A Book of Death and Fish

by Ian Stephen

  The term is currently being applied to matters of commerce. That’s worse than the guys in the temple.

  ‘You have taken the house of my father and turned it into a den of thieves.’

  You’ll know me now – the use of language is sacred to me. I’m hearing the whine of these hellish Stukas. Using that fucking word, that fucking way, is criminal.

  End of rant within rant. Back to my home island.

  In the same way as the First World War did not end for the people of the Hebridean Long Island on the 11th of the 11th of the 11th, 1918, the Second could not end for the Polish people until a leader visited the site of the mass grave. In 1992 a step was made when the Russian administration released documents which proved that Stalin’s Politburo had approved, on the 5th March 1940, the proposal to order the killings.

  Vladimir V Putin did not apologise but he did say the following, as reported by the New York Times (Michael Schwirtz, April 7th 2010). The words within quotemarks are still qualified:

  ‘In this ground lay Soviet citizens, burnt in the fire of the Stalinist repression of the 1930s; Polish officers, shot on secret orders; soldiers of the Red Army, executed by the Nazis.’

  But a photograph does indeed show yet another powerful wee guy laying his wreath. I don’t think the government of the United Kingdom has apologised yet for advertising the wreck of Iolaire, for sale to the highest bidder, before all the missing bodies had been recovered. There’s probably a record on file somewhere but I can’t tell you offhand how many pieces of silver they got, for all that bronze and teak.

  Patterns

  His mother and my father died within a year of each other. Robbie’s loss came first. Our flat had become the Shetland family home while his mother was at Foresterhill Hospital. I made big pans of soup and we bought ham and things to go with it. His father seemed to be taking it not too bad, if you could judge that. It wasn’t as if they weren’t expecting it. Some weeks had gone by since she’d been taken down on the air ambulance. Still, it’s hard when it comes.

  Then came the complications of flying the coffin home. I don’t know the details, only that Robbie and his uncle were trying this, trying that. Tension mounting. Then again, most of the family was in Aberdeen anyway. There were plenty of Shetlanders buried in that city and at least it was by the sea.

  I bought and borrowed clothes that weren’t jeans and genseys. Walked behind Robbie and his family and watched his mother’s coffin lowered, under a skyline of steelwork, within reach of the floodlights of Pittodrie. Call it halfway between the estuaries of the Don and the Dee. You couldn’t see them but I knew the stake nets were stretched out, between groynes, only over a wall or two. If an Islander had to be buried in a city, this would do.

  Robbie’s father gave me a pocketknife. It was slim with a very smooth wooden handle and a blade that took an edge. He made me give him a coin in return. So the friendship would never be cut. Did I know that one? He didn’t say if each partner in the contract had to keep the knife or the coin, forever.

  Then it was a blur of studies. I took to swimming, way back in the wake of Robbie. But still using up all the useless physical energy that the anxiety in your body was providing. I suppose we were both fit as butchers’ dogs then, so sitting on our arses in various libraries didn’t come too naturally.

  My year flowed into that summer job and the death of my own father, without any intimation. That was a word from all these church announcements – the following are the intimations.

  The olman was already up, with the kettle on the go when I heard the alarm tell me it was half an hour till the mail van left. I was getting a lift out to the road-end. He’d been trying out a new pattern, laying colours together, trial and error, till they seemed somehow happy. He didn’t do much weaving himself any more, just somehow got into this thing of designing patterns. In fact, pattern was the wrong word. He’d started off studying the market, coming up with the template for export goods. But the materials, texture as well as colour, were leading somewhere else.

  In his hands they took on a life of their own.

  He came out to the stairway, sniffing the morning. You could see a trace of mist in the gap between the buildings. The light was trying to break through. It would burn off in an hour or two. The flat still belonged to the Mill. Maybe the only one still active then, that part of town. Our very own wee industrial landscape. Power station and all. You got used to the timbre of the diesels, running on heavy oil.

