Chapter 4 #2
On the days when puberty made Cal petulant, when the Americans on television made him jealous with their bouncy friendships, he felt the choke of Doll being his only friend.
He would say deliberately hurtful things in order to provoke a reaction, anything that would stir what was generally a dull, steady friendship.
When Cal avoided him, Doll would bound around the headland like a collie.
When he finally found Cal hiding in a patch of long grass, he never seemed to bear a grudge.
All of which made his coldness seem somehow out of character.
“Are you pissed off at us?”
“Why would I be?” Doll began stacking the creels. Every so often he would find a small crab stuck in the netting and would toss it into the water, skiting it like a skimming stone, killing the crab in the act. “Why are you back? Thought you were too good for us.”
“I’m skint and my granny’s not well.” He clawed at his hair underneath his hat.
His crown was sweating from the wool even though his face was numbed from the wind.
“You wouldn’t believe how expensive everything was.
I had a room above a tea shop. It wasn’t fit to be a sheep shed.
Sixty-five pounds a week. Bills, extra.”
Doll paused stacking the creels. “How come when you were home at Christmas you hardly made any time for us? I saw you at church and that was it.”
“I was only home for a couple of days. Ella didn’t let me out of her sight.” This did nothing to appease Doll, and so he added, “I always worried about coming home. I worried Big John would tell me he couldn’t spare me any longer and find some reason to make me stay.”
Doll drew his head back. “You make it sound like a bad thing, staying here.”
The last time Cal came home from college, he had run into Doll and his sister, Isla, at the Hogmanay service.
Cal had been happy to see him, but Doll had been distant even then.
He had shaken his hand formally, called him John-Calum, as though he was putting childish names behind them.
As he strode into the church in his good suit with his mother on his arm, Cal could picture the type of upright man he would need to become.
He could imagine his pious, obedient wife, and their nesting set of white-blonde Hearach children.
“Are you on the boats full-time?”
“Yeah. But I want off. All I do is fight with my dad.” He took a single cigarette from his waterproof pocket. It was bent and he worked to straighten it. He lit it and sucked on it, without any sign of enjoying it.
“You could go to Glasgow. You could just as easily collect the dole there as you can here. I mean, while you look for an apprenticeship or that.”
“If it’s that easy then why don’t you go?”
“I fucked it, didn’t I,” Cal shrugged. “Now I owe a stupid amount of money. But you, you could go to technical college, get an apprenticeship. There are more women than you think at technical colleges. The one in Inverness teaches hairdressing and midwifery.”
Doll scoffed. “Like my father can afford to let me go.”
The only boy in a house full of sisters could not be set free easily, not while there were payments on the boat, and nobody to inherit the croft.
“How’s your old banger? You get her back on the road?”
“Nah. I fix one thing and another thing goes.”
“Stick at it. You’ll soon be able to get up to Stornoway and back.” He tried to coax a smile from him. “Think of all the townie women looking for a bit of maw rough.”
Doll shook his head. “There’s not been any women. All those school dances. Those fucking endless Communions. Who wants to end up with a lad from Falabay? They all want that oil money and a house with two bathrooms. They look at me like I’m a life sentence.”
These good, godly girls had an animal nose for failure. If all they would be afforded was to marry one man and raise his children, then they would choose that man carefully.
Doll reached into his work bag and cracked a can of McEwan’s Export. He didn’t offer one to Cal.
“A livener?”
“Nah. An extender.” He took a swig. “I’ve already had my liner, my steadier, my day-facer, my livener, my brightener, and my bracer.”
Cal searched for the midday sun. It was obscured behind thick clouds. “I’ve some catching up to do. When you’re finished here, let’s go and have a pint of belly wash.”
He held up the can. “This will do me.”
“Ah, come on. Old times sake. I’ll tap some money off Ella.”
“No, thanks.”
He was rising and falling with the lapping tide. It forced Cal to nod like an imbecile as he tried to hold his eye. “Doll . . . have I done something to annoy you?”
“You’ve done nothing. Nothing at all. You upped and left as it suited you. And then you show up expecting everything to be the same.” He flicked the half-smoked cigarette into the sea. “So forgive us, college boy, if no one has the heart to throw a cèilidh.”
