Strip the Willow

by John Aberdein

  – Did you eat well?

  – Four species of fish, not counting shellfish, three of berries, plus rose hips—

  – You mentioned. Are rose hips not a berry?

  – I wasn’t washed-up with a nature guide. Two species of root. And one shattered sheep at a cliff base, in a race against decomposition. Which, to be fair, we both entered. The dead sheep and this forked animal.

  He had told her all this before. The whole exile thing. Whatever else he had read, she knew he was into Lear.

  – The next sound you hear is going to be scissors—

  – I slept in a cave. A rock-cut tomb—

  – So don’t move, stay at peace.

  – Which had two stone beds, with a passage between them, and a bunch of fern waving at the patio door.

  – Yes, said Lucy.

  – It must have been hewn out before the day of the priest. A priest isn’t allowed to sleep next to anyone, not even in a tomb, in case he has bad thoughts.

  She just let him ramble on, not that there was much option.

  It was a shock, that combination of repulsion and attraction, to see the skull with its vegetation off. Previously the nearest had been when he was sleek and dripping after the shower. When she first held it in her hands. Now she proposed to massage it. She had a choice of oils.

  – What kind of gunge you going to slap on? he said.

  – Not gunge, oil. Rosemary, that’s for remembrance.

  – Sure it’s not rue? he said.

  After a while she made two cups of tea, and put lemon in them, a squeeze. She placed his on the asbestos mat on the Raeburn. Then rested her fingers on top of the stove a moment. Her hands got colder quicker these days. She was going to try to link the massage up.

  It was like making love to the skull.

  Now neither spoke.

  distant skittles

  Alison and Finlay were having a helluva row. And, not many people had seen this, Alison was crying. Finlay took her at face value, the life and soul, a fount of jokes and asides and piss-takes, but she was more than that. Finlay was only just finding this out. And she was insecure. That came as a surprise.

  He didn’t know how to deal with it, except by means that made it worse.

  They had gone out as a foursome to Strike Ten, the bowling arcade. It had only been planned that morning, but by the time evening came, Alison wanted private time with Finlay, and a shoulder to lean on.

  Right from the moment Alison’s first ball took to the gutter, the evening was on the slide. Finlay was doing his best to keep his team’s end up, striking and sparing like one possessed. He showed little understanding that this was not what Alison needed.

  The other pair were well matched, both average to useless when it came to tumbling distant skittles with a rotund piece of plastic.

  After the second game, while the other couple disappeared off to the loos, Finlay went straight up for drinks, but when he got back, Alison was flushed.

  – What is it? Is it that old time of the—? Hell, I don’t mind.

  He only caught her halfway down the car park. The row surged. Unfortunately it was an otherwise calm night, and every word carried, and carried home.

  And especially when Alison said, Bide then, Finlay. Jist ye bide here an play wi yersel. I’m gaain stracht back up the toon tae try an rescue ma dochter.

  ill-souled men

  – The first word that Sir Patrick read, he said.

  Lucy just waited.

  She didn’t want to get back to knockabout mode. Knockabout was very enjoyable, easy on them. Mostly evasive.

  – The first word that Sir Patrick read,

  Sae loud loud lauchit he,

  The neist word that Sir Patrick read,

  The tear blindit his ee.

  That was all that came. She continued moving her fingers, just playing the white notes, the platelets, still unsure about touching the darker ridges.

  – O wha is this has done this deed,

  And told the king o me,

  To send us oot at this time o the year

  To sail upon the sea.

  The breakers over the Bar at the mouth of the harbour, that would be bad enough, she imagined, for a boat going out. Even after Davie Dae-Aathing had floated Craig Metallan out of the channel, there was still that further obstacle, further out.

  The Bar.

  All the grit scoured off mountain crags by frost and ice, all the howffs of granitic sand burgled by floods, all the loam thieved off the sweat-rich fields of Lower Deeside by summer and winter rains, got carried there to build a fatal ridge, where the sea clashed and rumbled, and broke in pieces ill-run ships and ill-souled men.

  He carried on singing a few more verses. Some in order, some with a few words altered or missing, but all with the ballad’s relentless repetition.

  Then it started.

  reft

  For Alison it had been nothing to do with the ten-pin; how anybody could get into a lather over that predictable clatter escaped her. It was just that she had been out at Huntly earlier in the day, part of an outreach programme from city to county, and after a quick chicken pastie from the excellent baker, she went and visited the castle, then the local kirkyard.

  Good to find the courage at last to revisit the place you were brought up in.

  Huntly Castle was fine enough, it touched off half-decent memories. Long after her father had first taken her along, rather severely, for a historical introduction, she would flit in and out of the substantial pile at will, with a smile from the young woman curator. She didn’t need the printed guide, she knew all her favourite nooks. She would wrink around in the bakehouse, brewhouse, cellars and dungeons. She liked to imagine the different foods seething in compartments of the big black pot: poultry and eggs and onions together, hunks of beef for the laird and the laird’s guests, a parcel of bacon, a clootie dumpling with honey and beans.

