A Book of Death and Fish Read Online Free

splintered. They’re like chimney-rods, bent to take the netting over them. Everyone was whispering things.
    About two weeks later, Kenny F was called away from school again. A teacher’s car took him home. When I came in for my cup of tea and a roll, to keep me going, my mother told me, in a low voice, that Kenny F’s father and brother had been found. No, no, they weren’t alive, poor souls, there had been no hope of that but it still meant a lot to the family to get them back. Now there would be a funeral. Kenny would be off school for a few more days. I’d to promise not to ask him anything.
    So I was left wondering about the return of the bodies. I imagined them in clothes like all the neighbours wore now, going to visit. They weren’t in their bobbin-wool genseys and overalls. There weren’t any haloes or anything. Just the father and brother in dark suits, the older one in wider trousers, big lapels and a wide tie. The younger with the thin tie over the white shirt and tighter suit. Probably I had seen them dressed like this on Sundays. But I heard it from someone at school that they’d been found in a fisherman’s net.
    I could see pure bodies, from the Bible, returned from the nets as a present. Dressed in these suits. The nets were not the usual black stuff but made of something silvery. Those cast on the starboard side of a vessel afloat on the Sea of Galilee.
    I asked the olman about it. He said it didn’t matter how the bodies came back, my mother was right, it made a big difference to the family. It was the same in her town – The Broch. They’d lost two lifeboat crews there, at different times. Both within sight of the harbour, everyone watching as the boat went to help someone who’d been caught out.
     
    It was so many years later, more like twenty, that the olaid told me how my father had gone across the road, when everything was quietening down. He went to sort out arrangements that nobody else could cope with. Everything from legal statements to insurances. The way he put it, there was plenty of people to see to the spiritual side. Since he wasn’t so tied up with prayer meetings, he could do his own bit. The olaid told me thetweeds had picked up, about then. The markets he thought he’d escaped from, had recovered. He was one of the few with a stockpile because he’d kept on going to the shed, not really because he saw it as an investment but because he wanted to make cloth. There also seemed to be a demand for these unusual designs.
    That’s when they spoke to him about coming into the Mill, setting up patterns. But anyway he was doing all right just about then.
    So he’d gone to gather together the gear collected by the Team and still stacked at their store, down the road. Uninsured loss, it was called. The creels, ropes and buoys, what was left of them. Seems the way he put it to Kenny F’s mother was there was plenty at the lobsters down in Lochs, now, crying out for gear. He’d get her a fair price for it.
    He got hold of a van. I was in tears, not allowed to come with him. This was one time I couldn’t come. Me grabbing at his arm and crying louder but still not allowed to come.
    When he came back, his boiler-suit didn’t smell of my grannie’s shed the way it should have done. There was something I’d only smelled before each year on the night of the gellie. The paraffin hints around the burning wood. Then he went across the road to give the widow her money.

Strandings
    The blue of these doors was deep. It was a dark, navy shade, no green in it. Stornoway harbour was pea soup and the beaches you reached out to, on Sunday school picnics, were as much green as blue. A colour I’d seen called ‘mallard’ in the plates of the Arthur Mee encyclopaedias. A locomotive was called that and coloured it too.
    Three words, ‘Life Saving Apparatus’, were painted across the double doors, in white and you couldn’t see any drips from the letters. When you passed by here, it was