by Ian Stephen
Old Andra’s bairns helped get his wheelchair into the kirk. He wasn’t going to make it to the graveside. The service was as good as it could be. The minister had known young Andrew personally and seen him develop into a potential leader, potentially a great sportsman, with a very winning personality. Sadly, Andrew’s case was like many others in this town at this time. We would have to hold together as a community and look to see what we could do to help without having to assign blame. There were guilty people of course and they brought a plague as surely as if they had brought bacteria to the town rather than drugs. But once a new group had succumbed they also became dangerous to others. Because the habits of one fed on the habits of another.
In that same way, we had to be aware we were in possession of a more powerful source of change. In that same way, we would use our interdependence to counteract the threat to our community. We could only continue to offer support to our neighbours like Sheila and William and think of them and be with them at this time.
I went to the graveside. I threw my handful of sandy soil and I shook hands with my cousins. I didn’t go back to the house. There would be plenty and they could speak whatever comfort they could, in their own language. There were others who had lost their children or as good as lost them. I said I was sure they understood I’d need to get moving towards the ferry. They thanked me for coming. I sent the wishes of my mother at home and my sister from Canada.
But I had one more night in the Alexandria. It was too tight to catch the ferry. Anyway, I wasn’t in a hurry to get back, this time. This was a very rare patch of breathing space. This time I did queue for crisp lemon sole – the olaid’s own favourite. It was firm and sweet, steaming when you split the batter. But then I bought a reporter’s pad and a twinpack of Mitsubishi pens. A half-ounce pack. Some papers. A lighter.
I walked out for the paper, before breakfast. I’d written what I’d needed to write. I didn’t need to show it to anyone. The shop had a metal grille over the window. I thought of knickerbocker glories and bright Broch Candy.
For some reason I took the Fraserburgh Herald as well as the Independent.
I had fresh grapefruit then real porridge and a smokie with a poached egg on top. A buttery roll along with it. They called them rowies in Aberdeen but my Broch granma called them butteries.
There’s a lot of luck in how things turn out. Our gang sniffed solvents once shopkeepers started withdrawing the bottles of tincture containing opiate from the SY shelves. Soon they withdrew shoe-conditioner too and limited the supply of glue. That’s when someone sussed out the active ingredient could be drained into a lemonade bottle, in the Mill.
Most of us got away with streaming eyes and short-lived bouts of paranoia. But we’d set the local precedent. Did that mean I had a share of the blame for the lonely death of a kid who went on to do what we’d done, out there in Sir James Matheson’s overgrown gardens?
I read through the local paper, looking for signs of something I recognised – The Broch of Jimmie Sinclair’s ice cream. There was a paragraph referring to the cause of death of the youngster whose body had been released to the family last week. The body had been recovered from Fraserburgh harbour by police divers, following a short search.
Persons were being questioned by the police in connection with the incident but no arrests had been made. It was thought that there had been a scuffle and there was some suggestion that the incident had some link to drugs. The deceased was a known user of heroin.
The cause of death, however, had been found to be by drowning.
The Barvas Shore
This is the story I heard from a distant cousin of mine. A Siarach. Westsider. This was my last year in the Coastguard Service. You’re not going to hear about any incident we co-ordinated. But I’ll tell you a story I heard on watch. Courtesy of the master-mariner who became a trainee. I’ve got one for you. I’m passing it on, he said. This is it.
There was a blind woman in the village of Barvas. She had sons. The eldest was on the village boat. The Barvas men never went to sea until they heard that the fish were running. The risks were too high because the surf comes in strong on a steep beach. There’s nowhere to run for miles and miles, north or south.
They went for the biorach, the piked dogfish. Fish everyone else thought were a menace, tearing herring nets. But, on the west sides of North Lewis, and off North Uist too, they went out with longlines to take the biorach. They dried and salted them. Sometimes they’d be smoked. Sometimes they’d be buried deep into the frame of a coil of hay so when the wind blew through the haystack, the grey sharkskin wrinkled and dried too. So the fish was preserved.
The word came from Bragar and from Ballantrushall that the biorach were running. So the Barvas boat was out with the rest of them. But they were all caught in a sudden squall. They didn’t manage home in daylight. So the whole village was out there on the beach. Lanterns held up to help the boys find their way in. Everyone was scanning the white line of the surf, hoping to catch a glimpse of red sail.
But the mother of the skipper was searching with her hearing. Remember she was blind. She was noting the fall of the stones, great round boulders being shifted and running back down the slope. She heard a sound that was different to the rest. She knew it was him.
So she was the first to perceive that her son had come back. The shock brought her sight to her. So she saw him. She saw her son for the first time when his body was returned to her on the Barvas shore.
The Sister
The sister and myself were always one thing or t’other. When we got on we were best of mates and when we fell out we did it in some style. I remember one time the minister calling by, for a routine visit. Up the road to Westview Terrace. He was the cove with the moustache and a big smile. He had no objections to me bringing a book along to the services to keep me quiet, instead of kicking my heels. He did suggest The Water Babies might be more suitable than some of the texts under my arm.
