Chapter 11
aon-deug / eleven
There were three weeks until Isla left for university.
He stayed close to home and passed his days tending to the sheep, preparing the lazy beds, applying himself to chores around the house.
In the early evenings he went down to the water’s edge to read, then he came home and wove cloth till late in the night.
On Saturdays he went to the inn and scrubbed the toilets.
On Sunday he dragged his face to church. The weeks rolled into one.
The man from the lonely hearts never wrote back.
Each morning, he tried to reason with himself so he wouldn’t be hurt again the following day.
There were other men on the mainland, so why should William reply to him?
He knew enough to know that men didn’t want what they couldn’t touch.
They didn’t chase what they couldn’t fuck.
He didn’t even know if William was who he said he was.
He didn’t know if William was, in fact, a man.
Ella loved telly programmes about hopeful fools like him, those so desperate to be loved that they believed beyond the point of delusion.
She loved shows about the lonely housewives who put all their retirement money into importing young African husbands, or the cephalopodic men who conned teenagers into meeting by pretending to be misunderstood popstars.
Her absolute favourites were the chubby homosexuals who wrote graphic letters to inmates while pretending to be young sluts.
She believed there was something in everyone that longed to be fooled and it was never the charlatan she was angry at, it was always the fool.
She loved to see the disappointment on their faces and Cal supposed it made her feel better about her own retreat from the world.
No matter how his mind tried to insulate him from rejection it seemed the mutinous corners of his heart wanted to be hurt. The next morning, he followed the same superstitious routine. He got his hopes up and, in the turning of the envelopes, was crushed again when there was still no reply.
In the third week of September, he overheard his father telling Ella that he had picked up a few days’ work rewiring the old manse for the urologist and his wife.
It should have paid him a fair wage, but just as John was finishing the job, the Englishman asked him if he was licensed.
When John said he wasn’t, but that he had thirty years of experience and had wired every single light they could see on the headland, the urologist pulled a long apologetic face – no different in reality from his usual resting expression – and told John that he wouldn’t pay the sum they had agreed to, that the work was now worth less.
While John was out working, Ella found some packets of jelly at the back of the cupboard, dusty leftovers from one of Cal’s birthdays.
She made three different jellies and set them in large Pyrex bowls.
Then she and Cal sat on the settee and watched a marathon of Carry On films, spooning globs of green, red, and sherbet yellow into their mouths, and pushing it between the gaps in their teeth.
It had been several weeks since his father had last spoken to him, then entirely out of the blue, John addressed him twice in the same day.
The first time was to tell Cal that he would be sending the cloth up to the mill for darning and scouring.
The second time was to tell him to stop playing with the dogs.
His face had almost healed but when John spoke to him it was directed to the empty space next to Cal’s left ear.
If Cal shifted into that space, then John tilted his gaze upwards and spoke to the void where a halo would never hang.
Cal preferred that to the times his father stared at the centre of his chest. John’s scowl made him check his clothing for stains.
One look could make him feel that the T-shirt he was wearing underneath his shirt, jumper, and jacket, was somehow dirty.
Then, on a bluish day near the end of a greyish September, Cal gave in completely. He tied his hair back and went to the shed. He watched his father’s eyes fly across the warp in time with the shuttle and felt jealous for the attention. “Would you like a cup of tea?”
John hadn’t heard him enter. He ceased his pedalling and their eyes met for the first time in weeks. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, thanks.”
Cal went back to the house unaware that he was smiling. Ella was sorting through some baby cardigans, ready to run them down to Beady’s. She stopped her folding, sat back, and watched him light the gas and put the kettle on the flame.
“Did I hear you two say something civil?”
“Would you like a cup of tea?”
“No danger. Wouldn’t do to let ye poison us both from the same pot.”
He licked his finger and dipped it in the sugar bowl. “Have you no biscuits?”
“Did you buy any?” She went back to her sorting. Her cigarette was all ash. “I have a peach yoghurt if you want?”
