A Book of Death and Fish (10 page)

Basmati rice, cooked till al dente then placed on a covering of thinly sliced potatoes in oil. The pan is then placed on top of three crushed cans so the heat at the lowest setting steams gently through, so it all comes out from the pan with the cloth under the lid. Like a pudding with the potato crust gone brown around the white grains. Yes, you’ve guessed, that was the Egyptian Bahá’í.

A thick mutton curry where leaves are added towards the end of cooking time and you don’t have to do like the cook does and lift a green chilli and bite into it absentmindedly, as you’re finishing the dish. And by the way you shouldn’t do as I did and gorge yourself on the rice with the subtle spices, not realising it’s just a starter before the high pile of thick chapattis arrives with said steaming bowls of meat. That was my taste of the Punjab on Newton Street, before a discussion on Islam in the modern world.

The gammon, marinated in molasses and rum and studded with cloves before boiling and baking by the not-so-young rebel from the Free Presbyterian church. This guy wasn’t getting on very well with the new minister.

‘I’m not expecting him to live in a stable but I don’t see why he needs the church to build him a house that size.’

But that wasn’t the main issue.

‘I lent the man my wheelbarrow so he could get a start on the garden. Good to see him roll his sleeves up. But I’m having a hell of a job getting it back. And the question to ask is this. If you can’t trust the man with your wheelbarrow, can you really trust him with your soul?’

My mother’s liver and bacon casserole with tomato reduction in the gravy, waiting for me, just round the corner, after a New Zealander’s faithful copying of a dish of lamb in green herbs, taught her by her Iranian mother-in-law before she departed the Island to live in Holland. So I had two dinners in pretty quick succession. But by that time it was getting a bit late to get up the road for the first ever blood-donor session – because members of our gang had just come of age to donate and we were working on developing our individual social consciences to go with it.

So I legged it up the road, after the two quick dinners, made it just in time and did the business but the big hall started to go wooh wooh wooh like Hitchcock and I was on the deck. That wasn’t the worst bit. The worst bit was that when I came to, they offered me brandy and I said, ‘No, sorry mate, I don’t drink now.’ And I suppose that’s when it was pretty public – hell, he’s got a weird Oriental Religion. Pretty normal for a wild guy to get a dose of the
cùram
– hardcore born-again Christianity – or, to put it
another way, fallen into the care of God. But this was different. As Kenny F said, ‘What the hell breed of
cùram
are you suffering from?’

Soon there was thirty or forty of us, all ‘into’ different religious stuff and the tribe was seen as a threat. Which was great because we were the outsiders getting bombarded with letters to the
Gazette
from elders of the Last Bastion kirks. But we had some free-thinking champions who wrote punchier letters back than any of us could. This guy wrote, in answer to the issue of the possible threat posed to the youth of our island by Oriental Religions, ‘Does the previous correspondent believe that Jesus Christ appeared in Kyle of Lochalsh?

I helped discharge the
Quo Vadis.
These were boom years. All the records were tumbling. There were different ways of doing things. Like in Athletics. Things had never been the same since Dick Fosbury made the straddle-jump seem just as outdated as the scissor-jump, when you saw people doing it, fast time, on old newsreels. You couldn’t see how it could work, just coming in from another angle, turning and then he was over the bar backwards with his feet up in the heavens. Everything was changed. The heights went up and the times went down. Everything was moving faster.

The scale of
Quo Vadis
scared us all but we were in awe of her, the high red steel and the turning radars. The antennae that made you glance into the bridge – you could hardly call it a wheelhouse – with all the dials and screens. If anything, the talk had played it all down.

At least the herring wasn’t going to fishmeal. All these Norwegians and Faroese tied up with their stock of whitewood barrels lashed on deck. They fixed a price with the skippers, then took on casual labour. That was us, Kenny F and me, in the line with the rest of them, queuing like the dockers in our history books.

