Chapter 3 #3
Ella had sat Cal down and advised him that half a victory was still a victory, and so in the end he chose a modest technical school.
It was the campus that was farthest from home but closest to his father’s understanding of the world.
The textile school was forty miles south of Edinburgh, tucked away in the sleepy valleys of the Scottish Borders.
The college sat on a riverbank in a disused mill building.
The wide wooden floors groaned under the weight of printing facilities and industrial knitting machines.
In the light-flooded attic was the largest collection of handlooms Cal had ever seen.
The school had no desire to re-examine or reinvent.
It came to be simply because there had been a practical need for generations of workers to learn how to make textiles in the correct historical manner.
On the open day, Cal found it full of plain-faced women – there were almost no men except for some colour chemists and elderly technical staff.
The female students lacked the vanity of the city girls.
They had the short-sighted, quiet manner that suited the obsessive, repetitive stitchwork.
Even a maw from the islands could see they dressed for no one but themselves. He liked that about them.
“So you’ve no work and no woman to show for it?” John could be blunt like this, not born from a meanness of spirit, but from a desire to speak the economical truth.
Cal hesitated. John kept cutting his eyes towards him, awaiting his response.
Cal wondered if now was the time to be honest with his father.
Part of him wanted to tell his father he was gay, if only to hurt him for demanding his return.
Certainly, as deacon of their church, John could not be seen to be harbouring such sin at home.
If he told his father the truth, that he had no natural attraction to women, he wondered if John would send him away for good and if this would be the last time they ever saw one another.
But John took Cal’s hesitancy the wrong way and he answered for him. “So, all that money, four years, no woman, and no job.”
“I was top of my year, Dad. I got a First Class with Honours. It’s not my fault the country’s in the bin.”
He wanted to tell his father about the sorry state of the Scottish textile industry, how Pringle was all but Chinese-owned, how Barrie Knitwear had been steadily shedding jobs, how Innerleithen was a mill town with no mills.
But he saw the slump of his father’s shoulders, the side of John’s index finger thickened from decades of shunting the heavy bobbin, and so he sighed and turned back to the sea.
There was a small part of him that welcomed the news about his grandmother’s poor health.
To return under the guise of doing the selfless thing was a way to come home without a feeling of total failure.
He was bone-tired of having no bed of his own, of stealing other people’s food, of the job centres with their lines and lines of able-bodied men.
“And were there many women on the mainland? Be honest.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Millions.”
John tutted. “That’s not what I mean and you know it.
” He reverted to Gaelic. “You must have been tempted by sin. You might even have sinned. You’ve been busy, no doubt, with life.
” He glanced at Cal to make sure he understood.
“The busier we are, the further we get from God. But even if we sin, we can always come back to him. You know this. Run back to Christ and ask him to help you.”
Cal imagined running towards Christ, Christ placing his hand on his chest, shunting him, frowning, and asking him who the fuck he was.
He never once heard his classmates mention Jesus and so he had been discreet about his own upbringing.
The mainlanders saw the Free Presbyterians as the fire and brimstone set, as deeply old-fashioned, terminally uncool, a little frightening.
He had been surrounded by a faint sort of moral relativism that would have appalled his father.
Students who were for the most part ‘good people’ rejoiced in all manner of wickedness.
They boasted about every sin his father had warned him about, their sinning subject to constant innovation.
They frequently betrayed one another, fucked one another’s boyfriends, broke agreements, walked out on months of back rent, stole, lied, gossiped, behaved with idle cruelty and were otherwise a disappointment to God.
They should have appalled him – they occasionally terrified him – but in the end he found he felt the most like himself when he was amongst them.
He closed his eyes against the undulating road as John lifted his voice in prayer.
“O God, we are aware that we let you down in so many ways and that we often fall short. We are heavy with sin. But I thank you for all that you have done to bring my boy home. Amen.”
They drove past a cluster of homes where the owners had grown old and died: the MacAulays, gone; the Widow MacIver, gone; and Licky McAllister, going, soon.
There came a scattering of inhabited houses, the croft where Innes and Sorley lived, then a newer, pebbledashed bungalow that had been built by holidaymakers who no longer holidayed here.
There were a few more crofts that were abandoned and had fallen into disrepair, then a quarter mile further along came the Macdonald croft, which was the largest of all.
“Young Isla will be glad to see you.”
“Yeah?” he changed the subject. “You seen the landlords recently?”
John huffed. Any mention of the aristocratic family who owned their tenancy put him in a bad mood.
“The youngsters brought an entourage up from London. I heard rumours of a lispy chef, two failed popstars, and one of the Queen’s cousins.
I saw them, bored out of their minds, decked head to toe in brand-new tweeds, standing on the riverbanks while some local boy did all the fishing for them. ”
John had once rescued one of the heirs when her sports car bottomed out on the road. Cal overheard her referring to Harris as ‘our island’ in a manner that contained no exaggeration.
He peered out over the hills. The landlord’s estate owned as far as he could see.
They managed their interest through the Crofting Commission and a factor’s office in Stornoway, and all the crofters – his own family and most of their neighbours – paid their rents with little hope of ever owning their homes outright.
A wide sea loch appeared beneath them. The road descended sharply and at the bottom lay the Presbyterian church, made of fieldstone and lime.
The simple structure had a squat tower built with the intention of never housing a bell.
The absence was supposed to be a warning against all unnecessary adornment, but it scorned the weaker religions, it mocked the mindless sheep of other churches that needed a tinkling to come to the trough.
“I can’t believe the ministry hasn’t sold that church.” The cash-strapped ministry had already sold the manse and many of the outlying mission houses.
