a quick prayer under his breath.
‘What’s happened to these gannets?’ he asked, ‘They’ve been burnt to a crisp.’
Frustration
In that time of desperation,
when there were no women nearby to bear
the cradle or creel,
Shonnie’s imagination
flared from time to time with fantasies,
swearing some rock possessed the rare
shape of a woman
(who was not related to him),
a seabird transformed into human
company complete with shawl and dress.
But most of all,
there was that piece of driftwood washed
into Village Bay in a hushed tide
one night.
He took it home to bed,
caressed its seaweed lingerie,
timber limbs,
and gazed into the pebbles
he’d picked up
and employed instead
of dark eyes in her head.
Mailboat
Picture Ishbel…
Night after night she stands with shoulders hunched outside the door of her home on the island. She shakes her head sadly, thinking of her husband Fionn and the way he behaves inside their home. While most other men in the community make sure they are clean when they sit down to eat, he drags both feather and down everywhere he goes. White, black and grey fluff and quills bristle from every inch of his clothing. His hands are smeared with blood and guts, feet caked with ash and mud. There are even these black globules of tobacco juice he squirts from the side of his mouth. They dot the fireplace and floor like small reminders of the night he drags with him round their house at all times.
She dare not say anything in response, fearful that neither hand nor voice would show much restraint in chiding her if she opened her mouth. Instead, when he is climbing cliff and crag, she sits down and commits all her complaints to paper, anxious that, somehow or other, she might give in to the feelings of grievance and annoyance that overcome her every time he steps in through the door and do something she might regret.
‘There are times’ she writes, ‘when for all that man is said to be foredeigned the head of the household, I have more than my share of my doubts that he is. In terms of common decency, Fionn is little better than the dog that rushes and races behind him round the island. His toenails and fingers are like black talons, never cleaned. His beard is clogged with dirt. It is all I can do to stop myself killing him at times…’
She feels better after scrawling down these words. It is as if she is at long last confessing thoughts that were trapped inside her head as surely as she herself is confined to the island. She pads up and down once she has written them. Now they are on the page, she does not want them to disappear, to put them on the fire and see them flutter away in flame and smoke up the chimney. Nor does she want him to find them. There would be fury then. He would stamp, sulk and spit verses from the Bible in her direction, as well as small reminders of how much she depended on him for the food he brought to their home.
‘I guard and protect you,’ he might say, using Scripture for his own purpose. ‘Like the Lord our God, I cover thee with my feathers and under my wings shalt thou trust.’
She shivers when she thinks of this, knowing that when he rages, there is the possibility of him even bringing the elders and the minister to their home to grant him support. He is only doing much the same as us, they would say. ‘Why are you so vain and full of yourself that you expect anything different?’ It is partly in fear of this moment that she hides the note behind the clock on the mantelpiece, knowing he rarely looks there, pretending it has never been written.
It lies there for a long time, gathering dust from the smoor and ash of the fire, till one day she thinks of the mailboat. That had been their visitor, John Sands’ invention many years before, when both he and others had been marooned upon the island. The strange notion had come to his head when he tried to think of ways of alerting others to their presence there. Before that time, they had relied only on flames to warn people that some trouble had occurred, setting a bonfire on the island’s highest point to tell them something was wrong.
And so the shape of a small boat was carved from a piece of driftwood. This was later attached by a rope to a sheep’s bladder in an attempt to keep it afloat. Inside it, he placed a sealed cocoa tin; their note asking for help wrapped in oilcloth within.
She did the same, spending evenings while Fionn was absent whittling away at a piece of wood, hollowing it out for the container, weighing it in her fingers, making sure it could float. After she had done this, she takes it down to the waters, watching how it bobs up and down on the ebb-tide, moving away from shore. She knows from the movement of the ocean that it could be taken away to the north or west, to Iceland or the coast of Labrador, places where – she trusts – they will not be able to understand the privacy of her thoughts or where it is too far away to matter very much. She stands there watching the tiny vessel drawing further and further from the island, not noticing Effie creeping up to stand beside her.
‘Where are you sending that to?’ Effie asks.
‘No one… I hope no one… I’m trying to get some unwanted thoughts from my head, sending them out on the water… Trying to make sure they’re not with me any more…’
Effie nods, the fringe of her dark hair waving under the headscarf she had worn the last four or so years, as a married woman. There are some thoughts that trouble her too, words that she cannot express to anyone on the island, believing the answers they might provide will be meaningless and unsatisfactory.
