A Book of Death and Fish

by Ian Stephen

  ‘I thought I’d better bring something appropriate to the rig,’ she said. ‘And the Old Holborn tin didn’t quite fit in the pocket.’ She took a draw and let the smoke out over her lip, very slowly. She was enjoying that.

  The others were settling to their own chats, they were a bit further on than me. Mairi was sober. Maybe she’d had one glass. She was driving back.

  ‘You might as well have a taste,’ she said. ‘Be a bad lad.’

  She held it out for me and I felt the curl of smoke roll round my mouth a bit. There was also a tinge of her. We were standing close enough for that. In the huddle.

  She passed it on then, like a joint. The smokers were all up for trying the Havana. And I was back inside with her.

  The room was full now so it was impossible not to be touching someone. I knew when I was touching Mairi Bhan. There was no need to move. I wasn’t hard. There was just a gentle pressure, maybe hip to thigh. We stopped being social. We just talked to each other. The usual stuff. Boats and fish and fathers.

  We were outside the door when my lips found hers. There was still a taste of the cigar. It was not unpleasant.

  Gabriele and me were ten months into the ‘see how it goes’ period. We’d agreed on a year. We were getting on a bit better but sometimes I’d sleep the other end of town. Right at the edge. A cousin had a house there and I’d keep an eye on it when he was at sea. We’d agreed to keep letting the olaid’s house till the books balanced. It’s difficult to admit you need breathing space and even more difficult to admit that something you thought was forever might not be. I might not have been able to do it at all but my inner brain started talking to me. It kept me awake at nights but it was talking in riddles. It gets easier once it registers that you’re not the first one to go through something like this.

  Stop. Look around. Here it comes. But I think I only had two nervous breakdowns. One about a year after the death of my father and one a year after the death of my mother. Quite symmetrical.

  The second one was a bit confused with the issue of achieving the aforementioned fifty years of ageing. Once you admit you’re going to die, there’s a few experiences you want to have first, if you can squeeze them in.

  I signed up as crew on a tough delivery trip, along for the ride to nurse an old Perkins. Second night in, I realised that three out of the seven of us were up for it because it might be the last chance of a big seagoing adventure. Not counting me.

  One heart condition, one cancer scare and one living very close to clinical depression. About the usual. I wasn’t feeling that great myself but I came off that boat counting my blessings.

  ‘Did I hear you’re staying over at the Battery?’ Mairi said.

  ‘Time to time. I’m there this week. Bit of head space.’

  She held my eye and said, ‘Shit, I could have tried that Châteauneuf-du-Pape. I’m not driving, am I?’

  It wasn’t really a question.

  ‘No, and we don’t have to find a machine either. It’s a snip really.’

  Then we were walking, on the way home, just leaving her car across the road. It wasn’t just a matter of miles. I knew why we weren’t going to Garyvard.

  It was exciting and calm at the same time. I was peaceful when I did fall into her hold. Yet it was her eyes holding mine all the time, never wavering. Her nails made direct contact too and this was signalling. You never knew when you would sense that sharpness. I was responding to her and I was aware of when she wanted me to drive and when to slow. I lay inside her just pulsing and waiting for her signal to move strong again.

  I’ve never known such ease with someone along with the excitement and with such sadness at the same time. She didn’t say anything. There was only different degrees of touch. I don’t think either of us wanted it to stop but it wasn’t over with our little deaths.

  I think I knew that this was also the death of at least one friendship and possibly three. And that my marriage really had died in one form quite a while before. Now that calm and desire were happening at the same time again, I knew that part of me was coming back to life. And part of me was killing things.

  205

  I’m going to try to persuade you I only bought the car for the towbar. But you might suspect there were other reasons. The Peugeot diesel engine is a famous unit. It’s known to be reliable as well as light and powerful. The family of small diesel-powered cars were the only European products that could seriously compete, in terms of reliability, with the Japanese opposition. The 205 had a compact, light body and was quite famous for its get up and go. Maybe the 306 is similar and maybe that model too is obsolete by the time you read this. But, like the Austin A-Series engine, maybe that famous diesel unit has not changed essentially from badge to badge.

  I just thought you might want to have a bit of power in reserve if you had the weight of a dinghy on the back. The wee car had power all right. I have two endorsements on my licence to prove it. There was no drama. Both were over on the east coast between Inverness and Aberdeen. I was on my way to old Andra’s funeral the first time and on my way to rendezvous with a Fisheries Officer who was on a course, the second. The first time I just failed to notice where the fifty zone ended and the forty began. And the second incident was similar, forty to thirty, which sadly appears to prove the general premise that the human animal takes longer to learn stuff than a rat in a cage.

  The 205 had none of the vroom vroom you heard when you touched the throttle of the olaid’s purple Mini. But I liked the shape of the body of the small Peugeot and I liked the shade of red. It was a bit noisy but Anna had helped me install a decent CD player. I was able to arrange things to pick her up in Edinburgh or Inverness, a couple of times. We played disc for disc as we drove home together. You always call the Island home. That’s not conditional on where you’re living most of the year, or your state of mind.

