Chapter 12 #2
After she left, Ella would bring Cal to the concrete bus shelter on a Saturday, and if the weather was fair, he and Grace would spend a few hours walking the hills, eating sandwiches and the stack of chocolate bars that his mother now seemed to stock her handbag with.
When she fell pregnant with Abby, the walking petered out.
After she gave birth, his father would only let him visit on those Saturdays that were neither Communion, nor busy with crofting work.
By the time he went up to lodge at the Nicolson Institute, he was so relieved to be home for the weekend that he no longer wanted to spend hours on a Saturday travelling to and from his mother’s new life on the far side of the islands.
As he grew up, he began to understand that if he remained with his father at least his mother could be some small part of his life. If he had gone with Grace, it was likely that his father would never have spoken to him again. Grace must have known this all along.
“I saw him the other week,” she said, expelling a plume of smoke.
“Who?”
“Your father. I saw him at the big shop. He thought I didn’t notice him, but I clocked him the minute I walked in.
He was handsome as ever – the bastard.” Grace picked up the Letraset transfer and placed the J on some clean paper.
Using her thumbnail, she scratched the letter until she had transferred it to the page.
“You know he hid and watched me? I had to pretend to be looking in the freezer. You’ve never seen a woman seem so interested in chipolatas. ”
“He went to the big shop without me?”
“You’re missing the point.”
“No. The point is I wish you would both grow up.”
She pouted and tilted her head as if to say, fair enough. “Your grandmother was an awful colour when I saw her last. I thought she needed dialysis.”
He was still stewing over the fact that his parents insisted on acting like children.
He took a breath and then let the air out very slowly.
“It’s the sunbed. She doesn’t even take her clothes off.
She just lies there like a fish supper. She’s getting weirder, Mam.
She says the Blackface ewe talks to her.
That it tells her what’s happening on the road. ”
“It’s the women from the church. They could never mind their own.”
“I know that,” he said, but it was not entirely true. There had always been a part of him that wanted to believe his grandmother was special, that she was not just another gossiping woman. “Could I borrow a couple of pound till I get paid?”
“Of course,” she said without hesitation.
She found her purse amongst the invoices on the table and with a downturned hand, she passed him a small sheaf of notes.
Without looking at it, he thanked her, and put them in his pocket.
He fingered the notes and guessed it was about fifteen or twenty pounds in fivers.
The kettle boiled. He filled the mugs and left the teabags to steep.
As he stood at the sink the daylight broke through the clouds.
The light revealed the bruising that sat buried within his skin.
The colour presented as a hollowness, as though the left side of his face was made of ice that was too thin to walk on.
Grace saw it. She gave a small whimper. “You should just leave . . .”
He dropped his chin and stared through her with a bored sort of disbelief. “You make it sound so easy.”
She had hurt him twice. Once by running away and then again by not running far enough.
She had told him, over and over, that she had wanted to be free of his father, but that she would never want to be free of him.
She had gone just far enough to still be near and like a sickly plant transplanted into better soil, she had blossomed fully.
She became a woman he didn’t recognise. It hurt to see her happy without him.
He picked up one of her soaps and sniffed it. It smelt a little like Flash’s inn.
“Whisky and peat smoke,” she said, reading the label. “It’s so funny to me. I mean, imagine how mortified you would be if someone said that you smelt like drink and old fires! God bless every American that claims they’re ten per cent Scottish.”
He would have liked to own some of his mother’s soaps, but if his father smelt it on him it would only start a fight. He knew his grandmother scrubbed herself with carbolic every time she returned from an afternoon at Grace’s.
He sniffed his way through all the new recipes as Grace came and stood beside him. She rested her hand on his shoulder and brushed his hair away from his face. “You can bleach your hair all you like but you look more like your father with every passing year.”
It was hard to be the son of such a handsome man. Cal felt he looked like an inferior copy, a discount-shelf second.
The children had moved outside. They were chasing each other around the house. As their bodies ran in one direction their hair blew across their faces in another. The bare buttocks of the youngest girl were chapped raw from the wind.
Cal rapped on the window. “Oi! Put some trousers on her!”
The older children, unaccustomed to commands, tried to drag the youngest away but she held firm, squatted, and released a defiant jet of piss. All the while she smiled sweetly up at him.
His mother laughed. “Is Bella peeing like a dog again?”
“Yes,” he said. “She is.”
It was raining but the children begged him to come out and play.
The four of them cooried in the leeward side, lined up, pressed tight against the pebbledash like they were facing a firing squad.
He called them forward and birled them until they cackled with joy, until his arms felt like they might come loose at the shoulder.
Up, up into the air they swung and when they hit the Atlantic wind, they shrieked with terrified delight.
The muscles of his back quivered with effort, but he twirled them and threw them, giving each their three seconds of flight.
Once or twice, their palms slick with excitement and rain, they slipped from his grip, spun in the air, and skidded to the earth, grazing their knees.
They stood and did a rain dance of sorts and then ran back to his side, keen to be thrown again.
