Sine

The room that’s a haven for a while begins to constrain you. Your own legs start to hit against those of the table. You hear the door close behind you and you’re on the stairs. Whatever the weather is doing, out there, it’s welcome.

If there’s a harbour near your room, that’s perfect. There could be high jibs of cranes that run on tracks. There could be the spurts of unburned diesel as big Caterpillars start up in the early hours. There might be landscaped surfaces. Restored buildings. There could even be cobbles (surface of rounded stones) and cobles (flat-bottomed beach boats for salmon fishing) and rows of parlour-pots, stacked up for the photographs.

At Stonehaven you could round the shore towards Low Water and then see the smaller commercial boats discharging their codlings and fluke. The radars would still be spinning. All this in the foreground. A step or two back shorewards, you’d see the signs of leisure activities. Racks and racks of bright sea kayaks. And signs of dinghies, under canopies. A shelf of aluminium masts.

I slept in a garret right over the Bridge of Cowie. Might have been possible to catch a sea trout from the window. I was a bit preoccupied though. Trying to get right back into the studies. Final year. Comes to the stage you just want to get shot of them. Get back out into the world again.

Whatever the hell the real world is. Trouble is, the more you get into a subject, the harder it is to keep it tidy. What’s the point of studying history if you’re not making comparisons? To get steady good grades and deliver on time, you need to limit the fields. Or unlimited time.

I emerged, rubbing the eyes, to phone my mother. I was too late. Poor Sheena had gone down fast. A mercy, really. The funeral had been yesterday. I should phone Ruaraidh or send a card.

You know how it is. Memory sweeps by at a pace within the confines of a regulation King George the whatsit cast iron kiosk. Between the lines of a phone call to your mother, hours and weeks can flash back and fore in time.

 

Brave woman. I saw her with her hair gone, in the hospital. She was teasing me about the dungarees. Real Soviet-issue job. Very appropriate for the history student. I was thinking back to the summer holiday I’d spent with herself and Ruaraidh. She’d come back from work to find me and my uncle in the living room with the telly on. Newsflashes. I was not away on the bike, fishing. Unusual. She sat to join us, hardly believing the imagery of the tanks. She would call herself a Socialist. We were witnessing something different. That poor Jan Palach. Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. My arse.

I’d never heard her swear. Never heard any aunt swear. Not even one by marriage.

She was always witty and wry but she had nothing to say, that time. She never even went for the kettle, never put her shopping bag away. I was shocked when I saw some tears. She was tough and always won arguments.

Last time I saw her, she was home in bed. In remission. But there should have been a meal together. Ruaraidh was to pick me up after the early shift. A fank. Just like we used to. Business as usual. Back to the town homestead after. It would be marag and bacon and eggs though. Maybe get a bit of fried duff with it.

But we stayed over at Griomsiadair, at the next croft, for tea and sponge cake and stuff and this is the weird thing. My excuse was that the timing was getting tight for a meeting I needed to get to. But my stomach was in a knot all that year. I couldn’t see me coping with a fry-up after a daft bit of light cake. As the saying goes, you’re not cracking up if you know you’re going crazy. But I didn’t think I was going crazy.

In the phonebox on the Bridge of Cowie, about one year later, I knew it, all right. Fucking meeting. After the olman’s funeral, there was only one meeting that mattered that year. That was eating with Ruaraidh and Sheena. And I’d ratted out of it. Aye, a brave dame all right. Probably the first local woman to a graveside on Lewis. Unless she was being carried. Brave cove, Ruaraidh. Maybe it was no bad thing he liked his dram.

When the olaid sent me the Gazette I saw the notice. That was the first time I realised that this woman who had fed me so often was called ‘Sine’. I’d thought of it spelled the way it sounded – Sheena – not like the word from trigonometry. But of course it was a Gaelic name. Sometimes people called her husband, my uncle, Roddy. I knew his friend as Angus but he would be ‘Aonghas’, pronounced Innes, in the villages out of town. Many people on the island had to answer to two names.

Recovering to sound OK for the olaid. Mind, we’re still in the phonebox. Bridge of Cowie.

No problem, no bother. Grades a wee bit down on before but the tutor said there was a good platform to work on. Sure, sure, I wouldn’t leave it so long.