I stuck close to Kenny and usually got picked. He was heftier than me and had the reputation of being a grafter. Flat rate, no overtime, no tea breaks. You worked right through till the load was done. And one woman of the few amongst us, spread a sweet, maroon salt on the fish as they wriggled up the conveyor. She was just old enough to remember this from before, with the belching steam-drifters. And the crack flying with the knives.

‘But the hours,
a ghràidh,
the hours we worked.’

And we worked them again in the here and now. So the
Quo Vadis
could get out for another shottie. I took my turn, pressing the electronic counter, the Norskis’ tally against the East Coasters’. Got distracted when my opposite number told me there was talk of a Daimler, for a bonus, company car like, if the accountant could swing it. No point givin it tae the bloody taxman, like.

The top fish they scooped for the sample looked much like the herring you’d cadged on a string from the
Daffodil
, the
Lily
, the
Ivy
– the Scalpay drifters. Deeper down in the hold, they became faded and soft. So the further into the shift you went, the more dull the fish became. There wasn’t a lot of shine to them. No firmness left. That’s it, you saw what was missing in the herring, not what was there. Except for the eyes. The bloodshot eyes of seven hangovers in a row. And hardness now in the sockets that contained them, the bony sunken mouth below it.

I met the
Quo Vadis
again a couple of years later. She was anchored to her quota, out in Loch Shell. She’d taken the lot on the first night of the season. Most of it had gone to the fishmeal factory. Markets weren’t ready for them. They’d slapped the ban on fishing herring in the Minch. That included the Scalpay boats, and the last of the drift-netters amongst them – they were all tied up too. These boys were out of a job.

I had a summer job, up that loch. Up, over the burn, into fresh water. I’d to row anglers around and try to steer their casts towards the sea trout. It was as dry a summer as I can remember and the sky just got heavier.

Colin insisted on these patrols in the estate launch. We fired up a Merc inboard with a push-button start. A sweet piece of engineering in a planing hull. It was a novelty for me, being free of the laws of displacement for a while. It was supposed to be serious anti-poaching stuff but the real reason was just to get away from the Lodge for a while.

The paying guests were getting restless on a red diet of heather lamb and netted salmon steaks. There wasn’t a fish could get up over the dry stones to be caught by these people.

Sometimes we’d take the old boat and leave it on a running mooring, the other side of the loch. We’d get up the hill so Colin could get the telescope out. Once, he took me over the hill, right to the wreck of a World
War Two bomber. Forget the type but it wasn’t a Lancaster, Wellington or anything I’d seen in Airfix models. Maybe an Anson. It was impossible to get near by sea or road so it had just been left where it fell, once any bodies or survivors had been removed.

Belts and belts of ammo. Even the machine guns in the remains of turrets. Whitened needles, gone like bone that would never shift again, round black dials. Good bloody job the Orinsay boys hadn’t taken the arsenal back across the loch yet. One of these ex-Merch engineers with a lathe in his lean-to would probably get these guns going. Then woe betide any gamie and ghillie trying to flex muscle in the environs of Loch Shell.

That one didn’t win a smile from big Colin. Now at the end of the ridge, looking seaward, he’d get muttering when he caught the glint of monofilament as someone was cleaning their net. Maybe, in turn, the Lemrewayites were glancing across and seeing the flash from that glass – we were the Hun in the sun.

Colin knew better than to ask the ghillies to go with him to pick up any of these nets. I didn’t mind angling all day, weeding radishes and rowing out to a few pots in the bay. Non-combatant role only.

But on our way back from the outpost, he had me pull quietly upwind to the
Quo Vadis.
She was in good holding ground, good shelter and no tide to speak of, this far up the loch. If this ban continued, they’d have to steam for Cornwall, for the mackerel. Say what you like about Colin, he knew the tricks. Right enough, the grey floats, not that easy to see from any distance, were out astern and he pointed at once to the few that were down. He took one drowned fish out of it and laid it on the bottom boards while I kept to the oars.

‘A good nine-pounder,’ he said. ‘That one was meant for the fly.’

