by Ian Stephen
‘Well,’ said the doctor, ‘I’ll need to take these utensils back with me and any others you may have. We have to trace where an infection like that comes from.’
The returning traveller never recovered from that infection. When the results came back, the doctor came to see the family again. Most of the spoons and knives were made from the antlers and bones of a large red deer. But the knife that did the damage was whittled out of a human bone.
But if it was Angus who told that one, it was his sidekick who chipped in the next bit.
Remember I told you, you’d never stay a night out at Creag a’ Bhodaich. Even if you got caught out in the mist. Most folk said they’d hear the voice of an old man with a story he had to tell to someone. Up until very recently there’d be sightings out that way, near where our road meets the main one. Other folk said it wasn’t an old man at all. One fellow described a young man wearing something like a long woollen covering, not from our times.
Well, they found something when they were peat-cutting. They had to call in the museums people. They thought it was a preserved body from Neolithic times. But it wasn’t that old. It was the remains of a lad in his mid-teens. His woven long socks and long plaid thing were pretty much intact. He’d been killed by a crushing blow to the back of the head.
See the appetite we’ve got for stories like that, on Lewis. We’re insatiable. Once one cove or cailleach gets started, it prompts another and it could go on all night. Sometimes does. Same with songs. Only they’re worse. We like them a few shades below the mì-chàilear, when it comes to grief. And people will be cheery as you like, in between the songs or yarns. Smiling away and teasing each other. The very dab, as we used to say. You don’t hear that now and I’ve no idea where the phrase comes from. But you can bet someone will say, ‘O shut up.’ Which of course means, ‘Please continue.’
Now, I ask you, do you find that one plausible? I wouldn’t like to make a religion out of being sceptical – isn’t that what that Krishnamurti guy did? But I’m not going to buy that yarn. Doesn’t matter. You still want to hear them told.
The brass buttons on the dripping sailor’s jacket. Only it turns out he was lost some weeks before he was sighted. He says something which helps to find his body on the sand. You’ll meet him all the way from Sandwood Bay to the Ross of Mull. And there will be an Irish connection – either where his ship sank, or the origins of the mate who became the ghost.
Then there’s the fine boots which you know will be stolen from the drowned seaman, whether you’re in Uist or Shetland. You also know that they will be reclaimed by their dead owner.
The Carranoch
All these meetings. The memories among patent-mops, plastic folders. I met the skipper at the goodie counter. All roads meet here in December. If you don’t see someone out at Marybank Garage, waiting for a tyre or exhaust, you’ll see them in the Woolies. I was looking along the presentation boxes for Terry’s Spartan. The olaid had never gone for soft-centres.
This was F W Woolworth, not long before the sign changed to Woolworth and the cheques had to be made out to Woolworth PLC. The skipper was Angus from Garyvard. Kenny’s uncle. It might be enough to be all Jock Tamson’s bairns in the rest of Scotland but in the Outer Hebrides, we need to know the details of the relationships.
The round face was even more round. A trace of white stubble coming through the red. The thick glasses. No Sellotape. The ones he had to hand on the boat were held together with the stuff. These must be his best wear. I’d first met this man, amongst others, in a fishing boat chartered for a sea angling competition. Then again when he bought my olman’s Morris Traveller. He put the brush over it with Charlie Morrison’s Paint – yacht enamel – wooden bits and all and it did him a couple of years. But that was as far as my track went. I didn’t know he was Kenny F’s uncle, till that first time out in the sea angling boat.
‘Do you still go fishing?’ It was his question, direct, no smalltalk.
It was like we were in the movies. Marbled vinyl of the floor going wavy. Here we go. We’re away. A bit like LSD. But that’s how it was. The shoppers passing us by like other vessels in transit. I was afloat.
Kenny F and me took turns being anchor-man and mate. A bristling rivalry between us. Usually, it was Kenny who was up the pecking order. He was ahead of me in seamanship. A guy who knew what he wanted to do. But we’d work as a team to start the Lister. One on the handle, the other ready to pull over the lever on the first cylinder when she was turning over fast enough. Then the second two got recompressed when she was chuntering. Since then, I’ve never fully trusted an electric start.
