Thankfully, I am on my own because there’d be no chance of me being able to conceal the look of fear in my eyes. I lose the ability to stay erect and slump in the nearest chair. I force myself to take deep breaths to slow my heart rate. At first it seems futile but eventually this pays off and I have regained enough composure to try to engage my brain into action. I lift the postcard up again and turn it over. What else can I learn from this? Of course! There is no postmark, this postcard hasn’t come from Skye, it’s been hand delivered. So last night I hadn’t imagined seeing George, he was there, and he has hand-delivered this postcard to me.
I have lost track of time as I sit there staring at my unwanted delivery. It feels as though the initial thoughts I had about whether I wanted to choose to delve into my past and revisit what happened were being snatched away. There was no choice here. George had seen to that. He was forcing me into action. Simply burying my head in the sand was not an option.
I hear the crunch of gravel on the driveway, and it stirs me into action. I hastily shove the postcard into my trouser pocket and ready myself to greet Janey and Michael.
My two favourite people in the world manage to lift my mood somewhat. I get walked through the highlights of Michael’s game where he (naturally) excelled, making great passes at opportune moments, and of course scored the penultimate goal in the last five minutes of the game.
“Dad, after the game the coach asked to see me. He thinks I should be trying out for Edinburgh United Junior team!”
“He said, ‘it’s time’, Dad!”
I couldn’t let the force of those words impact on the reaction my only son was waiting for. I congratulated him and told him how proud I was whilst those two haunting words rang in my ears – ‘it’s time …’
CHAPTER 3
George
I
take in my surroundings. This is the first time I have ever visited the Scottish Borders. It is in stark contrast to the landscape of Skye. It certainly has a beauty of its own that’s for sure and this beauty is magnified as the pale sun sets over the horizon. Everything Jack Frost has touched starts to sparkle in the half light. I retreat inside into the warmth of my rental house. A coal fire tempts me in; the flames licking up the chimney flu. This at least reminds me of home.
I imagine Thomas will have finished his days’ work and will be sat down as I am, mulling over the events of the past twenty-four hours. I recall the look of horror on his face when he saw me stood on his doorstep in the middle of the night. There was really no need to pay him a visit at that ungodly hour, but I simply had to get his attention. I wonder if he has received my delivery. What does he make of it?
He will surely be wondering how I tracked him down after all these years. I am quite sure he thought his old life was dead and buried. I know he hasn’t been back to Skye since he left school. But believe me I have kept a close eye on the life and times of Thomas Taylor. It has been a hobby of mine tracking his comings and goings (always from afar). It was unbelievably easy I have to say. If Thomas was trying to stay hidden, he hadn’t made a very good job of it.
He started his studies at the University of Edinburgh, graduating with honours gaining a Master’s in Finance. (Local sources told me he’d left Skye to go study at Edinburgh University). From there he simply wasn’t hard to track down at all. His name often appeared on their website when he’d gained his next accolade.
Social media was also a vast source of information. Thomas himself didn’t have a very active profile but you can still tell a lot from someone’s friends list. You simply research each of the friends listed and slowly begin to form a picture. He was ‘in a relationship’ with a Janey McVie. A beautiful girl who had a vibrancy about her and, it seems, a very driven quality. She was an environmental activist and active member of the debating team at Edinburgh University. Beauty and intellect, Thomas, how well you have done for yourself! She was an intriguing girl and yet there was something familiar about her…
Yes, the world wide web is your one-stop-shop for finding out everything you need to know about someone. You only have to type in the person’s name then narrow the search criteria to the country you think they live in and the area of their work. ‘Taylor’ is a fairly common surname, but ‘Taylor’ combined with ‘Scotland’, ‘Edinburgh University’, and ‘finance’ led me straight to you in no time Thomas. It directed me towards your Facebook profile and, whilst I hadn’t seen you for many years, there was no denying who was staring back at me from the computer screen.
My online searches also allowed me to track your career progression over the years. You started off as a trainee financial adviser at Standard Life headquarters in Edinburgh. It didn’t take long for you to climb the ranks and make a name for yourself. You were headhunted and went to work for a prestigious financial advisory office in the city centre. The website for this company had a lovely photo of you, Thomas; a section devoted to you headed ‘all about me.’ Wonderful reading, I must say; hearing about all your achievements and what an outstanding and well-respected financial adviser you had become. You did not stop there, oh no, the sky’s the limit with you, Thomas! You made a name for yourself and built up a devoted client bank and settled in the town of Galashiels in the Scottish Borders. There you took the helm as Area Director and lead financial adviser (covering the Borders region) for a large financial advisory service with offices throughout Scotland. And this leads us to present day …
You see, Thomas, you may think you left Skye and you left it all behind but there’s a paper trail which led me straight to your front door. I have patiently waited over the years for just the right time to approach you and that time is now. If you were trying to cover your tracks, you did not make a very good job of it. Yes, to the onlooker, you really look as though you have it all – the perfect career; beautiful wife; perfect son; and more money than most people could wish for. This is true. However, there are things you need to face, ghosts from your past. I know things about you, Thomas, perhaps I know you better than you know yourself.
