Chapter 3
a trì / three
Cal stood in the gloaming beside a pair of shivering Australians.
He listened to the backpackers offer their first impressions of the moonscape.
They kept saying ‘wow’ but he couldn’t tell if it was in amazement or disappointment.
To settle his stomach, he ate a bruised banana and as he chewed, he pissed into the gulley beside the concrete shelter.
The Australians were barelegged and unprepared for the wind.
It seemed like they wanted to approach him for directions, but as they watched him sway, they thought better of it.
The young man was tawny-haired, roped with hillwalker’s muscles.
Cal was simultaneously chewing, staring, and pissing when he heard his father call his name.
John was resting against the driver’s door.
As Cal drew closer, he saw the change in his father’s expression.
John lowered his brow and drew a deep breath before his expression returned to its usual stillness.
It was a handsome face. Cal thought it was wasted on his father, with so few people here to appreciate it.
John had a heavy brow with dark, untended eyebrows, which only focused the intensity of his pale blue eyes.
At forty-six, his hair and sideburns were still a rich chestnut brown, the salting of grey only serving to make them seem somehow glossier.
It was the type of face that could feature in the men’s section of the Littlewoods catalogue.
The type of gentleman that young gay men searched out in poky basement bars.
“There he is,” said John. “The dream of his ancestors.”
“Such pressure,” said Cal. “Well, if it isn’t old John Macleod.”
John took Cal in his arms and clapped him twice on the back as though he was colicky.
Then he held him at arm’s length, his hands heavy on his shoulders.
Although John could speak perfect English he preferred not to.
“Tha thu air an t-sìde mhath a thoirt leat,” he said. You’ve brought the fine weather.
Everything was a heavy blue. The air was wet to the touch. Cal chuckled. “It’s good to see you too, Dad.”
John hummed as if he didn’t believe him. “I’ve been waiting here all day. And you’ve been at the drink.”
“Only the one.”
“In each hand? You can’t be under my roof and carrying on like this.”
Cal wanted to say he wasn’t under his father’s roof, not yet, and that this was the point. He felt the last of the ecstasy drip away. All that was left was a dull ebb, a dipping, dropping feeling like when the ferry fell in the water.
There was a tear on the sleeve of his MA-1 bomber. He had sealed it with electrician’s tape but the tape had come loose in the rain. It flapped noisily in the wind.
John watched a few feathers escape and take to the air.
He couldn’t pray for patience, the lateness, the drink, the disregard for how he presented himself; he wondered if Cal wanted to provoke him.
He sucked his teeth at the worn jeans that clung and showed every obscene curve, the green jacket and underneath that, the nylon shirt covered in a noisy medallion print. “Whose clothes are these?”
“Do you like them? I bought them at a charity shop.”
“Charity?”
“Everybody does it.” Then, in the hopes of finding a sympathetic nerve, he added, “It’s cheaper that way.”
“You’re wearing another man’s clothes? No wonder you look like a ceàrd.” John pulled the ugly green cap from Cal’s head. He recoiled as Cal’s hair whipped about his face like hellish flames.
Cal ran his hand through his long hair. It was crudely hacked and fell almost to his shoulders.
His natural colour had been so dark that the home bleaching kit had not been able to lift it all.
Instead of platinum blonde, the best it could manage was an angry ginger colour, and as it grew longer, the embers were now framed by an inch of dark brown root.
“You don’t like it?” he asked in English, tucking the flames back inside the hat.
His father’s jaw pulsed like he was biting back some hard words, things that he would say later, but had been warned not to let slip too soon. Cal could imagine his grandmother swooping, circling John like a gull on a fishing boat.
“Dad, I seem to remember a wedding photo where you looked like a hippy.”
“It was the style.”
“And then there were the Kevin Keegan years. A mullet and a perm.”
“I never permed it. I was blessed with natural curls.”
John studied his son. It wasn’t just the long, flame-coloured hair, or the ripped denim, or even the ridiculousness of a child who had never even been in the Boys Brigade wearing a military jacket.
It was the confused signal they were sending, the strange tension between the masculine and the feminine.
