A Funeral

I booked into the Alexandria Hotel. It wasn’t very expensive. I was anxious, driving down on my own. The hail was lying. I had the estate car which looked like shit but was mechanically sound. It looked after me fine. I was knackered and didn’t even go out. For a while, driving, I was thinking of the chip shop where you can ask for lemon sole rather than haddock but I was beyond that now. I’d picked up a sandwich when I stopped for diesel and I had that with the tea, in my room. Shit, UHT in plastic tubelets.

Das Boot was on the telly. I’d never seen the whole film. Men trapped in a steel cylinder. Now that must be close to Hell. A crew with a skipper who never gives up. But it’s the engineer who saves the ship. The ironies build up at the big parade. They’re about to get another batch of medals. But an air-raid comes and they all die, on the surface, in port. I never watched telly at home. I’d spend most evenings in the workshop itself or else leafing through files in the storage area up above it.

I’d thought I might have a view of the stretch of coast between the harbour and Broadsea, where Willum had once let me work the wee yole when he hauled a couple of pots. But now, I looked away from the sea to a row of houses that had been handsome once.

These must have been a big step up for folk like my roller-skating, singing and dancing grandparents. They’d stepped up to one of these, inside cludgy and all, from living with all the eight bairns piled into one room.

These same houses were boarded up now. Sheets of ply were nailed across where the windowpanes might still be. Talk about seeing through a bloody glass darkly. I think that was Paul rather than Peter. You could see a bit of coming and going but not much. One door at least could still open, in the block.

I remembered where I’d seen something like this before. We’d driven through the streets of Belfast on our way to a music festival in Dundalk, when I was a student. There were houses boarded like that. And I’d seen worse later in Derry, a visit for research. I’d decided that events were still all too close to be a suitable subject matter for a dissertation.

The War of the Worlds robot feet on the electronic watchtowers. They were surveying the estates. You could see a bright sprinkling of tricolours and Palestinian flags. Over in the rival estates, the Loyalist side, they flew Israeli flags in response. A few years later, I saw an exhibition where a Scot called Alec Finlay had asked to replace all the national and sectarian emblems with printed studies of wind-blown clouds. It was a reference to Basho, a Japanese poet. It gave a calm feel for a short time.

Back to this war-zone in the town that used to be our family’s El Dorado.

Young Andra was a casualty. They say some people have greater tolerance to addiction of any sort. I thought I was like that with the tobacco and the dope but now I’m not so sure. Some people get hooked faster and get off it earlier. Folk like me maybe take a long time to succumb to their deep wants and then have to give in to them.

I only ever really knew one guy who’d had a full-time addiction to opiates. I’d never heard from Torcuil, my old angling mate, since he left the Island all these years ago after burying his girlfriend.

Once, I stopped the car on the quiet street in Coalsnaughton. Off the main road. I used to reach out to Torcuil’s along the railway line. Sauchie was in the news too, for a few days of tabloid headings. A Scottish Republican living there was done for carrying arms. I might have gone to school with him.

But this time I was on my way back from a Coastguard training course. I’d brought a rod along, to cast a spinner in the sea at Highcliffe, in the hope of catching a sea bass, a fish I’d never seen in the flesh. Of course we went for pints when the official day was done and that was the real training, maybe even the therapy. Amongst the shop and the gossip, the stories of incidents. So I never wet a line.

I’d turned off before the Forth Bridge and crossed at Kincardine. I’d got the bus out there once, from Sauchie, to catch dark flounders we didn’t risk eating. I found the road up to Gartmorn Dam. There was something different but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I thought there might have been more pike fishers about. This was getting close to winter and I cast the spinner out near the island, the place where Torcuil took the big pike. Something wasn’t right. I folded the telescopic rod and walked all the way round to where the burn ran in. The water was high but the ripples and deep browns were the backs and dorsals and adipose fins of trout that still had the spawning instinct.

Folk must have netted the pike and perch and restocked the dam – but not with the imposter rainbow trout, peely wally shadows of their North American originals. These were native browns, bred for the entertainment of fly-fishers. Probably Loch Leven stock, in genetic origin, like the trout shipped out to India to stock the clear Kashmiri streams.

I was lucky not to get arrested on two counts – spinning in fly-only water and out-of-season with it. So I watched and noted the change of circumstances. The condition of the place had not remained frozen in the same state it was in that year the teuchter went home. I drove away from the Dam and out the road to Coalsnaughton. Parked just along from the large detached house. I had no way of knowing if Torcuil’s mother was alive or if her son was clean now or even still on the planet. It might or might not still be the family house. Courage failed me and I didn’t leave the car. I drove on before I was reported as behaving suspiciously.

Old Andra’s bairns helped get his wheelchair into the kirk. He wasn’t going to make it to the graveside. The service was as good as it could be. The minister had known young Andrew personally and seen him develop into a potential leader, potentially a great sportsman, with a very winning personality. Sadly, Andrew’s case was like many others in this town at this time. We would have to hold together as a community and look to see what we could do to help without having to assign blame. There were guilty people of course and they brought a plague as surely as if they had brought bacteria to the town rather than drugs. But once a new group had succumbed they also became dangerous to others. Because the habits of one fed on the habits of another.

In that same way, we had to be aware we were in possession of a more powerful source of change. In that same way, we would use our interdependence to counteract the threat to our community. We could only continue to offer support to our neighbours like Sheila and William and think of them and be with them at this time.