There wasn’t another so he had me glide up alongside but most of the lads were on deck. Colin started off very politely.

‘Aye, boys, plenty herring around but you can’t land them. Just biding your time, aye. Well, that’s very decent, yes, a few won’t go amiss.’

And a boxful, creamed from the very top, still decent fish, was passed to us. A few chafed scales but these were all right, though they’d come from
a net that could trap everyone in Hampden Park, spectators, players and all. I could already smell these, frying in their own oil, the oatmeal coating getting toasted.

‘Aye, now but there’s another matter, boys. That drift-net astern. Sure, sure it’s just for the mackerel, yes, bloody big mackerel this aye.’

And he got me to hold it up by the tail.

Card-play. I wouldn’t fancy a game of poker with Colin. They just quietly said, ‘Aye a richt, nae fit we wis efter like but it’ll dae jist the same. Ane for the frying pan. It’s no exactly on a commercial basis. Jist whilin awa a bittie time.’

Maybe not very commercial, Colin said, but it was illegal. As long as the net came in he wouldn’t take it any further.

‘Aye, but the cook has his plans for a bit change in the diet.’

I was amazed when he held firm. Didn’t say another word. Just sat impassive at the stern and motioned me to pull away. Their fish was on our bottom boards.

I felt the eyes burning into the back of my head. The daggers between my shoulder blades.

‘Come on, Colin. Hell, you’ve got to give them that one. We’re going to be heroes when we come back with the herring. Fair trade.’

But he pulled the outboard cord instead. I couldn’t look up to the high decks any more. It wasn’t that one of the guys might recognise me from when we were discharging her at Stornoway, or that one of them might be related to me. Just sheer embarrassment.

We never said another word, the way back into the loch. I was now looking up to the high ground. For the first time I was seeing how history worked. You leave traces as jets leave vapour. Propellers leave a paraffin whiff in the air, a less viscous slick in the water. The picture won’t last long, bust up by chop or the gradients of isobars as air masses move with pressure. When that movement shifts to work against wind-driven water, the waves stand up. They become dangerous.

Our craft can now venture into water and into air. The breath of airmen was frosted on canopies but their craft still moved over the high ground. Some got caught in low cloud, the crews trying to decipher instruments
that were slow to respond to changes. A failure to climb quite high enough. A hand on a stick.

Far below it, an eye on a periscope, a hand still as it could ever be, over a firing-pin. Another individual adjusting a heading but hearing a voice naming reefs. Particular hazards, named over time, said by one voice but moving on from what was said before. A long way over land and water, terrain burned-out even before new machines strafed it. Named people were left there too. Men trying to breathe, in a loud, hot tank when the lid clanged shut.

Not only humans. The known routes of flocks from cool to warm or back again. The grazing herds, sniffing water. The lithe eels from the Sargasso or bars of muscle, following krill in the North Sea, northern part. Maybe strangest of all, the herring. Even these masses were now proven to be finite. All these swimmers gone before, in the wake of plankton. All these trails of all these hunters in all these craft following herring. And the breathing women, gutters and packers fae The Broch tae Yarmouth, following the followers.

Colin just said, when he’d shut off the fuel and we were gliding to the buoy, ‘You’d have given them that fish?’

‘Sure I would. These herring are priceless. And we’ve a glut of salmon.’

‘Aye and you’re half East Coaster, with it. Blood’s coming out.’

The cook didn’t thank him for the
bradan
.

‘You can stuff that if you like and stick it in a glass case or anywhere else it might fit. Give me the
sgadan
.’

And her fingers were pulling at the backbones, to open them out, ready for the oatmeal.

That was the dry summer. Shoals of salmon and sea trout arrived to cruise by the mouths of the burns. Fish jumped often, trying to shake off the sea-lice. These would fall off, soon after the migratory fish entered the fresh water systems. But the fish couldn’t run the burns because there was hardly any water.

