Free Tears for a Tinker by Jess Smith

for its tail. So a tailless rat would clearly be a witch.
    My favourite shape-shifter is a drunken man on a Saturday night. It always amazes me, the difference in him from earlier, when sober and sensible, to his downright mental state with the alcohol
in him.
    We will no doubt wander back again through the pages of my chapbook, but meanwhile let’s see what is happening on the home front.

10

    FATTY

    D avie and Daddy found the painting-jobs drying up—in both senses of the word—so what did my water-hating husband do? He took a job on a
fishing-boat, and boy, did he learn the hard way that it’s not an easy life on the choppy sea.
    He looked terrified out of his skin standing on board that first day. We had walked the few hundred yards with him from our house to the harbour. Johnnie said, ‘Daddy has a green face,
Mummy.’ And that he did, as the waves almost swallowed his vessel. My poor man, what he did to put food on the table. The boat was a trawler, with a crew of grand lads, especially the cook,
who had his own ideas of the best way of filling my man’s belly, and just as odd a way of causing him to empty it over the side of the boat.
    Yet not being there out on the briny I have only what Davie told me to go by. In his words, ‘it was a hard life, catching wee fish, big fish, and giants o’ fish’. So
let’s leave him to the ocean for a while, and I’ll tell you how that blasted weight problem of mine left me with more than a fleeting resemblance to the biggest fish Davie was netting
on his trawler. I will take you on some of Davie’s trips as a fisherman later on, but firstly we’ll go through the tale of a fatty.
    The Macduff folk were right proud of their swimming pool, Tarlair, a mile from town and lying on the brink of the ocean. Everybody from nine months to ninety swam in this man-made dam. The only
problem was when the tide came in—there sometimes came with it an odd fish or jellyfish, you know the kind of thing. Not many big ones got in, because local lads were employed to clean the
pool regularly. ‘Nothing gets past us,’ I once heard a guy say, and he wasn’t kidding. Parents would sit about sunning themselves; picnics were enjoyed as the wee ones ran in and
out of the sea-green water. My boys loved it, and so did I.
    However there was a difficulty, not a big one, but a difficulty nevertheless: where would I purchase a swimming costume to accommodate my massive frame, all fourteen-and-a-half stone of it?
    You might ask how I knew I weighed this amount? Well, one morning as the boats were unloading, I went down to the harbour for some free fish. It was usual for the man weighing in the catches to
give a freebie to whoever was there. ‘You’re an awfy breadth for sic a wee quine,’ the weighman said looking me up and down. To be honest, I’d never given my weight-gain
that much thought, because my man said he loved me no matter how fat I got. He’d laugh and add—‘more of you to cuddle.’ So imagine my horror when the weighman told me I was
too heavy for his scales. Of course he was kidding, but when I stood on them the needle did a jig.
    ‘Fit are ye scoffing tae mak a bonny quine like yersel sae swelt?’
    ‘Pavement, swallow me up,’ was all I could think as I walked away. Suddenly I thought all eyes were on me, what a shaming it was. I turned and pushed my children back home, feeling
every cursed pound of unwanted flesh.
    ‘Get some exercise done, lassie.’ This was Mammy’s remedy for fatties.
    Yet I seemed to walk miles every day, and although we’d a telly it only got switched on for Johnnie’s programmes. But how could I bear to stay this weight? From that moment I decided
I would lose the unnecessary flab.
    ‘I saw some swimming costumes, Jess, there’s a sale of them in the Co-op,’ said my wee sister Babsy. ‘All sizes, even ones to fit you.’
    How awful she sounded, but she was only trying to help, I knew that. So I bought a Speedo, a nice