by Ian Stephen
Was he coming to visit, Gabriele asked, when I put the phone down and I said, no, only promising to. He could cope with it if he kept his distance. There was no work for him here and he went crazy with boredom after a while.
Gabriele said she’d need to cancel. There was no way she could organise a passport for Anna in time. There was an international panic going on.
Anna didn’t like hanging about after we decided to get going somewhere. It took a while to get boots and hats and everything arranged but now she was kitted out and looking in despair at her mother dialling numbers. I lifted her, wellies and all, though there was a taboo on them in the living room. We went over to see what we could see, out the window. Bushes were only wavering. Nothing was bent over. Looking good, if we could get down there. Some brightness warming the equinoctial sky. It was ten minutes to Low Water but we’d have an hour the other side, if we got shifting.
Gabriele came off the phone. The girl who’d dealt with the booking was out to lunch. Someone else took a note. She didn’t have the details. Best to call back later.
We drove to the shore at Holm. These excavations struck you again, even though you knew they were there. I said how the sight was not as hard to take as the first time we saw all the earth-moving equipment getting stuck into the quiet bay. Now there was some sign of the road being restored, with huge boulders being shoved to the sides to shore it up against tides that might advance further than they’d been known to come before.
I caught Gabriele looking again at the small house, last one before the water, down a croft. It was now renovated to make a holiday home. She said she’d risk it, a few metres increase from global warming, to have that outlook.
We turned our backs on the roadworks. We saw Holm as we’d known it. From here, the airport, across Branahuie Bay, looked as sleepy as it used to. You didn’t see the new constructions.
Slight and variable wind hadn’t held the ebb back. A huge expanse of Branahuie was exposed. The piles of the fuel jetty now looked stronger than ever, driven in regularly, at set angles, out to the deeper water. A road of concrete went out on the structure to about halfway along. Soon it would carry the fuel lines.
Then Nato would at last have the ability to protect itself in the Atlantic Gap, from here to Iceland. Well, not quite. There was still the final phase, which was the most expensive. Installation of the missile stores and shelters. But for now, the runway extension was proving very useful for civilian flights. The construction of this fuel jetty was too far ahead to stop but could have its uses. The local word was that it would go right out to reach the mackerel in summer, codling in winter.
These Reds hadn’t played by the rules at all. Move and counter-move have to be kind of predictable, fair’s fair. You don’t invest all these billions into an outreach of bloody, former herringville, SY, just for the planned enemy to fall apart at its own seams. The stitching holding the Soviet empire was failing – like the pale orange lines on my Levi’s jacket.
So the Expansion of Runway, Extension of Facilities would benefit a few Bolshy Heb civilians and their visiting tourists. And the Nato fuel jetty would be about as useful as the World War Two Nissan huts, refusing to rust away. At least they’d had their day, sheltering the horseshide and fleece-clad flyers who’d ventured up in flying boats and seaplanes.
I felt a small weight hit my shoulder. Anna had gone off to sleep in the backpack. She’d be out for an hour now. She’d be safe enough in the child-seat in the car. We’d have it in sight, all the time.
A few figures were well spaced along the shallows. Some strolled gently, water to the ankles of their boots, plastic bags held behind their backs. Others trod backwards along the wet sand, looking for a spout raised by the pressure of their boots.
‘Cartier-Bresson would have a lot of fun here,’ Gabriele said. I’d seen some of the photos her father had taken. The ones she used to take, herself. I could also now see the photo that would not get taken.
The breeze was colder than it looked, from the car. We worked together and became involved. Gabriele did the backward bit. You forget how daft it is whenever there’s a spout. Everybody around is quietly doing likewise. Our mood was recovering from the tension of the phone calls. I followed her and stooped fast when there was a show in the wet sand.
I’d glance my finger on a shell and be too slow. Then I’d feel one pulse, releasing the jet of water that would send it fast, deeper into the sand than you could follow. But my finger managing to nudge it against the side of its track. Gabriele would loosen the sand around it with the long trowel, until I had a safe grip. With patience, it was ours. Pull too fast and you left the meat in the sand.
