I was missing the driveway more than the village of outbuildings but it felt good to be back in the sway of the town. You could say I’d never been out of it, but it wasn’t about where you were laying your head. It was about being hemmed in. Anna was off to Newcastle. I said the Geordie accent would blend well with SY. I made my own move, not long after. It was a shit time, some ways. Gabriele wasn’t in a good state. I’d lost my own buoyancy. I was sluggish in the water. But some mornings I woke with a sense of relief.
When you’re unsettled, you go out on walks without being definite about where you’re heading. Or you find you’re in the car that’s stopped in front of a workshop. You have to re-map your own home town for yourself.
There’s one Italian café left, out of the three or four, including the one where you received very sound advice along with the coffee. The shoeshop (and centre of moral philosophy) has been converted to flats. The blacksmith is still inventing things and contradicting the pattern of economic activity still somehow generally accepted in the developed world. When you ask him what the damage is, he says, ‘Bring it back when you’re finished with it and I’ll make it into something else.’ And the hoil is in the throws of shifting from a haven for commercial fishing vessels to catering for leisure activities.
I stroll down there most days. I like the colour of the big boats. They’re ageing as fast as me and one by one you simply notice that there’s a name you’re not seeing. Al Crae never fixes a black-bordered notice in the butchers, for them. There was no funeral to mark the passing of Braes of Garry or Sonas or the Golden Sheaf. Their remains would take a bit of carrying, even if a big squad turned out to share the lift. Could be an argument for cremation, there.
The Sonas kept her varnish finish later than most. She might be pulling gear round the bottom of other UK coastal waters. Her larch planking is maybe what inspired me to keep to the natural grain of the timber in the rebuilt Peace and Plenty.
Once, I bought a painting that caught the changes in the colours you see round the hoil. It was in the Save The Children, when I was kitting out my hideaway with coffee cups. It was briefly installed up on the crisp new mezzanine library, over the workshop on Leverhulme Drive. That’s before I realised there was no thinking space in that building either.
I look at a particular orange in Donald Smith’s arrangement of components of heavy vessels and a mizzen sail across a weathered gable. His later paintings show the more bold colours that come from the cans in the Fisherman’s Co-op. Teamac – made or mixed in Scotland.
The prawns from the trawlers don’t go direct to Spain. That market’s served by the neat and careful creel-boats. The selected crabs and lobsters, fit enough to travel far and maintain the standard of Hebridean shellfish. And some of these creel-boats were built not so long ago of Scottish larch. Before architects started specifying it for eco-friendly cladding so it’s well nigh impossible to find boatskin-grade timber in the north of Scotland. Great broad planks of larch are imported from Siberia now.
But the Peace and Plenty has three sections of snug sawn frames. Cut by the cove, from wind-distorted oak and larch, found with the grain that meets the curvature of a given shape. Found amongst the storm-felled timbers out The Grounds. Larch and oak amongst the rare breeds – the russet-grained yew and the cypress that still smells like retsina.
The few trawlers still go out on days when the wind dictates that the new old boat has to stay tied up. You don’t want to get rescued by your former colleagues, even though it’s good to keep guys in jobs. The fisher-boys are generous. One of them will throw you up a few flatfish from the debris on deck. Obese seals cruise in the decklight-lit waters as the sifting and sorting continues. It’s not herring guts that ferment in our mud now, it’s the antennae of small nehrops and immature whitefish. You sift through the muddy shapes and touch the rough skin of a small turbot.
I might get a John Dory, though the larger ones are set aside now for the mixed box for another specialised supplier.
‘We can’t sell one of them, on its own. Is this any good to you?’
I took that one home.
My Episcopalian amigo was back up the road to sort out some of his affairs of this world. Rented property. I steamed the fish for us, cutting insertions so the flanks could be filled with slivers of ginger and lemongrass. Slices of lime go down its gob and into its belly. The spring onions go in after the Sauvignon Blanc and stock. I’ve seen us eating the tail section first, with a touch of the green-top soy sauce. Then it goes on for another minute so it heats up again and the thicker parts will be cooked, till the red at the bone goes pale. And the reduction is intense, to hit the grains of rice and give that background taste which does not dominate the delicate fish.