Kenny’s uncle Angus gave us the marks once. Then he let us argue between ourselves until we remembered them and found anchorage uptide from the pinnacle. Quite a knack in judging the slack so you’d hold but not drift too far down. I learned not to coil that warp, on the way out, but to flake it, end for end, loose so it would run.
All around The Carranoch it’s thirty fathoms and then it climbs. Twenty, then eighteen and you’re right on it. Abeam the tits up on the hill over Loch Erisort, the mark open on the island – Tavay. We couldn’t wait to get the lines down.
A real Christmas tree rig, Angus called Kenny’s set of lures. I blame all these angling magazines.
But there was something to be said for hedging your bet between the bigger hook on the bottom and a smaller one on a snood. You might get something interesting half a fathom up. Maybe because the three of us fished a different set of terminal tackle, the box would fill with colours. Twelve species was nothing out of the ordinary and sometime we’d be struggling for names, between our town English and the skipper’s Gaelic. Was a red bream the same as a Norwegian haddock? He would often start to sing but composing in English, for our benefit.
‘If you catch a Balallan Wrasse,
You can stick it up your ass…’
Cuckoo wrasse had the tropical colours, ballan wrasse, often larger fish, had a soft shift of shading from kelp red to a green I haven’t seen anywhere else. The ling coming up, mottled like pike but a valued fish in our parts. All sure signs you were over the hard ground. Every village in North Lochs would have its own set of marks for the reef. Balallan was further up Loch Erisort, almost inland. Not taken too seriously by guys like our skipper from further down the loch.
All gasping colours, darkening on wrinkled skins as the day went on. The light always seeming to be refracted so it came from the clouds as rays from a protractor. Spreading to link us, over The Carranoch, spreading further west to Eilean Calum Chille – St Columba’s Isle. If that Irishman visited half the islands that bear his name, he’d have got around as much as Bonny Prince Charlie. The Prince’s cairn was another of our marks, muddy ground for thornback ray, in his case.
‘Did you ever see such a fluke as –
A skate on a haddock hook?’
It was only a matter of time before Angus’s big rod would go right on over, as far as the water and we’d think he had the bottom and was winding us up. But no, nine times out of ten, a grey slashing conger would come up on his single Scandinavian hook. Mustad. Best forged Swedish steel.
But it was one of Kenny’s congers that nearly caused a mutiny.
‘If that bloody thing is coming into this boat, I’m leaving it.’ His uncle’s judgement. And I played along. Kenny was getting worked up.
‘Come on, I don’t have a wire trace on. Just the thick mono. It’s getting frayed. Don’t piss about, gaff that eel before we lose it.’
I was guided by Angus. We lifted several of the bottom boards before taking up the gaff. Put them aside in order. As I swung the big black thing in, Angus took his knife to the thick nylon snood so the whole thing fell into the place prepared for it. He chucked the boards back and sat on them. There was a drumming. But you couldn’t risk your fingers near that. He’d stun it, aiming at the spine near the vent, in a minute. That one would be in the salt by tonight. Feed half his own village unless we townies wanted it
.
‘No, you’re welcome to it.’ Kenny was recovering. ‘You have to live at least three cattle grids out from town to eat salt eel.’
Even if none of it’s said, sometimes you know the other guy is reliving it with you. Memories meeting. Passing vessels exchanging courtesies. Angus was still in the aisle of the shop. The voice that came through to me at last, said how was his nephew, Kenny, doing?
Hadn’t he heard?
He wouldn’t be blooming well asking me if he’d heard.
The skipper’s language was more subdued these days. I’d heard he was on the tack. Religion usually went along with that. He looked well on it.
I told him Kenny F had blown it.
‘Blown what?’
‘Blown a good job at the Arnish yard.’
