by Ian Stephen
Dolphins came close, the big ones, blowing, diving under our bow and that kept the kids sweet. Soon we had three heads settling, on the boards, beside their mother. It wasn’t that bad a night.
Once we felt the change in the tide, we pulled up the anchor and made the most of it, with the oars. The tide did most of the work for us.
He was waiting for us, of course, old Angus. His shape, in the old funeral-coat, was pretty clear in the morning light. He helped the kids out and made sure their mother was fine. They’d had a grand time – it made their holiday.
Angus just slipped me the nod – I should get my head down for a few hours. He’d use the fall of the tide to get the prop cleared. Then we’d need to get back to our nets, when she floated again.
I knew he was coming this time and didn’t try to argue. He had me take the helm, find my transit. I was cream-crackered. ‘Where the hell were yous fishing last night, off Lochinver?’ There was hardly a ripple and these big pink buoys should have been visible for half a mile. My eyes were on the skyline, trying to find the Last House, over Calbost way. That was trickier in daylight. I saw Angus make a reach down with the boathook, no hurry in the movement. Here was the blue warp.
I need to get myself glasses like these. Infra-red sellotape. He gave me the nod to start hauling. This net was full of herring. He pulled out one sample fish and grinned. Then he let me shake them out, maybe four full boxes. No, he didn’t need to take a pill. The second net was heavy and sad. He thought it was maybe a basking shark but it was worse.
Long marblings, perfect black and white, in the leather. There were two types like this, he said. He leaned over. The white didn’t continue above the mouth so it wasn’t the more common, the white-beaked one. This was the more scarce one – the white-sided dolphin. Not so heavy in the body. Poor lass. Then he turns to me and he speaks, dead quiet. I can tell you every word he said to me.
‘There’s two things we can do,’ he says. ‘One is just to cut her free and let her sink.’ A memory I could blame next time I took the top off a bottle and threw it over my shoulder. Or I could help him take out the jaw. The researchers wanted these, for positive identification.
He handed me the knife and I got on with it. I did it. We let the rest sink down to the crabs and the congers. That’s what happens at sea.
That was it, for me, I mean off the fucking sauce, and on the tack.
We came home with the boxes of herring. The dolphin’s jawbone, in a bag. I’d to make a driftwood fire and boil it down on the shore. Hell of a soup that would have been but it was better than posting the whole job to the Natural History Museum in August. The dog days. It would have been buzzing when it got there if I’d sent the whole thing. But I just posted off the bone in a box.
While I was dealing with that, Angus was driving all over Lochs, dropping off herring and coming back with eggs and ducks and cabbages and the rest of it.
Kenny was already up at the kettle as he finished his yarn. See a Lewis cheerio, it’s in stages. You do the first bit sitting down. Then someone says how they’ve got to shoot the crow. There’s always a few more yarns when you’re standing. At the door, you lean back against the wall. That’s how it’s done.
At the gate, he said we could bring a bottle over next time but that would be some nice extra-virgin. Plenty of space in the VW for that, next time we hit the continent.
That could be arranged. But it might be a while before we were in the olive latitudes again. You needed that much stuff, travelling with the baby.
‘You’re looking well on it,’ Mairi Bhan said, to Gabriele.
I’d never known Mairi so quiet so long. And she was looking at her man like she’d just met him. It looked good.
Just like Kenny F, I’d like to end the story there. It’s a great knack, that, knowing where to stop. Never cracked it, myself. People like his uncle Angus, people like both my grannies – they had it. I can’t do it this time. There’s more of this story to come. Not now though. Maybe later.
I think we got the van back down to Garyvard once. We remembered the oil but it came from the Co-op. First cold pressing for his pizza dough that had to rise half a dozen times over. It would get beaten back and back and it would keep on getting up for more. Like Floyd Patterson. Until he met his Ingemar Johansson. Then he came back again and rose up again and again until he’d regained the title. But even Patterson would have to meet his Sonny Liston.