“You look like a cross-dresser that’s thrown on a coat because he’s run out of milk. ”
Cal tutted. “I do not.”
“Well, I don’t think you look your best. And now that you’re home, it might be the thing to tone it down a little.”
“Don’t suppose you listen to much grunge, do you?”
They turned in time to see the Australians dip their heads into the wind and start the long climb up a rocky hill. It was too late in the day for an ascent. They underestimated the Atlantic wind that could knock the Western Isles even in the fair season – but then the outsiders always did.
When he was a child, Cal and his father would lay ten pence bets against the various hillwalkers they encountered.
John would peer at them and decide who would make the climb and who would not.
He saw gambling as a sin, but granted himself this one absolution.
It taught his son how to read character, taught him the virtues of determination and fortitude.
“That woman won’t make it,” he would say. “And see him she’s with? She’s only doing this to please him. And she is only pleasing him to get something from him.”
The Macleod men would place their bets, lining up coins along the dashboard.
In the afternoon they would go to the inn and sit in the snug.
His father was never a drinker. He drank cold black tea that Flash decanted into a pint glass so that it looked like a headless Guinness.
The gloomy walkers would be sitting there in a tense sulk, and John would smile at them over the top of his tea as Cal would slide coins along the bar towards his father.
Cal wondered how he could know so much about people when he knew so few of them.
John nodded towards the Australians. “Am bi sinn a’ cur geall?”
“No chance.”
“Right enough. You’re still down a hundred and forty-three pounds and twenty pence.”
“You’ve a memory like a peat bog.”
“I’ve not charged you interest, have I?”
“Good. Because I’m on the bones of my arse as it is.
” He swung his bags into the back seat. His father’s dogs, Bess and Tick, sniffed his laundry while he scratched them behind the ears.
They were constantly damp and their copper eyes were always on his father, awaiting his command, knowing Cal to have no place of real importance in the pack.
Their house lay at the end of a long serpentine road that had been gouged out of the rocky land.
The locals called it the ‘ribbon road’ because it unspooled like grey grosgrain and collected the scattered whitehouses like a string through too few pearls.
From the spinal junction this smaller road skirted hills and lochans and wound its way doggedly to the sea where it terminated at the Macleod croft.
It was so narrow that cars could pass in only one direction, and most locals chugged along it, pulling over into passing places in a pantomime of civility.
There was a time when everything the community needed had come by sea.
Portions of this road had begun as a drover’s path and it retained that feeling now.
It was best taken slowly, though John never did.
To be his passenger was thrilling and occasionally terrifying, but Cal had grown so used to his father’s driving that he found every other journey boring in comparison.
At certain points the road was truly remarkable for its tenacity – or sheer stupidity.
It could drop away on either side for ten, twenty, thirty feet, and any lapse in concentration could wreck the car and kill everyone inside.
There was a copy of Swann’s Way on the dashboard and as his father took a bend, it flew onto Cal’s lap. “We started a men’s group,” said John. “We spend half an hour talking about books after the prayer meeting.”
Cal turned the book in his hands. He considered telling his father that Proust was a homosexual. “I couldn’t finish this one. Didn’t you find it a wee bit . . . pretentious?”
His father gave a murmur of agreement. “It was Sorley’s pick.
But we’ve read some Hogg, some James, and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which offended everybody.
It’s set on Skye and there’s hardly a Scotsman in it.
It’s a particularly English talent, that.
The ability to visit foreign places and yet always think of yourself as the most interesting thing there.
We’ve read thirteen books this year. And we would’ve read more if Donnie wasn’t so slow.
” He looked to Cal. “You can join us. If you like?”
To join the book club, Cal would have to go to the prayer meetings. He looked at the dashboard clock. He silently applauded his father.
“You could choose the next book.”
“Then how about Jackie Collins?”
His father laughed woodenly. “You know, Innes cried in front of the elders.”
“He did?”
“We were re-reading Wuthering Heights and he was moved by the ending. Flash tried to baptise him with the nickname ‘Cathy’. I had to take him aside and tell him to cut it out.”