Chapter 4
a ceithir / four
It rained without end for the next few days.
It was the type of rain that separated them from the world.
The clouds were so thick that as soon as they woke in the morning, Ella went from room to room turning on the lamps.
It was impossible to tell the time without looking at the clock and Cal killed the hours by going to the living room window and staring out at nothing, then going to the kitchen window and finding the same grey murk.
Ella rolled rags and lined all the sills.
She had trained the dogs to lie against the gap at the back door.
She gave Cal buckets to take upstairs and he set one beneath the drip in the hallway and another beneath the drip in the bathroom.
He monitored them every so often and caught them before they overflowed.
He discovered it took almost four hours for each bucket to fill and so he was the first to notice when the rain began to ease a little.
His father approached him several times and gave him little jobs to do.
Cal said he would get to them in time, that he needed a moment to settle in, to find his rhythm again after so long away.
He could tell it strained his father to tolerate his idleness but he knew that if he said yes to every little job the work would quickly pile up and, like the rain, it would never end.
He watched from the bathroom window as his grandmother led John by the elbow out to the end of the garden.
They huddled underneath a faded golf umbrella and Ella scolded John, telling him to give Cal a few days to settle, to click back into place, as though he were a limb that had fallen out of joint.
Cal watched as his father stormed off, buttoning his collar against the downpour.
God was yet to make a rain that could keep John Macleod indoors.
On the fourth day, the skies clotted and turned a milky white.
Cal pulled on his bomber jacket and set out with no destination in mind.
As he walked along the road, he felt feverish from his containment and he was glad of the scouring wind.
Insula Ventorum, he muttered to himself, as, with his mouth hanging open, he turned and turned, biting the wind like a demented dog, letting it inflate his cheeks before gulping it down.
Anyone who saw him would have thought he was riddled with demons.
They lived at the end of the road, the out end, which confused tourists because there was no way out except into the sea.
At the bottom of the last hill was a narrow shelf of rocky land and squeezed upon it was the Macleod whitehouse.
It was a harled croft house, with its back to the hillside and its face to the sea.
Dormers broke the line of the slate roof and the moss on the guttering had grown fuzzier and more luminous than Cal remembered.
The samphire green paintwork was salted to a bluish-grey.
The house was flanked by a flat-roofed weaving shed on one side, and on the other a single-room caravan – neither of which made the house appear any less lonely.
The shed held his father’s loom and was separated from the house by a stony path.
The caravan began its life upright until the wind toppled it one winter and scattered its contents into the sea.
His father excavated a shallow grave and they sank the caravan into it to stop the wind from ripping it up again.
They bricked around it with a cairn of rocks until only its roofline was visible and it sat there as though it was erupting from the earth.
That spring, they ferried the last of his mother’s belongings across the shale and John climbed through the skylight and filled the caravan with the memories of his wife.
Then he lugged a heavy rock and set it on the roof, sealing the caravan as though it were a tomb.
Their house sat in the shadow of the crumbling hill.
The corrie face was coming loose and after the spring thaw it was not unusual for a schist to split and for rocks to dislodge and rumble to the sea.
His grandmother had a ritual of blessing any boulder that had spared them in the night and when his father shaved in the mornings, Cal would sometimes hear him sing a song of praise for the hillside, thanking it for sheltering them for another year.
Before he understood what coastal erosion was, it had always felt to Cal that the hill was playing a game of sneak, creeping up on them, and slowly pushing them towards the sea. Nine years old and sleepless with the pain of lengthening limbs, he had told his father about his fear one morning.
John had chewed his toast, deep in thought. Then he turned to his son and said, “If it does, it’s the Devil’s work. And it’s because you’re not praying hard enough.”
The bay was empty except for the Macdonald boat.
Cal recognised its flaking red hull from miles away.
When his father was a boy, the bay had berthed a dozen trawlers.
Now all the boats were gone and the slipway was slick with disuse.
From a distance, Doll looked like a tin figure on a modelmaker’s set.
Cal could tell it had not been a good day for the creels.
Doll didn’t raise his head when he heard Cal’s shoes ring out on the stone.
In his good church shoes, he stood at the top of the slipway and slid down the scum as if it were fresh snow.
It was a game they had played when they were boys.
It was childish fun and he knew Doll must have seen him acting the fool.
But Doll didn’t acknowledge him, he just kept tipping the lobsters from the pots.
Cal struggled back to the top and did it again, even though all the joy had leached from it now.
The lobsters were an oily brown, speckled with white spots.
Doll was checking the length of them, sorting the ones that were large enough from the ones that were yet too small.
From time to time, he produced a ruler and measured from their eye socket to the bottom of their carapace.
It was clear that Doll could tell just by looking at them, but by using the ruler he hoped to prove the experience of his eyes wrong.
It did no good. The lobster was always too small and he was forced to toss it back into the water.
“Thought you’d be at the prawns already?”
“A few weeks yet.” Doll didn’t bother to look up. His orange safety jacket gave an unnatural glow to the underside of his face, otherwise his skin looked blanched as though he was seasick or hungover or both.
Doll’s father was one of the few who still operated a creeling boat, a belching, trundling thing that he took out into the Minch most mornings, harvesting line-whelks and langoustines, and checking the pots for lobsters.
The family-sized boats were vulnerable on the open sea, and the winter was too hard for anyone to make a year-round living.
There had been a desperate time where too many fishermen were taking chances, pushing the season, never coming home again.
The young fisherman was taller than Cal, and broader, stockier.
At twenty, his body was still caught in the struggle between puppy fat and muscles, and his flaxen hair was tousled by the wind, which made him appear more boyish than he really was.
Doll’s youthful face sitting atop this bulky, powerful body made Cal think of the young boys who were taught to drive their fathers’ tractors, mere children given charge of moving the heavy equipment from the top field to the grazing grounds.
Cal dug out some lichen and squeezed the rain from it. “I just got back. Big John is biding his time but I’m to be a good lamb. I’m to be driven into the fank and sheared.” He lifted his hat and his orange hair caught the wind.
“Fuck.” Doll sneered and shook his head. “Look at the state of you.”
They had been amongst the handful of students at the one-room school in Falabay – and two of only three boys.
When Doll turned eight, Cal had turned ten, and Cal was promoted across the dividing line of masking tape that ran down the centre of the class.
It was an odd rite of passage into manhood, to be moved four feet to the left, but to celebrate the teacher cancelled all the lessons and let the children build a bonfire out of household rubbish.
In any other world, the two years of difference would have meant that Doll Macdonald was too young for Cal to be friends with.
They had been put together out of need and, to Cal, their friendship could sometimes feel like babysitting work that he was never paid for.
Doll’s mother felt guilty at having produced only one boy out of six children, so she had found a subscription service on the mainland where she ordered Doll an endless stream of American films – things that Cal’s father would not abide in their house.
The VHS tapes were graphically violent or childishly comedic and often, through sheer starvation for other stimuli, could be warped out and paused in odd places that seemed softly pornographic.
The boys spent dreich afternoons in movie marathons.
The G’s were Doll’s favourite, from The Goonies to Ghostbusters I and II, and even Goodfellas.
Cal skipped anything by John Hughes; the optimistic buddy-brigading made him feel giddy and then heavy for days afterwards.
He had liked the T’s best. T for Top Gun or Total Recall or Terminator.
And it was on a November afternoon, when Arnold Schwarzenegger first landed naked in a car park overlooking LA, that Cal sat with one of Mrs Macdonald’s cushions clamped over his lap.
He lied to Doll about having diarrhoea, then he went home and prayed for forgiveness, crouching behind the sunken caravan.