It needs analysing. It needs an analyst. I should have gone out to dinner with that nice one in the bobbed curls and the leather trousers.

‘You can tell me anything. Anything.’ In a strong French accent but I don’t think I imagined her. We met at a history conference in Edinburgh. This was her hobby. Mine too. To my own surprise, I got it together to submit a paper in time. To my amazement, it was accepted – Health and Industry: the case of the doctor employed by the labourers at Ballachulish Quarry.

But her English might not have been quite up to my complexities. My French certainly wasn’t up to her own individual nature.

But maybe I was learning. When should a guy choose the impossible when other options are available? Because he doesn’t admit to himself, for years and years that they are – or were. That’s what history is. Things you can’t change. Flashback time, again.

 

We’re outside the Arts Lecture Theatre, Aberdeen Uni. The Film Society has shown Les Dentellieres. Sad and beautiful and maybe a touch on the lush side but recommended by a certain very distant German woman who spoke English I could understand very well. And she might have picked up Hebrew too, in that year on the kibbutz.

I was not long back from a train journey to Cologne. It had been a disaster worthy of a wry continental film. I came back, tied up in knots of tension and worried about eating and worried about everything. Maybe I was like that before I left Aberdeen. I just knew about it, when I stepped back on to that platform with a tight gut.

I was no longer a shift-porter with people putting money in my bank account. I spent most of these earnings on a souped up Mini, registered and insured in my mother’s name. Then there was the fishing holiday, staying with the couple on that Finnish island. Before leaving the home island to finish the degree. The olaid liked the car because it was purple. She put up with its attempts at roaring and the banter from the bowling club folk because we could go for spins in it.

I was just too proud to get my arse out again to the phonebox at Bridge of Cowie. I only had to tell the olaid I was writing all these letters to thon German blone I visited on the kibbutz. And I was a bit short on readies except for the trains. I’d paid for them already.

‘Can you help me out?’ How difficult would that have been? But I didn’t say any of that.

So I was uptight about money the whole trip and I didn’t realise there was more train fares to find, along with her schedule of people to visit. Gabriele had arranged things so it was busy enough to be not too personal. We were both being cautious.

But even if cash and eating and everything else were OK, it’s clear as the olaid’s crystal sherry-glasses that this was not going to be an easy voyage. When I say it’s clear, I mean it’s clear now. Not then. Amazing bond you get from coping with stuff. The unexplained loss of a parent, in her case. And the sudden death of one, in mine. All these long letters. Both of us.

There was more to it than that. The powerful forces of fishing and dancing. Gabriele had come over to Aberdeen for the Folk Festival. She’d come along when I took a sea trout on the fly, from the Ythan estuary. She found some wild mushrooms she knew and trusted. It was a fine meal.

And the eightsome got us both out of ourselves, birling like dervishes. Holy shit, looks like the guys in the hats are right about that one too – dancing is dangerous, puts your very soul in jeopardy. I used to think Jeopardy was the name of a town. Maybe near Cairo.

It’s now we need my friend from Marseilles. No kidding, she’s a psychoanalyst with a passion for history. This is the question I failed to ask.

Is this well documented and normal, this way of not really coping with the death of a parent? Looking like you’re doing pretty good – the family meals, the compensatory building of a stronger relationship with other family members. The semblance of balance. Until about a year later, the nosedive comes. Like a plastic Stuka fallen from its fine string of monofilament fishing nylon and heading for the carpet.

The dive manifesting itself in broken sleep, manic behaviour, eating disorders, falling in love. With people who live in other countries. While the near ones are reaching out for you.

Does everyone’s mind work like this? Digression and flashback. Come back with me now again, outside said theatre, in a daze after said film, recommended by said woman, not quite a girlfriend. And you have to forget that there’s nearly a quarter of a century between where we are now and the scene outside the film.

I’ve one hand on the drop handlebars and a present, live young woman says my name. She wants to talk about the film. She wants to go for coffee. This is not correspondence. It’s not my imagination. She’s breathing.

She walks like a dancer. Talking and strolling with her, I now know the phrase. I didn’t know it then. ‘Ca marche comme sur des roulettes.’

It’s going on rollers, man. The sister taught me that one. She said I needed at least one cool phrase, in French.

I don’t look her in the eye because I’m somehow aware I’ll fall in there. She’s slim and has elegant fingers, elegant everything, cropped hair and fine features. My eyes are caught by the way the black on the backs of her hands shifts to pale along the fingers.

She didn’t come to lectures very often but we got talking after a seminar. Then I saw her in the launderette. Not a very beautiful one. She told me she was jealous of me. Why? Because I knew where I was from. She remembered my piece about attitudes to the Chinese opium trade. My approach was a study of recorded statements referring to the proprietor who was seen as a benefactor because of the obvious economic benefits from spending some of the proceeds on my home island. I’d suggested that we could, by analogy, also look more closely at how the slave trade was perceived in Scotland. Maybe a study of letters to newspapers by prosperous residents of a relevant trading town.