  Then she would go along the passageway, and see the dungeon below, like a stone bottle. Although there was a smell of stone-dust, plaster and clay, she thought there would have been lots more smells when the dungeon was full. All that the poor chained folk down there could likely do was scratch, doze and pee towards the centre, and then, to whichever absent god they’d been led to favour, pray. It was probably a lot worse than you could ever imagine.

  How did anyone even begin to have the right to pour your soul into a stone bottle?

  This time she went in with a wry grin under the defaced tall frontispiece, a Renaissance confection, with its pierced heart, dragon and griffin. They had been Catholics in Huntly, the ruling class, till the Covenanters bustled in during the 1640s and chipped off the crowning St Michael v. Satan disc. There was always a running battle to redefine the Antichrist.

  She went up the tight circular stairs, holding onto the rope, till she was in the earl’s bed-chamber. It was wonderfully airy without any earl, you were at tree-top height. Swallows in elegant manic twitter flitted in from the leafy sun to test ledges and alcoves. They made her so lightsome she surprised herself.

  She had an hour to spare, so she went to the cemetery outside town.

  Her parents had died within months of each other when she was in her late teens, and she hadn’t buried them. Going against her aunts’ wishes, she had them cremated. She had no truck with religion, that was the thing. And she was sorry about that now and wished she had a place to find them.

  Willa, then Jock. Then that infamous night of Jock’s funeral, when it got too wild in the Atholl. Waking up about noon, and not on her own. In a way, never on her own again, though her bed-partner emigrated soon enough.

  Perhaps she could track some of the rest of the family. She found Andersons, right enough, a potential uncle or two, a blacksmith, a joiner, a small mill-owner, that was some shock, a postman.

  Then, to one side of the Anderson slabs, there was a little stone doing its best to keep its head above grass. You could read the surname, it was Anderson too, but the lower words were
all furred with lichen. It was only a matter of going back to the car to fetch a blunt pencil and an empty white envelope. She tore the envelope open, it was too thick otherwise. She bent over and scoured the blobs of lichen out. Then she knelt on the sappy grass and, with the pencil laid broadside, began the rubbing.

  Jean

  Who?

  Our only daughter

  Whose?

  Died August 12th 1965, aged three months

  Erected by Williamina and John Anderson

  The year of our Lord, 1975

  Ever in God’s Thoughts

  She stared at the grey rubbed news of her usurpation. She had to hold the tiny slab by its two shoulders, like shaking a baby. Williamina and John. Willa and Jock. She tried to yank it out or push it over, but for all its lack of size, it was deep-rooted.

  Our only daughter.

  Not a word to her, during their years, that all she, Alison Anderson – Alison Orphaned Bastard Anderson – had ever been was a substitute. Only some bairn reft from god knows where – adopted – never the true Jean.

  Our only daughter.

  – Oh, Alison, she wept to herself. Alison, Alison.

  the famous sea-horse

  – We got away from the harbour eventually. Once Spermy had picked up his fancy science bird, he called her.

  Lucy sought a level of massage that was enough, just enough, now the motor was up and running. It was soon obvious the motor was up for far more than that.

  – At first she was just this masked and dripping figure I heaved aboard. Or would have. But she took her snorkel out long enough to say Ladder. And in that tone. If we hadn’t a ladder lashed to the mast, I’d have had to contrive one. The rest of the crew, with all their skills, were curled in their bunks and far from sober.

  We headed north. Whether it was true north or not, it wasn’t clear from deck. The sun was broadly behind us. It was having itself a riot before sinking into a cloud. Then I was summoned to take the wheel by Spermy, and he gave me the heading, twelve degrees. Keep her a berth off the land. Whatever that meant, jargoneer. He was going down to the cabin to help the diver out of her wetsuit. He was back in two minutes. He was a berth off the land himself, I think.

  He had grown to be a volcano.

  I gripped hold of the wheel.

  I checked the overhead compass so much I was snapped at.

  I wandered five degrees west and got bawled at.

  I checked the brass clock to the right of the compass and it was still only ten.

  The year was ten hours old. No doubt things were happening in Vietnam, Prague and Warsaw, in Paris and London.

  The year was unfolding at a frightening rate.

  I was right in the middle of all the action. I was part of a film, whirring away, I could feel the sprockets, engaging my readymade holes. That’s it, I could feel the sprockets. Sometimes I was in the projector gate and felt immortal. Sometimes I skated over the screen. And if my mind ever wandered a second, like a mote of dust, nothing was lost; it was still there, my mind, dancing in the beam.

  Sir Patrick Spens, locked in his ballad. That Conrad character, in Youth.

  – Marlow, said Lucy, softly.

  – Then Julie appeared in the wheelhouse and I went to the cabin to make three coffees.

  When I got down, the crew were lying abandoned in their bunks, some not even under the covers. There was one black knotted shoe sticking out from under a sheet. The smell of sick was worst, but stale beer, whisky, fag reek, farts and the rotten remainder of last year’s herring ran it close. Very, very close.

  It took time to find all the doings, and to get the kettle under way. By the time I came up with the shoogly tray, the day had clouded, the wind was up, gulls zig-zagged across our wake, and she was giving him a blowjob.

