Chapter 5 #3
Heading to his final shift with the Albanian cleaners, he was gripped by a fear that Sammy knew his full name and that this might be enough for any letter to find him; the island was not so big, the postman not so busy.
He cursed himself as the morning buses thundered by and wished he had told Sammy the truth.
He should have said that they were finished.
Sammy was the opposite of his father in all things, and the moment he had realised this was the moment he realised he could never love him.
Ella snapped a wet towel at him. “Why don’t you go see Doll again? I’m surprised he’s not been at the door yet.”
“I think we’ve grown apart.”
“Uch, nonsense. Poor lad’s been lost since you went away. Least that’s what Ishbel says.”
Ella slopped the laundry into the basket. She made Cal carry it outside.
In bare feet and boxer shorts, he shivered as she pegged clothes to the line. He was forced to raise his voice so that she could hear him over the churn of the sea. “How come nobody’s ever allowed to change?” he asked. “We were friends. Now we’re not. Just leave it at that.”
“Listen, son, if the women round here just left it, this place would be nothin’ but men living in caves, scowling out at the sea.” She took her time, smoothing the creases from his shirts. “If nothin’ else, stop in and say hello to Doll’s mammy. And have you seen their Isla?”
“Which one was she again?”
“Ha, ha. Oh, she just gets lovelier and lovelier, Cal.”
“You marry her, then.”
“And she’s bright!” Ella gasped in awe. “So bright. I mean, she’s no exactly well-endowed, but . . .” Ella parted the sheets. She made the charade for an ample bosom and pouted as if to say that whatever Isla had, should do any man.
Cal threw the basket to the ground. He went back to the house.
Ella hobbled after him. “Don’t you look at me like that!”
“She’s what? Eighteen?”
“She’s nearly nineteen, surely.”
“And I’ve been to college and she’s been where? To the end of the road?” He crouched before the fire and rubbed his cold shins.
“I was a holy terror at her age.”
“I’ll fucking bet.”
“Well, who else you gonnae get?”
“Is that the best you can do? You want me to hang around the school gates and wait for girls to come of age like some nonce?”
“Listen, Lorna Duff’s man was eighteen years older. Mad Licky’s was thirty! It was just the way it can be. They all went to the sea and when they came back the lassies their own age were spoken for. So what’s a few years? Never used to bother you.”
The television was humming with the sound down. It was always running, keeping his grandmother company. Cal crossed the room and snapped it off. It let out a whine of relief.
“You got something you want to tell me? I’m beginning to think ye don’t like women.”
“Just you,” he spat. “You’re the only woman I can’t abide.”
He picked up his book and then, remembering he had tried and failed to concentrate, he threw it into the chair.
The book bounced against the cushion and flew through the air.
They watched it hit the fire poker, which fell against the tiles with a crash.
The rhythmic clatter coming from the weaving shed stopped.
They froze and held their breath, heads tilted slightly, listening for the shuttle to resume its clack.
Ella lowered her voice. “That lassie’s more mature than you’ll ever be. Asides, you cannae put yersel inside her till you’re marriet.”
Cal looked at the clock again. “Can I have a bath?”
“It’s Thursday.”
“I have a feeling it’ll be a two-bath week. Tell Big John he can take it out my wages.”
Ella busied herself lighting the pilot on the gas boiler as Cal went back upstairs.
He sat on the edge of the bath and stared through the open window at the dark sea beyond.
The wind bullied the waves till they were cresting horizontal to the shore.
The loose fence post was dancing in the gale, whipping its single line of barbed wire back and forth.
It would be a while until the water was just about hot enough, and when it was, it would not be deep.
As he waited, he overheard his grandmother talking to his father outside.
They were arguing about his appearance. Ella was grassing to John about how Cal had rejected the hair dye, to which John replied, “What don’t you understand?
What doesn’t he understand?” Then he quoted Deuteronomy.
“The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God. ”
Cal put his face into his hands and waited.
As his spit pooled into his mouth, he thought about Doll again and how he was filling out with the well-insulated, muscular build of his father.
He thought about the thick vein that throbbed on the side of his thick neck.
The way his tongue moistened his bottom lip when he spoke.
He closed the window, pulled a towel from the rail and stuffed it along the bottom of the door.
Waiting for the clack of the loom, he pulled his boxer shorts to his ankles and put one foot up on the edge of the bath.
He tried to undress Doll at twenty. He tried to glue these pictures of him over the images he had of Doll at fourteen, when they had hid together and Doll had drawn his jumper over his head, his puppy fat marked by the train tracks of his boxer shorts, his skin pink with excitement, his body tense with fear.
The three of them were lined up in a row.
They ate a pale dinner of cod and boiled potatoes and nobody said much.
After dinner his father read to them from the Bible as his grandmother coloured-in, a happy scene of fat puppies chasing striped beachballs across a sandy shore.
Although Ella bowed her head in a state of reverential concentration, he was wondering, as he often did, how much of the Gaelic she might actually understand, when she leant in and said, “It’ll be you that put him in this mood. ”
After the evening worship, Cal tied his hair back and let himself be led into the shed like a docile heifer.
The shed had been constructed without insulation.
The concrete floor and the corrugated roof gave the room the acoustic qualities of an empty biscuit tin.
For a workshop it was immaculately clean, unadorned, suitably ascetic.
The walls were lined with well-organised shelves, racks of screwdrivers, cogs and maintenance parts that were clearly labelled and hung on the studs, like primitive idols.
In the centre of the room was the iron pulpit itself, the Hattersley loom, with its multiple shafts and treadle pedals.
Its heavy, iron frame gave the room the feeling of a Victorian workhouse.
