Chapter 19 #2
It was early evening, and Cal caught the last bus heading south.
Sitting in the back row, he shivered as he pulled his coat tight around himself.
He had left the Irishwoman’s and then he had detoured the twenty miles or so to his mother’s where, after some lunch, he had stolen two of her temazepams from the medicine cabinet.
He found them now in the lint of his pocket.
He nibbled the edge of one, working up a mouthful of spit and swallowing the bitter powder.
Then he dozed for an hour or more, before the bus dropped him at the top of the ribbon road.
He walked for miles against the slanted rain as a syrupy peace came over him. Nearing the first houses, he became suddenly self-conscious and, fearing that the pill was affecting his gait, he straightened up, locked his knees and tried to copy the upright demeanour of a clean-living man.
The rain was so loud that he didn’t hear the car pull up behind him.
The nurse struggled to roll down the window. “Get in!” she shouted. “Get in, before you catch your death.”
She cleared off the passenger seat and he climbed in.
The car smelt like ointment. There was an awkward moment, like she expected him to say or do something, before she reached over and buckled his seatbelt for him.
She tried to drive away before she released the handbrake. The car sputtered and shot forwards.
“So, what is it youse like to take? Klonopin? Valium?”
“Take? No, nothing. I’m just tired.”
She pressed her tongue against her cupid’s bow. The windscreen wipers were working their hardest. Cal felt overwhelmed by their manic rhythm. The nurse drove too close to the edge, she veered slightly. “You were gowchin’. It’s pills for sure . . . Or heroin?”
“It’s not heroin,” he said. “I had half a temazepam. Half. That’s it.”
“Well, whatever you do, don’t drink on that.
And when you get home have a glass of milk and eat some bread.
” The car shuddered in too high a gear. “Imagine. Temazepam. Here, in God’s own country.
” The rain was washing over the road. She fiddled with the vents, trying to clear the fog from the windscreen.
“What did your father say about me, that day at the fank?”
“He didn’t say anything. It’s not in his nature.”
Cal reached over and wiped the condensation for her.
They came to the foothills of Beinn Mhaitheanais.
The road clung to the hillside and skirted round it apologetically, like a schoolboy round a bully.
“You should slow down on this corner. It’s the acoustics.
You can’t hear if someone’s coming because the rocks bounce the sound out over the sea. ”
Anna-Marie had to pump the brakes to stop them pitching into a gulley. She dropped to first gear and leant over the steering wheel. “So, what do you think of him?”
“Who?”
“Sorley, of course.”
“Oh . . .” Cal realised his negative opinion of Sorley was entirely an echo of his father’s.
He thought about it a moment and tried to find something positive to say.
“He’s all right. He reads a lot. If you’ve questions about how government works, then he’s a good one to ask.
” Cal wanted to stroke the skin on her inner arm.
“But hardly a man to lose your mind for?”
Anna-Marie began to shake her head. Any conversation she was having was only with herself.
There were tears in her eyes and they were so thick they seemed almost blue in the dim daylight.
He watched her with a fascination. She turned towards him and he realised her tears were electric blue.
It was ruined eyeliner, the same colour as Shiv’s, and it was pooling, spilling down her cheeks.
“I once saw Sorley get his arm stuck in a pregnant ewe and scream out for his father.”
“No!” she started laughing. It was a reluctant, choking bark but it was enough to halt her crying. “It’s official, then. You don’t like him.”
“We don’t talk like that. Whether you like someone or not, you have to live beside them.”
She checked her face in the mirror and dabbed at the streaks. Then she rummaged in her handbag for cigarettes and offered him one. He wished she would watch the road.
He lit her cigarette from the end of his. “So, will my granny be OK?”
It took a moment for the nurse to connect Cal through John and back to Ella. “She needs to lose some weight and keep an eye on her blood pressure. But she should be fine.”
“So her feet won’t go purple and rot?”
“No,” she frowned. “Should they?”
They finished their cigarettes as they drove on through Falabay. As they passed the MacInnes croft he watched her as she slowed and studied the house for some sign of Sorley.
The nurse dropped him at the slipway.
Before he got out of the car, he struggled for something cheering to say. “The lambs are coming,” he said. “Just wait. They make everything nice.”
