The FREE literary magazine of the North Northwords Now Issue 29, Spring 2015

What Do We Think We Are? Robert Davidson on Writing, Territory and Identity

New fiction and poetry including Robin Fulton Macpherson, Regi Claire, Pàdraig MacAoidh, Lesley Harrison and Hugh McMillan

Interviews and Reviews including Christopher Brookmyre, Ian Stephen and Michel Faber EDITORIAL Contents Changing Times 3 The Morning After: Interview with Christopher Brookmyre his is the last issue of Northwords Now in its current form. At the time of writing this editorial I am waiting to hear from 4 Poems by Eileen Carney Hulme, William Bonar, Catherine Wylie, Tour principal financial partners, Creative Scotland and Bòrd na Anna Danskin, Stuart A. Paterson, & Kate Hendry Gàidhlig, about applications for funding for 2015/16. I am confident the news will be good but even if our applications are successful some 5 Marta’s Last Wish – Short Story by Regi Claire changes need to be made. Northwords Now will now be published just twice a year - in March 5 Poems by Stephen Keeler and September. This means that, at a time of acute financial pressure, we can save money on printing and distribution costs. However the 6 What Do You Think You Are? – Essay by Robert Davidson impact on writers and readers will not, I hope, be felt too keenly. The magazine will grow in size from 24 to 32 pages per issue. In other words 8 Imprint – Short Story by Mairi Sutherland we will publish almost the same amount of fiction, poetry, articles and reviews. Importantly, Northwords Now, will also remain free to its readers, 9 Poems by Andy Allan, Frances Robson, Coinneach Lindsay, whether online or on good, old fashioned paper. That we are able to Hugh McMillan, Paula Jennings, & Grahaeme Barrasford Young do this owes much to the continuing support of Creative Scotland and Bòrd na Gàidhlig, and to Highlands and Islands Enterprise. Our thanks 10 Vodka Tonic – Short Story by Brian Hamill go out to them. I’ve also decided to bring in submission deadlines so that writers 12 Poems by Robin Fulton Macpherson will have a better idea of how soon they can expect a decision on their submission. The submission deadline for Issue 30 is 31st July 2015. 14 Night Time in Ninewells – Poems by Derek Ramsay One thing, I’m happy to say, that does not seem to change with the times, at least not for the worse, is the amount of fine new writing that 15 Is Daor a Cheannaich iad an t-iasgach (dearly have they bought comes our way. Long may it continue. n the fishing) Words and Image by Ann Bowes 16 Poems by Pàdraig MacAoidh and Lesley Harrison – Chris Powici Editor 17 Trinidad – Short Story by Richard W. Strachan 18 Poems by Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh 19 Poems by Paula Jennings, Ian McFadyen, Mark Edwards, Philip Miller, Desmond Graham & Katrina Shepherd 20 Reviews 23 Contributors’ Biographies, Where To Find Northwords Now

At The Northwords Now Website: www.northwordsnow.co.uk

Podcast of Pàdraig MacAoidh Gaelic Poetry in translation Reviews Extra www.facebook.com/groups/northwordsnow/ How to download Northwords Now to an e-reader

Northwords Now is a twice yearly literary Advisory Group Submissions to the magazine are welcome. magazine published by Northwords, a not-for- Jon Miller, Peter Urpeth, Pam Beasant They can be in Gaelic, English, Scots and profit company, registered in February 2005. any local variants. They should be sent to Designer the postal address. Unsolicited e-mail New Address for Submissions Gustaf Eriksson, www.gustaferiksson.com attachments will not be opened. The material Northwords Now should be typed on A4 paper. Please submit 6 Kippendavie Lane Technical Advisor no more than three short stories or six Dunblane Tony Ross poems. Contact details – an email address Perthshire [email protected] or an SAE - should be included. We cannot FK15 0HL return work that has no SAE. Copyright Advertising remains with the author. Payment is made for Board members [email protected] all successful submissions. The next issue is Adrian Clark (Chair), Ann Yule, www.northwordsnow.co.uk/advertise.asp planned for September 2015. The deadline for Valerie Beattie, Kristin submissions is 31st July 2015. You will hear Pedroja, Stewart Lackie Subscriptions about your submission by 31st August 2015. The magazine is FREE and can be picked up Editor at locations across Scotland. See list on P23 Chris Powici, [email protected] The fee for individual ‘home-delivery’ is £6 for 2 issues, cheques payable to ‘Northwords’. Gaelic Editor The Board and Editor of Northwords Now Rody Gorman, Front cover image acknowledge support from Highlands [email protected] Front Cover Image: Photograph of poet and Islands Enterprise, Creative Magi McGlyn by Dominique Carton Scotland and Bòrd na Gàidhlig. www.alba-photography.com ISSN 1750-7928

2 Northwords Now Issue 29, Spring 2015 Good Guys and Bad Guys

An Interview with Christopher Brookmyre By St e p h e n Ke e l e r

hristopher Brookmyre is the best- is so much more interesting for a journalist selling author of eighteen action character, especially one who’s guilty of all Cnovels which are strong on plot these things that were revealed in the Inquiry and blend social comment, occasional satire itself. You see he was probably one of the and, increasingly, character development. characters I was least interested in as a writer. The early novels, written under the name I would bring him into it so that I could Christopher Brookmyre, have a rich comic, concentrate on the issues in the book. To me almost absurdist seam; later novels, by Chris he wasn’t that deep or complex. And then Brookmyre, are somewhat darker. Stephen in Dead Girl Walking I kind of rediscovered Keeler talked to the author before a reading the character and suddenly he was far more from his latest novel, Dead Girl Walking, at complex and far more interesting to me Waterstone’s in Inverness. because he’s someone in a state of crisis at that point. He’s not so interesting when he’s SK Could we start with the name? Are you cocksure, which he was before. I’ve taken Christopher Brookmyre or Chris Brookmyre? And ownership of him again. does it matter? SK Crime fiction seems to be alive and well and CB It’s one of those questions I wish I could living in Scotland. Can you account for that? make some sort of public statement about. It was really my publisher doing something CB Geographers call it a conglomerate that would signal a change of tone. I can economy: the more there is of something understand why they were doing it but I think there more it groups together and the more they were hamstrung by the fact that it was Photograph of Christopher Brookmyre by Stephen Keeler likely it is that there’ll be more of it. You can the wrong way round: if I’d always been Chris see how the strength of Scottish crime fiction Brookmyre writing these informal books it wanted to write social commentary. I chose will engender more of it. would have made perfect sense…as a publisher CB Yeah, I’m able to engage with that sort it because it’s the kind of writing I like: they’d been very successful distinguishing of thing in a tone that’s in keeping with the stories that have good guys and bad guys SK You don’t think there’s something particular between Iain Banks and Iain M Banks and I rest of the story, whereas in the past there was and complicated and convoluted plots, and about the landscape, the mood, the culture, the think they were thinking they could maybe an almost cartoonish element to my writing surprises and twists…I’d never have written history..? show different sides to my writing but I’m and I don’t think that would sit so well with anything else. not sure those sides were quite so distinct… the more character-driven type of story When I grew up there was no real fiction CB I think Scottish writing in general does and now, just to confuse matters, there’s a Jack that I’m writing at the moment. Dead Girl for older kids so I went straight from Asterix tend to want to examine our society quite Parlabane novel published under the name Walking is very much a character piece, so it to Ian Fleming and Robert Ludlum. So unflinchingly, and I think therefore you’re not Chris Brookmyre. wouldn’t really do if you suddenly had some my sense of what a grown-up novel was going to get an Aga-saga written in Scotland. whacky set piece as you might have found in was a story that had that sort of plot, evil I think there’s a certain unflinching harshness SK How do you feel about the description of your my previous books. But it wasn’t as though I machinations, highly complex ruses going on: and honesty that we look for in writing and early books as comic thrillers? And to what extent reached a stage where I thought right I won’t to me that was the kind of story I was always that lends itself to crime fiction. have you made a conscious decision to move away do that any more. For me it’s always been going to write. from the comic? about the story. SK Like most best-selling writers today you are SK Where did the character of Jack Parlabane in demand at book launches, readings and festivals. CB I don’t object to that at all. I think SK How do you feel about the ‘tartan noir’ tag? come from? Does it get increasingly difficult to set aside time publishers don’t much like it though. It for writing? makes the books harder to sell. People don’t CB I don’t object to it. I think it was first used CB He has evolved over a long period of always respond well to that. Hard-core crime about me with my second book. It was a handy time. Initially I was conscious that I didn’t CB Not at all. I say yes to everything readers seem to shy away from it. It’s not thing to band together a number of writers. I want to write about a police officer. Other that’s offered. As much as I possibly can. I ‘proper’ crime. I set out in Quite Ugly One never had any problem with the ‘tartan’. The people know more about that and can do it enjoy speaking in front of an audience. I’m Morning, which was directly influenced by problem I had was with the ‘noir’. Most of my better. I’d worked in newspapers so I was a practised at writing on trains, on the road, in Carl Hiaasen – his characters are larger than early writing was fairly colourful and upbeat. bit more familiar with journalism and also hotel rooms. I actually feel pretty good if I’ve life and fun to be around – to create a tribute It wasn’t mean streets. I think that ‘noir’ ends it’s not required of the journalist the way travelled somewhere and I’ve written 1500 to the Carl Hiaasen lumbering hitman who up being misunderstood: it ends up being a it is of the police to follow logical lines of words during that day and done a reading in gets increasingly debilitated as the story goes shorthand term for crime fiction. Admittedly enquiry. So that was part of it, and there was the evening: I feel like that was a damn good on. And I didn’t consciously decide to move some of the stuff I’ve written recently is far also an element of Ford Prefect from The day. away from that. It was a very gradual evolution more ‘noir’, but you couldn’t describe a book Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy about him. away from the comedy although I’m not sure like One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night That character stuck with me. And I like the SK You’re headlining the Ullapool Book Festival there’s always a clear line. as ‘noir’. It’s very cartoonish, it’s over-the-top, idea that someone can break in and breach in May. Is there anything you’re particularly looking it’s very redemptive. It’s characters exorcising security – not realising that this was actually forward to about that? SK It’s not that you’ve become a more serious their personal demons…and it’s fun, it should standard journalistic practice! person yourself? be energetic and knockabout. It’s about as far CB Seeing my pals! I think Louise (Welch) from ‘noir’ as crime fiction can get. SK He says, at one point in Dead Girl Walking, will be there and Val (McDermid)’s going to CB No. Well, I think that more recently “I’ve got a habit of finding dangerous situations be there. It’ll be good to catch up. And also I’ve been less overtly satirical in my writing. SK To what extent do your novels set out to make and effortlessly making them worse”. I’ve got a short story I’ll be reading and it’ll Partly it’s the fact I’m not in my twenties any social comment? be great to have a chance to read it in front more and partly I think other things have CB Yes, that creates an impression…readers of an audience. engaged me as a writer. The type of story I CB Every novel I’ve written has had some are going to know that he’s not a conventional want to write about doesn’t lend itself to that sort of ideological agenda, sometimes more kind of journalist. I didn’t know that I would knockabout tone. transparent than others…I don’t feel engaged be writing about him again. In the early books with a novel if I don’t feel that it’s telling me I made him a bit too sure of himself and had SK You take a fair swipe at the Daily Mail and the something about the society around it. But I to treat him really badly after that, to humble Christopher Brookmyre will read from his work at Leveson Inquiry in Dead Girl Walking, though? don’t think I chose crime fiction because I him a little. And the post-Leveson landscape this year’s Ullapool Book Festival. n

Northwords Now Issue 29, Spring 2015 3 Poetry

Touchstone Dà Rathad You and our daughter. I watch you loving her Eileen Carney Hulme Anna Danskin like you’re allowed. For this short time of her babyhood you can baste her with love. We enter the restaurant Dh’iomsgair dà rathad ann an coille bhuidhe. No talking to work out, no fighting over food complain to each other Brònach nach b’ urrainn dhomh siubhal na dha, or bed times. She lies there for you about the cigarette smoke, Sheas mi ùine, a’ coimhead sìos fear can’t decide if a corner table Cho fad’ ‘s a ghabhadh gu lùib san doire. as you dangle your fingers over her tummy or one by the closed door and kiss her feet. ‘You’re in love with her,’ can claim a breathing space. ‘S an uair sin thug mi ’m fear eile, a cheart I say. ‘Who?’ you say – it’s your game. cho grinn,‘s dòcha le tagairt na b’ fheàrr, I’m not to catch you loving her. It’s done You talk about your working day feurach ‘s gun uabhas caitheamh. in private, in dark rooms, when I’m rushing out. and I tell you of my waiting - gidheadh, bha ’m fear eile cha mhòr na leth-aon. that Almir is preparing the ground ‘S bha an dithis a mhadainn sin a’ laighe for planting next year’s raspberries an duilleagan air nach robh duine air coiseachd. and he plants them close O, chùm mi a’ chiad fhear airson là eile, MacDiarmid on Whalsay to the fence of an adjacent garden ach le fios mar a leanas slighe air slighe, William Bonar where white gravestones chill the landscape le amharas nach tilleadh mi tuilleadh. Bidh mi ag innseadh seo le osna, an àiteigin, Black oan white cries this böd I also tell you some workmen ri linn is linn ri tighinn: Dh’iomsgair dà rathad Grieve House. Fenced n nettled appeared to be testing the gas meter an coille bhuidhe, Ghabh mi ‘m fear neo-àbhaisteach. thaive pit yer ocean, Chris, at the half-house next door, ‘S le sin dh’atharraich mòran. in a mutchkin n stawed the one scarred with bullet and mortar holes the key. Laid yer path and that Almir’s daughter ran past me (às dèidh Robert Frost) wi crusht rid granite forby. whispering a shy hello. Oan this Sysiphean hill thaive pegged ye, trig n snod. Later we walk back to your rented flat through the town’s night life, Where is that girl? Fegs, Chris, whaes tae blame thaim! the cracked pavements, Catherine Wylie Unskeely yersel, ye admired roads with no street lights or names. thaim at the peats, the fishin. Almir, standing by his door Seek her outside swinging on the gate, Bit thai cottoned tae yer gemme: last cigarette of the day in hand, telling the time with a dandelion clock kid-oan wurds hid ye rise calls us to wait, or high in the copper beech. frae yer bunk luik a sillock. returns with a bowl of pears Thai kent ye fur a pör bein from my trees, he offers, You may glimpse her waving legs whae dune nae work thai cud name we thank him in torn, sky-blue tights. and I look to a smog-filled sky, She is swaying with the wind, bit gaed aboot in a kilt the Igman mountain nestled underneath, her blown hair full of feather and twig. n hobbed wi nobs at the North Star nowhere to be seen. Cupped in her hands are sparrows, a wren. Symbister Hoose raither thain She throws them for the wind to catch. swash wi fishers n lilt She has spiders for yoyos wi crofters. Lingered and stretches, sticky, web-bound, fingertip to toe. oan Linga twinty meenits Late n imagined three days o desert — Grez-sur-Loing, November 2014 Call her by name and she will come to table no juist Christ tae the hilt! Stuart A. Paterson trailing earth, leaves, burrs. Her perfume is of wild petal Yet ye hung oan in this hain. It’s long after midnight, cold, damp, – dog-rose, speedwell, daisy – Nine year ye wur hovelled French fog slinking up from the Loing and leaf in a jam-jar. in the lee o yon quarry, with shrugged wet shoulders With berry stained lips yirdit frae history n pain, & I have cheap red wine, an old baguette, she gobbles and gulps and is gone. whiles ye fell n rose stringy Dutch tobacco & the internet. reenged oot ayont the leemits At night, find her lying awake o earth, sea n lift, The lights in the other rooms are out. listening to the last rustlings of the day. hammerin sang frae stanes. Their inhabitants aren’t Scottish, Opening her mouth to yawn, or Ahh at the stars, they’re sensible & wouldn’t stay up late an owl emerges, flies round the room Note: In Shetlandic, a böd is originally a fisherman’s hut, to muse on evocative fog, nibble gingerly and, by an open window, leaves to hunt in the dark. now used as basic hostel-type accommodation, which on back-fridge Brie & how the ducks Grieve House, as it has been named, now functions as. sound on the river at half past 3. This is the tiny, rudimentary cottage where Christopher Murray Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid) lived from 3rd May 1933 until 13th They aren’t Scottish, wouldn’t understand Permission January 1942. that awful need to be awake when Kate Hendry Linga is a small, uninhabited island off Whalsay. everyone & everything the world over’s far beyond the pale of history I’m running late for work. The baby needs & late. a nappy change. In the still-dark morning I lay her on the bed. You sit up, as if it’s your birthday and you’ve been waiting for this one present, which I place on your lap.

