Free A Book of Death and Fish by Ian Stephen Page A

shell. Then creelfuls of darker peat, broken smaller, were just piled inside. Some places they did them herringbone style like tweed because they said it kept the water out better. The
caoran
was the bottom peat, cut last so it wouldn’t go to smoor, which was peat–dross. These were the ones your grannie wanted to start the fire and to get heat up in the Rayburn for baking. The dampened smoor kept the fire smouldering overnight.
    Torcuil’s mother, coming in with cups of tea, said it was easier to be interested in peats when you were sitting in your armchair in the south of the country, well clear of them. There was a lot of heat in peats when you were cutting them. Plenty heat when you were lifting and turning and gathering them. Only time there was no heat in peat was when you put them on the fire and tried to burn them.
    But Torcuil’s father was back in the
Indicus Nauticus
. Gob Rubha Usinis, not too far south from the Dubh Sgeir. A lot of people confused it with Usinish light in Uist. There, at the Sound of Shiants. Did I know that place?
    I told him I knew a spot just north of there. You kept a house in Calbost open on a point. We put on bigger hooks if we had a drift off there. One day there was a thumping on the line like I’d never felt before. A big green head came to the surface and a long white full belly under it. I saw the hook, not looking so big any more, just in the skin of the mouth, above the barbel. Someone tried to get a hand in the gills but the fish rolled over and flicked a huge tail and was gone. It didn’t sink. It swam. It was alive.
    Aye, he said, it’s the ones that got away you remember best. He had a story about that. It had happened not that far out from Calbost, out on the Shiant Banks. But when it happened he didn’t know anything about it.
    I could see that Torcuil and his olaid had heard this one before more than once but I was hooked.
    I was second mate on the
Loch Ness
during the war. We were always chock a block, taking fellows only a few years older than yourselves, on the first leg to join their ships or regiments. There was a scare or two but we never saw much trouble.
    A couple of years ago, I met this fellow at a conference. He was very well turned out. We all were but he was noticeably smart. I thought he might be Danish. He wasn’t giving away much. The smoked salmon and tab-nabs were getting passed around. He asked me if I’d served in the Merchant or Royal Navy during the war. So I told him I was in the Merch but on the ferries for most of it.
    He asked me which ferries and he seemed to know the area. He said it must be rough for a surface ship in that place when the north wind blew.
    The hairs were standing on the back of my neck then. I had a feeling. Sure enough he described the
Loch Ness
pretty well. Told me we were making good about fourteen knots.
    â€˜We had you in our sights,’ he said.
    The thing was, their main mission was to gather information on the places where Atlantic convoys mustered. They had judged it was not good to give
their whereabouts away. They would find other prey out to sea after they had passed their information.
    I wasn’t going to thank him for my life. I didn’t get through the war without seeing the destruction that follows a torpedo-hit. The smell of burning oil is something you remember.
    So, in this case, we were the one that got away. That’s why he remembered our ship so clearly. The way you remember that big ling, off Calbost.

Andra
    The summer after the one when all the grandparents disappeared, the olman had to work on, get some overtime. This was a new word in our house. There was no more talk of having to earn your crust in a decent number of hours. And it wasn’t only pattern-making. The olaid said he was just a foreman really, overseeing all these rows of knitting machines. They were getting all the rest, out of him, free, gratis and for nothing.
    So I’d need to go with my