He entered through the back door. Ella was slicing cabbage at the kitchen counter. She put her fingers to her lips and motioned for him to keep his voice down. “Did you have a good time?”
“No,” he said bluntly. “What am I doing here, Ella?”
“No the now,” she said, nodding towards the good room. “He’s waiting for you.”
She had an elastic band around her wrist, and without saying anything more she gathered his long hair into a bun.
She wiped his face with a tea towel and, placing a thumb under each eye, she pulled downwards and tutted at the redness.
Mistaking his lowness for a hangover, she forced him to drink a glass of water.
Then, like a lady-in-waiting, she opened the door to the good room and judging him to be presentable, she ushered him in.
His father was sitting in his armchair, his head slung low.
He cradled Bess in his lap and was singing to her gently, an old Gàidhlig song about seafaring goodbyes.
The dog lay like a pelt spread across the lap of some weary Norse god.
Cal watched his father caress Bess’s withers, then massage her from hip bone to claw.
John raised his head at the sound of the door closing.
Cal nodded at the dog. “Is she bad?”
“I took her up the hill an hour ago. Had to carry her back down.”
Cal crossed into the room and sat on the pouffe at his father’s feet. He stroked Bess’s muzzle. “I’m sorry. I’ll dig a pit.”
The dog must have felt crowded. She stirred and tried to climb off John’s lap.
“Oh, give us some room!” His father toed him away.
It was only a demand for space, a refusal of pity, but the toe of his work boot caught Cal unawares.
It hit his shin and he pulled back, feeling rejected, and trying not to show it.
He moved to the fireside and prodded the embers.
He hated how he had to check with his father before he used more fuel.
But he glanced up at him and John nodded and so Cal tossed a peat onto the fire.
“Where were you?”
“There was a cèilidh at Tormod’s. Doll and I lodged at the Irish one’s.”
“Yes. But that was last night,” he said. “Where have you been all day?”
There was a throb in his shin. He had a faint taste for revenge. “If you must know, I was at my mamaidh’s.” His father’s gaze was on the dying dog and Cal took this as not quite an invitation to continue, but as the space he needed to say his piece. “I miss her, Dad. And I like seeing the childr—”
“We discussed this. I thought I asked you to never mention them in my presence?”
He watched as his father turned Bess’s ear the right way in. For such an old black dog, it was such an unblemished pink.
“Let me say this one thing and then I promise I won’t speak of my mother again.
” He looked at his father for another nod of approval but this time John gave none.
He kept his gaze lowered, and so after a long, tense moment Cal was forced to go on, a little less certain now, “Dad, those children are my siblings, they are your nieces and nephew. None of this is their fault and I would bet that right now they are in great need of a big brother, maybe even an uncle . . .” He paused to see the effect this trespass would have on his father, but he could read nothing more than a faint tightening in his father’s jaw.
“Uilleam is dying. His shaking is worse and now he has the start of some form of dementia. I asked the nurse and she said he won’t have many good years left.
That’s it. Your brother is dying and I think you should know. ”
“And what makes you think I don’t know?” John said flatly.
Cal had a desire to cross the room and hug his father.
He had a competing desire to cross the room and kick him in the face.
“If everything I do upsets you, then why did you call me home?” he said, his voice trembling slightly. “Why did you do that?”
Ella interrupted them with a tray of tea things.
She came to Cal, checked the back of his jumper and finding it soaked through, she drew it off over his head.
He had been stripped by two different women in the same day and it left him feeling like nothing more than a boy.
Ella left the room sighing to herself as Cal tore into a crumpet.
He shivered as he chewed. He turned back to the fire and licked some melted butter from his thumb.
“We lost three sheep while you were off gallivanting.”
“How can that be?”
“A ewe started her bearing down. The first lamb came out headfirst but with its feet up under its muzzle. It got stuck on the road out and it choked itself, dangling from its mother’s back end.
From there it suffocated its sister. Then all the bleeding killed the ewe herself.
By the time I found them this afternoon, the gulls had taken the eyes and eaten half the lamb right out of the mother. ”
“But they’re too early. They’ve come too soon.”
“And who are we to keep God’s time for him? I’ll do it all myself shall I? I’ll feed you and clothe you and for what? So that when I need you, you can run to your mother . . .”