Gabriele and me were at the settlement stage. That’s another way of saying we were arguing.
She cut across the discussion of practical matters, ‘You couldn’t let go of your need to be part of a congregation until you’d found another relationship. And you couldn’t admit you wanted to break from me until you knew there was the possibility of somewhere else to go.’ A neat analysis. Worthy of a devotee of the mistress of irony, Jane Austen.
Guilty as charged. Maybe I didn’t need advice from the blone in the leather breeks after all.
Gabriele and me should really have had the argument of the two Janes. Maybe it’s already been fully explored but excuse me, I couldn’t get into reading interpretations of interpretations. I got to the end of Pride and Prejudice but I found the certainties of the moral framework pretty offensive. All these manners. But that Jane Eyre, she’s some character. Charlotte Brontë brings you into passion and banter and a fight for justice. I never read it at Uni. It was the daughter, educating me. I felt I was being drawn into a female mind.
But I can hear Gabriele’s counter-argument. If I’d learned to know my own true self, I’d have found ways of expressing it earlier. Aye, as long as these were prudent ways. Jane Eyre’s expression is not always that prudent. Thank the Lord or anybody else you deem appropriate. And I can also hear the daughter’s warning about trusting unreliable narrators too far.
There is a radio ‘pro-word’ or convention, ‘Prudonce’. In the context of radio traffic during a distress, a vessel can remind other vessels to keep other transmissions off the distress frequency.
But we had not really admitted, out loud, that our marriage was in distress. Maybe Gabriele and me always did have a different way of looking at things. That worked well enough for long enough.
You know in yourself when it’s time to shoot the crow. Maybe my thinking is still coloured by Westerns. When it’s time to go, these guys go. There might be an ‘Adios amigo’ and that’s about it. But when you’ve been building up property it’s not that simple. And when you’ve made a child together, it’s impossible.
I had the vasectomy soon after the birth of our wonderful daughter because we were both sure this was plenty of responsibility. Knowing the dangers of spoiling the only child but also knowing that so long as we in the West think that people in other countries should restrict themselves to one, but we ourselves are exempt, then the planet won’t hold us. And it’s an easier op for a man than a woman. So they say. I’m only one guy and have only ever had the one op. So this is not a very scientific bit of data but I can tell you now it wasn’t that painless even though the local policy was to give you a general anaesthetic rather than a local.
It’s all going woozy and you recognise the orderlies from the sea-angling club. One of them is whispering quite loud to the other, ‘Is that the bit we cut?’
The other says, ‘Not sure. Maybe it’s that bit.’
So you just get it together to say, ‘Thanks, guys,’ in appreciation of the double act.
It was bloody sore for a few days after. Make your own considered decision, gentlemen, but don’t believe all the propaganda.
I can’t plot for you the graph which would indicate how a couple had the security to build so much up together and then reach a point where separation was inevitable. The duration of the niggles which become arguments. The shockwaves of said arguments as measured on something you could call a Richter scale. The length of the sulks, the frequency and duration of love-making. The incredible difficulty in doing anything spontaneous.
It’s easy to be analytical afterwards, even if the history is your own one. But something in my inner workings took charge, at the time.
I would wake and it wouldn’t be due to my wife’s snoring.
I was troubled and didn’t know why, at first.
Then I began to tune in to the signals coming from New York. That’s just down the road from Leverhulme Drive. You swing a right at the first roundabout then take the next left. Take the West Side road and stop before the sea. It’s out there and I was hearing a whistle from Emily. One evening and the following afternoon, I’d fallen into the deepest of conversations with that Irish-African-American blone. But we didn’t fall into either of our hired beds, please note.
I’d got a grant to attend a diesel engine maintenance course. My thinking was this – if the bottom falls out of the Scottish Fishing Industry, there could be a lot more berths for sailing yachts. These now come with pukka lightweight diesels. They get hardly any running so they need more maintenance and repairs. That’s an opening.
Gabriele kept asking, ‘Why do you need to do this?’ She said she had enough for us both, between her scheduled hours and the inheritance. I must have had more doubts than I was admitting because I knew I needed to sort out an unspectacular little income.
It was over in Aberdeen and I was in The Lemon Tree. Emily was the support act. But we were looking into each other when she was playing. I had the idea that she’d clocked me hanging on the notes and the lyrics and she’d started playing for me in particular. I had one glass of wine with her but we just tumbled into each other’s phrases. A petrol engine has to keep sparking and exploding. A diesel is different. Once that fuel comes under sufficient pressure to cause a very fine spray, delivered by the injectors, the cylinders will fire and the flywheel has to keep turning and turning. So steady. So little strain. There was a brush of lips on each side of her face, at the door, but I’m still feeling each one.
She turned up for a coffee along at the art gallery next day, to keep that conversation going. Emily replied fast to the first e-mail. But I knew to be wary of the Send button. If you write a letter you have to make a step or two to post it.
I woke up thinking about her. I heard the tune, in my head, every night for about a year. Gabriele was sleeping a lot these days, in the afternoon, when she could, after work or at the weekends, as well as the evenings.
Something was happening to my memory. I realised it first, the week after the olaid’s funeral. We’d had a good week with Kirsty. I’d seen her off on the plane that morning. The sorting out could wait. The jobs on the boat and our own house had been dropped while I got the olaid’s stuff sorted, alongside the sis.
Then I returned to my tinkering. Fine-tuning the installation of the restored small diesel in the restored Peace and Plenty. We were soon back in commission. I was out in her, on a fine day, at the mooring. Bright sunshine with warmth on my neck, in the harbour I know well. I began to be aware that I was lonely as fuck and I couldn’t remember where the third strand of the first tuck of the eye-splice went.