4 Northwords Now Issue 29, Spring 2015 Marta’s Last Poems by Stephen Keeler Wish Short Story by Regi Claire Still Life (2) he cop cocks his gun and begins to In memory of Mary Fedden, RA swivel-walk into the suspect’s lockup. TAs he advances, the music rises to a The small Portmeirion vase I never liked discord of shrieks that signals the showdown. Until you died, and suddenly it was The old man holds his breath, leans closer to The last thing that you ever bought for me, the screen. Just then there’s a loud crash in Is stuffed with bright immodest daffodils, the kitchen. And next to it, the lizard bought in France ‘Oh no, what a mess,’ his wife cries. The summer that you learned to drink pastis; ‘Sebastian, quick, get me the bucket from the Dried lavender, a Russian porcelain doll, cellar, I’ve dropped a pan.’ A snapshot in a coffee shop in Prague ‘The film’s almost finished, Marta, just a Of you because the light, reflected in couple more minutes.’ The chandeliers and mirrors, seemed to draw ‘I’ll have to get it myself then, will I?’ Her The very pulse of you, and I, compelled voice has an edge to it that Sebastian knows To take the photo, inarticulate only too well. Except to make a picture, understood And so it goes. Every time Sebastian For time that could not be defined, the life watches an episode of his favourite crime Of you – the livingness – against the glare series or an action film, Marta asks him to And clatter and the muzak and the smoke: fetch her something from the cellar: walnuts A photograph of you that would in time or chestnuts, onions, a bottle of vinegar, a tin Be slipped into a wallet, moulded to of peas or asparagus, anything at all, really, and The shape of a back pocket, flattened by he invariably misses the ending. The florid banknotes of an alien Her death from a stroke comes as a bit of Republic as indifferent to us a relief. After the funeral, once his in-laws As torpid oceans rinsing tidewrack shells have driven off, Sebastian celebrates with two Cathartically, on a foreign shore. bottles of Feldschlösschen bought specially for the occasion. There’s a thriller on TV and his slippers are warming by the fire. Snow has begun to fall outside, a jostle of wild, Untitled whirling flakes that makes him feel reckless For Elsie Chapman and Elizabeth Lane and young again. He grins, holds up his glass in a wordless toast. January was a lonely month to die. Just as the film’s climax approaches, he The clouded baubles had been taken down realises the fire is about to go out. It needs and loosely wrapped again in mildewed cloths, more wood. Now. ‘Damn,’ he says, allowing the little lights unstrung, re-boxed and shut away himself to swear under his breath. ‘Might as though like rare and fabled plants as well not have buried her.’ He leaves his they need neglect and feed on necessary dark slippers where they are; no one to tell him to crop again somewhere that’s changed meanwhile. to put them on before he hurries downstairs. January was a lonely month to die, He smiles to himself, then laughs out loud unfollowed even by the light. when he finds himself swaying slightly. In his head he can hear Marta complain: ‘I’ve married a drunk, a good-for-nothing drunk.’ To drown out her voice, he whistles ‘Yellow October submarine’. He switches on the cellar lights, starts to Looking up from my tea-cup descend, his right hand on the banisters. through the kitchen window, Then he remembers the wood basket; it’s small against the razoring gale still upstairs, beside his slippers. ‘Damn, damn, beyond the rain-rippled glass, damn.’ Swearing quite openly now, he turns I caught on an inference of movement on his heel. high up, above the cliff-top, A few days before she died, Marta, ever and took it for another power cable house-proud, had waxed the stairs. But this loosed and flailing at the shuddering turmoil out there, evening Sebastian doesn’t have time to admire and waited for the lights to fail. their glossy sheen. He slips, slides, then bump- bump-bumps all the way down, his stocking Looking again, I saw the skein of geese soles, corduroys, flannel shirt and finally his unravel from the foreground stave of shock of thick grey hair giving each step a power lines, and wondered whether ‘skein’ very last polish. Immaculate. is Scandinavian, Old Norse, perhaps, As the stairs settle back into their sleek, – the geese were flying south – worn shape, the wood creaks a little. A current but found it is of English origin, of air whispers above the still figure stretched to do with yarn or ribbon maybe, out on the floor, and a loose flap of wallpaper wavering; twisting nods in the draught. In the room upstairs, the like a silent line given out in thick uneven ink film music swells to a crescendo. Outside, the by the ancient poet. snow keeps falling, more calmly now and with more determination. Already only the tips of the grass blades are showing. Soon the lawn will be an unmarked white sheet, waiting for the hieroglyphics of bird feet and the orderly paw prints of the occasional cat. n

Northwords Now Issue 29, Spring 2015 5 What do we think we are?

Identity and the author in Scotland Ess a y b y Ro b e r t Da v i ds o n

he most significant experience of my writing life, the one that changed Tme most as a person, that produced a significant book, and that altered everything we do at Sandstone Press has everything to do with ‘identity’ at its most fundamental, at the level of life and death. In 2006 we were publishing the Sandstone Vista series of novellas for adult learners*, when a series of meetings led me to a highly gifted and impressive woman, Remzije Sherifi, Development Officer for the Maryhill Integration Network, the most advanced such network in Britain. In 2007 Sandstone Press published her book, Shadow Behind the Sun. It was shortlisted for both the Saltire and Scottish Arts Council Awards as well as receiving two page coverage almost uniformly across the Scottish press. Remzije is an Albanian Kosovar, formerly an engineer and broadcast journalist, whose family and people suffered years of persecution at the hands of Kosovar Serbs and was later expelled by, we would better say ‘escaped from’, Serbian military and para-military forces to a concentration camp in Macedonia and, from there, in the first flight of refugees to Scotland, to my home city of Glasgow. With its reception of the refugees Glasgow showed its best side, welcoming and generous to the stranger who arrives with nothing. Unknowingly, it also gave me, working with Remzije Sherifi, the challenge of my life, a challenge that required the rapid reading of Remzije Sherifi, Author of Shadow Behind the Sun a dozen or more books on the subjects of Kosova, former Yugoslavia, and the wider Balkans. I found myself reflecting, as I really had the Seventies and Eighties, and I remember unusual in this process. It is how all cities, Through all this reading and since, I have to when reading and talking and describing that the Baader-Meinhof Gang, or Red Army other than those that have been planned noted the unwillingness of commentators Yugoslavia and former Yugoslavia, indeed Faction, received at least moral support from and built from scratch are formed. Readers to ascribe the events of the 1990s within considering the deeper history of the region, many people I knew. of Charles Dickens will remember how Bill former Yugoslavia to such concepts as on why people kill each other. The conclusion Do you think it could not be you doing, Sykes, in Oliver Twist, walked from village ‘ancient hatreds’, rather putting them down I reached is that we kill each other over what or inciting, the killing? What do you think to village in desperation after the murder of to the ambitions of a powerful criminal class, I now think of as ‘bottom line identity’: you are? Nancy, a walk that Dickens himself had done or residual tyranny. This is to be blind to the religion, nationalism, and ideology. Those are This leads me to the idea of territory. This repeatedly. All those villages have since joined obvious. One of Remzije’s repeated sayings what all else come down to. Mix any one place, meaning the area around the Inner to become what we now know as ‘London’, was that ‘every generation in Kosova gets its with territory and the effect can be lethal. Moray Firth, felt like it was waiting for me. of which the City of London is a relatively visit from the Serbs’. Mix two or three and it can be hopeless. I From discovery at the age of fourteen Argyll, small part. ‘Civilisation’ has both noun and verb put them in that order because that is how I Mull and Iona, an astonishingly beautiful More time passed and when a job forms. ‘Culture’ is as big a contributor to see them coming to us as a species. Imagine region, was where I really wanted to live, so opportunity came up in Dingwall I duly atrocity as it is to art. ‘Civilisation’ the process, a lone creature howling at the moon, that’s this part of the Highlands in some ways felt arrived on the 4th May 1980. Since then requires peace and time. It also requires hard religion begun. Imagine a pack or other like second best. Inverness has grown exponentially and been physical work, a notion that contributed to group hunting and gathering across a Discovery of this area though, in which formally recognised as a city, the Kessock the ending of another book, Site Works, beside territory, there’s tribalism and the beginnings I have now lived more than half of my Bridge has been built to complete the line my belief that the labourer engaged on, say, of nationalism. Settle them and invent the life and which is so much my home I can of the A9 across the region, joining the the construction of a sewer is as much a storage of wealth, eventually money, and have imagine no other, came in the late 1960s, Cromarty Bridge. Sewerage is now immensely contributor as the thinker in the University. them wonder about governance and planning when I participated in a traffic survey for improved, as are roads; broadband has arrived; The moment also underscored the lethal and reward and ideology appears. my employer, a consultant traffic engineer. I the airport has become international; and for relationship between identity and territory. From this thought a question formed: should explain that my background is not in a time we had the fastest growing population There can come a time, and it can repeat ‘What do you think you are?’ which has a publishing. In my teens I stumbled, somehow, in Europe which is now highly plural. Eden over the centuries, that peoples cannot larger significance than the more common: into civil engineering and remained there for Court Theatre has been opened and since share a territory, even when they have been Who do you think you are? What would more than thirty years. developed; we have a great rugby club; two neighbours for years, and this on the basis of you kill for? Religion? It’s happening today At that time there was a certain amount of football clubs operating in the top division; a what they think they are, of their identity, of in the Muslim world. Nationalism? It is talk, or prediction if you like, among the town superb literary magazine in Northwords Now their loyalties and traditions. It goes down to happening in Russian enclaves all around the planners and traffic engineers I was working and an international publishing house. the very naming of things, such as Kosovo Motherland, in Georgia and Ukraine. Soon, with, that the towns around the Inner Moray and Kosova, and when blood is spilled the if you want my opinion, it will start again in Firth would someday join and become one Raigmore Hospital has been transformed differences harden, often into obsession. Estonia. Ideology? In Germany and Italy in place, a new city. There is nothing new or into a crack institution serving the wider

6 Northwords Now Issue 29, Spring 2015 Highlands and Islands and, in addition, we Dunn, me, Rhoda Michael and now Chris governments was mass literacy: in Egypt the placing it beyond good and evil, and recognising no have the University of the Highlands and Powici, and I like to think that we have a fine results were dramatically beneficial almost beyond other duty than that of advancing its interests.’ Islands whose new campus is presently under publishing house which has the potential to imagining.’ There are territories on the ground construction. become great. If and when we eventually get round to and there are emotional and intellectual What we don’t have, yet, is a unified sense of What you will struggle to find though, properly addressing our own national literacy territories. I can only say for myself that the identity. Asked where they come from, people is any common theme to the work beyond, problem we should look at the positive identity of ‘writer’, with its commitment to who live in this region are highly unlikely to frequently but not always, the landscape. The Egyptian experience. It can be done, and it daily discipline and the hope of an afterlife say ‘Inner Moray Firth’ or ‘Highland Scotland’. only territory shared, as far as I can discern, is can be done in times of economic strictures. in books, will do for religion; ‘editor’ with They are much more likely to identify as the geographical. That may be why we have He goes on:‘Yet the mixture of dramatically its symbiotic commitment to the ambitions from Invergordon or Nairn, or possibly ‘The never been seen as a school in the way that accelerated literacy and tub-thumping ideology and wellbeing of my fellow writers, will do Highlands’, but it will come, albeit with sub- socialist writers in Glasgow have, or those exactly bears out [Franz] Fanon’s fears. My for a nationalism; and ‘publisher’ will pass for divisions for internal use. The point I want following the strong lead provided by Irvine impression is that more effort is spent in sustaining ideology because no publisher worth his or to make is that the infrastructure arrived first. Welsh, or those of the agricultural North the connection, bolstering the idea that to be Syrian, her salt cannot but be committed to freedom In the same way, eventually, there will be a East. Iraqi, Egyptian or Saudi is a sufficient end, rather of expression and put that freedom above all recognition of writers as being from this place So we have it that, like so much about the than in thinking critically, even audaciously about others. because the experience of living here is so Inner Moray Firth in particular, but also the the national programme itself.’ By this time I hope I have aired some very different. It already is. wider Highlands, great things are happening While following those post-War Arab fresh ideas on the matter of identity, while So, writers? Boy, do we have writers. The without the rest of the country realising. In Nationalist governments’ example we should also sounding a warning or two, but let me Highlands, whether here around the Inner this case, a vast body of literary work united also heed Said’s warning. If Church, State or sound another. Through the Eighties and into Moray Firth, or in the wider area generally by habitation of, or interest in, this particular Party money is being used, they will surely the Nineties there probably was a need to known as the Highlands and Islands, have territory, which is nonetheless contemporary want their share of indoctrination and we, assert ourselves as Scottish authors, to say that, produced or hosted a great many authors. and relevant everywhere. A new ‘Us’ is the writers, will be our readers’ first and last yes, we exist and here is our culture. I feel Historically: Duncan Ban MacIntyre and forming, and actually whether they wish to line of defence. He closes the passage thus: though, that the sixteen years of enhanced Alexander MacDonald, more recently or not authors are building its infrastructure. ‘Identity, always identity, over and above knowing democracy since the establishment of the Norman McCaig and George Mackay Brown. Some will see this as a danger as it might about others.’ Scottish Parliament has rendered a repetition Hugh MacDiarmid lived at Kildermorie in imply a loss of individuality. They might This leads directly to my second quotation. unnecessary. Without making any attempt to Ross-shire, where he assembled A Drunk Man also note the creation of a new ‘Others’, by It’s from an essay titled ‘On Nationalism’ read the future, or to predict further change Looks at the Thistle, long before his extended definition, and not wish to be seen as in any but, says Orwell (writing in May 1945): in what seems to be a dynamic constitutional stay in Whalsay with Valda and Michael. way oppositional. Maybe so, but it has other ‘Nationalism, in the extended sense in which I environment, I’d say enough has already been Neil Gunn is one of my most important dangers. am using the word, includes such movements and done in this area. The world now knows that authors and Highland River one of my most Let me read from Edward Said here, from tendencies as Communism, political Catholicism, we exist, and with Scottish culture no longer important books. Neil was born in Caithness Culture and Imperialism. Here he is, writing Zionism, Anti-Semitism, Trotskyism and a clapperless bell we do not have to strain to but lived in Inverness before moving to in 1993, in a chapter titled ‘Freedom from Pacifism’. ring it. Dingwall to write most of his great books, Domination in the Future’:‘One of the great More specifically, he means:‘…the habit of After that, there is just one more territory later Strath Glass and North Kessock. The first achievements of the early post-War Arab nationalist identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, I wish to visit with you, the most private thing I wrote when I left the water industry and creative territory of all where the writer in 2000 was the libretto for an oratorio and editor work alone. Auden had it as the titled Dunbeath Water, a sort of combination Cave of Making and it is our place of work. of Highland River and The Atom of Delight Even there, if we provide ‘light you could but different in form and extended. William mend a watch by’ and the ‘best dictionaries Gilmour scored the piece, brilliantly, and it money can buy’, as he ascribed to Louis was performed three times during Highland MacNeice, a fully furnished, permanent, Festival 2003. COLONSAY internal environment still only serves as an Jessie Kesson is from the wider area if we entrance to yet another place that exists even include Moray, and last year we lost Katherine BOOK more deeply within us. If we have answered Stewart, who was beloved across the world, FESTIVAL that question of ourselves, ‘what do you at the age of 97. Iain Crichton Smith lived 2015 think you are’, we will have a better idea of and worked for many years in Taynuilt and 2015 our own mental and spiritual infrastructure. produced what, to my mind, is our finest With the wealth of our lived and observed poetry. He was also a great encourager and 25th & 26th April experience at fingertip length, along with all example to aspiring writers. our remembered reading, and all tradition Still active in the wider area are Angus e best and loyalty disregarded we can listen to our Peter Campbell on Skye; Ian Stephen whose “th t” featuring own Third Voice, which is neither wholly our novel A Book of Death and Fish has just wee fes own or our subject’s and which only speaks been published by Saraband; Andrew Greig Val McDermid the truth. DH Lawrence’s dictum, ‘Never and Lesley Glaister spend time on Orkney; – Lin Anderson trust the teller, trust the tale’, was repeated Ali Smith, this year shortlisted for the Man often by Iain Crichton Smith. On the other Booker Prize, was born and raised in Inverness; – James Buchan side of all this a narrative is waiting, and it will her poet and novelist sister Anne Macleod iterary tell itself if we let it. lives on the Black Isle. Another novelist “a l ” Better not to be a propagandist. Better and poet, Moira Forsyth, lives in Ross-shire lock-in – Jim Crumley to be neither a prosecutor nor an advocate. and is editorial director of Sandstone Press. Sara Sheridan Better to avoid the two great obsessions of Moira’s fourth novel, The Treacle Well, will be – Mary Contini grievance and pain, and, if they cannot be published in 2015. Most famous at the present avoided, better to be like James Joyce and time is Michel Faber, whose latest novel from Samuel Becket and get away. Best to arrive at Canongate, The Book of Strange New Things, – Sara Maitland the borderland of memory and imagination is already being tipped as a Man Booker like our friends the asylum seekers, as a candidate for 2015. – William Letford stranger carrying nothing. n Our three writers in residence, Angus MacNicol, Thom Nairn and Brian McCabe, For details of tickets and accommodation, see did enormous, unseen, good work, in the www.colonsaybookfestival.org.uk late Eighties and early Nineties, especially with what became a legendary group, the Don’t miss this literary treat – book now! Dingwall Writers, when Brian wrote us up in the Sunday Herald. @ We also have a great literary magazine, conversations theedge Note: an extended version of this essay Northwords Now (formerly Northwords), appears on the Northwords Now website – successively edited by Tom Bryan, Angus www.northwordsnow.co.uk

