Chapter 23 #3
Innes opened his mouth several times but each time he paused. Eventually, he found what he wanted to say and so he said, “I have known you since you were your mother’s dream. I love every single hair upon your stupid, beautiful head.”
“I am my own man now, Innes.”
“Aidh—and I am an old man. I’ve wasted my life in waiting,” he said. “Don’t waste yours. Go. Go see the world.”
The truth arrived with a realisation that knocked the breath from him.
He didn’t want the world. Here is where he belonged.
He wanted to shout: All I want from this world is someone to love, and here you are.
But he had kissed this man. He had climbed in his window.
And so he had embarrassed himself enough.
He pushed his hands into his pockets, dug his nails into his thigh, and he shrugged, “OK. Fine.”
Innes smiled sadly. “Math,” he said. Good.
They became aware of a faint rubbing sound which they thought was coming from the radio. They fell silent. Innes lowered the volume on the wireless and tilted his head to listen to the old house. Then they heard it again. The sound of shuffling footsteps just outside the door.
Innes stepped away from Cal. He hurried to button his shirt.
For a long awful moment, they held their breath and listened to Innes’s father feel his way to the toilet, his knuckled hand knocking the wall, his slippered feet taking little scuffing steps along the carpet.
“Dad?” he called out. “Dad, are you all right?”
His father didn’t respond. Everything was quiet for a moment more until, all of a sudden, there was the loud bang of a falling toilet seat.
Cal watched Innes’s shoulders slacken. “I have to go help my father,” he said quietly. “And when I come back, I would like you to be gone.”
“Innes, please—”
Innes made a halting motion with his hand. “If you see me on the road, please stop to say hello, ask me about the weather, ask me about my father. But this has to end. Do you hear me?”
They were silent a while, each man staring at the other.
Innes waited for Cal to respond but when Cal offered no response, when he merely made a frowning mouth and shrugged again, Innes nodded, “OK,” he said. “Get home safe.”
He cut his hand climbing down the drainpipe. There was a flake of rust and it sliced a gash into his palm. He cried out in pain. He let go of the drainpipe and fell onto the flagstones below.
Winded, he squirmed on the ground, clutching his bloody hand, hoping Innes would see him, scoop him up, and beg to be forgiven.
He waited and he waited as the rain splashed upon his face.
He lay there long enough to become ashamed of his own pathetic nature, until, like a child who had thrown an ineffective tantrum, he was forced to get up.
Pressing the cut closed, he wrapped his hand in the hem of his T-shirt, and he turned for home.
He made such a racket that his grandmother came out of the pantry to a kitchen covered in bloody handprints.
She tended to the wound best she could but it would need stitches to heal.
He could feel his nose getting hot, the sting that preceded tears.
And he wept, as Ella dripped dabs of superglue into the wound and then tried to hold it together and staunch the bleeding.
When John came downstairs, he kept his distance and sniffed the air to see if he was drunk.
He let Ella do all the talking. She asked Cal where he had been at this hour and Cal lied through his tears.
He said he couldn’t sleep and so he had wandered down to the shore where he slipped on some dulse.
Then he covered his face with his good hand and wept while Tick went around the kitchen, licking blood off the linoleum.
John didn’t say anything, he watched his son with a wariness as Ella pressed Cal here and there, checking to see if some bone was broken, if there was some greater hurt she could not see.
As the clock moved into the small hours, he bled through two towels.
Ella called the nurse in her lodgings and Anna-Marie agreed to come as quickly as she could.
They gave up all hope of sleep as Ella fired up the kettle.
They watched over Cal as he laid his head in the crook of his arm and wept, perplexed as to why his hand was bothering him so much.
Neither of them were much use at consoling.
But Ella patted his shoulder every now and then, always at arm’s length, as though he was a dog that might turn and snap.
“Dad,” he said in a small voice.
There was a long pause before John answered, which told Cal he had already committed to his punishing silence. “. . . Yes?”