We rowed guests across the bay and they cast teams of gaudy flies. The sea trout fins would follow the lures but the fish wouldn’t take. The visitors, English, French, German and Austrian groups, were paying plenty for wild fishing. Soon it would be the stalking season and still the fish hadn’t been able to run. The seals were cruising across Loch Shell, taking their pick.

I found out that I could use my fly rod like coarse-fishing tackle. I could put a small float and a hook with a worm on and let it go from the burn into the sea. There would still be traces of the fresh water, enticing the fish in. The float would dive and I’d hit a fish of two to three pounds. It would jump and I’d take a long time to get it ashore. There were rocks with bladderwrack and kelp at the edge and the mouths of the fish were very soft. I lost a few and landed a few. You had to be careful, hitting the thick head on a rock because they were so lively. The speckles and spots continue deeper into the flank than those on a salmon. And you don’t feel the bone in the tail the same way, so they’re difficult to keep a hold of.

They took them from me for the kitchen. They’d go in the freeze for the next guests. We had the salmon we’d netted, for this week. Then they saw my tackle at the end of my rod. I didn’t try to hide it. They never spoke to
me directly. That’s not how things were done. They got Colin to tell me, the owner was not too happy with the fishing method so it was back to fly-only from now on. The guests would get angry. Or jealous.

So at the end of the week I asked for my sea trout to take in town. One for the folks and one to bring round to my uncle’s. Sheena wasn’t keeping that well. The owner wasn’t used to you talking to him direct. He didn’t put up much resistance.

He shot a seal from an upstairs bedroom. Colin said he was very proud of the shot. Bad news. The owner had noticed me swimming the other night. When I’d stayed underwater quite a long time, looking for scallops till I got the shivers.

The three of us went out in the estate launch. I thought it was a poaching patrol and I’d need to stay away from the Island for a while when the word got out. But no, the cove himself had another idea. He handed me a rope. He’d taken a bearing of where that seal was hit. He was sure he’d got it and it sank. It wasn’t deep and it was about Low Water, now. If I got a line to it, that would feed all the dogs for weeks.

But Colin tipped me a nod which said, don’t you bloody dare find it. The stink of boiling up that thing would choke us all. A very eloquent nod. The carcass was deeper than I thought and I got scared in the kelp anyway. That could have influenced the decision to run with Colin’s wishes and not those of the boss.

And then it was the stalking. I thought I’d be rowing fishermen around all summer and into September. But then a new lot of guests were being taken down to the bay. There was a rusting steel shape, cut to the rough shape of a deer, a good distance off. Target practice. The guests thought they were checking the sights of their guns. Colin was checking how close he’d have to take them, so they wouldn’t just wound a beast. I didn’t know I’d be expected to lead a pony into the slopes around Ben Mor and hold it till a stag, still warm, was strapped on its back.

The old Eriskay pony was fine. She was used to it. Colin warned me that the young Highland – a heavier animal, might panic when he smelled the blood. I’d to take the pony close when I heard the shot or saw smoke from a small heather fire.

I’d been present when a wedder was killed in the byre, the week before and I’d seen the innards of sheep and cattle often enough in the slaughterhouse at Westview.

This time, after the shot, Colin rubbed his hand across my face – I took a step back and then realised he’d smeared the blood of the deer on me. Like my uncle did once with the thick slop of the peat-bank when we were bantering, near the end of the day.

Archie did rear up, when the carcass was put on his back. I’d been warned to dig my heels in and let him turn the circle. Talk quietly to him. I did that and it worked. He carried the stag after that.

It was all sweat and smell and warm close weather. I hadn’t even brought a thick gensey. Next thing, it all just went black and this cloud dumped its hard hail on us. We couldn’t believe it, kicking it on the ground to check. Then my teeth were chattering. I was hugging myself and beating my elbows trying to get some heat. Then, before we were back at the Lodge, the air was warm again.

I was looking forward to the venison, a change from lamb and salmon, but Colin told me these people hang it for quite a long time. But we’d get a fry-up of the liver for our breakfast tomorrow.

