Fidelity

I couldn’t go back up the stairs after that conversation in the phonebox. A good healthy whiff of exhaust down my lungs might help. I walked along the road first, not sure why. I’d got used to the traffic noise and lights. That was before the bypass. Sharp night.

The shadow of the swimming pool – it was closed in winter. Remember outdoor pools? Spaced along the east coast, Tarlair, Stonehaven, Arbroath, Eyemouth.

The olman had driven us from one to the other, one summer holiday, since we’d learned to swim.

And, of course, that night I took the path away from the bridge, the one that led round to the sea. Heard the sifting of pebbles down the shore. Heard a Gaelic song in my head. A tune I never knew I knew.

Coming by the breakwater. The smaller trawlers were landing. A few boats still worked longlines. Then there were smaller boats still, ones that could take the ground, as they say, fall over on one side when the tide dropped, keel in the mud.

Amongst them I saw the Fidelity. PD. Registered in Peterhead. But when you said the two letters it could be peedie, as in the Shetland way of saying wee.

She was half-decked, rigged with a bowsprit. The details, again. I was seeing with a close-up lens and the focus was sharp. When you’re fucking hurt, guilty to the core, the perceptions burn bright.

A man in a fishing gansey and a Hamburg or Breton-type cap was checking her running mooring, taking up slack. There was a bit of a blow coming in.

When I admired the boat, he said I was from Lewis, had to be, from the voice.

‘You’re not, though. Northumberland? But how come you caught on to my accent so fast?’

Well, how had I caught on to his? Pretty fair stab, that.

‘I went to hear some guys play tunes. Tapped along with them. The small-pipes player, he was Northumberland.’

‘Aye, and so were his pipes. But I lived on Lewis enough years, to recognise a voice from SY. Well, I’ve started all over again here. New family. Come on up to the house.’

James led me, one street back from the harbour. Wilma was an artist; graphics, drawings, mainly. His boy played the piano. Electric one, though. They just called it playing keyboards, these days. Mostly jazz. One of his girls had made a career of music – clarinet. We could put a record on later. On the high-fidelity.

We talked about fishing boats.

The shape of the Fidelity was a forerunner of the decked drifters, great black smooth ships that carried a massive dipping lug forward and a standing lug aft, not much smaller. This was a little craft, maybe nineteen-foot six. The scaffies had often been built to thirty-foot or more. He didn’t know of any of those which had survived. Being open to the skies, a lot of them were lost in famous storms. Government Inquiries recommended a move to decked boats.

There was a toddler and a baby. A large fish tank. Oriental rugs on the walls and on the floor. The hangings all had a twist to the warp or weft and the colourings were something.

The wee girl led me up the stairway to see the trains. We bypassed a blue painted spar with a white cotton sail bent on it. Aye, I’ve a very understanding wife.

‘A wife as flipping crazy as himself, more like,’ Wilma said.