Chapter 8
a h-ochd / eight
Cal crouched by the water’s edge and studied his reflection.
His face had the start of a blackening bruise so large that he looked up at the clouds to see if he was in shadow.
His left eye was swollen, his brow was bleeding, his bottom lip had split in two places.
With trembling hands, he probed his tender nose.
The bleeding had stopped and he was surprised to find it unbroken.
He was nothing but a pile of grey tweed and viewed from the road he looked like any large boulder. He rolled forwards and pushed his bloodied face into the rock pool. He held it there as long as he could bear it. The salt stung his lip. The cold slowed the swelling.
He raised himself out of the water, before, in a bowing prayer, he drew a deep breath and pushed his face under again. He did this several times until the water no longer streaked pink. Then he sat back on his heels, stared out at the sea, and became heavy as a rock again.
The water came up to John’s chest. He was beyond the blue, out where the seabed disappeared and everything became a greenish swallowing black. The shore was slick with slime where the sea had abandoned it. The air was briny with kelp.
“Come here,” he said.
Nine years old and Cal was ankle deep in a rock pool, feet burning from the cold. His arms were hugging his chest and his face twisted away from the wind. Behind him, he could hear his grandmother pacing, wearing riverbeds into the pebbled shore.
“I can’t,” he answered in a whisper.
John nodded once in flat acceptance. He swam ten feet further out, as he had done four times already: two strokes for every single ‘no’. He was breaking the waves now, disappearing behind the peaks in a way that scared Cal.
“Come . . . here.”
Cal sucked his fingers in the babyish way that John hated.
He turned to Ella but she would not take her eyes off John.
“I can’t.”
His father dropped beneath the waves and was gone suddenly.
Cal stood on his tiptoes to look for him.
When John reappeared he was much closer, which took Cal by surprise.
His red-rimmed eyes were an unblinking, piercing blue.
Cal watched him push through the tide, his skin a florid pink, the thick black chest hair drying in the wind and springing back to life.
Cal sat down, rubbed his cold feet, then turned his attention to gathering tentacles of bladder wrack.
He could bear the embarrassment if he didn’t look at his father.
His shame was like a stain on the front of his shirt, he could forget about it until he found his father staring at him and then he looked down and saw himself through his father’s eyes and was reminded again of what a disappointment he was.
“The waves are too jumpy.” He wiped the dribble from his nose. “Maybe next time will be better.” It was the excuse his grandmother had presented for him all the times before.
His father never spanked him. He preferred to cuff him around the back of the head.
Then later, as Cal complained of headaches, he jabbed him between the shoulder blades.
When Cal turned twelve, John shook him in anger, and when Cal looked up at him piteously, John slapped him for the first time.
His slaps had the power to halt everything, the immediate cessation of whatever Cal was doing wrong.
They came with the expectation that Cal would find his feet quickly, would turn his attention to whatever he had been doing incorrectly, or too effeminately, or in a clicking repetitive way that ground on John’s nerves, and redouble his efforts and do it right this time.
John pushed through the water. He muttered something under his breath.
Cal looked up. “Tha mi duilich,” he said. I’m sorry.
John clamped his hand over the scruff of his neck, his long fingers almost encircling his throat, and like a puppy he intended to drown, he dragged his son into the surf.
He lifted him and threw him into the water, out past the blue, straight into the blackest part of the sea.
Cal spun, a whirling set of limbs, and cut through the surface with the blades of his shoulders.
The hallway between Beady’s kitchen and the single-room shop was piled high with articles bought in bulk.
Each month, an islander would give her a list of things they needed: simple supplies like bread or flour, or larger, more cumbersome things such as ironing boards or parts for an immersion heater.
Beady would go to Stornoway and if she couldn’t find it there, she would call the mainland and place the order to come by ferry.
In this way almost everything in Falabay passed through Beady-Màiri.
It offered her a central position in the community, and granted her – a woman with no status in the church – a way to busy herself in the lives of others.
Cal worried the tape on a box of adult nappies while Beady went in search of her first aid kit.
There was a pinboard above her telephone.
