Chapter 26 #4
“Yes!” They would soon be high enough that they would be able to see the Isle of Skye in the distance. Cal tried to guess how long it would take Donnie’s boat to cross the Minch but he had no idea of how the family boats fared on deeper waters. It would be hours by ferry.
“You think I should go and bring him home?”
“To what home? That home?” Cal gestured towards the MacInnes portion. “No, Dad. Innes needs your help. Hear what his plans are. Then trust in God and go with him.”
“Trust in God?”
“Yes. You don’t have to be gone long. It would be a great opportunity to do missionary work.
You have no idea how far from God these people are.
You could visit some of the other parishes.
Strengthen connections. Bring some of their light back to us.
We need it so badly.” He was laying it on thick now, and he could tell if he pushed much harder his father would close off to him.
“I can look after this place, at least for a while. I can manage.”
“What if he doesn’t want to return?”
“This is your test. Remind him of the goodness of the place.” He nodded towards the blocky MacInnes house. “But he won’t return if he’s to live there. It would be degrading. You, of all people, understand that.”
“Yes. It would.”
“So he should live with you.”
“Have you lost your mind?”
Cal laughed as they trudged through a low point. He might argue that he had, just at this very moment, come into possession of his mind.
“Innes should have my old room. It would be cheaper for both of you. I need to go back to the mainland, Dad. I need to do something with this degree. And in order to do that, I need Innes to live in our house with you. I would worry about you. It would be a great help to me, to know there was someone keeping an eye on you as you dodder and slip. You’re not as young as you used to be. And you can’t cook for shite.”
He gripped the back of his father’s neck as if he was the father and John was his boy.
“So, go! Ask Donnie for help. He won’t deny you.”
He drove his father to the Macdonald house. They pulled up at the croft and he turned off the engine. The shock of earlier was giving way to bitterness. There was a thin scab covering a sour anger and he told himself not to pick at it, not yet.
As his father collected his things, Cal looked at his own hands on the steering wheel. He laughed to himself when he saw he was still wearing the single Marigold glove. He pulled it off with a sweaty thwap. The air felt good on his fingers.
“Your mamaidh . . .” said John, trailing off.
“Yes? What about her?”
He shook his head. “Be good to her.”
With the engine stopped, the dog stuck his head into the front to see what the next task would be. Tick yawned and filled the space between them with his fishy breath.
“Can you forgive me? For . . .”
John had started a thought he didn’t know how to end, an apology he could draw no outline around. He waved his hand at the world as if to say, all of it, this whole life.
Cal glanced at the clock. The time showed 7.05 p.m.
“You’ll be late,” he said. “We can talk about that another time.”
He held on to the dog’s collar as his father got down from the Landy.
He waved him onwards as John made his way hesitantly up the path, turning around for reassurance like a child on the first day of school.
He would wait until his father knocked on the door and the Macdonalds admitted him.
On the top step, John paused, he ran a hand through his hair, then he turned around for one last look and Cal gave him a thumbs up.
He chapped the door and after a few seconds, the door opened, and Isla came out into the porch.
They had agreed to meet again at the slipway in thirty minutes time, and so Cal sped towards the house and, bursting in the back door, he flew upstairs with a fistful of bin bags.
He felt manic, both elated and heartbroken at the same time.
He was spinning round the house, trying to outrun his own hurt feelings, trying not to think of his father and Innes together, then very clearly thinking of his father and Innes together, and wondering if they still fucked, and then wondering what that fucking looked like, and then pushing those thoughts away as he began to feel aroused.
He packed indiscriminately, tossing everything his father needed, thin shirts and greying underwear, into the bin bags. He went into the bathroom and swept an entire shelf of toiletries into his arms, hardly checking to see whom they belonged to.
He tried to picture his father sleeping in the back of a Transit van and flinched inwardly at the image.
John would complain about the cold floor, the chill in his hip, the indignity of climbing down while parked in a supermarket car park.
He would hate going to the toilet in a tearoom, he would hate bathing in cold rivers.
He had seen how his father was daunted by the unknown, so even now as he wished him forwards, he could spare him.