The yard out over the harbour Approaches, near the old quarantine buoy. I’d jotted the figures down for the surveyors who prepared the ground. That was one summer job. Next season I’d looked at the smoke from the town side, as they burned the farm cottage and bulldozed the hill behind it. Kept a lot of young guys at home. Brought a few travellers back. Jackets and collars in steel for North Sea platforms. Cash to be spent in the shops down town. Accommodation for welding inspectors.
To be weighed against the loss of the more adventurous townie’s Sunday stroll. The pollution of one shore which was thick with horse-mussels. The clappy-doos you see at the Barras in Glasgow. Once, when it was blowing too much of a hooly even for us to go out past the light, the skipper had taken us into Glumaig Bay at Low Water to fill a fishbox with them. First you saw nothing. Then you became sensitive to the barnacled black stone that wasn’t a stone. You needed a decent knife. Meaty shellfish, asking for a garlic sauce.
Angus told me my mate hadn’t been out to Garyvard for a long time. I told him I hadn’t seen him, myself. I’d been at Uni, back and fore. And on shiftwork, when I was working at home.
‘Is he at the welding? He was at Nigg for a while.’
No, Kenny hadn’t been a welder. A scaffolder and, the word was, a bloody good one. He had it all planned. A definite share, each week into the boat account. Sure as Pay As You Earn. He had the keel laid in a yard at Buckie. Small enough to work single-handed, if he had to, big enough to put out in a bit of sea.
‘So what’s gone wrong?’
The twelve-hour shifts. You could see it coming. First it was only one on the way home, when you knocked off. There were a few places you could tap at the door, whatever the finishing time.
‘Aye, I used to know a few of these knocks.’
Then it was after the night shifts, before you got to your bed. Only a matter of time before there was something in the back pocket or in the tea flask.
Angus only had to give the smallest nod. ‘So it came to a head?
‘In style. They thought he’d gone crazy one night. Nobody realised what he was up to, carrying all these poles outside the main shed. Then someone misses him for a tricky bit where they were welding. Goes out to find this amazing bit of scaffolding, pretty well the full height of the shed. And there’s Kenny, swaying, with a big can of that indelible paint, making this huge mark.
‘When you stood back, it was a big white cross. First they think it’s a big Scottish nationalist sign and a lot of guys start cheering till it looks like a war’s going to break out. Then somebody think’s he’s got religion in a big way. Could be that kind of cross.’
But the skipper knew what it was the way I’d known what Kenny was up to. Our northward mark for the Carranoch Reef was gone, since the old Coastguard aerial at Holm had been shifted. Then the Arnish sheds obscured another mark. So Kenny had painted a white cross you could see from five miles out at sea. Just what we needed to line up on the war memorial. Only of course some tidy so and so painted over it before we had a chance to test it out properly. And Kenny was down the road. I hadn’t seen him for a while.
‘He’ll get his boat another way if he gets off the sauce,’ Angus said.
And I could see now how the red in our skipper’s face was somehow different, clearer, not broken by small veins. I remembered someone saying he was an Elder, these days. But he was saying something else. I hadn’t answered his question, did I still go fishing?
No, not that way, not to sea, not for a while. But I went to fresh water. The longer the hike over the moor the better. Maybe that was like enjoying the clearing up more than the party. But I was a bit that way as well, believe it or not. And himself?
‘Eels. No, not congers. Freshwater. Like reptiles.’ He had a small business, laying traps and fyke-nets in the lochs near home. Then he had a stainless-steel smoker set-up. Got oak chips from the boatyard at Goat Island. They fetched a better price than smoked salmon, these days, with all that farmed stuff about.
He’d seen them often enough, Hamburg or Rotterdam, out on the stalls. About the only thing that stayed in his mind from the blur of all these shore visits. He’d never eat one himself.
‘If you ever taste one,’ he said, ‘it might be one of mine. You’ll need to report back to me, what they’re like.’
