Chapter 23
fichead ’s a-trì / twenty-three
He would leave. He would leave on the first boat.
To hell with his father. To hell with his father’s friend.
The envelope felt hot against his skin as he bounded upstairs.
He closed his bedroom door and began cramming things into his bag.
He didn’t care if he made a racket and he took a bloody-minded pleasure in leaving most of his life behind, saving only the second-hand clothes, and the cassettes and books that he loved.
But as he was balling the mended blue jeans and punching them into the throat of the bag, he remembered: tomorrow was the Sabbath. There would be no sailings.
There would be an early sailing on Monday morning.
It was a supply ferry that was not permitted to carry passengers but if he explained how desperate he was to get to the mainland, citing some exam or hospital appointment, then maybe the ferry hands would take pity on him.
He looked at the bursting backpack. He stood up, swung his leg, and kicked it into the far wall.
He lay awake most of the night and from the unsettled sounds of the house, he could tell that the others were awake, too.
They rose early, which they would all come to regret later that afternoon.
They gathered in the long room and prayed together before Ella served them a breakfast of leftover sandwiches, which they ate in tired silence, sitting side by side by side.
The Sabbath bled by like a slow tide. The long daylight of late spring felt like an imposition, there were too many hours to spend and no way to spend it but in quiet reflection.
He didn’t want to be alone with his thoughts: he wanted to be four deep at a bar, strangers pressing in on every side of him, the music so loud he couldn’t hear himself think.
Before the first service, the church men gathered in a loose circle and brought John and Donnie into the centre like boys who had scrapped in a school yard.
Donnie shook hands with his father and apologised for his temper.
Cal knew it was the right thing to do, a social formality, but he stewed as John returned the apology, and said they were sorry for any offence they had caused, for anything that made Donnie feel they were piling judgement upon his daughter.
Although Donnie’s tone was conciliatory, there was a limpness to his handshake that let John know neither he nor his lamb-hearted son would be forgiven.
John gripped the larger hand, tried to wring friendship from it, while Donnie let all the bones in his arm go slack.
The sermon that followed was nothing but dead words: an old text that Reverend Rose had written years ago.
He read it in a monotone, while the congregation wondered why he was unable to bring them inspiration when they needed it.
After the welcome disruption of the Communion season, the return to normal services felt like an abandonment.
There was a renewal of faith when the surrounding parishes came to worship, and a reminder that no matter how few they had become, they were never alone under God.
Now, in the white-blue light of church, the sparse congregation gave in to fears that they had been forgotten by the world again.
It would be many more weeks before the spring sunlight warmed the stone walls.
They shivered in their winter clothes. The paraffin heater gave out a miserly heat that barely reached the elders and by the end of the service, the gone-forward could just about feel its comfort, while the remaining faithful would have to be thawed by God’s light.
Cal spent the long service staring at the back of the Macdonalds’ heads.
They lined up in descending height, an almost perfect gradation that was ruined by Isla’s absence.
He passed the time by rearranging them in his mind, from white-blonde to wheat, and then when he grew bored of this, he sorted the whole congregation, lining them up from light to dark tones, warm to cold.
He was squinting, trying to see if people had an aura, when Ella elbowed him.
He watched Innes for a while. Innes had his arm around his father and was preventing him from slumping in the pew. He turned and caught Cal staring at him. Then he looked right through him and to the light coming in the eastern window.
When the service ended people made their way outside, eager to stand a while in the sun.
Sarah was wearing a brand-new hat and matching coat dyed in a deep royal blue.
Cal could imagine her sending away for this new armour the exact moment Isla told her she was pregnant.
She left her brood behind and made her way towards him.
As she passed from the overhead lighting into daylight, Cal saw a flickering in her new coat.
It flared red and then slightly purplish, before returning to its royal blue.
The dye was unstable and in some lights her hat and coat would not match at all. He felt sorry for that.
“I can’t bear it when the minister reads an old text.” Sarah took one of his hands in hers. She rubbed the lean tendons.