In the Crit
There’s no point in telling you lies by omission. I bumped into Kenny F again, in the Crit, when it was still more of a fishermen’s pub. Before all these Gaelic actors and journalists appeared. Nothing against them, it’s just that it’s a small pub. For a second I thought he’d be having a Virgin Mary, waiting for Mairi to finish work, round the corner.
No, he was looking like he looked ten years before. Eyes red, everything red, hair gone longer. Hair is back in fashion with Italian football stars but his was looking kind of forgotten. He held out his glass and I nodded to get another one put in it. Why not? If he was on it, he was on it. I asked for a pint of stout. We went over to a corner. There was going to be a story.
I was going to ask him to save it. If he was on the piss again, it wouldn’t be a short one. He was straight into it. No introductions.
She must have been crazy to think she could hide it. OK, it was very early on but he was pretty sure of the signs. She was supposed to be going on another course. Pretty plausible, with all that new tech and her promotion board coming up. Adapting this database programme for the office needs. Fucking brownie points.
He’d a feeling though, even before someone from the office asked how Mairi was. Real concerned note.
Click.
To him, she was in East Kilbride, on a course. She’d even phoned him. Said it was going all right. To them, she was on the sick.
It was me who was slow, taking a sip of my stout. I thought we were talking about something on the side.
Kenny knew I hadn’t got it.
I could have coped with her having a fling, he said. I couldn’t have shared her but I’d have waited to get her back. Now he could have her back but he didn’t want a blone who could do away with their baby. She hadn’t even been going to tell him. Just wanted to get back to her fucking development programme. No choice, she said, since he wasn’t working. Doing up the house. Debts building up. No choice. They’d have another chance later.
Not with me, you won’t. That’s what he’d said. He’d gone straight out the door. A woman’s right to choose, he said. Well, a guy could choose, too.
He was choosing now. He’d found a place to crash in town, wherever there was a couch. All of us too fucking old for other people’s floors. She could have the house and the croft and every other thing. It was her family croft, anyway. And she was earning the dosh. She could fucking pay someone to do the last of the finishing.
I was thinking of my own blur of shifts and snatched sleep. The things you’re not proud of, the shouting and the huffs when the bairn’s asleep.
But then there was the photo Gabriele took when I fell asleep but Anna was turning the pages for herself. She was just reading on before I even knew she could. When I was knackered from the shiftwork. And you knew then you could hold it together. Maybe not for keeps but maybe for long enough.
I turned back to the eyes of a guy I grew up with. The formative years. I couldn’t ask him back to our house. Couldn’t be that much of a bastard.
I put another dram in his glass and walked home.
Offal
We brought the olaid to Italy once. She always wanted to go there. The olman had been there in the war. There and North Africa. She wanted to go somewhere that had been a big part of his life. But she didn’t want to go to the desert. We piled into the VW. She played with Anna in the back. Read stories out loud. Nothing was a problem.
Every night she’d eat spaghetti bolognese. ‘Ah ken ah kin eat that. Ken fit it is.’
But when we were i
n Sienna, we found a trattoria with white painted roughcast on the inside. I asked what the local thing was and the guy said tripe. We ordered one portion of lamb’s liver with sage and one tripe, to share. I asked the olaid if she wanted spagbol again. ‘Did he say tripe?’ she asked.
I said, ‘Aye, but it won’t be like you know it, with milk and onions.’
‘Ah dinna care fits aboot it, if it’s tripe ah can eat it,’ she said.
She ordered another Tripe Sienna. It came in a tomato and herb sauce. She ate every bit and took her bread to the plate after.
The liver was seared outside. The sage was fresh, of course, and the flavour went right through the rare organ. It was the best I’ve tasted and I’ve tried to cook it like that ever since.
In the past few years I’ve thought back to that liver. Or rather to different dishes of liver and other sights of liver.