Although there was talk of introducing the double-width rapier loom, the weaving technology had not changed much since the Industrial Revolution.
The loom had to be man-powered, that was the accredited stipulation.
It could not be driven by electricity or gas, it could not be steered by computer.
The rest of the world were making lengths on screaming, ceaseless power looms, but not here.
Here on the islands the cloth had to be woven by hand, and powered by foot; it had to be made at home in exactly the same manner as it had been centuries before.
The one innovation – the single concession to the weaver’s comfort – was that the looms could now be attached to a fixed pedal and shaft.
In front of the loom was his father’s seat and the loom pedals which, ironically enough, made the whole thing resemble a papist’s organ.
“Do you never get lonely?” Cal asked. “Working here by yourself.”
“Sometimes,” said John. “But I’m never alone.” Cal was expecting some trite line about the omnipresence of the Lord, but John surprised him when he said, “I think about you. And I talk to you. Tell you the little things about my day.”
He crossed to the yarn shelves. It was his favourite place in the whole world.
“Look at all the new colours!” The shelves were full of hundreds of yarns, all the romantic colours of Scotland: bracken and grouse, gorse and heather, rain and moss, the chafed red of a drunkard’s face, and pure, bilious whitey.
Amongst these were punkish hot pinks and acid yellows, violent tones that made people recoil until they saw the finished cloth and saw how skilfully John could mix sour greens with wheats and nightshades until it was a field of spring bluebells.
It was a treasure box. Cal had loved playing with these cones when he was younger.
He would take a colour and wrap it around his finger, until each finger was a multicoloured worm of mad stripes.
John had taken time with him then, unwrapping the hues, rewrapping them to show harmony, or contrast, or how a Macdonald funeral tartan should look opposed to a Macleod hunting.
“If it’s right,” John had said, “then you should be able to feel something.” His father had wrapped Cal’s little fingers in lapis, violets and cornflower blues.
He added a light, over-ripe peach tone and then to ground it all, a mossy brown with flecks of coppery sienna.
“That was the day we took your mother to Callanish. Do you remember? That was what the stones and the sky and her good coat had looked like.” John unspooled a single strand of vermillion and wrapped it amongst the other colours.
“You took a nosebleed. You could never stop picking at yourself.”
When he was underfoot, John would give him spools of colour and send him outside to find the article that had inspired them with strict instruction not to come home again until he had matched the colours perfectly.
Cal liked the searching, the wandering with watchful purpose, the reward.
He would return, holding the hem of his jumper, and his father would take the bladder wrack, the scab of lichen, or the guillemot feather and hold it next to the yarn.
Cal’s matching became near exact. “But you’ve no match for the teal,” his father had said.
“The teal is the sea. But when I filled my hand with seawater it was a watery nothing.” He picked at the tiny green flecks amongst the teal. “So I have matched it, but we need to go look at it together, where the water meets the kelp, and floats over the sand underneath.”
John would bury his nose in Cal’s crown and inhale the fresh air. It was on days like this that Cal came to love colour.
Cal leant against his father as he had when he was a boy, but John brushed him off.
“You’re not here to be a nuisance. And tomorrow, soon as you are up, get dressed.
I’ll not have you half-naked at all hours.
If I catch you over that door in your boxer shorts again, you’ll be sorry.
Your student days are done. You hear me? ”
Cal nodded. Behind the loom was the fruit of John’s current labour, a plump roll of hunting tartan that Ella would have called ‘brown’.
But it was so much more than that. Alone, the colours were too dull or too sharp.
Together they had made a kind of harmonious magic.
John put his glasses on the end of his nose and peered at a twisted heddle.
He knotted a broken end. A fault to be sewn in later.
“Dad, my granny seems fine. She’ll outlive us all.
” He felt almost certain that his father had lied, but he could not accuse John directly, not without expecting a sore mouth for it.
“Her feet must be feeling a lot better. They’re not purple, not in the slightest.” He met his father’s eye and forced himself to hold it.
To fill the silence he thought about the radials of John’s irises.
There were all manner of light blues and warm greys: soot, pigeon, mica, ash, bluebell, and in certain lights there were flecks of the rarest lapis lazuli.
“Well, they were a hellish colour.” John looked away. “Perhaps it comes and goes. Perhaps there’s still good days ahead.” He busied himself picking flecks of dust from the warp. “Trust in providence,” he said. “There is a plan for each of us. All will be revealed in the end.”
Yes, he thought, but is it God’s plan or is it yours?
John turned back to the loom. He showed Cal how the overcheck sat upon the undercheck. “You see how the colour lies?”
Cal watched his father weave a half yard of cloth, paying close attention to the rhythm of the shafts, the packing and tightness of the weft. Then his father watched him weave the other half and corrected him for setting it too tight. It was tricky to match one man’s hand to the other.
When John was satisfied that Cal’s beating matched his own, that the cloth would be acceptably even and they would get away with their deception, he drew the curtains tight, clapped him on the back, and went back to the house.
Cal stood at the loom and listened to the hum of the fluorescent tube.
He worried that the moment his hands settled on the beater they would stay there for the rest of his life.
That this shed would become his hermitage, and that one day he would raise his head and he would be older than his father.
There was the soft brush of slippers on concrete.
She was watching him, half-hidden in the doorway. “Hello, little spider.”
“I can’t do this, Ella.”
“Ye can. You’ll feel better when ye make some money.”
Ella crossed the room and rubbed the far wall and Cal noticed for the first time that it was blank, the only surface free of tools or spare parts.
“Imagine whatever you like on that wall over there, and then just pedal towards it.”