Chapter 12
dhà-dheug / twelve
On the day Isla was set to leave, Cal rose early.
He was keen to avoid any awkward goodbyes so he told his father he was going to the inn, but instead, he hitched his way to the west coast of Lewis.
The journey was about sixty miles. It took several hours of waiting and many changes of car, but in a final stroke of luck the mobile library passed by and carried him the last few miles, almost right to the bottom of his mother’s road.
Far out across the moor was a large glass house sitting all by itself.
It had no neighbours, none of the usual mess of houses within its eyeline.
It should have been proud of its seclusion, but the land surrounding it was boggy, worthless, and there was something about the house that felt excluded, unloved.
He stopped and lit a cigarette. He heard a soft singing which he assumed was the wind, but as it grew louder, he turned and saw a band of little girls walking towards him.
They marched against the sky, soft clouds whirling above them.
They came singing along the road like travelling pilgrims, eight little girls in two rows of four, holding hands in neat formation.
They wore matching dresses set with faceted gems, the teal cloth as iridescent as a capercaillie feather.
Each of the girls had a centre parting and a celestial coronet of white-blonde hair that was plaited and wrapped to the back of their head.
They took skipping steps, then almost as one, they turned and turned until their skirts were umbrellas spinning in the wind. He wondered if he was seeing things.
“Callie?” One of the girls broke rank. Her cheeks were pink with her mother’s rouge. She ran towards him, pausing a second to be sure it was him, then she flew into his arms and crushed herself against his chest. “Are you coming to see me?”
“Why else would I be on your miserable moors?”
Abby turned to her friends, beaming. “See, told you I had a big brother!” Then she squinted up at him. “What happened to your face?”
“Oh, you should have seen it!” he gasped.
“An almighty stramash! There were marauders on the shore. The Duke of Buccleuch in a tall ship! They had swords and big nets and they were trying to clear the land.” He pointed to the nearest settlement.
“We fought bravely but they were snatching all the women and girls, forcing them onto their boats, sailing them to Canada.”
“Canada!” The littlest girl had a sweet, piggy face. “You’re telling stories!”
“Am not,” he said. “We fought bravely. We drove them back, back to their ships but not before they stole your mother.”
The girl’s jaw dropped.
He pointed at a tall, anaemic-looking girl. “And your sister!”
“I don’t have a sister—”
“It all happened so fast!”
The girls looked at one another. There was a pause as though they were gaining consensus, deciding if they would go along with it. Then they screamed in unison. Then they screamed again because they’d enjoyed it so much the first time.
The little dancer tugged him away from her friends. “Ignore him. He’s an idiot!” She punched him in the arse cheek and he pretended to be mortally wounded.
Abby waved goodbye to the other girls and, taking him by the hand, they clumped across the moors. “So how come you look like one of those dolls they cover toilet rolls with?” he said.
“We’ve been at a dancing competition. We came in second!”
“You win any prize money?” he asked. “I’d pay you back.”
The house had a feeling of interrupted work about it. It was newly built, or nearly built – he wasn’t sure which. The window frames still wore their protective wrap and up under the eaves the moisture barrier flapped noisily in the wind.
Abby kicked the door in greeting and the driftwood sign that read Pàrras rattled on its chain.
Another little girl, younger than Abby, appeared at the top of the stairs.
She leapt bravely from the top step. There was no meat to her but the force almost toppled them both.
More children appeared, a young boy, and a toddler girl who was naked from the waist down.
They all had the same straw-coloured hair.
The four children bounced around him in excitement, even the toddler, who had no idea as to why she should be excited.
The hallway was still unpainted, the plasterboard covered in childish scribbles. Abby held his hand and chatted incessantly as she led him to the back of the house.
There was a man sitting in the morning light, facing an enormous plate-glass window that opened onto the moor. Uilleam Macleod stared at Cal with the same blue eyes of his father. Cal nodded and continued down the hallway.
His mother was working at the kitchen table, her chin resting in the cradle of her palm, her gaze unfocused.
There was an abalone ashtray heaped with her burnt-out thoughts, and at her elbow a cup of cold tea, filmy with milk.
