Chapter 10
Euan pulled the entire drawer right out of the old dressing table and tipped his socks and underwear straight into the suitcase.
‘How will you fit a case on the back of the bike? Think, lad!’ appealed Clyde from inside the bedroom doorframe, where he watched his frantic grandson.
‘I won’t be taking your bike, Grandad. It’s yours. I’ll get the bus to the train station, and I’ll be at Mum’s by the time it gets dark.’
‘What will you do there?’
‘I’ll find something. I might be able to get my old job back at the petrol station.’
‘You hated that job.’
‘Doesn’t matter.’ Euan caught sight of himself in the winged dressing table mirrors. His face was pinched and angry.
‘I told you Carenza was a big bully, a right scunner. You’re better off without working for her.’
Euan shrugged this off and kept packing.
‘So, you’re giving up?’
He swung the wardrobe doors open. ‘How can I stay? I’ve ballsed up two jobs and every single person in town knows it. I’ve made myself unemployable.’ He pulled his t-shirts free from their hangers.
‘You know they say never to quit on a bad day?’
It was no good. Clyde couldn’t make him change his mind. ‘Cairn Dhu’s been a total washout, sorry, Grandad.’ He folded his shirts, laying each one in the case.
‘We werenae a washout, you an’ me. We’ve had a rare time!’
‘I need to get my toothbrush from the bathroom.’
Clyde barred his way. ‘Son. Come on. Sit wi’ me.’
Euan watched as his grandad wandered off towards the living room where the muted TV was making the room glow multicoloured.
When Euan put his head round the frame, Clyde was already sitting with his feet up and the remote in his hand.
‘I can’t watch any more movies, Grandad. I need to be making a new start.’
‘Sit.’ Clyde pressed a button and the old VHS machine whirred and clunked, and on the screen came a video, dark with age, but unmistakably a recording made in this very room.
Euan dropped onto the edge of the sofa.
‘Our ruby wedding anniversary.’
The screen showed the familiar old sofa, pushed up against the wall, and the same sideboard and lamps and armchairs cleared aside to make way for a crowd.
‘That’s old Dr Millen there, with his wife, and that’s old Mrs McIntyre and her man, both gone now, of course. And there’s my pals from the long bar at the Cairn Dhu Hotel. Jock and John…’
‘All right, Grandad, I…’
Clyde shooshed him, and Euan realised he’d have to delay his exit for a few more minutes.
‘And there’s your granny.’
This made Euan pay better attention, as it became clear the man behind the video camera was Clyde himself.
‘Don’t be filmin’ me!’ his grandmother said, waving a hand at her husband.
‘Who else would I be filmin’, eh? Here, Jock, take this…’ came Clyde’s voice from behind the lens, and in a moment he emerged into the wobbly shot.
Euan watched as his grandfather, with slicked-back dark hair, danced his way over into his wife’s arms and the two of them fell into a slow dance beneath the same old rattan lightshade they were sitting under now.
Other couples joined in, swaying and circling in the smoky little room.
‘If I’d given up on your grandmother the first time she knocked me back, there’d have been no ruby wedding, no kids, no wee Euan Forte.’ He showed the gaps in his teeth as he smiled. ‘Do you get my drift?’ Clyde’s sly look told Euan he must have figured out about him liking Peaches.
‘That’s different. I never even got the chance for her to knock me back, and now she must think I’m a joke, same as everyone else in town.’
Clyde lit a cigarette, while at the party onscreen the Righteous Brothers stopped singing about a lost Lovin’ Feelin’ and changed to someone singing about Red Red Wine.
‘The first time I asked her out, she was seeing some laddie from Tomintoul! Second time, she said she was getting over that same laddie and wasnae looking for a boyfriend. The third time, a whole year after the first, she said yes.’
‘Your point?’ Euan asked wearily.
‘The time needs to be right. The stars aligned.’ Clyde laughed and coughed at the same time and turned back to the screen. ‘If it’s worth having, you need to stick around until the right moment. And stay true and faithful while you wait.’
‘I’m not waiting around Cairn Dhu jobless and useless. Sorry, Grandad, but I’m not.’
‘When your grandmother passed, everybody said it’ll take time.
When I had the stroke, the same folk said it’ll take time.
But I didn’t want to give it time. I wanted it over, fixed, and fast!
’ Another draw from his cigarette and he chuckled a wistful laugh.
‘I had to learn patience. I had to learn how to be rehabilitated to the world.’
Euan bit his lip, thinking of the time ticking. He didn’t want to be rude, but what was his grandad on about?
