Chapter 6 #2
Annabel had learnt to line her eyes with kohl – the men were staring anyway – and to turn her ill health to her advantage.
Under the mirror ball, the men were seduced by her sickness.
They found her mesmerising and the sisters laughed at the fools who would line up to buy her drinks.
Annabel was a beauty, inside and out, but Ella knew how different her sister could look in the morning light, hunched, hung-over at the kitchen basin, with her hair in sleep-snarled tangles, her mouth twisted in complaint, transformed from a Siren into a dishwater Medusa, a Gorgon of the middens.
There was the constant thrill of strange men passing through the city, boys from small towns, then the boys from the Highlands and Islands, and then after that, in shades of human that Ella had never ever seen before, came the Americans.
These men had a different understanding of a good time.
It wasn’t anything like the desperate drinking of her father and brothers.
Even though Calum Morrison was a decade older than her, she immediately thought of him as a mammy’s boy.
He was hale and broad-chested but to Ella he was dull, too watery and introverted to be of interest. He had been watching her, but then he had been watching everyone, with the cautious remove of a traveller in a foreign land.
As the crowd paired up for the night, they had been shoved along the bench towards each other, in the same way her mother paired socks, until all that was left were the odd ones.
He wore the tight-faced concentration of an island man trying to understand English, her Glaswegian English, which was nothing like English at all. No matter what funny thing she said, he looked at her earnestly. He was sincere in a way that made her think he was mocking her.
When she eventually excused herself, Calum stood up and cleared the chairs from her path.
He guided her towards her friends and shook her hand goodbye.
He asked for her address so he could send her a few Bible verses he found comfort in, as a token of his gratitude at having been given her company for the past hour.
Ella dared not look at her friends in case they erupted in laughter.
Her father had a vindictive temper. So she gave him the address of Miss Ferguson, the spinster who lived on the landing above hers.
Calum memorised the address without asking her to repeat it.
Ella forgot all about the islander until the first letter arrived a few weeks later.
Calum had written from a naval base in Plymouth.
He wrote in stilted English, the page a battlefield of crossed out words, often spelt phonetically.
She could sense his frustration in the heavy indent of his pen.
He wrote to her again, and even though she didn’t reply, he wrote to her again.
His letters began arriving every other week.
He omitted all news of the fighting and instead described the scenery of North Africa and up through Mussolini’s Italy as though he was rambling through the country on a peacetime holiday.
His letters read like a traveller’s diary and it was clear to her, a city girl, that he saw nature in a way she never had.
He seemed particularly fascinated by trees, and he bled through page upon page describing the blessed shade of the tamarisk and his delight at seeing the wagging cats’ tails of Italian cypress. The letters bored her.
She never intended to write back. But after three months of no reply, Calum still wrote to her as often as he could. There was something in his faith, his blind commitment to write. She had never met a man who would give something of himself without expecting something in return.
After several months she finally wrote back, having been shamed into it by Miss Ferguson who, when Ella said she couldn’t be bothered to reply, had hounded her down the street as she read aloud the names of the fallen from the evening paper.
Her co-workers at the biscuit factory were writing to three or four different soldiers at any one time.
They spent their lunch hour fabricating tender feelings and there was a practised efficiency to their letter-writing.
One girl dabbed perfume on her chest before blotting all the letters with her intimate sweat.
When one of the hair-netted bards came up with a heartfelt lie, they all cooed, copied it down, and added it to their own correspondence.
The first thing Ella wrote demanded that Calum stop quoting passages from the Bible.
Instead, she wanted him to tell her what the dresses were like on the Italian women, what colours did they favour, how did they set their hair?
Then came several weeks of silence where she wondered if she had gone too far in criticising his faith.
She was surprised to miss him.
Eventually, a letter arrived and in it was only one passage from Leviticus, which came at the end of a long description about Neapolitan women and how they oiled their skin to keep it smooth in the sun. He did his best to watch them, he said, but he did not like to stare.