  Anna introduced me to Tom Waits. And a Tuvan throat singer who sounded very like him. And I happened to have Willy the Pimp, sung by Captain Beefheart on the Zappa album. She was amazed at the similarity. The lyrics are astonishing too. ‘Da,’ she said, ‘I trust they are satire.’

  The daughter also said how her tutor quoted a dude called Matthew Arnold: ‘Criticism is comparison.’

  I was able to make the bonfire when I got home. There was a short-term let of the olaid’s house and I was able to cut it shorter. My former colleague, gone back to sea, was home from installing offshore wind farms in foreign parts and the house on the Battery didn’t need minding. I had nowhere else to go but I still felt a bastard. Now the lyric that was in my head was Dear Landlord. It was me putting a price on the soul of another.

  This was the time to perform certain actions. The letting agreement had been that one upstairs room was reserved for storage of the remainder of my mother’s possessions. Kirsty had already sorted the most personal stuff. Now Gabriele helped me go through the rest of the drawers and boxes. We set aside some more family photographs and a few more keepsakes.

  We had the seat of the old estate folded down, so she could get a good load to the skip at the dump. She was quite cheerful, once the pace got going. There’s an element of relief in carrying out a duty like this. I’d done runs to the dump, myself, after the death of Ruaraidh.

  While Gabriele was away, I looked once through the box of unsent letters I’d kept in the top room in this house and then I threw it on the crackling pile. She came back to find me standing by the wee gellie. Something caught her eye, maybe my handwriting.

  She picked up the charring sheets of A4, in the same way as she’d gone through a few generations of a family that she was connected to but wasn’t her own. She read from one sheet. She didn’t have to. It was in my head. Still is.

  The tin of Old Holborn

  Shakes like a rattle.

  I’m looking for the quietness

  Before I exhale.

  It comes before the bitter

  And the fear of the dull.

  You got to take

/>   The time it takes

  To roll the single-handed roll

  Before you dream of raising stakes.

  Six deep clean breaths

  Were not enough.

  I circled the box but

  I posted the letter.

  I’m not hell of a sure

  It made anything better.

  You stop for a smoke

  You eye the horizon.

  You watch the land fall,

  The ridge, a bare backbone.

  ‘That’s yours,’ Gabriele said. ‘Your handwriting. You’ve never showed me any poems.’

  ‘Songs,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t sing,’ she said.

  We stood for a while. I poked the bonfire.

  ‘Is there anything you want to tell me?’

  I told her I’d started smoking again.

  ‘You could have left that out of the midlife crises.’

  By then I knew I wasn’t really in love with Emily but I did know that something deep in my brain was telling me I couldn’t stay where I was.

  Gabriele asked me to tell her about the letter.

  So I told her I’d tried to make explicit a longing that thought it was a desire. Maybe it’s not unusual to write or do one thing when you think you’re writing or doing another.

  It’s not only the daughter who can cite previous discussions. Now I’m not comparing my songwriting attempt to the novels of Tolstoy but there’s an essay by one Isaiah Berlin, quoted to me by a fine man who urged me to read the unfashionable Sir Walter Scott and then War and Peace. A literary detour from the chronological progression of history. You had to take one course in another discipline so I signed up for ‘Scott and the European Historical Novel’. I fell in love with Jeanie Deans and now my heart is in Midlothian.

  Berlin says that there are two kinds of novelist – hedgehogs and foxes. A hedgehog has a purpose and plods methodically along a route. A fox is wily and twitchy and sniffs at the details. So you have novels in which histories are expounded and novels in which the complex motivations of individuals are examined. Tolstoy is a great novelist because he’s a fox who thought he was a hedgehog.

  I think I might have told you Gabriele and me decided to give it a year. At least. I also told you I jumped the gun by two months. I can’t say now if waiting out a further eight weeks would have made any difference.

  But I can chart the exact moment when our union became only an alliance of mutual convenience, applicable for certain situations at certain times. Some of the time we talked some sense but mostly we just talked for far too long. Of course, most guys would say that.

  But it came to property and it was taken as read that there was no reason at all why we should start off with a premise of sharing things out. I was the one who wanted change so I had to pay the price. Now in principle that argument sounds fine but I’d been working twelve-hour days on property development for a bit too long and now I wanted to get what was left of my brain on to other things.

  Pity I didn’t reach that conclusion before stripping two more roofs for enough slate to make the hippy-dream, garage/workshop/sleepover-centre/sanctuary. And it’s perhaps a pity I managed to service enough marine motors that year to pay the joiner.

  It was not really about making an independent living, out of the shelter provided by Her Majesty’s Service. Tinkering with engines is grand for a hobby but now that I’d done it for real a few times, servicing auxiliary engines, I knew it was never going to be enough to satisfy me, even if there was a sound business there for somebody else. While the oil was draining I’d be thinking back to something started in my own mental journey but nowhere near completion.

  I’m not going to tell you now, the specific subject I had in mind for my mid-life thesis. In general terms, I wanted to look closely at one period of change in one part of Scotland. To examine contemporary accounts, in letters and records which might have escaped close scrutiny. Because there’s still something to be learned by going into that level of detail.