At the end of the day I found my new boots weren’t quite broken in. I got a plaster for the blister but Colin said he’d find me another job – he needed me fit for later in the week – they’d be working the high ground.

I wasn’t too bothered because I liked weeding and grass cutting, inside the walled garden. No-one bothered you. But the owner showed me the boilers inside the dog pens, where they used to cook up offal and seal meat. He was carrying the head of the stag we’d killed. It wasn’t much of a head but the guest wanted a trophy – the skull with the horns. So all traces of the meat and hair would have to be scoured.

I don’t mind the smell of game cooking. But that wasn’t much of a job. I’d to keep going back to it, topping up the fire from waste and rotten timber. The eyes were a good indicator. When they’d fallen out.

Sometimes we’d row a bit then start the outboard in a dinghy and get some mackerel or lythe. They’re common fish but they’re still fine to look at. The zig-zag pattern on the back of the mackerel can shift from deep
green to indigo to black. There’s a lot of colour on the flanks below that when they’re fresh. The lythe has a bronze sheen and the lateral line takes a dip. It’s broken, like the trace of an old track on the moor. The sea-fish were a change of diet. We hit big shoals one night. I was for stopping when the blood and beat of the tails was up over our boots but Colin said no. Fill a few boxes and we’ll salt them for pot-bait.

They just went in whole into plastic tubs with plenty rough salt. I found an old wooden firkin and put it aside. My own share of the catch. I was up till the early hours. I’d seen village guys do this, when I was out at Holm Point with Kenny. One guy on the long bamboo pole. The other splitting and gutting the fish as they came in and packing them in layers of salt. There and then. Going home with the firkin full of salt fish. They’d a way of carrying it too. Efficient.

It was just about September and still warm and dry. But it was almost true dark again. I scrubbed at the smell for a while, in the shower and then slept sound.

I’d to come back to the Lodge to collect my gear. It was a break from all the rounds of people coming to the house to offer sympathy. There wasn’t really anything to be said but there’s a way of doing things. My mother told me to try to make a day of it. Get out a walk or cast a line before I took my stuff back. It would do me good to get out and she was going for a hurl with my sister. Kirsty was able to stay at home for another few days.

I ate lunch in the kitchen of the Lodge. My radishes and cos lettuce were doing well. The fish had run at last. Now they were catching sea trout where the burn came from the loch. Yes, on the fly, one after another.

Down at the pier, I went to roll my firkin out to the road where the van could pick it up. I was going to be the hero of the out-of-town brigade of relations. I heard it before I saw it. Hatching bluebottles. The maggots were bright and fast, all through the backs of the split mackerel. I’d seen this before, but that was a plan to create bait for trout. And I’d seen it once when I was very young. I hadn’t followed the
Blue Peter
instructions for hibernation. I’d neglected the large tortoise. I remember crying and my sister thinking I was making a big fuss.

When Colin arrived he said, never mind, my work wouldn’t go to waste, they were needing more pot-bait.

They paid me till the end of the broken week. Insisted I take some brown crab, yes from our own pots. The lobsters were moving in now. Colder at last. I didn’t fancy digging out Mrs Beeton again to look up
Crabs, how to dress them
. You can just see one in a tuxedo, can’t you? But you couldn’t say no. I never got a lobster, though. Dead and red, or alive and blue.

I don’t like putting crabs into boiling water. You’ve to jam the lid down for a minute or so after when you do it that way. Mrs Beeton says you can kill them instantly if you pierce a metal skewer through each eye, diagonally, once in each direction. That does seem to be faster. That night the olaid led the way, picking out the meat from the shells. The sister, herself, myself, two hammers and a pair of pliers. The sister was saying how the olman had to dig out the tools to make the tea on a Sunday – opening a tin of sardines.

The three of us were learning how to make a smile again. We were filling two bowls of sweet flesh, the brown meat and the white.