A Book of Death and Fish

by Ian Stephen

  Attempts to control the angling were abandoned. It became free to all. These trout could be bottom feeders or they could snap at smaller fish of several species. The perch territories encouraged float-fishers. But all these areas intersected around that old pier. All substantial fish gravitated towards the small fry.

  So when I could, I would catch baitfish like cuddies in a harbour, on the smallest hook you could find, tied on a handline. The trouble was you got too occupied in this and forgot you were collecting them for bigger things. And I learned not to call them cuddies. I didn’t like being laughed at. People kept asking me to say salmon and worm. Hebridean indicators in the voice. Like the way we say ‘soup’. I was ready to give way to a new accent the way all these Poles who’d settled here after the war, had dropped a syllable or two out of their names. A concession.

  I cast the herring fillet from the narrow walkway and paid out line, going round the spikes to take me back to the concrete. Big guys arrived on bikes with drop-handlebars. They normally went after salmon but even on the Tay there was a couple of months closed. They had Barbour jackets and gaffs. They had reels with numbered grades of tension, worked from the back. They told me to wait for a run. Don’t hit him till he’s turned.

  ‘Like conger?’ I asked. ‘Like conger,’ they agreed.

  One of these guys hit a fish. There wasn’t much bend in his rod because all his line was running out as he fiddled with the drag. I watched my own nylon go out the three feet they said it would. I waited then hit it and it worked. At first it was a weight then it came in with me. I wound fast and it slashed at the surface. I remembered to give line like the books said, then, next time it surfaced, I just held on. The tension in the rod was pulling it by its wide-open mouth, a treble hook visible in a jaw. The teeth were prominent, like those of a ling, but the marblings, the camouflage, were shades of reed and waterlily. It came to the net in a strange tangle of light, bright enough to be shocking, from that thick water. It was three and a quarter pounds on their spring-balance. ‘Do you want to put it back?’ I shook my head.

  Well, some of these Polish guys will take one from you. A lot of them had been airmen who got stranded here at the end of the war. Or met local women. There was a back-street shop in Alloa where you could buy salami and stuff.

  But I brought it home. The olaid made an effort. She didn’t know why the book said it was an ugly fish. Mrs Beeton claimed that they were good eating but inclined to be dry and so required plenty of basting. We forked at the baked fish but no-one really liked it.

  Most days I caught none but once I caught four, all of them smaller than the first one. When my mother said I shouldn’t have taken them home and my sister said it was cruel to kill fish, I said I knew someone who would take them. One of the names on the morning newspapers was foreign enough to be someone who would eat pike.

  Instead, I buried them to make maggots. I’d read about this in one of the angling books, from the main library. When I dug up the rottened and softened flesh, some weeks later, it had worked. The skulls and teeth and shrunken eyes were recognisable. That resilient skin still showed a smudged print of the pattern. The maggots in between everything were smaller than the ones you bought, for trout or perch, in the tackle shop. I couldn’t get the smell from my hands.

  One Sunday we went through to Glasgow. The olman had found the money to get the car tested and taxed. That bloodymortgage was now another single word in our house. He waxed the Morris so it shone like the other cars in the street. Then we were away. I remember his points like a route to fishing-grounds: Dobbie’s Loan; Great Western Road; Kersland Street. This was an aunt-by-marriage on my father’s side. She’d lost her husband in the war. He was on the convoys.

  Folk she knew, back on the Island, said, by way of condolence, ‘So you’re still in Glasgow?’ But she said she loved it, here. We’d all to come with her now, on the Underground. It didn’t go anywhere you needed to go but she brought all her visitors this way. There was talk of doing away with it so you had to grab these chances.

  She bought our tickets and we sat on leather benches, holding chrome rails. The smell of the seats made me think of old books. The chrome was the pipework of our Stornoway neighbour’s BSA. The glimmer of brass was my first pike from Gartmorn Dam.

  We got out at Kelvinbridge. This is near the Botanics. My mother and father were ready to get back to the flat to catch up on the news and have some tea. Kirsty wanted to walk by a few shop windows. Didn’t matter that they were shut. Better that way. Yes I could go to the Botanics on my own. I was sure I knew how to get back to the flat. My aunty said she’d write the address and phone number down on a card, just in case. My landmark was a snooker-room. Smoke spilled out of the windows. A blackboard at the door said, ‘Private Club.’ The flat was round the next corner.

  I was hit by the sweaty smell of the Camellia rooms. I took in all the names, going down a gear into sleepiness. Sunday afternoons were still like that, trapped near a bar of the electric fire. The olaid never bothered with the coal fire now. The olman wouldn’t let me go fishing on a Sunday but I don’t think it was religion. Just trying to get me to think of something different to do.

  Still in the Botanics, I found carp. You couldn’t say they were merely goldfish. These fish were bred to bring out decorative features. One had a stark colour scheme of red and white. Another had a dorsal fin like a sail. Pectoral fins would move like orange seaweed. They were big and lazy and mouthed at any items that fell into their oxygenated pools.

