‘And would that work the ither way then?’ said Neil, standing his ground.
‘It would,’ said Ben.
‘Seals aren’t fish anyway,’ interrupted Saskia.
‘No,’ said Ben, ‘but they are part of the life system. And each creature on this planet is connected to the other.’
‘There’s few fishermen would grieve a seal’s death,’ said Neil. ‘They devour so mony fish.’
Ben raised his eyebrows. ‘Don’t we?’
Neil laughed. ‘Ach well,’ he said. ‘I’m fae the old school who believe that man has more rights than animals.’
‘But with that right comes responsibility, surely,’ said Ben.
Saskia glanced at him. The look on his face was intense. He obviously cared deeply about his work.
‘There isn’t an inexhaustible supply of fish in the sea,’ Ben went on. ‘If we don’t formulate some policies on conservation, then the time might come when we have to close our fishing grounds.’
‘That could never happen!’ Saskia looked from one to the other. ‘Could it?’
‘They’re talking about it in Canada,’ said Ben. ‘They say they’ll close the Grand Banks in a couple of years.’
‘The herring a’ all but gone fae the North Sea,’ said Neil. ‘And when I was young nae body would ever have foreseen that day.’
‘I think sometimes we leave taking action until it’s too late,’ said Ben.
‘The restrictions and regulations that’ve been already laid doon are worse than useless,’ said Neil. ‘When we went into Europe the fact sheets issued by oor own government said that they would prevent anything which ran counter to oor major national interest. But the Common Fisheries Policy disnae tak’ into account that this is the only livelihood for the British coastal communities from Cornwall to the Shetlands. The Icelanders were smart enough tae extend their exclusion zone. But then nae every other nation will agree to another’s wishes.’
Ben nodded. ‘That’s a major part of the issue, but much more than protection of self-interest is at stake here. It’s important for all concerned to be aware of the consequences of modern fishing methods.’
‘The men’s safety should come first,’ said Neil.
‘Conservation measures don’t have to compromise safety!’ Ben said passionately. ‘We must pay attention to scientific findings. And scientists need to make their information available to all. It’s the reason I went into marine research. The more we know about life in the sea the more we can work towards preserving it – for everybody’s benefit.’
‘Is that why you’re out rescuing seals?’ asked Saskia.
‘We’re only lending a hand at the moment,’ said Ben. ‘Reports are coming in of dead seals from as far north as the Orkneys. Norfolk and the Moray Firth are seeing the worst of it, but the whole seal population is threatened. We think it began on Anholt, which lies between Denmark and Sweden, but it’s spreading rapidly. Seals are very gregarious and regularly travel long distances, so it arrived here in a space of weeks. Scotland has most of the United Kingdom’s seal population, and the majority of the Atlantic grey seals live in Scottish waters so there are not enough staff in our animal rescue centres to cope. The scientists think it might be a virus, some kind of distemper, but it’s not one they are familiar with.’ He stood up. ‘I’ll have to go.’ He went over to Alessandra and touched her gently on the shoulder. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said gently. ‘It’s not contagious to humans. If you see another one, you don’t have to go near it. Just contact us and we’ll deal with it.’ He wrote out his phone number and office address in Aberdeen.
He spoke to Saskia as she helped him carry the stretcher back to his van. ‘Are you planning to do anything special during your time here?’
‘Not really.’ She shrugged. ‘I’ll probably help my great-aunt. She’s doing historical research and I’ve said I might do some typing for her.’
‘If you get bored you can give me a call,’ said Ben. He smiled at Saskia. ‘Even if you don’t find that seal again.’
After dinner, Saskia tried telephoning her parents again. This time she put the receiver down as soon as the answering machine came on. Her aunt looked up from the book she was reading as Saskia returned to the living room. ‘There wouldn’t be anything wrong?’
‘Oh, no,’ said Saskia. ‘They go out a lot.’ She didn’t add ‘but not together’ as she might have done if it was one of her friends. ‘That long journey yesterday has caught up with me,’ she continued. ‘I thought I might have a bath and go to bed early. I brought a stereo and tapes with me. Do you mind if I play my music?’
