Chapter 4 #3
There was a strict code amongst weavers that stated: one loom per house, one weaver per cloth.
You could get a family licence, but it meant that each family member would have to work on separate cloths, waiting for one man to finish his beam before the other could start.
This would mean taking shifts every other week, when in truth what they needed was to increase their output and find a little extra work each and every day.
It was an egalitarian system designed to give all islanders a chance to make a modest living, while deterring those who might wish to monopolise production through automation or subcontracting.
It was intended to guarantee the quality of cloth by ensuring each yard could be traced back to one single weaver, not two, no matter how similar their hands were.
By offering this to Cal, John knew he was violating the code and that this could cost him both his licence and his good name.
But he had made peace with the spiritual discomfort he felt from this deception.
The peace had come one cold February morning, when the heater had run out of gas and neither he nor Ella had money to buy more.
“I have my sources.” Ella tapped the side of her nose, clearly pleased with herself. “Did Doll mention his mammy’s varicose veins?”
“No. Thank goodness.” Cal turned back to his father. “I’ll let you know how many shifts I can do. I was hoping to talk to Flash, see if he needed help at the inn.”
John scoffed. “What do you mean, ‘how many shifts you can do’? I’ll let you know how much work there is and then you can organise yourself accordingly. How about that?”
His father was a tireless tide.
“I appreciate that. But let me sort out the inn and then I’ll tell you how much weaving I can do.”
Ella was eating with her mouth open, rambling on regardless. “Terrible those veins are. All swole tae bursting. Would hurt ye just to look at the—”
“Will you STOP talking over me!” John thumped his fist on the table.
They sat in silence for a time, embarrassed, reluctant to provoke him further.
John considered Ella a profligate waster of words. He said she was like someone who kept the car running when they ran into the shop, even though they should have turned the engine off and given it all a good fucking rest.
He leant forwards. “It’s been forty-eight years. How have you not learnt a lick of the Gàidhlig? You carry on, filling this house with English, like some lazy foreigner.”
“Dad,” Cal said softly, “come on. That’s enough now.”
There had been a time when the Gaelic had been knocked out of John.
The teacher at the small parochial school had taken the back of his hand to any child that dare speak the old tongue, telling them it was the language of peasants – which, to be fair, was exactly what his family were.
When John spoke English now, it was perfect, purer than Ella’s Lallans Scots.
His English was free of any dialect or mainland slang and there was a melodic lilt that disguised how bitter he felt about it.
His choice to speak Gaelic was often territorial, designed to mark some part of Cal as his and his alone.
Ella sniffed and Cal searched for her reflection in the television. He reached for her hand, but she lifted her fork. “Ye cannae believe I don’t speak the Gàidhlig, eh? Well, I cannae believe I haven’t thrown you out on your arse already. It’s a world full of mysteries.”
“Dad was just saying the mill ha—”
“I can talk for myself!” John brought his fist down on the table again.
Cal pushed his plate away. He slid to the floor like a disobedient child and scuttled under the table until he was upright again on the other side. They watched him with some incredulity as he tucked his hair behind his ears and tried to regain his dignity.
“I’m going to talk to Flash about some shifts. I need to get out of the house, Dad. I can’t just go from there, to there, to there like some dog on a rope.” As he said it, he pointed from his bedroom to the weaving shed to the kitchen table.
Ella picked some gristle from her back teeth.
There was a fresh crack in the plaster above John’s head. Cal could see it had spread from the last time he was home. Even the repairs were failing in the lath now, and the house was struck throughout with this slow lightning.
He rubbed his chest. The lamb was sticking in his gullet. “I’ll away and see Flash and you’ll have your answer soon enough.”
John poured himself a cup of stewed tea from the yellow teapot. The slowness with which he did it seemed intentional. He was trying to calm himself but it only infuriated Cal.
“And what about worship?”
John read to them from the Bible most mornings and then again every night.
He thought deeply about the scripture and the ways in which the Lord’s word could be applied to their lives.
He chose the passage best-suited to what they faced at that time of year: gentle Luke for the lambing, Galatians for the mercy of God at year’s end.
Everything had a rhythm and a structure, like patterned cloth.
In the in-between, his father filled the weft of their evenings with Matthew and Peter.
As John read to them from the Bible, Ella liked to colour-in. She spent her evenings filling in old colouring-in books, books full of princesses and fat fairies dancing on toadstools, childish things that Cal had grown too old for, but that she now found a quiet meditation in.
“I can miss worship for one single night.”
“Stay.”
Cal could tell his father was trying to calm himself. His left hand was opening and closing like he was working some pump for his heart.
“You can see Flash in the morning.”
Cal shook his head. He went to the hallway and returned with his boots.
“I think we should have wine with dinner. If we’re going to sit down every night then we should at least have some wine, and we should talk all together, not this half-English, half-Gàidhlig nonsense.
We should have wine and we should enjoy the flavours and we should enjoy each other’s company. ”
“Imagine,” said Ella.
“Wine?” asked John.
“Yes. Chardonnay. And maybe some Marlow with the lamb.”
“Marlow?”
“That’s what normal families do. If we’re to sit at this table every night then I want us to look forward to it. God would grant us that.”
“Would he?”
Cal turned to his grandmother, hoping to find an ally. “We could talk about real things. We could read the paper and each of us could talk about one thing we read. Like have a proper discussion. Politics, art, books – Dad, you love books. And we would do it all in English.”
“Sounds like homework,” she said.
“Don’t go to the inn,” said John, tapping the tabletop to draw Cal’s attention back to him. “I want you to pray with us. You have wandered away.”
Cal plonked himself into an armchair and pulled on his boots. “Is it to be Matthew?”
“. . . No. Deuteronomy.”
Cal laced the boots tightly. As he did so, he recited the Word of Deuteronomy from memory, in archaic Gaelic, flat in tone, a half-beat too fast. “If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them.” He tucked his shirt tail into his trousers.
“Then shall his father and mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place; and they shall say unto the elders of his city, this our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.” He buttered a slice of bread and sprinkled it with sugar.
“And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die; so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear and fear.” He folded the bread and took a bite. The sugar crunched between his teeth.
He dared not look at either of them directly.
He was certain his grandmother was grinning.
The house was heavy with bookshelves. He found his mother’s copy of The Wasp Factory where he had left it two Christmases before, coverless from love. He picked it up and put it inside some-other-man’s bomber jacket. Then he slung his bag over his shoulder and went out into the drizzle.
Flash had converted his home into a charmless inn.
It was a bland, pebbledashed house that was built in the thirties with a boxy extension slapped on the rear.
The upstairs bedrooms that had once housed his daughters were let out to the occasional rambler.
He had turned his front rooms into a bothan of sorts.
It was little more than a shebeen for the local men to have a quiet pint, neighbours who had been drinking for free until Flash figured out he could build a wood-panelled bar and charge them for it.
He had never bothered with a publican’s licence.
He had earned the name ‘Flash’ because he had once shimmied to a Boney M song.
His brother-in-law, Shockie, who was feeling a simmering resentment at his own nickname – earned when he was recounting a shopping trip to Edinburgh and had exclaimed, “Oh now, those prices gave me the shock of my life!” – had been the one to see Aonghas shuffle across the floor.
“Hey, Flashdance!” he cried. “Give us a twirl.” And in the very moment all the men laughed, Aonghas Calder had been renamed ‘Flashdance’ for the rest of his life.