They wrote to each other for over a year, him with great frequency, her with less.
It wasn’t that she felt much for Calum, but his letters began to make her feel safe and she realised she had something her sister did not: a man who wanted to know what she thought.
All the same, there were other men in her life, real men: drinking, laughing, fucking men.
She never stopped dancing with the Americans at the Locarno.
The second time they met was at an Italian cafe underneath the Trongate bridge.
Calum bought her something called a ‘frothy coffee’ and she was delighted with the dusting of cocoa powder.
He was handsome in his uniform, taller than she remembered.
He showed her how he had marked all her letters and underlined silly things he hadn’t understood, daft Glaswegian idioms, aberrations of English he had never heard before.
He was nervous and in the fleeting way he kept glancing at her, it was clear their correspondence had meant a huge deal to him and she was embarrassed to not feel the same way.
He was a gentleman and he had never professed his love to her, or admitted that he might harbour feelings, but she realised then, that perhaps that was just his indirect, timid way.
Perhaps it was the shock of his expectations, or perhaps it was the milky coffee that upset her stomach, but Ella felt suddenly uncomfortable sitting in the narrow booth.
She squirmed and apologised as she undid the zipper at the side of her skirt.
Her belly rose like proved dough and she lit a cigarette and sighed with relief.
Calum kept glancing up at her, but he said nothing.
She sucked a mint. She fiddled with her brass hoops. She lit another cigarette and wondered how long it might be before she could excuse herself.
When he eventually spoke, he chose his words very carefully. He started by saying he knew a thing or two about ewes and their rhythms. Then he apologised before asking her what colour she thought the baby might be.
Flash was changing the barrels when she arrived. “You’re looking well,” he said, as he poured her a warm lager and topped it off with lemonade. Ella felt pleased with her sunbed.
He seemed happy to talk about island politics and she pretended to be interested.
She was thinking about his thick head of hair, the copper curls that rolled and licked like fiery waves.
She could never admit it, but she liked to see him in his Sabbath suit; when he walked, his manhood swung heavy in the wool trousers.
It spoiled her daydreams slightly to remember that Jeanie, his wife, had once complained that he didn’t like a lot of kissing.
What a waste that was. He had such beautiful lips.
Ella waited for a lull in his tirade about the Comhairle.
Flash thought the island council was an old boys’ club, nothing but a shady gang of church elders who voted in their own narrow interests.
She asked him if he would take Cal on for some shifts, just one or two nights a week, enough to get him away from his father for a few hours.
He waved at the empty room. “I’ve not had a lodger in weeks.”
Flash supplemented his own wages by running a minibus service.
He couriered a young girl with cystic fibrosis up to Stornoway for physiotherapy even though it cost him half his take in diesel.
All the men cobbled together a living from any need they could meet.
They learnt to follow a day’s work: fixing leaks, driving fence posts, repairing dykes, doing anything that needed doing.
Ella drained her shandy. It helped with the ache in her heels. She said she would subsidise Cal’s wages from her pension, fifty-fifty, just as she had done when he was in school.
Flash looked sorry to disappoint her. “Times are harder now. Every mainlander wants a package holiday in Spain. They’d never think to explore their own back yard.”
Ella took a pen from her bag and scribbled sums on a coaster. If she used her pension and some savings she could pay his entire wage, at least for these first few months: eight hours split over two short shifts.
“But there’s nothing needs doing.”
She cast around. She could see a hundred little jobs that a man would never notice.
Flash had a sense he wouldn’t win. “I pity Big John. Bet he never gets his own way.”
Ella climbed down from the stool. “No. But he thinks he does and that’s all that matters.”
Sarah Macdonald was lurking behind her net curtains but she was foolishly lit from behind, creating a lean silhouette stencilled with an ear-of-wheat pattern. Ella rolled into view. She pipped the horn, chuckled, and gave her a wave.