A Book of Death and Fish Read online

  “What a book, by what a writer! Here’s a novel – with shades of the memoir, echoes of the documentary – from a man soaked through by sea and story, about lives and the ways they take place (and the ways place takes them). Lives within lives, and stories within stories, intricately nested; or perhaps hung like hooks to snag the readers: ‘a few droppers dangling off the thread’. Line by line (thread by thread), the voices were so rich, so inventive, and the vision so sharp, that I relished each paragraph. It’s a bright book and a brilliant book, that surges with vigour.” - Robert Macfarlane

  “Some stories are shaped as though they are not a story at all but are charged with a content that would have its way with you anyway, irrespective of plot. A Book of Death and Fish is such a story – dense, compelling and wildly idiosyncratic, it’s a novel that splits the form open like a fresh catch, glistening and raw and singing with the sea.” - Kirsty Gunn

  “…there is a wealth of anecdote, creating a kind of patchwork quilt of narrative. The chronicle and the memoir elements combine quite well to realize a gritty portrayal of life on Lewis … Stephen’s poet’s eye for detail and his linguistic precision make for a strong sense of authenticity.” - Brian McCabe, Scottish Review of Books

  “A Book of Death and Fish calls to mind writers as different as Herman Melville, Mark Twain and Alistair MacLeod. Like Moby-Dick, A Book of Death and Fish combines compelling narrative with densely detailed but no less compelling chapters devoted to such mundane matters as building a boat, repairing a chimney and selecting roofing slates. (As in Melville, no metaphysics without physics.)” - Robert Morace, Professor of English, Daemon College, Amherst, NY

  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO

  NORMAN AND TO MAIRI MACDONALD,

  A FINE POET AND TEACHER

  The excerpt below was first written as the lines for the character of a fisherman on a herring drifter in a large-scale community play, written by the late Norman M MacDonald and performed in the transit-shed, number one pier, Stornoway. It was later included in Portrona, a spirited novel which gathers together several strands from plays by MacDonald.

  Always you stare at the purple water, looking for the smoking signs of the herring. It’s good when the water’s dark for then you can imagine it swimming with fish.

  When the day’s clear you’re sailing over safe sandy bottom, nothing to be seen but the smooth green ground. A crab slides along sideways. A speckled plaice stirs up the sand like a puff of smoke, gone at once like blood in the water. Yes we like the deep indigo sea. Even though the colour also hides the rocks, it hides the fish from us, we say, planting the nets.

  We say to each other, “They’re down there in shoals, millions. Soon they’ll be in our net, a year’s money in one night.”

  After the psalm and the supper and the waiting, the hauling of the nets, the capstan turning, we shake out the gasping fish, the hold fills, the boy coils, coils in his wet cubbyhole, in his weaving world of black wet rope.

  We turn for home. Portrona beckons in the pearl and gold dawn. The wind with us, she takes it, hear her hiss through the water. The Zulu boat heeling, straining boards and sheets and canvas.

  Hear her chuckle past Tiumpan, Bayble Island, The Chicken. She heels so far, at The Beasts, herring slips from her decks back into the sea.

  Arnish, Goat Island, Number One. Portrona Quay before us. We’re not the first but we’re not the last either.

  from Portrona – a novel by Norman Malcolm MacDonald

  (Birlinn, Edinburgh, 2000)