It would not take much to discourage him and he toyed with a selfish daydream where he would sneak away in his father’s place. He could go find Innes and travel by his side until Innes came to love him a little.
He imagined parking at the edge of a dense forest, opening the doors to a dawn rain.
He imagined lying in Innes’s arms, as the trees exhaled and filled the van with their damp green breath.
He found his father’s suit hanging on the back of the door.
It always looked so presentable on him, but Cal saw how it was worn thin in places, the wool buffed to a shine under the arms. John must have held himself well to conceal that from the congregation.
As he packed, he was making as much noise as he could, trying not to think about the empty house.
He tried to soothe himself by dreaming of the gatherings he would hold.
He thought of the roast he would cook for his mamaidh, how he would follow her from room to room and listen to her stories as though she were an exile returned to some motherland.
He would make beans on toast for Isla and Anna-Marie and they would stay up late, gossiping, listening to music.
He would cook for Cheeks. He would make him a curry and when they had blackened their teeth on cheap wine, he would say it was too dangerous to drive and offer him a bed for the night.
He went to the window and looked upon the sea. The wind was whipping the waves to peaks. The tide would be working against them. The clock on the mantle said it was 7.17.
His father would be many hours late. He would never reach Portree in time.
He began to worry. He felt like he had talked his father into this knowing the task was impossible and, when his father arrived in Portree and found Innes long departed, he would be so ashamed at his own hope that Cal would bear the blame for it.
He didn’t know anyone who lived on Skye, but he thought he could recall seeing a number for the local shop scribbled in the margins of the phone book.
His grandmother suspected Beady was gouging them, so she collected the numbers of the shops on the outlying islands.
A few times a year she phoned the grocers in Portree, Lochmaddy, Castlebay, and pestered the shopgirls by checking the price of comestibles.
He flicked through the book and found a number for the grocers in Portree next to a long chart of prices that she had tracked over a period of several years. He picked up the phone and, not quite sure of what he might do next, he dialled the number.
It rang out for a time, but just as he began to fear that the shop had closed for the evening, a woman answered and apologised for keeping him waiting.
He asked the woman to look out the window and tell him if there was a Transit van parked near the water.
She laughed and said that, yes, in fact there were three or four vans.
He asked her if there was a man hanging about, a tall man with sad green eyes, and she laughed again, and said that in fact, yes, there was, and that he had just been in to buy some milk.
“And is there anything else you need?”
“Yes,” he said. “I wonder if you could go outside and give the man a message. Ask him to wait a little longer. John is coming in on Donnie’s boat.
Tell him no matter how John protests, or asks him to come home again, tell the man he is not to give in to him.
Is that clear? Tell this man that he is the bellwether now – he will understand that. ”
The woman gave a little gasp. She said she would try, but she explained that even though Portree wasn’t so big, she could not promise she would find the man again.
Cal thanked her for trying and returned the handset to the cradle.
He was slumped at the phone table in an overwhelmed sort of palsy.
He had to get to the slipway but his mind was racing, trying to make sense of what he now knew.
There was not a single frame of his history that was unaltered by what he had learnt about his father.
For every question that arose there came a sudden reframing.
All the things that had never made sense were finally clarified.
All the cruelties he took as truths were now uncertain.
He was shaken from his thoughts by the tip-tup of a dull tin bell.
Ishbel came around the corner and he realised he had left the back door open. She strolled down the hallway with a lazy, insolent gait. She was so matted with fleece that she dampened the wall where she brushed it.
“I didn’t hear you knock,” he said.
Ishbel rubbed her toothless gums together. She was casting around as if bored, as if unimpressed with the changes that had befallen the old place.
Cal pressed his fingers to his eyelids. He did a final check of the things John might need.
He wondered if he should get his heavy coat and make him a flask of tea for the sailing.
He wondered if he should actually bother to dig out some Bibles from the box that lay under the stairs and decided he would, if only to allow his father to feel upstanding in his lie.
He blinked and found the bellwether ewe staring up at him. He looked into her slitted eyes and although he knew it was absurd – that he was nothing more than an empty man in an empty house – he reached out and stroked her greying muzzle.
“Can you take a message to my grandmother?” he said, with a splutter of embarrassed laughter. “Can you ask her to come home?”