Chapter 5 #2
Cal rose up on his tiptoes to get a better look. He considered the toothless ewe and, because he was bored, imagined this a Machiavellian triumph. He wondered if the old cast ewe knew she would have soon been stew and had orchestrated the downfall of the ram in her place.
“See,” Ella said. “We can do anything a man can do.”
“True,” he said. “Thatcher was an apartheid-supporting, boys’-club-loving oppressor of women’s rights. A man couldn’t have done it better.”
He was wondering if ‘Ewe can do it’ would make a funny slogan for feminist T-shirts when Ella dropped to her knees suddenly.
As she searched the cupboard under the sink, he took the opportunity to stare at her feet; they were the light lilac and the chalky texture of Parma Violets.
They looked like they would feel better if she soaked them for an hour.
“How are you feeling?” he asked. “How’s your health?”
“Fine,” she said. “I could stand a bit of sunshine. I would enjoy an Italian lover.” She groaned as she got up from the floor. She used the hem of her skirt to wipe the dust off an old box before she dropped it on the kitchen table.
He could tell from the woman’s hairstyle that the dye was from the eighties.
The print was faded and the paper was curled where the cold tap leaked and made everything under the sink damp and mouldy.
The hair dye had been sitting under the sink for years so it must have been his mother’s.
It was this thought that made Cal tilt it towards himself.
Autumnal Ash. He knew nothing about trees but it was as flat and lifeless a colour as he had ever seen.
He flicked it like a hockey puck. It flew across the table.
“Didn’t know the shop sold such contraband,” he said, and then thinking of his mother he asked, “So, how is she then? How is my darling mamaidh?”
“Oh, she’s great,” she said. “Why don’t you go see for yersel? She’s expecting a visit.”
“I will,” he groaned. “Give us a minute, will you?” He rearranged his balls, then he took up the Iain Banks novel and dropped himself into the chair nearest the fire. “It’s miles away. And besides, I have to prepare myself for the sermon I’ll get from Big John.”
“Stop making excuses.”
“Ex-scuses?” he said in a snide whine. “My folks are nothing but a pile of selfish excuses done up in two old raincoats! Let me ask you this: why does my mother never come to see me, eh? It’s been fifteen years and she’s never once come back to visit me.”
“Oh, because you’re a real charmer, apparently.”
“Just spare me your nagging, Ella.” He thumbed in the direction of his father’s work shed. “Why do I always have to be the big man when the pair of them insist on acting like children?”
Ella huffed and turned away.
He picked up his book again but he was too annoyed to read.
He watched as his grandmother began loading laundry into the twin tub.
She held up an old sheet that had become thin with age; there was a large tear where the cloth had finally split.
She considered it, then she turned the sheet and, forcing her thumb through the fabric, she tore two small holes in it.
She pulled the sheet over her head until it covered her completely then she raised her arms and tried out a low wail.
She was so accustomed to being alone that she often did weird things like this.
Cal watched her as she went to the sink, gathered up some cutlery and returned it to the drawer.
For a few moments, she went about her ordinary, everyday chores dressed as a ghost. She wrung out a cloth and wiped the counters, then reaching for the tea towel, she thought better of it and used her ghostly form to dry the surface.
She chuckled to herself and let out a high, delighted wail.
He couldn’t help but soften towards her.
“Do you want to get drunk and go for a drive later?”
“I can’t,” she said sadly. “I’ve been warned that we’re to grow up.”
Ella lifted the sheet and let it fall down her back like a veil. She gathered a fistful of clean forks as though they were a bouquet. “You’re no gonnae sit there all day, are you?”
“Here,” he said. “Come here to me a minute.” He rose from the chair and came up behind her.
He tore a large hole in the sheet and draped it over her like a smock.
Finding a tub of safety pins and elastic bands in the junk drawer, he began draping on her like she was a model, pinning the bedsheet into a loose gown.
He fitted it to her waist and used the elastic bands to gather the sleeves into a dramatic ruched shape.
“I thought you were to be the next Jean Muir?”