People looked at her and saw a black girl with a trace of an American accent so assumed she had a strong cultural identity. But her parents had lived amongst the leafy courtyards and stonework and university culture of Oxford for a part of her upbringing. She spoke with a nice accent. She didn’t know what African-American meant. She didn’t know who she was.

And all I could find to say to this handsome woman, engaging with me again, was that this guy was coming round to the flat tonight. (I was back in Aberdeen city for the last year of Uni.) And I should be heading home in case I missed him.

He was one of the travelling people. He was a relative of my landlord. I wanted to meet him because he could direct me to all these recordings of stories and songs and history which had been retained by the travellers – the outsiders – when they’d been lost by most other sectors of Scottish society. He could just open his mouth and there you would have it, all that knowledge. All these stories.

This is another of these moments when you know just what you should have said. ‘Jump on the carrier. There’s my jacket for a cushion. We’re going to hear some history, first-person narration. Three on a bike’s a bit of a crowd but two’s a piece of piss.’

But I just said I’d love to go for a coffee but someone was coming round and I needed to get back. I couldn’t settle into all these stories I heard that night, because I kept thinking she would have been in her element.

But I was to dance with her twice. Once, she and her flatmates were having a party. I didn’t usually get asked to parties because people knew I didn’t drink and was serious. But I was pulled along by a group, doing the course.

She grabbed my arm. ‘Drink?’

‘No, ta, I’m fine.’

‘Well, let’s dance then.’

‘OK.’

She tried to get me to stay when the others were leaving. I used to wake early, these days. Get up to make the most of the time when your thinking could be clear. ‘You’re not really going now?’

But we did meet again, maybe two years later, not long after I’d finally got together with Gabriele. I’d come back to Aberdeen to see different friends to the ones she’d come to visit. But we went together to hear this band. We’d both been planning to go there. It wasn’t a date. But there was dancing. We were still very compatible dancers. I didn’t walk her to the door of her pals’ flat. Just to the corner of the shared road.

I hope I had the good grace to kiss her the French style. By which I mean a brush of each cheek. I don’t think I did. Of course, I now know I loved her, after these half-conversations. I think I still do. I haven’t heard of her again, since.

Who says men don’t find out their own feelings? In my case, it only took some years. Funnily enough, that quarter of a century again. My analyst friend might tell me that’s about average in male behaviour. And fear is pretty common too. The sort that kills a relationship that’s going to go and throw you off a course you’re pretty well bound to take. Even if you think you’re a nonconformist.

So of course, as part of the slightly late mid-life crisis, I was lost for a time in the eyes and voice of another slim, black lady when she visited that same city to sing in The Lemon Tree. Don’t get me wrong. I saw the singer’s individuality. Her face did not look at all similar to that of my student friend. She was an artist, not a historian. I was not at all conscious of making comparisons or returning to an intense period in my own life. And I was not yet ready to admit to myself or to Gabriele, out loud, that you can only live in a state of sustained tension for a limited time.

The way you lie awake, night after night, composing songs which won’t be sung. Certainly not by the petite diva from New York City. Of course I could always have sent them to her, which might have improved the chances a little. Like buying a lottery ticket increases the odds marginally in your favour.

Then again, maybe I was almost aware that it was another cropped African head I was really seeing and another set of quite pale fingers, equally expressive ones, moving before me when the world was a bit younger.

Something inside your skull activates some gland or other so one desire damps down another. It’s a force for defence in that it attacks love. It’s lethal and in fact capable of killing passion before it has a chance to start.

So the death I’m discussing in this paper is without question a murder. I don’t even have to consult my lawyer mate, to confirm this. It’s quite clear that a real possibility of love was killed by wilful avoidance.

And now, so many years later, it seems that you’re still quite capable of disregarding the lessons of your most personal history. A bit like the Griomsiadair boys (that’s the old men, remember?), heading out into the Minch when the great, black drifters are running for harbour. But do you think we can be too hard on ourselves?

When I fell into deep conversation with Emily, the singer, I was not yet ready to admit, consciously, that I needed the kind of space that is not created by building physical structures but by clear thinking. Even if I’d already taken that step, I’d still not been able to sit down and talk it all out with the woman who bore a child we made, together.

I’m suggesting now, without the advantage of professional advice, that a less conscious part of you is really making the connections. But it also informs your conscious self, eventually, so it too has a chance of coping with them.

That’s conflict.

There is one piece of documentation.

It’s not objective but it is contemporary. I found a scrap of paper in the flyleaf of a notebook. An attempt to keep track of a project which was in danger of getting out of control. I knew at the time the building work, for my mother, could easily get out of hand. But I didn’t have a clue what else was going on, in my head.

I don’t think this is a love poem and so I can copy it here. I don’t think it’s really addressed to either of these two black women I met, all those years apart, in Aberdeen city.

At last, I do know what it is. It’s a town boy’s version of all these Gaelic songs of separation.