Glasgow Student Short Story Prize 2009

Judged by A.L. Kennedy
Edited by Elisabeth Ingram, Rebecca CF Bradburd and Jose Velazquez

Guga

In the photograph my grandfather is a gangly calf of a man, wide eyes with round patches. Guga they called him, not rattling off his paternal line like they should: mac Alasdair Iain Callum. Just “Guga”, scratched onto a lichen-chewed headstone that’s splattered with guano. He’s buried shoulders to the sea, the wind breathing up kelp from the island dunes and tall skies reeling past in grey quilts.

    He was eighteen the October Saturday they say he walked up the croft, the big white bird swaddled in his jacket. Said he’d found it dragging its wing along the beach where he’d been sent to rake for cockles in the sand.

    “Morus bassanus”,

    Solan Goose,

    Guga,

    Booby,

    Northern Gannet;

    Sùlaire, the list of names I’ve unearthed for it.

    When he’d come of age earlier that year, my Grandfather had rowed out with the men on a two week trip to the offshore skerry; his first and last time there. He was game as any first-time fowler to winkle his bare toes into the cliff’s black cracks and get scaling to the nests. Hands flexing eager for the hooking and snaring; fingers for the throttling and plucking. Final gutting and salting thickening his tongue before the homebound procession, gunwales pressed close to the cold August sea by stacked-high stinking barrels. Any man without an oar to work sitting stock-still beneath his bonnet, steadying the thwarts, the women restless on the jetty for the first returning bow to inch around the point.

    On the day my grandfather brought the bird home from the beach, his brothers joined a call for its slaughter. Other folk said it was a bogle, a shellycoat, fachan; perhaps a wirry-cow. One caileach diagnosed the spirit of a guga: an infant gannet, whose neck he had snapped at the skerry. A different old woman said it was a victim-bird’s unforgiving mother, the “broken” wing an easy trick to fall for. All agreed it would cause him bother, but with the gannet having been carried over the home threshold, his parents were wiser than to turn it out.

    I’ve learned the facts.

    How the long-lived gannet never flies over land, chooses just one mate for life. Parents raise a single chick before their ocean x-ray eyes reveal the fish are thronging south, calling to be dive-bomb plundered all the way to Africa and back.

    It’s said that when this girl-gannet stretched, its ink-dipped wings scythed wider than its lanky finder stood tall. Its torso snowy as a swan, save the balaclava of its cold-custard cowl, its chill mackerel eyes. Grandfather fashioned a driftwood crate, at least that’s how the story goes, stole herring for the bird. Stared at burrowing moles of the oily fish inching down its gullet, rippling the white velvet of its neck.

    ‘Guga,’ folk whispered to my grandfather’s back. ‘Guga guga guga,’ until the name stuck to him, like salt splinters from a broken wave. The back of his hands were lined they say, his arms his face, from where the gannet swiped, the lilac dirk of its beak.

    With the war, “Guga” signed up to be a despatch-rider for the local navy bases. Dead before he was twenty, they found my grandfather with a crooked neck on the stretch where the track bends with the curve of the bay; the motorcycle engine still running, hoodie-crows rasping and the seals watching shiny-headed from the shallows. After the funeral, my great-grandmother worried open the gannet’s cage watching the bird fly west until it faded on the wide horizon.

    It wasn’t long before a fair-haired woman dressed as a WREN tapped at the door. With her pale skin and her accent she announced they had planned to marry, that she carried his child.

    Today we are at the hospital, my unsuspecting Dad and I, amongst the smell of polish and rubber shoes. We are waiting for news on my mother: the Guga’s daughter. Curling the corner of a magazine I admit hope to myself that her pale-purple lips will surrender something before she dies. Dressed by this landlocked city that I chose, I perch with Dad on the blue plastic chairs, trying not to preen at my straw-coloured hair.

    There is a flash of white at the window but when I look up it’s just a ratty gull. We are expecting a cousin of sorts to arrive from the Island, the only one who mentions the sùlaire. I think about the times when I can’t avoid going “home”. She takes me down the machair when it’s all eyebright and plump orchids, humming with breeze-defying bees, the blown air all buttery clover and warm sand.

    ‘Have you seen the sùlaire this year Suzy?’ she’ll ask.

    ‘I’ve not been near the coast,’ my usual lie, reply. Thinking she is staring at my throat as I gulp a piece of scone. Me willing it to slip down without a bulge, scanning the sea. Beneath the waves I spot a school of silver herring. They are shoaling away from a lazy cod, its chin barbel curled like a piglet’s tail.

    ‘How about a man? Anyone suitable on the horizon? Mr Right?’

    Over the Atlantic an invisible cirrus hatch has opened, letting sun through in sepia searchlight pillars. The wind must be gusting where the clouds have parted, the sea crumpling in sharp white-horses crests. I see gannets then. Hundreds of gannets raining on the ocean, same skew as the sunlight slants, peppered puffs of spray where they punch the swell like flak.

    The cousin is saying something else, touching my shoulder, but my eyes are skinned sharp now with the sun metal sea. I feel myself diving. Diving the way I like with my hands at my side, my hair pinned back, to split a cold loch’s brackish skin. The way I can keep my eyes open, the silver flash of a fish and my ears hissing again.

    The foamy ribbon rush of every thrilling plunge.