Thomas
As a hush descends in the house, I no longer need to pretend to Janey that I am lying asleep. I sit upright in bed and find my thoughts drifting back to Skye. I wonder what has become of my siblings. In all the years following my departure from Skye they have never tried to make contact. I consider whether this has been a fault of mine or if it’s a mutual indifference.
We truly are a broken family. This pains me somewhat when I consider the upbringing Janey had. It was in stark contrast to mine. I wonder what it must have been like to have had parents who dote on you; to grow up without the recurring simmering threat of violence in the air.
I suspect that I, along with mother (although obviously to nowhere near the same degree), bore the brunt of father’s moods. I took on board the job of keeping my siblings in check and looked after them whilst mother cooked and cleaned. She was so consumed with chores and jobs on the croft which were never-ending. He would bark orders at me, and I was only too willing to oblige since anytime spent outside of the house was a welcome relief.
There is no contact either with father and I muse over where he is now and what has become of him. Surely he can’t be tending to the croft all on his own? Were any of my siblings still there helping out?
I left Skye at age 16. My siblings (Caroline, James, and Juliet) were all younger than me. At a rough estimate, I would suggest they would now be in their early thirties (Juliet, however, may be late twenties). Unlikely they would still be living on the croft and, if they were, I felt heart sorry for them. Left alone with father, what kind of life would that be?
Mother is the only one I am still in contact with. I say still in contact, but only intermittently via telephone. I get regular updates from the nursing home she now calls home. She has early on set dementia and lives in her own little world most of the time. When she has lucid moments, the staff are very good at contacting me and I chat with her briefly. The content of these chats varies drastic
ally depending on how her mood is that day and whether her medication is having a positive effect. Sometimes she has me fooled into thinking she shouldn’t be in care, that there’s nothing wrong with her. At other times she may have agreed to chat with me and when I speak to her, she can scream at me down the phone, shouting repeatedly, “Go away; go away.”
When I first started making these calls with her, I used to bring up father’s name or my siblings. Or sometimes I would talk about matters relating to the croft. But I soon realised that this put her mood into a downward spiral, and she reverted further into herself. Any chat about the past seemed to make her recoil and I pictured a frail little woman on the other end of the phone, so we kept things simple. I would enquire about what she had been up to and what the food was like. Very banal conversation but this was the way it had to be. It was very frustrating as I had no clue what had become of my siblings. Father I was not so concerned about, but I was anxious to know if my brother and sisters were OK.
I recall some of the times we spent on the croft. We stuck together and pulled together when there were jobs to be done, such as cutting the peat or feeding the animals, but when there was some free time it often fell that my sisters would pair up and go off together and I’d be left with James.
All three had very difference personalities. Caroline came across as very quiet and timid. A reserved girl, she shied away from large gatherings and was not confident at speaking out. What people did not realise was that underneath that shy timid exterior, there was a very clever mind at work. She was a master manipulator. How expertly she worked at making you think you had chosen to do something in a certain way, but she was a puppeteer, pulling your strings and making you bend and twist this way and that to the beat of her drum. The truth was you could never be angry at her either because of the timid little girl persona she donned. She was really such an expert in manipulation that you were always left questioning whether she could’ve possibly had any part to play in the outcome of the situation in the first place.
Juliet was the youngest and, bless her, she just went along and had to do what she was told. She was a beautiful girl and was very open and honest. I felt sad for her growing up as I felt sure she would have been used as a pawn by Caroline. If she was being manipulated, she didn’t let it bring her down. Nor did she let father’s dark moods penetrate her positivity. She radiated happiness and I suspect this was a source of annoyance to father who seemed to revel in us all emanating his gloominess. Yes, we could all aspire to be more like Juliet.
Then there was James. What can I say about James! The sides of my mouth pinch as I realise a smile is forming on my lips. I have fond memories of James. He was the quintessential naughty schoolboy. He was forever plotting and scheming up new plans, never able to sit still to catch a breath. But you couldn’t help but have a soft spot for him at the same time. We all think at one time or another about what we would like to do in a situation, but something holds us back. With James there was no such filter. He acted upon anything which came into his mind. I marvelled at some of the schemes he would dream up. But because he was unable to act on these in father’s presence, it was up to me to somehow rein him in when we were outside doing chores or having free time. He was manageable whilst doing tasks as his mind was kept busy but in our free time his creative mind was left to run wild.
I chuckle inwardly to myself when I recall the fascination he had with horses and being a cowboy. It began at an early age. He would pester our parents to buy him a horse. But money was tight, and we were already stretched with the livestock we had. This did not deter James. He wanted a horse and he wanted to look the part, so he set about fashioning a saddle from the cushioned seat left over in an old rusty tractor sitting out back. I didn’t see the finished product but what I witnessed is one of the funniest things I think I’ve ever seen even to this day … there he was in his home-made saddle with father’s hat on, riding our tup Bruno full pelt across the field and up the ridge. Give him his due, the boy was holding on, but it looked like a scene that could only end badly! Where are you now, James, and what are you up to? I cannot begin to imagine what a thirty-something-year-old version of James could possibly be like. Had he settled down or was he still the spirited character I remembered?