Northwords Now Issue 29, Spring 2015 7 his time it’s my turn to go. To fly the for the cork tablemats. We sup our leek and nest. I wake to the sound of Mum Imprint potato soup in silence. I notice Gran’s fingers Tscrabbling around in the dark with a gnarled with arthritis, hooked around her mug of coffee. She places it on my bedside spoon. I wait for her to offer me pearls of cabinet, moves the pile of paperbacks over. Short Story by Mairi Sutherland wisdom on flying the nest. She spoons out It’s the mug I like, with Durness in black apple and bramble crumble and eyes me as I letters etched across it and flying puffins ✯ wolf it down. dotted around the rim. It’s the right thickness I run my tongue over the roof of my of china. Not delicate like Gran’s bone china mouth and feel the blisters forming. Tiny, wee which shatters like snapping a wishbone or blood blisters from the heat of the crumble. your wrist when you slip on the ice because lipstick, Fox-glove mauve; a mug of milky lowered into Gran’s hatboxes and placed on You and I picked brambles from the railway Dad has forgotten to salt the path. coffee with a skin forming. Mum forbade us top of your walnut wardrobe. Gran gave the line and watched as Mum poured bag after I’ve got a set of six matching mugs from to touch anything. It was like a shrine to you. room a deep clean, with her floral pinny with bag of Tate and Lyle granulated sugar over the Auntie Viv as a good luck with university present. She didn’t even Hoover. I tiptoed in, lay on the zigzag stitching and her yellow Marigold berries, which bubbled for hours on a low They are stashed in my kitchen box. Dad has your floor and rolled fat sausages of dust in my gloves which she snapped on and off with gas. We helped write the labels and placed marked each cardboard box with indelible fingers. We watched a programme once about efficiency. I went to see her yesterday. Dad the greaseproof paper covers on with elastic pen and sealed them with brown parcel tape. wee beasties crawling in the warp and weft. dropped me off, his golf clubs in the boot. bands. We got to lick the wooden spoon once My clothes have been washed, ironed and How if you dropped a sandwich it was better He leant into me. I breathed in his Palmolive it was cooled. folded. They smell of outside on the wash line to eat it off the pavement than the carpet. We soapy skin. There is a rap at the door. Mum and I and a faint whiff of lemon from the Summer wore slippers for weeks and balanced plates ‘She just wants to say goodbye properly. smile. Meadow fabric conditioner. When I am in of buttered toast on our knees. Your fossils Try not to get upset.’ Dad sticks his face round the door. ‘How’s my new room I can burrow my face into my were lined up on your windowsill. Waiting. I nodded, bit my lip. my angel girl? All set for your big day?’ sleeves and the folds of my matching towels Watching. Guarding. I nearly didn’t go. Because of you. It was He’s completely bald. You’d walk right past and breathe in that homey smell you only Mum shifts beside me. I turn to glimpse her Gran who persuaded me, told me that I had him in the street. Maybe you have. smell at other people’s houses. profile. Thick strands of dark hair, peppered to lead my own life. I chose Edinburgh. I ‘Ta ra!’ he hovers by my bed, with a bottle ‘You awake Rhona?’ Mum nudges my with grey, hang loose around her face. wanted to: live in a Georgian flat with high of fizzy and three champagne flutes Gran gave shoulder. I taste her perfume Je Reviens. I ‘So, what’s still to do?’ ceilings; breathe in the yeasty smell piped them for their twentieth wedding anniversary. will return. You never did. We waited five I shrug, glance at my boxed up belongings. out from the brewery and trail down the I blush beetroot red. years. That’s one thousand seven hundred Clothes, books, posters, kitchen utensils. cobble lanes for a bowl of soup in boutique He hands Mum and me a glass and clears and twenty five days. Your face was plastered Eighteen years worth of clutter packed away restaurants. I studied hard at school and did his throat. I hear him say how proud they on thousands of milk cartons. I chose the into cardboard boxes Dad collected from his well in my exams. I was a loner. You were are of me. I swallow the fizz; the bubbles rise photo. Mum and I spread out our favourite office. My room has been stripped bare. the chatty one. The life and soul. I listened. inside my nose. I feel giggly. ones on the sunroom floor. We narrowed it We repainted your room, Jen. After your The police lady with the shaggy fringe and He hands me an envelope ‘There’s some down to two. In the end it was my decision. third Christmas away, Dad announced he was shaking hands quizzed me. Where were you money to get your books and a few drinks or Mum wanted the serious one. I didn’t want to be decorating. My counsellor reassured me going? Did you mention any boyfriend? They cocktails. Or whatever it is you girls like to your pursed lips on breakfast tables, as people that this was a good thing that he was moving read your diaries. You got up that day, rolled drink nowadays.’ reached for the carton to pour over their on. It took him three coats of white paint to up your school uniform, and stepped out in They had given me a leather satchel for cereal and peered at your grainy image. If you blot out the purple walls. The colour seeped your purple garb, with Dad’s rucksack and my lecture notes, a cartridge pen and a pair of were joining families for breakfast, I wanted through like bloodstains. You were in a purple your passport. Vamoosh. You were gone. silver earrings. Gran gave me writing paper, a to see you happy. I chose the one I took with phase when you left us. You wore your mauve Gran with her banana and walnut loaves, butterfly paperweight and a gilt photo frame my Polaroid instamatic on our caravan holiday skinny rib polo neck and fringed, violet flares her clicking denture plate, urged us all to with a picture of you and me. to Pease Bay. You jiggled from foot to foot with black platform boots. You took Dad’s stop looking. Dad worked long hours at the We finish our champagne. Mum gathers as we counted twenty elephants waiting for rucksack from his youth hostelling days. Dad office, Mum took on voluntary work and up the flutes whilst Dad starts to lug the the fixer to set and we peeled back the flimsy had the police force combing the Pennines Gran knitted. She started a knitting club at boxes down the stairs to the car. I peer cover. You thought you looked Chinese. Mum convinced you were using the dog-eared our primary school. Pasty faced West Coast out the window to glimpse him hoist the announced that if you were happy your smile map of the Pennine Way he had climbed of Scotland children with a sing-songy accent boxes into the boot. My head feels cotton reached your eyes. two weekends before. He was relieved that casting on multi-coloured squares in three-ply wool-dizzy. He glances up, waves. I raise ‘You okay honey?’ his waterproof trousers were rolled at the wool for Malawian children. It was strange to my hand. I sip my coffee; pat my bed to let Mum slip bottom, with a half nibbled bar of Kendall think that these skinny, shiny brown skinned The house was noisy when you left with in beside me. ‘Mmm. Just thinking.’ Mint cake. He painted the walls Sun Kissed children the colour of conkers lay huddled phone calls day and night. Neighbours She nods ‘I know.’ Yellow like the sunflowers we plant in the back beneath covers Granny had stitched together. ringing the doorbell to leave casseroles and Dad doesn’t say your name now. He has garden each year. Gran came over, cooked us I watch her stir the soup. soups in Tupperware tubs. Prayers were said in built a wall around him. That’s what my lamb stew and helped Mum scoop up your ‘Set the table will you Rhona?’ church and I was let off homework. Teachers counsellor told me. A fortress made of the trinkets, perfumes and diaries, which they I slide open the kitchen drawer, fumble whispered my name at registration and patted strongest stone slabs, shipped in from Greece, me on the arm. I wanted to be shouted at, told flecked with sparkly bits, like the fossils we off for missing tests and made to run round found on Fossil Beach. You and I raced down the playing fields in the pouring rain in my the hill, pelt melt to get to the shore. Dad maroon mini kilt until my teeth chattered and had his Swiss Army penknife, which he lips turned blue. Other neighbours crossed carved into the soft shale to reveal, imprints the road incase we had some disease, which of spiralling shells, like a row of sixes chalked we would pass onto to their precious sons on the blackboard by Miss Williamson, to and daughters. Some even sent flowers, as if copy in our handwriting jotters. Dad had a you were dead. Gran had to rush out to the tiny brush, which he swept over the flaking charity shop to find more vases. I wanted the bits. We peered over his shoulder, our bodies fuss to die down and when it did, I wanted pressed together, like two peas in a pod. it back. ‘Girls you’re in my light.’ The police have looked after us. We even Arms looped through each other we get a Christmas card from Detective Inspector staggered back and lay on the soft sand. You Ron. He’s retired now but will still follow up swept your arms in wide arcs above your any leads. He doesn’t like to leave loose ends. head, sand angels, we called them. Your mark Funny that. You being a loose end. in the sand. The imprint of you. I tiptoe into your room. It doesn’t smell For months afterwards your room stayed like yours any more. Its polish, new carpet the same: head dunt in your pillow; the quilt and paint. On the window ledge the fossils cover rolled back; an inside out jumper on remain. I finger the grooves in your favourite the floor; a half eaten Kit-Kat on your walnut one and peer at the row of sixes. I scoop it dressing table with the three way mirror; a up, pop it into my dressing gown pocket and clogged up mascara wand; Mum’s borrowed creep out. n

8 Northwords Now Issue 29, Spring 2015 Poetry

Khrushchev Days Journey to the Post-Box Caroline Herschel’s Christmas Frances Robson Andy Allan Hugh McMillan

Our matchbox homes are mansions The world dissolves. They pitied Caroline Herschel, made of thin walls to defend us from solitude; I lumber forward, marked by typhus, our bellies rumble because we have eaten distracted by simmering rage. but while other girls picked goose bones, every sausage laid out on the table. Bouncing sparrows dreamed of kissing-boughs, We need no painkillers: frolic in my path. she was in the garden there is no more pain to kill. Yellow mats of pine-pollen with a 2.2 Newtonian Telescope drift on breeze-rippled puddles. pointing at the northern part of Monoceros We know what we need to know; A sudden ice-cold shock jolts on the midpoint of a line and this we are told: all our enemies from foot to brain and the from Procyon to Betelgeuse, will be defeated by iron curtains. road-slap of my wet slipper where the ionised hydrogen forms starts a ginger cat across my path. a haze of stars The air we breathe is thick with promise; At lane’s end, that emerge from leaves of sky tomorrow we fly to the moon. excited bird-song like pearls. re-ignites the day. When they wondered if she might Hungry hedge-fingers be tempted inside clutch at warm sunlight for pudding, some society, Rebirth as I post my letter of complaint. she demurred, Grahaeme Barrasford Young On the bones of a naked elm preferring instead a crow cocks her head to watch the birth of light. Even with Facebook and seems to know. can this become a trend, people with sad ashes blown back Fairies into their faces? Catcher Hugh McMillan Hugh McMillan The moon is a dull blade When it was you and everything beyond we were high on a safe rock, (In his log, D. A. Mowat, keeper the pond of street lamp at Killantringan Lighthouse, Wigtownshire, is gone except two blue lights but half of what was meant for sea records counting 293 moths near his lamp swimming: maybe a house in the hills ended disappointingly in grass. on the night of 19th September 1913.) or a 737 coming home to Glasgow, or then again fairies. Now I no longer mind: I imagine sailors It doesn’t look more your cockle-shell, rococo with casts, watching the lamp’s eye, than half a mile, envious as they creep worth the soaking sits magically on my desk along the breast of the sea when I burst into the circle waiting for a dry Venus to rise: and they slowly turn like shadows. their hard little faces to me earth and water confer From this high place white and beautiful different immortalities. they are a plank’s width in the light, from death, like dolls.

all questions Aig Uaigh M’ Athar drowned on their lips. Coinneach Lindsay I know: I’ve seen it. Ann an dòigh b’ e tiodhlacadh m’ athar Aon de na làithean as fheàrr nam bheatha. I am beyond marrying, Bha mi duilich fhaicinn a’ falbh watch moths instead of time, Ach, bha a’ ghrian, aig deireadh a’ Ghiblean, beating on the glass. At night A’ losgadh na smùid bho uachdar Loch Èite I sit in the watchroom, Far an robh an seann mhilidh air a shuidheachadh Mar laoch bho aon dhe na sgeulachdan aige fhèin. throw my beam of light Thàinig oiteag ghorm bhon taobh an ear like a rope Nuair a chaidh a thiodhlac chur dhan talamh across the back of the ocean, Agus thuit am smùr air a’ chiste-laighe. and reel in hope after hope after hope. Sheinn na pìoban ‘Flùraichean na Coille’ thar an loch Agus smaoinich mi gun robh an conasg na bu bhuidhe Na conasg sam bith bha mi riamh air fhaicinn. Mar sin, chùm mi m’ inntinn dheth na bha tachairt.

