Strip the Willow (15 page)

In the clench of pressure, wheeze of alloyed air, in the flick and drive of her fins, she was in her element. How could you not think we came from the sea? The water was on the murky side. Silver sand eels shimmered into view, sensed her, spun like the snap of a flag, and ribboned away in ragged unison. There was a shard or two on the shifting bottom. She moved her glove to pick one up, and a dissolute cloud of mud rose up and streamed away. The current was getting stronger; she could feel a sting of ice coming down from the hills, she could see the odd rainbow of harbour oil hallucinant on weed. One of the reasons she didn’t do drugs. No need. She had visions while she worked.

– Tam seems pretty well into her? said Lucy. Very well in.

– In his dreams, maybe. Problem—?

– Oh, no. I quite like Julie, said Lucy. Now she’s underwater.

Yet it was wrong, Jamie had kept telling her, her over-responsive approach. Her tutors said isolate, take one variable at a time, form a disprovable thesis and test it rigorously, for scientific peers
worldwide
. Ahead, in about mid-channel, she saw a big plate of reddish metal, embossed with an acne of juvenile barnacles.

Spermy in the harbour mouth gripped the spoked wheel with his left hand, while he twiddled with the radar-scale. He’d retained his ex-schoolmate on watch, the rest packed off below, to snore off their binge of dark rum and lager.

– I notice we don’t see the name
Jim
so often, said Lucy.

– Not for a while.

– Are you really Jim, is that who you are?

– Interim Jim, maybe. Best keep reading.

There was no booze allowed aboard
Spare Me
; you couldn’t become best boat in Scotland by pishing it up against a wall, or thumping into the base of a cliff in a bastard stupor. No clink of cans from the galley, but still drink in the men. Spermy couldn’t wait to get back to the grounds, to do what he did best. So many ways you could track herring. Gulls, echo-sounder, a glisk of their oil smoothing the surface. Or a sprachle of bubbles released from their swim-bladders, as they rose at dusk to feed.

In the harbour’s jaw the
Spare Me
now. In the very spot. Spermy checked and rechecked the echo-sounder. The
Dépense
would be in smithereens long ago. Wake up, twat. This is far ma Da and them drowned. I ken, I was there, mind, on the pier? said Jim. Ye were just wee then, said Spermy. So were you, you spat on my boot, said Jim. I still get nightmares, said Spermy. Clap yir een on the soonder there. What for? said Jim. Read the traces, said Spermy. Ye’d better look, ye’re the expert, said Jim. Why dae ye nae look? Spermy spun the wheel slowly. Scared ye’ll see somethin? said Jim.

– Then a spate of
Jims
again, said Lucy. I keep thinking. Would they not still have you on file at the hospital?

– I’m not going back there. No more ops. I’d rather be who I am.

– Namely?

– Don’t think the hospital had a clue anyway.

Spare Me
circled sunwards. The waters live and scarlet-shimmering. The water was rocking back and fore in the channel. His drowned father never told him stories, not that he often asked.
I come ashore tae forget aboot the sea, loon, nae tae blabber on.
So he followed his father to sea, and made his own story. Just ahead, interrupted, a stream of bubbles rising. It could hardly be herring, this time of day, not this close in.

– Julie, said Lucy. Bubbles.

Jim decided not to rise to the bait.

Julie approached the reddish plate. It was waving with weed and
knobbled
with barnacles. The marine archaeology side didn’t concern her. What was under the plate might. A conger laired, with parted snout, ready to slash a diver’s finger off with slimy needle teeth. Or a lobster, not red by nature, but perhaps taking on a rouge under this hulk. She poked with a knife. She picked up a vibe, which grew to a vibration. A butterfish pouted and fled. Her quick snap with the Calypso
probably
missed it. Something heavy was arriving over her, sending a
whop-whop
through the column of water. She held onto the section of wreck with both gloves, and took a buffeting.

She waited till the vessel was on an away path before beginning surfacing, not holding her breath, that was fatal. She was only half-way up when the prop began to throb again. They might do something mad like chuck a stick of dynamite in. Engine hum permeated the waters. They were about to do something. She finned upwards, expelling air in expanding gouts.

Her third snap was of a bronze prop, very close, steadily carving water.

– That’s it, I’m afraid. End of third folder. Where’s the rest?

– No more? But none of these so-and-sos has so much as breathed my name. We’re no further forward.

– Well, you’re on a boat, heading out to sea, or playing about in the harbour mouth, trying to pick up or carve up you-
know-who
—

– He must have got more on tape than that, Tam, he must have. What was he playing at?

– Did Julie come? said Lucy. I mean come on board. Did she?

– Search me.

– Oh, you getting up now?

– Need a good walk, he said. Blow the webs away.

– Want someone to go with you?

– No. Do you mind? It’s a lot to try and digest.

– How long do you feel you’ll be?

– Not terribly long.

They called it his
voyage
or
inner voyage
or trip but it hadn’t helped.

Trip
had a double meaning of course.

A specialist in an understated tweed suit had said, Now you were undertaking a nautical trip if my dossier serves.

Sorry?

You had run off to sea.

Had I?

You were all at sea? ventured one, a lady psychiatrist with white earrings like sugary pandrops.

Part of me wasn’t, he had replied.

But they needed you to be all at sea, floating on their couch.

When he came back from his latest wander, reeling in invisible wool and stuffing it in his right hand pocket, Lucy was sat in front of the bedroom mirror. She was running her hands up through her hair both sides, running it through her fingers.

– Is
bouffe
a word, would you know?

–
Boof
, he said.

