Chapter 11 #3
He stood up and went to the sideboard. “Do we have any old photos of me?”
She picked up the 501s and inspected her stitchwork. “There’s one of you on the beach, riding Alistair’s ponies.”
“I was four.” He rummaged through the cluttered drawers. “I mean a recent photo. I’m entering a beauty pageant.”
“You’ll be fucked if they give marks for personality.”
Cal removed his old Nicolson portrait from the glass cabinet. He was fifteen and gormless, his short brown hair damp with its own grease. He unclipped the frame and found the spare copies inserted into the back. He took one and hurried upstairs.
He braced his bedroom door with his chair, then lying back on his bed, he switched on the lamp and studied the image.
It looked nothing like him, but to take another photo, to catch the bus up to Stornoway and have it developed at the chemist, would take too long.
He wondered if they even had a camera. He could not recall ever seeing one.
Resigned to having nothing better, he doctored the photo with a biro, squaring the jawline slightly, filling in the stripes on his school tie so that it appeared solid navy.
Then, unable to help himself, he drew long hair to his shoulder, and filled it in with hundreds of frantic little scribbles.
It looked like an indigo fright wig. He buried his face into his pillow and bellowed.
He had read Our Lady of the Flowers in college, carrying it everywhere in his Bible bag and then, with tremendous grief, abandoning it in a public bin far from his digs.
He became obsessed with the burly convicts who traced around their bloated erections.
The prisoners who created outlines made up of a thousand little pin pricks on seemingly blank pages, that they posted to their lovers knowing their lovers would hold the page up to the light and press the outlines of their dicks to their chests, their noses, their lips.
He dropped his trousers and teased his cock through the slit in his boxer shorts.
Wiping it on the hem of his T-shirt, he caressed it, running the foreskin back and forth over the glans until he became hard.
He pressed his erection against the page and traced around the outline, travelling carefully up one side till it reached the angry, swollen head and then curving back down the other.
He stood back and looked at the length of it on the foolscap, feeling proud at each line the marker had crossed off in length.
He took care in adding the wispy curls of pubic hair and then, with the broad side of a purple crayon, he rendered the thick vein that ran along the shaft.
Then he coloured the entire thing with a daub of peach watercolour that he reconstituted with spit.
When he was done, he licked his thumb and tried to clean the ink stains off his penis.
The ink was waterproof, indelible, and the rubbing took more and more spit, a palmful of it, until it fell into a more considered rhythm which, by the time he realised what he was building to, seemed a shame to terminate, and so he finished and ended with a silent moan, one sock stuffed in his mouth, the other staunched over the end of his cock.
When he was calm again, he considered the drawing and was -horrified – not by its vulgarity, but by how terrible it was, how perversely childish it looked.
Pulling his trousers up, he crept downstairs to the dormant fire. He fished around in Ella’s knitting basket until he found some needles and a boule of pink yarn. He crept back upstairs and bolted the door.
Lying on the single bed, he waited for the blood to fill him again.
He knitted around his erection, starting at the base and laying each stitch the same way a bricklayer builds a chimney around the flue, or the way Ella knit a turned-heel sock.
Even though he took care – and even though he was well-enough endowed – it didn’t take long to knit.
He followed the gentle curve, increasing the stitches for the thickening, knitting the fabric back on itself to create the foreskin.
He decreased the stitches towards the head.
He did it in such a neat, refined way that he almost wanted to show his grandmother.
He finished the tip with a tiny inverted seam.
He stuffed the phallus with toilet paper, then he debated whether or not he should send it. The cock was both adorably childish and at the same time cartoonishly obscene. If nothing else, he hoped Billy would get a laugh.
The following day, as the letter went into Beady’s sack, he was gripped by a sense that he had gone too far.
The Landy rumbled over the sheep grid. After five weeks away, the Glaswegians had returned to repair their disabled boat, confirming that whatever business they were in, it was not fish.
As the Macleod men drove past, they saw a small rowboat full of supplies working its way to the lilting trawler.
There was the spark of an ethylene blowtorch and the low rasp of a grinder working through metal.
Cal ran into Beady’s for a can of Lilt. Two of the young men were picking through foodstuffs and squeezing the days-old bread.
