Chapter 16
sia-deug / sixteen
Doll hammered on the door. He could hear the girls on the other side, giggling, splashing in the water. He pushed and the lock strained at the hasp. “Hurry up!” he cried. “Let me in.”
“You’re like a troll amongst the fairies. Come away from there!” His mother had appeared at the top of the stairs. Her hair was set in its church bun but she still wore her cooking dress. “That’s what you get for lying in your own filth. Let your sisters have a bath in peace.”
He felt the hangover lurch inside him. Standing in nothing but his Y-fronts, he wanted to argue that he hadn’t been lying in his own filth.
That he got up at three in the morning, six days a week, every week of the year, just so that they could be out at the creels before the light hit the water, and that this Communion weekend was the only time he was ever allowed a morning to see the sunrise from his own bed. “I need a shite, Mam.”
“Then you’ll have to go behind the shed,” she said. “I can’t be pulling four girls out of a bath. We’ll be late as it is.”
The March morning was bitter cold. After he emerged from behind the shed, after he had shovelled his own waste into the slurry pit, he hurried back to the house. The door was locked. There was a basin of water waiting on the back step.
His mother had barred him from using the kitchen sink, complaining his shoulders were too broad and that all he did was send water into the four corners of the house.
He worked quickly. He wet the cloth and lathered himself.
His breath clouded as the water ran down his back and he panted, hoh-hoh-hoh.
He dug at the dirt under his nails and scrubbed his scalp with a bristled brush.
He wanted rid of the reek of the boat, the stink of the lobsters, the diesel that seeped from his pores.
The church would be full and he didn’t want any of the young women to look at him like he was only a fisherman.
They were fond of fishermen – men like their grandfathers or favourite uncles – but nobody wanted to be married to one.
Sarah carried a pot of boiling water from the kitchen.
Doll had washed every inch of himself and on the back porch he shivered in his bagged-out underwear which was translucent with damp.
She realised her error: he was mostly hidden from view but if any of the cailleachan spied him they would die, right there, on the Lord’s day.
Yet as she hurried to cover him with towels she felt a surge of maternal pride, for her son was an impressive specimen, a real man, stronger and, from what she glimpsed now, better endowed than his father.
It was insanity that these chinless fools were not pounding on his door.
What a shame that you couldn’t rope a son like a pony, parade him up and down in his underthings, and let the girls see him as they made their way to the church.
She slicked his neck with soapy water and took his father’s razor to his nape. “How long are you two going to sulk?”
“I’m not the one sulking. So you’ll be in for a wait.”
“I don’t know how you do it. Out there on the water, just the two of you. But that’s the problem. You think it’s just the two of you in this world. While the rest of us have to live between you. What have I done wrong to deserve your nonsense?”
Doll wiped his face with a corner of towel.
She went on, “A good son is his own man. Oh! But a bad son is his mother’s fault.
You know how I look forward to the Communions!
I’ve been cleaning for weeks – not that any of you lifted a finger.
” She wiped the blade on her apron. “Your Auntie Beady had eight cars outside her house last night, eight, a Dhòmhnaill! And we didn’t have a single one.
All that baking. All that cooking, wasted.
So, tell me what I did wrong, for you to be such a selfish article? ”
He closed his eyes and prayed for an end to it.
“Imagine, the people who saw our house without a single visitor and still thought they’d fight for the scraps at Beady’s.
” Knowing he had delicate skin she took care to shave the hairs in one fluid motion.
“I invited Donalda to tea. She asked if you would be there. I mean, where else would you be? She said she’d have to ask her James and get back to me.
When has she ever needed to ask her James?
She always comes to tea.” Doll attempted to respond but Sarah thrust his head forwards.
She shaved down over his broad shoulders, clipping all the fine golden hairs she had been so sad to see the first time her growing boy had asked for her help.
“All eyes are on us and there you were, a member, drunk at three in the afternoon.”
“I wasn’t drunk.”