  ‘Bet you wouldn’t mind dropping a line to one o them.’

  I started because of the accuracy. It was spoken in a soft tone, a Glasgow voice but slow in pace and without the hard edges of the mining towns of the Central Belt.

  ‘Hold on and I’ll see if they’ll go for a Mint Imperial,’ he said. ‘Aboot your age, we used to figure oot ways to catch wan. No tae kill it or eat it or anything, jist tae get a right look at it.’

  He’d have been about forty to fifty. Dressed like anybody else, in a jacket and good trousers. A cap but I think it was an open-necked shirt. Could have been a polo-neck. I don’t remember a tie.

  I found I was talking. Telling him I fished for trout and pike where I lived now. Where did I used to live, then, with that accent? No, he liked it, a change. The Hebrides. Aye, he’d guessed aboot there.

  ‘So you’re a pike-fisher, then. Quite far up the piscatorial pecking order an that?’

  I liked the way he talked like the angling books. We were out of the hothouses now. I was talking again and we were gravitating towards the Kelvin. ‘Any fish there?’ I asked. I wasn’t too keen on the laugh that was his answer.

  ‘Is it too dirty, then?’ I thought of the maroon colour that came on the Devon before it met the Forth. Someone else had laughed when I’d asked if it was peat, washed into the water after a spate. It was from Tillicoultry paper-mill, whatever shade was being done that day.

  ‘Aye, it’s dirty,’ he said, ‘but they’ve made a start on it. They’re trying to clean up the Clyde an all. Talk of the first salmon for God knows how many years. Now, if you wouldn’t mind being lookout, I’ve had one lunchtime pint too many the day.’

  ‘Are even the pubs open here on a Sunday?’ I asked. ‘I kent ye were a real teuchter,’ he said. ‘Well, the hotel bars anyway. Here’s the ideal place, if you would jist keep a wee eye peeled for any old dears coming along.’

  It was a sort of tunnel, with the grass turfs growing over it and the path passing all the way through. It had turned dull and not many people were about. I said the coast was clear.

  He carried on speaking as he was pissing, looking over his shoulder towards me. I lost the thread of what he was saying. Just hearing the tone of his voice. Then he turned, shaking the drops off and said, ‘No a bad size o cock, eh, would you no like to have one like that, yersel, eh?’

  My own fins were bristling then, ready to drive me out of the confined area, back to the light. But I didn’t try to run or anyt
hing. I would have had about two yards start, more really because he wouldn’t have been able to start running until he’d got his zip up.

  I just stayed still. He said, in much the same tone, maybe a wee edge of something that wasn’t there before, ‘I suppose you’re too shy now, to show me yours.’

  I still didn’t get into gear. Just backed off.

  Now I can see it, instinct serving you, just keeping it slow, getting you away from the hazard. Hearing my own voice saying yes I was too shy and then getting towards the surface, out of that tunnel. Some fifty yards later, not running but walking fast, looking over the shoulder.

  He made no effort to come after me.

  Back at the flat, over pancakes, back in the car, back in the bungalow on Hungry Hill, I never said anything. It wasn’t exactly a big debate going on in my mind but I remember considering whether to say something. Maybe he’d be bothering someone else. Maybe it was more than bother.

  It takes a while to get a focus. Now I can observe the tone, the skill in letting me do the talking, homing into my subject. It seems to me now a real tint of danger. I never did say anything though.

  That afternoon went right out of my mind, till one time I was back in the West End, maybe twenty years later. Round at Bank Street, remembering the way to the Botanics. Within a mile or so of that tunnel, I saw it all again. Felt my muscles quiver like fins. Looked for the open space, people swimming by.

  Torcuil’s Olman

  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.

  I was second mate on the Loch Ness during the war. We were always chock a block, taking fellows only a few years older than yourselves, on the first leg to join their ships or regiments. There was a scare or two but we never saw much trouble.

  A couple of years ago, I met this fellow at a conference. He was very well turned out. We all were but he was noticeably smart. I thought he might be Danish. He wasn’t giving away much. The smoked salmon and tab-nabs were getting passed around. He asked me if I’d served in the Merchant or Royal Navy during the war. So I told him I was in the Merch but on the ferries for most of it.

  He asked me which ferries and he seemed to know the area. He said it must be rough for a surface ship in that place when the north wind blew.

  The hairs were standing on the back of my neck then. I had a feeling. Sure enough he described the Loch Ness pretty well. Told me we were making good about fourteen knots.

  ‘We had you in our sights,’ he said.

  The thing was, their main mission was to gather information on the places where Atlantic convoys mustered. They had judged it was not good to give their whereabouts away. They would find other prey out to sea after they had passed their information.

  I wasn’t going to thank him for my life. I didn’t get through the war without seeing the destruction that follows a torpedo-hit. The smell of burning oil is something you remember.