Beady was glowering at the back of their heads, certain to charge them extra for their ill-manners.
She reminded Cal that Isla was leaving in a few days, and that if he was going to say goodbye to her niece, then he should hurry up and do so.
He got back in the Defender and they drove on towards the fank.
Half a mile along, they spotted the handsome fisherman with the mess of white-blonde hair.
He was walking up the path to the manse and John slowed to watch him.
“You don’t think he knows the piss doctor, do you?
” John pulled over. The men watched the Glaswegian, wondering if he knew the urologist and, if he did, speculating if he was selling drugs or buying them.
Then it occurred to them that perhaps he was scouting the houses, looking for something to rob, when, to their surprise, he knocked on the door and, all smiles, he was swiftly admitted.
“I never trusted that Englishman,” said John as he started up the engine again. “Whatever work the boy does for him, I hope he gets cash up front.”
They continued down the road, and as they passed the house Cal looked at the driveway. There were no cars parked outside, no sign of the urologist or his quite-quite wife.
They arrived at the common grazing. Cal took the dogs up the hill and brought the sheep to the men.
The lambs were trusting little things, long-legged and frisky and yet to grow into their erect, inquisitive ears.
He was enjoying the mild weather so he took his time and herded them round the bay while his father waited at the fank with Innes.
With the low sun at their backs, their eyes were obscured by the brim of their bunnets but he knew they were watching his every move.
It was a great annoyance to John that the wool they needed for the tweed had to be imported from the mainland.
It came from the Lowland Cheviot, their fleece much softer and less tangled than the local flocks.
Their island sheep were hardly worth the shearing because their wool got such a low price at market.
Their wool was harsh to the touch, good for underlay, or for insulation where it could be useful without coming into contact with the skin.
The men separated the lambs for the cull, feeling the fat on their ribs and choosing this one over that, with all the remove of heartless Gods.
Cal wanted to believe their hand was guided by experience or a sense of fairness, but he could not discern the pattern in their selection.
They set aside the fattest lamb for meat, the next fattest they kept because it would make good breeding stock. It seemed too random.
“Why,” he had asked as a boy, “why that one?”
John had tried to explain it to his son, but any reasoning he gave, any knowledge he tried to impart, sent Cal scurrying for a loophole.
This lamb is too weak to breed. Then there is not enough eating on it!
This one here is nice and fat. Then think of all the fat wee lambs it might make next year!
Because. Was all his father said now. Because.
They were meat. They were money on legs.
His father set aside twenty-six lambs for slaughter. But he spared the smallest lamb, which Cal took up into his arms.
Innes loaded the others into the church van to be taken away and butchered.
It was better not to think about all the dark mornings and the knife-like rain, or the stink of sheep dip, the parasitic worms and the scabbing. It was better not to weigh the hour upon hour of lugging bags of feed to the fank against so little money.
He buried his face in the lamb’s neck and felt her ears tickle his cheek. He had a feeling that the road was unspooling beneath him, but no matter how fast he ran, he was no further along.
Later that week he went to the inn to collect his wages. It was Friday night and so he had a pint and chatted with Flash for a while, hoping that Doll would show his face. He nursed his drink for as long as he could but there was no sign of Doll, and so he called it a night and headed home.
When he came into the long room, his father was reading the paper while his grandmother sat on the couch, chuckling at a variety show. Cal could tell the television was bothering John; he had his head in his hands and he was digging his fingertips into his temples.
It was the exact same scene from all the Friday nights of his youth.
And, if they lived long enough, then it would be the same scene, ten, perhaps twenty years from now.
Ella stretched her legs, her slippers dangling off the peg of her toes.
“There’s a parcel for you. Beady came by specially.
Mind and thank her next time you see her. ”
“OK,” he said. “I will.”
He went to the kitchen table and smiled to himself when he saw his name written in Billy’s slanted hand. He picked it up and wishing them goodnight, he headed up the stairs.
He couldn’t wait to reach his room, so he paused on the top landing and tore the parcel open. Out fell the doctored photo. Out fell the knitted cocksock and a short note scribbled on the back of his own letter:
Cal,
I don’t think you’re what I am looking for.
Wishing you all the best and that,
Billy.