  If I’d only known, I could have waited.

  How did I feel? I didn’t feel anything. It was the kind of film where a rogue reel might slip in. Mainly I thought it was quite a nice touch. He had his right hand on the wheel, with his left flat on the top of her head like he was blessing her. I’d known Spermy since he was ten or eleven. He was a hard man, he wasn’t religious.

  She faced me as I opened the wheelhouse door. She raised an eyebrow at me, though there was little she could say. I may have looked shocked, so she gave a shake of her head. That seemed to please him; it was just as well something did.

  I, being a gentleman, withdrew. I stood outside on the flying bridge, under a machine they called the Triplex. I had drunk two and a half coffees, when the wheelhouse opened again.

  Knock, cunt, next time, he said. Na, ye’re okay. Come in and say hello tae Julie. Hello, Julie, I said. Hello, Peem, she replied.

  Lucy wanted to yell out, break it precisely there, but knew disclosing his name was only part of their purpose. There was the whole head thing to be laid bare, whatever happened there, and to find that out they would have to go on.

  – So, everything was nice for a while. The skipper was in a good mood, he had had his rocks off. Julie and me had a bond. We had both been kidnapped and were heading round Scotland together. She asked me what I did; Spermy had only told her my name. I said I was an ex-student, a bit of a poet, a builder and in love.

  Lucy wanted to say Were you really? but refrained. Her touch now was of the lightest, just enough to keep the hippocampus, the famous sea-horse of memory, swimming through the years.

  – She told me she was finishing a PhD, marine biology, specially prawns. Scotland was overfished, so she was off to Sarawak shortly. Out in Sarawak, where headhunters kept their parangs gleaming, she would be an advisor on very big prawns, on how to get the mangrove cleared. I am completely my own person, she said.

  We went down in the cabin amongst the sozzled. We made dinner, very late dinner, to be consumed after nightfall, Spermy’s orders. Much would be mince and peas, the rest tatties. We peeled away side by side in the gathering storm.

  As soon as the tatties were on, she led me through to the fish-room and I fucked her standing against the boards. It wasn’t love, but it was very, very good. I felt at home on the boat.

  Lucy wrestled with herself. Her fingers stopped massaging. Her palms and fingers were spread out over his skull, all ready to press down, all ready to punch through him twenty thousand volts.

  – When we came up on deck, it was thinking about getting dark, and the skipper was scowling. Baxter rose, and he took the wheel so we could all get dinner. Around the table there was no grace said. But I think they were grateful for anything hot; they looked peely-wally and some were shivery.

  We had come through a wild place, the Pentland Firth, though Julie and me had not noticed the extra bumps. She attempted to talk about moonrise and herring rising, plankton and such. Spermy wasn’t in the mood for that. Then she told us she was the Lord Provost’s daughter. Nobody seemed amused or even interested. I said I needed to talk to her later. As we came out of the shelter of Orkney, we realised there was a northerly swell running, so dinner was cut short. The cling peaches and condensed milk remained unopened.

  I need your help, Julie, I said.

  I explained her father’s designs, on the source of the city’s water, on all the future side-deals from oil. Julie wasn’t fazed, I know what he’s like. Her father bankrolled her many enjoyments. His actions might be in some ways regrettable. He might like to pull some wool over eyes. But, she said. Julie spoke like she fucked. But? I said. Blood is thicker than water. Basic science. Check that sometime.

  I spoke to Spermy on his own. Spermy was worse. 77% of the Spare Me was owned ashore, by SwinkFoods. Spermy was no more free to act than fly in the air. Spermy was gripped, so no help there.

  Never mind that bastard Swink, Spermy said. It’s you that better watch oot. And I’m nae referrin tae the fuckin wheelhoose.

  ’68 was twenty hours old. I was losing my illusions fast, on a pretty high sea with that rum pair.

  Lucy made another couple of cups of tea and lemon. She didn’t feel like
talking. She noticed he had his eyes closed now, and this aid to dwelling in the past profoundly annoyed her.

  – The Spare Me was a purser. Me, I wouldn’t have known a purse-netter from a Botticelli. I sidled up and queried Baxter: Spermy would just have laughed.

  Purse, ye’re asking? said Baxter. Just a net as deep as the North Sea and as lang as a running track. Drop her ower the boat’s arse as she steams in a circle, pick up yir ain end, because naebody’s goin to pick it up for ye, whack the twa ends thegither in the hauler, the block, the Triplex, whatever ye want to call it, and heave awa. Thanks, I said. That’s when the fun starts, he told me.

  Especially if you shot for herring, but only got sprats. Under persuasion, herring would swim in ever-decreasing circles till they were like a ball of silver tight in a purse against the side of the boat.

  But sprats, no, not sprats.

  Sprats would get it into their tiny heads that they could swim away through the net. They couldn’t. Trying to reverse without anyone noticing, they then got trapped by the gills. Not just the odd one or two. A net the size of a running track, a decent mark, ten or twelve million. They had to be shaken out by hand.