MacKay On a Northern Shore

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80425-258-1
Verlag: Luath Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

This far north, they say the dead are with us...  Hogmanay, the far north of Scotland. Alone on the shoreline, lobster fisherman Rob Sinclair pours a dram into the freezing waves of the North Sea. It's a family tradition; an offering to the sea spirit, the Selkie.  That same night, a stranger arrives in Rob's village. A young woman, Mairi, charged by her dead mother to carry out three acts of vengeance. Bitter revenge for deeds done before Mairi was born.  Lonely and damaged, Rob and Mairi are drawn to one another. Rob is beguiled by Mairi, but she is elusive, frustrating, her personality shapeshifting. The only certainty is that Mairi is not who she says she is...

JANIS MACKAY is a Scottish author and storyteller residing in Portobello, Edinburgh. Born in the heart of the city, Janis's adventurous spirit led her to live in diverse places, including France, Palestine, Greece and the far north of Scotland. Although she trained as a journalist on Fleet Street, she soon realised her true passion lay in creative writing. After years of exploring the world, Janis returned to Scotland. She honed her storytelling skills as a drama teacher and voice coach, which enriched her writing journey. Her breakthrough came with her debut novel, Magnus Fin and the Ocean Quest, which won the Kelpies Prize in 2009. Janis's love for language and storytelling stems from her childhood. Inspired by nursery rhymes and the Commonwealth Games, she became a dedicated athlete, which she credits for keeping her fit and motivated. She is pursuing a PhD that explores the intersection of self-reflective creative writing and mythology while continuing to write and engage with young readers through her novels.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mackay, Janis

Leseproben

2

WIND-BLOWN; LAND of edges, ledges and big skies.

Where great curtains of rain sweep the North Sea, and winds roam untrammelled, whipping up white horses, crashing spume over jutting skerries then fleeing inland to batter the flat, treeless county.

Where the gull’s cry and the peewit’s piercing song echoes on.

Caithness.

Her sparse-strung necklace of villages hugs the cliffs: Berriedale, Dunbeath, Latheron, Latheron Wheel, Lybster, Thrumster, Wick, Staxigoe, Reiss, Keiss, Freswick.

And, end o’ ee road; Ronester.

Ronester’s one pub is called The World’s End. The one hotel is shut. A handful of farms sprawl into the interior. Near the village hall there’s a huddle of cottages, and a few council houses up by The World’s End. A church with a small but consistent congregation and a shop with the same. Near the church is the village hall. And down in the harbour three fishing boats rise and fall with the tide. South of the harbour lies a stony beach and by the shore two white-washed cottages, set well apart from each other, brave salt spray and high tides.

Ronester. Where the seals howling on a moonless night can tear your heart.

Rob lives in one of those cottages near the shore. His is the only boat that works the sea. The Stella. It’s his now, his dad in the windy churchyard. If it’s true the dead forget then he’s at rest, worry for his only son over. Except this far north, they say the dead are with us.

Rob was born here. Bred here. Knows the tides and shifting winds. The seabirds that nest on the Ronester cliff ledges.

Afternoon of the first of January and Rob, breaking custom, took his boat out.

Winds skimmed the flat lands like shearwaters to where jutting cliffs plunged to the sea. Fulmars, puffins and black-backed gulls returned year after year to these craggy ledges. From his fishing boat, out in the bay, Rob lay on the deck, blowing up smoke rings and picturing what might fly into his circle of smoke. An avocet. A lost albatross.

A selkie?

He reached for his binoculars and followed the flight of two fulmars. What a sense of freedom, the way they rode the thermals with stiff wing beats. It fascinated him the way they came inland every January, from far out at sea to check and prepare their nesting ledges. He watched the fulmar circle four times then try and land on a crag ledge at the far end of the beach. Each time the bird hovered, came close, hovered, then swung away. Probably the aerodynamics and positioning needed to be just right. ‘You can do it!’ Rob muttered as the bird slowed near the ledge for its fifth try. ‘Well done!’ Rob cried, seeing the seabird finally land.

His dad, that shy, quiet man, had liked fulmars. Little sayings, too. His parents had had that in common. If at first you don’t succeed… was one, especially when Rob came back from Aberdeen. Home to lend me a hand on the boat was how his dad tactfully put it, but for months Rob hardly got out of bed. Try and try again, son, was another. Ours is a clan that don’t give up!

‘Aye, but every clan’s got its black sheep,’ Rob had said, mumbling.

A son of mine deserves the best. Dad again. Ha! That was a joke of a saying. There’s a good woman out there, son, and don’t settle for anything less!

Rob uncorked his hip flask and drank to good women and persevering ancestors. While the boat bobbed and gulls circled overhead he pulled his notebook from his shirt pocket. With a stub of pencil he added a bit about fulmars hovering and judging their landings. They don’t give up, he wrote, under the page on fulmars.

They find mates, he wrote, but wondered if they all did? Were there single fulmars, who didn’t make the grade? Didn’t succeed in wooing? Were there females out there, who never laid an egg? Were there snubbed tube-nosed males who were not good enough?