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  BOOK ONE: Migrations

  Attic

  Providence

  Westview

  Stella

  Strandings

  Yarns

  Migrations

  The Move

  Ghillie

  Pike

  Torcuil’s Olman

  Andra

  The Swimmers

  East

  Quo Vadis

  The Dry Summer

  The News

  Bhalaich Ghriomsiadair

  Ruaraidh

  The Carranoch

  The Trolley

  The District

  Laws

  Thomas

  Peter

  Patterns

  Seagull

  Sine

  Fidelity

  The Brails

  Mairi Bhan

  Peter’s Fish

  Broad Bay

  A Letter from Köln

  Another Letter

  In Black and White

  Biology

  A Constitutional Question

  A Local Issue

  Emcee

  Peace and Plenty

  Ordnance

  The Gynaecologist

  Flights

  The Rescue of the VAT Man

  The Year of the Fathers

  West Side Mayday

  That Year Again

  In the Crit

  Offal

  Will and Testament

  BOOK TWO: Turbulence

  The Twist

  Torcuil

  Torcuil 2

  Klondykers

  Reunions

  Brickwork

  Spare Parts

  Clinker

  Tante Erika

  Loss

  Shipwrecks

  Slate

  Paper On Slate

  Lax 1

  Willum’s Mary

  Noble Anvil

  Calbost

  Nine Pounds

  Anchors

  The Black Pram

  Steel

  A Funeral

  The Barvas Shore

  The Sister

  Rebirth

  Two Bridges

  Bridge Number Three

  Andra 2

  Analysis

  Emily

  Siller Morn

  Smoking

  205

  Invitation

  Fabric

  Mapping

  Colonoscopy

  From: [email protected]

  From: [email protected]

  After a Storm

  Stoves 2 (verses 1 to 3)

  From: [email protected]

  The Dream

  Turbulence

  Ceramics

  Plagues

  Lead-Line

  In The Fish Shop

  A Liberal Consensus?

  Will and Testament (revised)

  The Business

  Cause of Death

  Executor’s Notes

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  BOOK ONE

  Migrations

  Attic

  Seamus was renovating a place just up from Bayhead. Not a bad little town-house with a nice bay window. Enough space in the attic to make another small room. He needed a fit young cove like myself to swing a sledgehammer. He could shovel the debris out, bit by bit, in his own time, once I’d brought it down.

  Seamus ran a Coastguard watch and took part in training the coast-rescue team. We got on. I did a couple of shifts with him, as an auxiliary, once I got my radio ticket. First day I learned to skin a rabbit. Learned a couple of other things from him as well. It was the done thing then, favour for favour between coastguards.

  He issued me with the heavy sledge. He took up a dainty five-pound club for the tidying up. We were in our Coastguard boilersuits. Seamus pointed to the partitions which had to come down. Some of them were plasterboard but some were the older type of construction: plaster on a strapping of lath.

  We got on with it. We had teacloths over our mouths and noses. Health and safety, late-Seventies style. Earlier in the dec
ade you’d have had nothing at all.

  We became possessed as we swung. The walls fell and the dust rose. I opened the skylight, which was about to be replaced by a larger Velux, and both of us gulped in air. It was all suddenly very quiet.

  Some good wood here. Might be pitch-pine. You could smell the resin in the splintered bits. But we were horrified at how little time the demolition had taken.

  ‘Aye, it doesn’t take long to pull things down,’ Seamus said.

  I thought of The Who and ‘Talkin bout my generation’. I also thought of Pete Townsend smashing up a beautifully built guitar, for dramatic effect. I was acting under instructions but I felt implicated.

  I didn’t voice any of this. Instead I asked why the low attic was divided further, into stalls. I was thinking of the Arnol black-house. It wasn’t that different from other European peasant houses. The accommodation for animals was in touching and smelling distance. But this was an attic. It couldn’t have been for beasts.

  He could see it all. The whole plan would have been simple. Tiers of bunks at both ends with a cubby-hole in the middle.

  ‘Look, that’s where the chimney’s bricked up. They’d have worked shifts, just like ourselves. That’s where they’d have done their cooking. One shift shoving some hot foot down, quick as they could so as not to lose their sleeping time. The kettle back on for the next folk. One lot would be out into the cold of the morning, the next fall into their warmed bunks. All the women packed tight in here, like herrings in a barrel.’

  Seamus could decipher the system at a glance. But what would have happened from midnight Saturday to midnight Sunday? They wouldn’t have worked then.