Cal said he would, even though peach was his least favourite flavour and he was sure Ella knew that. He opened the heavy fridge. There was no yoghurt inside.
“I cannae keep it in the fridge,” she said. “You’ve no self-control.”
The ash from her cigarette dropped onto her knitting.
She wiped it away but there was the acrid tang of burning wool.
Cal had seen the tourists’ eyes light up when they picked up one of her pieces, their expression quickly souring when they held the blanket to their noses.
He boiled the tea in the pot. Then he covered the teapot with a knitted cosy that she had jacquarded with a version of her own smiling face.
It was so old and familiar that no one noticed the strangeness of it any more.
He loaded the tea tray and carried it to the shed.
He poured himself a cup, but he left his father’s steeping, knowing he preferred it without milk, a tar so black it absorbed all the light.
John seemed pleased for the break. He looked Cal in the eye as if the last few weeks had been nothing at all.
“If you’re making the tea then who needs Ella? ”
“Careful,” he said. “You know these Glaswegians. She’ll be unionised.”
John chuckled. He nodded at the television. It was playing the afternoon news. The prime minister was in a spliced montage, a small ferrety face with a perpetual grin, shaking hands at a biscuit factory and then at a naval base.
“What sort of man grins on a nuclear submarine?” said John, not expecting a response.
Cal let his gaze wander outside. The earth was turning darker, deepening into burnt umbers and drab greens.
He glimpsed his grandmother waddling across the rocky ground.
She was hunkered low as though she was searching for something, strafing slightly as though under fire.
She came to a thin stream and she rolled up one sleeve and plunged it into the water.
She fished around and then stood up with some difficulty, holding a tub of yoghurt in her hand.
John started picking lint from the warp, which signalled he was ready to get back to work. Cal poured a little more tea. He tilted the mug to his father who nodded his approval at the colour, before Cal resumed pouring. He filled it to the top.
“How is it nearly October?”
Cal expected a lecture on the cloth’s progress. He had been stealing half an hour from either end of his shift because he was tired.
“We missed the guga harvest.” His father nodded at the television again.
It was playing a repeat of a cultural segment from the end of August. A reporter was talking to animal rights activists up on Lewis.
They were protesting the annual hunt for the juvenile gannets because a tradition the men had upheld for centuries had recently caught the attention of Guardian readers.
The protestors were lined up in thick Aran knitwear and expensive Berghaus jackets.
There was a proud shimmering on the screen when the afternoon light caught wellingtons unsullied by peat or mud of any kind.
Cal hated the juvenile gannet meat and its fetid, pungent flavour that placed it closer to fish than fowl, but he felt defensive as the television showed the protestors surrounding the hunters as they attempted to load their boat.
The men went to Sùla Sgeir, a hard, dangerous trip by trawler, where they camped for weeks on a colony rock in the middle of the Atlantic.
On their return, all of Ness met the hunters on the waterfront to claim a portion of the salty, fermented seabird.
John sucked his teeth. “They should leave the men alone. Let them feed their families.”
“All those kids I met at college, they want us to be these old-fashioned, romantic things and yet they’re horrified when they learn we kill the lambs they eat. You can never win. You’re to be a tourist attraction. A smiling waxwork in the museum of Scotland.”
“Well, my knees are melting.”
Watching the protestors, Cal was reminded of the things he had hated most about university.
Although it was a friendly, intimate campus he had still been entirely unprepared for the sudden confrontation with privilege.
He thought of all the well-to-do students who talked endlessly about purpose while demonstrating so little.
Most of the women were comfortably middle class, some came from a posh Edinburgh set, and a few were sent north from the Home Counties for a taste of the wild Scottish frontier.
Those women had attended fancy schools and went on foreign holidays twice a year.
It hardly mattered if they passed or failed.
For them studying textiles was something inoffensive to do before they married, or before one of their father’s cronies gave them a job in advertising.
They would never in their wildest nightmares consider working in an actual mill.