“Jean Muir!” he scoffed. “Is that the last time you bought a dress?” He put his hands on her shoulders and caught her eye in the mirror. “Don’t give up on me yet.”
He cut and he nipped and he gathered the skirt into pleats. He fixed the dress so that it fell from her ample bosom in a flattering cascade. “You look like a Greek goddess.”
“The goddess of soup-making?”
“No! A goddess in her dotage, the grandmother of some lesser-known but completely charming young demigod.”
Ella laughed. “Even when it’s about me it’s really about you.” She plucked at some of the ruching. “I look like a joint of lamb wrapped in wax paper.”
“But a plump joint,” he said. “Fat and full of good eating.”
He set a sprig of rosemary in her hair, and noted with sadness how she didn’t like to look at her own face in the mirror.
Ella wore the long gown as she finished the dishes. Cal went back to sprawling on the settee. He tried to read but he carried a Calvinist’s guilt. He put the book down and turned his restless mood on his grandmother. “I’ll start the weaving tonight.”
Ella stopped her scrubbing. “So you’ll do it then?”
“Do I have a choice?”
She didn’t grasp the pressure of working with his father, or how it was more of a duty than a job.
John saw Cal as his property, or as an extension of himself, and his father was less inclined to listen to him simply because he would always be the child.
The idea that you were kinder to your kin was untrue, because his father said things to him and treated him in ways that he would never dream of with any other human.
The worst boss in the world was always a father.
Ella took a tea tray to the weaving shed eager to tell John the good news.
With Ella gone Cal took the opportunity to sort through all the post that had been addressed to him but had been opened by his father.
The four years of student loans would take a hundred thousand yards to pay off, longer if he had to pay his keep first. His course had been covered by the government, but he had patchworked together his living with grants and summer work and all those loans and credit cards that had seemed so harmless at first. One by one, he read the first line, made a fart noise, and dropped the statements into the fire.
Ella seemed relieved when she came back into the kitchen. She was tottering like she might start a dance and he thought he might waltz with her. Then he glanced at the pre-opened post and soured again. “Is this all the letters that have come for me?”
“I imagine so.”
He looked at the clock, then he looked out at the spitting rain. “I was expecting a letter from somebody from college.” He looked at the clock again. Then he closed his eyes.
“Well, it’s all there.”
There had been a boy on the mainland who he slept with from time to time.
Samuel Harvey was a Welshman, a colour chemistry student who liked to wear many-pocketed military trousers and a tight, cropped T-shirt with Tweety bird on the front.
On their last night together, as they lay cramped in his single bed, Sammy had asked Cal to stay and not return to the islands.
He had said he would split his bursary and pay all the rent.
He said Cal could live with him until he found his feet.
It was more kindness than Cal knew what to do with.
Then Sammy had spoiled it all by saying he loved him without truly meaning it. That was the type of man he was. He liked to say nice things because they sounded nice. He liked to declare enormous feelings without meaning any of it.
In all his time on the mainland Cal had had much less sex than he would have liked, and any sex that he did have, he enjoyed much less than he wanted to.
He had been raised to be fearful of intimacy.
It was a fear seeded through scripture and nourished by the horrors he saw on the evening news, all those biblical images of gaunt, sunken-eyed men, covered in sores and dying alone.
As a boy, he had sat at the back of the church as the men discussed this plague in their prayer meetings.
They took no pleasure in the suffering but there remained an Old Testament comfort in it.
Here was evidence that the wages of sin was indeed hell on earth.
Here was evidence that God meant what He said.
As the sun came over the low town, Sammy had said he would write to him every day, every single day, until Cal came back to Edinburgh.
Cal had seen how the Welshman decorated his folders with cherubs and skulls, signing his name in big bubbly script.
As he flipped his underpants inside out and dressed himself in crumpled clothes, he gave Sammy a fake address: a vaguely Gaelic sounding village that didn’t exist and a postcode that was nothing but a random selection of numbers and too many letters.
Sammy scribbled it all down in a dogeared novel as Cal slipped his feet into his rancid Converse and tried to avoid his eye.