‘Why has God allowed all my children to die?’ she asks all the time. ‘Three have failed to live for long within my womb. Another died soon after she was born. Why is God doing these things to me? Am I that evil and wicked a person?’
She, too, steps out one evening with the mailboat under her arm, walking down to the rocks to set it on salt water. The vessel shifts out a little before it turns in the wind, swirling towards the shore as if all the questions she has asked are determined to stay with her, haunting her days and nights for years to come. Determined to avoid this, she hitches up her skirt and paddles out into the sea. This time she gives the small boat an extra shove, hoping it will not come back, that a current will take it far from this place. Slowly, steadily, her wish is granted. She watches it begin to leave the island. Perhaps it will be washed ashore on the northern coast of Norway, the Faroe Islands, the coast of France, locations where they will not understand what she has written but only the urgency of her questions and wishes. Perhaps this voyage will take all the barrenness and waste she has suffered away from her, releasing her from its burden and weight…
Other women watch her from their homes in Village Bay – all with different concerns and troubles. There is Catriona, puzzling over a question that keeps returning to her mind. (‘What would it be like to sleep with another man? One that doesn’t smell of bird-fat and feathers? One like a visitor from the mainland with the scent of soap and after-shave?) There is Agnes, whose man sometimes pummels her with his fists on those nights he dreams of being attacked by a gannet on the cliffs. (‘What can I do to calm him? Who can I go to to protect myself?) There is Seonaid, worrying about how she will live alone for much of her days, not having the chance to find a husband on the island. (‘Far too many are cousins of mine. The ones who aren’t are not the ones I like…’)
And so their letters, one after another, sail out fro
m the bay, a flotilla of small hopes and wishes that they do not want those on the mainland of Scotland to read, only those who would be baffled and confused by their words and desires, ambitions and dreams, only those who would allow them to keep these visions and aspirations marooned in the depths of their own hearts…
Petrel Post
Because his love for her must be concealed by night,
he trusts that fragile bird to bear
a message to the dark-eyed girl he’s glimpsed
while landing on the shore at Bailesiar.
He dreams about her as that petrel rides
eastward on these waves within the dark,
hoping its wings will sweep across that gap,
find her home where she will catch it, sending back
words like those he scrawled upon the note,
clipped and fastened round its tiny foot,
that might tell him that her small heart trembles too
and if it’s worthwhile, this pursuit
of love – or will she choose simply to remain
landbound on that shoreline, sensing only danger
in the pitch-black night that brings this bird
and in the edgy gaze of a lovelorn, wordless stranger?
Mailboat II
In the months before they sailed away from the island, Ferguson fashioned a whole set of new mailboats, hewing and carving from a length of driftwood a series of these small vessels people employed to carry mail to the mainland. Within a cocoa tin in each one, he placed some coins and a postcard with a grainy photograph of a fulmar. On the opposite side, he scribbled a note to whoever might find it;
‘To the One who finds This… Could you please return this photograph to…’
After this, he wrote his own name and the address to which he would be moving when they left the island’s shores.
For almost a year after they had gone, he heard nothing more about the mailboats. In August, however, the cards he had written began to flock to his door. One came from a lady in Okinawa, off the coast of mainland Japan. Another arrived from a teenage boy living in an estancia near the town of Puerto Piramides in the Valdes Peninsula in Argentina. Another from a fisherman in Paradise, Newfoundland, who had brought it up with his catch. From Reykjavik in Iceland, where the small boy who found it would later write the popular Icelandic song ‘Sailor In St Kilda’. From a retired man in Fort Lauderdale, Florida…
Ferguson was spellbound by all these messages, thinking of the bird he had once hunted and ate flying towards him from all these different edges of the world. He could see them in the sea-cliffs of the Far East, flying out over Okinawa; a peninsula in South America where their wings would reel and circle over fur seals, sea lions, elephant seals…
He was sure that they would be cherished there almost as much as they had been in the island he called home.
A Quartet of Angels
1
Ascension happened when men fell
from the hold of earth to be lifted by the swell
and heft of oceans, transforming them to angels,
or when breath choked, altered into feathers, down
that clogged a child’s lungs; that gasping sound
a sign that ground
was waiting for them,
that they and death would no longer just be strangers
and flight-feathers would glisten among seabirds,
as they became transcendent,
altered once more into angels.
2 Finlay’s Struggle with an Angel
In the weeks before departure,
Fionnlagh wrestled with an angel
and asked him why he had to leave,
live elsewhere among strangers.
