A passing van, maybe a postal worker’s van rattling along the island’s skinny roads, would have noticed a boy with an architecture of hair carefully closing the door of a big double-fronted house that operated as a B&B. There was a big NO VACANCIES sign in the window, and the boy coming out of the door was part of the NO VACANCIES. His mam and dad slept, indeed snored, upstairs. It was early in the morning and the day’s paint was still wet.
A hawk circling like an LP on a turntable would see the boy walk across the road and pause at the other side, looking around and trying to take everything in. The sea is a mirror of the blue sky, already bright at this early hour because it is June and the days are almost too long to fit the calendar. The hawk would have noticed that the boy is carrying a notebook. If the hawk was a fan of poetry (and who knows, it may be. They are the subject of many.), it may have concluded that the boy looked a little bit from above like the young Dylan Thomas and this would have pleased the boy very much because the boy wants nothing more than to be a poet and he has been soaking in Dylan Thomas since he discovered his poems in Darfield Library one rainy Friday evening just before Mrs Dove said ‘Seven o’clock please’ and I prepared to go.
Yes, the boy is me. I am on holiday with my parents on the Isle of Skye. It’s my first time on this transcendent and singing rock and I am fourteen years old and the cauldron of adolescence is bubbling and smoking and I want so desperately to be a poet that I am taking every opportunity to slip away from my mother and dad who, as far as I’m concerned, live on a planet inhabited by war memories and fly-tying, to write poems that are so tortured I’m surprised their bones don’t shatter and their muscles shred.
A gull on a fence near the footpath to the sea that we wandered down last night sees me take out my notebook and begin to write about it, trying to distil its feathery essence into a learner poet’s overheated lines. God bless all learner poets, I say, with L plates on their stanzas. They are learning the scales of language.
I write, in handwriting so bruised and turbulent that only I can read it I am the gull with wings so clipped by boredom that I cannot fly. If I die I will just be a mountain of feathers pushed away by the wind.
Not bad. I’ll keep that and work on it later then maybe send it to a poetry magazine like Outposts or Pink Peace. The gull flaps away and is absorbed into the distance. I walk along the pebbly beach towards the shore. The urge to be a poet is stronger in me than the urge to write poems. In my head I am receiving an award for my first collection, entitled The Uig Poems, Uig being a place name on Skye that rings in my head. In my head a sequence about Skye will form the centrepiece of the as-yet-unwritten volume. Suddenly, as though I am the first person to think of it, I write Skye sky in the notebook, swiftly followed by sea see. Maybe I’ll call the book Skye Sky. I see it in a bookshop. I see somebody buying it in a bookshop.
I walk further and I write the seen sea meets the Skye sky. I am absurdly pleased. Far ahead of me a couple are walking, hand in hand. Even though I can’t see him properly I’m sure that he is ugly and even though I can’t see her properly I’m sure she is beautiful and mysterious. Maybe, in my teenage head, she is as beautiful and mysterious as Emma Peel in The Avengers. They stand looking out to sea; the waves are making splashing noises and gulls are whirling. I bend and pick up a pebble and pocket it because I want it to remind me forever of this moment on this beach with my notebook and that couple. I might even have the pebble for the front cover of The Uig Poems. I might send a copy to Diana Rigg when it comes out.
Overhead, the sky is getting changed, putting on darker clothes. The breeze is revving up. I look at my watch: ages till breakfast. I walk towards the couple; it’s not that I want to talk to them. God forbid that I should want to talk to them. I’m fourteen and I don’t want to talk to anybody. I just want to write about them, to put them in my sequence.
Now they are standing facing each other. Her hair is blowing in the wind, as is his because this is the very early 1970s and everybody, even newsreaders and police chiefs, has got long hair. Wind like seaweed in the air’s sea I write in my book and although that’s not quite right I can work on it later in the B&B’s residents’ lounge as my mother and dad watch Bonanza on a black-and-white TV that frays at the edges of the picture and the landlady brings in tea on a tray.
I stop and watch in wonder and a kind of growing horror as the couple stand even closer and he puts his hand on her bum. I don’t know where to look/I know exactly where to look. They kiss and I am about to spontaneously combust. I am angry that I am not that man. I am angry that I am a lad with a notebook. I am angry with the sea; I am so angry with the sea. It can just hang around being the sea.
The couple stop kissing for a moment and a few drops of rain are parachuted from the sky. A storm is coming. The young woman turns and sees me and waves. She waves! Maybe she’ll buy my book once I’ve written it and she’ll recognise herself in it.
The rain is pouring down. There’s a distant shout of thunder. The couple and I run from the beach but we run in separate directions because they are local and I am not. My notebook is getting wet and I push it under my shirt to keep the words dry. I am almost at the B&B. I am almost there. They were kissing. He had his hand on her bum.