Hellfire and Herring by Christopher Rush

Author:Christopher Rush
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2007-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

No, not strange at all. He was very ordinary. That was the strange thing. He showed me the small short-spined sea-scorpions appearing in the water in early February, and the porcelain and thornback crabs in the rock pools. The whelks had left the pools now and ventured out on to the rocks and skerries. As early as the first day of February the fulmars were flying offshore and the skylarks singing loudly over the fields. Hundreds of gulls fluttered along the newly ploughed furrows in long white bridal trains, behind tractors that looked like busy red-cheeked farm girls coming over the shoulder of the land. But by the third week of the month the fieldfares and redwings were getting ready to leave, and eider ducks were cooing on the tide. Aconites buttered the woods and Dog’s Mercury gold-dusted the ditches. On clear frosty nights Rigel and Aldebaran glittered over the firth, lamps above Edinburgh.

‘And Edinburgh would frizzle up in a second in one of those sparklers. The whole world would go out like a moth.’

I followed his pointing finger south at ten o’clock to where stars were being born in Orion’s sword even as we spoke – out of time.

‘There’s no ten o’clock or anything o’clock in Orion.’ So he liked to say.

When grandfather wasn’t entertaining me, my own first attempts at self-amusement were snatched from the rolling wheel of the seasons as it whirred past our windows. I played on the beach among the tangles after a sea-cat gale in February, and saw the dead sea-cats in among the giant weeds, their slippery corpses not yet stiffened, voiceless things of the sea, which I pulled out by their tails, whirling them round my head and loosing them like unchained comets to land with a thud on the bouldery shore. The old folk and the poor used to eat these sea-cats. Nobody looked twice at them now, not even the niggards who would go out and kill for a coupon. But old George took a different view. After a wintry gale he would ask me to go down to the shore to look for them. ‘As long as you can see blood coming from them, they’ll make a good enough eating.’

He examined each one I brought him, slashed with my penknife to check for blood, and trundled all the way up the brae in my miniature wheelbarrow. The sea-cats, he told me, were so stupid that they deserved to be eaten. During the deep storms they clung to the big stalks of the tangles, not letting go even though their holdfasts were uprooted from the seabed, and so they came ashore, still clinging to the washed-up weeds, to take their last journey, a funeral procession in my little blue barrow all the way up to old George’s dinner table.

Some he kept, others he returned to me to throw back into the water. Down on the beach again, I sorted through the tangles for a fair-sized root which grandfather cut out for me in the shape of a pistol.

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