Debatable Land Read online

  DEBATABLE LAND

  CANDIA McWILLIAM

  The tropics vanish, and meseems that I,

  From Halkerside, from topmost Allermuir,

  Or steep Caerketton, dreaming gaze again.

  Far set in fields and woods, the town I see

  Spring gallant from the shallows of her smoke,

  Cragged, spired, and turreted, her virgin fort

  Beflagged. About, on seaward-drooping hills,

  New folds of city glitter. Last, the Forth

  Wheels ample waters set with sacred isles,

  And populous Fife smokes with a score of towns.

  There, on the sunny frontage of a hill,

  Hard by the house of kings, repose the dead,

  My dead, the ready and the strong of word.

  Their works, the salt-encrusted, still survive . . .

  – From Songs of Travel,

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Chapter 1

  The washing that went on in Alec’s house when he was a child was carried out with a fervour that had something in it of atonement. There was no washing out, though, what lay deep in the flesh of his mother and father, the distant coastal whiff of fish.

  Today, a man of almost forty, he looked from the window of his hotel out to the southern sea to whose care he was preparing to commit himself. He had packed for the voyage and now had only his thoughts to collect. Over the boulevard from the hotel was one edge of the Pacific, docile and oily at this margin against the sea wall, imponderable further out under its blue reception of the wide sky. His own North Sea never brought itself to so melting a blue. The hot air here did not move but hung and sank on its own weight. He thought of the argumentative air of Scotland. The thought punched aside his homesickness somewhat.

  He had come so far from home in order to see it clearly. As a painter he lived by light, and he feared that the light in his head was going. Having taken the decision to live on water with strangers, he had to keep his own respect by sticking to it. He could sail, he would be fed, even paid a little. He had found a boat. It remained only to cast off.

  An uncertain passage in the Odyssey has Tiresias speaking of a land without salt. Odysseus mentions this place to Penelope even before they first sleep together after their long parting. Is Odysseus preparing the ground for another great journey, this time to the saltless land? Is Homer ensuring that his epic has the ragged edge that adventure has in life? Or is he describing, perhaps even unwittingly, that saltless state of being that makes people take to the sea or to another sure source of fear when they have no need to, when they have come to feel the savour gone from their daily life and a deathly blandness consume their works and days? If a land all salt will not support life and a sea greatly salt is called dead, it is also the case that deprived of salt we long for it and will lick stones to get it.

  It was in such a saltless state that Alexander Dundas was collected from his hotel on the seafront at Papeete by Elspeth Urquhart and brought to Ardent Spirit.

  No one now on the yacht needed to be at sea. Her owner-skipper was happiest there but also had more than one anchorage on land. Logan Urquhart was a Scots American of fortune who doubted his own courage and was timid though successful with women. Each time he wrestled physical fear he needed to do it again a little sooner; metaphysical fears assailed him but receded after each trial of the body and will. In common with many rich men, he confused enlightening introspection with womanish indecision, and in so doing he lost the feline self-knowing power of the transcendent tycoon. Moreover, Logan Urquhart was young, only forty, and had morals, for which he respected himself.

  Elspeth was his wife, and was grateful for it. She loved the boat and had suggested the name Ardent Spirit for reasons of her own, when asked by Logan to think of something to call the material beauty that was slowly forming in a cold concrete barn on the East Coast of Scotland. For all the miles she had sailed, Elspeth did not yet consider herself, as she did her husband, a sea creature. Ardent Spirit she had named for the old name of the liquid that has shaped Scotland as ornamentally and destructively as seawater. Its own place in her life lay deep and only tidally admissible. It was not she who was the drinker, but often enough she wished she were. She feared she had not the allure of firewater, that her own spirit was not ardent.