Someone near me said they were deep today. I knew this cove. He had a small trawler and was having a day off. The prawns were there but the market was quiet. ‘Not worth bothering, this week. Blame it on the Gulf.’
‘Aye, it’s some of that bloody plant up there we’d need to dig down to them, the day. JCB-assisted razorfishing.’
And the three of us glanced to the excavators, which had started again after the lunch break.
Gabriele and me looked to each other, both of us sensing the Caterpillar tracks too near our car. Digger shovels too high, up over it. We went, both of us, without saying anything. Anna was still dead to the world. But our peace of mind was gone.
I was left to the tide while Gabriele drove back with Anna. This business of the flights was worrying her anyway. She’d have to sort it out.
I knew something was up when she returned to collect me. Anna was bright again, so I sat in the back by her car seat.
‘Get on OK, then?’ I said to the front.
‘Not really. There’s a problem. No refunds. Mutti always pays for the flights but we can’t ask her for that if I don’t get to Germany. It’s a lot of money.’
By this time I should have guessed that Gabriele was in her own dilemma. It was an increased state of alert. A car on the A9 this time of year was a more dangerous way to travel, even with a war on. Fear isn’t all that rational, though – and we couldn’t say it then – how it wouldn’t have bothered us so much, somehow, if we were all going together, as a family, sharing our fate. But we’d used my leave. I had shifts to do and that was that.
It wasn’t the best time to travel but she’d felt she had to do her best to get to Bonn this time in case it was the last time she’d see her mother. A big birthday. Michel had got in touch with the aunt and the cousins. But she’d left it too late to arrange to have Anna placed on her passport. The olaid would have helped me out but Gabriele was still breastfeeding. Not an option.
So I shifted into the driving seat when we got home, though Anna wasn’t keen on letting me go away again. I left them and went down to the travel agents. These daft company clothes. I waited to speak to the right woman.
They had a special number for the Passport Office. There would be someone there, till about five. Not much time. Yes, they were through.
Not by post. A personal visit. Wait, what? Oh, that was unfortunate. Maybe the person who came had not made it clear the party was due to travel in two weeks. If someone else could come and quote this reference…
I said thanks but I’d need to make one more phone call. They nodded to the one on the desk. Kenny F was back in the flat. Early start, early finish. No overtime. Fixing some scran to make up for the missed lunch. OK, I felt guilty. Not guilty enough to stop me asking the question: had he posted the stuff?
‘No.’
‘That’s the right answer, cove.’
My long-suffering comrade agreed as absolutely the final favour to go back to Kafkaland tomorrow lunchtime and quote this reference. It would work. And re lunches, what about a side of smoked wild fish, guaranteed illegal, posted, vacuum-sealed. Forget all that crap, chemical stuff at Glasgow Airport.
‘Done.’
I felt proud. The great Lewisian network. They were shaking their heads at the travel agents’ desk but not too bothered. The booking fo
r Gabriele and Anna held. Mission accomplished. It was like going back to the elation of three-card-brag, played blind, with Kenny and me as a team on a Friday night. Go home early, skint, or get plastered. Nothing in between.
Gabriele didn’t look so pleased with the news. I thought she was still doubting that this passport thing was going to happen in time. But it wasn’t that. Mixed feelings about the visit. She didn’t want to have to explain why she wasn’t talking German to Anna. I refrained from saying how I still didn’t understand that one myself.
A registered envelope arrived in the post, in time. So Gabriele had Anna’s daft big passport, bound in black, to put beside her own more demure green one. I drove them to the airport, glancing across to Holm, on the way. The tides were not too huge now but still significant. It was Low Water and the ebb had left our own desert right out to the piles of the Nato pier.
I waited till the propellers were turning. Casablanca moment. Anna would be getting the royal treatment. Loving it. After all the arrangements, I was ready to get my head down.
