Chapter 14 #3
The floor was cold to the touch. Cal beckoned him onto his sleeping bag and they knelt at opposite ends, hands folded on laps like it was a prayer rug.
Cal offered him a can of Tennent’s but Innes waved him away.
He crawled past him, crawled up to the passenger side and opened the busted glove box.
Inside were two cans of McEwan’s Export and a half-full bottle of Bell’s whisky.
“Welcome to my sheiling,” he said. “I’ll be forty-seven next summer and I still have a fear of being caught by the minister with a quarter bottle in my pocket.
” He offered Cal the first mouthful. “I needed to get out of the house and I thought where can I go? And, well . . .” They drank with silent focus as if the drinking was a job to be done.
Cal waited for Innes to say something more, but Innes was looking out at the sky and didn’t seem to be thinking of anything at all.
Cal pushed his lager back and forth between his teeth and thought about all the times Doll had brought him to the van. How he waited patiently as Doll sank can after can, knowing he needed to reach a certain point before the touching could begin.
It had all started when Doll was fifteen and he was seventeen.
His grandmother had tossed the old catalogue onto the pile for burning and Cal had torn out the pages of women in their underwear and brought them to the van.
They were bland, middle-aged women in mumsy-looking bras, turning three-quarters to the camera, elegant fingers resting on their clavicles as though they were delighted to have been caught in their dependable knickers.
He had shared the pages with Doll and they had wanked over them.
Cal had pretended to share Doll’s interest in the women when he was only really interested in Doll.
It built slowly from there, from little suggestions that Cal would deliver with a wouldn’t-this-be-fun tone, the same tone that they had used when they were younger, and they built dens, or set fire to hay bales.
What if you play with yourself, and I watch through the window and pretend to be her husband. What if I pretend to be her, and I touch it, just for a minute.
The pages became so familiar that they named the women, Stephanie, Rebecca, Joanna, which in their immaturity was what they supposed mainland slags were called – never Donalda, or Mairead, or Annag.
Cal invented backstories for each. Stephanie was a woman who had come to Harris on her holidays.
In the evenings, she snuck away from her elderly husband to cruise the country roads in her big fancy car, stopping now and then to offer the local boys a ride.
Rebecca was posted to the islands to teach the local boys French.
She had been run out of every town she had ever taught in.
Joanna was the most straightforward. She had a cruel husband who didn’t like it when she wore make-up.
She modelled a mumsy sort of nightgown which didn’t hide the fact she was a slut who liked a cock in every hole.
The stories made the women real for Doll, yet over time, as Cal became lazier and the novelty wore off like in any relationship, the women all lost their names and their personalities and became known as Julianne. Julianne who was bored at home and was dripping to be fucked by a sheep farmer.
At some point, Doll found a pamphlet in his parents’ bedroom.
It was a Christian version of the Joy of Sex, distributed at a time when women were walking out on their husbands.
It was full of simple line drawings like the emergency card on the ferry.
There was no rendering of genitals, no space between their bodies, and in a few of the drawings it seemed like they were both wearing all their clothes.
But she sat on him. She lay beside him. She lay under him.
And in one drawing – Doll’s favourite – he opened her up like she was a pair of giant scissors.
She kicked one leg over his shoulder, and he pressed tight against her, right into the back, as though he was trying to reach the part where the blade still cut the sharpest.
Cal had used the pamphlet to talk Doll into fucking him for the first time. They had lain together awkwardly, studying the pamphlet from time to time, as though assembling furniture.
As things progressed, they followed a routine that was marked by how disinterested they appeared, they assumed roles, like working men setting up to complete a job.
Doll always gave in with a tired huff and a flick of his blue eyes.
It seemed to Cal that he felt better about the wickedness of it all if he pretended he was doing Cal some favour.
If he pretended that they were only here because of the dirty things Cal wanted and that he was a big man, a good friend, to grant it to him even though at the end of it all, Cal was the one denied the pleasure of release.
He was just a collection of replacement parts. A substitution for what Doll could not get. And so there was no way to begin with kisses, or with caresses, or with tender words. No way to be seen to be enjoying their bodies.
“I introduced them, you know.”
Cal was a million miles away. He frowned. “Sorry, what?”
“Your mother and father. I introduced them. Aidh—your mother grew up in Number One and I grew up in Fourteen. There was a time people imagined we’d be sweethearts.
But then your dad showed up at Communion one year, looking like a young Gregory Peck in a souped-up rally car, and that, as they say, was that. ”
“So you could’ve been my father? Would you’ve made a good dad?”
Innes blushed a little. He shook his head as if he wouldn’t like to speculate.