She had been tallying invoices, making name cards for her soaps with a Letraset transfer sheet: Sea Salt, Marsh Orchid, Sweet Rose.
“Halò Mamaidh,” he said. Grace flinched like he was an intruder, which he realised he was. Cal prised his hand from Abby’s grip. “All right, give me five minutes to say hello.”
“And then you’ll whirl us?”
“I’ll whirl you till you’re sick.” He guided the dancer through the door and closed it at her back. He turned to his mother. He recognised himself in that face. The quick grey eyes, the aquiline nose that looked noble on her and broken, somehow violent on him.
“Seven weeks,” she said. “Where have you been?”
It would be easy to comfort her, any number of small things might explain his absence: the lack of money, the needs of the season, the church, the weaving, the sheep, his father. It was all true and yet none of it was enough. “It’s not the coming, Mam. It’s the leaving.”
Grace opened her arms and he went into her embrace.
Her hands were cold as she pushed them up the back of his jumper.
She checked the individual knuckles of his spine, like she had counted them once and wanted to check they were all still there.
She rocked him gently and he was sorry that he had stayed away.
“Your granny comes every week. Do you know how often I hoped you’d be with her?
” She took his face in her hands. The damage had almost healed, but she traced the soft skin under his eye socket, the fading scar on his brow. “What on earth happened?”
“Would you believe me if I told you there was a monster in the bay?”
She shook her head.
“Then I fell down a hill.”
She peered deep into his eyes, one and then the other. He couldn’t lie to her from this distance. He pulled away. “I can’t stay long.”
“Why not?”
“You know why.”
“You have to stand up to him, Callie.”
He tucked his shirt back into his waistband. “Can I have your notes for my improvement at the end of my visit?”
Grace tidied away some of her soaps and paperwork.
The kitchen was brand new, the appliances were stainless steel and the drawers opened easily and closed silently.
But there were power tools nestled amongst the provisions, spilt cereal said the children were fending for themselves again and in the corner, there was a bag of sheep pellets chewed through and surrounded by mouse shit.
Grace picked up one of her hand-made soaps. She weighed it in her hand as though she could tell what he was thinking. “I’ve been busy with work. And your Uncle Uilleam’s no help.”
“Please,” he said. “Don’t call him that. ‘Uilleam’ will do fine.”
He found the kettle and put it on the hob while Grace lit a cigarette.
She took a draw and pulled the smoke deep inside herself.
She nodded at the fridge and the children’s artworks that were pinned there.
“I found a new drawing the other day. It was of the family, all of us lined up in front of the house and underneath each of us was our name and our age and a little bit about what we liked, puppy dogs, spaghetti Bolognese, that sort of thing. I can’t keep track of who draws what.
So I pinned it to the fridge and thought nothing more of it.
” She tapped her ash into the shell. “Turns out he had drawn it. Uilleam. He was trying to remember us. Trying to keep us all straight.”
“He recognised me a minute ago. I could tell from his face.”
“There are good days. But he gets confused and then he gets angry at the children. He’s started this thing where he thinks everything is a copy, the children, the couch, the deer on the hill. He says someone’s stolen the real thing and replaced it with a copy.”
Cal took the cigarette from between her fingers and took two quick puffs. As he did so, he noticed some flattened boxes in the corner. The top one was for a portable commode.
“We’re sleeping in separate rooms,” she said. “That’s if he sleeps at all.”
John had been certain that Uilleam and Grace had kindled a relationship long before Grace left him, and even if it had not been consummated, it was still romantic in nature and a violation of their sacred bonds.
To John, she was a deserter and a whore either way.
To Cal, it made a world of difference. He wished he could ask her.
When his mother had walked out on them, he felt like she was walking out on him specifically.
It was a son’s selfishness. He was too young to consider that his mother might be a person outside of him.
In the months that followed, he had begged Grace to collect him and take him with her but she said she didn’t know where she would end up herself, and that he was safest there in Falabay with his father, and his grandmother, and his friends.
Perhaps it was where he was safest, but he knew it was not where he would be happiest.