Chapter 2
a dhà / two
He had lain in bed for an hour past the point of waking and no matter how he chided himself, he couldn’t summon the heart to rise.
John Macleod liked to be upright and working as God sent dawn over the rocks, but long gone were the days when he leapt out of bed with a list of things to be done and his body raring to go.
Now when he woke, he felt he had spent the night in a half-sleep, the body exhausted, the mind restless, worrying, singing the same refrain to itself, over and over.
The leeward wall was subsiding with the eroding coastline.
His wife had once joked that the cracks were just the house bursting with all their love, and he laughed sadly to think of it now.
There was a time when he would have mixed fresh plaster and patched the faults, but even the new plaster had begun to crumble and on windy nights he awoke with a fine layer of grit dusting his quilt.
He considered the crack that was creeping up the wall.
When he had first noticed it some years ago, he had marked its end with a pencil line.
Then, as the crack grew, he marked it again in the same way that Ella would chart Cal’s growth on the door frame.
This crack had long since travelled into the corner and onto the ceiling.
It hung above him now, his hatch marks like the legs on some monstrous centipede.
Today would be the day his son would come home and he used that thought to get himself up.
He searched his trouser pockets and finding his cigarettes, he lit one.
He hated smoking in the bedroom, but he could hear Ella clomping about downstairs, the old pipes humming as she filled the kettle and prepared the table for breakfast. He hated how she would already be blabbering the moment his foot touched the linoleum.
He listened to the wind and tried to guess the weather before he opened the curtains.
Stubbing the dout, he dressed himself in yesterday’s clothes.
As he put on his shirt, he was surprised to find the button he had lost the previous afternoon already reattached.
He realised Ella must have noticed it missing as they sat down to dinner and mended it while he was stewing in the bath.
Instead of feeling grateful, he was irritated that she watched him so closely.
The first lights came on across the headland.
The whitehouses were scattered across the rocky hillsides and they began to flicker to life like beacons.
From here John could take account of who was awake, and as he switched on his own lamp, he knew they would take account of him.
He couldn’t see all the houses for the curve of the land, but he noted that Alistair Rae was up next, then a few miles further out he could see the soft pink glow of Beady-Màiri’s upstairs loo.
All was well. A few moments later, Donnie Macdonald’s croft sparked to life.
It was the last croft to contain any children at all and for that it glowed brightest against the black.
His finest ram had come down with the fluke and died in the night.
The day before, the ram had been ill-tempered in the morning but when he returned to the fank in the afternoon it had become strangely placid for such a territorial little bully.
When it started foaming at the mouth John had ministered to it where it lay.
He sat on a rock and sang to it like it was a poorly child.
When he came across it this morning it was slumped on the hillside and in the dim blue dawn he could tell the seagulls had taken its eyes.
There was an oil cloth in the Land Rover and he spread it over the carcass and weighed it down with stones.
When the rain stopped, he would bury it if he could find a pocket of earth not blunted by rock.
He watched as the Macdonald boat headed out to the lobster beds.
He took the stack of notecards from his breast pocket and undid the elastic band.
He sorted through the timetable of tides and his various prayer cards until he found the little chitty where he noted the initials of his neighbours, every single one of the twenty-six believers.
He marked it up from memory and next to their initials he placed a mark for each time they had missed a Sunday service.
Doll Macdonald had already missed five Sabbaths this year.
The church was so plain, the heads were so few, that as John stood at the front and sang to the congregation, he could see every soul that was there and note any soul that was not.
He had heard reports that young Macdonald was rotting away on the drink and as the church deacon he resolved to talk to the minister about him.
He set the chitty aside. Then, even though he knew it by heart, he checked the ferry schedule for the fourth time that morning.
The drive from the croft to the bus stop took exactly twenty-two minutes – John timed it perfectly so as not to lose the best of the working day.
He parked at the end of the ribbon road where it abutted the main spinal road that travelled the length of the islands.