  In one way he liked a bit of bustle, getting breakfasts done, cups of tea for visitors. My olman was on his best form before most of the household was awake or after folk had gone to bed. If he’d outlived his wife, he’d have been a good hand at seeing to the visitors. As long as he had a window of the kitchen open. It wasn’t a big room. The house had no outlook, except another roughcast wall but he needed to know there was an airflow.

  I’ve told you how I heard the news. Out at the estate. My uncle and Colin, the gamekeeper, must have had a conspiracy going. Following the doctor’s advice on how to break it. And they had some experience between them. They were both in the Legion. Give him time to prepare himself.

  Tell him his father is not well and it looks serious. You don’t tell anyone right away that a heart has stopped beating. A nose and a mouth are no longer registering the air, passing through a system.

  I remember wondering if a body still shook and muscles moved with the nerves, after the blood stopped circulating. The oxygen missing. I’d seen plenty fish die. I hope to hell it was fast. The panic of being caught without the chance of air. Pure bloody merry hell for anyone. But what must that be like for a guy who already knew what it was like to be trapped in a tight space? Because his death was so sudden, a lot of people came up these cold concrete stairs to sit in the flat for a while. This was no bad thing because all the rounds of making tea, seeing to the fire and shaking hands – all that stuff gave us something to do. It was hardest on my mother who had just to sit. The sister came into her own, once she got over the travel. She was struggling all right but already she’d had a few years of attending people as they passed in and out of the world.

  The olaid didn’t want a real Island wake, for her Lewis husband. She got one all the same. Ruairidh took me aside. My olman always had his own way of doing things. But he wouldn’t want to make a big fuss. The village people were here.

  The olman wouldn’t have wanted the sermon we got. But he’d have put up with it. So we did for him, as he would have wanted which was just the most normal way. It took my sister and the olaid to make a stand where it mattered. I’m not sure things were the same again, between us and our uncle.

  It was easy to sort things out with the Uni, to arrange to take a year out. Everyone accepted the need. I phoned Robbie. Well, hell, he’d not long been there, himself. And he kent another Shetlander, on a one-year course, so he could take my room. We could all return to normal, after that.

  I’d come to Aberdeen for a week, just to sort things out. I couldn’t leave all that driftwood shelving, roped and balanced like a pilot-ladder. Some people liked to sit in a bit more comfort than a basket fender could provide. And it wasn’t everyone who was willing to step over all the maritime debris before they could make a cup of tea.

  Robbie met me off the train. The Shetlandic flatmate. We took as much as we dared back on the Number One bus to where we’d found it. The driver knew my ways. We got off at the Bridge of Don, on the north side where the beach carries on past the wreck of that trawler. All the way to Balmedie. We didn’t go anything like as far as that. Only placed everything back above what seemed to us to be the High Water Springs mark. Our own ritual. It was easier than finding a skip with some space. Things you gather, things you dump. From the shore, back to the shore.

  That year just went. But I got the details of the progress of the Russian Revolution and the events following the collapse of the Nazi-Soviet pact clear in my mind. I wasn’t ready to go back to Uni. Then there was the kibbutz.
That changed my life in a way I could never have imagined. Then there was the trip to Finland. Archipelagos and fish.

  I also got to know my mother better. We’d sit a while in the kitchen having coffee after a meal. Mine black, hers made with milk. Maybe she needed a wee break from me. We got through the last few months OK. Maybe Gabriele’s visit helped.

  Then I’d to get the degree finished, in Aberdeen. Robbie’s offer of a break in Shetland sounded good. Less of a jump from the quiet life at home back to the course and the city. A thing you had to do. Pick things up again. I still had a bit of money from the hospital job. Herself was cool as always. She just said, ‘Aye, definitely. You should definitely dae that.’

  Maybe she needed to pick her own things up. Her own way. Ready for it. Kirsty had a few more months on the Island. An overlap. She’d call by more often when I was away.