The Trolley
I had rounds, like the consultant, but I delivered supplies to the different wards and I collected rubbish. There was an incinerator so you could get rid of a lot of waste on site. Other bags would be marked as sharps and you’d take special care to put these in their allotted place. Then there was the laundry collection and that was good for an extra cup of tea and a yarn.
A sample conversation: ‘Maternity’s busy.’
‘Sure is.’
‘You’d think that cold spell we had last March these men would be keeping it in their trousers.’
‘So you’d think.
‘But no, the zips must have been up and down like President Kennedy’s.’
‘Aye.’
One of the jobs you had to do was to help take a body out to the mortuary. You could go months without a death happening on your shift. When it did, you’d get a call from the ward. Then you’d go and fetch a different trolley. This one was long enough and it had a hinged metal lid so everything was discreet. If it was during the day porter’s hours, you’d go and get him to help. If it was at night, the ward sister would lend you one of her nurses and see if she could get a male nurse from one of the men’s wards.
The guys were good about swapping shifts but this day I was keen to get off an hour early to get to a meeting. I forget which brand of religion I was exploring at the time. Of course we were changing the world. History was on our side.
A new day porter had just got a start but he seemed OK for the crack. Glaswegian but he spoke slower than most so you could sometimes get at least two words in three.
So I asked him, any chance you could stay on an extra two hours and I’ll be owing you? ‘No bother,’ he says, ‘but just cover me for an hour. I’ll get down the road. Get some dinner in me first.’
‘Fine.’
But he’s just out the door when the phone goes in the canteen – I’ve got the chairs up on the tables and the mop’s out – but I get to it OK. ‘There’s been a death in female medical. You’ll need to get the day porter. We’ll have everything ready for you in about fifteen minutes.’
It needs two people to lift a body out of the trolley on to the slab.
Now I can’t tell her I’ve just made a deal with said porter which means he’s not where he should be right now. So I have to come up with a contingency plan. I happen to know that a guy who used to be a day porter is in the hospital pharmacy now. So I go and whisper a word in his shell-like and he says sorry, he’d like to help but the back’s been a real bastard – that’s why he got the move in the first place so he just can’t risk it.
Plan B has to kick in. Accept the help of the nurse to get the trolley out to the mortuary and wait till the Glasgow cove gets back on scene. Then we can lift the body out together.
So it’s a student nurse and she’s not done this before. Everything is very discreet. The body is always sewn
up in a crisp shroud so you don’t see the features or anything. These nurses have the techniques for lifting, you wouldn’t believe it. Slight wee things joining hands under a hefty patient and easing her where she needs to go. Impressive. So the ward sister, the student and me, got the body in the trolley with some dignity. I swung the lid over and we were on out way. When I say ‘we’, I mean the two of us, the nurse and me. Or the three of us if you count the deceased.
We’ve got to keep some flicking decorum. No fancy swerves at the corners.
The student was so relieved when I said, that was the job done for now. ‘The other porter and me can see to the rest of it at the change-over.’ So she doesn’t ask any further and she’s gone back out that door before you can say cheerio.
Fine, so far, except your man is a bit on the late side and I’m in that mind-set. We’re talking religious investigation here – mission mode. And I’m that relieved at staying out of trouble so far. Trouble with a plan is once you’ve formulated it you think the thing is done already. So I just forget to say we’ve a wee job to do first. And of course when God’s on your side too, it’s possible to get a shade complacent.
I got to the meeting, more or less on time. I was oblivious to the fact that a law of the universe was kicking in. In the next hour, before the night porter came on shift, the new day porter took a phone call. Male medical ward. Another death. But no-one’s done the full induction for the new man so he hasn’t done a death before. So the sister – that red-haired, striking one – she talked him through it. Sure enough, the key worked. He was in the mortuary and the trolley was there.
But remember, he’d never pushed it before and the lid was down. So he was wheeling the body I’d not long moved out of the hospital back where it came from. With a bit of difficulty, he negotiated the bends. The sister and the nurse were holding the swing doors for him in the side ward.