  Because of the presence of others, Elspeth was able to conceal her maritime insufficiencies with forms of overcompensation that she felt made her monstrous but could not hold herself back from. She undertook the housework on the boat with a masochistic vigour that newcomers noticed, speculated about, and then took for granted, imagining it to be to do with being spoilt on land, or perhaps childless. The four-hour watch system was the only reason for broken nights known to Elspeth, a soft-looking woman with an untidy body that she kept hidden. Logan had the blond hair of a man with brown hair who spends half his life at sea, and arms hard with muscles from winching up sails the size of castle walls.

  Ardent Spirit’s wardrobe of sail was kept in a bin just astern of her main mast, each heavy-sided billowing sail folded down to tameness and at last silence and kept in its own bag, labelled in black stencilled letters on the whispering Terylene: Genoa, Big Boy, No 1 Spinnaker, No 2 Spinnaker, Storm Jib. The rarer sails were kept in the fo’c’sle, under whose floor lay the sewing machine for mending sails shot through by the wind or in a bad gybe punched in by the spars.

  In the fo’c’sle were to sleep two men, Alec Dundas and Nick Pedersen. Alec had found the job advertised between old suits of sail and exhausted moorings on the thinning English coast, in the back of a sailing magazine he picked up waiting at the hospital for Lorna, the nurse with whom he lived, to stop working and come home with him. The magazine seemed in that hospital to be the leavings of lives unimaginably emancipated, lived between sea and sky, not bandages and botched periods of perforated sleep. He read the advertisement:

  Strong man with some experience of sail required for last leg of Pacific voyage. Keep and fair wage. Apply box THA7A55A.

  The simplicity was enough. He flew to it from the life he had organised around himself, to which he had become averse. He had sailed a little around the river’s mouth at Cramond, and knew many words out of books of the sea. His contained manner and the enthusiasm that unfolded from him had recommended him to Logan Urquhart; those, and his being a Scot. Alec wrote a letter and they spoke twice by telephone; Logan sent an air ticket, explaining that it was more usual to hire in port, but that he had taken to something about Alec. From this Alec realised that he was about to enter a world with freedoms and restrictions he had not contemplated ever before. He felt as though he were joining up. A lightened sense of duty and a beautiful unnatural surrender came over him.

  Alec’s mother Mairi said that her hands had been cured to salt hams by a working life gutting and filleting the fish brought in to the processing works. She’d hold up her hard-rinded hand, and take a shivering thin knife up to it, to show where she’d carve off the salt slices, snick along the side.

  To keep a grip on the fish, to hold them from squirting out of the grasp, his mother and the other fish girls would salt both hands regularly, pressing them into deep vats of rough salt. Each girl had her own knife, black steel with her name burned with hot wire into the wooden handle. These knives were left behind at night. Like a pen, each knife in time became modified to suit its user.
Some knives had come down from mother to daughter. The rate was forty fish a minute for small fish, say herring.

  His mother said she could feel down her knife, with a faint near-magnetic charge trembling through the blade, if there was roe in a fish, if she’d not already been able to tell from a jowly look to its belly. She could sense the grain of a fish along the knife, the way its flesh pulled in arrows of muscle away from the backbone, and the freshness of a fish was for her not crudely a matter of smell. When the flesh began to sicken, she saw it and knew that the fish had been kept waiting by the weather.

  The floor in the processing works struck a cold up your legs bitter as ice. It was slippery with the snarls of guts that had been thrown to the bin and missed it. The guts of these small fish had the look of dropped yarn and the cats that haunted the place played with them, making cats’ cradles. Swim bladders beaded the floor like bits of mercury, tough as seaweed to tread on even through a rubber boot. The floor was hosed down twice a day with a disinfectant that stank of tom-cats and someone in a city’s idea of fir trees. The floor was faintly canted, its lowest end at the dockside, so the water and guts could run out through small drains that ran down to roans over the harbour water where gulls waited.