“I’m so sorry about Isla,” he said quietly. “How’s she keeping?”
Sarah smiled sadly. “She’s bored. Some of her new friends phoned her. That lifted her spirits a little.”
“She has to finish her studies. She’s the eighth smartest person in Scotland.”
“And will she ever let you forget it?” She caressed his cheek like he was still a boy. She took hold of his chin, then she squeezed it, not hard, but hard enough that he could feel the disappointment. “Come and see us soon. It’ll cheer us all up.”
Sarah made her way out to the road. When he turned around again, Licky was standing before him.
“It’s impressive, really. You always find new ways to disappoint us.
” She clipped him round the back of the ear and then she moved away, her black skirts sweeping the floor.
Beady had seen what the widow had done, and as Cal was rubbing his head, she made her way towards him, piercing him with those hot, violet eyes.
All the women knew of Isla’s trouble. They had been brewing a collective fury, first with the assumption that he had ruined a young woman, and now with the knowledge that he hadn’t.
Their anger coalesced, not at Isla, but at all the men who had left her in a vulnerable state.
As they filed out of the church, they each reached out and cuffed him or duffed him on the shoulder.
It was a confused rebuke, full of affection and anger.
His inaction left the girl exposed. He had done nothing to her, but then he had done nothing for her, so in this, he had harmed her twice.
Jeanie pinched his waist. “Glaoic,” she said. Foolish, foolish boy.
Ella gave him a look as if to say, just endure it, and he understood he was to bear their mutterings, absorb their little reprimands with a quiet, doltish acceptance, and maybe even a sense of gratitude that they were fond enough to express it to his face.
They pinched and poked until each woman had registered her disappointment, and they were all sated, and kneading their palms with a satisfied dissatisfaction.
Ella came and stood at his side. “Well done.”
He looked around for Innes but Innes was busy loading people into his van.
“In a day or two that lassie will be nothing but a hoor. They’ll forget about that fisherman and the blame will be hers alone. You’d be surprised at the ways women betray themselves.”
Ella went to say goodbye as Cal waited on the steps and fought the desire to rub his ringing scalp. The women seemed cheered by this rare treat of violence, and he watched as they kissed each other and thanked Ella for her whipping boy.
Afterwards, he helped Ella towards the car and settled her into the passenger seat.
She was slow pulling her leg in, and he entertained a dark thought of slamming the door on her foot and fulfilling the promise of calf-liver purple.
Ella caught him staring. “If I didnae know better I’d think you were one o’ they perverts that likes women’s feet. ”
He closed the door and went round the back. They sat in an annoyed sulk while they waited for John.
“Think of big Joseph,” she said, out of the blue.
“Who? Joe from Scarbost? Or Joe who put the immersion in?”
“No. Big Joe-Joe. Jesus’s dad.” She angled the mirror to look him in the eye. “Jesus wisnae Joe’s wean. Where would the Holy Mother be without him?”
“Those sound like Catholic sympathies.” He held out his hand.
“The point is, we’ve all been lumped to raise weans that were not ours.” Ella rifled through her bag and dropped a mint into his palm. “Isla’s a nice lassie. And I’ve washed enough socks to know you’re hard-up for company.”
In the evening, his father read to them from Ephesians, while Ella violated the Sabbath and unravelled some knitting and reclaimed the wool.
John was too tired to protest, so Cal offered his hands as a winding creel.
He wondered at the restraint Ella possessed, to have sat there and to have never responded to their Gaelic when she understood enough of it.
She was wearing a garish Rangers top, an unloved birthday gift his mother had bought for him years ago.
She must have understood all the unkind things the women said about her, the petty remarks they made about her appearance – not behind her back, but right there to the side of her sweet, smiling face.
Cal marvelled at her then, at how she had defied them anyway by doing exactly as she pleased, by being exactly who she was.
He reached out and squeezed her hand and she swore at him and told him he was fucking up her unravelling.