It held a map of the world, lit up with a constellation of royal blue map pins, one for each of her five surviving sons, all gone away to every corner in search of women or work.
Cal vaguely knew the younger Glennie boys, the youngest who was killed in a car accident, the next youngest who was now managing boats along the Panama Canal.
They had all grown up with his mother and any of them could have married Grace instead of his father.
Looking at the pins spread across the world, he harboured a sour, indirect anger.
Beady noticed him squinting at her map. Cal’s head was tilted, his good eye compensating for the swelling in his left.
She wiped her hands on her skirt, took a red pin and, sticking it into the English Midlands, she exclaimed proudly, “Our Gregor’s eldest just got into Loughborough.
Bright wee thing. Physics and Theoretical Physics. ”
Cal humoured her even though there was already a pin hole over Loughborough. He knew she had performed this ritual for every visitor who had come by.
She led him into her kitchen. She cleaned his face with a dish cloth. “Seems you’ve had a hard week?”
“I’m an idiot,” he said. “I fell coming round the hill.”
“You are an idiot,” she said. “At least that much is true.”
Beady-Màiri liked to wear her never-cut hair in a braid, twisted up into a neat chignon. As elder sister to both Donnie Macdonald and Jeanie Calder she was connected to most of the families along the ribbon road. She had known Cal since before he was born.
She took a sewing needle and poured Dettol over it. “I have navy or green. Heaven knows why I have green. But co-dhiù.”
“Navy. Please.”
He had interrupted her lunch and the pot of boiling potatoes made him feel lightheaded. “Do you have any hair dye I could buy?”
She stopped what she was doing. She removed her glasses, leaving them to hang by their silver chain. Her eyes were two violets in a bowl of milk. She had the hottest, coldest stare of anyone he had ever known. “You must have really banged your head to ask me that.”
“I know you can’t sell it to me, not today,” he said. “But could you give it to me? I’ll come back with money later in the week.”
He tried not to cry out as the needle went through his brow.
When she was finished, she led him through to the small shop. He had never come through the side door before and was suddenly disoriented like he had arrived somewhere foreign.
He gathered a bag of crisps, a pair of paper scissors, and a packet of disposable razors.
Beady presented the four shades of dye she kept hidden under the counter. As she bent over, a box of condoms fell on the floor. Too old to be nimble, she did a comedic shuffle and tried to stamp on them as though they were a mouse.
“You did not see those!” she said, as she kicked them out of sight.
“See what?” he said.
He considered a chestnut brown. It was a shade darker than his father’s.
She opened the ledger. All of their neighbours carried a running total of some kind, some were insignificant, others at least four months’ wages.
His father’s page was unblemished and seemed proud of it.
Beady smoothed her hand down it before she started transcribing the cost of everything.
Then she post-dated it all for the following Wednesday.
When he left Beady’s, he was surprised to see strangers at the slipway.
The men were working, shouting, violating the Sabbath peace.
There was a deep-sea trawler in the bay, its netting rig hung slack and trailed in the water like a long white arm dragging its fingers through the waves.
The broken rig caused the boat to list dangerously, the scum line on its hull indecently exposed.
As Cal drew nearer, he saw the markings for Oban, which was not far, but far enough from here.
He couldn’t recall seeing a long line trawler in Falabay; their bay was not deep enough to give port to industrial boats.
The fishermen gathered outside the inn. They were fighting amongst themselves and cursing in low Glaswegian with the restless fidgeting of a group that could not gain consensus.
They seemed little more than teenagers, work experience boys, or outward-bound -students – Glasgow neds who should be drinking up the unders at Fury Murrays.
They wore trendy trainers, thin jumpers, and tracksuit bottoms. The captain was the only man in a waterproof jacket.
He was listening to the others vent their frustrations with all the patience of a weary father.
One of the men-boys, a young man with a dossan of white-blonde hair, was chewing his lip in mutiny. He was a distance from the others, ignoring their infighting.
He was the only man to notice Cal as he slipped along the waterfront.
Cal cupped his hand over his brow and shielded his bruised face as though he was bothered by a bright sun. The sun was low and distant and far behind him.