He received no answer,
though the tussle left him lame,
both limp and wound crippling his step
like the English name he’d gain.
3 Angels of Comfort
Angels used to swoop from Heaven
to comfort island women giving birth
until the years they only came down
to accompany those infants meeting death,
wings swaddling and enfolding them
as they were laid down in the earth.
4 Forgetful Angel (after Paul Klee)
He was meant to be their guardian angel
but he often forgot,
Mullach Mor and Village Bay
slipping daily from his thoughts.
Till he lost all light and lustre, wings drooping over time,
his celestial form transformed into
no more than hurried, jagged lines.
Parliament
In the last years of the community, the island Parliament often declared itself to be in extraordinary session. On these occasions, the sole item on the agenda was concerned with improving their economic conditions and securing the future of the population by encouraging others to move to Village Bay. One time, in order to do this, they decided to hire a marketing consultant. The gentleman arrived in Parliament and suggested the following advertising slogans to aid their campaign for survival:
‘Eat Fresh; Eat Fulmar’
‘Pick Up A Puffin...’
‘You do the shoogle vac to lift the feather sack…’
‘Guga Is Good For You’.
In order to illustrate the last catchphrase, the marketing man decided to create the image of a gannet, complete with white plumage and black-tipped wings. This was to be inscribed on the outside of a glass of Irish stout.
As they were teetotal, the islanders completely rejected this suggestion, believing it might give the wrong impression of the kind of new arrival they were seeking for their shores.
2
‘You should extend your range of gifts,’ the marketing consultant advised them.
He flourished a hand over those items that already existed; the lengths of tweed woven over the winter; the cuddly puffins and gannets created for a child to cuddle under eiderdown; the buxom Murdina Gillies ® doll equipped with tartan shawl and a creelful of peat as essential fashion accessories.
‘What do you suggest?’ one of the islanders growled.
‘We could improve upon your selling of guillemot and razorbill eggs. Make a hole in them. Blow them out. Fill their empty shells with granulated sugar and glucose syrup. Market them just like the sticks of rock they sell in Blackpool…’
3
‘According to a Government directive,’ old Gillies declared one day in Parliament, ‘we should be investing more in renewables.’
‘We’ve got plenty of possibilities,’ Macdonald said. ‘Wind…’
‘Tide…’
‘Wave…’
‘What about the fulmars?’ Ferguson asked. ‘We could be dealing with them in a different way.’
‘How?’ old Gillies growled.
‘Employ a special fulmar-agitator on these cliffs. Get the birds to spit at them and squeeze all of the oil out of their coats, trousers, beards…’
4
When old Gillies was finally ‘going over’, the others gathered round him; young Ferguson noting each word he gasped out in the pages of an old school jotter.
‘In August that year, we went out to the stac, harvested a thousand birds…’
‘In May, we sold souvenirs to the tourists… Five good lengths of tweed…’
‘We gathered three hundred fulmar eggs that day…’
‘Why are you doing that to him?’ the nurse asked, horrified at their cruelty. ‘Can’t you see the poor man’s dying?’
‘We have to do this,’ Ferguson muttered. ‘He keeps the records of all we’ve discussed in Parliament. They’re all contained inside his head.’
‘He’s sort of our Hansard…’ Malcolm Macdonald explained.
5
One fine summer’s morning proceedings carried on longer than usual.
To begin with, Angus B arrived late, his clothes smarter than usual, his hair neatly combed by a fish-skeleton. Af
ter that, he proceeded to talk endlessly about irrelevant matters – the candelabra in the Turkish embassy, changing the rules of the game of football, the distance and nature of the arc birds flew between Ireland and Iceland, the cost of storm petrel oil in the Faroe Islands.
‘He’s trying for a filibuster,’ Ferguson muttered, ‘He doesn’t want to do any work today.’
A Protest Against the Island Parliament
‘They only ever procrastinate!’
the revolutionary declared,
‘What we ought to do is storm the barricades;
tear down cleits;
occupy the high cliffs and denizens of this fine estate;
overcome these institutions where old men ruminate…’
But the fulmars only listened,
scowled,
soaked and spat at his delusions
with a foul mouthful
of oil…
An Ascendancy of Angels
/ Aingealean
1
When that mermaid washed up with the tide,
men failed to note the beauty of the scales
silvering her limbs, the tangled tresses
that half-concealed her shoulders, the sweetness of her breasts.
As if they could not see
how such a graceful creature
could be heaved in their direction,
The Guga Stone Page 3