You know we eat fish livers, here on Lewis, but that’s something different. I’m talking only about meat now.
There was the time I bought a wedder from one of my watchmates. But the deal was you had to be there at the killing. It was all done on trestles. A fellow came round. He was the man. He did everyone’s. You gave him some chops or another nice cut. I don’t think it was illegal then.
My thinking was, this has got to be better than loading the animal into a trailer. Driving miles to town. Then it’s waiting in a pen smelling what it’s smelling and hearing what it’s hearing.
Instead, you get the village expert round. I thought back to Angus, come across the loch by boat to preside over the deed in the shed at Griomsiadair. I’d thought of asking him along on the Italian job. Himself and Ruaraidh would have been company for herself. And entertainment for wee Anna. Then there would have been a vermouth or a last cup of tea, after the wee one had turned her last page of the day.
They would have memories. It might be time to talk about past events. But Ruaraidh wasn’t keeping that great. We’d left it too late.
This time the man who was not Angus, but was like him in some ways, said, ‘Well, you boys should know about knots.’ That was a mistake. I think I went for a clove hitch with a locking turn. But see that moment when the animal struggles. The panic should only be for seconds. But that puts a jerking strain on a tie. Mine did not hold up to that test. He did the proper lashing himself then.
This time there was no mistake. There was just a tiny twist of a small sharp blade, a pocket knife really. Its eyes just glazed over and I remembered my job was to hold the basin close. Everything was clean with a trace of bleach. Someone else poured some salt in the basin and you had to keep stirring, all the time, as it filled. Otherwise the blood would congeal.
He showed us the bits we had to scrub to contain the marag. Black pudding. Then we left the carcass there to hang for a while and went home with the blood and offal.
Gabriele opened the Mrs Beeton edition, provided by my olaid, of course. I said, no, never, but sure enough, there was a recipe for haggis. So we made black puddings and we made our own haggis. I chopped the heart, kidneys and liver. There was a description of how to drain the fluid off the lungs so you could use them too but that sounded a bit much.
The hardest bit was scrubbing the doosh – the stomach that would contain the pudding. I remembered they used to take these to the shore and do them in the salt water. I remembered having to go to the slaughterhouse to get one for a relation so that proved you could do the job at home too, in Westview Terrace.
We did it and everything worked out.
I loved the olaid’s own casserole but that was ox liver, cooked till tender. She hadn’t been able to do much of her own cooking for a while, with the stroke. Her balance was not so good for standing at the kitchen.
Back in Sienna, there were three clean plates and the waiter was beaming. Four, really, because Anna was always a good eater too.
I remembered frying up thick slices of deer liver, out at the estate. That was a breakfast that kept you going. The smell was kind of pungent. The cook wasn’t that happy but she had plenty to do so let us get on with our own breakfast on a corner of the Aga. You’ve to be really careful, selecting liver for eating. A lot of it is condemned. And wild deer get parasites.
After that, it was the hospital. The porter’s job. Mostly, it was routine. Now and again something would come up. You’d to keep the incinerator going clean. Burn the cardboard and stuff, a bit at a time so it didn’t get clogged up. One time a staff-nurse comes chasing out of Surgical. They were needing another oxygen bottle in a hurry. I looked to the store, and knew the trolley you used to wheel them in was at the other end of the round. ‘Is it really urgent?’ I asked. ‘It is,’ she said.
So I just let the cylinder fall onto my shoulder and ran with it, balanced there. She held the doors open for me. It wouldn’t do to batter someone on the way. Save a life and take another. Net gain nil. But that all worked out fine. We saved some minutes.
But this time, there was no urgency. I was passing the lab. A woman in a white coat saw me and said they’d been meaning to phone round. Was the incinerator running? It was.
Well, there was some samples here. They’d had to keep them for a long time. Just in case. A legal thing. But they wouldn’t be needed. Could I dispose of them as soon as possible? They needed to clear the chilled storage.