Had a bit of a tidy up first. Breakfast dishes. Quick hoover. Things turn over when you’re doing jobs like that. I thought of a prawn fisherman with his boat tied up all week, due to poor markets. The conversation. Blame it on the Gulf. No-one wanting to hang around restaurants in big hotels. There had been a scare. There was always a scare. If it wasn’t Saddam, it was the other guys.
I found my oblivion. I didn’t always manage a doss before the first night-shift but I was wrecked. At least there should be a break from teething now. For me, anyway. Not for Anna and Gabriele.
I woke up hot. I was seeing a shape cross a sky which was like sand. A desert landscape and the long razor-shell hurtling above it. Vapour trailing from an end but the detail of the shell amazingly clear. So clear that I could see the layers of growth, the swirls. As well as the rivets, holding the shell together. The rivets that were popping, the shell falling apart, quietly, as it continued at speed.
The Rescue of the VAT Man
Don’t trip over the VAT man. And there he was, full length on the lino, in his grey suit. A couple of bowls of crisps and stuff on the deck beside him. Of course someone had stuck a pay-slip in the saucer of nuts beside his head. Civil servants work for peanuts.
We were looking for space. The place was heaving. We were the contingency from Her Majesty’s Coastguard. We arrived, the survivors of one office party, bearing gifts. A bottle of Trawler Rum and one of Grouse. Thus we could cater for most normal tastes. A space was being cleared on an office table. It was Mairi Bhan, shifting a case of McEwan’s Export.
‘Room for a discreet little arse here,’ she said.
Then, ‘Is that all you have? You’re as bad as the Customs. I thought they would run to Cognac or Bison-grass, or something kind of special, half-inched from some poor bastard.’
‘Fucks sake. When I was a lad there were only four drinks. Light, heavy, whisky and rum. And we managed to get pissed just the same.’
‘Listen, Mr Her Majesty’s flicking Coastguard in your pretty uniform, you’ve come a long way from Westview flicking terrace.’
She held out her glass and nodded to the rum. I said I didn’t have any mixers, either. She said maybe Her Majesty’s Customs could run to the Coke. But no, that team couldn’t even run to Coca Cola. Good job she liked the black rum just as it came, if there was a tin of a beer to wash it down.
Mairi Bhan seemed to have forgiven me. Our first meeting since Billy Forsyth’s wasn’t too hot. It was over a full pot of coffee in the galley shared by several departments. A liaison visit. We’d got talking. Was she a typist? No, she was a flicking Fisheries Officer as it happened and the Civil Service was an Equal Flicking Opportunities Employer, in case I hadn’t got that yet. OK?
Things had improved over the coffee. Real McCoy. Remember Calum Sgianach’s round the corner? They ground it there, the smell lingering over the worn maple counter. Her olman had developed a taste for the stuff, on his travels. A lot of folk still drank Camp then. Chicory and sugar included. It was a syrup in a bottle, like HP sauce. But there was a soldier in a kilt on the label. She’d liked going in town with himself. So now she insisted on decent coffee, any office she was working in.
The cove she was with had his head turned the other way. He was yarning with another Fisheries Officer, a guitar legend in the city of SY. I remembered his playing. Mairi’s cove turned back to her, I couldn’t believe it. Kenny F.
‘Where the hell have you been hiding? I thought you were still in Glasgow.’
‘I was but I got fed up of waiting for that side of wild fish you promised. You forgotten how to cast? That was a flicking year ago. Is the wife back in Deutschland?’
She was indeed. And I had knocked off the day shift with a sleeping day tomorrow before starting nights.
‘I’d never have guessed you’d just come off shift. Nice braid, by the way. Must feel proud to be a servant of Her Majesty?’
I just nodded. My misspent youth was staring me in the face. He looked in pretty good shape. Considering.
‘You guys have some catching up to do. Yeah, suppose you’re both verging on the bodach stage.’
‘Trainee bodaich. Lads really, I said. Sure I used to know Kenny F but hell, he wasn’t on the orange juice in them thar days, Jim, lad. What have you done to the man?’
Kenny said he didn’t mind being the driver if the crack was good.
‘Thought we’d established there was none to be had? From Customs sources, anyway.’
‘You can chalk that one up.’
