Chapter 15 #3
“No.” He said it more firmly this time. “Not this. I don’t believe you came all this way to talk about the Gospel. You will have people in the church for that. So tell me the real thing, Gregor. The real thing you would never dare tell your friends.”
“But that is . . .”
D.I. clasped his hands over his belly. He stared at the floor by John’s feet.
“I lied to you, earlier, when I said I’d never seen you before.
I’ve seen you four or five times now. You bring the Bibles as your excuse to come here and then you linger in the waiting room.
Maybe you think whatever burdens you will shift on its own, but it hasn’t.
And I can’t help you shift it if you won’t be honest with me. ”
John watched the shadows cross the window. He took a sip of the water.
“There’s this man,” he said. “He’s a good man.
If you need something in life, he will have noticed you have a need before you can even express it and he will be there, at your side, with the very thing you are missing.
He lives on my road. I have known him since I was fourteen.
I have loved him since I was fourteen.” He raised his eyes to D.I.
, but the man’s expression was one of blank acceptance and so John took a sip of water and went on.
“We were only boys when we met. I grew up on the west coast and he grew up on the east. It’s not such a big place, but when you’re that age, sixty miles can feel like worlds apart. ”
“Yes,” said D.I. “It can.”
“It was his kindness that I loved. It was such a rare quality in a boy.”
“Were you raised in a kind home?”
John shook his head. “I suppose they had always been good without being kind, and so, I don’t know .
. . I was struck by it. His father was never a well man and his mother died when he was a boy – we had that in common.
He has a younger brother, but he had all this promise and so the family used everything they had to get him to university.
That meant that this boy, this friend that I love, couldn’t leave.
He couldn’t leave his father to cope on his own. ”
John looked up again and D.I. nodded that he should continue.
“There was a girl who lived at the end of his road. I-I married her to be near him. I moved into her father’s house. And she fell pregnant and gave me a son, and well . . .”
D.I. let out a small, almost inaudible hum.
“She’s nobody’s fool. She knows I love him and so she leaves me there with her mother and my son, in that house next to my friend. And maybe she wanted to hurt me back, but she takes up with my brother, or he takes care of her when no one else would, but either way . . .”
John saw the faintest flicker of recognition. The islands were not so big and the story of the woman who left one brother for the other must have reached the town.
“Please,” said D.I. calmly. “Go on.”
John raised his hands and let them fall in defeat.
“I’ve had to spend my whole life playing the jilted husband, listening to people say she was a selfish bitch, when in fact she had done me the greatest kindness of my life.
” He felt his vision blur. D.I. lifted a box of tissues from his desk, but John shook his head and used the heel of his palm to wipe his eyes. “I am not the man I set out to be.”
D.I. leant forwards. He was looking up at him like a dog might. “So now you’re free to be with this friend. Surely that’s a good thing?”
“No.” The release that he felt was fleeting. He had said too much and yet D.I. did not understand at all. How could he undo everything he had built, the story, the lie, the man upstanding in the church. “I have to think of my son.”
“Do you think your son would be upset to learn you are a homosexual?”
“He would be upset to learn his childhood was a lie. That every cruelty his mother endured was my fault. And that after all that . . . all that loss, that his father was nothing but a poofter, nothing but a wicked little coward.”
It was a small consolation to see the realisation that was settling over the man.
It was a relief to know this hellish trap was not of his own imagination.
He felt a slight affront that this arrogant stranger should think he could find a solution to his problems, problems that were so woven into who he was that he had never been able to solve them for himself.
There was a boat entering the harbour. It sounded its horn in welcome.
He was caught between his lover, his son, and his Maker. And he was a disappointment to all. “We have a gas heater,” he said. “It’s an old, unreliable thing. Sometimes I think about unscrewing the hose and . . .”
The room kept growing brighter and then dimming again as the sun dipped in and out of the clouds.
John finished the glass of dusty water and watched the shadows of men as they crossed the window.