The concrete bus shelter was an ugly, modernist design.
It attracted camper vans of architecture students who made the long pilgrimage to take photographs of its strange brutalism.
It was a cruciform of interlocking walls, designed to offer protection from the biting wind which could feel like it was howling in all four directions at once, without a tree or bush to buffer it.
A small part of him was dreading the return of the prodigal.
Falabay had always been the centre of his universe.
He had never wished to be elsewhere, or felt he was missing out on something better, something busier.
But ever since his boy had gone away to college, John felt Cal looked at Falabay as though it was the far edge of a flat earth.
Although he never said it out loud, John felt that Cal thought their lives were lacking, as if the things that had sustained him as a boy bored him now. Cal’s gaze tainted the things John had always loved and made him feel like he should apologise for the life he had built.
He could remember a summer that Cal had been pally with an English boy from the Nicolson Institute.
The boy was the son of some newly-arriveds, big-time university professors who had relocated to the islands to focus on their own work.
The family must have had serious inherited wealth because they built an arrogant, modernist house overlooking the finest beach on the west coast. John had dropped Cal off one afternoon and later that evening when Cal had returned home again, he wandered from room to room like a nosey social worker and stopped intermittently before a familiar piece of furniture, a painting, an old scuffed skirting board and just stood there and stared as if seeing it with brand-new eyes.
The bus appeared in the distance. From the way it groaned it seemed that its next hill could be its last. He smiled at the thought of seeing his boy again, but when the bus didn’t stop, he watched it trundle by with a bemused look upon his face.
When he turned back around, Innes MacInnes was pulling in.
His trailer was filled with young Texel ewes.
John rolled down his window as Innes climbed down from the van and came to lean against the Defender.
Neither man said hello. There was never any hurry to speak.
Innes wore a brand-new Shetland jumper knitted in the bluish-greyish hue of dried thyme.
The colour suited him well. John noted it without remark.
“I swear I saw you smiling just now,” said Innes in Gaelic.
“It’s a sin to bear false witness.”
Innes, who was often gently grinning, laughed. Each man looked at the scabbed hillside, the black tar road, the darkening sky. It filled some easy time and it was pleasant enough to have quiet company to do it with.
Innes drew a card from his pocket. It was an official-looking postcard, stamped with a bold EA8AFB and marked with a date and time. “Gran Canaria,” he said proudly.
“So far?” said John. “Well done.”
Innes had a bedroom filled with radios. Ever since he was a boy he had been bouncing out signals in the dark, hoping to connect with people, thrilled when they acknowledged he had reached them.
Every few months he produced one of these QSL cards from some far-flung place: Gibraltar, Reykjavik, Troon.
“Aidh—I’ve never reached as far as the Canaries before. Practically Africa.”
John had never seen the point. What was this need Innes had for someone in Spain to acknowledge he existed?
Innes noted his lack of enthusiasm. He wiped the rain from the card and put it back in his pocket. They spent a time looking at the hillside again.
“I saw the son and heir on the boat.”
John frowned at his friend. If Innes had seen Cal, then why wasn’t he with him?
“Oh, I offered him a lift, but he said he had things to . . . attend to.”
John didn’t laugh. He hadn’t seen his son since the New Year.
Since he’d left for college, Cal had rarely come home.
And when he was home, should bad weather settle on the islands, he called the ferry office and asked if they planned to cancel all the boats.
If the boats were to be cancelled, he always brought forward his departure – he never seemed to want to wait until the storm had passed.
John nodded at the sheep in the trailer, curious white faces peering from behind the bars.
He didn’t want to tell Innes about the dead ram, that would be to admit that Innes was better with his sheep than he was with his.
“I’d like to know where you get all that money? ” he said, nodding at the young ewes.
“I set a little aside here and there. If I left it to our Sorley then we’d all be living under an upturned boat.”
The mere mention of his brother sent Innes scowling up the road.