Malin Head (standard:romance, 1605 words)
Author: KShaw	Added: Jul 21 2005	Views/Reads: 3477/2422	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Sailors will go where sailors go...an almost true story. A love story with a difference.

Malin Head 

Ask a flyer what he would most like to do and he will probably tell you
that which common sense keeps him from doing; flying an airplane too 
close to the ground. A sailor will test his navigational aids to the 
limit, sailing into the presence of hidden dangers. The mountaineer 
will consider, one time, climbing without ropes. A good man might steal 
something once. 

“There are warnings of gales in Hebrides, Bailey, Faeroes, and South
East Iceland...” To a sailor's heart these names inspire adventure; a 
longing that cannot be explained to those who have never used words 
like: abaft, avast or athwartships. Know such words and you know the 
whereabouts of Dogger, Fisher, Malin Head, German Bight, and Cromarty. 
It's a language to itself. 

I've been a thief. My excuse is typical if inexcusable, being always
skint. If another kid had something I wanted it seemed natural to me to 
take it. George Bryant's dad had a good job, he would simply replace 
whatever it was that I managed to steal from his son. The Dobson's, who 
ran the local ‘farm shop' never missed a couple of apples, or a quid 
from the till when their backs were turned. Some might say 'once a 
thief always a thief', but this is not the case, not since I turned 
fifteen. 

When Jack Rafferty, the only policeman on the island, came to our door
to speak with my mum, he took me aside and told me about a place where 
they lock ten year old kids up. I decided my daydream of building a 
boat was not actually daydream but a necessary means of escape. Jack 
did scare me, I'll admit, but seeing my mum in tears after he left 
leaves a worse memory. 

Months later I found a five pound note. I bought a cut-out cardboard
circus, a penknife, and perfume for mum. I thought she'd believe me if 
I bought her something with the money. She made me take the perfume 
back, as well as the penknife, and the cardboard circus, and then told 
me to take the money to Jack Rafferty. Jack told me it was the right 
thing to do. Mum never mentioned it again. 

I never did build my boat but I did escape from the island a few years
later without spending any time in that place Jack told me about. But 
it was a close call. 

The first time I met Jimmy he was gasping for breath beneath an oxygen
tent over his hospital bed. I was fifteen. He was nearly dead. “Have 
you never taken a risk in your life, lad?” he spurted out, chest 
heaving weakly, as though it might rise just one more time. Jimmy owned 
his own ‘clinker-built' boat, a 1955 Viking, and hunted a meager living 
for bass, crab, and lobsters off the jagged headlands. He was as tough, 
I was told, as the granite that had tried to suck his boat into their 
grinding undertow. What I saw was an old man propped up in a bed 
wearing an old woollen vest, and wheezing. His hands seemingly made up 
of veins and loose skin, lying still at his side. 

Sid, Harry, and Cecil, all old men themselves, agreed that Jimmy's
remains be spread over the dark waters and not used as fertilizer on 
the land. That was the plan anyway. Each had pre-arranged his own death 
wish and those who remained were to see such wishes carried out. Which 
is why all three of them, and me, had arranged to steal Jimmy from the 
hospital. “T'weren't your fault, Jimmy,” Sid said, “those bloody social 
workers said you were living in a slum and had you fixed up here.They 
got you fixed up for a burial." Jimmy coughed vilely and spat the 
result into a kidney shaped tin bowl. 

Jimmy found the breath to squeak, “There was a time when we were free
men,” and again he coughed and choked up bile, which hung from his lip, 
“see me right, lads, that's all I ask.” 

The nurse, wondering what the whispering was, used Jimmy's coughing bout
as a reason to come and stand close. “I should be taking that vest off 
you, Jimmy,” she said. 

“Bugger off, I'll not be stripped by you tarts till I'm stripped for my
funeral!” And he wheezed coarsely and spat some more. The nurse, 
flushed of face, turned and went away, muttering under her breath. 


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