–
Bouffe
, said Lucy.

– Yes, something went
boof
, he said, I seem to remember. Keep saying it.

–
Bouffe. Bouffe,
said Lucy.
Bouffant.

– Nice pausing.

– I wasn’t always a pauser, she said. I went at things full tilt, Tam got it right.

– Why?

– I wanted everything.

Again she ran her fingers, both sides, up through her hair.

– I used to have a beehive, do you remember? Do you remember beehives?

– Like gold wire stuck high with lacquer, he said. They made girls’ faces seem smaller, so nobody would think they were too brainy and be put off. Were you too brainy?

– Probably, she said, not quite brainy enough.

She stopped putting her hair up and just elongated her face in the mirror to try and diminish the deepening lines.

She glanced at her eyes, then glanced away.

– I don’t know what brainy is, he said. You need to remember a lot of stuff to be brainy. My sieve’s a memory. I must have gone to sea in it—

– No, said Lucy. Enough. I want you to tell me straight what happened out there.

– At night. All I know is, it happened at night.

– Just take your time. I put some lobster on earlier, we need to go down and look at that.

– A lobster?

– Some lobster, said Lucy. Bisque.

– Never heard of it.

– Very slow soup.

– When did it come in?

– It’s been in a while. Lobster bisque.

– Let’s have a look at that head of yours, said Lucy.

– Being the only one available, worst luck.

– Pull your chair this way a bit. Under the light.

– Then you can interrogate the skull, I’ve done my stint. What will your weapons be? Apart from light, Lucy?

She tucked a couple of tea towels round his neck. One was a terry towelling identification chart for the more exotic auks and seabirds. Razorbill, albatross and such. The other was of smooth linen and just said, on a green strip,
GLASS
. She went behind him and rattled in a drawer. He could hear the sound of scissors or small shears.

– Your hair, she said.

– Often compared to patches of gorse on a half-burnt hillside, he said. In the traditional love poetry of High Priest Island. I always thought the title of that island was ambiguous.

– Was it nice, apart from the ambiguity?

– I don’t remember getting there and I don’t remember leaving. I could have been wrecked and then unwrecked, I suppose. Snatches I recall.

– Uninhabited?

– Yes. I breathed and slept, ate and shat there. I wouldn’t give myself airs, I didn’t go the length of inhabiting it.

– Did you eat well?

– Four species of fish, not counting shellfish, three of berries, plus rose hips—

– You mentioned. Are rose hips not a berry?

– I wasn’t washed-up with a nature guide. Two species of root. And one shattered sheep at a cliff base, in a race against
decomposition
. Which, to be fair, we both entered. The dead sheep and this forked animal.

He had told her all this before. The whole exile thing. Whatever else he had read, she knew he was into
Lear.

– The next sound you hear is going to be scissors—

– I slept in a cave. A rock-cut tomb—

– So don’t move, stay at peace.

– Which had two stone beds, with a passage between them, and a bunch of fern waving at the patio door.

– Yes, said Lucy.

– It must have been hewn out before the day of the priest. A priest isn’t allowed to sleep next to anyone, not even in a tomb, in case he has bad thoughts.

She just let him ramble on, not that there was much option.

It was a shock, that combination of repulsion and attraction, to see the skull with its vegetation off. Previously the nearest had been when he was sleek and dripping after the shower. When she first held it in her hands. Now she proposed to massage it. She had a choice of oils.

– What kind of gunge you going to slap on? he said.

– Not gunge, oil. Rosemary, that’s for remembrance.

– Sure it’s not rue? he said.

After a while she made two cups of tea, and put lemon in them, a squeeze. She placed his on the asbestos mat on the Raeburn. Then rested her fingers on top of the stove a moment. Her hands got colder quicker these days. She was going to try to link the massage up.

It was like making love to the skull.

Now neither spoke.

Alison and Finlay were having a helluva row. And, not many people had seen this, Alison was crying. Finlay took her at face value, the life and soul, a fount of jokes and asides and piss-takes, but she was more than that. Finlay was only just finding this out. And she was insecure. That came as a surprise.

He didn’t know how to deal with it, except by means that made it worse.

They had gone out as a foursome to Strike Ten, the bowling arcade. It had only been planned that morning, but by the time evening came, Alison wanted private time with Finlay, and a shoulder to lean on.

Right from the moment Alison’s first ball took to the gutter, the evening was on the slide. Finlay was doing his best to keep his
team’s end up, striking and sparing like one possessed. He showed little understanding that this was not what Alison needed.

The other pair were well matched, both average to useless when it came to tumbling distant skittles with a rotund piece of plastic.

After the second game, while the other couple disappeared off to the loos, Finlay went straight up for drinks, but when he got back, Alison was flushed.

– What is it? Is it that old time of the—? Hell, I don’t mind.

He only caught her halfway down the car park. The row surged. Unfortunately it was an otherwise calm night, and every word carried, and carried home.

And especially when Alison said, Bide then, Finlay. Jist ye bide here an play wi yersel. I’m gaain stracht back up the toon tae try an rescue ma dochter.

–
The first word that Sir Patrick read,
he said.

Lucy just waited.

She didn’t want to get back to knockabout mode. Knockabout was very enjoyable, easy on them. Mostly evasive.

That was all that came. She continued moving her fingers, just playing the white notes, the platelets, still unsure about touching the darker ridges.

The breakers over the Bar at the mouth of the harbour, that would be bad enough, she imagined, for a boat going out. Even after Davie Dae-Aathing had floated Craig Metallan out of the channel, there was still that further obstacle, further out.

The Bar.