Northwords Now Issue 29, Spring 2015 9 he first time I was so small that it big Esso garage for two months. The other took both hands to lift my mam’s glass Vodka Tonic counter lassies talked me into going, saying Tof white wine, cupping round it the they would go to the bar for me. I sloped way a baby holds its own bottle. And it took in behind them and stood choosing every both hands to press against my mouth, fight Short Story by Brian Hamill Madonna song I knew at the jukebox, hoping off the sting of how bad it was. Her and my da the barmaid wouldn’t notice me. The pub laughed and said, ‘See Gemma? Told ye!’ ✯ filled up and I sat, drinking wine after wine, When I was a teenager I told the parents I while they talked about how badly the garage was staying over at my friend Angie’s house. was doing, how it might close down, and if They’d no idea that Angie’s mam disappeared our manageress would ever get caught in the to England the week before. We pitched her back room with Jason, the delivery man’s son. brother’s tent in the park across the road. Her an hour straight!’ Then laugh, and shake her sleep, then scraping all our leftovers onto one The conversations went on a long time. The da was in the living room crying and drinking head. plate and making me take it up to Robert. night became a blur, but I mind June, the something black. We sneaked by a few times, The burgh had given him a shitty wee flat in oldest woman that worked with us, taking me taking things out the kitchen, first food, then a It was like Ronnie infected the family. My the highrisers after Paula kicked him out. He outside because an older girl was screaming box of cider from the fridge. The glass clinked uncle Robert it was the next year. I’d thought had a new woman right away, her name was she was going to kick my fucking cunt in. I inside but he kept staring out the window. of him as my da’s cool younger brother. He Margo. Her hair was red and very short. ran and stumbled all the way home, and never After we finished the last bottle, Angie smoked joints, and would show me sketches I never wanted to tell mam he wasn’t found out what I’d done. unzipped the flap and stuck her head outside from when he was a teenager, charcoal eating it. Most times I went he’d have on a The next morning I woke with mam the tent. She screamed as loud as she could, drawings of tigers hiding in tall grass. After a pair of jeans and a vest, Bowie or Fleetwood shouting, WHIT THE BLOODY HELL’S and I tried to pull her back in but was few drinks he’d tell me stories about what my Mac blaring from the ghetto-blaster that was THIS? I was wearing just a T-shirt. The sheet laughing too much. She wanted to see if the da was like growing up. Robert was married sat on the floor. Margo sprawled out on the and the mattress and the cover were wet noise would wake people up. But she said no to my auntie Paula, who wasn’t much older couch in her leggings, smoking. and very cold. The smell was horrible. She lights came on in any of the houses. We told than me and wore her platinum hair rolled up ‘Thanks hen, thanks,’ he’d shout. ‘Sit yerself screamed and screamed at me till I burst out stories and rolled about in the sleeping-bags on her head. Mam always said Paula’s problem down, just having a wee bit of fun eh?’ crying and begged her to clean it up because till she fell asleep, and the sun came up. was she thought she was a somebody, but she ‘I canny the night Uncle Robert, I’ll stick I couldny. Our wee terrier Jimmy got his nose The next day I had to go to my cousin’s wasn’t. this in the kitchen for ye.’ in about the quilt, sniffing and wagging his tail. wedding, and sat in the church telling myself I noticed mam getting twitchy in the And when I went through, last week’s food Mam stared at me, LOOK WHAT YOU’RE I never, ever wanted to feel this again. evenings, jumping up to answer the phone would be lying in the wee wastepaper basket MAKING THAT POOR DOG DO! I went But I was young then. Everybody has their before anybody else could get there. She he used for a kitchen bin. When I got up the down the stair and got in the shower. When stories. I’m really talking about why things knew when something would make him lose road she would ask, ‘How was he?’ I came back in she was scrubbing the bare are different now. it. Of course, da picked it up one time and it ‘Fine. Ok.’ mattress with bleach. ‘You are some mess lady. was Paula. I sat halfway down the stairs - it ‘Aye’, she’d say, ‘He’s better off. Happier.’ Some mess’, she said. The next door neighbour. When we was the closest I could get without being seen I’d go to bed wishing I didn’t like the same Late that night I went to get a glass of milk. moved to that scheme, Ronnie worked as through the glass in the living-room door. My music he did. She was sitting in her chair with the telly off. an electrician. He lived there with his wife. da was shouting that my uncle was nothing There was a glass on the sideboard, nothing in She was a fat, red-haired woman who would but a waster, that he’d ruined that lassie’s life It came to my house gradually, in the it but melting icecubes. She looked at me but never say hello to me. They had four wee sons and our door was fucking closed to him. It months following my first ever staff night her eyes were out of focus. She lifted up her who all looked the same, even though they didn’t stop mam waiting till he went for a out. I was fifteen and had been working at the arms and I went over and gave her a cuddle. were different ages and sizes. They stayed next Her and my da started to alternate weeks. to us for years. One night I sat bolt upright in Half the time I’d go upstairs and find him the bed because it sounded like a full football surrounded by empty cider tins, listening to team was coming up our stairs. Before I got Queen and laughing at nothing. When I came to the door, mam kicked it open and in came down she’d say, ‘I’m sick of that bastard, so Ronnie’s laddies. They were crying – all of sick, I could run away. Just piss off and never them were. come back.’ ‘You get up’, mam said, ‘Put a film on for If she knew. Da got a satellite hook-up to the boys. And give them the bed, you sit there’. the bedroom. I stopped in to get a video off She stamped her slipper on the carpet. I didn’t his shelf and he’d fell asleep with the TV still look at them, just raked through my videos on. This was why he was paying the extra and found one I thought would be ok. I put it tenner a month. I turned it off for him, but in the VHS, then crept out to the landing and found myself watching his eyes every time looked over. My da was putting his working we were in the car and a good-looking girl boots on. He knelt down to do the laces, walked past. and she stood against the radiator, arms Other times it’d be her, swaying around folded. I breathed out. Mam’s face turned the living room and shouting, ‘That bastard, upwards, ‘GET INTO THAT ROOM that fucking bastard’. She’d phone her sisters MISSUS AND DON’T DARE OPEN and say the same thing down the line until THAT DOOR’. I did as she said, and tried she was hoarse and ready for sleep. to not hear the four of them snivelling away under my covers. I met Victor at a houseparty where Ronnie had got so drunk he punched people were racing tequilas off the kitchen his wife in the head, and she fell down on windowsill. We smiled at each other while the bathroom floor. Mam told me my da everybody cheered the winners. Then I beat went round and beat him black and blue. I him at trying to down a full pint. Victor said was warned not to mention it in front of the it didn’t count because I spilled some on my sons. I never got the chance. Irene (the wife’s top, and he pointed out the soaked patches. name) took them to her parents and they I’d been with him two years when his never came back. granda died of heart failure. We went in to Ronnie was good pals with my ma and da the Southern General in his car, sat with his after a while. He banged our kitchen window family. It took hours. They spoke well of the whenever he came back from seeing Scotland granda, and there was a lot of tears. I felt down. play at Hampden, and they’d invite him to sit He came to Scotland from Nigeria in the late at the dinner table and have a can. 1930s with nothing to his name, and in a Sometimes I’d come down the stairs to see couple of years had built a reputation as the her standing in the bathroom in her dressing best carpenter in Glasgow. He’d stand out the gown, one ear to the wall. When she saw me back of the local furniture shop in the freezing she’d say, ‘That Ronnie’s been spewing for cold for hours and hours at a time, carving

10 Northwords Now Issue 29, Spring 2015 and sawing away, making beautiful wardrobes understand how he was so much smaller since and saying hi with a guy on top of me. I was and I was looking at the reflection of us on and tables and chests of drawers. Victor’s mum the hospital. I heard a gasp come out of my looking over his shoulder. Victor said that I the inside of the window. My da said he had told him to show me the photos of his work, mouth. Victor’s hand was squeezing mine. I had no idea. work in the morning and could they take me the great one of the dresser he built for the trapped my tongue in between my back teeth, The time I took my shoe off and hit home. Mam put clothes in my suitcase while I Balmoral Hotel, or the doll’s house he made and bit it. it against his face, his cheek, outside the was in the toilet. Then we got in the car and I for a millionaire collector. At one time he was pub when his friends were there, and then never went back to that flat. My da picked up as well-known and respected in the city as On the third anniversary of Victor and I screamed, screamed till the police were the rest, sorted things out. a politician or a footballer, Victor’s dad said, me getting our own flat, he packed up all his running to help. And more times, worse ones. We still slip up sometimes, the three of us. but it’s all changed now hen, changed days stuff. I can’t remember much of that day - just Or just as bad. We all have it. My mam hides whisky bottles indeed. following him from room to room with a The next day I opened my eyes and knew I down the side of her chair, in against the wall. On the way home Victor told me how glass in my hand, bottle of red held against my wouldn’t see him again. The wine was finished He has packs of cans under piles of clothes in his granda had spat in his gran’s face one body with the other arm. The way I held it but there was gin. I had gin and soda till the the loft. But they saved me. And I’m happy. Christmas, and another time he grabbed when he tried to get it off me. soda ran out, so I moved to gin and tap water. I’m thirty and in my old room. their cat by the neck and shoved it out the I can imagine the things I was saying. The Then the gin on its own. And I was sick. And upstairs window. Victor was the joke of the sorts of things I’d said before. My friend Zoe I cried for Victor. But mostly for myself. All that’s behind me. Victor going. Nothing school because of him. Old man kept turning told me some of it later. Victor must have My mam picked up the phone and she is changing in my life now. I worry when I up after a day on the cheap rum, most days phoned her. What I called him when he tried knew too. They came in the car. I stood at wake up and feel like a drink of something. hardly able to stand. Once the janitor made to give me his front door key. But there’s no the front window and had some bad thoughts. But I do know that after work on Friday, him wait on the football pitch, away from the point getting in touch to say sorry. He knows. Really bad, thoughts I never had before. I I’ll be at the pub with the rest. I need the playground. When he saw Victor he smiled so It wasn’t really me. It’s the alcohol attacking watched them getting out, the two of them job more than ever, and things have a way of hard his eyes closed over and he fell back on me, my brain. A fuse blows somewhere and it down below, hurrying up the stairs. The buzzer going bad if you turn down an invite from the grass laughing. The weans were all running stops working. rang and it took me a minute to answer it and our boss. He’ll look me in the eyes and say round him, pissing themselves and calling him I never have a memory. He couldn’t live let them in. ‘Gemma, what’s your poison?’ And I’ll say Uncle Ben. with it and I didn’t expect anything else. He I was calm again, and I told them they had back, ‘Just a wee vodka tonic thanks. I’ll get It was an open casket at the funeral, and his forgave me before. The time he looked for me enough of their own problems and couldn’t the next ones’. skin had gone a dark, dark yellow. I couldn’t at a party, went into a room and I was smiling handle mine. We talked. It was dark outside This is why I’m writing. n Poetry

Oedipa Snaps Marcas Mac an Tuairneir Pneuma Amy McCauley Anne Hay Chaidh mi a chrochadh eadar aimsir is soillse, God help me the boys love it. Os cionn bràighean bàna Tìr nan Òg I watch the pink-bronze of an acer A blind girl on the pier Is dùintean-sìth, snaidhte bho sgòthan. rise and fall on the wind with a Polaroid. rise and fall like a diaphragm. Shiubhail mi tro shìth slàn. Branches fan like bronchioles. Click. Say camembert. Is tron na beàrnan beaga san smùid, Click. Say baby bel. Chunnaic mi an fhairge na laighe fodham; A whole day’s plans Click. Say any fucking thing at all. abandoned. Cal-Mac mòr is bàt’ an iasgaire, Sometimes the world The camera loves you I say. Na solasan-biorach ‘s na teine-sionnachain has too many voices. Somebody needs you I say. Is drochaid a cheangail eilean gu tìr, An ache as familiar It will all be over soon I say. Mar iarna shìoda bhrisg a’ bhrandubhain. as a favourite necklace.

What’s the truth but a camera? Chunnaic mi bogha-fhrois cuarsgach, Wind drops What’s a camera but an eye? Is tro phrism an treas shùil, the acer stills. What’s an eye but a world getting born? Faileas ghobhlan-gaoithe na meadhan. A soft outbreath.

What’s a world but a mirror? Thuig mi sin mar aisling mo mhiann; What’s a mirror but a face? Dualachd chothruim ùir, dèanta fìor, What’s a face but a million masks? Crìoch don obair, don ailbhe, don iasadachd. Beatha; sgiath mar iomall na fighe. What’s a mask but an image? What’s an image but a dream? Chaidh mi a chuir mun cuairt, le lùb; What’s a dream but a funny kind of camera? Caisteal Leòdhais romham mar chlach Lego gleansach, a’ piorradh na faire,

Sràid Chrombail cùrsach is lannrach, Mar earball radain, no riadhain bìthe Peantaichte ri taobh a’ chladaich.

Northwords Now Issue 29, Spring 2015 11 Poems by Robin Fulton Macpherson

Caithness Inheritance Unseasonal

Pentland Firth breakers are still Someone with a grudge doing damage to themselves and against September to the edge of the flat earth has dimmed the light. where Macphersons and Shearers Lapis lazuli entered and left my boyhood - horizons are bleached. The moon´s so thin cliff-nightmares from Holborn Head it´s now transparent. and The Clett Rock, moor nightmares from The Causewaymire, also Someone has opened invisible doors sky so much wider than land so wide no-one there´s no need to fear an edge, could ever close them. and one harebell with the whole sky as its private domain with no need of worlds beyond. Snowfall At Sea

As if left for a moment Moor alone between two moments I watch snowflakes on the Skagerrak - It´s those wiry roots that hold me in place. masters of hesitation, Nothing exotic no branches to balance on, tints my life-story no landscapes to unsettle and blind. with a somewhere-else. Are they what souls would look like One heather blossom finding out there´s ”no more sea,” seems a widow´s mite. clouding the air of an after-life? The Standing Stones of Get. To eyes that pause, it Photograph by Chris Sinclair, defies horizons The Caithness Broch Project and is abundant www.thebrochproject.co.uk By Krakower See

I fabulate about a half-moon Sailing Past Cliffs above ox-eye daisies and cornflowers that once belonged to the DDR. Rock-face cracks take centuries to widen. It uses the vision I give it: Ledges have time I can say then it probably saw to cultivate humble generations, Samuel Palmer and his friends in Kent. underdeveloped birches, backward pines, It was certainly the moon I watched low life, but life. one August in the 1950s The wind is unseen but never empty. lifting over Sutherland hill-tops. Dimensions

That ochre warmth has refused to cool. Some days, we´re traditional, divide Him into three: Pause trinities help us to keep our balance.

Summer´s increase now a residue, Other days, we give up, His dimensions jagged leaves no longer leaf-shaped, too many: one we´re like flies running across book-titles. of which - suddenly a vanished bird too black and small and quick to be Most days, we settle for two and hang Him named. on bare walls: The twig shook. The universe moved our walls glow like peat fires all the night long. again.

