Chapter 6
a sia / six
As Ella buttoned her good coat, she wondered if it was still, in fact, her good coat. The seams were fraying under the armpits and the red lining needed to be pinned in place or else it hung beneath her hemline, wagging like a pervert’s tongue.
As she pinned the lining, her eye landed on the black bin bag that lay by the front door. It had lain there for weeks now, as though he was unsure if he were staying. Cal had given her his laundry already, but each time she saw the bag she cursed him, knowing that he had more to be washed.
She knelt and tugged and opened the knotted throat.
To her surprise, there were seven dresses stuffed in the bag, each more intricate than the last. The first dress was knitted from blush-coloured silk.
As she held it to the light, she could see the sky through it and the sky was prettier for it.
It was crafted from the tiniest, most elegant lace stitches and if someone told her they had been extruded from a spider’s spinneret she would have believed them.
These dresses were the most refined thing she had ever handled and here they were, left to moulder in a bag.
Their simple silhouettes had a Calvinist discipline, but in their delicacy, their sheerness, there was something of an undergarment about them, something private, profane.
She had been the one who taught Cal to knit.
But she could never imagine the beauty that he could dream up; her mind didn’t conjure things it had never seen before.
She returned them to the bin bag and the last dress shimmered in the blackness, bright as a moonlit puddle.
Earlier that morning, she had struggled up the stairs to dig Cal from his bed.
It was half past ten and he was lying with his eyes open, staring at the ceiling like a paraplegic.
He had been at the late shift for two weeks now, weaving until past midnight.
Then afterwards he crept into the living room and hunched close to the television.
He watched Channel 4 with the volume turned down, his nose so close to the screen that, as she spied on him, her own nose itched in sympathy.
She had torn open his curtains and handed him a yoghurt that was past its sell-by date. She searched her pockets, but she had forgotten a spoon. As he propped himself up in bed, he sniffed the yoghurt and dipped two fingers into the tub.
“I’m going to see your mother. D’ye want to come?”
“Oh.” He blinked. “Do you think she would loan me some money?”
“She might. She’s dying to see you. Couldn’t give two hoots about me.”
Cal rolled onto his back. He hooted like an owl, hoo-hooo, hooo-hoooo, as though she were not even there.
Eventually, he grew bored of it and rolled onto his elbow again.
He sucked some yoghurt from his fingers.
“You said she was doing well?” When Ella nodded, he added, “Well, that’s good. Tell her I’ll visit soon.”
“Would you go see her if I telt ye she was unhappy?”
She watched him be offended. Then she watched him flounder for a response. But before he could answer, she turned and left without saying goodbye.
Ella didn’t like to drive. She had the tendency to stay too long in the lower gears, screeching her way round the bays.
Cal had shown her many times where to change the gears, how to coast along in third and then gun it into second at the foot of the hill, but she never seemed to remember.
The road twisted so often that she was scared of losing control.
She let the car struggle and scream and drove it like it was a golf cart.
She had mixed feelings about the battered Sunbeam.
She could remember the day the men brought the car over from Scalpay and how they had waited for months for the sea to be calm enough.
John laid planks across Donnie’s fishing boat and drove the car onboard it like it was nothing at all.
The boat sat low in the water, the car dangling out over the sea.
One angry wave and it would capsize the creeler and drown them all.
After Cal was born, John had become friendly with some church men from over Breacleit way, a group of amateur enthusiasts who took part in rally races on the weekends and gathered to watch the champion-ships on the telly.
The Sunbeam was to be a restoration project for John, but it was also a gift for Grace: a chance for a little more independence.
When it arrived on the jetty it was clear to Ella that the car was in such a state of disrepair that it would run up and down the ribbon road, but it would go no further.
It would never have its road tax, nor pass its MOT, and there was no money to have it insured.
When Ella saw it, she knew what John was doing.
She thought the red car was a leash, a tether, a sense of freedom without the actual liberation.
But when Grace climbed into it that first time, it hardly mattered that she didn’t know how to drive.
She didn’t care that the wing was salvaged from another vehicle, or that the seats in the back had been removed to make it lighter for cornering.
Many of the houses had a motor like this and one or two others rusting away on bricks. There had been talk of the Chinese sending tankers around the world to buy up all the island scrap, but until then, everything was left where it had broken down.
Ella hunched over the wheel as she drove. She came to a derelict blackhouse that belonged to her mother-in-law’s family.
When she was a newlywed, Old Calum and she had used it as an escape, a hideaway of sorts, even though it was only half a mile up the road.
When they were trying for children, she would pack a hamper, and they’d come and spend the warm summer nights here.
It filled her with sadness, to see it go from a lovers’ nest to a storage shed.
Ella parked the car and clambered up the overgrown path.
It was a long, low building laid up of stone and sod, and if she would have seen it on the mainland, she would have sworn it was a cow shed.
There was a knack to opening the door. It had warped in the frame and she had to lift it and force it with her shoulder, much like a bailiff might.
She was getting too old to do it. That anyone should see a woman grunt like this would be the talk of the church.
The Morrison blackhouse had fallen into such disrepair that she felt as though she had let all of Calum’s ancestors down.
Several windowpanes had smashed one winter and in the thaw all the textiles sprouted black with mould.
With no fire in the grate, finches built their nests in the gable corners, mice tore at the mattress and shat in the drawers.
Then a section of the roof blew away. There had been two separate rooms but the dividing wall had liquified to mush.
Now there was a puddle in the middle of the dirt floor and the surface was skittering with midges.
No matter how often she asked John to mend the roof, he never seemed to get around to it.
Yet he found the time to fill the blackhouse with bits of his own junk: the generator that would no longer generate, the painted doors he had salvaged, any of which could have repaired the roof until he could find the time to go up island and buy supplies.
Ella straightened the tatty nets and wiped the dead flies from the window ledge, which though it was a waste of time, made her feel a little better. It was indecent how her life had been left behind and exposed to the elements, lying here for anyone on the road to see.
She liked to come to the house now and again and look through all the things from her past. The items that were truly meaningful she had rescued long before, but the house still held some odd ends of furniture and little outdated things, all the trinkets that Grace had whined about not having enough space for, her dishes and towels that all seemed to have a pattern or a fleck of colour that Grace didn’t like.
The drawers on the kitchen sideboard had buckled and when she opened them now, she stepped back for fear of what might be scuttling about.
Inside was a set of brown bowls painted with crude Canadian geese that Grace had hated for being too ‘poor-looking’.
There was an old mariner’s lamp that reminded her of the nights she and Calum were first married.
They would set a candle in it and lie in bed, feeling smug as they listened to the rain drum on the tin roof.
What a relief it had been to discover that Old Calum was a considerate lover. He had the patience of a working man, a weaver’s respect for consistent rhythm. His lovemaking was unlike the immature and selfish lovers she had known in Glasgow, the townie boys who stuck it in and raced to a finish.
She met Old Calum Morrison when he shipped through Glasgow on his way to North Africa.
She had been dancing at the Locarno with her friends, a handful of them pretending they were more sophisticated than they were, all dolled up in their big sister’s dresses.
Ella’s elder sister, Annabel, was the most striking woman in the dancehall.
She had goitres in her neck and a serious problem with her thyroid.
Her illness made her eyes bulge and protrude in a way that made them seem like they could, given one hard bump – or as she joked, one hard fuck – simply pop out.