Chapter 8 #2
Jolyon and Shell looked at one another very disappointedly.
‘Oh well,’ Shell told her friend, stoically. ‘At least we get to hold the fire sticks to help light the bonfire with!’ This cheered Jolyon immensely.
‘The mums and dads hold them, actually,’ Mhairi threw in as fast as she could.
‘Aye, aye, but the kids can help!’ Shell corrected her, rolling her eyes, and a defeated Mhairi was left to draw a big breath and meet Livvie’s eyes in a patience-of-a-saint kind of way. Livvie Cooper only smiled back and shook her head.
‘Have you two ever been picked for May Queen?’ Shell asked the Gifford sisters.
‘Not us,’ Senga replied, ‘but Roz here was Queen, years ago.’
Roz, who’d been tightly tying some bundled gorse twigs around a long shaft of broom handle to make a decorative Beltane besom, lifted her head. ‘Hmm?’
‘Queen? You?’ asked Jolyon, possibly a little sceptically, given the look on his face.
‘It’s true,’ Roz confirmed. ‘Back in, ooh…’
‘Nineteen ninety-seven,’ someone said.
Everyone snapped their heads round to look at McIntyre, over by his repair bench where he was tidying away some clutter and making to leave.
Roz watched him too, possibly a little surprised he even recalled the year.
He had his jacket on now and his bag on his shoulder. ‘Just popping out to the Garten Valley,’ he said, coming to kiss his wife on the cheek.
‘Off to the DIY megastore?’ Rhona asked him, seemingly innocently.
All the while her older sister was peering back and forth between the husband and wife through narrowed eyes.
‘Aye, that’s the one,’ McIntyre said hurriedly, while making for the shed doors. ‘Cheery-bye.’
Roz didn’t reply, only wondering why Senga’s gaze made her feel like shrinking away entirely.
Shell, however, was still processing the bombshell. ‘What, you and him were the king and queen of Beltane?’
‘Shell!’ Livvie rebuked her child. ‘Manners.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Roz. ‘Yes, we were. I was in my twenties then. I always suspected my granny was one of Walpurga’s elders. She’d never tell me when I asked, but she would sort of… twinkle her eyes, you know?’
Jolyon and Shell nodded that they did know.
‘Anyway, that was the night I met Mr McIntyre. Or at least, the first time we spoke properly. The elders paired us up as king and queen, and we danced together for the rest of the night, and we jumped between the fires’ embers…’
‘The what?’ Shell shifted excitedly in her seat. This just got better and better.
‘You know how there’s the giant bonfire in the middle of the rec?’ Roz asked, and the kids nodded. ‘There’s also two smaller ones, called the need fires, with a gap in between, and the king and queen have to pass between them, to sort of…’ Roz stopped, unsure why they did it.
‘To purify themselves, and ask for a blessing,’ said Senga. ‘Walpurga was an ancient saint of healing. That’s why she’s associated with witches and wise women.’
‘That’s right,’ said Roz, inspecting her finished besom which she’d decorated with green ribbons criss-crossing all down the handle. ‘And then all the other couples in town jump between the need fires together, and… well, that’s it.’
‘By then, the punch bowls are near aboot empty and the music’s birlin’ and the sky’s dark and… ah, it’s braw!’ This came from a starry-eyed Rhona, who seemed to be revelling in her own memories of May Days past.
‘You certainly got your blessings, Roz!’ Senga put in, and Roz couldn’t help but take her meaning.
Within a year of jumping through those flames, she and McIntyre were living together at the mill house with Ally and Murray on the way.
‘I remember that night,’ said Rhona dreamily. ‘You were so bonny in your costume and cloak, and your hair was long then, right down to your waist.’
Roz found that smiling at this took a surprising amount of effort, so she focused on gathering another bundle of gorse for a second besom broom.
‘It was our mother that crowned you both. Do you remember?’ asked Senga.
‘I remember,’ Roz said quietly.
The conversation took another turn as Shell exclaimed about the Gifford women having a mum.
‘How old even is she!’ This was followed by some gentle explaining from Rhona that she was no longer around (and a lot of apologising from a mortified Livvie), and in all this chatter Roz was forgotten about, allowing her to sink into a quiet funk (which to everyone at the craft tables looked like her usual industrious focus).
More locals and their kids arrived and everyone shifted up to make room and more craft supplies were shared out. Aamaya Roy had brought her own Beltane cloak to show everyone, though hers wasn’t green but red and orange, and that stole everyone’s focus even further.
No matter how much besom fastening, mask making and gossiping went on around the craft tables, and no matter how much tea was drunk and how many times Senga had to refresh the dish of top hats, Roz’s brain kept insisting on showing her moments from the night she was first paired with the young Charlie Gas, which lived as fresh in her memory as if it had happened yesterday.
That night, there’d been people eating and dancing, others wandering amongst the stalls hand in hand.
It was almost impossible to work out who was who as everyone wore masks.
The ones with their dogs on leads helped identify their owners, but other than that, when people approached one another they had to lift their coverings to reveal their identities.
Roz, however, like some of the younger townsfolk, had worn her mask on top of her head so she could drink her Walpurgisnacht punch.
