Chapter 14 #2
The weather was so foul that Flash didn’t need him at the inn.
When they could face the rain, his father turned his eye outward, spreading mineral feed for the ewes, mending rotted fences, tending to the dormant beds.
In the worst of the weather the sheep were brought down from the grazing and put in Innes’s barn.
The tin structure rattled in the gale but it kept the sheep out of the cold, which helped keep the fat on them and the cost of feed down.
Christmas was quiet. To supplement her bursary, Isla had been forced to take a part-time job stacking shelves in a busy supermarket.
She complained that working caused her to be behind in her studies.
She said she needed to use the library and so she asked her parents for permission to stay on the mainland over the break.
Doll was still ignoring him and so Cal missed Isla with a yearning he had never felt before.
Ella knitted thick socks for her men. Cal received his gift with a quiet disappointment and wished she had given him money instead.
In the lull before the new year, their dull evenings were filled with homemade mince pies and English sitcoms. A few days before Hogmanay, the boredom got to be too much and so summoning the courage to face his father’s disapproval, he slipped away one morning and spent the day at his mother’s.
Grace seemed surprised to see him. They hadn’t spoken since they had rowed over the tenancy and the day felt strained and unnatural.
They went to great lengths not to mention his father or the croft and as he watched the children play on their brand-new bikes, he felt like he was intruding on an otherwise happy day.
He tried to compensate by forcing his own merriment but the children noticed the false edge to his laughter and eyed him with a slight wariness.
In the new year, the first of the winter storms fell upon the islands.
All the ferries were cancelled and Beady’s shelves went bare.
The mobile shops came round less often and Ella scratched through the cupboards, cutting mould from bread, making meals bulked out with oats.
They ate porridge in the morning, heavy with salt and sheep’s milk.
In the evenings she defrosted the last of the lamb and they had it with sprouting potatoes and a scoop of cold porridge as filler.
There was a brief respite in late January, a few strung-together days when the sun broke through the clouds and shoots of moor cotton started to show their tips.
Ella and Cal stepped outside, following the sun as it streaked across the hills.
They made a game of it and walked wherever it led, trying to stay in its faint glow, their faces tilted skyward in a kind of bliss.
“I feel like you’ve been avoiding me these past few months,” she said.
“And it took you this long to ask?”
“Have I done something to upset ye?”
“I don’t know, have you?”
When his mother had first told him of the plan for the tenancy, he had been furious with his grandmother.
Since then, Ella had been circling and whenever they lapsed into silence she would ask if he was OK, if there was anything he wanted to talk about?
He would answer as lightly as he could, that, yes, he was fine, and why bother talking, what was left to say?
He had resolved not to say anything to his grandmother about the assignation. His silence was selfish and he knew that and he was ashamed of that.
He could demand Ella sign the croft over to his father, but if he did that he worried she would want a guarantee that he would stay on in Falabay to inherit it.
He had been home for five months now, and with each passing month his return to the mainland seemed less likely.
He couldn’t take responsibility for his father’s future when his own was so uncertain.
They stopped to watch Bess limp across the peat fields.
The dog seemed drunk on the smells emanating from the thawing earth, dragging her muzzle in the dirt, snorting loudly.
His father had found an oozing lump between her toes that smelt like death when he pressed it.
He had wondered aloud if he’d get another season out of her and as Cal watched the poor beast limp across the peat, he thought again of his grandmother’s feet.
“I’ll never get used to the winters.” Ella plucked the cigarette from his fingers. She took a draw and passed it back. “I dreamt of a shopping arcade the other night. You know, a big covered hall full of shops and tearooms and hairdressers.”
“I know what a shopping centre is! So, go. Go back to Glasgow. You have a few quid tucked away.”
“Och, it’s never the same city I remembered.”
“Isn’t change the best part of a city?”
“Aye, but they destroyed it, din’t they?
Ran a big stinkin’ motorway through the heart of it.
Tore down the old tenements, shoved your Auntie Annabel into that poky high-rise flat.