We were squared up shouting as he walked through the door. The olaid was only next door for a Nescafe and a fag. It’s a wonder she hadn’t heard us. The minister spoke softly, calmed us down. I found out, a lot of years later, he translated Burns into Gaelic.
The sister took her chance to build a new life in Canada. This is a traditional route for emigration, over the years, in The Broch as well as the Islands. It worked out for her. Nursing was a better career there than here at that time – with proper coffee on the go, non-stop, along with first-name terms. You couldn’t return to the hierarchical systems of the NHS after that. Or the coffee.
When she said that, I thought of the paramilitary motifs of my own trade. I was a servant of Her Majesty. I might be there yet if it wasn’t for the residue of post-Thatcher ideas in the public services. You spent so much time accounting for your time that you had very little time left for watch training. Or team building. Or yarning, which of course is both of the previous items combined.
How can you say how resentments build up? My mother’s eyes would light up when her former cycling partner would arrive from the airport. Not on the first night but on the first day, the sister would rearrange the stuff in the cupboards in the kitchen. OK, she’s a woman and I don’t know much about them. I know more about trout really or I used to at least.
The home-help would be on leave when the sister was staying. Kirsty had her own systems. And they did seem to work.
The olaid made it pretty clear. She wanted to stay in her own house right up till she was taken to the hospital to get ready for satellite re-entry or whatever was going to happen next. If anything.
For me, the sister’s visit was a time to catch up on this, that and the other. And I’d messed up in style not once but more than that. The appointment for the podiatry department was an outing for the olaid. Not a hassle but a wee excursion. I forgot at least one appointment.
The stroke club annual Christmas dinner was a laugh with other people of like mind and body. All of them had plenty of bloody marbles,
nothing short there, and they all relaxed in each other’s company, flirting and chatting because they didn’t have to pretend. Knew they didn’t have to prove they were compos mentis, even though they talked with a slur or had lost the use of some muscles. In that setting, they didn’t have to prove a damned thing. A crew, a team. Similarities to the angling society or the boat-owners’ association. The legion. You could rant about your obsession without worrying about being abnormal.
I had a grand time the first year I went. The olaid had the home-help pin the next year’s invite up by the mantelpiece in good time. She knew it took time for things to register in my mind if I was doing research or on the tools. She reminded me more than once because she knew what I was like.
But I still got involved in a moorings operation, because it was the only day, for months, the tide would ebb far enough. After you’ve lost one boat from a mooring dragging, you lie awake imagining wear and chafe and unrelenting forces on the points of strain. The black pram was a modest craft but she was a link with my daughter and she was a link to my uncle and a connection with my surviving mentor. So I came dashing up the road far too late. I could still have got my arse down to the Caberfeidh Hotel to grab the pudding and say sorry and join in the banter and wheel her out again. But I was stinking of SY hoil mud which smells like nothing else. But not as bad as the shame. I hesitated at the door when I realised I was late and the olaid was down the road in the minibus.
So part of the tension between the sister and me was sheer simple guilt. I could see how the blone’s professionalism was showing up and how my own was wanting. And now that I’d finally quit Her Majesty’s Service, that made everything worse. Of course you’ll have plenty of time now, folk kept saying. They just couldn’t know that you’d never have less, first years of trying to establish a wee living for yourself. Of course the more Gabriele would say, ‘We can get by even if you don’t earn anything at all,’ it made it kind of worse. She was teaching German, part-time. But she had good weeks and bad weeks. I was chief cook and bottlewasher.
So it was a crunch when the sister quietly said that she would only be going back to Canada for a fortnight to tidy up loose ends. She was needed here full-time for this stage. Because I knew somehow, somewhere beyond conscious thought, that she was right.
Don’t know how it came to writing notes to each other. Talking via the home care system – home-helps to give respite to the sis so she could get shopping and get to the few vestiges of normal life. Gabriele and me just somehow stopped having her to meals on her night off. There was a very intense night when Kirsty was round and she just started reliving a case of hers, caring for a terminally ill child. Anna was very sensitive these days and Gabriele and myself were taking turns at trying to catch my sister’s eye. But she had to continue.
Now I know she had no choice. Maybe the timing could have been better. But the need to tell it just surfaced right then and that’s how it was. Better than leaving something that should be said, still unsaid. I think I knew there was something else between us we hadn’t dealt with yet.
Once the note-writing starts, the game’s a bogey. You’ve lost it. So I would time the visits down the road to when she wasn’t there – ‘Phone me when you’re going shopping and I’ll go down then.’ That was good in a way because it meant a continuity of company for herself.
Latterly there were some signs that even the invincible Kirsty was under some strain. She was just needing nights off, out at the movies which weren’t available then in the city of SY. She wouldn’t take a drink. And it wasn’t going to get easier. The olaid had been diagnosed with a cancer in a kidney. But it could be very slow-growing in a person of that age and it was quite possible that a different illness would appear before it reached a critical stage.