  She told him that these gulls took kittens from time to time, blind and newborn or just emerging into seeing, with milky marble eyes. The gulls took out the eyes at a swoop without even the mercy to devour the rest of the creature. His mother had dropped a stone on one such kitten, though it pained her to do so. The wee cat was mewing at the gulls. Their own kitten cries out of their hard screaming beaks mocked it. The kitten had been so surgically murdered that in every way it appeared new and hopeful but for its absent eyes.

  The cats sometimes had their kits among the salt sacks behind the sheds. The babies could not keep out the salt, being born bare and blind. So there were preserved litters, pink and rigid, among the straining jute sacks. If you pulled the salted kittens away from the fat woven sacks, they were printed with the coarse weave and flaked in their folds with crystal salt. You could see everything that was to make this small thing a cat hardly begun but present, flaps of ear, tricorne nose, distinct pads like white raspberries. It was all there but the late flattering luxury of fur and whiskers.

  There was one persistent orange tom who would walk away from work with Alec’s mother, sometimes as far as her bus stop on Leith Walk. He would rise up on his back legs and biff her hands as though he were heading a feather. His balls stuck out behind like an apricot under his tail. Alec’s mother thought the smell of the fish had sunk to her bone. She could imagine the cats digging her up to chew on her, so she told him, to suck on her fingerbones.

  Jim, Alec’s father, said he could not smell it, but that was no surprise. He was a fishmonger. Certainly she smelt it on him, for all he was so clean and had a different white coat each day. Her own nose detected each distinction; she suffered, like Alec, from perfect nasal pitch. She caught the lot: the oily smell of herring; the salt-blood tang of mackerel; the gloom of cod; the washcloth vapour of cooked roes; the pipe-smoke and zoo smell of smokies; they were all there, in his hair, on his hands, folded in his body.

  His blue van, shared with his partner Fordyce Macrae, had shelves of slatted wood in the back, and stalls to hold the buckets firm as he drove on his deliveries over the hills of the city. Anything over he would sell to housewives before he went to work at the shop. He parked the van down by the clock at Canonmills, by the Water of Leith. The women stood in a woolly queue, their net bags ready for the morning’s catch. Every one of them wore a hat on her head, or a headscarf. Hair is a modern accessory. Alec’s father made a parcel of even the smallest purchase, two skate-knobs for a minister’s housekeeper, a single roll of coley for an old man without teeth. Taking the fish in his left hand he placed it dead centre atop the pile of grey-blue paper, and folded it with envelope ends to stop any leaks, pulling out his left hand at the last moment to give a squaring-off slap to the parcel. He made out receipts with care from the pad headed ‘Dundas and Macrae’. Each action came to him easily. He was in his element. The silver streets of Edinburgh in the fresh morning might have been rivers to him.

  Mairi was not so aswim. She feared the sea, that had reached her grandfather down from a foredeck at night and pocketed him deep in a net heavy with starfish. The ominous weight of starfish in a net has fishermen miserable before they find a man in it, a drowned comrade become a mass of hungry muscular stars.

  Alec she had named Alexander for her grandfather and it was upon him that her hopes of rescue rested, optimistic and transparent as a message in a bottle.

  It was not that she disliked fish. She merely wished it in its place. At night when she smelt his father’s and her own mixed sleep it cannot have been that of warm-blooded animals resting between dry sheets and under wool in a house on dry land, but that of seals among weed and wrack. Then perhaps she felt the deck slip and her own grip loosen and the sea open.

  Maybe it was on mornings after such nights that she cleaned with even more zeal than usual, abrading and scouring and sluicing until she left the house with a clarity of air and freedom from dust whose unwitting effect was solely marine.

  Nick Pedersen had one pair of shorts and a pair of spectacles that were held around his neck on a string black with sweat, salt and oil. He lived at sea and was at home on it wherever there were winds. His calmness and slowness to speech gave him the apparent dullness that was his great advantage in foxing people. He had begun his life on the hot metal presses, in Essex. At these presses, his father had tweezed and dropped letters, spaced them with beautiful tense spaces held open by discretion and metal, and locked them into their formes. When he saw that the work he had pined for was disappearing, Nick told his father of his plan to get out on to the sea and his father had told him to do it while there was still room on the water. He spoke of the sea as though it were a page growing ever more crowded with poorly spaced letters.