She let that pass.
‘Don’t you worry about Kenny. I’ll make it up to him when we get home,’ she said and I got the feeling she wasn’t going to be stopping to pour him a dram.
‘Kenny, a bhalaich, let’s make a deal. I won’t go telling nobody bout the crazy things you done in the days of your youth if you don’t tell nobody bout mine, man.’
There was a Gaelic proverb to that effect, he said, so he wouldn’t go spilling the beans to Mairi Bhan about the day his so-called fucking mates left him for dead on the quay and pissed off fishing somewhere.
No and I definitely wouldn’t tell nobody, man, bout the guy who went on a bender the one day in the year we’d got our flicking act together to get out to score some sea trout. But shit, I’d come in with someone, a New Arrival. I couldn’t leave him swimming in this den.
I got my backside off the table and saw my colleague making conversation with another Fisheries Officer.
‘This is…’ I said but that’s as far as I got.
‘Never mind the fucking shop, do you still listen to Hendrix?’
‘Strange thing is I dug out Axis: Bold As Love the other night and it didn’t sound too bad. I can’t listen to the Stones anymore. How can you take all this streetfighting talk from these bastards? Never mind my listening, do you still play the stuff?’
He nodded. ‘Sure. Sometimes just for myself. Sometimes I get a shout. You still on the drums?’
I had to shake my head. Donnie, the Fisheries Officer, still had the Strat. The cove brought it out of the house when he got asked to jam but most of the time he just played for himself, the wee amp in his room.
‘This guy was the best. Probably still is,’ I said and my fellow Coastguard Officer politely said he’d missed out on Hendrix first time round but his kids were into it now so he was getting a taste. He wouldn’t mind hearing more.
I topped their glasses and left them to it. Mairi held out hers for a rum. I kind of hesitantly offered Kenny again but you get the feeling some people know what they’re saying.
‘You have your dram,’ he said, ‘but some of us are better off without it.’
‘Shit, the head’s reeling,’ I said. ‘Not whisky, but memory. Stronger stuff, by far.’
‘You got to move on. Someone, sometime did a song about that, too.’
I pushed it. Looking round, you could see that the whole room had broken up into a big number of sma
ll ceilidhs. Everyone was gabbing. Except for the VAT man. He was at rest.
‘Times like this,’ I said, ‘people are supposed to remember what they were up to when President Kennedy got shot.’
‘Go on,’ Mairi Bhan said, ‘take it away.’
‘Yeah. I’d been at the Lifies – you know, junior Boys Brigade, uniforms and brass and string – just like the Coastguard, now. Thought I’d got away from that. Anyway, we went to Charlie’s on the way home. That was Cher Ali. His son tried to get the Western Isles’ first Indian Restaurant off the ground. Change from selling nylon drars and FLs but he was way too soon. We bought plates of chips there. I ate mine and went home and it was on the telly, but on the way, you could tell something was on. People talking in whispers, stopping each other in the street. Like, really mourning. Like it was somebody’s brother, somebody you knew.’
Mairi poured me another Grouse, a rum for herself. Kenny got another orange juice. I caught her smile to him, looking like a promise.
She couldn’t care less about John F flicking Kennedy. He had to get hold of a new bit of skirt every day. With the whole world ready to fall in about all our lugholes. It was the brother she felt for. That poor bastard was really trying to do something to stop the war and nail the Mafia. Must have been a hell of a shock for him to find that Daddie Jo had bought into the big firm and paid for elections with these same dollars. That wasn’t Bobby’s fault. And his death was even more weird.
Talking of death, I’d a rabbit called Floyd Patterson because they said he’d fought back and killed a cat that had a go at him when he was out of the hutch.
‘What?’ said Kenny, like the sober bastard he was. ‘It’s not everyone would see the connection. Pick a subject and we’ll run with it.’
‘Skip all this pseudo-historical smalltalk. What about the year of the herring ban?’ Mairi Bhan said. Quite firm. Loud enough to break into the yarns going on a table away because Donnie’s voice came over the top.
‘No Fucking Shop.’