The rain poured through the cracks in the windows and it ran in runnels down the wall. The men watched the runnels form streams, the streams turn into rivers, before the rain found its way to the lowest point and poured out through a hole in the floor.
“How’s your brother?”
Innes chuckled. “We were watching a programme about Mars and he kept talking over the presenter. I mean, the woman was a NASA scientist but he wouldn’t let that stop him.”
“I used to love watching you ignore him.”
“Glad we amused you. He’s like a frequency I can no longer tune in to.”
“Is that why you built that great honking antenna?”
“Is it that ugly? Ach, I suppose it is.” Innes looked horrified and Cal realised he would now worry about what his neighbours thought every single time he passed the radio tower.
“They should study you two.”
“Aidh—you think we’re a freakshow?”
“No, no.” He said it quickly, afraid he had offended him.
Innes grinned to let him know it was all right.
“I suppose we are strange. Funny how things can seem peculiar to other people, but it’s just family to you.
” He peeled the label from his bottle. “My whole entire life that man has done whatever he pleases. My father subsidised his studies with the money I earned running the croft. He took all that money without so much as a thank you and all the while he was cashing a dole cheque and a student bursary and a loan. No wonder he spent fourteen years getting that PhD. He was living better than us.”
“And what would you have studied if you could have?”
“No-o,” he said sheepishly. “We had an understanding, my brother and me. He could have the world if he let me have this one damp corner.”
Cal watched him take a mouthful of lager and chase it with a mouthful of whisky.
It felt right to leave the conversation there, but as the silence stretched on he felt like he should say something more if he wanted to keep Innes in the van with him.
He toed Innes’s thigh with his boot. “You never answered my question—”
“Shhh.” Innes squinted at his watch. “Come here,” he said, and when Cal hesitated, he patted the floor beside him. “Hurry. Come on, quickly now.”
Cal did as he was told. He crawled over and sat beside Innes, shoulder to shoulder, their backs to the wall. They were staring out of the west-facing windows onto the barren hills.
Innes strained to sit up. He rose up on his hands, tilted his chin. “. . . Wait for it.”
Cal craned his own neck, hoping to see whatever it was Innes was searching for.
“Close your eyes,” he said, closing his own, and then . . . “Do you feel it?”
He did. He felt the last rays of daylight caress his face, the faint warmth of the winter sun. For a few brief seconds, they were bathed in a pale golden light as the sun sank below the thick clouds and held its position before it disappeared behind the hills.
“There,” he said. “It doesn’t always happen. But I knew you had to be good luck. God is good.” Innes opened his eyes and found Cal watching him. “Stop thinking. You’ll ruin it.”
In that last shaft of sunlight, it was almost as if Innes’s eyes were lit from behind, the dull, watery green alive with a thousand flecks of gold.
Cal wanted to cut a little slice, to hold the iris in his hand and marvel at it under different lights.
He would walk to the weaving shed and find its match – although the longer he studied him, the more certain he was that there were none.
Innes pulled his head back. “What are you smirking at?”
“I just had the weirdest, most serial killer-y thought. But I was thinking, could I have your eyeballs when you’re done with them? I’d like to put them on my shelf.”
“Sure,” he laughed. “When I’m done. But what do I get in exchange?”
“What’s the going rate?”
“In the Bible? More eyeballs.” Innes ran his tongue along the inside of his lip. “See what you said earlier, about studying? When you were at college, were there any students my age?”
“There was one woman in her fifties. Her daughter had done the same degree a few years earlier and I think that inspired her to give it a go.”
“And how did this woman get on?”
“She did well with the technical work but she found fashion to be a struggle. Some of the younger women were a bit cliquey. A bit . . . unkind. See, at its heart, fashion is like a school of fish that twists and turns and won’t let you swim with them. You can’t study your way into that.”
“And did you always know what you wanted to do with your life? Was it a calling?”
“Like fore-ordained?” Cal laughed. “I don’t know. I can no longer tell the difference between what John wanted for me and what I wanted for myself. How? Are you thinking about studying something?”
Innes huffed as if the question was absurd, as if he would never wish to bother the universe with his own wants.
Cal didn’t rush in to disagree. He drank his lager in the waning daylight and let Innes feel his way forward in his own time.
Eventually, after a little more whisky, Innes said, “I feel stuck and I don’t know how to unstick myself. ”
Cal bumped his shoulder into Innes’s. “Are you sure you don’t like being stuck? Isn’t there a comfort in sticking?”
Innes stared into the middle distance for a moment, then he turned his gaze back to the west as the sun sank behind the hills and the day dulled to the usual grey.