This is a job I’ve done thousands of times. And I tried to be methodical and slow it all down but it just wasn’t working.
I remembered I’d still got the brick aboard. Think they’d just stopped calling them cellphones then. There was a good signal and I phoned a friend, another sea angler and said, ‘This sounds daft, I’m doing a job at the mooring and I’ve forgotten how to do an eye-splice.’
‘You’re the guy that taught me it,’ Michael said.
‘Aye, but the mooring’s half done. The rope is cut and the tide is rising. Are you busy right now?’
‘I’ll be over,’ he said but he didn’t hang up. I didn’t, either. Then he said, ‘Remember I used to be a fisher of men?’
My voice said, ‘Aye, you were the Piscie minister in the New Wave tweed jacket. Deep purple.’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I was an Episcopalian priest. I think you’re suffering from post-bereavement stress and it’s perfectly normal. Can you pick me up in the dinghy?’
The former priest did the splice before the tide covered the link. The mooring was saved even if the fate of its owner was in the balance.
During the day I’d be functioning fine. Or I’d be thinking I was. At night I’d be lying awake beside a sleeping wife. I began to compose letters to a woman in New York. They were more direct than any e-mails I sent. But I never posted them. Even the e-mails petered out.
There’s a bit of luck enters everything, good or bad. You saw that often in the Coastguard Service. Some guys got away with it, others didn’t. Both Gabriele and myself lost our fathers at much the same time. Later we lost our mothers within a year or two of each other. Maybe we could have supported each other better if there had been more of a gap. To the outside world, it probably looked like we were both coping.
We kept buying bikes for each other. They kept getting rusty, outside, unused. Maybe there was a good winter’s day and she would cycle to work but the next day she might be exhausted, for no reason. I’d get my own out but salt would get into the chain and gears and I couldn’t bear the thought of all that damage. I built a bike-shed but I didn’t go cycling with her. Maybe all our sheds, in all our drives and crescents, are home to nearly new bikes, seized from lack of use.
My Piscie mate went off to try to start a new life in Edinburgh with a woman he met in the Guardian. His wife had already found a Lewisman with shining eyes and a Gaelic voice, from the next village. So, pretty soon, after the messy business of the filthy lucre, everyone was pretty much happy. Michael told me this was nothing really sudden. It had been on the cards for a while. There was a bit of history. And it was a good few years since he realised he had lost his faith. The usual issue – reconciling all the suffering of the innocent with the idea of a Being that still has influence over his creation. And if he doesn’t – if he just set the whole thing up with man’s freewill as a mixed blessing, then what’s the point of praying?
He called me up from his new life.
‘I’m amazed this number works. You’re not still on the brick?’
‘No, it got salted. Anna fixed me up with this new one and showed me how to do the brain transplant. The phone’s I mean.’
‘Sure. Look, Peter, I don’t know if I should be telling you this but…’
‘Aye well, you’d better, now.’
‘There’s a gig in the Jazz Café, Friday next. Chambers Street. Just round the corner. A sultry New York visiting artist. Wasn’t that when you were thinking of trying to come down for a break?’
‘Not a black Irish singer-songwriter with a leaning towards jazz but sounding nothing like Joni Mitchell. One who did a Scottish tour before, culminating in the Lemon Tree?’
‘The same.’
We had of course shared our stories.
I went down the road.
You think you’ve come to look into the eyes of another but the reality is that a real breathing person would have to conform to an impression that’s been developing inside your own head. The e-mails, back and fore, with Emily had kept up the urgency, the dangerous spark of language. This time, we didn’t flow. Maybe it had something to do with the plan to give Anna a lift back up the road. She was just finishing her first year in Newcastle. Literature and film studies. This awareness just reminded me I was not a free man.
I came out of a year-long dayandnightdream on the sitting room futon in the Drummond Street flat. Michael was holding me by the shoulders to contain the sobbing.
‘Sorry to wake you,’ I said. It wasn’t something I could control. This was a space I’d never been in. Not even in the hallucinogenic days.
I thought I was lovesick for the woman sleeping somewhere in this same city. Michael told me I’d been sobbing for hours. He didn’t want to break into something I had to do but he couldn’t leave it any longer. He’d seen me scribble in the jotter, bought to take notes for the conference. History, this time, not engines. Pity the psychoanalyst wasn’t there. Or maybe just as well. He showed me what I’d done. The pad was chock-full of intricate doodles, working it all out.
Like the splice. I was nearly there, he was sure.
‘You’re not fucking unique, you know,’ the Piscie mate said. ‘It’s just about one year after your mother’s passing. I don’t think your anxiety is about love. I think it’s about death.’
He wasn’t finished. ‘Something I’ve been meaning to ask,’ he said. ‘The Coastguard job. You must have seen a few missions with a sad outcome.’
‘Aye. A few.’
‘Did you get counselling?’ he asked.
‘Don’t think that was invented, back then. The Civil Service did welfare stuff but I never heard anyone offer counselling,’ I said.
‘Did you ever talk about them – the jobs that didn’t go well?’
‘I made reports. You got a paragraph – maybe two – to tell the story.’
‘Did you talk about them with your watchmates?’
‘One or two.’
‘One or two jobs or one or two watchmates?’
‘Both of these. Just the guys who were on watch at the time. The guys who’d been through it with you. Remember we were only the co-ordinators. We didn’t go out into dangerous situations and get cold and wet.’
‘It might have been easier if you had.’
‘I did jot down a few notes once. One night in The Broch. I was hearing the voices.’
‘Maybe you need to go back to that,’ Michael suggested. ‘Find a form for it. Just tell the story.’