There’s this thing about authority. I was down the pecking order. She held out a small, thick, polythene bag. It was double sealed with a zip of some kind and labelled but it was still transparent. Something inside it looked like liver.
She saw my question.
A poor soul who shot himself.
There but for the grace of who or what. Maybe I’d been too eager to take my dose of the opiate of the masses but I might still be on a one-way nosedive if I’d not been given that support.
I was about to say, hold on, if it’s been here for months, what’s the hurry? I could go and get a box or another bag. But she was holding the top of the sample-bag out for me to take.
I took it.
I tried to walk as fast as I could, the most direct way to the shed where the incinerator was housed but one of the engineers saw me, holding it out a bit.
‘That’s a shit job you have there,’ he said.
So I opened the door and closed it as fast as I could. That was it done. You couldn’t hear or see anything now. I’ll tell you this though. You could smell it. And it was just like meat cooking. I thought of eating a hare or a goose. Spitting out lead shot now and again. I thought of any stray shot melting instantly in there as the liver disappeared.
Will and Testament
Sand and gravel shift. Essential landmarks remain. Amendments, rather than corrections to your own chart, in your mind. Sounds like a thing you should be able to do. Say who you are. Say what you think. But now I don’t think that’s easy. All of us responding to moving conditions. Just a few things you can maybe be sure about.
The olaid dropped a not so subtle hint. ‘A mannie wi responsibilities noo. A wife and dochter tae think aboot. If onything should, happen, God forbid.’
All right, here it is.
Everything’s for you, Gabriele. I knew love before I met you but you taught me a different kind of love. I think we know each other’s bodies quite well now. I have these strong impressions of the shapes your body makes, in different positions. If I’m away from home, more than a few days, these images stay with me.
I hope I learned to listen to you and your body. My mother once said you were made of galvanised wire and that was a compliment. No wonder you found you could live on Lewis. A place in a state of change, like all other places on our overstocked planet. But our Island home has become dependent on fencewire, as a means of holding everything together. These temporary repairs have a habit of proving more permanent than systems designed to last for at least a millennium.
You said, a long time ago, when it came to arrangements, you didn’t want anything left to chance. You could cope with a lot in these strange
islands as long as you got some bread that looked as if it might have come from a Bible story. You missed the stout, rye bread of home. That light loaf, with a scattering of grains in it – the one we used to get from Billy Forsyth’s – it was called ‘rye’ but it just wouldn’t do.
You didn’t mind being imported, yourself, to improve the stock with a healthy bit of hybridisation. Looking at that fit daughter of ours, it seems to have worked. Suppose the question is, would it have worked the same if I’d gone to Cologne? Same genetics, another urban environment. The Rhine is wide. Barges ride down it with their loads, or slog up against the flow. They send their waves and wash to the built banks. But it’s not the sea.
It’s fitting, your mother living in prosperous Bonn – with your brother’s support. But my own mother’s offspring settled either side of the Atlantic. There’s geography and there’s language. Your immaculate English – well, it was better before you came to live here. We’ve roughened it up. But I didn’t have a word of German. Then again, look at my sister, gone Canadian, fluent in French with a funny accent. So maybe language isn’t the issue we think it is.
My job is about communication. That’s the technical word we use, for an operator of the changing technology that sends wireless signals over water – a communicator. The idea of being out there, lost, out of reach of all signals, that’s what really scares me. My mother keeps asking me if she’s still making sense. Her speech is tricky but her mind is on the ball.
So I’ve already discussed a little deal with you, my own wife. If I go gaga, before departure, I’d be grateful if you could find a way of arranging something. And I’ll try to do the same for you, if it should be the other way. Maybe all these intermittent shovels of aluminium sulphate to whiten the peaty water of the Island will have their effect. Or all these daft mercury fillings in my teeth. I got most of them the same year. You can do a lot of damage fast with McCowan’s toffee bars on a daily basis.