‘Not at all.’ Alessandra paused for a second. ‘As long as you don’t mind if I play mine.’
It was a joke. Her aunt had made a joke. Saskia stared, smiled, and then laughed.
It was as if something unheard of and very unusual had happened, but now Alessandra was unsure how to proceed or how to act or react. She studied Saskia for a moment and then said, ‘You must find me a very strange person.’
‘Not really,’ Saskia replied automatically. She shrugged and then added. ‘Define “strange”. What’s normal for one person can be strange to another.’
Alessandra did not look away.
‘OK,’ said Saskia. ‘A bit.’
Alessandra smiled. ‘How honest is youth.’
‘You mean cheeky,’ Saskia joked back.
‘No, I don’t think I do,’ said Alessandra. ‘It’s . . . refreshing, yes, I think that’s what I mean, refreshing. Certainly it is preferable to have someone say things to you than talk badly of you behind your back.’
Saskia didn’t reply. Did Alessandra mean her father? How could she possibly know how he spoke of her to Saskia?
‘You probably heard Neil reassuring me in the kitchen earlier that everything was all right.’ Alessandra spoke slowly. ‘I . . . I . . . I was troubled with my nerves for a long while, and he knows that I become agitated . . . about certain things. Tragedy touched my life . . . such a weight of sadness to carry, it almost overwhelmed me. I’ve got tablets . . . now. Although sometimes I forget to take them. That’s why I said to you this morning that I might not remember if I was up and about last night.’ She paused and then said, ‘I used to sleepwalk.’
‘How awful,’ said Saskia. ‘One of the girls in my year group used to do that. She would wake up outside in the garden and have no idea how she got there.’
‘Yes,’ said Alessandra slowly. ‘I found myself on the beach a few times. I imagined I saw things . . . people . . . my family, the ones who had died. I would wake up by the water’s edge. Not safe . . . It was years ago but I got a name in the village for being odd. That sort of thing sticks. And when one person thinks a thing, then others join in for reasons of their own or . . . sometimes for no reason.’
‘People do that,’ said Saskia, memories of incidents at school surfacing in her mind. Of fellow pupils ganging up against each other.
‘I found that if you smile at the wrong places or laugh inappropriately it unnerves people,’ Alessandra went on. ‘The pills the doctor gave me disorientated me. I felt detached from the world. I laughed frequently.’
‘It’s good to laugh,’ said Saskia.
‘Not at funerals,’ said Alessandra. ‘I had to stop going to church. Everything the minister said gave me cause to smile. I found some Bible readings hilarious.’
‘So?’ said Saskia loyally. ‘They should have been glad to see you happy after suffering such grief.’
‘Not during church services,’ said Alessandra. ‘I found that even the most liberal-minded of the congregation took exception to my giggling during a serious sermon. And it was difficult for the minister. He thought I mocked God.’
‘But you got better?’ said Saskia.
‘I was in hospital for a while. Then . . . then, they let me come home. I was by myself in the house and to begin with I found that I could not leave it. Even now I don’t like to be away from the house for long.
Recently I made a huge effort to break free and take part in the Heritage Project. It was an act of kindness by a cousin of Neil Buchan. She persuaded me to volunteer. She said I would like the work, that I needed company now that you and your father and mother no longer came. I think Neil told her that I was on my own too much. First they asked me if I had any old photographs that were suitable for copying, and then she asked me to do one or two other things, and now I work part-time for them. To begin with it was difficult for me . . . to interact with people again, but I found that I liked taping the reminiscences of the older men and women. At first I just went to those I knew from when I was a young woman. They were very kind. I didn’t need to do or say very much, just switch the tape recorder on and off. Then the Heritage Centre gave me a camera and a tape recorder to work on my own at home. I only need to go into the centre one day a week. They pay me a small wage and an allowance for expenses and . . . and . . . I actually enjoy doing it.’
