by Ian Stephen
That’s a moral tale for you. But possibly also open to interpretation. Anyway, my point is, if I’ve lost the plot, I wouldn’t want to linger on.
I know your own menu, for your send-off, even if you haven’t written it down. Pretty sure, though, that you’ll be burying me first, somehow, barring accidents. Statistics are on your side. But you stated your wishes, just in case. In this respect, they’re dead right, all these guys in the hats who say you never know your hour.
A menu for a funeral. When you say menu now, it sounds like something that appears on the computer screen. Maybe restaurants will also be like that by the time you read this spiel.
You’ll touch a discreet screen, built in to the end of the table. Maybe the font imitates fast handwriting. You’d say, that’s typical of Westfalia, ox-tongue, served hot in its liquor. A bay leaf. An onion studded with cloves. And I’d go along with it as I told you about the tongue that my uncle Andra would still do, for the New Year, in The Broch. Maybe we’d walk into the house while it was cooling and get a slice, melting the butter on the white doorstep of loaf.
We both found shared ground, by the Rhine and by the Minch – and in more things than food. Where you draw the line is sin. Our daughter is full of mischief. She can be capable of hurting but also feeling sorry afterwards. Same as all of us – she just hasn’t learned to conceal it yet. She’s not evil, though, not unredeemed. So you won’t have anyone go on about sin over your dead head. Instead, you’ll have the Unst Bridal March. Keep cash in the kitty to pay the fiddler.
OK, it’s a Shetland tune but let’s face it, there’s not much of an instrumental tradition on the Long Island. Big songs, though. One of them wouldn’t do any harm. But your own only request is that one tune. There’s an understanding that friends are asked to linger for a round-the-table dinner with the menu up to myself. Trouble is, if you don’t specify things, things might get taken out of your hands when you’re in a daze.
But I didn’t set out to write your will. So here we go. Take two. Or it might be my third attempt to get practical. I’d no idea this floodgate was going to open. Where did all these words come from?
SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS
BEING THE WISHES OF PETER MACAULAY,
COASTGUARD COTTAGE 1,
LEVERHULME DRIVE, STORNOWAY
No prayers, please. I don’t mind flowers as long as they haven’t been flown round the world to get here. But I want this to get read out, legal requirement or not. It’s an audience, flick’s sake. The epistle has spread off the red Post Office form it started on. It’s taken on a life of its own.
I hope there are some good conversations going round our living room. None of these hushed tones. The traditional assortment of chairs pulled in from next-door or borrowed from the school down the road, if there’s enough people to sit on them. If there’s only a few, just get everyone seated round the kitchen table. Blast up the stove but don’t dump me in it yet.
The registration plates will maybe have gone another cycle of letters. Maybe all cars will be made in Malaysia and Korea now, or in whatever powerhouse is being promoted. Or the Far East might have had its day and Romania or Bulgaria taken over any manufacturing that’s still going on. An equation of low labour costs and a population desperate for economic advancement. Or maybe everything will be made in China. Military dictatorships are going out of fashion in a lot of places but they seem to be OK if the country is a trading partner. And we’ve got to sell our electronic weaponry to someone. That’s about the only stuff we’re making now, anyway.
Never mind the random shots, what about my own code of beliefs, now that I’m dead? Well, I’m not dead yet but I should be, when you’re reading this. What were MacAulay’s beliefs, exactly?
The act of writing this wee document started something going. I can’t stop typing now. I can’t say it in one word any more. Not Christian, Bahá’í or Buddhist or Marxist. I don’t think I ever could. Just tried to do that, for a short while. My own story is tapping out into its own order now but these other complicated bits of history keep butting in. I’m nowhere near at peace with myself. I’ve missed too many chances to do something to help. Shit, sounds a bit like they’re right about sin, after all.
Best get back to practical matters.
PRACTICAL MATTERS
I’m quite happy to leave the choice of music, at my funeral, to yourself, Gabriele, if you do indeed survive me. My critical faculties probably won’t be at their best anyway.
