Chapter Thirteen
Thirteen
Axe
The girls arrive looking so sleepy. This is always what Axe notices first when he stands waiting for them on the dock, his basket of flowers in his arms, as the boat of new arrivals comes in.
He likes to greet them and present each with a bunch of wild Scottish heather and thistles, plus a sprig of Scotch bluebell, all picked himself and tied in a white ribbon, because it puts a smile on their dazed, baffled faces.
They perk right up to thank him, and they ask how old he is (seven) and they tell him in all different languages that his eyes are beautiful, as blue as the ocean they’ve recently crossed—the water that now separates them from home.
Wherever they’re from, they ruffle his hair like he’s a lucky charm.
They’re collected from all over, these girls, but they always have two things in common.
They are very, very pretty, and they are very, very young.
Even at seven, he can tell they’re bonny lasses.
When they step off the boat onto the dock, they look up at the enormous castle looming in the distance, unsure what sort of fairy tale they’ve found themselves in.
Their baffled eyes take in the many outbuildings, the barns and the orchards, the barracks and the keep.
Axe and his brother, Hamish, are responsible for bringing the girls inside.
They’ve all been lured here because they want to become models or actresses or hoteliers or massage therapists. These are the promises that have been made, what they’ll get if they work hard enough. Though Hollywood is so far away from Scotland, it might as well be Mars.
Sometimes the girls end up being babysitters.
Or they work as Pa’s special friends. Sometimes they end up dead, but as Pa has told him many, many times, we are all going to die eventually.
Death is unremarkable, as much a fact of life as eating blueberries off the low, spreading woodland shrubs in the summer and falling asleep under wool blankets to the sound of a crackling fire in the winter.
“Death comes for everyone, Axe,” Da says, as if this is something that should make Axe feel better.
Instead, those words make him feel like he swallowed the stones he likes to skip from the bluff.
Mrs. Collins, who takes care of Axe and Hamish but also manages the girls, used to be pretty, but she is old now, with a slash of red lipstick and tall black heels.
She is Pa’s “right-hand man,” but he never kisses Mrs. Collins on the lips like he does the girls when they’re dressed up for him in the great hall.
Mrs. Collins wears shirts buttoned all the way to her neck and pleated trousers. Sometimes her sleeves creep up her arm, and Axe can see raised jagged lines along her wrists. He imagines she was once bitten by a shark.
If anyone can survive a tussle with a shark, it’s Mrs. Collins.
All the girls call Pa Daddy, and the staff calls Pa Eldy—so Axe simply thought that Eldy was just another way to say Da, too.
His brother, Hamish, who is five years older than Axe and knows many more things, tells him that it’s not Eldy, ya stupid arse, it’s El D—short for El Diablo, the Devil.
Then Axe really does feel like a stupid arse, because he still doesn’t understand. So he asks Hamish, the only person on the island willing to field Axe’s questions, though he knows he has to dole them out sparingly. He doesn’t want to test Hamish’s patience: “Why is Da the Devil?”
Hamish shrugs. “Because Da owns everything and everybody in Skara Brae, and if you get in his way, he will make your life so bad, you’ll wish you were dead. Now come along, Axe, let’s make a fort oot this bramble!”
The boys play forts a lot. Sometimes they’re soldiers and sometimes they work for Her Majesty’s Royal Air Force.
Axe dreams of a day when he will get to fly a real plane.
His whole life is Skara Brae, filled with girls who need to work hard for his da, and all Da’s friends, who look very happy when their big, fancy boats dock here.
Da’s friends are rich, with large bellies taut like drums, and they are mostly old and smell like whiskey and tobacco.
When they step onto dry land, they pronounce Axe’s home Heaven, which is confusing. How does the Devil live in Heaven?
Though sometimes Axe understands that this place is different, especially when he scrambles up rocks on the shore and lets the mist whip his face and talks to the otters that, like him, know how to camouflage.
Especially when he prays to God in the chapel and watches the sun move through the stained glass and make rainbows on the dark oak floor.
Sometimes whole days will go by and no one will notice or talk to Axe.
The men are here to sit and drink wine and get massages, and the girls are here to serve them. They rub the men, who lie like large and greasy beached whales on the massage tables. No one can ignore their snapping fingers, the way they grab at everything as if the whole world belongs to them.
The girls wear skimpy see-through T-shirts and tiny thongs, and they bring food and drinks to the lounge chairs around the pool in an endless loop.
If the Whales pinch their asses or shove their tongues down their throats, the girls act happy and excited, though Axe can tell from their eyes that they’re sad. That they want to be anywhere but here.
Axe gives the girls flowers because he wants to see them smile one last time before they stop smiling altogether. Their job here is to make Da and the Whales happy. They’re like teachers or camp counselors or nurses, Da says. They’re supposed to take care of people. That’s what they signed up for.
But Axe wonders who is supposed to take care of them.
Once, one of the girls offered to massage Axe if he’d help her leave, and he didn’t know what to say to that.
He didn’t want to be massaged, and he had no idea how to leave.
He’d been here, on the island, every single day since he was born.
He’d taught himself to read by sitting on the cold stone floor of the library, tracing the letters with his fingers.
He’d never watched the telly, though the staff often moaned about missing it most from “the real world.” As a child, he hadn’t really understood what it was, though Hamish had described it as a screen that tells a story, and at five years old, Axe took that literally, imagining the telly speaking directly to its audience like the old ham radio and the walkie-talkies he and his brother played with.
Now he knows better. Now he understands the telly doesn’t talk to you—it plays out stories performed by beautiful, bonny folk. And he wonders if it’s anything like the castle, where everyone has a role to play.
Sometimes, late at night, Axe imagines slipping from the rocks into the churning ocean and swimming in the brutal water, pumping his arms until he finds another, better shore.