Her great-aunt’s conversation was in Saskia’s mind as she bathed and washed the grit and sand from her hair before going to bed that night. Alessandra’s account of her depression explained a lot about her behaviour. Saskia guessed that any type of mental illness would shake a person’s confidence, and would make it more difficult for them to be in company. And of course people were uncomfortable with anyone who was ‘different’ – which, within a community, could result in that person being isolated, even picked on.
It wasn’t so long since Saskia had been through those years at school when having a friend or being part of a group was almost essential to survive. She knew how easy it was for the outsider to be pushed further and further away. She thought again of the fish in the sea and how they react to any subtle change within their environment. How fish swim in shoals, and respond to urges. The salmon travelling hundreds and hundreds of miles to return to their own spawning ground, the eels’ pilgrimage to the Sargasso Sea. People seemed driven by basic instincts, flitting away from anything that might seem like danger. Moving as one to shun the perceived enemy; getting caught up in gang behaviour, like crowds who turn up to kick police vans and shout abuse at those arrested for murder when they don’t know for sure if the accused is guilty or not.
Yet it was easy for an individual to be sucked in. Saskia became uncomfortable as her thoughts progressed . . . the shame still with her at being one of those who had joined in a bullying episode at school some years ago: name calling, cold-shouldering the girl whose turn it was to be left out. The whole incident had lasted several weeks. Days of mounting tension, personal and communal. Saskia’s helpless feeling at being dragged in, horrified by her own actions at the time, but seemingly not able to stop herself.
She bent her head as she relived her mixed confusion of emotions – self-disgust, with a horrible moment of slithering pleasure on seeing the victim, Emma, break down weeping. Shock that some of the boys in her class had also contributed to the ugliness, adding their own vocabulary of abuse, hurling words like ‘cow’ and ‘slag’ at Emma.
Eventually the school had taken action, changing Emma’s classes, the guidance teacher spending a morning lecturing the whole year group. Afterwards Saskia found she was not able to look at her friends directly or talk about her own behaviour with anyone. Their different reactions confused her. Some dismissed the whole incident and moved on, sloughing it off with no remorse. Others argued that Emma had deserved it, had it coming, or that it was just part of life – you just had to learn to take it. A few, like Saskia herself, were embarrassed and did not take part in any of the discussions.
Saskia was sure Emma had been altered for the better by the experience. Although terribly hurt, Emma had evolved stronger, whereas Saskia had felt that she herself had been damaged and, for her, the outcome had been less positive. She’d found it difficult to live with herself for months afterwards. That she could have been so weak! Had so little confidence that she’d gone along with it all. And those excuses she had made for herself at the time that she had trouble at home just did not wash – everyone had trouble at home.
The Head had moved Emma into different subject classes and out of their class for English and Maths into the year ahead. It must have been tough going, making new friends under duress and taking key subjects at a faster pace than she could really cope with. But Saskia had bumped into Emma leaving school one day almost a year later, and Emma had said ‘Hi’. Emma had made this first move. Saskia had been too ashamed to say much in reply, couldn’t believe that Emma had not borne her a grudge. The same Saskia who had stood and watched Emma’s lunch box being opened up, the contents thrown away and replaced with earth. The same Saskia who had obeyed the order of the leader of the bullies; at the queen bee’s command she had brought Emma’s school bag to them so that they could do the deed. And Emma must have known that. She had left her school bag beside Saskia in the cloakroom when she went off to the loo.
After all that, Emma had said . . .
‘Hi! How are you?’
‘Erm . . . fine,’ Saskia had managed a smile. ‘How are you?’
‘Working like crazy,’ Emma had replied, ‘trying to keep up with the rest of them in this new class I’ve been put into. You know me. I never was very academic, but I’m actually enjoying it and I’m attempting things I’d never have believed I was capable of doing.’
