A Book of Death and Fish Read Online Free Page B

rope. A few got off. What’s the tide doing then? Falling. That’s it, then. She’ll be over. A watch was recovered, stopped at the time water entered it.
    ‘And the
Stella
?’ It was my father’s voice again. Kenny F’s olman’s boat.
    More recent history. They were all running for home but she was behind the rest of the fleet. He’d been on watch, at Holm. She was still showing her fishing lights, as well as her steaming lights. Red over white, up top, for fishing other than trawling. Most of the boats never bothered to put out the fishing lights, when they were steaming home, and most of them showed green over white – the trawlers.
    ‘You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?’ the Coastguard said.
    I saw him get a nod from my olman. Something passed between these two then, I wasn’t sure what.
    Knowing she’d be stacked up with gear, he’d watched her go under the blind spot at Holm. Off the Beasts. You could start counting then till you saw the lights re-appear. A slow count to fifteen or so, usually. But she never came back into sight. He called out the lifeboat and LSA then.
    ‘Aye,’ the olman said, ‘the word is she just lost steerage, surfing in there and couldn’t turn in time. Could have been the same with the
Iolaire
. Or maybe just underestimating what speed she was making in that following sea.’
    ‘So you’re a seaman, right enough?’ the Coastguard said.
    ‘Not now and you still don’t know me, do you?’
    Then my father did something I’ve only seen him do in our own house. Took his beret off. You didn’t even notice it was on, after a while. Outside the house, it was always there. But that wasn’t too unusual, round the town. We even have a word for it – your caydie, not just any hat. Like your trademark.
    When I say he was bald, I don’t mean just in the centre. He didn’t have any hair on his head. You didn’t even notice this after a while, even when he had the caydie off, in our house. And I suppose our neighbours were used to it, too.
    But as soon as he took the beret off, the other man knew him. He couldn’t say a word.
    ‘I’m not a ghost yet. Remember, you got me out alive,’ the olman said. ‘There was nothing wrong with our own steering that night. Just the guy on the bridge.’
    The Coastguard was recovering. Leaning against that rescue equipment. Remembering. Then he could speak.
    North African coast. Ben Line. I was bosun. You were shaping up that way yourself. We hadn’t been that route before. We thought Casablanca was only in the movies. This was a wind-up. We couldn’t be heading there for real. Hogmanay and we were off watch. We’d taken our skinful early and were sleeping it off so we’d be ready for the next shift. Pity everyone hadn’t done it that way.
    The apprentice was left on the bridge on his own. Poor wee cadet steering when the mate went off to try to quieten down all the whoopee getting made down below. ‘Just be a minute,’ he said.
    The baby sailor had the course to steer, safely round the top but he got into a daze. Instead of putting the helm over to keep her off the land, fighting the drift, he just calmly went with it. The compass started swinging.
    What a crunch when we hit. Then the bloody klaxons went off. Everybody was going for a door. Drunk or sober. In their clothes or not. Bloody shambles.
    Four to a cabin, those days, in steel bunks. Hellish steep companionways. The captain was shouting for the bosun to get a count going. None of these boats is getting lowered until every man’s accounted for.
    ‘Where’s MacAulay?’ he asks. Bloody hell. I had to get back down below with another guy to look for you. There was bit of a list on the ship already. She was settling. Not falling any further.
    We found your cabin door and the bunk was collapsed in there. The steel beam of the top one was lying across your bunk below. You saw the torch and started shouting out in Gaelic. But you weren’t in pain. Nothing lying on