  ‘I suppose half of the girls would walk out to their homes out of town. They didn’t think much of ten or fifteen miles back then. If the other half were from away, they’d have the bunks to themselves. Go together, arm in arm, to the kirk round the corner.’

  He asked me to stay for a dram. But I wasn’t drinking then. And I wanted to get the dust out of my hair. Up the road, the olaid had a big fire on for the hot water. The new council houses still had an open fire but now you got the radiators off it.

  I told her about the room with the bunks, over our fried chops. She came alive when I told her what Seamus said about the herring girls. This was where East and West Coast folk had come together. It all got joined up in the towns of Stornoway or Wick or up at at Baltasound, in Unst. The Baltic trade. That never really recovered from the First World War. She’d never seen the big days of it but she could say she’d caught the tail end.

  She was on form.

  My Broch grannie, her own mother, had been to Stornoway long before that Lewisman danced herself off her feet. ‘D’ye mind thon row o ornaments i the pre-fab i The Broch. Peterheid tae Yarmooth. Takin trains tae follow the fishin. Trying to save a few pound to send hame.’

  Then it was saving up to get married. ‘Your grannie aye said she’d hid nae a baud life.’ Hard work but always amongst friends. She definitely mentioned Stornoway. It was a long time ago. Bayhead, Keith Street, Kenneth Street, Scotland Street – they were all full of attics like that. In between the barrel stores. Keith Street rang a bell. Now she thought of it, my grannie always said there was a lot of banter about being billeted so close to Al Crae, the undertakers.

  My bit was done but Seamus asked me back. He’d finished the big sweep-up. The wallpapers were stripped, layers and layers of them. He pointed to the beams. The slants of light from the skylights were making them shine. There were waves and waves of lightly chalked names. Dolly MacDonald, Garyvard. Ishbel Mary MacLeod, 12 Habost. Milly Strachan, Inverallochy. Henrietta Stephen, Brightsea, Fraserburgh. And more and more.

  I went home for a shot of my mother’s camera. A wee Olympus Trip. Easy to use. Some of the snaps were a bit blurred with the slow explosure. The olaid went through them all, a few days later. We never sighted the name she was looking for. Her eyes misted over just the same – a thing you didn’t see very often.

  Providence

  I was born one street back from the hoil. My arrival gave the olman and the olaid the points they needed to get their first council house. They already had a healthy daughter but one child was not enough to get up the list. They had to escape the brush. The cove in the flat down below would bang the end of a wooden handle on his ceiling, their floor, whenever the baby cried or there was any other sign of his tenants surviving. My father had survived a war. He wasn’t scared of what lurked under the stairs. He just didn’t want to lose the rag. Shoving that brush-handle up or down an orifice belonging to the landlord. I never saw or heard this, because I was only the baby who brought the points for the council house. But he talked about it himself, later on.

  My mother’s health wasn’t that great then, he said. It wasn’t an easy time for them. A weaver was self-employed. If you didn’t get the hours in, you didn’t finish your tweeds. No tweeds, no money. And you were down the list, for the next delivery of warps.

  I don’t remember the flat we escaped. But Westview Terrace is loud and clear. This was and is a pebble-dashed house, part of a row, wearing a blaeberry roof of best Penryn slate. The individual houses have faces and I’ve seen similar groupings of similar shapes in towns on the mainland and on other islands. Kirkcaldy and The Broch. Kirkwall and Lerwick. But the harling or the slate can vary. I don’t suppose anyone was making concessions to local architectural styles because there wasn’t a lot of any style, in towns that had grown big on the backs of squashed herring or on long rolls of linoleum.

  We couldn’t look out to sea but it was never very far away. Stornoway was still a herring port. I would be sent to the corner shop to buy a score. A different fish from the ones you saw swinging over, in dripping baskets. But the same species. They came from a firkin. That sounded like one of the measures laid out, black on pale blue, on the back cover of our school jotters. You had to know how many chains were to the furlong. Down the hoil, some cove off a boat would let me gather one for every digit I could hold out. I think I said that, instead of finger, because it’s like a cubit, which maybe wasn’t on the jotters, but it was in the Bible. The fry was taken from spillage from the crans, swung ashore in creels filled from the hold. We’d go back to the Terraces with handfuls, held out ahead. We’d leave behind, drying on the concrete, the cuddies we’d caught. These were small fry of lythe, saithe, cod and whiting.