After the last identified stroke the olaid got periods of amazing clarity. She was able to go back for miles in the long-term memory and of course she’d have to ask you more and more about the plans of the day every five minutes. But I’m a bit like that myself at my tender age.
She’d also wake up after two hours of sleep and need help to get to the toilet and then to her chair. And the sis was just cream-crackered. So I was forced to climb down from a standpoint of saying I just couldn’t work along with my imperious sister. We figured out something like a rota.
Things had happened quite suddenly with Gabriele’s mother. That was only a couple of years back. We hadn’t been there to see the slide down the slope. But we were all together at the funeral. I suppose the olaid’s journey was more gradual. But this was another stage.
The first night was tough. My olaid was near aggressive a couple of times. She’d got so used to a way of doing things. Just as well the sis was staying with a mate out of town or I might have had to go crawling for help. The second night, we’d got to understand each other a bit and I’d discovered the right channels on the all-night radio. We had it purring away with the Morsø glowing fine and it looked like we’d all sorted out a workable routine. But there wasn’t a third night.
Kirsty phoned me. A swelling. She was frightened of a blood clot so the ambulance had taken our mother in. We agreed to stagger the visits so the olaid would have the maximum company. The sis sounded bloody tired.
The old girl was clear and funny. She couldn’t cope with the dry heat and wrestled to get her cardigan off. Most of these nurses liked things tidy and full of decorum so they kept buttoning her up. She’d scowl.
When she got hit by an infection on top of every other bloody, shitty thing she was trying to deal with, they moved her to a side ward with one other patient. I could read the signs. I remembered side wards from a previous career that had spanned a full year.
So there wasn’t a lot of need for decorum any more. She kept going way beyond what they thought was do-able by adopting a mission. After breakfast – well a spoonful of porridge flavoured liquid – she’d start on the first button of the cardy. The Count of Monte Cristo had nothing on her – that used to be a favourite book of hers. By my next visit she’d have the cardy off her shoulders and was feeling the cooler air around her chest. And grinning away at the victory. She’d tip a big wink to me. A rebel with a cause.
That struggle gave her a mission and so an extra week of life. It mattered. I cancelled an outboard servicing course because she wasn’t going to come out of this one. But what a fight she gave. I’ve seen fresh run sea trout give up easier than that and they don’t come much tougher or bonnier fighters.
So then you could just about believe she could last for ever. Like her brother. I left in the evening to get back to some weather-dependent jobs. I had the roof off a porch.
But I took the mobile. So I was up a ladder, catching the last hour I was going to get away with a fibreglass skin, when I got the call from Gabriele. The hospital phoned. It might be an idea to get down sooner rather than later. I phoned the sis right then too.
And soon we were together in that room with the olaid. She might have seen it, might have not, but the sis told me she’d got it across to her a day or two before, that we’d buried the hatchet.
Maybe that gave her another day or two boost so Gabriele was able to come in to say goodbye. And I was happy when Anna said it of her own accord. She wanted to see her grannie. Yes, she knew what the score was. She came in with me.
A couple of times Anna had sorted the whole show out before me or the home-help arrived. Incontinence pad changed, the whole lot, no fuss. If that wasn’t an intimacy, what the hell was?
The olaid made it as easy for Anna as it could be. She got her laughing – I forgot what the crack was but they could still be good. The nurses just loved that mother of mine, knowing there would be a smile and maybe a whispered crack as well.
Parents, parents. That’s what they’re supposed to do. God’s sake, show the offspring how to do things right. The Broch woman who bore us showed us how to die.
The sis says, ‘You know, I could do with a smoke.’
I hadn’t seen
her smoke for years. So I went and rapped with one of the auxiliary guys. He looked like a surfer and sure enough he had the makings. We might have got some blow from him too by the look of the cove but we didn’t need that now.
So I kept my sister company when we went out the back door. The fresh air was good. Then I found myself skinning up – well a single-skin tobacco smoke. Lit up and passed it to her. I didn’t want any more but it was just that connection. The sis didn’t say anything but there was a lot in that nod.
It was my watch when the change in the breathing came. I just went over and gave the sister a squeeze of the hand, enough to take her out of the catnap. She nodded and came over to join me, our chairs up close.
‘I think she’s going,’ I said. And then, ‘I think that’s it.’
We weren’t in a hurry to go for the nurse. And when I did go over she just nodded to me to say, ‘Yes, that’s it. She went peacefully.’
My sister never said she was a nurse or anything.
Kirsty and me, we haven’t had a bad word since.
Splitting up stuff, any of that – nothing was an issue. Our mother was a magician. Bloody funny with it.
Rebirth
I’d very much like to tell you now of the process whereby a vessel can be born again. This is a technical operation but the main requirement is neither nails nor timber but, my friends, it is faith. If you take a cuirt along the shores of Goat Island or Griomsiadair, or enter through the locked galvanised gates of Renfrew or Govan, you will see an abundance of projects. These will be directed at vessels of differing dimensions and type but most of them are unlikely to be completed.