  I had to go via Aberdeen anyway, to get the ferry to Shetland. I only stopped off long enough to dump my gear. The flat was sad. An orange carpet had been thrown down over the old Wilton in my room. It smelled of parties.

  Maybe I had a lot of talking to catch up on because I got yarning to people, on the ferry. Drank a lot of stewed coffee and didn’t manage to sleep much.

  So this was Lerwick, the working harbour, with new buildings of sheet metal. Central streets more picturesque than Stornoway. The stone-built architecture had a bit more integrity. Less of the Sixties showing.

  So here I was. ‘Good to see you.’

  Robbie’s father had got painfully thin but of course I said, ‘You’re looking well.’ I think I said too much. And it was daft to go raking about in the rucksack then and there. It was fine to take out the smoked salmon but I should have left the other brown paper parcel for the right moment.

  I was thinking back to when I’d found it. Part of the clear-out. The design, in progress on my own father’s frame. The one I found in the shed up from the town when the house quietened down at last. Wondering how to take it off without unravelling it.

  Realising it was more or less complete. Two sections with a plain bit for a break in between. Of course it was all clear, a piece for the sister, piece for me. I don’t think the olaid had ever been in the loom shed. That was a place her man went to, on his own, in the morning. Came back from it in the middle of the day. That used to be dinnertime and then it became lunchtime.

  My sister was still white from the suddenness. She had never spent much time in the shed either. But I could see it meant a lot to her to see these signs of our father’s creative work as well as his living. The only really personal signs of his life. It was difficult for her to book that flight back to her own life. She had some photographs and her share of that last cloth.

  But there was another few small sections, already completed and stored, on the shelving, wrapped loosely in brown paper. Cloth my father probably had no idea of selling. My mother didn’t show much emotion when I showed it to her. Didn’t break down at the sight of it or anything. She unwrapped what was there. She took her keepsake, a throw to put over the settee that was now starting to show its own age. That’s all she wanted. We were to share out the rest.

  My sister chose another small piece. That was about all she could take on the plane. So I had one last section of the small amount of tweed that was made without an eye to any market. Here it was, in a new brown paper parcel, brought all these slow miles up the North Sea.

  Imported to Shetland. For Robbie’s olman. The guy who gave me a pocketknife after the funeral of his wife.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but I just can’t take that. I’ve never been that good wi presents and that’s a thing you should keep.’

  Don’t know how he just sensed that this was something that should have stayed on another Island.

  Canny guys, Shetlanders.

  Seagull

  Robbie said he knew I was into diesel engines but I’d have to make do with a petrol two-stroke when I came to visit him. I said that a Seagull engine had plenty of character. At least it wasn’t a Suzuki. Then I remembered his guitar was a Suzuki.

  He lived pretty close to that guitar. You had to make an appointment to get into the toilet in the flat we shared. It was in a square box set right between his room and mine, neutral territory. The extractor fan used to make a big noise but hadn’t worked for a while and the acoustics were good. He might have disconnected it.

  When you did get to hear him play, it could be just about anything. Robbie alternated between chords to accompany the Shetland fiddle, contemporary jazz and a few acoustic versions of rock riffs. One of his heroes was Peerie Willie, the Shetlander who fingerpicked all that lot together, maybe with some bluegrass. And got away with it.

  Robbie was also good enough to get away with it. But he could cope with a lot of things because he could adapt. Eat any food. Play Country and Western in some zinc shack he’d been driven to on a Friday. You had no choice when the motor stopped for you and someone who was needing a guitarist came knocking at the door.

  My sleeping bag was stretched out somewhere in his Da’s house. At the heart of a scheme in Lerwick which was the double of another one I knew well, on another island. In both towns, the council housing was back a good way from the harbour and up a slope. Maybe the site of the Lerwick one had been a cornfield too. Not that we’re short of decent arable land in the outer Isles, you understand.