If we both do peg out together though, and a third party is making the arrangements, what about laying on a bit of a show? We could have your Unst Bridal March with a PowerPoint slide of the late romanticism you’re so keen on. Maybe we should have a couple of figures in misty mountains – Caspar David Friedrich woz ere. To keep it balanced, so to speak, we could have the Reverend Whatsisname skating, courtesy of Raeburn. Even if they do use that outline on the plastic carriers of Edinburgh Galleries. And they reckon it might have been some other cove that did the painting. Oh and the pond’s not where the title says. Apart from that it’s all pretty genuine.
What about if you’re making arrangements for me? A good get-up-and-go South African-style funeral wouldn’t be bad but it might take a bit of arranging on Lewis and I wouldn’t want to give you the hassle. Who would have believed Mandela would get out alive and he’d somehow continue to inspire? I fancy one of these painted coffins but maybe there’s a simpler idea. We’ll come to that later. You might be mourning, for all I know. But if you fancy making a shindig of it, that’s OK with me.
You’d go quite a distance for a good demonstration. Never mind all this asking if it does any good. The exercise of the democratic right to speak your mind. That’s what brought us together. You were looking for a different father at that kibbutz. You weren’t ready for a lover.
With all this said, Frau Richter, we come to the material arrangements and welcome back to any materialistic bastards who went to sleep during the above digressions.
MATERIAL ARRANGEMENTS
1. ALL MATERIAL ASSETS.
All yours. Then you can decide what’s to happen to the stuff, when you’ve taken your own turn to pop the clogs. If you’re not around by my demise, all goes to the offspring. The property is in joint names anyway so it’s all yours, girls.
2. BURIAL ARRANGEMENTS.
Don’t go planting me in the ground. But before I forget, let me state now – it’s OK to use any bits, best Lewis tradition of spare parts, before you get rid of the rest. That’s the only card I believe in carrying, these days. Let’s be realistic. The only way to avoid being taken over by the aforementioned men in the hats is to do the business elsewhere. I’ll be most surprised but willing to posthumously eat my words if there are women elders and ministers on this Island (Episcopalians excepted) by the time I vamoose.
Please ferry the bits to Inverness, to get burned. I would have no serious objections to a blazing gellie of driftwood but there’s bound to be legal obstacles. I know that the vultures pick the bones in Tibet but don’t feed me to the seagulls. The council wouldn’t allow it anyway and they’re fat enough on batter and chips. That’s the seagulls, not the councillors.
Better to pay through the nose, I think, and get properly cremated. But you can tell young Al Crae not to go crazy with the varnish and brasswork. The box is going to be wrapped in a certain very distinctive bit of tweed. But do like they do at sea and keep the cloth for another day. A flag of the hill. Colours of a section of our moor, shifting from wet to dry in its own light. My own father’s woven image of it, anyway. After this use, my own section of his last tweed goes to our daughter. This seems to have become unbusinesslike again. Back to the practicalities. I’ve no serious objections to a wee service at the house, with people reading what they feel might be appropriate, sacred or no.
Maybe while that’s going on, it’s a good time to get the Decca Navigator flashed up. No, I’m out of date again. That was looking good for a few more years but of course they
flicked the switch on the UK’s Decca chains on the 31st of March in 2001. The midnight hour. One hell of an April Fool’s gag. I never thought they were serious. That’s all history now and the three masts, standing up from the Ness Machair, were felled. All that rigging was scrapped and I hope some of it found its way into fences or hawsers. I still have one of the last Decca receivers somewhere in the garage. I was going to have it wired up so you could observe the historical moment when the data fell from the screen. But it all happened too suddenly. Maybe the Yanks’ GPS is also as obsolete as their Loran C. They could throw the switch on that too. We’re at their mercy, unless you’ve a paper chart, a compass and an eye for transits.
