I was trying to get a lift with an Aberdeen trawler to Lerwick for work but the Aberdeen boats had not been to sea for years. The fleet was tied up in the harbour and salt wind had scoured them down to the bare metal so that every boat was red with rust. A man in his late 20s wearing a Wrangler jacket and carrying a duffel bag sat down beside me. I said I was going to Shetland but I didn’t have enough money for the ferry.
“I’ll spot you the difference,” he said. “You can pay me back.” I said he might regret giving money to a stranger and he gave me a look which said what did I know about regret?
From the ferry John pointed out the tollbooths and batteries of Aberdeen town. In the distance the grey shadow of Peterhead Prison. It was a hard salt-reeking coastline of sandstone and granite cliff tops and lonely rock outcrops overlooking the sea.
Out at sea we passed within 20 miles of the inshore oil platforms. That’s where I want to work, John said, but at the big offshore rigs. You make money fit to beat the band. At 20 miles distant the platforms were vast scaffolded things dark against the evening sky. They disappeared over the horizon but when it got dark they started to flare gas and you could see the glow on the underside of clouds like far-off battle.
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We got work in the fish factory on the North Road in Lerwick. John asked the foreman Baird if we could stay in the huts which were a row of broken-down wooden prefabs behind the factory. The paint peeled on the weatherbeaten planks and tar melt ran down the walls from the roof. There was an old wood-burning stove in the middle of the hut and John got it going and fed it with old pallets and driftwood. We slept on steel-framed beds with thin foam mattresses and threadbare wool blankets. The beds were child-sized so that your feet hung out the end. John said that the beds came from a children’s home in Aberdeen after it closed down.
A plywood partition divided the hut into male and female sections. The women in the female section came from the industrial hinterland of Glasgow. When work was slow they stayed in bed reading the religious tracts which were left on their bedside lockers and talking. There was something hoarse and broken and insistent in their accents as if you had to be heard above yourself. At work they wore white nylon hairnets and white overalls. There was an icy mist in the factory air and the women moved through it barely visible, transformed, incorporeal.
The herring came in frozen slabs from Norway. The men dipped the fish in baths of red dye using plastic baskets. The dye coloured your hands and arms red and gave you eczema. We complained to Baird about it. God sends afflictions, Baird said, he sends lamentations and afflictions.
Baird had been a lay preacher with a roadside church on the mainland. There had been a scandal, an apostacy, and he had ended up in Lerwick. He had been in the military and wore a white hat with a peak pulled down over his eyes and a trimmed moustache. He showed evangelical films at the North Star cinema on Saturday afternoons.
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Lorna was a thin girl with fine blond hair and a refugee pallor. She was putting fish into white polystyrene boxes at the end of the packing line. There were tears streaming down her face. John went over to her and asked her what was wrong and she said there was nothing wrong but she was crying now because when sorrow or worse came your way there might not be time for tears. John said a gust of wind would blow her away but she was the youngest of us all and the women looked after her.
That evening I saw Lorna outside the shower block behind the huts. She was inhaling industrial glue from a tin. She had a transistor radio which she kept tuned to Radio Caroline. No one cleaned the block. There were stained tiles and broken windows. Lukewarm water trickled from the showerheads and the drains were blocked with fish scales and overflowed. At night the pipes groaned and banged. Lorna said that the glue brought her to a better place. This was why the women looked after her. She held the promise of other, less damaged worlds.
That winter you saw the aurora borealis often on clear nights. John borrowed the factory flatbed lorry and drove me and Lorna to Sumburgh Head to look at the lights. Lorna said it was believed that the lights were dead children at play. John said how could it be dead children? In what knowledge do lights become children?
John said that if you went out there just beyond the horizon you would find the deepwater oil rigs and their giant hollow legs, fathoms deep. He said that dock workers had sometimes been sealed into the legs by accident and if you put your ear against a leg you could hear them. There was a ghostly tapping below the waterline. He was just biding his time until he could get a berth on one of them. He got drunk one night and told us that his younger brother had been killed in an accident and his mother had never got over it. He said I reminded him of his brother. I didn’t mind. When you were cast up in a faraway place you took kinship where you could find it.
He made a room in the huts for the two of us by hanging blankets from the ceiling. He didn’t sleep well and sometimes I woke at night and he was sitting on the edge of his bed wearing pyjama bottoms and looking down at me in the dark. You set about the tasks of family as best you can. I did not tell him that when I closed my eyes in the child size bed I was beset with orphan dreams.
Lorna used glue every day. It left her helpless, barely able to walk, her pale limbs afloat on her own imagining, borne aloft by dreamed winds. When it was time to go to bed one of us brought Lorna to the door of the women’s hut. One of the women would open the door and beckon to her like a novitiate being received.
The day before the storm I brought Lorna to the women’s section and waited with her. She drew my head down to her face. There’s a storm coming, she said, I heard it on the radio. Then she kissed me on the cheek. The door opened and gentle hands guided her in. The kiss was light and dry like that of a child. I know now that the kisses of the lost stay with you forever.
John said that Radio Caroline was broadcast from a converted trawler anchored off the south coast of England and that the DJs knew the sea and its perils and that Lorna should be heeded.
