A Book of Death and Fish (35 page)

Her speech never really recovered from the big stroke. In The Broch they say a body has ‘taen a shock'. Her eyes seemed to move that bit faster. So you had no doubts she was taking everything in. She got her home-helps trained. None of them would talk down to her. Otherwise the olaid would get aggressive. No wonder.

But you could tune into her new voice. She'd a memory for turns of phrase. I offered to get her to the kirk one week, if she wanted. We might need a shottie o a chair.

‘A hope it's ane wi wheels you're speakin aboot and no ane wi electricity tae fry me,' she said.

The kirk means the Church of Scotland. Not the one on Kenneth Street. Definitely not the one on Scotland Street. Nor the Bayhead division, nor the new one, out Sandwick way. And of course the new Catholic Church, also on Scotland Street isn't in the equation. Hope you've got all that.

‘No, dinna worry, Peter, loon. I'm nae bothered aboot goin tae the kirk.'

I knew she was worried about how long she could go without the toilet but she saved face.

‘Last time I went there I got naethin but cheek. We'd just seen a coffin oot o the kirk and oer tae the men tae carry her. A neebor fae Westview cam up to claik.
You knew her well, Mary?
she asks. Aye, says me, weel enough, poor soul. She's at peace the noo.
Was she a good age, Mary?
the other ane asks. No really. I dinna think she was saxty-five.
How old are you yourself, Mary?
Saxty-four, I says.
My word,
she says,
do you think it's worth your while going home?'

But the olaid seemed able to accept it when she lost this and that. As long as it was physical. Stuff got delivered to her modified house. It was the zimmer first. Later, we needed the Social Work wheelchair to get out of the house. We still called it a stroll when I took her round the block. She kept asking if I could understand her. She missed talking to Canada on the phone but she got flustered when Kirsty couldn't make out what she was saying. I told her not to worry, I'd let her know if she wasn't making sense.

I remember telling her about the time I went to borrow the tractor. We were towing a heavy boat to the harbour. A favour for a favour. Anyway, my mate was on the dayshift but he said to pick up the tractor – the grey Fergie painted red. But I'd to see his sister first. Aye, Portrona Drive, the urban croft.

Nobody came to the door when I rang so I went out to have a look at the beast. I was going to give her a warm-up anyway but nothing happened with the starter. Right then the
bodach
came running over. I'm not kidding, he was like a whippet. He'd been dozing in the chair, out the back door but he just woke up and came running.

‘The battery,' he said. ‘It's the battery. John's got terminals in a box.'

So we found them together. It wasn't long before I had one connected to replace the cracked one. But before I could step aboard, the
bodach
was in the seat and the Fergie was away and nearly took the gate off.

The daughter came running out then and waved her arms till he stopped and dismounted. She'd been on the phone. They had a few words and he went meekly back to his seat.

‘John puts that cracked terminal on whenever he leaves the house,' she said. ‘That's why he asked you to see me first. The
bodach
's grounded. He's lost it for driving anything.'

You had to admire him grabbing the opportunity.

But when the olaid heard that one from me, she leaned over quietly.

‘A wee word in yer shell-like. Am fair enjoyin the fitba an th athletics an th snooker on the telly,' she said.

‘Aye?' I said.

‘Aye, but promise me somethin. If you ever call by an catch me watchin the cricket on the telly, get somebody tae shoot me.'

She wasn't finished.

‘I jist like tae ken there's enough tae cover the funeral. That's all we're needin in the kitty,' she said. ‘But a dinna think there's muckle tae be anxious aboot. It's like my ain grannie. Grannie Bruce. When ane o the loons tellt her to behave herself or they widna bother aboot a funeral, she says till him, Weel if ye'll nae bury me for love ye'll bury me for stink.'

First, grow some dill and that flattish-bladed Italian parsley. If you’ve the use of some ground, use that, otherwise put a grow-bag in a fishbox. Plastic is fine. Wooden ones are collector’s items now.

Go to a hidden loch. It has to be a long way from the road. It’s best to go a few days after a decent rainfall.

Leave the fly rod behind because it will get in the way. Late season on Lewis, there’s likely to be squalls too fierce to cast against. Worms are good bait if you can bear to put them on a hook. If not you could cast a spinner.

When you’ve caught enough for the number of people who’ll be eating, leave. You’re unlikely to get done for poaching with rod and line but they’ll take your fish.

Have a dram and start cooking while you’re still hungry from the bogslog.

Gut fish, leave heads intact and make several slashes across the thick backs so the seasoning and butter will enter the pink.

Stuff the cavities with as much parsley and dill, maybe chives, as you can fit.

Stuff more butter in the cavities as well as in the slits, or olive oil if you’d rather. A fair turn of pepper. A fair squeeze of lemon.

A grill at the top of an oven is best so they’re kind of half baking as they’re browning. Look for the skin crackling. Turn with care.

Best if there’s some new potatoes, home-grown. If you don’t have a plot of ground, you can grow them in a tub or inside a couple of tyres, holding soil.

You can dribble on the buttery juices from the pan, maybe with a drop of white wine stirred in but I wouldn’t bother doing the cream sauce bit.