  It was a hope that nearly died in a Peugeot 205. Gabriele put the brakes on any open discussion of the principles of our settlement and I put the handbrake on. It didn’t happen just like that. She was driving and I asked her to stop please because I had to get out. I had to get some air. I’ve heard since that these symptoms are often termed a panic attack. She said, no, I couldn’t get out, I wasn’t getting away with that. I said I had to get out, no really, I had to. She said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Gabriele, I’m going to put the handbrake on now because I honestly have no choice but to get out of this car right now.’ That’s when she accelerated.

  It was a class wheelie. Well, it would have been after about two a.m. when there wasn’t so much chance of something coming the other way. This was about twelve noon. Now I did tell you that Westerns have left their mark in SY culture. Along with James Cagney. Hell’s teeth, it was more like the Blues Brothers only we missed what was coming to us.

  A better way of putting it might be that the poor driver of the oncoming vehicle (on the correct side of the road) was spared injury to himself or his property. We were lucky he’d said his prayers that morning, the only possible explanation for missing us. But thank God he was still so shocked he never got our number or was too shaken to report us.

  I decided that evening I wasn’t going to buy my former classmate, the lawyer, a Laphroaig and pose a hypothetical question he might have heard a dozen times. I decided that continuing dialogue with Gabriele was essential because we’d somehow managed to make a baby together and raise her between us for a good few years. The baby was now a sharp and aware young woman and in the process of getting educated in a country where they charged tuition fees. If I didn’t manage to pay half of these costs, I knew I was more and more tied to a woman I could not lie with any longer.

  The death of our marriage was about to mean the birth of my new career. I didn’t run away to sea or run back crawling (an interesting combination of movements) to the Coastguard Service. I was probably qualified to drive a cab in Cairo after my half-share of responsibility for that incident.

  Instead, I did what comes naturally to a historian by training. I went back to pick up a strand of my previous life. The pace of a busy kitchen used to give me a buzz, even when I was only washing the pots. It was time to get back on the pans.

  So I got my foot in a door that was open to visitors who wanted to taste local produce rather than ostrich steaks. I had to cook these too, a couple of times. But usually they trusted me to choose the fish of the day and have my wicked way with it. Megrim and tusk made regular appearances on the specials board.

  I might have cooked for you already if you’ve dined out in SY. They say I’m good at what I do. I respect good fish.

  Invitation

  It was time I phoned Kirsty. I’d sent some books, a few small things around New Year. I was never going to make the Christmas Airmail deadline. I was burning the late lamp oil, doing a bit of research, so the time difference wasn’t a problem – minus five hours.

  Quite civilised. She was off shiftwork now.

  It rang and soon there was a person on the end of it. Her twang seemed more pronounced. Not much Lewis in it.

  ‘Ici ton frere,’ I said but that was about my limit. Even without the accent and the lack of hand and lip movements. Her voice slipped back a bit.

  ‘Now I’d know you’re an Islander,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, a Montreal islander,’ she said. ‘West side though, so there’s a lot of English spoken. Suppose I should have settled down the coast in Long Island. Hardly a change of address then.’

  There was a bit of a pause, nothing awkward. Kirsty said, ‘Is everything OK? I mean, it’s good to hear from you but…’

  ‘Aye, no worries, Anna’s fine. I know, you’re expecting something wrong. It’s not like we talk every day. And yourself?’

  ‘Back to routine.’

  ‘Yes, Gabriele’s OK – well, physically anyway – we know a bit about that now, the
last parent passing. She’s never really got back on track. But that’s kind of why I’m calling.’

  ‘You’re no longer living with Gabriele?’

  ‘That was quick off the mark.’

  ‘Well done,’ Kirsty said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well done. Nothing against Gabriele but…’

  ‘Most people said they were surprised.’

  ‘You made too good a job of putting on a show.’

  ‘You saw that?’

  ‘I saw you were under a lot of strain. You can only do that so long. Part of my job is to see that, remember. Doesn’t give you immunity, though.’

  ‘And how are you doing? Really.’

  ‘Well, strange thing is, brother, I’ve been thinking of giving you a ring.’

  ‘Everything OK?’

  ‘A bit better than that.’

  ‘So what’s your news?’

  ‘An invitation.’

  ‘Not a head to wet?’

  ‘Hell no – a bit late for that. A ceremony. A civil ceremony. A marriage in the law.’

  I don’t think I said anything.

  ‘You’re shocked?’

  ‘No, just didn’t see it.’

  ‘Well I could have been more up-front earlier. Suppose it was that religious stage. First it was the Bahá’í list of beliefs. I remember the exact phrase, does not condone homosexuality. Then it was the hardcore Christianity.’

  I went quiet.

  I was back there, in the students’ union building. They did a decent, cheap liver and onions. People were always giving out leaflets.

  A gay activist challenged me head-on. Very reasonable arguments. He said, ‘This may not be directly relevant but please take a look.’ I said, ‘I’ll read anybody’s viewpoint of anything.’ He said, ‘Thanks a lot.’ I knew the tone in my voice had come out all wrong because really I couldn’t claim to be open to his viewpoint. He’d clocked that. I ducked and dived.