12 Northwords Now Issue 29, Spring 2015 The Standing Stones of Get. From An April Window Harebell Photograph by Chris Sinclair, The Caithness Broch Project A distant ash half ready for spring Not enough to be just a ”pale flowerett” www.thebrochproject.co.uk shines against black clouds with the boldness in a trackless and boundless universe? of ancient reliefs. We worry for it, provide it with names (Latin and vernacular) to help it Lacking the persistence of Dante, against lonelieness. It will never know the pilgrim who could make things gleam just we marked out space with tracks and boundaries by glaring at them, and scared ourselves by taking them away.

the sun is easily distracted The waif is tough, will follow a calm road by the fullness of Yorkshire. The tree far ahead of us through its universe. fades, the clouds whiten.

Spring Noise Dimensions Leafage Bare copses roar like planes coming in low. Some days, we´re traditional, divide Him The badly pruned plane-tree has at last The branches are spiky, have leprous fists. into three: turned green. Along the fjord boulders have done nothing trinities help us to keep our balance. In an evening breeze that is not quite ever. Their edges catch too in the wind. a breeze Other days, we give up, His dimensions the new leaves seem to take it in turn Far inside the spring noise there´s a music too many: to stir as close to silence as music can reach: we´re like flies running across book-titles. as if they were taking it in turn fragile and stubborn, it follows me home to stay. to talk Most days, we settle for two and hang Him in a commonwealth without conflict on bare walls: and not our walls glow like peat fires all the night long. knowing anything of the hacked limbs they hide.

Northwords Now Issue 29, Spring 2015 13 Night Time in Ninewells Poems by Derek Ramsay

Night Time in Ninewells Her new best friend And now we run

She has the size of a child; Another rushed move It was during the hour when her eyes Has become Jessie and To another ward; Began to dry out then blacken over - Thomas Reid’s wee lass again. Another bundling. While all the others were at the shop, Tonight there are geese flying overhead You’ll have to look for teddy. The seal on the sandbank finally made sense. On their way to the lochs in Fife He’ll be in a plastic bag; everything Just gets shoved in plastic bags. Me and teddy have her between us now, And as Ward five seems to have Running down Ninewells Brae The only open windows in the entire hospital Teddy sits at the other end of the bed. Towards the river. I tell her this and she drags her one The room is full of their noise. Hundred tonne little bird’s head Mum puts her hands over her ears, From the pillow - Makes ‘honk honk’ with her empty mouth. Och, so he is. Lair 17, Area the East, Row 4

A boy and his teddy, four months late; Grave robbers waiting on the swings The Tay Estuary near Dundee Visiting Hours In the play park until the last Lights in the maisonettes go out. Maybe it’s just too simple; A hard frost last night, The seal lying on the black mud of Then heavy rain first thing. Only, they’re returning a stolen thing, The ring which was slipped from My Lord’s Bank every time I visit - From bank to bank Their mother’s wedding finger. The bile dripping soundlessly Bay to bay the swollen As with sailors, if you must pay Into the bag; her tumour River slurs, the colour To end your travels someplace fine Feeding; full of itself now. Of stewed, milky tea. Then I am certain there are those who know the True worth of gold to be in its thinness; No sandbanks No seal. Can tell by the burnish, that given time Soft Fruit Less shall always mean much more.

I lied about the strawberries - Copies of the Annabel and My Weekly lie Said there were none; Flight On the sewing box at the Pulped and mushed as they grew - Side of her chair by the fire; When I’d given the whole crop to a girl. I thought I might read to her. A cup of black tea on the Something from a Scottish fairy tale; Smallest shelf of the mantelpiece. Mum mentioned them again in her When The King of the Faeries A Town Called Alice starts in half an hour. Morphine driven stoner talk - Flies in the company of shadows No strawberries this year. Through sapphire lit glens.

No mum, none; too much rain. But she would have none of it - Maybe not next year either; Wanted only for coffee; I’ll have to put new plants in. Shouted for it, sucked it cold From one of those eight-sided, Aye, they’ll take a while. Sponge-headed, lollipop things. You’ll just have to find Someone else to give them to.

The window of her side room Looked onto a cement courtyard. A crow landed, rose into the air, Changed its mind, thought Something better.

14 Northwords Now Issue 29, Spring 2015 Northwords Now Issue 29, Spring 2015 15 Poems

O leabhar-latha MhicGriogair I was fortunate to shoot a snowy owl; windless and flickering Pàdraig MacAoidh the flesh is tender white, but tasteless. cloaking the horizon till dawn

Agus bha am fear ann mu Shaorsa, * then hovering, hoarse and silvery eapasod Friends far an deach Joey a thàladh Our harmonium is on the lower deck. like low fog, freezing our instruments gu Ioslam radaigeach – an dèidh ionnsaighean The men enjoy its pleasing tones. nan US air Iraq ann an ’98 – agus dh’iompaich e our compasses now useless. Rachel, Chandler, Monica, Phoebe, While Christian turns its handle, Without them we are blind as kittens. a h-uile duine ach Ross, coma leat Ross, stellar crystals fall: a bhith na dlùth-chealla ceannarceach, * agus thàinig an eapasod gu crìch le flat falamh they have six points waves gu cearbach faoin na dhòchais dhearg, and in the sun or moonlight have carved miracles into the ice agus còignear air an t-slighe gus Ìomhaigh na Saorsa a spreadhadh. glisten brilliantly; calving Nuair a thoisich sreath ùr our masts and rigging on threaded rings cha robh guth air. Ach uair sam bith a rinn Joey magadh air Ross, a lace crust, brittle as glass glass hulls bha an ceòl-gàire tuilleadh is brèige. gorgeous, with no disruption. transparent in the air

* a sea lens a ship solid, like porcelain O Fhèin-eachdraidh a brother in our trade MhicGriogair a joy in these barren regions. * Pàdraig MacAoidh Already the long bay swell lifts five feet above * above the hollow of the sea; and seams of coal agus an là a bha sin and feldspar, and zeolite loose pieces dash and crush, dh’fheuch mi ri Probhadh Phrìosan Stanford and orange flowers in a cleft with pleasant violence. a ruith a-rithist air mo chroit ann an Cille Mhoire, agus sgar and sandstones, and bivalves The rotting pack now has all the functions mi mo chaoraich – an dèidh crannchur – and thin, dry corral beds of the ocean aon air aon, eadar ‘caoraich’ is ‘mhic-thìre’. and garnets, rose and transparent the afternoon air tepid with the breath Nuair a thadhail mi air an fhaing an ath là * and flux beneath. cha robh ann ach torr fuilteach clòimhe gun fheum, dark figures glide singly about: closaichean sgriosta leth-chuid mo ghreigh, wolfish dogs the red flash of rifles * madaidhean-allaidh a’ leum and there, at the sudden run thar mullaichean an sgarpa a bear, thin and light from glassy blue to mud agus aon chollaidh gu foirfe calla ’s sorcha. running fast to open water. the white whales hide Dhòmhsa, b’ e adhartas a bha seo. * obscured, like lumps in milk We are drifting freely from the shore further and further, on fresh growths of ice * a cold wind Middle Ice and are now in that free space falling off the glacier Lesley Harrison unloosed and weightless a streaming – From The journal of the Arctic Fox. leaning over maps in silence a keening of wind melt Captain Francis L. McClintock, 1857-59 withdrawn from the world a high note dying off, Salt ice - young ice - black ice - wind ice - absolved, like isolates level with the water Floe ice - - plate ice - drift ice - middle ice - the last black outcrop removed. Sound ice - land ice - red ice - old ice - our long wake Field ice - loose ice - water ice - clear ice - * sinking curling over. We march at night, towards * the dark of southern latitudes All birds are scarce the few retreating southward. and take our meals by lamplight in silence, drunk with sleep. A raven was shot today two eagles at Bellot, a brace of willow grouse Yesterday, the aurora loured above us burning salt green, electrical our little auks the only birds remaining in twos and ones obscure, barely visible.

16 Northwords Now Issue 29, Spring 2015 e dropped off his bags and out like a great balloon around her waist. immediately took another taxi. Trinidad Screaming. Did that happen? He looked again HThey drove, the windscreen wipers at her face on the page of the photograph. dryly scraping insects from the glass. Every detail of her was inside him, as every ‘So it’s not my first time,’ Robert said to Short Story by Richard W. Strachan detail of his brother was not, but he thought the driver. ‘I used to live here when I was a about his brother more. Not a day had gone boy, with my family. My father still does, he ✯ by without a visit from that ghost. They live never left.’ more vividly inside you the longer they are He had to repeat himself until he could be gone. understood. At the end of the cinder path there was onto his leg. There were pictures of them all He sipped at his drink and took the photos ‘And where about?’ the driver asked. a cluster of houses with lopsided gutters, the lying on the grass in the Savannah, and dozens back through to the main room. He stretched ‘When you lived?’ paint flaking from their walls. Scaling through of photos from Carnival, the faded colours of out on the vinyl sofa. Drinking, sweating, he ‘St Andrew’s Court. Although I couldn’t the layers of bush back down in the valley the old emulsion taking nothing away from stared deeply into the past. tell you where that is, I just remember the were shack roofs and strips of corrugated its splendour and crazed flamboyance. A man name.’ iron, tin huts, tumbledown villas. Robert with a fibreglass rhinoceros head, and in the The phone woke him, and he answered it ‘A smart part of town!’ recognised his father’s house at the top of background the strut of the Spider Queen’s without thinking. It was still light outside, but ‘I’ve not been back since, not for years. the track. He had seen photographs. The yard procession. Robert sipped his sherry and the light was diffuse and green, and trembled Years and years and years and - ‘ was silver with dead grass, and as he readied studied it. She stoops now to eat her suitors, like the surface of the hotel pool. There was ‘So it’s a homecoming then?’ himself to knock he saw the note pinned and as a child, with a child’s wilful acceptance sherry spilled all over the carpet. ‘Not really.’ behind the screen door. of all that’s most horrific, he had thought ‘Yes?’ ‘It means Trinity,’ the taxi driver said. CALLED ON URGENT BUSINESS. every moment of it was true. So he had been ‘Robert, it’s me. Your father.’ The line was ‘Trinidad. Did you know that? I bet you did. ROBERT, MAKE SELF AT HOME! told anyway, told by the woman who stared bad. ‘Are you still there?’ Like in the Bible? God, the Son and the Holy The door was unlocked and the house at him from the captured past, on white West ‘Yes,’ Robert said carefully. Spirit, yes.’ was empty. Uneasy in an unfamiliar space, Indian sands, and who was dead now these ‘I hoped you would be.You saw my message ‘I know the Bible,’ Robert said. He leaned he switched on the air conditioning and sat last few months, utterly dead. Robert touched then? I’m out in the sticks. Bad labour,’ he back in the seat. I know it like you can’t down on one of the vinyl sofas. Every surface his thumb to her face. That you were ever this said, ‘and I’m worried about the baby. What believe. held a layer of dust. There were old magazines young. could I do? Complications, there are always The drink sloshed pleasantly in his belly. on the floor, paperbacks splayed open at He found them eventually, separated, folded complications.’ He muttered, The voice of thy brother’s blood ‘Will you be long?’ crieth unto me. ‘Long enough. I’ve got to wait for an Ahead of them, along the highway to ambulance and - Listen, why don’t you head Diego Martin, verdant hills of bush and He was walking out into the night, sultry and back to your hotel and I’ll call you when I’m rainforest rose like breakers in a tide of mist. done, let you know what’s what?’ ‘Ah, it must be a blessed place, I think,’ the calm and black. The forecourt was lined with ‘Okay.’ driver said. ‘Trinny.’ ‘How are things anyway? How was the There’d been news of drug murders. flight?’ Curfews, police corruption. So he’d been told. palms, each bladed leaf scraping against its ‘It was fine, no problems at all.’ His mother had always said it was a dangerous ‘You got the time off okay?’ place. He put up his sunglasses. brother, a sound like somebody snoring in a ‘Yes.’ When he woke the driver was tapping his ‘And where are you working now, I lose shoulder, looming over from the front seat. room at the end of a long corridor. He didn’t track of all these jobs you’ve had!’ ‘But this is your stop fella?’ he said. ‘Same place as last time.’ Robert paid the twenty dollars and paused remember any of this. It was all so different. It ‘Well that’s good. And everything else is a moment to scour his face with his palms, fine?’ and it was only as he stood out in the fine probably wasn’t even the same hotel. ‘Yes.’ humid haze, watching the car descend into ‘What about the programme?’ he said in the valley, that he realised his wallet was still time. ‘Still sticking with it?’ inside it, along with his jacket, phone and ‘Yes,’ Robert said. passport. ‘Well that’s good.’ ‘Off you go,’ he said, waving, ‘all the way unread pages. A line of ants marched across inside a yellowing sheet of paper. There he ‘Wait,’ Robert said, before he could hang back to Port of Spain. And with you goes the the windowsill. His shirt started to dry against was, a baby, with Robert as a toddler looking up. ‘I don’t, I don’t have any money on me. I hope that your driver is an honest man!’ his skin. over him. Then him as a toddler, walking, and left my wallet in the taxi.’ There was a path ahead of him, curving Even if his house was robbed to the last pin grinning his gums at the camera. Robert’s ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that’s tricky.’ through a bower of trees, where hidden insects he would trust the people round him rather mother had not kept any of those pictures. ‘I know. I’d be the first to admit it.’ played their monotonous guiros and fell silent than lock it. He put them to one side. He knew the child ‘You probably shouldn’t have done that.’ as he passed. Something rippled with a whip There was no beer in the fridge, no wine only from what he had been told. He had ‘No. Should I just stay here, or - ‘ of leaves off into the brush behind him. or whisky in any of the accustomed places, never seen a picture of him before, and his ‘Tell you what,’ his father said, rallying. Each memory of this place had an animal but in a cupboard above the sink he found memories were dim, the dimmest. ‘There should be some cash in the sock attached to it, some gross familiar. There were a bottle of sweet sherry. He poured out and There were other photos in the shoebox, drawer in my dresser, take what you need. rats behind the cooker one year, scratching at drank off half a pint, and carried his refilled ones of the swimming pool at the hotel, New There’s the local firm’s number in the book. night. He could remember a tide of red ants glass through the house. Year’s Eve 1980, everyone decked out, drunk, Maybe you’ll strike lucky and it’ll be the same engulfing his bare leg once, when he stamped It was all on one level, a bungalow, and wielding their glasses at the lens. Had it chap who brought you out!’ He paused and down on their nest. Moths as big as birds, it went back further than you would think. happened that day? He could remember the said, ‘Only don’t think about walking back to birds as small as moths. There were those dogs His father’s office was at the rear, next to his water erupting, the delayed plunging thunk save the money. It’s a dangerous place if you that time beneath the veranda, when he had bedroom. Robert looked through the drawers of displaced air as he went in, but not much don’t know what you’re doing.’ joined his father on his rounds, slavering from and cabinets but couldn’t find anything. else. It was hot, without a doubt, air you could their chains. All the poorest places, and he They would be here somewhere. Then, in a spread with a butter knife. No kicking or When he got back to the hotel Robert had gone in there armed with nothing but a bedroom that smelled of stale deodorant, the flailing, just the surface of the pool wobbling checked at the desk to see if anything had medical bag. sheets half crumpled on the floor, he found once or twice, settling to a flat sheet. But it been handed in. Just the passport would have But most of those were not real memories, a shoebox full of them at the bottom of the couldn’t have been New Year’s Eve, because made him happy. He thanked the receptionist they were just the stories his mother had told wardrobe, buried under towels and plastic that morning it had been his birthday, and and collected his key, and stood in the centre him when he was older. When he stopped to bags. He sat down on the floor and got to his birthday was in March. From his father’s of the atrium squeezing the back of his neck focus, to sink back into the past of himself, work. poorer patients there had been presents, toys with one hand and pinching the bridge of his those moments were no more than an amber There was his mother, no more than woven from palm leaves, he could remember nose with the fingers of the other. He tried glow and the idea of profound heat, perhaps twenty-five, standing thigh-deep in a crystal that, paper aeroplanes too, decorated in to think what to do. The photographs of his the luminous flash of a detail that missed sea and dressed in a black bikini. There was crayon colours. You tore them as you took brother were in his pocket. entirely the larger picture. Sometimes he felt his father, square-jawed and handsome as he the wrapping off. He went up to his room. In the bars of he had never really lived here at all. faced down the sun, with Robert hanging His mother in there, maybe, skirt billowing light that fell in through the blinds he stood

