Chapter 8
Roz wiped her damp forehead with the back of her hand.
It had been a long, unseasonably sunny Wednesday for mid-April, and it was stifling up here on the repair barn’s storage mezzanine up against the huge glass wall at the shed’s deepest point.
McIntyre had been hoarding stuff up here for months, even though the repair shop volunteers had made him swear he wouldn’t.
They hadn’t forgotten his old clutter-loving ways.
Everything comes in handy if you hold on to it long enough, he’d say. Sod’s law, as soon as you chuck something out, someone comes along needing exactly that thing!
It had driven Roz mad over the years, and yet, today, when she was looking for something actually precious that should have been stored away carefully up here, it was nowhere to be found.
She heard steps on the loft ladder below her, followed by her husband’s voice.
‘What are you rifling for up here?’ He’d popped his head over the mezzanine platform. He did not look happy.
‘Have you seen our May Day costumes? I could have sworn they were put up here when the extension was finished.’
McIntyre clambered up the last few steps, inserting himself between his wife and the accumulated piles of boxes and bags.
‘They’re no’ up here.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Well, did you find them?’ he said in a prim, pointed way, clearly agitated.
‘You don’t think they got binned when the builders were here, do you? There was a lot of disruption. Who knows what ended up in that skip?’
‘Aye, aye, that’s probably it. The builders will have binned them.’
The careless way he said it made her gasp. Didn’t he know how important that stuff was to her? To them?
‘Bloomin’ builders!’ he growled, like a man making a point of being annoyed. ‘It’ll be under a mountain of landfill by now.’
‘But… our May King and Queen cloaks?’ she implored. ‘My dress and mask, and your crown? Mac, are you sure you haven’t squirrelled them away in one of your’ – she’d been about to say hoards, or clutter corners – ‘in one of your storage spots?’
‘Sure I’m sure. Now, come doon! It’s no’ safe up here.’
That wasn’t strictly true. The railing protected against falls, and the whole extension had passed its safety inspection in January. Still, he was taking her by the shoulders, guiding her towards the ladder. Yet, she would not be hurried.
‘If you see them, you’ll tell me, won’t you? I wanted to show our costumes to the young ones coming in today for my Beltane crafting session.’
McIntyre lifted his shoulders in an exaggerated shrug. ‘I’ll keep an eye open, but I cannae really remember what they looked like.’
‘You can’t remember? Mac!’ If he was trying to play on her last nerve, he’d succeeded.
Roz McIntyre rarely lost the rag, yet today she couldn’t be certain her irritated feelings weren’t about to tip over into rage.
‘I feel like you’re avoiding me,’ she challenged.
This stopped his attempts to get his wife back down onto the ladder.
‘Roz, no! Not at all.’ He looked genuinely hurt and was blinking in astonishment.
This only fanned the embers of resentment smouldering within her.
She reached for another source of annoyance. ‘I’ve been asking you for weeks what you want to do for our anniversary—’ she began.
‘Do?’ He cut her off, like this was the first time he was hearing it.
‘Yes! To celebrate us?’
His blank stare confirmed he hadn’t been planning on doing anything at all. ‘We can do whatever you want,’ he offered feebly.
‘I want you to want to do something.’
‘Eh?’
‘Oh, never mind.’ If she didn’t stop now, she might scream, or shove him off the mezzanine and onto Senga’s impressive display of rock buns on the café counter below. ‘Are you coming to help with the mask making?’
‘Aye, I would have, but I’ve that many other things need doing…’ he began.
‘You are avoiding me.’
‘Of course not, I’m just busy, what with Clyde’s sidecar and all the repairs that keep comin’ in, and everything else that’s always going on.’
‘What’s got into you lately? And what’s all this with the new clobber?
New overalls that you bought yourself the other week?
And is this a new shirt?’ Roz rubbed the tip of the collar between her fingers.
These were the first clothes he’d ever gone out and bought on his own.
She was firmly established as the clothes-shopper of the marriage.
She’d learned long ago that, without her interventions, Mac would simply patch up and re-wear his shabby old clothes until they were more patch than anything else.
Where had he even gone to buy the new stuff?
Plus, he’d taken himself to Ozan the barber’s the other day, entirely unprompted, and arrived home freshly shorn and clean shaven.
Normally he’d need prompting umpteen times about making an appointment.
‘I just thought it’d be nice to make an effort.’ He shrugged.
‘And now you’re saying you don’t even remember my May Queen costume?’
‘You know I’m not good with these things. I’m sorry.’
