Chapter 8
Wednesday
By the next morning, JB was in a better mood.
He could put a little weight on his foot now.
He was also dressed. For breakfast, they all tucked into the leftover pasta from the night before, plus some porridge oats which they ate the Scottish way, according to the instructions on the box, with salt.
In the twin beds last night, Taylor and Drew had messaged each other: JB may have told his father he’d be running – but what was that all about?
There was no way he’d be able to. So who was going to tell him?
! Neither wanted to reply to that one so they’d put their phones down and gone to sleep.
But the question remained, carried around the little cottage that morning in the scent of burnt toast, in the steam puffing from the boiling kettle and the warmth still emanating from the peats.
The issue was there, in the air, just hanging.
Well, let it hang because neither Taylor nor Drew had worked out quite how to broach it out loud.
‘What’s the plan, Stan?’
‘I don’t know, bro.’
There was jovial silence during which they all tried to find other rhyming quips but they quickly gave up.
‘I have cabin fever,’ JB said. ‘Feels like I’ve been cooped up way too long.
And she keeps staring at me.’ He gestured at the old framed photo on the wall which had continued to captivate Taylor since the first morning, but which Drew was only noticing for the first time.
‘Her eyes follow me, man. She’s freaking me out. ’
‘I guess that’s Flora’s ma or grandma,’ Drew said.
‘Probably just some random picture from a magazine,’ said JB. ‘Whoever she is, she’s looking into my soul!’
‘What’s she found in there?’ Taylor laughed.
‘Darkness,’ Drew said, a little too darkly.
‘Ass-wipe!’ JB threw a balled up sock at him. Drew caught it and took the insult with a shrug of his shoulders and didn’t parry back, so JB tried again with jerk and cocksucker and dick until Taylor stood and stretched and suggested a drive.
‘Let’s take the Golden Road,’ he said.
‘What – are we in the Wizard of Frikkin Oz?’ said JB.
‘You can’t be in the Wizard,’ said Drew. ‘But, as Taylor will say, we are in Harris – so let’s get out there.’
‘You can be in the Wizard if that’s your thing Drewdog,’ JB said and he laughed at himself and called himself such a dick before he, too, stood and stretched.
‘Just looks like a regular road to me,’ JB said, as they turned into the Golden Road. This island was one big disappointment.
‘So-called because it cost a bunch to build it,’ Taylor said lightly.
He’d been enjoying quite a lot of research, quietly on his phone and from his guidebook while the other two slept.
All around, the land stretched and rolled, pocked by rock and loch; it was intense and stern like an elderly man of few words.
Taylor, though, thought it was magnificent in its grandeur and melancholy.
Every hour he was here, Harris injected itself deeper.
This place, for whatever reason, was significant.
He sensed that it ran deeper than just the marathon, that it was more intricately woven than four scraps of fabric. Why would that be?
‘They filmed 2001: A Space Odyssey here,’ Drew piped up from the back. You could forget Drew was in your company sometimes. ‘I read that. I read that Kubrick used Harris for Jupiter.’
Taylor loved Drew just then.
‘It’s godforsaken,’ JB said with a shudder.
‘I thought we were going to some tiny, cute island, like we could skip around it. But it feels so big, lonely too. And also – could somebody tell me – where are the trees? Why’s there not a single tree?
’ He looked out at the window, at the miles of rock and squelch.
He felt smaller here than ever he had in the presence of great mountains or forests and he wasn’t sure how that could be.
Maybe it was because of his ankle, perhaps he felt vulnerable.
Fuck that. He was in pain. Fuck that too!
Pain is all in the mind, he told himself because it had been drummed into him.
God, his Dad had told him a bunch of crap when he’d been young.
The awful thing was, he still believed it, lived his life accordingly.
‘Well I think it’s cool,’ Taylor said. ‘It’s good to feel small.’
‘Do you know where your family’s home was?’ Drew asked.
‘I never really asked my mom that,’ Taylor said. ‘She always said Harris, nothing more, so I imagined it was going to be a small place with one tiny town and everyone knowing each other.’
‘You can see why she left here when she did,’ JB said. ‘Imagine growing up here with all this nothing, too much water and no trees.’
‘Look!’ said Drew. They were in a place called Drinishader and there was a tweed shop with a small museum attached. ‘Do you have your pieces of tweed?’
Taylor did not. He turned to JB. ‘You okay if we make a stop, buddy?’
‘Yeah, I’m done with the landscape – and they have coffee.’