‘I get up every day at seven, alone. But I get up on the very dot! And I go for my paper and my milk and my rolls, because that’s what I always did. I make my breakfast. I wind the clock. I polish the bike. All of it helps me live without her.’
A sharp sting behind his eyes alerted Euan to the threat of tears. His grandmother laughed from the TV screen, drawing Clyde’s eyes away again.
‘I go to the stroke clinic every month.’ He was directing this to his wife on the screen now.
‘And I do my exercises every night, and I go to the Garden Project on a Sunday, and I tell the new lassie in the newsagents not to let on about the cigarettes to that new doctor because I’m cutting back.
’ He smiled now. ‘And that’s how I keep going every day. ’
When their eyes met again, his grandad’s were sharp and alive while Euan’s were damp and heavy.
‘What’s this got to do with me leaving?’ he asked.
‘You need a wee bit of time to rehabilitate yourself, Euan. Maybe you won’t work for a wee while.’ He shrugged. ‘So what? I’ll look after you. Maybe you won’t win young Peaches McDowell. Maybe you will. But you can hardly prove to her that you want her if you’re miles away at your mum’s, eh?’
Euan looked at his hands. There was absolutely no keeping of secrets in Cairn Dhu. Clyde had it all figured out.
‘I know that you didnae have the easiest start in life. First your dad bolted, and then your mum whisked you away to Glasgow with that fellow, and by all accounts he was a waste of space, and then you found yourself with a wee sister, and yourself out of school. It can’t have been easy.’
Euan shrugged. ‘It was all right.’
‘I could have helped more. I see that now. We were’ – Clyde flicked the hand that held his cigarette towards the screen – ‘doing fine here. Having a rare time!’
‘It’s not your fault,’ Euan said. ‘And I was the one mucking about at school, leaving with no qualifications.’
‘And why was that, do you think? You needed better looking after. I wish I’d done more.
But you’re here now, and we make a braw team, I reckon.
I didn’t help look after you then. I didn’t try to talk your mum into getting shot of that ridiculous Sparks fellow when I could have, but I can help look after you now.
Now that it’s you needing some time and rehabilitation.
Stay, please. Just another few weeks. If you feel the same come May, I’ll pay your train fare back home. ’
Euan’s eyes switched to the screen just as the video cut out and another rippled into place.
It was a film of Hogmanay. Again it was filmed right here, and there was Euan as a kid and his mum, pregnant, but no Jimmy Sparks to be seen.
He wouldn’t come to family visits. Even in those grainy scenes from years ago, he could see the way his mother had lost all her glow being married to that man.
In a paper cracker hat, his younger self was sitting at the dinner table while his granny dished up steak pie. Little Euan barely moved, and he didn’t speak or smile once.
‘I should have intervened,’ Clyde said again, sorrowfully. ‘I can’t say I wasn’t aware of what a bad business that fellow was.’
‘Mum wouldn’t have listened. I used to beg her to lock him out, every time he went to work.
She never did. I’d tell her to stop giving him money, stop letting him walk all over her, but she wouldn’t hear a word against him.
She’s still waiting for him now. Has been since the day he left.
Half hoping for him, half dreading him coming back. ’
Euan knew as well as his mother did that after a decade Jimmy Sparks wasn’t returning, but the shadow he’d cast still darkened their home. The loss of trust in his mum still stung. His little sister was too wee to remember what it had been like, but Euan wasn’t likely to ever forget.
‘Stay here,’ Clyde implored. ‘These last few weeks simply haven’t been your time, but it’ll come, if you’re patient.’
‘How will I know when it’s my time?’ Euan asked as the VHS faded to crackling black and the tape clunked to a stop.
‘There’s one way to find out.’ Clyde indicated the spot where Euan’s phone stuck out of his shirt pocket.
‘I’ve not got her number!’ Euan cried dejectedly.
Clyde reached for the landline phone on the little table by his armchair.
‘I know who does, but keep in mind, you owe me for this one, big time.’ He shook his head with a sigh as he dialled a number and waited while it connected.
‘Is that you, Senga? Clyde Forte. Listen, I’ve need of your help, for the boy, but it’s to be a secret, mind? ’
Across Cairn Dhu and up in the penthouse kitchen of the town’s most exclusive house, Peaches McDowell’s mobile rang on the kitchen table.
Carenza stopped pouring her wine at the sound and flicked her eyes towards the stairs.
Approaching the phone a little tentatively, she checked the screen.
Unknown number? What was the harm in picking up?
Peaches was up in her room, oddly quiet.
She’d barely eaten the takeaway Carenza had brought home on the way back from her hair appointment.
It must be nerves over the runway, only a few days away.