Northwords Now Issue 29, Spring 2015 17 and drank the rest of the duty free. He looked and pink, the green sea, the pale sky. He put want maybe a little more luxury than I could out at the pool, but it was closed for the the pictures back in his pocket. provide!’ evening. The trees shook in a great waft of air, ‘They live inside you,’ he said to someone, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ the leaves in a languorous shuffle. or maybe to no one, maybe to the memory After the silence his father said, ‘It’s the When the whisky was finished he went of his brother which had grown and swollen same hotel, isn’t it? It’s the one you said.’ down to the bar and spent the rest of the inside him all these years, to the new memories There was a pause, then, ‘I haven’t been there money he’d taken he was shoring up against the loss of his in such a while.’ from his father’s room. More whisky, ice mother and the long estrangement from his ‘I think so.’ Robert was perfectly sure. in the whisky. father, ‘They live on inside you, right? That’s The next silence was so long that Robert ‘They don’t really drink rum in the where they go when they die. Not heaven. fed more coins to the slot to break it. Nan Robh Caribbean,’ he said to a young white couple, They live forever in there.’ ‘You know,’ his father said, and over the Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh Americans, as they stood at the bar. He held He called his father’s house, paying coins poverty of the line his voice become mere up the glass. ‘They drink whisky. With ice. I into the phone in the lobby. He remembered suggestion, ‘she never blamed you for what Nan robh a h-uile chànan know, I used to live here. You see that pool then about the bad labour out in the bush, happened. Don’t even think that for a minute. agus fhacal san t-saoghal out there? My brother died right out there, but the phone was answered. She never loved you any the less for it.’ air mo theanga, is e toiseach right in that pool.’ ‘Dad? It’s me, it’s Robert. Is that you?’ ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Did you?’ tòiseachaidh a bhiodh ann Later he said to someone, ‘Holidays, right? ‘Yes? Yes! So … what are you going to do ‘Of course not. God, you were just a child. ‘s chan e crìoch. I used to live here, when I was a boy. Carnival, tonight then? Why don’t you have yourself a It was an accident. It was just one of those Nad shuidhe the Spider Queen, all that. Every year. You nice dinner somewhere, go into town, enjoy things.’ Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh know, when I was young I thought it was yourself.’ He pronounced town ‘tong’, like He said, ‘She blamed me, Robert, not you. all real, that someone always got killed at the the locals. She always blamed me.’ Bha thu nad shuidhe an taic an dorais. end. Listen, you know they don’t really drink ‘What?’ Thill mi ach bha thu air falbh. rum in the Caribbean? Whisky. Whisky and ‘And tomorrow - ‘ He was walking out into the night, sultry Chuir thu às dhut fhèin. ice.’ He held up his glass. ‘No, I told you, I lost my wallet. I don’t and calm and black. The forecourt was lined Cha do rinn m’ fhaclan feum. At one point he was in the gents, having a have any money.’ with palms, each bladed leaf scraping against Carson a shaoilinn gun dèanadh? dribbling piss. Cockroaches, horrible brown ‘But you took the money from my its brother, a sound like somebody snoring in things, greasy things, droned in through the dresser?’ a room at the end of a long corridor. He didn’t open window. His mother had hated them. ‘That’s right,’ Robert said. ‘I’d forgotten. I remember any of this. It was all so different. It Every memory has an animal attached to can use that.’ probably wasn’t even the same hotel. Ciamar it. Once, an iguana in the garden, turning ‘Grand,’ he said. ‘So, how long are you here He fell, steadied himself, hauled upwards Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh its leathery green head towards him, seeing for again?’ against the branch of stars. with an opalescent eye. It knew. It had a long ‘A week. I could really afford - ‘ At the back he found the swimming pool, Ciamar a ghabhas perspective. It knew what he had done. ‘I would have invited you here,’ he said the tarpaulin drawn down across the water. bàrdachd thùrsach He sat at the bar and looked again at the at once, ‘to stay at the bungalow, but with Chlorine spiked the air. He knelt down at the aithris gun ghul? pictures, staring into the blur of white and red space being what it is … And I thought you’d shallow end and patted the tarpaulin’s hide. Not the same water of course, and the pool Ciamar a chluinneas itself no doubt renovated many times over the an luchd-èisteachd years. Like the broom in the riddle, with its ma ghuileas am bàrd? new shaft, its new head of bristles. He unhooked the twine and peeled the An e fìrinn mar sin cover back halfway. There were two white no breug a th’ ann am ovals rippling on the water, reflections from pearfòrmans? the hotel lights. He undressed and flopped into the pool, and was enveloped then in a new skin cool against the night. Gliding through the water, ducking under into Mealladh-sùla darkness and with held breath feeling his way Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh along, patting the cover with his hands from underneath, the cover stretched so taut at this Tro ghlainne an dorais chùil end of the pool that his hands couldn’t even chaidh m’ aire a ghlacadh break the surface of the water, thinking of the le poit-ghàrraidh làn ùir. photographs, of them, the way he had taken them both inside himself. Shaoil mi car greis The dead settle on the land inside you. gun robh lann uaine They till their gifted acre and give back the air seòtadh. tithe. As he swam he thought, This is what it Ach nuair a choimhead mi would have been like, exactly, just black panic na bu dlùithe cha robh ann and the safe air a mile above you, unreachable. ach stob plastaig. Maybe he would have looked up and seen me at the side, looking down. The picture of me shattered into a kaleidoscope by the movement of him passing through, backlit by sun. And then that would have been it. He died, and she died. He looped and skimmed back along the surface of the pool’s floor, and when at last he retched up into the air he saw two porters running across the grass, one already prepping to take the plunge, and behind them a manager in a black suit with his tie flapping over his shoulder. The stars were magnificent. It’s alright, Robert tried to shout. I’m fine, I’m fine. He hauled himself out of the water, the porters’ hands under his arms, saying, ‘You know my brother died in this pool? He died.n

18 Northwords Now Issue 29, Spring 2015 Poetry

Vernal It was Schwetzingen Paula Jennings Mark Edwards Desmond Graham

The tall scarlet of crested hens that long eared cat sprayed the shed roof felt ‘among features in the remarkable gardens is a fanfares through hawthorn, torn in last month’s storm, ‘Perspective’ generally called ‘the end of the world’ struts among verdant twigs I was up there patching yesterday from a trompe l’oeil painting at the end of it’ before dark skies reformed. plump with the infant year. where the lake is a lake April is freeing story upon story My bad foot stung on each rung of the ladder and the clouds are clouds from a frosted jar. fearing a neighbour might record any fall but not those clouds for the village to witness my shame. floating towards you Now that winter’s gales are spent the air repairs itself, breathes All hands but mine lost. I cant believe true, and the carp are carp jonquil scent, drenched loam. all went their separate ways. gathering in the shallows New owners painted the vessel as you see them change to powder At moonrise star particles glint a black sheen that’ll outlive you. smokescreen of mud around them in the bent horns of trees, barks of foxes charge the night. Still the jukey will butcher your finest tunes and the heron is a heron preferring the blander version, posed over its own reflection Tulips have darkened their cups could always limp past, see some auld cove in perfect symmetry and the grass blazes silver chat fitba, a bit on the weather and not a jot concerned with us as the storyteller begins: avoid the hard talk, dont run, walk mind fit yer grandfather telt ye: and the end of the world Perhaps she came from beyond the ice is the end of the world where colours pour down the night sky. bairns greeting like gows their Ma gone pleading down a corridor of arched We only know that one day she was here… end up the poor huis if we remain breathing. trellis covered in green

This aint Iraq. You aint Saddam. You’re nay up in court the end of our looking dereliction of duty. 3 things I hate, it’s plain to say past the last of perspective Deshabille tornadoes air noise pollution. where nature and art exchange Ian McFadyen their different looks

Up North, I’m told, if you came close you would see birches are stunted by the Arctic cold. Bin only a picture But unlike other trees, Philip Miller if you could reach it you ‘d find they don’t grow cowed by the wind: no way through they are so loosely, delicately feather-limbed, Putting trash out in the rain so pliable, they offer no resistance; behind our flat, into the windy lane, they bend before the gale, I clear out the mulch at the bottom then back they spring. of the lidless bin: a slippery ball of soaked paper, Haiku They winter laden with a weight of ice, an inch of soupy sewerage, Katrina Shepherd but come the thaw they rise up bent birthday cards and , horrible – lithe and lissom as before. a burst nappy, wind and rain darkness writhing with maggots, with a sudden stench like two a hedgehog unrolls Down here, they’re elegantly tall, decayed thumbs pressed into my nose. into a trot more willowy than willows, that yellow coinage against a thin blue sky Our baby boy made this. copper beech leaves a wonder when the sun shines, every fall. Excrement and fluid, noxious refuse. the truth The birch in the garden there Perishable. in robin song has wrestled three whole days I fish out the haggered stinking rag, with a vicious equinoctial wind, which moves with life, and not a leaf spent. a swollen dressing wet with wounds, Last night the frost blew softly and put it in a new clean bag, in its arborescent ear, for a hygienic departure. and this still morning it is quite undone, for all its foliage lies carelessly I have to kneel, in the frame about its feet, a pale gold ring, of the door into the lane, the sunrise glowing on its silver skin. suddenly bent sick, and retching. My son’s bright face is at the window, held by his mother. I can hear him laughing and calling: Da-da Da-da. I smile back, like the survivor of something indescribable.

Northwords Now Issue 29, Spring 2015 19 REVIEWS

A Book of Death and Fish And there are the tentatively romantic By Ian Stephen relationships between Peter and two other Saraband women – a colleague and a native who he Review my Meghan McAvoy assumes is female. Michel has written about love before, but Ian Stephen’s account of a life shaped by not like this. This is love of the domestic variety, the culture of the fishing communities in with misunderstanding, resentment and Scotland’s Western Isles is both detailed and insecurity. Yes, the story takes place in outer sensitive. A lengthy first novel,A Book of Death space, but remains an entirely recognisable and Fish provides both a celebration of, and a tale of married love. And something very eulogy for, a declined Scottish industry and interesting happens to Peter’s capacity for love, the centuries-old culture which it has created. from the cold distance of another planet. Infused with Gaelic and an intriguingly fresh Much is made of Michel Faber’s diversity take on linguistic specificity — Stephen’s – that he creates entirely different books protagonist, Peter MacAulay, refers to his each time. Victorian prostitutes who plot to parents as ‘olaid’ and ‘olman’ throughout the thwart men, man-eating aliens who pick up novel — this work provides a distinctive, hitchhikers, etc. But I disagree. I think each ‘island’ take on the dialect literature which has of these books are recognisably his, both in become so popular in Scotland and further tone and story line. The protagonists (usually afield in recent decades. At the same time, it female and disfigured in some way) are neatly side-steps the literary inheritance of often unhappy outsiders who struggle in an the ‘urban kailyard’ of Irvine Welsh’s junkies indifferent world. Loneliness and alienation and James Kelman’s figures of existential crisis, are often central themes. Beautifully written eschewing these writers’ sense of desolate in Michel’s unique simple style, the stories individuality in favour of an ‘island’ sense are nevertheless complex and often brooding. of community and connectedness, which The Book of Strange New Things is all these also contrasts with Iain Crichton Smith’s things as well, but there is something achingly celebrated explorations of the stultifying, tender and wistful about this story. And this claustrophobic effects of growing up within tenderness is new. an island community. It’s a long book (almost 500 pages), but However, Stephen’s work never a quick read. Stop whatever you are doing romanticises the fishing culture it portrays, for a few days and read it. It adds something and its memoir tone does not fall prey to strange, new and good to the world. n nostalgia or idealisation. Instead it is alive with the sights, smells and hardships of a life closely connected the sea and its inhabitants, Infidelities dealing with death, exile, poverty, and the by Kirsty Gunn volatile relationships between different fishing Faber & Faber communities, gender roles, and classes, against Review by Cynthia Rogerson a backdrop of treacherous conditions and generational shifts. This highly ‘regional’ novel The title alone is enough to make a reader of island experience is alert to the context perk up – a title that doesn’t pull punches or of oral tradition and traditional storytelling, try to act coy or intellectual. It puts its cards embodying an intertextuality that is woven on the table. Short stories about infidelities, through with recollections, tales, letters, in all their various subtle, and not so subtle, documents, emails and other memoirs from permutations. various members of the community of Lewis Gunn has long been established as one of fishermen, and several generations of the Scotland’s finest literary authors, since her protagonist’s family. However, the novel does debut in 1994. Her accolades include winning not confine island experience to established, Scottish Book of the Year, with The Boy and expected motifs, dealing with subject matter the Sea. Like Michel Faber, she is a Scottish as diverse as the role of Scotland’s fishermen writer who was born and raised somewhere in the second world war, an encounter with a else – New Zealand, in her case. Perhaps drunk paedophile, and a Scottish experience due to this unusual mixture of linguistic of the globalisation of eastern religions in the The Book of Strange New Things there, and the natives do not need converting influences, as well as the ex-pat perspective, mid-twentieth century. by Michel Faber – they miss their previous minister and wish her style is distinctively her own. The Gunn Each of Stephen’s short chapters is a Hogarth for another. Peter is welcomed warmly by narrative voice is seemingly informal, casual finely-detailed snapshot of an episode in the Review by Cynthia Rogerson natives and humans alike. and confiding – and yet, one always senses a life of a protagonist who has inherited both Set in the very near future (next week?), deep intelligent reserve, often a darkness and the fishing culture of Lewis and the industry This is a genre-confused novel. A big dose the story is credible on every level, despite tension, under the lightness and accessibility. and modernity of Glasgow, demonstrating at of science fiction, as the main character Peter there being no scientific explanation for the Like her other work, the stories in every turn a crucial sense of connectedness is sent to a distant planet where he meets a mode of interplanetary travel, or indeed, any Infidelities concern the complex way in to the past, informed and interrogated by the lot of beings who speak without mouths and of the futuristic phenomena. And nothing scary which people connect, or not, with each changes inherent in growing up, moving from see without eyes. A rather large smattering of happens. So, none of the usual aspects of the other. Sexual infidelity is just one of the ways Lewis to Glasgow, and cultural shifts between religion, because Peter is a missionary and he sci fi genre, yet I don’t think this novel would in which humans betray each other, and decades and generations. A lengthy first novel thinks about God a lot. There is an apocalyptic disappoint a sci fi fan, or indeed any reader. Gunn’s stories explore the inner workings of which is dictated more by a finely-detailed, aroma, because as soon as Peter leaves, society Much is intriguing, but it is Peter’s hearts belonging to a wide variety of people. episodic account of the protagonist’s life than on Earth begins a rapid descent into anarchy. relationship with the wife he left on Earth, Adolescents, mothers, husbands, fathers, wives, by any driven sense of plot, A Book of Death And it is a love story too, without cynicism, that kept me turning the pages. Bea in children, siblings. Maori and Scots and English and Fish will be appreciated for its negotiations and yet without sentimentality either. So, a London emailing Peter, and Peter answering and New Zealanders. In all their cases, there and reconciliations between past and present, sci-fi, end-of-the-world, religious love story. in between bouts of preaching to his alien is one common thread – the awareness that local and international, island communities Who could ask for more? flock. There are plot lines pertaining to life wrong has been done, either by themselves and city communities, regionalism and Peter is a missionary sent to appease the on another planet, as well as a thread of or to themselves – and more, that a choice of globalisation, and life and death. It is a fine, natives, but it’s not a tall order. There is a colony Christian philosophy that manages to be response is their responsibility. far-reaching and and sensitive book. n of humans already settled very comfortably both intellectually and spiritually engaging. These are brief, bright, shining stories, in