When he couldn’t lift them any more, they pulled the tarpaulin from the cement mixer. He helped them peg it out with bricks and they made a lean-to den where they could gather from the rain. He played teacups with the girls. Bella was garbling in a language that wasn’t Gaelic or English or human.
Eventually he left them playing and went in search of his mother. Grace was gathering clothes pegs that the children had scattered over the grass. He checked the time. He stood on his tiptoes and watched the bus that would deliver his grandmother winding its way across the moors.
“I should go,” he said. “It’s easier if we’re not both missing at the same time.”
Grace took his arm. She clung to him.
“I have to go, Mam.”
She sighed. “You know, I was eavesdropping on your granny as she was bathing Bella. She was singing to her, teaching her some sounds, baa, woof, meow, farm animals and the like. Anyway, Bella would say, ‘What noise does a chicken make, Granny?’ And your granny would go, ‘Cluck!’ Then it was ‘What noise does a lamb make, Granny?’ And your granny would go, ‘Baa!’ Then it was ‘And what noise does a cow make, Granny?’ And your granny said, ‘Boo!’ And Bella wagged her finger and says, ‘Don’t you mean moo, Granny?’ And your granny goes, ‘No, I mean Boo. Boo! Cos this is fuckin’ boring! ’”
He covered his face with his hands and laughed. “I’m so sorry.”
“Oh, don’t be,” she said. “Bella has had a high time telling everyone at nursery they’re ‘fuckin’ boring’.
I was mortified. It cost me a fortune in apology soaps.
Look!” she cried suddenly, pointing into the distance.
There were deer on the moor, they shone like pennies in the broken sunlight.
After a time she turned to him and asked, “Do you even want all this?”
“Want what?”
“This,” she waved her hand across the moors. “To be home. To be here.”
“One day. But not yet. I want to do something with this degree first.”
“First time you’ve mentioned it.”
“Do you remember when Sorley MacInnes told everyone he was moving home to write a book? Now every time someone sees him, the first thing they ask is, ‘where’s that book?’”
“You’re allowed to dream, Callie.”
“Am I?”
Grace took him by the hand and led him around the side of the house.
She had planted a raised herb garden that she used for her soap-making.
It was dying back for the winter, but he could tell from how neat it was that she attended to all her worries out here.
She plucked some withered leaves from a twiggy green bush.
“I love rosemary.” She popped the leaves in her mouth and chewed them.
“Has your granny spoken to you about the tenancy?”
“No. What about it?”
“She’s getting older, Callie. Her health is more of a worry than she lets on. She wants to make sure it’s all taken care of. That everything’s squared away just as she wants it.”
“Yeah? And how does she want it?”
“Safely in Morrison hands. She feels she owes it to your grandfather.” She ran her hand up a stem and in one fluid motion stripped it of dead leaves. “She spoke to the Crofting Commission. She plans on assigning the tenancy to me.”
“She what?”
“I would hold it for you. Just until you were ready. I suppose if you ever make it big in New York or Milan, and you didn’t want it, then our Abby or Thomas might—”
“You would throw my dad out? Or are you hoping he’d be so ashamed he’d just leave?”
“Your great-grandfather, Calum Morrison, built that house. It doesn’t belong to your father. It never did.”
“He works the land. It belongs to him as much as it belongs to anybody.”
“Well, things have changed. It hasn’t worked out as it was meant to.”
“You, Mam!” He jabbed his finger at her. “You’re the reason it didn’t work out!”
Grace grabbed his finger and held it. “Like I said, you get more like your father with every passing year.”
The children stopped their play. They started to gravitate towards their mother, inching towards her as though it were a game of statues.
Even Bella, who would not give him a moment’s peace, let go of his leg and wrapped herself around her mother’s thigh like a monkey leaving one tree for another.
The wind picked up and threw all their hair across their faces, and then blew it off again, and in those bare, exposed faces, there was nowhere for their shock to hide.
He looked away. “So what? Ella’s going to sign over the house and the land to you, and he gets what? A carriage clock? Does he know about this?”
“No.” Grace wiped her hands on her trousers. “And you can’t tell him.”
He gazed out over the moor. He could see his grandmother coming along the road, she moved slowly but she was making progress.
Ella wouldn’t have needed to have said anything directly.
There would have been the Crofting Commission letters on the door mat.
Or Beady-Màiri might have mentioned that Ella had written to the factor.
Or Ella might have asked Flash or Innes how a person goes about transferring a croft tenancy to a new owner, thinking she was being casual, thinking she was being roundabout, not knowing that the men shared a network that was as quiet and gossipy as the women’s.
Any of these things would have alerted his father to what Ella planned to do. John knew. Cal was certain of it.
“It’s your grandmother’s tenancy. She can do what she likes.”
“Please. Just let my dad live there. Let him die there. Don’t shame him like that. Don’t rip it out from underneath him.”
The land that he was standing on had been the Macleod tenancy. John had lost his own family plot to his wife and his older brother, and now she was circling back around to pick over the last of the bones.
Cal screwed his eyes shut as the children went back to playing, as his mother picked the weeds from the flowers, and his grandmother came through the gate whistling Patsy Cline.