Chapter 3 #2
Cal cringed for Innes, so moved by a doomed romance that he cried in front of these suited stoics.
It would be a long time before the men forgot that.
“I saw Innes on the boat. But I bet you already know that.” He was smirking as he cut a glance at his father.
“I don’t know what came over me, but I hugged him. ”
John tapped the brakes. Cal shot forwards in his seat. “You did what?”
“You should have seen his face.”
“I could do without becoming known as the man who has a hugger for a son.” He clamped his hand on Cal’s knee. “Innes has been low recently. Don’t you make a mockery of him.”
“I wasn’t mocking him.”
John made a fist and tapped Cal’s thigh to signal that he would be obeyed.
Cal sighed. He leant against the window and watched the barren hillsides. It was impossible to look at the unforgiving beauty and not feel the hand of God, albeit a God that cared nothing for your comfort, a God who expected you to struggle if you were to endure.
The denuded hills were eruptions of Lewisian gneiss marbled with schists of pink mica and white anorthosite.
The anorthosite was a stone so rare his father claimed it could only be found here and on the moon.
There was a quarry nearby that had an abundance of it.
John had once told Cal that the Moon and the Earth were joined as lovers, and that when they parted, this quarry is where the Moon had kissed the Earth goodbye.
There was a sprinkling of garnets on the hilltops and these were the tears of the Moon, fallen back to Earth.
As a boy, Cal had pored over images of the Moon and wondered about the loneliness of that.
For his twelfth birthday, his father had saved up and bought him a high-resolution atlas of the moon.
All the lunar seas and mountains, all the promontoria and rimae were laid out and labelled by NASA.
Cal had pored over it obsessively, until one night he finally found the island, Insula Ventorum.
Despite his father’s protests he knew a little Latin, and after he confirmed it in the appendix, he raced downstairs and declared that this was it, they had fallen from the moon.
Harris was in fact lunar, and perhaps that was why he felt so lonely.
This here was the proof, Insula Ventorum. The Island of Winds.
“What are you thinking about?” His father had been watching him.
Cal wished he would put his eyes back on the road.
The blind summits were the most treacherous.
Beady-Màiri’s youngest boy had died nearby.
He had driven drunk the night of his school dance.
The girl he was with had survived. She had lost her left leg, but she had found God.
“Street corners.”
“Like women?” John asked.
“No, Dad! Like corners.” He made a right angle with his hands. “I like the feeling when you don’t know what lies around the bend.” He could feel the come-down start to bottom out. The drink did nothing to numb it.
When he had first arrived on the mainland, he hadn’t been prepared for how different the roads there would make him feel.
These towns and cities with their taken-for-granted high streets and tree-lined avenues, their four-lane traffic and iron pedestrian bridges.
There was something about the joy – and danger – of an Edinburgh street corner that spun him around and gave him a giddy, stupid pleasure to know there was more than one way to get from where you were to where you wanted to be.
All those vennels and wynds had felt like a video game set in a sprawling unmapped dungeon.
He had loved how he could go to the newsagent on a Sunday morning, how he could pass a hundred different people and none of them knew his face.
He had panicked once, aged twenty-two, the first time he lost a friend in a crowd of shoppers.
“I was happy when you told me you were coming home. Happy, like. But surprised.”
Cal thought about the tourists defeated by the wind and how his father always knew before they did. “Were you though? Surprised, I mean.”
John smiled out over the hillsides. The brightness of it was such a rare thing that Cal stopped to watch it. “Your granny said it would be mean-spirited to say, ‘I told you so.’ So, let’s pretend I was surprised, eh?”
“Dad, you told me to come home.”
“No. I told you your granny was suffering and you made the decision to come home.”
“But it was there. It was implied.”
“She’s not my responsibility. It’s not fair of you to put the burden on me.”
“Well, I still don’t see why she couldn’t go live with Mam.”
“We’ve been over this. And you know how your granny is, so it’s better if she doesn’t know that we’ve been talking about her health. If she thinks you feel sorry for her, she’ll pretend she’s fine. If she thinks you’ve come back for her, she’ll feel guilty, which will only make her feel worse.”
“What? So, I just ignore a pair of purple fucking feet?”
John tapped Cal’s leg in warning. He responded in Gaelic. “We do these acts of charity because they are right, not because we hoped to be thanked for them in this life. And it’s better that you be useful here at home, rather than idling away on the mainland.”
“I was hardly idle.” Cal kept his gaze on the mussel-blue sea. He could see its anger growing. The weather was worsening. They would cancel all the boats tomorrow. “None of the graduates could find work. It wasn’t just me.”
Here, at the edge of Scotland, he had been happy as a child.
The shore and the hillsides were his to roam.
And even if he could not believe every word of the scripture, he could feel how small and insignificant he was, and understand how all this must have been created by a God much larger than him.
It was only as a teenager that he started to feel like he was the bigger thing and that it was the world around him that had grown too small.
Most young men went to the sea, worked the land, or were wrapped up in the cloth – either the ministry, or the tweed – they often chose more than one, wages poor as they were.
All John did was complain about how there was no stability in weaving, and how the mill paid low wages if they gave out any work at all, but Cal showed no aptitude in anything else.
Despite John’s reservations, he was proud when the teachers said his son was bright enough to go away to study, gifted enough to attend any art school he liked.
Cal had come off the island and toured these art schools.
The faculty in Edinburgh had trotted out the work of graduating students, diaphanous dresses knitted from a slippery polypropylene.
The dresses were heat-set in ovens till portions of them melted, solidified, and became sculptural.
From the front they clung obscenely to the body like pretty lace pieces caught in a summer smirr, but then as the model spun, the dress tented behind her and they became jagged and violent.
Cal had been mute for a long while afterwards, touching the intricate knit, amazed that something as silky as a spider’s filament could be as hard and spiky as a sea urchin.
In Dundee, a black boy with peroxide hair had touted the dimensionality of their flocking and printing facilities.
He guided the school-leavers through the workshops with the frigid awkwardness of a man who was still a child himself but seemed scared of being exposed as one.
And at the open day in Glasgow, a lecturer who was wearing ski goggles as a hair band had looked down her nose at him as she explained the importance of the intersection of embroidery and fine art.
Against the dusty Mackintosh backdrop, she had declared that the world needed to reclaim traditional female handwork and turn it into something subversive and stridently unapologetic.
Cal, barely seventeen, had blushed when she asked him to run his hand across stitchwork vulvas to see how the artist had cleverly combined monofilament with a Peruvian alpaca to give the hole piece a whole, lifelike vitality.
His interest in art schools had provoked a conflict in John.
He was so proud to have made a son like this, and he thought of Cal as a thing that he had crafted.
They came from a long line of crofters who had been tied to the land they managed and his boy would be the first Macleod to finish school, the first to go on to university.
Here was a boy who was bright enough – no, not bright, because bright could be taught, bright was nothing but discipline with a book – John had a boy who was talented, blessed, and best of all, gifted with the cloth, which made John feel like his own life had not been such a waste.
But Dundee, Glasgow, and Edinburgh had all met with his father’s resistance.
John had a Presbyterian respect for education but there was too much of the unknown about university life, and there was something about art schools that sent him into a moral panic.
The notion of self-expression was antithetical to religious obedience and the art schools seemed too liberal, the women too unfettered and bent on their own pleasure.