  I wouldn’t have minded being in the down cocoon, right then. His father had lodged a wee protest. You can’t go hauling that boy out to sea now, after he’s been on that P&O boat for fourteen hours. Robbie said he could, the forecast wasn’t that great for the rest of the week so we’d have to grab our chance.

  He knew I was keen to get out in a Shetland skiff. Shetland Model, they called them, here. Makes them sound like toys but they’ve a name as sea boats. More of a rowing boat you can sail, compared to the beamy, load-carrying boats of Orkney and Lewis.

  The keel of the Shetland Model runs the full length of the hull, thus presenting sufficient area of timber against drift. That would be oak. Then there would be the lighter larch of the first broad plank. The Shetlanders would shift their weight to keep her well down in the water. They fair crowded on sail, to race them, so one man was there with a shovel, bailing all the time. The out and out racers would have some extra keel. That would help them keep a course close to the wind.

  Robbie’s father had never sailed this one. Even those who did sail might have a Seagull stashed away under an oilskin for when they just went fishing. I held the door of the shed open and Robbie carried the beast out. This one had a square cylinder and even had a clutch. It was a late-Sixties model. A good period. Think of Jimi Hendrix. As he said to me quietly, once, in that Aberdeen flat, you don’t write off Hendrix’s music just because the guy’s dead. Where would that leave Samuel Taylor Coleridge? I couldn’t argue with that.

  He’d liked The Ancient Mariner, rediscovering the thing after it had been murdered at school, the Anderson High. It was the open-endedness that hit him, the way you couldn’t fit it all into this moral framework it was pretending to illustrate. We traded studies in our better moments. I was doing a Literature module that year – reflections on the French Revolution and all that. Leading into a short course on the European historical novel.

  Robbie swapped Basic Navigation for Literature. Not basic enough, sometimes. He had to get the star-sights in there. Capella and the like. Only high-sounding names to me. My olman would have hung on every word.

  A bearing and a distance. A vector. A line carrying both magnitude and direction. I could get a grip of that. But there were a couple of wee complexities.

  ‘Tell me more about Variation and Deviation.’ They sounded quite sexy. You have to allow for the difference between True North and the way the compass points, varying slightly year by year. Then there’s compensation for the vessel’s own magnetic field, on a given bearing.

  I’d seen his advert. Our flat was cheap but we had to pay the price. It wasn’t that q
uiet. He’d grabbed the chance to rent it from another Shetlander, who’d got a job back home. It was just off Market Street. Walking distance from the Nautical College. Fish lorries passed under our window at any hour. We got the stale smoke from up the road, when the wind blew it down – the place with the sign we wanted to liberate and install in the flat.

  REEKIE AND COLEMAN: FISH CURERS

  Robbie was soft-spoken, for a Viking. Younger than me but used to being attended to by stewards and so on. I taught him a few survival skills. There was the cheese sauce, roux method, livened up with some leek and Stilton. Your own curry paste, with natural yoghurt, lemon juice and coriander. A basic garam masala prepared in small quantities, for freshness. He was too easy to lead. I shouldn’t have got away with it for so long.

  The hint of his other side came when I saw him cruise up and down with the other half-dozen regulars of the early morning session at the Bon Accord Baths. His fair hair looked even thinner, plastered wet and still not much sign of a beard. But a bow wave coming off him as he swam miles, propelled by a steady breaststroke. All these swimmers, navigating on lines of black tiles along the blue. They passed each other as courteously as ships following the secure rules of their roads.

  He phoned me before I left from Lewis. Yes, the trip was still on. But there was something up. I’d get the story when I got there. Robbie wasn’t a guy to give away much on the phone. I’d to bear with him but it was time I saw his home ground.

  Robbie wouldn’t let me carry the Seagull from the shed beside the running-mooring. That would have been the usual thing. One guy would pull in the boat and the other get the engine down.

  ‘I know how to carry it,’ I said. ‘The gearbox end held below the level of the fuel tank.’