They were the only people there. It was a compact, brightly lit space cleverly designed and informative. JB hobbled around from display to display, reading, feeling and smelling; learning about the history of the cloth. He soon forgave the island its lack of trees in return for its tweed.
‘I like that what started as a functional cloth became high fashion,’ said Drew.
‘It’s like jeans,’ said JB.
‘Huh?’ Taylor was only half listening.
‘Yeah, in America denim was used not for clothing but for bags and stuff for farm hands. And then this farmer dude’s wife called Jean runs up work coveralls for the labourers from denim. And so, jeans were born.’
Taylor and Drew stared at JB.
‘Yep,’ he said. ‘I’m not just a pretty face.’
‘Denim is, in fact, French,’ Drew said. ‘De N?mes – fabric from N?mes.’
‘You and your brain,’ JB shook his head and rolled his eyes and although his voice was generous, still he gave Drew a shove though it caused him to wobble.
They came across the old spiked hand paddles, learnt about blending and carding wool, about dyeing and spinning and how every thread has a precise twist to create an even, resilient yarn. They looked at the sheep bones used as the shuttles on the early wooden looms, passed through by hand.
‘So you say your grandfather knew how to do this? He’d’ve had a loom like that one?’
But Taylor wasn’t listening. There was a spoon, just like the one in the pocket of his backpack back at Flora’s House. A simple spoon with part of it shorn off at an angle.
‘I have one of these! I brought it with!’
‘It was used to scrape crotal off the rocks,’ Drew read.
‘Scrotal whatnow?’ JB limped over.
‘A type of lichen used as a traditional dye – for a deep red-brown.’
‘So now you know.’
‘Yes,’ said Taylor, ‘I guess I do.’
They left for the shop. It was the sister branch to the one in Tarbert and the welcome was just as warm.
‘Well, if it isn’t the Speedy McSpeedies,’ the manager laughed. She regarded JB, gave him a kind wink. ‘And Hop-a-long Hank.’
‘JB,’ he corrected. Privately, he cursed his stubbornness for leaving the crutch in the car. His ankle was starting to throb. ‘Is there anyone who doesn’t know about the marathon?’
She gave the matter great thought. ‘Not a soul,’ she declared. ‘Now – are you shopping? Browsing? How can I help?’
‘So I have these tweeds,’ Taylor said. ‘My grandfather knitted them.’ He closed his eyes and winced at himself. Did he just say knit? ‘Wove.’
‘May I take a wee look?’
‘They’re back at the cottage,’ he mumbled. ‘I have his crotal spoon too. Like yours. But – also back at the cottage.’
She smiled. ‘Is this a Hearach I see before me?’
‘Colorado Springs,’ Taylor said. ‘Or Missouri, I guess.’ And it struck him how he was no longer sure where was home. ‘I met Becca in Northton and she took my tweed to Donald John in Luskentyre and next I’m going to go meet Mr MacDonald in, er, Hooshynooshy.’
‘Hushinish.’
‘Hushinish. Thank you. But maybe I could bring mine in for you to see? After the marathon? We have a whole day afterwards, before we leave.’
‘What’s this music?’ Drew asked.
‘It’s traditional waulking songs – we sell the CDs. It’s what the womenfolk would sing as they waulked the tweed.’
The boys all imagined processions of women carrying long swathes of tweed as they walked around the island whilst singing their lovely songs.
‘òrain luadh – waulking songs.’
‘My mother used to have the best walking rhymes when she was dragging me on a hike,’ Taylor said.
‘Waulking,’ said Drew looking at the CD, thinking he might buy it, despite having nothing to play it on. It was far cheaper than the waistcoat still on hold for him at the main shop. ‘W.A.U.L.K.’
‘Aye,’ the manager said. ‘In the olden days the woven cloth would have been hard and greasy so it would be soaked in stale urine to fix the dye. Then the women would gather around a long grooved board and together they’d pass the cloth amongst them, beating it in a rhythm to soften it, to thicken it, to set the final dimensions.
After waulking and washing and drying, the tweed would be up to two inches narrower.
All the while they’d sing – such beautiful songs.
And they’d chat, so they would, and have a good old gossip too. ’
JB was still processing the fact that tweed had a good soaking in piss while Drew was checking if waulking songs were on Spotify.
Taylor, though, just gazed around at all these everythings made from tweed.
He wondered how his grandfather’s pieces had been soaked and set.
And he hoped, he truly did, that they too had been passed around and sung to, that the cloth had been infused with so much more from the island than lichen from rocks, wool from the sheep, the hand of the weaver.
Perhaps it takes a village to make a tweed.