His eyes flickered as he followed them left to right.
He had told this stranger the things he had told no one else and he felt no better for it.
“I thank you for your time.”
D.I. took the hand that was offered, but instead of shaking it, he held on to it. “Gregor. Please. Will you give me your details? You have to come see me again.”
“I will,” said John, freeing himself from the handshake. “I will.”
They arrived on the west coast as the last of the day was sinking into the Atlantic. Everything was bathed in a glorious light and even the restless sea slowed to marvel at it. They never got sunsets like this at home; at the end of the day the sun simply disappeared behind the hills.
“Are you all right, Dad?”
“I’m fine.”
John suspected Cal had spent all his money on lager and none on food.
He had been talking to fill the emptiness while John was trying to climb out of the low place he had fallen into.
He passed Cal a tinfoil package and hoped the food would sober him up.
The pancakes were smeared in thick salty butter and stuck together like a stack of mortared tiles.
Cal unhinged his jaw and tried to eat them in one bite in an attempt to make his father smile.
“C’mon now,” said John gently. “The mice will be shitting all over the place.”
They ate their cold dinner and then they walked along the beach. John made lists of jobs to be done and thought about the best order to do them in, while Cal hummed to himself and gathered up cowrie shells.
They tried to sleep in the car, sitting upright in their anoraks, their heads against the window.
Without the engine running it was cold and the wind howled off the sea.
With nothing to break its fury it whistled round the chassis and found every rusted hole, filling the night with peeps and sighs.
After a few hours of shivering and shifting, John unfurled a length of Japanese cloth and laid it over them like a blanket.
He let his boy lean against his chest and although the handbrake dug into his side, he slowed his mind, and felt the change in his son’s breathing.
Beneath the stale lager, he could smell the butter on his cheek, the heat of his forehead, the cakey soap he used behind his ears and had forgotten to rinse properly.
The first light came over the moors as the sun rose behind them.
John placed silent bets as rivulets of condensation raced each other down the window and pooled in the cracked rubber casing.
He wiped the fog from the window and gazed out at the Atlantic.
He met his reflection in the wing mirror and was surprised to see Cal was awake and peering out the same gap in the condensation. “Look at that,” he said. “God is here.”
Cal itched his nose. “Does he want tea?”
Cal laughed at his own stupid joke, but it felt good, the way his chest heaved underneath John’s arm and as John stared out at the sea he tried to think of ways to make him laugh again.
Teeth chittering, they drank from the Thermos that Ella had prepared. John watched Cal take a drink. He knew he would take three little sips in a row, testing, tentative.
There were times when he felt he knew his son better than he knew himself. There were other times when Cal looked at him with some distance, when John thought: Oh, I don’t know this man at all.
Cal took the three sips, exactly as John knew he would. He frowned at his father. “What?”
John put his nail against Cal’s cheek, picked a fleck of dry skin, found the same skin underneath. “Nothing.”
The mill was made up of various buildings, large tin hangars with vaulted roofs, each building its own step in the production line.
They delivered their bolts of woven cloth to the warehouse and as Davey Maclennan unfurled the yardage to inspect it, John checked the cloth delivered by the other home weavers.
With his hands behind his back, he walked the aisles and took stock on all the finished orders.
His eyes were more accurate than Davey’s yardstick and he saw he had not been underserved in favour of another weaver, that everything was fair and as it should be.
He received a docket for the Macleod yardage and said he would deliver the cloth to the mending girls.
He wound through the dye house where the men were loading the raw ecru cake into vats, preparing it for dye.
The air was slow with steam and the mildewy smell of damp fleece.
He crossed through the finishing warehouse, with its soap-slick floors and the rhythmic sloshing of the scouring machines.
To make a thing by hand meant there were always errors, yet the weavers had only to submit their yardage and take their money. The darners had to search for the flaws and there were codes and names that the girls dreaded seeing attached to the cloth.