You’ve got to throw the ashes somewhere so we might as well go for the weather side of the Carranoch reef. Fine, I know I should stipulate that only visual landmarks are used but I’ll be lucky enough to get thrown anywhere south of the back of Goat Island, by the old outfall pipe, without making things any more difficult.
Even if Kenny F is back on the tack (off the deoch) and got himself a small boat on the go, don’t trust him with the job. Better not present them to my near-colleague Mairi Bhan either. People who are into the fishing are primitive hunters. I know about this and about the strategies they use to disguise it. Pleasure or commercial fishing, they’ll only want to get the gear down as soon as they can. Mairi would forget about the ashes till she found them in the galley sink, months later, between casts with dried up mackerel skin and used teabags. Safest bet is the lifeboat cox. Calum’s successor, Murtie, or the guy after him, if I last that long.
All these guys have a conscience, by definition. No use giving them a bottle of malt for their trouble because most of them won’t even take a dram for fear of missing a shout. Another chance to get shaken about by turbo-diesels, get sick and thrown about. Great. Give a decent donation to the cause.
I don’t suppose you can get wee self-propelled caskets, yet. One to drop a model anchor by remote control, when you’re right over the mark. You can probably get one if you send to Florida. But don’t bother. Just ask the Cox to chuck the burnt bones over, when he’s updrift of the spot.
My various greys swamped by the deeper greys of the North Minch. That’s not a bad picture to go out on.
But I hope I manage to do a bit more typing first. I got rhythm. Melody might have to take its place in the queue.
BOOK TWO
Turbulence
The Twist
For every story there’s a lighter and a darker version. My uncle Andra, fae The Broch, talked about plucking the geese. They were in Italy in the war and the lads had done a deal. Jock Rose, the tinker, showed how it was done. He plunged the carcasses into near-boiling water and then the feathers just flew off. But first you had to kill your goose. They’re big birds and none of the squaddies ever managed to do that twisting the neck thing. Except Jock.
So it was all done, in the right order, and they made a proper dinner. Invited their new friends and colleagues in the trade fuelled by British Army petrol to eat with them. The squaddies told their new mates to bring wives and daughters. The table was set. But Jock Rose arrived pissed. He’d got hold of a horse and cart and there were two hoors from the brothel, sitting one on either side of him. The guests evaporated. Some of them grabbed food, as they legged it out, stuffing it in the pockets of their good clothes. These were hungry times in the villages and the towns of Italy.
But Andra also told me about the dysentry. How no-one was reporting sick. If you did that, they wouldn’t let you on the train. No-one wanted to stay on that continent any longer than he had to. You were so desperate to get home that you’d shit in overflowing buckets for three days and nights. That was the only hint that something had happened inside the minds of all these men in tin hats. Not just those with a story like my own father’s – his escape from a tank. An armoured vehicle that had been mobile, just seconds before, became a steel coffin. A smouldering target. A hatch clanged shut for the last time and he was outside of it. By a whisker.
We kept hens for a while. Out the back. The daughter, Anna, and me had fun, building the housie with the nesting box on the side and the run out front. Long before that, I remembered my grannie just lifting a corner of the coop and grabbing a black one. She disappeared into the shed with it and we got it to take home in a bag. It might not be worth roasting but there would be good soup there.
I killed hens after making sure Anna really was somewhere out of the way. First I listened to advice then I did the twist thing just as I’d been told, so I thought. But you might as well have been doing the other kind of twist, chasing it round the garden when it came back to life. So I put an edge on the hatchet after that. They still quivered and moved more than you could think possible but you knew they were dead in most senses.
We kept two geese for a while. This was pushing it, even in a back garden stretching out for half an acre. The neighbours all had projects too. There was no hassle. We thought our geese would breed but one day we found two eggs. We phoned a man versed in these matters. When are you in town, next?