Saskia had seen Emma later at the local cinema with a group of older pupils, talking and laughing. One of the boys had had his arm around her. Saskia had accepted that her own fleeting moment of jealousy was deserved. Emma had outgrown them all, become more mature, with no residue of bitterness, and Saskia realized that she’d lost a potential good friend.
Good grief! She should be studying psychology instead of accounts. Saskia brushed out her hair quickly. The water was much softer here than in London and her hair had changed texture, become more difficult to manage. Little tendrils coiled round her face. When she looked in the mirror she could see no resemblance to Alessandra, or indeed to any of the Granton side of her family, apart from the dark reddish sheen to her hair. It had begun to lighten in the sun, that hard unforgiving light of early spring that caught you unexpectedly, reflecting angles of the windows within the house. It showed up the hall and its varnished wallpaper with its scrolled, embossed design, a style so old that it was almost fashionable again. Picking out the worn parts and faded marks on the carpet. The shadows on those outside stairs recessed into the wall, the shaft of light catching the line of the harpoon, dark rust spreading on its tip. Her mother had always said Saskia had an eye for colour, even from when she was very young. All the hues of Cliff House and the bay were imprinted on her eyes. London so distant now, city tones so different.
Already her face was burnished across nose and forehead; her skin singing with the wind and the sea spray. Saskia lay down on her bed to listen to her tapes, then switched off her stereo and listened instead to the ebb tide rustling its skirts below her window.
Over the surface of the sea drift vast expanses of plankton. Within this ceaseless moving phosphorescent mass lie the vital micro-organisms of life, spreading a food web for all the world.
Saskia’s father phoned the next morning.
‘How are you, darling? Sorry neither of us got back to you the first night when you phoned. We were both out, and then I got a bit tied up with things yesterday so I didn’t get a chance to call you until now. Anyway,’ he went on without giving Saskia a chance to speak, ‘how is Alessandra?’
‘She’s fine,’ said Saskia.
‘Her manner can be a bit peculiar at times, but that’s just Alessandra’s way. So . . . everything is OK?’
‘Yes,’ said Saskia, ‘although we had a bit of excitement yesterday. There was a seal in trouble on the beach and someone came along to try to rescue it but it had disappeared.’
‘How was she with that?’ asked Saskia’s father. ‘She’s not used to strangers in her house. Apart from us, the only person who used to visit was a chap who grew up with her, a
Ned or Nick Buchanan or some name like that.’
‘Neil Buchan,’ said Saskia. ‘Yes, I’ve met him. Well, as I said, it was a bit of excitement at the time, but everything is back to normal now. Aunt Alessandra is doing some work for the local Heritage Centre so I’m going to help her with that.’
‘Then you’re getting on all right together?’Her father’s voice was warmer and Saskia felt happier.
‘Yes we are, and the place is wonderful.’
‘It is quite a setting,’ her father agreed.
‘But, Dad,’ Saskia said quickly, ‘I didn’t realize that I had been here when I was a little girl.’
‘We spent one or two summers at Cliff House when you were very young, but it was so long ago that you probably don’t remember much about it.’
‘Why didn’t you mention that to me before?’
‘Listen, pet, I’m on my way out to meet a prospective client at the moment. I just thought I’d give you a quick call.’
‘Hang on, Dad. Before you go, another thing – I thought you told me that Aunt Alessandra asked me to come up here?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘But she says . . .’ Saskia hesitated. What had her aunt said?
‘What?’ her father asked impatiently.
Saskia lowered her voice, suddenly conscious that she was talking on the phone in the hall and the doors to the other rooms were open. ‘Aunt Alessandra said that you told her that it was me who asked to visit her.’
Saskia’s father gave a short laugh. ‘She gets things mixed up a bit, you know. I’d better go now. Take care.’
Saskia frowned at the receiver before replacing it. Her father’s answers didn’t enlighten her at all. The subject was still niggling her later in the day when she was helping her aunt label the fisherfolk interview tapes, so much so that she suddenly decided that she had to find out.
‘Aunt Alessandra, I’d like to ask you something.’
Saskia's Journey Page 6