  Nick was admired in many ports for his patience. He could fix all engines, even the sulkiest, even the engines of fridges. He did not see the need for patience since it was interest that lured him as he dismantled the questions set before him and reassembled them as answers. He had a swot’s face and pirate teeth and the newt-like body often thought of as intellectual. His reputation arrived before him in harbour. Logan had put out the word in ports across the Pacific that there was a place for him if he wanted it on the last leg of Ardent Spirit’s voyage from the Panama Canal to New Zealand. Over oceans the gossip travels in bounteous sneezes, chatter reaching islands at dawn, multiplying with the lifting sun and moving off to infect and settle the next atoll before the abrupt darkness. Nick was curious about the boat and joined her in the Marquesas.

  Sandro Hughes was a New Zealander. If the Scots are the most emigrated people on earth, the New Zealanders must have most nationals afloat, outside of a navy. The boats of New Zealand outnumber the people on water as do the sheep on land. Sandro’s mother came from North Italy. In Auckland she ran an Italian restaurant called the Check Tablecloth, where she made Italian food with a New Zealand flavour. Lawyers came every night for her oyster cocktail in a sundae glass. One or other handsome son waited at table, combining the mother’s punctilio with the father’s aversion to what he saw as fawning.

  Sandro and his brother Luca alternated their periods of absence from the flat on top of the restaurant, to spare their mother the loneliness of life with a man who had decided to resent the native land of a wife he had once chosen for her eyes, her cooking, her forgiving unwillingness to close up against what she did not know. Sandro, at twenty-four, had made it twice to the Panama Canal but the first time his papers were lifted in Colon City and the second time he got drunk with a man who said he was a mercenary though he had no detail of where. In the morning Sandro saw the boat that would have taken him through to the next sea, held in its place in the deep canal by straining ropes and heckled by dirty pilot boats that seemed to threaten its
sudden departing smallness among the great precipitous ships of purpose, trade, tourism, national power. He was left behind by these things and did not much care. At last he found Ardent Spirit, after reading a postcard on a board in a bar. After five different men had checked him out over two afternoons, he met Logan, who took him on.

  Sandro had, instead of the patriotism he might have, had not his mother divided and his father made repulsive such an idea, a high romantic regard for sailing boats. He loved them and learnt quickly the mood of each boat he lived and worked on. Ardent Spirit, for instance, had a list to port before certain winds and under certain combinations of canvas. At her best, she sailed more perfectly, more nearly silently, than any boat he had been on. Her ornamental interior he noticed and did not mind, while Nick saw it and was irritated somewhat at details that he felt were pointless enough on land. Sandro forgave the vessel’s fine innards and her well-made solidity, even the sofa cover patterned with stylised marine knots, the shelves battened to measure for books, the tantalus socketed in its cupboard, the rotating captain’s chair plugged with buttons, before a chart table big enough, really, to eat off, to sleep on.

  And it was so that above, on deck, such detail lost the note of frivolity although it was incidentally elegant, being entirely bent on purpose and maintained at a level that might be called groomed. Each rope, for fear of catching and holding and thus, at such great weights of sail, tearing off a hand or foot, was coiled invariably, discreetly, concentrically, paid down inside itself – even if it had to be so in exactly the same manner again two minutes later. Winch handles were stowed as though they were sharp knives. The deck was smooth and white and close-set with only the regular golden freckle of brass screws to hold it. Towards the bow the hardly visible curve of the deck took the eye like the wing of a hovering bird as its two sides approached one another precisely, minutely, the tessellation of the pale wood meeting without demarcation.