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

mother to The Broch. I couldn’t be left alone all these days and my sister had her own summer job.
    They were worried about my fluctuating moods. One day I’d be hitting the glottal stop with the rest of them, the next pissing them off by saying that Stornoway ruled OK. Even if the Aths or the Rovers weren’t even in the Highland League. At least Alloa was in the second division. But I only boasted out loud to those my size or smaller.
    Maybe it was just the time of life. Hair was starting to appear all over the place. At last you felt you could hold up your arms when you were diving, at the baths. But you were worried that the almost constant erection would come out over the top of the swimming trunks. So you didn’t focus too long on these older girls, swimming slowly by with the upper parts of their costumes pretty full.
    That was about the time that sex started to rot my teeth. Or maybe it was the lack of sex. This science teacher had bobbed black hair. I’d study the bare part of her neck while she wrote on the board. Even now, there’s a faint hint of the erotic when you click to light the gas – the smell of a Bunsen burner. Normally distant and aloof, she hated anybody chewing in class. So you got attention. OK, you got belted as well but that was attention too.
    That item of Lochgelly craftsmanship would go back over her shoulder and then she’d catch your eye before she swung it. She put plenty into the swing but it wasn’t like when a male teacher belted you. If you got even one or two on a cold morning, from a man, that was something you wouldn’t want to go through again, in a hurry.
    The ritual was also a kind of status. Sometimes a female teacher would send you to be belted by a male. But the science teacher was maybe too proud for that. We kept a score. I ate a lot of toffee. I was in the lead.
    Maybe I was just seasick. Defined as a growing awareness of the lack of the stuff around you. Not only sea for the purposes of floating vessels or for providing a home for mackerel whose dorsals made a zig-zag of vees in calm harbours, broken by the leaping cloud of small fry.
    Your line going first one way then another in a pattern you couldn’t predict. The sheen and phosphor hints of the belly. The back turning against the source of light to show something of a crazy pattern of greens and blues and blacks.
    But the sea as something on the move. Just there. So a day trip to the gritty and probably contaminated Burntisland shore beat the Trossachs. We weren’t too fussed about the Aberfeldy-Auchtermuchty Scotland where you could find the Broon’s But and Ben round the next bend in the road. Too much scenery. Bonny enough. Damp enough. Not salty enough.
    So I did grieve for the loss of the harbour, the inner loch at Griomsiadair, maybe even for my grannie with the Spangles and the stories and the bloody great forearms that would wrap you all up in a wrestle just when your temper was at its fiercest. You couldn’t win that kind of struggle with your grannie. Even if she wasn’t related to Grannie Broon.
    Then there were the plots across from the Toolies at The Broch. The hard wee onions that came from them and came to you from out of wide jars. The wind blowing sand between the barriers at the beach. Ice-creams from Jimmie Sinclair’s van, eaten amongst the dunes. Out along the rocks to Rosehearty and the cold blue pool, the tiles concreted in to a smoothed-out hollow, near the black breakwater.
    Andra would pick us up from Aberdeen Station. Dr Beeching had got to Fraserburgh station first. I used to mix up his name with the Dr on thepowders for colds and flu. The adverts were still new to us and we concentrated on them, still.
    Andra was the oldest. Maist o his loonies and quinies were gang aboot the planet. Satellites jist. Comin back to base jist when they were wintin fuel.
    Maggie let him talk most of the time, just throwing out a line when she felt he was totally off the beam. Andra loved Scotland.