Charlie had his mask up too. Her first impression of him had been of rosy cheeks (it was the Beltane punch and a few pints at the pub beforehand doing that) and his thick red brush of hair.
He’d been there with pals from the tractor factory, flush with their week’s wages and intent on spending all of it.
Roz’s friend from the school, Miss Tierney, an NQT like herself, had quickly paired off with one of Charlie’s pals, Murtagh, still in his factory overalls, and Roz had been left standing by the unlit bonfire listening to Sachin Roy’s band, Down in the Dhol Drums, playing Scottish-Bhangra mashups of pop and rock anthems, all nineties’ keytar and Tumbi string.
As Roz knew very well, in the Highlands, no one needed to be doused in drink before they’d take to the dancefloor.
All a Scot needed was a square foot of space around them and a melody of any kind, and they’d be off.
It is bred into them as bairns in school Country Dancing lessons, and you can bet your last pound coin that a Scottish child’s first memory of dancing will be standing on their uncle’s feet for a St Bernard’s Waltz at a wedding reception or gripping the clammy hands of another wee lad or lass at the Christmas ceilidh for an Eightsome Reel or a Gay Gordons.
Moving to music is irresistible to Scots, and no one’s particularly shy about it.
She’d watched the band, swaying in her long white Beltane dress, the one she and her grandmother had handmade specially.
In the spirit of Walpurga’s devotees, they’d sewn real ivy vines around the waist and criss-crossing over the front and back like a leafy bodice.
The weather had been dry for days, so she’d worn her ceilidh pumps too, and just as Senga had described, her long hair was hanging loose down her back – not straight, not curly, but a stubborn mix of the two.
Charlie had seen her dancing alone and presented himself to her out of nowhere, bold as brass, lifting his ‘Green Man’ mask.
‘You dancing?’ he’d said, initiating the old script from the Scottish dance halls, for which there was only one answer.
‘You asking?’ she’d replied. She’d recognised him, though only hazily, as that boy who’d been a couple of years above her in primary school.
‘I’m asking,’ he’d said, so assured and full of simple joy. She could still conjure up the way his eyes sparkled in the dying Walpurgisnacht sunset.
‘I’m dancing,’ she’d said without any hesitation, and they’d taken hands and joined all the others on the grassy expanse between the band’s ‘stage’ and the bonfire.
Roz didn’t know now, just as she’d had no idea then, how many songs they’d danced to.
Time has a way of running thin then thick through the Beltane hourglass.
All she knew was that they’d barely registered the arrival of the procession or the moment they’d brought their flaming torches to ignite the bonfire.
She did remember, however, how the pair of them had complained when Sachin and his pals stopped for a break and the dancing ended, but then a piper had stepped in and taken over, his chanter agitating the night air and waking the mountain birds so they sang along.
Or at least that’s how it had sounded to her ears that evening.
All the while, flames from the bonfires had licked into the air and smoke swirled at their feet, and they danced themselves closer together, sharing details about themselves in snatches between tunes, and kissing too, because they were young and they hadn’t a thing in the world holding them back.
Of course, their families knew each other going way back, but after Primary they’d gone to different schools, and then Roz had gone off to college and teacher training.
That night Charlie had told her how seeing her dancing alone in her white dress had ignited immediate memories of his boyish crush on her, years before, and how as a teenager he’d sometimes spot her around Cairn Dhu and want to talk to her but never did.
Now, he’d told her, he wasn’t a shy little boy any more, but a man intent on staying awake all night just to talk with her.
She didn’t remember eating anything that night, and she didn’t remember being hungry for anything other than him. She also couldn’t recall feeling even a hint of the night chill, but she did remember taking his hand and looking hard at him as they’d come to a wordless agreement to get out of there.
She’d walked him across the field, leading him.
She’d been taking him to the meadows, fully intent on lying him down under the Nithy Brig and kissing him until dawn, only, their voices were suddenly being called out loud, announced on the night air.
The town had no speaker system or mics back then, so it was just a chain of voices chanting ‘Charlie Gas and Rosalyn McIntyre’.
Although their instincts had told them to keep walking and hide themselves away, they’d quickly been located and brought before old Mrs Gifford, the one who’d passed away years ago now, and she had the pair come up onto the haybale platform and proclaimed them May Queen and King to the town’s hearty approval, draping the long cloaks over their shoulders and crowning them with sturdy varnished and gilded papier-maché coronets.
‘The elders have decided,’ old Mrs Gifford had said.
After that, the whole night was a wild blur of many more drinks and many more dances, culminating in Charlie and Roz leading the whole town in the frightening leap through the embers between the two healing bonfires, and later, when there was nothing stopping them, and no one was paying them much attention any more, they’d broken into a run.
By the time they reached the ancient bridge over the shallow silver waters of the River Nithy, Roz’s dancing shoes were ruined and her ivy tendril lacings had come loose and were strewn over the meadow behind them.
They’d thrown themselves down on the smoothed, dry pebbles under the brig’s stone arch and done things in the Cross Quarter Day darkness that even the Nithy River sprites and water bogles must have gasped at.
It had been an instant kind of love for them. A rare kind.
Roz blinked away the daydream now and looked about the shed at the bowed heads of the crafting circle, everyone deep into their talk and mask-making, everyone apart from the person she most wished was here, her errant May King.