Oh they loved it at first. But it was lit pigeons in a cage.
And that was afore it all went to shite – and my God did it fall to bits! ”
He took another drag and passed it to her. His grandmother’s reluctance to visit her hometown made no sense to him when his own longing for the mainland clouded every thought.
They walked a little further. The sun left the road and went out over the rocks where Ella could no longer follow it.
He studied her as she watched some rabbits scamper across the hillside.
Whenever Bess stuck her head into a warren, the rabbits escaped out the back door and hopped away without the old dog seeing.
It was an ordinary thing, but his grandmother cackled in wild delight and he wondered again at her boredom in that small house.
He held his arm out to her. “You’re a real Norma-no-mates, you.”
Ella took his arm and cooried into his side – delighted to be thought of, rather than offended by the thought. “I have friends,” she said. “I have you, don’t I?”
He escorted his grandmother back to the house. The sun was still streaking the land and so he packed his sleeping bag and his damaged, coverless Walkman and went out, over the hills.
As he climbed, he rewound the Inspiral Carpets tape that Doll had dubbed for him years ago.
He had given him the tape as a peace offering after they had fought over Depeche Mode.
It was Doll who compared them to Erasure and had guffawed when Cal said he loved Erasure, too.
Doll had argued passionately. He copied out the clumsiest couplets, which were lousy with spelling mistakes, and then he underlined them with disgust. He often got overexcited when debating something and listening to him could have the feeling of talking to a drunk person at four in the morning.
He would fall into the kind of proselytising monologue that happened too close to a sober person’s ear, the spittle of persuasion slick on the side of your face.
Cal never cared that much for Depeche Mode in the first place, but he wouldn’t lose an argument to a man who couldn’t spell ‘unnecessary’.
He stood on the summit as honking geese flew in time to the beat of ‘This Is How It Feels’.
He closed his eyes and tried to imagine himself in the middle of the Barrowland ballroom, people pressing in on every side, a lover’s hand searching for his own, feeling euphoric on eccie, happily claustrophobic.
He rejoined the road and walked along it until he came to the abandoned van.
It sat fifty feet below the road, rusting on the shore.
There were three skerries in the bay and in the low tide they rose from the sea like prehistoric beasts, covered in kelp, shaggy as sleeping mammoths.
When Cal was younger, he had seen the Macdonald children playing out there.
They swam to the skerries, chased the seals, and then claimed the mammoths as their own, dancing in circles in their bagged-out underwear.
He climbed into the van. The floor was spotted with sheep shit and broken glass. He swept the mess aside with the toe of his boot and spread out his sleeping bag. He cracked a warm lager and lay on his back listening to the first drops of rain hit the roof.
He pored through an old i-D magazine, studying the fashion and the street style photography of Black kids running round South London.
There was a time he had obsessed over the credits and memorised everything they wore and where they had bought it.
He had cared about it all so deeply once. Now it felt like another life.
He lay there for an hour or more, until it was too dark to read.
There was a rustle of plastic and the squeak of rubber boots on wet rocks.
He turned to see a figure watching him, rain dripping off the tip of a penitent nose.
Innes looked back across the shore. He chuckled as he gave a small, defeated shrug.
“Fair play to you. Finders keepers.” Innes retreated with a bundle of tarpaulin under his arm.
He was a man made of island bones. He never leant into the wind and Cal watched him plod onwards and felt hollow, insignificant compared to him. The rain was streaking closer.
“Innes!” he shouted. “At least wait till it passes! I have plenty of lager.”
“Uch, I know what it is when you want to be alone.”
“Don’t be daft. I’ve had plenty of alone.”
Innes plodded back to the van. He was just over the threshold when he hung his tarpaulin in the doorway.
There were bulldog clips he must have installed some time before.
Cal hadn’t noticed them. “I should never have let Flash take the back doors,” he said.
“But this is the trick. Keeps the worst of the wind out.” Cal watched him peg it taut and when he was done, the rain and the wind fell away and they were suddenly alone, in a van, in the dusk.