I must have fallen into a deep sleep shortly after because the next thing I knew, the alarm was ringing in my ears. After gathering myself I make my way down to breakfast and I am surprised to see Janey still sat there as she is normally out the door long before me.
“I found something curious,” she says. I am caught off guard and unsure where this is headed.
“What, love?”
“In your trouser pocket, Thomas … I went to do the washing and picked up the trousers you had dumped next to the bed and a postcard fell out of them. It was a very odd card as it was hand-delivered with only the words ‘wish you were here’.”
I manage to stand firm and simply say, “Oh that, I meant to put that in the bin. Yes, I thought it was strange too, but it must’ve been put through the wrong letterbox, nothing to worry about.”
I turn my back to her to indicate the conversation is at an end and go about fixing breakfast but when I turn back around and make eye contact, I see an altogether unconvinced Janey staring back at me. She doesn’t pursue the subject so for that I’m grateful and give her a quick kiss and make my way to work.
Morning passes in a blur of meetings. I pause for a brief lunch, wolfing down my sandwich, and set about analysing the performance of my client’s investment portfolio. My assistant Susie knows not to interrupt me just before a client meeting so I suspect this must be an urgent call when she buzzes through to me.
“Thomas, I know you’re busy, but I’ve got a Mr Smith on line one and he says it’s urgent. I tried to put him off, but he was very insistent. Sorry! Is it OK to transfer the call?”
“Yes, no problem,” I reason, thinking whoever this is, I’ll get rid of them.
“Hello,” No reply. “Hello, Mr Smith?” Again, no answer.
Just as I was about to place the receiver down, I hear, “Did you get the postcard?” OK so this was no Mr Smith, George Traynor had also tracked me down at my work! Let’s play along and see what he has to say …
“You know I received the postcard, George! Now tell me, what is it that you want. You show up at my house in the middle of the night, deliver a random postcard to me, and now you’re phoning me at work. I will not be harassed by you!” Time stands still as I wait for his response. He appears to be in no hurry as I listen to nothing but a faint sound of static on the line. Impatiently I cajole him, “Well?”
He responds, “Thomas, the time has come for you to go back to Skye. You can’t run and hide from this any longer. Let’s you and I take a wee trip home, son, back down memory lane.”
I’m confused, I can’t tell if he’s being menacing or friendly with that last comment.
“Look, George, I can’t just up and leave my business and family just because you show up out of the blue and demand that I go on some random trip with you! Now please just leave me alone. Do not contact me again. Do not show up at my house or my work, just go back to wherever it is you came from and leave me alone!” I am about to slam the phone down when I hear laughing on the other end. What the…?! I can’t help myself. “Exactly what part of all this do you find so amusing? If you carry on, George, I’ll be forced to contact the Police.” With that the laughing ceases.
“Do you really expect me to believe you would go to the Police? This is no matter for the Police, it is personal, Thomas.”
With no response, he carries on, “You need to come back, son, there’s things you need to know.”
I respond, “What things?” but I realise my question will remain unanswered because the faint static has been replaced with a dull tone. George has hung up.
I am late for my 2 o’clock as I take time out to gather myself and find that my usual enthusiasm has waned, the stuffing literally knocked out of
me. The meeting went ahead and dragged on for longer than I would have liked. I realise I have no idea what time it is as I stare outside and notice that not only is it now pitch black, but it’s also snowing. It starts as a little flurry but gains momentum quickly.
The little flurry had deceived me for it must’ve came on heavy when I’d been in the meeting. I see only mine and another couple of cars left in the carpark, everyone else must have left for the night. As I set foot outside, I marvel at the snow scene before me. There is an ethereal quality, a beautiful silence. The drive home could be interesting with the snow coming down fast on top of the ice which had never managed to melt away. I don’t have time to consider what to do about George as I focus all my attention on simply getting home in one piece.
The night passes uneventfully and for that I’m grateful. It’s refreshing to be part of ‘normal’ conversation; easy-going and light-hearted. I quiz Michael on whether he has a girlfriend and it’s just friendly banter back and forth. “Of course I have, dad, who’s gonna say no to this face, come on now.” Janey as well seems fairly relaxed and if she’s at all concerned about our chat earlier this morning, she doesn’t show it.
I manage to sleep solidly for the most part throughout the night, resolving to push any thoughts of George to one side for now.
All was going well when I arose and set about getting ready for work. That was until my mobile phone rang. Sunny Days Care Home flashed up on the screen – mother’s care home.
“Mr Taylor.”
“Hello,” I respond.
“Hello this is Beatrice from Home Farm Care. Sorry to bother you and I don’t want to alarm you but there’s been an incident—”
IT’S TIME: COULD YOU RISK YOUR SANITY TO SAVE YOURSELF? Page 2