His dad, despite all his little sayings, hadn’t succeeded in keeping a good woman either.

Like father, like son.

Rob had the sea to himself. That’s what it felt like. The two other fishing boats in the harbour never left it. Rob cut the outboard motor. The radio was still on, Karine Polwart calling a heron home. He let the boat coast to her song then turned the radio off when the news came on. He’d start hauling creels soon. After this smoke. And this quiet. A few wheeling gulls. This doing nothing except bird watching and gazing out to the horizon. Empty apart from the oil platform, that blight on the seascape.

‘Here’s tae possibilities,’ he said, raising his flask to a passing gull. He took a swig, smacking his lips at the rush firing up his insides. He thought of his dad, but wasn’t about to share this dram with the salty sea.

Rob extinguished the glowing end of his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger before stuffing the dout into his pocket. He pulled the lever and the motor puttered into life.

Surly, the villagers called him. Rob went away then came back. Saw things it doesn’t do for a man to see. Now wants to live quiet, the tongues wag. Born in an ill wind, that one. Such a shame, though, about dour Rob at the shore. Mad keen on seabirds. Daft if you ask me.

He never did.

He lay wrapped in the cradle of his boat with the picture-filled clouds above; a dancing girl, a seal, then an elfin face. Gulls swooped low in a tang of salt and brine. Rob trained his binoculars on the soft white underside of a banking fulmar, watching the stiff, straight wings ride the updraught.

Lying on the deck of the Stella, it occurred to him the mad escapade to first-foot the sea had been a dream. To the north curtains of rain fell. By the time the rain reached Ronester, Rob, with a bit of luck, would be inside, fire on, a beer to toast the year.

With a groan Rob sat up and eyed the land. Seaview cottage still felt like his dad’s place. He still expected to moor his boat, go into the kitchen and find him there, asking about the catch and the swell, back from the dead and ready to make him a brew.

He pulled the throttle into a low growl. The old boat still felt like his dad’s. It moved off and at the bow his frayed Saltire flapped. The wind tugged at Rob’s hair, whipping it back like a ragged flag from an annexed, broken country. His pet gull trailed, hoping for fish, but Rob’s catch had been poor. These few hours out on the Stella weren’t about fishing for bait. He wasn’t sure what this trip was about. Some kind of prayer for a man who does not pray.

Rob worked the tiller, bringing his boat through the swell and on a course, bow-nose to the harbour. Like a lot of fishermen, Rob had salt blue eyes and brine thick hair. The lines around his piercing eyes were crinkled with years slitted against spiralling cigarette smoke, stung by wind and salt spray. With the way binoculars made you screw up your face. Maybe, too, with loneliness. Handsome, some of the locals called him, or used to. Rough, with that scar down his cheek. Haunted, others said, shaking their heads. He could do with a good bath and a set of new clothes, they said of poor Rob Sinclair. And a wife.

Betsy, his neighbour from the cottage along the shore, and tired of their tongues, said we’re all different and thank God for that, and there’s someone for everyone. When she had gone, the gossips raised their eyebrows, muttering how Sinclair Senior had had zero social skills and that fairly rubbed off on the son, and the lack of a mother did him no favours either. As for Betsy Manson, had she any idea how many single men were rotting away in hovels, dust an inch thick on their mantlepieces. And she was hardly one to talk, a spinster.

With the boat on course, Rob looked to his own stony beach. It was seldom anyone save him set foot there. Seals sometimes. It flashed back to him, the way visions do; a cast seal skin draped over stones, a naked woman dancing in the sea and him standing at the water’s edge wanting her. Wanting her so bad it hurt. He battened down that longing and pulled his thoughts back to seabirds. You knew where you were with seabirds. Oyster catchers, seldom alone, the heron, seldom in company. Gulls, ducks, snipe, divers, waders. Avocet, the beauty, seldom seen.

With his binoculars he followed a fulmar banking over the roof of his cottage. By its skill in flight, he tried to work out how old it was. Hard to credit, but some were as old as he was. Near on forty.

But this was a young one, struggling to land on a cliff ledge. Rob followed the bird as it swooped back over the beach, where there was something else, some creature. The thing was moving, crawling over the stones. But then the creature rose up. Rob adjusted the lens, and now saw it was a woman, who seemed to be wearing a brown fur coat. Rob stared, transfixed. His pet gull cried as if snubbed. The woman stood, letting the coat drop behind her where it landed like a slumped bear. Or the cast coat of a selkie. Rob’s heart raced. Under the coat she was wearing a long, green dress. The woman pulled that off, then, naked, waded into the sea.

The boat was close to the harbour now and the woman up to her knees in water. Then it was her waist submerged, then just her head visible, her hair floating behind her. If Rob wasn’t mistaken, she was looking at him, or at least in the direction of his boat. What was she doing in the freezing water and it only the first of January? Maybe this was some kind of New Year dooking ritual? Or did she need help? It was too far to shout. Rob cut the engine then trained...