20 Northwords Now Issue 29, Spring 2015 REVIEWS

Gunn’s minimalist trademark style of truncated in his Shetland-based novel The Pirate, and The narrative itself is highly experimental, developing and important Scottish plays were sentences, repeated phrases, and an almost onward to the creation of Shetland’s first shifting between – and sometimes within – touring the country. Virginia Woolf stream of consciousness. They literary magazine, The New Shetlander, and chapters, from first-person to third-person Dolina could think in Gaelic and she was are easy to read, compelling even, but don’t be the subsequent establishing of a Shetlandic points of view. Occasionally, there are even vitally important to the other Scots, whether misled and read too quickly. Take your time, literary scene predominantly writing in the changes of time, moving from historic-past they wrote in Gaelic, Scots or English, as she savour each one. Pause at each ending before local vernacular. Though Smith maintains narrative to immediate present or even future sang at their events, presented their poetry, beginning the next. They are all rich and will a high standard of objective and balanced tense. This changeable narrative pattern interviewed them on radio, or fed them in reward your full attention. analysis throughout much of the book, blends with the deliberately-fragmented her Edinburgh homes as they incessantly This is a gift of a book, tightly packed with his analysis is particularly excellent during structure of the novel and creates an overall discussed Scottish affairs. glimpses into those intense, intimate moments passages dedicated to Hugh MacDiarmid, effect of disjuncture, challenging the concept Much of this part of her story is literary on which lives turn and relationships burn. Billy Tait and Stella Sutherland. of linearity and the attractive illusion of the history which will be corroborated by Either to ashes, or into splendid life. Enjoy n However, Smith does lose a little of his teleological through-line. accounts of the other personalities, MacCaig, critical finesse in the penultimate chapter, As has so often been the case in Gaelic Henderson, Maclean, and all the rest. But dedicated to contemporary Shetland writers. novels, language catches the reader’s attention. there is also a moving personal story running The Literature of Shetland Whilst he himself acknowledges that it Cala Bendita has significant amounts of through the book, of Dolina’s private life, two By Mark Ryan Smith is difficult to appraise the work of living English, used extensively in dialogue but also marriages, children and grandchildren, and The Shetland Times writers when ‘any judgements we make are frequently in the narrative. Appropriately, then of her bed and breakfast establishment Review by Roseanne Watt provisional’, the chapter does still feel slightly given the international settings and cast of in Blair Atholl, her subsequent illness and underdeveloped, as well as missing some vital characters, other languages appear or are return to Edinburgh. All is told or hinted at Mark Ryan Smith’s book, The Literature names, such as the late Fair Isle poet, Lise referenced, notably Spanish. One entire without a single ill word being spoken against of Shetland, is the first substantial work to Sinclair, and award-winning poet and prose chapter is in Cockney English, mirroring the anybody, and with unerring dignity. critically examine the literary tradition of writer, Sheenagh Pugh. That said, Smith has usage of its viewpoint character. Not least of her achievements was writing Scotland’s northernmost archipelago. In his cleared much of the groundwork for future Cala Bendita is, in many ways, a 54 episodes of the Gaelic TV soap Na introduction, Smith provides a brief historical scholars of this field, as well as future scope challenging read. The novel leaves the Moireasdanaich (The Morrisons), a project overview to his subject, wherein he highlights for a second-edition of his book with perhaps reader with a strong sense that its writer she herself had suggested to BBC producers. a startling fact: Shetland’s literature is still a more thorough penultimate chapter. In has made every effort to employ a wide This was hard-headed professional writing in incredibly young, barely two centuries old any case, there is no denying that Smith has variety of techniques, the effect of this Gaelic, which makes it all the more remarkable (compare this to Orkney’s millennium of contributed a commendable and important being rather like listening to the fruits of that this book is so self-effacing. “I’ve also literary history and you grasp something of body of work in the field of Scottish Literary a creative writing course on the final day. written bits and pieces of verse over the years, the discrepancy here). What is most curious, Studies. n Coupled with the lack of a strong plot and but have never considered myself a poet.” however, is that Shetland’s literary identity the disconnetion between chapters, this Dolina Maclennan seems to have invented seems to begin with the loss of its native tends to make Cala Bendita read like a short her own gender role over a key period in language. Cala Bendita ’s a Bheannachdan story cycle at times. However, irrespective the development of Scottish culture. In the In the fifteenth century, Norn fell into a Màrtainn Mac an t-Saoir of this, the book rewards a reader’s patience Gaelic world, the world of Lewis, gender roles slow, irrevocable decline; by the end of the Acair (Aiteal series) and marks another positive development in were well defined. With her gift of song, her eighteenth century it had ceased to exist as Review by Moray Watson our recent prose fiction renaissance. n ability to write and imagine in Gaelic, her a living language. This, combined with low work as an actor, her contributions to all that literacy rates, crucially incurred the loss of Màrtainn Mac an t-Saoir’s recent novel Cala was going on, she created her own role at the orally-preserved poetry and prose. Whilst Bendita ’s a Bheannachdan (2014) begins with An Island Girl’s Journey. centre of the cultural upheaval that has so little of this oral tradition has survived, the what initially feels a clichéd and banal set- Dolina Maclennan, In Conversation with affected Scotland in our time. n fragmentary examples Smith provides in his up. The point-of-view character in the first Jim Gilchrist and Stuart Lydmann introduction are striking enough to remind us chapter is a Gael called Gilleasbaig. Gilleasbaig The Islands Book Trust of the depth of this loss. Consider, for instance, feels himself to be out of place among the Review by Sally Evans The Book of Ways ‘The Unst Lay’, which features a genuinely Lowlander characters. His ‘otherness’ is by Colin Will captivating conglomeration of Christian imaged through his very different use of Cultural icon, Gaelic broadcaster, singer, Red Squirrel Press and Odinic theology, suggesting the original English and in the difference in his manner actress, friend of poets, Perthshire hostess and verse had ancient roots: ‘Nine days he hang and manners compared with the characters he latterly campaigner for independence – a The Road North pa da rötless tree,/For ill was da fök an göd interacts with. At this point, the reader might BBC manager once told her, “Your place is by Alec Finlay and Ken Cockburn was he;/A blöddy met was in his side,/Made be concerned that Cala Bendita will serve not behind the scenes” – Dolina Maclennan Shearsman Books wi a lance at widna hide;/Nine lang nichts i up predictable and stale fare. However, the has quietly and diversely become one of the da nippin rime/Hang he dere wi his naked initial chapter is by no means indicative of most famous women in Scotland. Review by Stephen Keeler limb,/Some dey leuch/Bit idders grett.’ the sort of novel that Cala Bendita is, and the Written ably by herself, despite the title The introduction’s historical crash-course reader should indulge Mac an t-Saoir’s teasing page’s hesitant “in conversation,” the book I was grateful for the introduction in The is a useful and necessary overview of the opening, which prepares the way for a much opens with vivid reminiscences of her Book of Ways. Haibun are one of those genres book’s subject; however, in the following more interesting and diverse main course. upbringing on a Lewis croft, Gaelic speaking so accessible to Japanese, from where they chapters (each a dedicated case-study, Indeed, Gilleasbaig himself immediately gives and where she acquired her knowledge of originate, so elusive in English which does chronologically ordered) Smith eschews a way to a range of fascinating and intriguing Gaelic song. This background reminds me not always willingly accommodate the form. methodology where the work of individual characters. The cast is an ensemble one, with of that of another highland woman – “Jane The so-called classic definitions, ‘writing in writers is assumed to be inherently informed only the slightest connections between some Duncan” the novelist from the Black Isle. In the style of haiku’ and ‘sketching in words’, by the ‘bedrock’ of an historic, linear narrative. of them. The significance, indeed, of Bendita the same way, Dolina Maclennan was drawn may only cloud the issue further for Western Instead, Smith determines to be perceptive of (in Mallorca), is that it is the main point of away from the highland crofting culture by an readers. Are haibun prose or poetry, or both? the individuality and diversity of the various commonality between several of the families English language education. Both women are And to what extent does it matter? Colin writers he engages with; if common themes in the novel: they have noticed each other modest to a fault, yet fiercely proud of their Wills is unequivocal: ‘this is poetry’. Yet he or tropes emerge (and they certainly do, while on holiday there. highland roots. Despite major achievements is comfortable acknowledging that, ‘Most particularly in the traditional figure of the In complete contrast with Mac an t-Saoir’s neither woman seems to consider herself commentators agree...they contain prose crofter), they stem from a context that has 2011 novel, An Latha as Fhaide, linear plotting immensely gifted or important. written in the spirit of haiku’. Among others, not been forced to conform to imagined is avoided here. Instead, the reader is invited Yet it was no accident that Dolina was at the this raises the question of what we understand historical substrata. to tease out the threads of a story by piecing centre of Scottish culture for so long, in Lewis ‘the spirit of haiku’ to be. This is a highly successful approach, and together the tantalising strands that the book and Stornoway, in Edinburgh and Glasgow Haibun, we are told, contain at least one paints a comprehensive and fascinating picture offers us. Sometimes, the significance ofa and latterly Perthshire. She had so much to haiku, often at the end, and the prose of the of Shetland’s literature through the ages: from scene is not at all clear until much later in the give to the poets, musicians, play companies, haibun is often, ‘but not always’, an account the earliest writers (Margaret Chalmers and novel, and the reader may even have to go back broadcasters, academics and intellectuals, of a (literal) journey. Will recognises that this Dorothea Primrose Campbell) navigating the and re-read certain scenes for a reminder of especially through the 70s, 80s and 90s, when has led some to characterise the haibun as a absence of a literary tradition, to Walter Scott’s what the relationships of particular characters the folk scene was fizzing, the great Scottish waybook (hence the title of his book). So are reimagining of an enduring Norse identity seemed to be at other points in the narrative. poets were so active, Gaelic broadcasting was haibun a literary form or a collection of pieces rr