“I want you to shave my head.” He wiped his eyes with his wrist. “To the wood.”
John, barefoot, went out to the shed and returned with the brass weaving shears.
He didn’t give Cal a chance to change his mind by putting down newspaper or asking him to stand over the sink.
He gathered the hair into thick ropes and then clipped the roots.
The wheaten locks fell into his lap. “I don’t want you to be friends with Innes.
He cheats us with the sheep. How come he has all that money to build sheds and barns and radio towers, and we have nothing? ”
When the long hair was clipped, John lost interest. He left Ella to take another pass and tidy up any tufts he had left behind. When she was finished, she washed Cal’s head over the kitchen sink while John lay on the couch and closed his eyes for an hour.
The nurse arrived sometime after two in the morning.
Cal’s hand had bled through the towels and when the nurse saw that Ella had sealed the wound with superglue, she asked her about growing up in Glasgow.
John didn’t emerge to greet her or to offer any thanks.
He remained in the good room but Cal knew he would be lying there, eyes closed, listening to every word that was said.
The women shared a pot of tea while Anna-Marie soaked Cal’s wound in soapy water to try and soften the glue.
Then she drenched it in nail polish remover in an attempt to dissolve it.
Cal writhed in pain but she had wrists built by the Southern General A&E.
The burn of the acetone took his mind off Innes but as soon as the burning subsided, his first thought was of Innes again.
“I know that look,” she said. “Who’s the lucky girl?”
He looked to the clock. He had missed the supply boat.
Anna-Marie gave him twelve stitches. His hand was so numb after the acetone that he barely felt the needle. “I have to thank you, you know. You made him sit up and take notice.”
“Who?” he said.
“Sorley,” she said. “He saw us in the car together. He was annoyed with me. He thought I was making eyes at you.”
Cal let out a tired wheeze.
“Well, I appreciated it. I’ll take his anger over his apathy any day. You gave me a little of my power back.”
They were so close together, their heads bowed in the work of tending wounds, that he only needed to whisper. “I hate the MacInnes brothers. Couple of chinless idiots. I hope that radio tower gets hit by lightning and sets the whole place alight.”
She bit her lip. “Finally. How boring, hearing everyone say they thought only the best of their neighbours. What’s the point of being nice, if it makes you so dishonest?”
“It’s not niceness,” he said. “It’s cowardice.”
She wrapped gauze around his hand. She must have done this a thousand times because she barely looked down and spent the time considering his face. “I like what you did with your hair. You have good eyebrows.”
“Thanks,” he said. “They came with the face.” He was staring at the tube of superglue, wondering if he could take it upstairs and get a huff off of it.
Anna-Marie cut some surgical tape and secured the bandage.
“Thank you for making Sorley jealous but I’m defeated all the same.
I lost the battle of the Minch. And so I’m going home to Glasgow.
” She smiled, then she bowed her head and her mouth showed her disappointment again.
He watched her concentrate. How beautiful she was.
If he were a real man, he could love her like mad.
“So,” he said, dipping, trying to catch her eye. “A man went to the doctor’s . . .”
“Don’t you dare!”
“. . . And he said, ‘Doctor, I’ve got butterflies in my stomach . . .’ So the doctor asked him: ‘Well, what have you been eating?’ To which the man replied . . . ‘Butterflies.’”
She laughed like a drain. It made him feel better. And while she laughed, he tilted her kit bag towards himself and peered inside, looking for painkillers.
It was still dark when the nurse left. Ella was chopping leeks for soup, while his father lay stretched out on the couch.
He went upstairs and got under the covers for a few hours.
Despite the painkillers, his hand throbbed like he was holding his heart in it.
He was replaying the conversation with Innes, thinking he would go over there in the morning and apologise for anything Innes demanded an apology for.
He wondered if he would be able to sleep, but almost as soon as he had the thought, the world fell away.