“I’m sure it’s been discussed,” said John. “I daresay the minister’s afraid of the old women. The cailleachan can be terrifying. He’ll be waiting for a few more to die off.”
Cal slunk down in his seat.
John frowned at him. “What on earth are you doing?”
“I don’t want people to see me. I’m not ready to be social.”
“And yet you’re well prepared to embarrass the fuck out of me!” John grabbed hold of his collar and yanked him up. “You’ll have me looking like I talk to myself. Up! Get up! You feckless idiot.”
Cal wormed his way upright again.
They continued along the water’s edge, passing the wrecked van that sat abandoned on the shore.
Cal turned in his seat to look at it. The little Bedford had once belonged to Innes.
After he had junked it onto the rocks, it had become a den of sorts, a place for children to play in the bad weather.
The back doors had been salvaged to make a chicken coop and all the seats had been stripped out and were sitting on Licky McAllister’s porch, doubling as a patio set.
The remaining frame lay rusting in the rain and there was a comfort in seeing it still standing.
It made Cal think about Doll Macdonald and all the afternoons they had spent together.
Ella was waiting in the middle of the road. The sheep gathered around her and it appeared as though she were floating towards them on a sea of damp, foul-smelling clouds. John nudged amongst them and beached the Land Rover on the rocks.
Cal got down and bounded towards his grandmother. He threw his arms around her. He held her for a few seconds before she made a tutting noise and twisted free of his embrace.
Ella placed a hand on either side of his head. The smoke from her cigarette made him blink back tears. “Let me look at you,” she said.
“So, what’s new, Ella?”
She rattled with her scratching laugh.
Eleanor Morrison was exactly as he had left her.
She was short and plump. Her eyes were bright and quick and full of mischief, and her mouth was lined with fine wrinkles from disapproval and smoking and laughing – everything in abundance.
In rare defiance of the scripture, her grey hair was cropped close to her head, shorn with clippers in a no-nonsense, manly cut.
She framed her round face with a too-short fringe.
Before he went to college, Cal had thought the fringe made her look like the village idiot, but now that he’d seen something of the world, he saw how unwittingly chic it was.
If only she would wear a slash of red lipstick, she could have been the coolest thing for a hundred miles.
None of these thoughts occurred to Ella.
She simply needed a way to end her hair and start her face.
Her face was free of creams or make-up but on each lobe hung a brassy gypsy hoop as if to clarify that she was indeed a woman. Cal had never known her to take them out – not even in the bath – and the earrings had a yellowed, dirty look to them, and smelt faintly of chip pan grease.
She had entered the period of her life where she was determined to wear whatever clothes the family owned until they frayed and fell apart.
She wore Cal’s old jumpers, or things that were horribly out of fashion, layering pattern over pattern, the clothes always clean but the care of presentation long gone.
Over the years, as she had grown shorter and stouter, she added godets and gussets to her clothes, patching them with fabric from his mother’s blouses.
A new patch on an old dress could stir memories that made the men stare at her in reverie.
“I’ve been waitin’ here all day, gawpin’ up that road like a fuckin’ eejit.”
Her irises had begun to melt, the colour feathering at the edges. He hated to see it.
Ella squeezed his cheeks, forcing his lips into a pout. “What you doin’ home, eh?”
“I’m a failure, Ella. Haven’t you heard?”
He wanted to tip forwards, to collapse onto her, hug her fiercely.
He placed his hand on her wrist and wormed his way up inside her cardigan sleeve.
He remembered the trick, how she would allow this touching and stroking, if only he seemed to be looking for a spare hanky.
As he searched her sleeve, he caressed her forearm. It was soft as chamois leather.
Not long after his mother left, he had been heartbroken by the miscarried spring lambs.
It had been a foul spring, full of late snow and too many teats grown hard with mastitis.
In the kitchen, he had pushed himself into Ella’s softness and pulled her old cardigan over his face as he wept.
He was hiding from his father, who held the dead, mucus-slick lambs by their hind legs and was considering whether or not there was still good eating that could be had.
When John left the room, Ella pried Cal from her flank.
Wiping his damp face, she had said, “It’s an awfy thing, all those dead lambs.
But you cannae be grabbing at me like that.
It willnae do either of us any good.” She had steeled herself, believing if she was hard on him now it would be for the best later.
“I’m no yer mammy, Callie. And we cannae pretend that I am. ”
As the years passed, he thought with some sadness that this was not how a grandmother should be, until eventually he studied alongside a boy at the Nicolson whose own mother had eight sons and two daughters.
This boy told Cal that his mother never kissed them and that she never, ever hugged her own children.
Each morning, she would wait by the door where she shook each of their hands as they left for school.
She was too busy, he said, and she feared a favourite would emerge and there would be nothing but hurt feelings.
Cal was trying to glance down at Ella’s feet, to get a look at them without making it obvious.
They were swollen, spilling over her orthopaedic sandals like dough leavened with too much yeast. She was missing a few toenails and the ones that she still had were yellow in colour and ridged like rams’ horn.
But her feet were not the colour of liver.
They were not the engorged, ready-to-rupture purple that his father had let him believe.
They were grey from the cold. A soft, dusty lilac, not unlike a cheap eyeshadow.
His father was not a man given to exaggeration. He was exacting with the language of colour, faultless in its matching. He could discern minute differences between forty different dye lots and send the ones that were not up to standard back to the mill.
John unloaded Cal’s bags. He was humming as he came up the path. As he passed them by, he leant in and addressed his mother-in-law in English. “You owe me a tenner. I told you. No job, no woman, and lousy with drink.” He reached out and snatched the hat from Cal’s head.
Ella’s eyes waxed wide as two moons.
“And see what you can do about that!” he said. “He’s not to be let out until it’s sorted.”