Down below them, a small but noisy crowd was gathering in the café seating area. Peaches was setting out the sewing stuff and heating the glue gun, and the barn doors slid open and shut as more locals arrived, ready to benefit from Roz’s Beltane costume making know-how and free craft supplies.
She lowered herself onto the ladder, stomping heavily on its rungs in her annoyance. ‘You know, Mac? Something’s seriously got to change around here,’ she hissed, before disappearing beneath the parapet.
Her last glimpse of her husband’s face told her he was still confused, and a little afraid, and possibly a little guilty, but he said nothing.
In that moment Roz knew if things were going to change in their lives, she had to be the one making it happen.
Not long afterwards, once McIntyre had shifted boxes and rummaged around up on the mezzanine, he sheepishly slunk down the ladder, disappearing among the storage shelves on the ground floor, and Roz was left tipping out onto the café tables her craft materials, including the collection of sticks, branches and handfuls of dry gorse and lavender she’d foraged over the winter, spreading them out alongside the green wool and scrap material she’d been thrifting all year long.
Peaches added to the craft materials her own fabric offcuts and decorative odds and ends left over from creating her fashion collection.
She’d also torn the newspaper scraps and poured out a dish of PVA glue for papier-maché making.
‘That ought to be enough,’ said Senga, looking over their Beltane offerings while taking off her café apron and coming to sit down.
She brought with her a dish of ‘top hats’ for the crafters, her own favourite party treat from when she’d been a bairn: a big marshmallow standing upright on a chocolate disc to give the appearance of a dapper hat, and with a colourful chocolate bead on top, also stuck on with a wee blob of chocolate.
‘Remember the paper plates,’ said Rhona, placing the pile of white plates next to the scissors, green poster paint and bobbins of thick white elastic. ‘For the kiddies’ masks.’ Then Rhona sat down too with a loud sigh of relief that the café was now closed for the day.
Craft sessions were things the repair shop did well.
They drew the families and the repair shop regulars alike, and this one was no exception, not when there was Carenza’s lauded Beltane Bonfire and Sausage Sizzle to prepare for.
Under her leadership the event promised to be bigger and better than ever.
Jolyon Sears lost no time in getting stuck in to the top hats and in grabbing one of the paper plates to decorate. Roz helped him cut eyeholes while Jolyon’s mum helped herself to tea from the big urn.
‘Are you looking forward to the bonfire party?’ Roz asked the little boy now, and he replied with some emphatic nodding.
‘Who do you think’s going to be crowned May Queen and King?’ little Shell Cooper wanted to know. She’d thrown herself into the chair next to Jolyon and was crumpling newspaper and glueing it to a paper plate to form the contours of a lumpy-bumpy face.
‘Nobody knows until the night itself,’ answered Peaches. ‘Well, I suppose my mum knows.’
Shell didn’t seem to like this answer. ‘Who decides?’
‘The Walpurgisnacht elders,’ imparted Senga as she passed Shell fresh newspaper strips for her to glue.
Jolyon’s very next marshmallow top hat paused inches from his mouth. He reached for the tablet on the chair beside him and tapped a button. A boy’s voice, Scottish just like him, came from the speaker. ‘Pardon?’
Mhairi, who stood behind her son’s chair with her steaming mug of tea, explained to the astonished Senga and Rhona, ‘That’s Jolly’s ACC software on his tablet – Augmentative and Alternative Communication.
It’s one of the ways he communicates out loud.
He chooses from words on the screen, and it makes the sounds. ’
‘Oh, righty-o,’ Senga said, leaning towards Jolyon. ‘Nobody knows who the Walpurgisnacht elders are,’ she told him. ‘But once an elder, always an elder, and the whole committee is sworn to secrecy. Elders, it is rumoured, do not even know for certain the identities of the other elders.’
‘Well, how do they decide then?’ burst Shell.
‘It’s said the elders visit Walpurga’s oak, out on the Knowe, on the last night of April and place a slip of paper with their choices on it inside the knot in the trunk – there’s a hole, you see, in the shape of a great raindrop – and someone collects them on May Day morning.’
‘That’s my mum,’ Peaches added.
‘That’s her mum,’ Senga confirmed, not wanting to be outdone. ‘And the elders’ decision is announced at the bonfire celebration.’
‘And then the specially picked people get the crowns,’ Shell told Jolyon, importantly.
This sent him back to his screen where he chose more words. ‘Can children get a crown?’ Jolyon asked.
‘Oh no,’ Rhona took over from her sister. ‘It’s always two grown-ups that are selected to be king and queen.’