Northwords Now Issue 29, Spring 2015 21 REVIEWS r in one volume? Either way, Will acknowledges characterised by a ‘generous wariness’ and Ian McDonough’s A Witch Among the Also from the Red Squirrel’s drey is the risk that ‘a haibun collection becomes a he is exactly right. Relich’s work shares a Gooseberries (Mariscat Press) deals largely with Matthew Macdonald’s Cò às a tha thu? / series of travel notes’ and is at pains to assert kinship with that of Robert Garioch’s, funny, both memory and childhood imagination Who Are Your People? (Red Squirrel Press). that this is not his intention. This is poetry. wary but with hidden depths. Like the title and the attempts of the adult poet to As might be gleaned from the title, this So the reader of this eclectic collection of suggests, there are many bird poems here with recapture such moments of wonderment collection is a sensitive and resonant return of pieces (prose poems?) might be best advised to Relich acting as an auspex reading patterns and otherworldliness. While there is a secret the Edinburgh born Macdonald to his family suspend prejudice awhile, set aside questions and predictions into the day from the habits commonwealth of fairies and other creature roots on Harris and Lewis. These poems are of form and genre, and let the evident of the birds he sees. Above all, it is Relich’s here, it is the much starker, more existential at all times lyrical, humane and warm but I strength and delicacy of Will’s thesis emerge family poems about his mother, displacement poems which genuinely haunt and impress often found them lacking fire and drama, but through the unobstructed writing, for these and belonging which move the reader most: the reader. Here is a spell to summon your perhaps that says more about me. In fact, I liked are, for the most part, calming meditations ‘What’s an opera/house?,’ I wondered,// shade: ‘Snare the shade in light,/bind it on an most of all his poems from Edinburgh such as on the human condition; part memoir, part having no inkling/that Montreal//was oath,/ask it when the thing/we once were ‘Afternoon’ where I can see he is still finding manifesto and yes, part travelogue, much of it not home to her,/and never would be.’ promised/will arrive.’ (‘Summoning’) his bearings and mapping the landscape: ‘I find celebratory in intent and effect. A delightful (‘Caruso’). out later that the loch is not big enough/to collection to dip into for observations on Jim Carruth’s Prodigal (Mariscat Press) warrant the activity of naming/which seems the Moscow State Circus, in Moscow, on Jim C. Wilson is another poet whose adds another instalment to the on-going appropriate, somehow/for a country with so climbing Suilven; on the torpedo testing poems deftly mingle both darker and lighter poetic chronicling of his agrarian life and much wilderness/woven into its bones.’ station nearby the Ta’er Lamasery, or on new shades. Many of the earlier poems in Come background. This moving pamphlet is all shoes. Often serene, always thoughtful; a joy, Close and Listen (Greenwich Exchange) about returns, homecomings both auspicious Although Arc Publications are perhaps simply. Much of what I struggled to find in are metapoetic, talking about waiting for and ominous. At the heart of this pamphlet best known for their translations of major The Road North. inspiration to strike or the business of writing. lies a sense of familial drama, of old ways European writers, here they add Ian Crockatt’s Where Wills offered an explanation if not Inspiration certainly comes in the latter stages dying out or perhaps being preserved and translations of 12th Century skaldic poetry in a justification ofhaibun , Finlay and Cockburn of the book where poems can go from witty the imaginative wanderlust of Carruth as Crimsoning the Eagle’s Claw (Arc Publications). hit the road running. Their “journey around to nightmarish with just the turn of a page. a poet, who is always simultaneously apart From the scholarly introduction onwards, it Scotland guided by Bashó’s Oku-no-Hosomichi” Wilson is a craftsman above all and I found from and with the farm in his mind. Besides is very clear that Crockatt’s enjoyment and is a collection of poems in the form of a more myself drawn to his graver poems, such as the hilarious tour-de-force of ‘Vade Mecum’ sense of importance of this task is central and or less continuous poetic narrative. It is often his poem for Lorca: ‘when the men held with its recommended come-hither chat-up it makes for a fascinating reading experience. exquisite in its simplicity, you down/in their terrible passion…could lines for farmers, acceptance of Carruth’s craft Here are poems on the whole cycle of life you taste a sailor’s kiss/in that black grove of by his father comes in ‘Old Collie’: and we discover that Rognvaldr, the poet, was what is a glen? olives?//Before the last explosion of blood,/ both a lover and a fighter, as Crockatt writes: did you remember love?’ (‘1936’) While working together ‘your mind engaged with minds / before air where once my father shouts across the parlour opening men’s veins’. Above all, Crockatt’s there was ice I just read an interview with Susan an idea for my next poem translations have made me appreciate anew Sontag where she claimed that praise was the skaldic technique of kenning, which heather where once not an effective force in creative writing. How about a working collie – makes such vivid and euphemistic images there were trees Reading Laurna Robertson’s Praise Song one that’s on its last legs. (‘fleshed ravens’ meaning leaving dead men (HappenStance Press) I feel she was probably I tell him it has been done before. for carrion): wind where once quite wrong. Here are poems in celebration there was breath of place, birth, language and family. Not only McGuire’s As I sit quietly, I begin to smell I was with the rouser does Robertson write about her Shetlandic burning (Red Squirrel Press) is a very different of war-winds in Orkney; but its elusiveness seems, to this reader, heritage, concepts of the ‘North’ and folklore, kettle of fish from anything else here. His he’d fleshed ravens before, to verge on the opaque, sometimes on the she also writes in such a longing and crystalline work straddles both poetry for performance fought and won that winter. inconsequential, even the obscure. A page way about things closest to her heart. Here and the printed page and ‘Reductio ad Now, his shield-rim shouldered, of notes at the back of the book explains a is the memory of a swimming lesson by Absurdum’ dramatizes the often elitist way in the sure-footed jarl tackles little of the Japanese poet Bashó (1644-1694) her father in the sea: ‘My father taught me which these two styles are discussed by critics, Acre’s gates. It’s a rain-flayed and of the intent behind The Road North but how to swim…Years earlier, seeing a toddler so I am on parlous ground. ‘Lackey: The Friday morn. We storm on. leaves the no doubt ill-informed Western tumble/from the harbour wall, he had leapt Useless Poet’ shows a certain antagonism to reader unsure of the connections or of the into the water,/forgetting the day’s takings in such critics who fail to ‘sit down’, take their It has certainly been a prolific year for motivation behind the device. his pockets/and that he could not swim at all. jacket off and ‘just chat’. Full of spleen and Sheena Blackhall. Not only has 2014 seen There are occasional bursts of sunshine (‘Life Class’). seaminess, the obvious comparison would be the publication of the Aberdeen University recognisable to anyone who has walked in with Bukowski, but I think McGuire’s work Press hardback The Space Between: New and Scotland, as on ‘a squeaking walk on the The title of Valerie Gillies’ new volume reads more satisfactorily as a 21st century Selected Poems, Blackhall has also published singing sands of Moidart, Arisaig and Morar’: The Cream of the Well (Luath Press) relates to version of Glasgow’s James B V Thomson and with Lochlands a new pamphlet of poetry the first sip from the well at sunrise, when the his City of Dreadful Night: ‘Glasgow. We do not for nearly every month of the year. Here we ...another day healing properties of the water are believed tend to it,/but watch it blacken like a burst have October’s and November’s – An Inside to sip dark tea to be at their most potent. Here we have eye,/blacken like a coal pit,/blacken like a Job and Mr Charon’s Ferry (Lochlands). As the from the mussel’s flared rim… the cream, or more accurately the choicest, dead flower.’ (‘The Glasgae Boys’) respective titles suggest, the former deals more most limpid draughts from Gillies’ collections, with phrenic matters, of MRI scans of the …another day beginning with 1977’s Each Bright Eye and Another collection with a Glaswegian poet’s brain and Thematic Apperception Tests, of salt water ending with a sequence of poems occasioned air is Chris Young’s pamphlet Greetings from while the latter deals more with mortality and without storm, by a recent associateship at Harvard University. Glasgow (Red Squirrel Press). Like McGuire, elegy. That said, Blackhall’s poetry is never far light shattering A strong water-table lies underneath all of Young is also a performance poet, but his from breaking into song or being enlivened by glinting fragments… these poems, giving them a refreshing flow work does not translate as well onto the page. gallows humour, making these two pamphlets and fluidity, there are homages paid to wells, These poems are bright and often uplifting mixed bags of the serious and the silly: ‘The and the poetry is always considered. It is an rivers, lochs but more than this I was struck by but they are often a lot safer and more flip airt far poems cam frae/Is like the traivellin ambitious undertaking which, for this reader, how this collection shows Gillies’ movement than McGuire’s. At times, in some of the tide/Wi treisurs, joys an nichtmares/Warld- fell just short of its intentions. n from a strongly narrative type of poem, more humorous poems, I felt like I was gaithered in its side.’ (‘An Inside Job (2)’) n informed by family history, towards a more reading the work of a Glasgow Betjeman, in lyrical poem directed either at herself or the poems like ‘Umbrellas’ about Glasgow’s rain Poetry Reviews elements. Both work brilliantly well, but like and ‘Ode to a Vegetarian Haggis’. That said, I By Richie McCaffery some collections where a poet settles into a like Young’s work most when he is not trying style, Gillies’ has avoided this sense of stasis. too hard to perform and entertain. Here is Mario Relich’s Frisky Ducks & Other Poems This is from the ‘Golden Breast’: ‘Say goodbye ‘Underground’: ‘His leg against mine,/we sit (Grace Note Publications) collects together to your breast,’ she said,/‘for tomorrow it will in bristling silence, packed tightly below./ decades of poems. Tom Hubbard’s effusive be gone.’//So I walked far into the hills./I My stop. I part with a smile/as bright as the introduction states that these poems are opened my shirt,/the sun set on my breast. unseen sun.’

22 Northwords Now Issue 29, Spring 2015 CONTRIBUTORS’ BIOGRAPHIES

Andy Allan, a native of Strathspey, has been Sally Evans’ most recent collection is Poetic Coinneach Lindsay Dàin leis ann an Sandstone Derek Ramsey listened to his best of Albert Ayler published in a number of magazines and anthologies. Adventures in Scotland with Seventy Selected Poems. She Review etc. Na Fhilidh air Mhuinntearas aig Sabhal L.P. last night instead of writing; it was good. His first pamphlet, Breath of Dragons, will be edits Poetry Scotland. Mòr Ostaig an-dràsta. published by Indigo Dreams in 2015. Frances Robson’s writing has appeared in various Robin Fulton Macpherson was born in Arran Pàdraig MacAoidh – À Leòdhas. Na fhear-teagaisg publications. In 2014 she published the first Scots Grahaeme Barrasford Young’s first full collection, in 1937 and now lives in Norway. He edited Lines aig Oilthigh Chille Rìmhinn. Cruinneachadh Gu translation of Lermontov’s ‘Demon’. She lives in Routes of uncertainty (Original Plus), was published in Review and has translated the Nobel Prize-winning Leòr 2013. Edinburgh. 2014. poet Tomas Tranströmer. A collected edition of Robin’s poems, A Northern Habitat, was published by Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh Bàrd a tha air an Cynthia Rogerson has published four novels and Ann Bowes is from Drumnadrochit and lives on Marick Press in 2013. dreuchd aige mar fhear-teagaisg ealain ann an Inbhis a collection of stories. Her novel I Love You, Goodbye Skye, having worked as a museums designer & Nis a leigeil dheth o chionn ghoirid. was shortlisted for the 2011 Scottish Novel of the exhibitions curator. She is a poetry and kindle writer, Desmond Graham has recently published, in Polish Year, and developed into a Woman’s Hour serial. Her mixed medium artist. translation, Nowe wiersze (Gdansk); nearer home Meghan McAvoy is a PhD student at Stirling latest novel is If I Touched the Earth (Black and White). Unaccompanied (Villa Vic Press Newcastle) and The University, working in contemporary Scottish William Bonar was shortlisted for the 2015 New Scale of Change (Flambard). writing. Her other interests include fiddle music, Katrina Shepherd’s haiku are published widely Writers Award. His pamphlet collection Offering will Scots song, and left-wing politics. with one in The Haiku Calendar 2015, www. be published by Red Squirrel Press on 23rd April Brian Hamill lives in Glasgow. He serves as snapshotpress.co.uk ‘In the stillness’, music by Sally 2015. Submissions Editor for thi wurd magazine. Brian has Richie McCaffery’s first full length collection of Beamish, is available from www.gonzagamusic.co.uk had stories published in various books and magazines. poems, Cairn, was published in 2014. Eileen Carney Hulme‘s third collection, The He was a winner of the Scottish Book Trust New Richard W. Strachan won a New Writer’s Award Stone Messenger, will be published by Indigo Dreams Writers Award in 2013. Amy McCauley’s poetry has appeared widely in from the Scottish Book Trust in 2012, and has Publishing in 2015. Her poems appear in magazines UK magazines and anthologies. Her current project written for New Writing Scotland, Gutter, The Herald and occasionally surface in competitions. Lesley Harrison lives in Angus. Her most recent is a collection of poems (Auto-Oedipa) which re- and the Scottish Review of Books. poetry pamphlet is Beyond the Map, published by imagines the Oedipus myth. Regi Claire has twice shortlisted for a Saltire Book Mariscat. Mairi Sutherland’s move to Nairn in 2000 of the Year award. Her writing has been anthologised Ian McFadyen is a retired English teacher, life now kick-started her writing. She eavesdrops on public in Best British Short Stories 2013. She is a Royal Anne Hay grew up in Perth, lives in Edinburgh. She divided - weather permitting - between Sutherland transport for characters’ voices. Her first novel is Literary Fund Fellow and a lover of crows and dark has written short fiction and comedy for radio. and the Borders. Poems and occasional short stories gradually emerging. tales. in Scots and English. Kate Hendry is a writer and tutor, living in Moray Watson is a lecturer in Gaelic Studies Anna Danskin À Bhatairnis an Eilein Sgitheanaich Edinburgh. Her first collection of poems will be Hugh McMillan is a poet from Penpont. His within the School of Language and Literature at the bho thùs. Dàin leatha ann an irisean leithid An Guth published by Happenstance Press next year. Selected Poems, and Galloway: An Unreliable Tour are University of Aberdeen. is Gairm. Ag obair air a’ chiad chruinneachadh aice due out this year from Luath. aig aois thairis air ceithir fichead. Paula Jennings is published in magazines (Stand, Roseanne Watt is from Shetland. She graduated Rialto, Gutter, the SHOp etc), has two poetry Philip Miller is a journalist, writer and poet who from the University of Stirling with a BA (Hons) in Robert Davidson is a writer, editor and publisher collections and a third on the way (HappenStance). lives and works in Glasgow. His short stories and English and Film Studies and has now successfully located in Highland Scotland. He founded She lives in Fife. poems have been published in Gutter magazine, the completed the university’s MLitt programme in Sandstone Press in 2002. Books written by Robert Fish Anthology 2014, The Island Review, The Herald Creative Writing. Davidson have been short listed for the Saltire Stephen Keeler is a writer, poet and teacher. He has and other places. His debut novel The Blue Horse is Society, Scottish Arts Council, and Boardman Tasker lived and worked in Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and being published by Freight Books in March 2015. Catherine Wylie taught English in the Stirling area. Awards. the Far East for, among others, the British Council, Her work has been published in various magazines. the United Nations Development Program and the Stuart A Paterson lives by the Solway Coast, In 2014 she participated in the Orkney Writers’ Mark Edwards lives in Lossie. His first book, BBC. He lives in Ullapool and is a Scottish Book received a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship in Course. Clearout Sale, was published in 2008. Trust New Writing Award winner 2015. 2014 and has a collection of Galloway poems, Border Lines, published by IDP in 2015. Where to find a FREE Northwords Now Northwords thanks all the locations below for their support in distributing Northwords Now. Special thanks go to all the librarians who put us on display.

Inverness Ullapool Bookshop, Quay St., Ullapool Aberdeenshire Edinburgh Costa Coffee, Waterstones, 69 Eastgate Centre Storehouse of Foulis, Foulis Ferry Books & Beans, 12 Belmont St, Aberdeen The Fruitmarket Gallery, 45 Market Street Eden Court Theatre, Bishop’s Road Achins Bookshop, Inverkirkaig, Lochinver Lemon Tree, 5 West North St, Aberdeen Blackwells Bookshop, 53-9 South Bridge Inverness College Caithness Horizons, Old Town Hall, High St, Thurso Newton Dee Café, Newton Dee Village, Bieldside, Scottish Poetry Library, 5 Crichtons Close Leakeys Bookshop, Greyfriars Hall, Church St VisitScotland, High St, Aviemore Aberdeen Elephant House Café, 21 George IV Bridge Moniack Mhor Writing Centre, 4 Teaverran, Kiltarlity Birnam Arts Centre Blackwell’s, Old Aberdeen, Aberdeen The Village, 16 S. Fort Street Highland Wholefoods, Unit 6, 13 Harbour Road Stirling Libraries Aberdeen City Libraries Filmhouse, 88 Lothian Road Museum & Art Gallery, Castle Wynd Anderson Restaurant, Union St, Fortrose Woodend Barn, Burn o’Bennie, Banchory Peter Green & Co, Warrender Park Road Waterstone’s, 69 Eastgate Centre Yeadons of Banchory, 20 Dee St, Banchory HICA, Dalcrombie, Loch Ruthven, by Dores Islands, West & North Aberdeenshire Libraries Glasgow Visit Scotland, Castle Wynd Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, Slèite, Isle of Skye Hammerton Store, 336 Gt Western Rd, Aberdeen Centre for Contemporary Arts, 350 Sauchiehall Street Bogbain Farm, Drumossie, Inverness Blue Shed Cafe,Torrin, Isle of Skye Spindrift Studio, The Marina, Banff Òran Mòr, 731 Gt. Western Road WEA, 57 Church St, Inverness Cafe Arriba, Portree, Isle of Skye The Piping Centre, 30 McPhater Street MacIntosh’s Bookshop, Portree, Isle of Skye South Caledonia Books, 483 Gt Western Road Highlands Carmina Gadelica, Portree, Isle of Skye Kings Bookshop, Callander, 91 Main St, Callander Tchai Ovna Teahouses, 42 Otago Lane Highland Libraries An Buth Beag, Skeabost, Isle of Skye Dundee Contemporary Arts, 52 Nethergate, Dundee Mono, King’s Court, 10 King Street The Green Kite, The Station, Strathpeffer Mor Books, Struan, Isle of Skye Clementine, Gray Street, Broughty Ferry Gallery of Modern Art, Royal Exchange Square. The Community Centre, Tulloch St, Dingwall. Ravenspoint, Kershader, Lochs, Isle of Lewis Jessie’s Kitchen, Albert Street, Broughty Ferry Tell it Slant, 134 Renfrew St Kilmorack Gallery, by Beauly An Lanntair, Kenneth St, Stornoway Broughty Ferry Library, Queen St, Broughty Ferry WASPS Studio, The Briggait, 141 The Bridge Gate Timespan, Dunrobin Street, Helmsdale Hebridean Jewellery & Bookshop, 63 Cromwell St, The Forest Bookstore, 26 Market Pl, Selkirk Oxfam Books, 330 Byres Rd Dornoch Bookshop, High St, Dornoch Stornoway Kesley’s Bookshop, 29 Market St, Haddington, The Nairn Bookshop, 97 High St, Nairn Taigh Chearsabagh, North Uist East Lothian Phoenix Bookshop, Findhorn Foundation, The Park, Forres Shetland Arts Trust, Tollclock Centre, 26 North Rd, Prestongrange Museum, Morrison’s Haven, Prestonpans Moray Libraries Lerwick, Shetland Montrose Library, 214 High St, Montrose, Angus The Ceilidh Place, 14 West Argyll St, Ullapool An Tobar, Tobermory, Mull Su Casa, Lorne Arcade,115 High St, Ayr

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