So my uncle’s mate, Angus from Garyvard, officially sexed our stock and neither was a gander. But they were very protective about their fine eggs – it took a single one to make the richest omelette or scrambled egg you could want. I’m tasting them now, creamy without the addition of cream. I felt bad, keeping one goose off with a stick while I stole the egg they were jointly guarding. I knew I couldn’t carry on doing this. So the deal was done – two live geese for two live lobsters. At least I knew how to do them, courtesy of Mrs Beeton. As per crab. That diagonal thing with the skewer through the eyes.
The latter days of the barter system in the Coastguard Service. I broke the news as gently as I could to Anna who liked to stroll down the urban allotment to throw grain in their direction. They were going to a good home.
‘But I wanted to eat the gooses,’ she said.
I don’t think I could have swung the hatchet at one of those arching necks. And I didn’t know any relative of any Jock Rose who would do that favour.
It was my Lewis uncle, Ruaraidh, arranged mattters, out on the croft. I must have been very young because they didn’t want me in there at the time. I could catch some of my grannie’s yarns for a change. It might even have been Angus, in there with him. In the villages there was usually an expert, in at the killing.
But I remember being proud when my uncle gave me my share to take back to town. ‘You earned it,’ he said, ‘you’ve hardly missed a fank.’ And the olaid was proud of me too, not just because there was a whole pile of chops and a gigot, shoulder and everything. Maybe my sister was scowling. It wasn’t fair. I got to go driving about in the van and take part in all these things while she had to help my mother in the kitchen.
Ruaraidh was at the hospital when I saw him for the last time. I wasn’t so good at reading the signs – he didn’t give a lot away anyway, asking after everybody. He had cancer of the stomach. They say that’s one of the most painful. But I was there in uniform, on the way home after the day-shift. Her Majesty’s Coastguard, he said. That was maybe enough. He knew I was in a job that needed doing. That’s all he would say about his own years in the war. Except for one new year’s visit, a rare exchange with my olman.
‘Aye, we were there when they were needing them. Not when they were feeding them.’
We came close to getting the real stories then. But they never came out that night. They never did, in my hearing.
It was a bit sudden when I said I’d better be heading now because Gabriele’s brother, Michel, was over from Germany and they wouldn’t eat till I got there. Something went, fast as a North Minch rainsquall, across his face. He knew that was it, even if I hadn’t faced it yet. He did say something to me though. Very low-key.
‘Don’t wait till you’re an old man,’ he said. ‘It might never happen. You tell your own stories when you need to.’
I never took the chance to tell him what it all meant to me
, the runs out to fanks at Griomsiadair. An initiation into a world of blood, sweat and yarns.
Torcuil
Glasgow Airport doesn’t run to recycled paper, yet. At least WH bloody Smith’s doesn’t. You couldn’t fail to find the stuff in Germany. Either end of the process. Putting your shit down on paper or wiping it off you. Maybe it’s all that guilt. Maybe now that there’s signs of a lasting downturn in the industrial world over on the continent, things might change. Still plenty of new Mercs and BMs. It’s getting difficult to find used cars because everyone sells them for silly money to the East. And they say there isn’t a border any more.
There’s an abundance of borders still to be clearly defined and agreed. Constitutional Questions.
The Independent, picked up from the vacant business class seats of this aircraft, quotes the revamped Cecil Parkinson, adding to his serious target, right from his conscience, going for three per cent less emissions from exhausts this very year. Cool. Until you find his footnote which says this means we can now increase production of cars by, wait for it, three per cent.
Public transport went up in price as The Wall came down. Even the bloody wall itself is now packaged in wee bits for sale. Of course that’s only right. Since that system over the other side eventually corrupted itself to death, it naturally follows that the wonderful one, West of it, is necessarily correct in all its aspects. Course it does.
These wee bottles on the flight. Could they not just give you a slug from a litre into a glass? No, they’ve done the time and motion study. Modern Times in the air. The designer labels. I’m seated beside a young kid, going to Scotland, fed up with history. Fed up of all that money going to the East whether they work for it or not.