More greenery wouldn’t go wrong.

Let’s stay with this. Going to take a sea trout. Going out over the hill. This is research. You don’t want to postulate a pattern too soon. You don’t want to assume this is like that. This proves that. Or that causes this.

There are false friends in history as in language – words that you think you know because they sound the same but have a different meaning in a different context. Like ‘cuddy’, as I may have mentioned before – that mad way the mainlanders use the word for a fish to mean a horse. Just the one example.

The example in my own mind now is ‘Allied Forces’. There was an occupation, of many countries, in lines out, in several directions, from something called Germany, at the time. These advances were halted, most notably on the eastern fronts. The lines of invaders were eventually beaten back, in Italy and in North Africa, as well as in the Soviet Union. These wars ranged over deserts and over vast, formerly fertile plains. Then a counter-invasion began in Normandy, France. This led to allied forces, advancing through western Europe, as the Russians advanced from the east. So it was also a bit like a race. But Allied Forces is also a computer game. Version 4.0 is best, Anna will tell you. It’s also a term that’s been applied to conjoined efforts to deal with the horrors that occurred in sections of the continent of Europe about fifty years after the recognised end of World War Two. The continent of Europe was still far from peaceful in the last year of a millennium.

A strong case was made for the urgent necessity of collective action of members of the Nato organisation, resulting in the bombing of the country formerly known as Yugoslavia, which took place between March 24th 1999 and June 11th 1999.

Atrocities which became known in allied countries as ‘ethnic cleansing’ but as ‘Operation Horseshoe’ in Kosovo, were documented beyond all reasonable doubt. Systematic human rights abuses directed at the Kosovan population were an obvious precursor of an escalation of violence against civilians. These actions were already well documented in the Balkan conflict.

This was officially confirmed in 2005 when the United States Congress passed a resolution declaring that ‘the Serbian policies of aggression and ethnic cleansing meet the terms defining genocide’.

This is the obvious reply to those who point out that the decision to bomb, though taken jointly by Nato members and not solely by the USA, did not in fact have the backing of the United Nations at the time of its execution.

At the time, I’d alternate between the
Guardian
and the
Independent
for coverage of these conflicts. This also happened to be about the time I realised I couldn’t juggle all the demands of being a decent coastguard, father, husband and son. So I quit the job. Thus I no longer had a meal break to spend in a rest room, catching up with a world outside the mapped environs of Stornoway Coastguard’s area of responsibility. (Out to thirty degrees west and abeam the Outer Hebrides, as it happens.)

But my real understanding of the war only began when I ran away with the milkman. I was still living with Gabriele at the time but I’d like to summarise the points in my defence. Mitigation before litigation.

This guy hovered around on pay day. He was in no hurry to get the cash but would lean back and ease himself into Lewis yarning mode. He spoke of fishing. You could map the seasons by his stories. In April we’d be out into the Tolsta moor, way past the bridge-to-nowhere and he’d name the deep lochs which hid a stock of fit native trout. He’d describe the shades of their speckles and the depth of their taut bellies. The wide muscle in their dimpled dark backs. The pallid nature of the pink in their flesh, falling off the strong but delicate-seeming structure of light bones.

Later there would be word of the first salmon. Usually a grilse, a fish that’s spent only about a year in the ocean, but a good eating size, about right for sending whole into the oven, in a tomb of silver foil, not much less bright than the flanks of the fish when it came into the side of the peaty water. Not long from the sea.

Finally, in October, there would be mention of sea trout. The late stock that sprints for the lochs at the tops of systems, the ones reached only by the strides of the fittest of guests.

‘Where do you usually go?’ I asked. And then, ‘Would there be any chance of me tagging along?’ and then, ‘What do I bring?’ And then, ‘Only oilskins?’ And then, ‘No tent, no survival bag, sleeping bag, any of that?’

‘You can bring a wee camping gas stove, for the tea,’ the milkman said.

Of course Anna wanted to come when she saw me oiling the old reel. I was swithering because of course it would be as educational as anything she’d get at school. But it would also be illegal. Despite the efforts of that calm pipe-smoking MP of ours. At least he’d said his piece, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen of the House, you must understand that in my constituency poaching is not regarded as a crime but a moral duty.’ Donald Stewart, quoted in Hansard.

Let’s try it out.

This was composed but not submitted.

I went alone with my friend and so we had no need of notes. I had already drafted my notice to the Coastguard Service so that I could consider the possibility of becoming a full-time juggler. That was also composed but not submitted. The roles of son, husband and father all seemed to involve a lot of building work. Being a husband was also about listening to anxieties and pacing shores while doing so, glimpsing other people going out at sea.

So of course I wanted to bask in the milkman’s beaming smile and enjoy his jovial nature as we slogged through mud. We had to take the wet route because the estate had been granted planning permission to blast a track out through the shorter, higher route. They always do get the
permission. There would of course be a spare key for the gate, available for recognised representatives of the community.

The milkman is a fit cove, for one so heavily built. I was glad I didn’t have the weight of camping gear on my back. But you hit a rhythm as you slog through bog and once the cold surface water has seeped over the tops of your boots, it’s done and the layer warms a bit inside.