“You were! You talked utter nonsense for an hour. Grinning at that MacIver girl like she was a film star. People didn’t know what to say. Couldn’t get away from you fast enough. Then you came back here and fell asleep at the table.”
“I was tired, Mam. I’d been on the boat. I’m always on the boat.”
“You were stinking of the drink! And everybody knew it.”
His head was bowed as frustrated tears began to drip off the end of his nose. If anyone saw, he would say the soap was in his eyes. “I work every hour God sends. Every penny I make goes back into this house. I have no savings. I can’t go anywhere because I have a car that I can never get to run—”
“And the amount of money you waste on that thing.”
“I don’t even get a week off in the summer, Mam. As if my father could give me holiday pay. Other lads are going to Zante or Ibiza. I’m lucky if I can get to Uist!”
Sarah laid her hands on his shoulders. “You have to stop this drinking or your father is going to do something he regrets.” She couldn’t get her arms all the way around him, but she tried. She kissed him behind his ear. “Now come inside. Eat something. It’ll be a long day.”
He was a hunched man on a too-small stool.
He turned, sick of his own sadness. His mother was looking down at him with a pity he couldn’t bear.
He grabbed her arm and pulled her across his lap.
He burrowed his chin into her neck, into the place she was most ticklish.
It was something she had done to all of them when they were babies, when she had sent her children to bed, bursting with love for her, trembling with the giggles.
He ate his breakfast in his room. His father complained but his mother hushed him, certain that Doll and she had reached an agreement. Up in his room, he crammed sausage and egg into his mouth between sets of push ups. He chewed with his mouth open as he lacquered his body in deodorant.
He had bought new shoes from the catalogue and had kept them aside for the Communion.
He had a new tie that was skinnier than the standard.
The difference was hardly noticeable, but everyone would notice.
He made a fine figure as he barged into his sister’s bedroom and considered himself in the long mirror.
All that was needed was a little levelling out, a reviver, and he was sure he would summon the courage to talk to the girls, and not stumble over himself like he usually did.
He slipped out the back door. He cut along the rear of the house until he came to the burnt-out shell of their grandfather’s house.
He stepped down into the pit of the interior, and kneeling in the dirt, he felt for the hole he had dug beneath the foundation.
He searched, groping deeper, soiling the cuff of his new shirt, until his hand brushed the dimpled glass of the gin bottle.
Sarah had expressly stated that she wanted the family to walk to church together but Doll had gone missing after breakfast, sulking no doubt, or lingering outside one of the other houses, waiting to see if he could walk one of the young women to church, and Donnie had left early, saying there were things to get organised, cloths to be folded, seating to be arranged.
As she cleared the last of the breakfast dishes, she wished Isla was here. Isla always knew when to walk a few steps ahead of her. She always knew how to greet people, how to ease open the conversation and spare her the anxiety of finding the right thing to say.
Passing through the kitchen for a final check, she wiped a scattering of salt and crumbs off the tablecloth.
Eilidh had reached the age where she wanted to put salt on all her food even though she hated the taste.
She was only interested in the ritual, how grown up she thought it made her.
She took a pinch and went through the show of sprinkling it over her eggs before she hid the rest of it under the rim of her plate.
Sarah sighed as she swept the salt into her hand.
She made to toss it in the sink, but something stopped her.
She ushered her girls out the door. They came down the path, stepping around the various creels and boat parts.
They passed the asparagus-green Capri that Doll had bought from one of his fishing buddies and spent the past four years trying to restore.
It had never driven so much as a single mile: an awful waste of money.
Doll loved it for what he imagined it said about him, he loved it for how powerful it looked.
Sarah stopped and checked to make sure he was not inside, sulking in the back seat, drinking by himself.
Her girls were waiting for her by the front gate, growing impatient.
She nodded that they could go on ahead and then she waited until they were just out of sight before she opened the fuel cap.
She sprinkled the salty detritus into the petrol tank.
She wiped her hands on her skirt and slipped on her gloves.
There were people leaving the distant houses. Beady had a house full of visitors. Licky had her sisters and all their children and all their children’s children.