She told us there was a polar low to the north of Shetland and a storm coming down from the Arctic Circle. John drove us out to Sumburgh Head again and we watched the sky darken and the helicopters flying to the mainland from the oil platforms and terminals. We waited at Sumburgh until we couldn’t see the red green flicker of helicopter landing lights streaming north any more. When the sky was empty we drove back into Lerwick. Many of the shops were closed and the town had an abandoned feel to it. We felt open to signs and portents.
The factory was closed for the day but Baird said we would be paid if we went to the film he was showing that afternoon in the North Star. We sat in two rows in the middle of the balcony straightbacked and solemn. It felt like the proper way to behave watching a devotional film on the eve of a mighty storm. The film was called Angels in Our Midst. In the film the mother died and the family split up but a little girl who was an angel unknown to them brought the family back together with the power of prayer.
Outside snow flurries blew to the streets. Baird shook hands with us at the door as if he was a real pastor. We followed the women out the North Road back to the factory. They were grave-faced, pilgrim in the falling dusk. Lorna walked behind everyone. She had cried during the film as though for the first time she had glimpsed a salvation denied her.
The blizzard struck shortly after we returned from the cinema. The huts shifted and creaked on their foundations. The snow blew up against the walls and through crevices and chinks in the wood. We took down the partition between the men and women’s section and pulled the beds up so that everyone could sit around the stove. The fish scales on the walls and floors gleamed in the firelight. Lorna had not followed us in and I went out with John to look for her. When we opened the door the gale blew snow the length of the room.
Outside the snow was blinding. We went into the shower block. John held up his lighter. There were eerie creaks and pipings. The wind was barely audible. You felt as if you were below decks in an abandoned ship. We could hear her radio playing faintly like a haunting and we found it pushed behind a pipe in a toilet stall. The signal was lost to the storm, static crackling in the speakers. It sounded like a last transmission.
We went down the road calling out her name. John held my arm to keep us together. We reached the front of the factory. Baird stood in front of us and blocked our way. There was frost in his moustache and the fire of God in his eyes.
“Behold,” he said, “the storm of the Lord has gone forth in wrath”.
“Man’s not right in the head. Come on back,” John said, “we would have found her if she wanted to be found”. He was right. You cannot come between the lost and their truant hearts.
The gale blew across the island. Power lines came down. Ships were driven from their moorings. Snow collected on the roof of the factory and collapsed it. The wind beat about the hut’s tin roof and shrieked in hag voices. The electricity had been out for hours and we lit candles. Around four in the morning the storm started to die down. As the snow stopped falling Lorna came in from outside with a tin of glue in her hand. She bore it like a chalice and drifted through the hut, her hands webbed with the glue. Light emanated from her, volatile compounds. She brushed against the stove and the fumes in the air around her caught fire. She floated between the beds driven by an imagined wind. In the light of her presence the silver fish scales glittered like a thousand constellations. She went out of the door at the other end and ran lightfooted into the snow. The mainland women watched her go into the night outlined in blue flame. The knowledge of God and of his banished angels was in their eyes.
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The first chopper in the air after the storm took Lorna to an infirmary on the mainland and we never saw her again. Baird called us all to the factory canteen and told us that the factory was closed and our jobs were gone. While we were away John took a can of petrol up to the huts and burned them. When I got there all that was left was charred timber and the blackened frames of the beds, the springs tangled like beach wreckage, like memory.
We were all interviewed by the police in Lerwick. I told them about John’s brother dead and his mother’s grief.
“He strung you some line son,” the policeman said. He said John had a string of convictions for larceny and assault. He stole a car in Glasgow and crashed it. His younger brother was in the passenger seat and got put through the windscreen and killed and his own mother disowned him.
“He’s a violent man,” the policeman said, “he beat a cellmate to a pulp in Peterhead Prison. Waited until he fell asleep and then set about him.”
I remembered John sitting on his bed looking down at me at night, his pale torso and his arms stained blood red as though he had come from a scene of atrocity and murder.
John was charged with arson and sent to Peterhead Prison on remand. I left the island that week. When I went up the gangway on to the ferry Baird was standing at the land end handing out tracts but he looked haunted. I could have told him that God is not beholden to us but we are beholden to him.
He did not try to give me a tract but held my hands with an earnest look in his eyes as though to bind me with covenants of remembering.
That night I got off the ferry in Aberdeen and slept on the beach in the shadow of Peterhead Prison. It was foggy and I went to sleep to the sound of water droplets dripping from the marram grass on the dunes. But when I woke in the night the sky was clear and I saw the lit windows of the prison cell-blocks building ablaze in the night as though it was on fire. And everything I knew of love seemed to burn with it. Years later I heard that after he was released from Peterhead John had gone to work in the deepwater oilfields and some time afterwards he went over the side of a rig and his body was never found. The soundless years go by. Baird’s covenants stay with me. Bodies drift on deep sea currents. Blood red fleets set sail from ghost ports. There are seraphs rimmed in blue fire in the night. You go to bed and dream orphan dreams but our children are gone from us. You try to remember what they were called but their names are lost in the grassheads and sea winds.
Eoin McNamee is director of Trinity Oscar Wilde Centre. He is working on the script for the remake of Harry’s Game. His new novel, The Bureau, will be published in March 2025