We were getting close to the top loch and it was late in the day. There would be about an hour and a half of daylight left. I asked why we were not going direct through the saddle but had to climb the nearest hilltop, right to the top.

‘We’ll get a good look from here,’ the milkman said. ‘Some of these toffs are keen. They might still be at it.’

We took a good sweep of the loch, through the glasses and walked on down the glen by the burn. It looked good. There was nothing moving.

The milkman was still cautious as we went quietly down and across to approach that loch, nestled under crumbling inland cliffs. He went straight to the usual bank – a long bed of gravel, broken by a few large protective rocks. We tackled up. I impaled a worm and put the rod back to cast. ‘Impaled’ is a funny word. In this case it means that I threaded the wriggling creature along the shank of a bent steel hook and made sure a barb broke its skin so that it couldn’t fall off. Once upon a time, I made many cups of Darjeeling for a gentle Christian friend, whose studies of the sciences enabled him to explain to me how an organism such as a worm is incapable of feeling pain. I might not be able to argue with that but it can’t be comfortable.

I was threading the fly line through the rings when the reel on the worming rod began to screech. You leave only a little tension on, so a fish can take some line if it pulls strongly. That way, a salmon or a hefty sea trout can’t pull your rod and reel into the water. It’s been known to happen.

I went for the rod and noticed the milkman was into a fish. The light was already fading but you could hear a decent splash. He reeled his fish in, before I saw mine and it sounded substantial. Mine would make runs and half leaps, when it seemed to be tiring, but soon a black and silver speckled trout was gasping, as its tail caused it to beat up the gravel. I
pounced and took hold of a fish of about two pounds. I swung its head against a rock and it quivered. Then I reached out for the can of worms. The fly rod was abandoned at that point.

The milkman had three or four and I had two. Then it went dark. Then they stopped taking.

‘I thought sea trout took in the dark,’ I said.

‘Well, they do,’ the milkman said. ‘At least, you get an odd one.’

That was the cue for the hail. You could just about still make out the anvil-shaped clouds, speeding to dispense their electrical discharge. A blast of sleet gained momentum as it followed the gradient of the glen and came right at us.

My fingers were shaking, not functioning properly as I reached for my oilies. More of the road-workers issue than the marine quality we’d need in this high loch, well up from salt. No wonder the sea trout were fit, negotiating that gradient. Hungry too. But it was maybe too cold for them to emerge from their sheltered lies to feed at night. Oh well, only about eleven hours dark to go.

When the shivers came, I had the thought, I’m here because I chose to be here and because I’m lusting after one of the finest fish of all. The look of it and the taste of it. But out in Bosnia and in the ruins of Sarajevo, people were huddling in weather that would make this seem like summer. And they had no home to go to, in the morning.

You get these moments of clarity and concentration.

‘Do you want some tea?’ I asked. But the milkman was dozing. He had a bit more insulation than me. A squat, well-built, unstoppable man. I got the flint in the lighter flicking and the gas flared. There was enough peace behind a boulder, to shelter it, till there was a boiling in the stainless pot. But I didn’t pour it for a long time. I got my boots and socks off and held my feet to take in some of the heat from the steaming water.

In the morning we took another few fish. The milkman was twitchy.

‘We’d better not be greedy,’ he said. ‘They’ll take them off us if they’re up here early.’

So we did the slog back. The fish got heavier as we walked. He’d judged that about right.

Twelve months later, I ran away with the milkman again. By this time, teams of forensic scientists were preparing to travel to the former Yugoslavia to investigate sites in areas coming under UN control.

‘Same procedure as last year?’ But I brought a lightweight sleeping bag and an orange plastic skin. My own body-bag. Once the bites tailed off, I dived in and said, ‘Wake me up when they’re jumping.’

I saw him not so long ago in Engie’s. That’s the petrol station where you also buy tackle. We made a deal for next year, if we’re spared. But it wasn’t only the milkman I met there.

I also bumped into the MP. Not the dead one with the pipe. This time it was the Labour MP who felt that the Kosovo air-strikes had achieved something worthwhile. We talked about the headlines. The Middle East was looking unstable again. The Saddam issue was the crucial factor, he said.

‘Well,’ he added, ‘the precedent is there. We’ve come a long way from being pacifists. We’re up against aggressors with a degree of ruthlessness we thought we’d never see again. The systematic use of rape as a weapon. The herding of people into camps. That could ony be countered by collective action. And the precedent of a sanctioned air-strike is there now. The Nato bombing in Kosovo.’

On the other hand, I thought but did not say, a strong case could be made out for viewing the pragmatic Nato decision to drop deaths in Yugoslavia as an action which itself became a cause of escalating violence. Subsequent investigation by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia confirmed that the Yugoslav security forces did indeed commit proven atrocities upon the civilian population of Kosovo. Many successful prosecutions at international courts proved that the evidence for these was beyond reasonable dispute.

However, the same body also found that the majority of these acts, which included mass murder as well as mass rape, took place
during
the bombing directed by Nato but not sanctioned by the UN, rather than before it.