  Later I learned that the cuddy was strictly only the young of the saithe or coalfish. In other parts of Scotland the word means horse. Coves from away are welcome to use the word any way they want but we know what it really means. These fish had gone for a sliver of bait, torn from the bone with your hand. That was offered on a halfpenny hook to brown cotton line. When you had a bite, you pulled so the fish made an arc through the salt air to finish against the weeded concrete. I don’t know why we had to kill them.

  One of our neighbours worked on a boat, not a drifter. She was stacked high with pots. It was lobsters then. Prawns were trawled up, amongst the fish. These days, an occasional fish appears like a miracle among the prawns. We’d get a bucket of tails now and again from a Broch boat with a Strachan or a Tait fa kent Sandy Sim’s quine. That was my olaid.

  She’d do them there and then. The sister, Kirsty, and me would get to wait up. You’d to let the pale pink prawns cool that bit so you could give them one squeeze inwards, one out. The white meat would then come out clean and whole, from the shell. You couldn’t stop till they were all gone.

  Then we’d sleep. We didn’t know then that the lobster and langoustine, the high-status shellfish which boil red, are the scavengers of the seafloor. They tear and eat dead things.

  Westview

  When you interrupt yourself in a story, for any reason, you go back. Not always the full way but you backtrack before you gain forward momentum. It can be long enough before you overtake your original point. This is good. The first telling has raised ghosts but their friends have had time to wake up by the time you’re on t
he second.

  I can’t go back further than Westview. This is no dead end. All the houses are double-skinned with cavities left between the walls, linked only with galvanised fixings, spaced for additional strength. I’ve seen enough being built to know the construction. We were already in ours when the streets around it were still to be completed. Finished in that pukey pebble-dash.

  Round the backs, space was left for the peat-stacks and tattie patches. Most tenants had only just moved in from the rural parts of the Island. They brought their ways of life with them, in the removal vehicle. Usually it was a works’ lorry, out of hours, driven by a mate, on a dry evening. My uncle said we had enough ground at the back to keep a cow. We did too, but he was only joking. That’s what folk were leaving.

  The front was for show, with annuals and roses and cured paths. People who cared for their gardens got upset when the football went over the privet. The hedges were slow to get going. In a few years, they’d be dense and cropped or high and wild.

  Westview turns on to Jamieson Drive, which turns on to KT. Kennedy Terrace. I don’t know who Kennedy was. Jamieson must have been from Shetland but we said it as Jimson. Cul-de-sacs, mapped into the overall design, made a turning place for these peat lorries, rubbish collections, mobile shops. It was also a self-contained stadium with a lamp post for a floodlight. At first, no-one had cars so there was nothing to interfere with the games. It was mostly football by day. At night, those who had been to Cubs or Brownies taught their own versions of British Bulldog. Whatever the chants or questions in these games, you always had to run for some base. Get home to an established point. Kick the can. Start again from that.

  There were groupings of names in the guessing games – Gold Flake, Woodbine, Bogey Roll. Our Kirsty was great at them all. There would always be a sprinkling of older kids with the main gang, all about the same age. She would organise us, a bit.

  My mother sent me for ten Embassy tipped and a packet of Ryvita. The word Embassy wasn’t in our game yet. These fags only arrived after the tape was cut on MacLennan’s Corner Shop. I had money for a thru’penny toffee. I didn’t have to run to Johnny Og’s on Bayhead for the plain loaf. A baker’s batch or two now came up the road in the van for eight o’ clock. You could ask for your rolls soft or crisp. The loaf was always crisp, the top was near-black, over the pure high sides.