Cal felt the shame like a slap. It made him want to rub his face. He turned to leave but his shoes slipped on the moss and he stumbled and cracked his knee off the stone. He limped to the top of the slipway.
He glanced along the road. There were only two directions: home or away.
He turned back to Doll. “I’ll suck you off. If you want.”
Their eyes locked and then quickly broke away.
Doll seemed pained as he turned to the creels. The morning’s work was done, but he would wait for Cal to be gone before he ever came ashore.
The kitchen table was covered with overdraft statements, student loan agreements, and an angry-looking letter from a credit card company that had once only spoken in a friendly, supportive, anything-you-need-just-ask tone.
His father, who had never bought anything he could not pay for in cash, had taken care to unfold the statements and lay them face up.
Their placement was almost curatorial. “Some mornings we get two or three letters at a time,” he said. “I’ve never seen such an amount.”
“I can’t do this now. Please.” Cal gathered the statements and stuffed them in a drawer. He sat at the table and helped himself to a plate of stew.
“I was thinking we could take on more sheep.”
This was a thought that needed no response.
It let Cal know how desperate John felt about the situation.
There was no money in the sheep, not in their meat, nor in their wool.
Ella served them dumplings from the heavy black pan.
Cal offered to take it from her, but she waved him away.
“I’ve been at that sink all day and now the cavalry roars over the hill?
Oh, my hero.” She slopped four white dumplings onto Cal’s plate, both his portion and hers.
He was hemmed in, sat between them on the bench his father had screwed to the wall.
They bowed their heads and joined their hands as John said grace.
As they gave thanks, Cal opened his eyes again and watched their reflection in the dead eye of the television screen.
Ella was staring right back at him. She pushed the bottom set of her false teeth out of her mouth and made a gurning face.
He had to cough to cover his sudden laughter.
“Amen,” said John with a sideways glance.
When he was home, his father had the habit of talking to him in Gaelic even though it excluded Ella from their conversations. This meant that John and Ella often took to talking at the same time, in different languages, like a foreign film that had been overdubbed into English.
Since he had come home the table talk had been easy.
It was as if they had saved up all their thoughts and now they were both grateful to finally have someone to talk to.
For his grandmother nothing was too minor to go unmentioned.
Ella was gabbing about Anna Ahearn and her dead mother’s cat, while his father, sat on his other side, worried him about some tweed yarn he was sure was brittle and lousy with an irregular twist.
Conducting one conversation in English and the other in Gaelic, Cal did his best to keep up with the both of them, until he stumbled, misheard his grandmother, and asked her to repeat something. “What?”
“Prolapsed,” she said. “The insides were hinging oot o’ the poor wee beggar.”
John placed his hand over Cal’s as if to say that was enough of this vulgar talk.
Cal had seen a play once, some amateur theatrics that they staged during the Fringe. There had been six actors sitting on a dark stage, talking to themselves about the Falklands War, delivering monologues to the audience. It made him oddly homesick.
Ella mashed her food together and Cal was wondering if her teeth were bothering her again when she asked, “So, did you cook much for yourself up at the college?”
He was both appalled and fascinated by the paste she was making.
“No. Nobody ever washed their dishes. I saw one fella take a dirty plate, turn it upside down, and eat his curry off the underside.”
His father was mopping up the stew with the end of a white loaf.
“I spoke with Fiona at the main mill. They got an unexpected order from a Japanese company. It’s nothing complicated.
But it’s a big order. Two different patterns.
Ugly things. Not a single colour that was ever seen in nature. They need it by mid-November.”
“Weaving?”
Ella spoke over the top of John as though she had not heard him, which, in a way, she hadn’t. “I heard you seen Doll the day.”
Cal sighed and turned back to his grandmother. “Now, how did you hear that?”
John sucked the gravy from his fingers. “I can’t tell the mill that you are helping in case the other weavers take the humph. But we can draw the curtains, and you and I can work the loom in shifts. More money that way. Besides, it’s a shame to see the loom sit idle at night.”
“But, Dad, that’s cheating.”