Emotional Geology

by Linda Gillard

  .

  Sagamartha. Mother of the Universe. The Sherpas’ name for Mount Everest. I think it was Dave who first coined my nickname and it stuck. But at times I felt like Snow White with the seven dwarves. Not that there was anything dwarfish about Gavin and his climbing friends. God, how they ate. I seemed to spend entire weekends standing over the cooker frying bacon and eggs, listening to them seated round my dining-room table, arguing, jabbing their fingers at maps, shouting at each other in a mixture of profanity and impenetrable jargon, laughing uproariously at any mention of potential disaster.

  Megan used to sit at the kitchen table, pretending to do her homework, pretending to be irritated by a house full of men, but really she was entranced. She idolised them. They were father, brothers, heroes, gods to her.

  After one expedition Gavin brought her back a piece of Everest. (He said it was Everest. Knowing Gavin, it might just as well have come from Glencoe.) Megan wept and kissed the rock, flung her arms round his neck and kissed him. Gavin had no idea what such a present might mean to her, nor what his giving such a present might mean to me. It was really his way of boasting.

  The lump of Everest sat on Megan's bedside table till she left home. She would have taken it with her then had I not already hurled it through her bedroom window. It landed deep in the shrubbery and there it remained, lost, forgotten.

  By then of course Gavin had gone.

  And I was alone.

  I like to think that one day in the distant future my act of vandalism will give geologists pause: how did a lump of rock from the foothills of the Himalayas come to be embedded in Highland topsoil?

  .

  January 19th

  Forgive my handwriting, my dear, and the dis-jointedness of this letter. It's 3.00am and I have drunk far too much whisky. (I didn’t think I even liked whisky very much but I find it grows on you if you drink enough of the stuff.) I have had such a wonderful evening I don’t want to go to sleep, so I’m eking out my pleasure by sitting up in bed with a mug of tea and a hot water bottle, determined to finish the letter I started yesterday.

  I was very brave and went ceilidh-ing! I just presented myself at Shona’s this evening and asked about the Burns Supper on the 25th, what contribution to the catering I could make. (Wasn’t I brave?) And of course they asked me in. I finally got to meet husband Donald who fishes (like most of the island men) and evidently drinks (ditto). He is a handsome, red-faced, red-haired man, inclined to fat, thanks no doubt to the fibre-free zone that is Shona’s cooking. Donald had poured me a hefty dram before I’d registered that they already had what seemed like a houseful of guests. In fact it was only the children, the minister’s wife Jean, and Calum, Shona's brother. They all made me feel very welcome, as if I were an old friend. I think they were actually a bit surprised to see me but far too polite to say so...

  .

  As I come into the sitting room Calum stands up to vacate a chair for me. Shona eases her considerable bulk from the fireside armchair and insists I take it. She looks delighted to see me. One of the twins, Eilidh, proffers a plate of scones with such a smug expression I know she must have made them. There is much commotion about the whereabouts of another chair; Calum asserts repeatedly that he is quite comfortable perched on the arm of the sofa, but Aly is dispatched. A chair appears and since the only remaining space is next to me, Calum takes up a position beside me, which unfortunately largely deprives me of the pleasure of looking at him. The conversation is general (the Burns supper, the ceilidh afterwards, the weather, the fishing) in both English and occasionally Gaelic - sometimes a mixture of both in the same sentence. Calum apologises for this but explains that the house rule is that the children must speak Gaelic in the evenings. He translates for me so I don't think I miss much.

  They are warning me again about my house’s proximity to the high tide line. ‘The gales just come from nowhere,’ the minister’s wife informs me in shocked tones. She is a tiny, bird-like woman, white-haired but clearly once a beauty.

  ‘Aye, but the fishermen know...’ Donald says with a wink. Misty-eyed, he beams at me over his glass, nursing his sizeable belly like a cat in his lap.

  ‘They can look up into a cloudless sky, stare out across a calm sea and smell it,’ Shona says with relish. ‘Then before you know, the wind freshens, the sky turns black and the island will be lashed by a gale. It might last minutes or days,’ she says, picking up her knitting, a large lacy garment of an eye-popping pinkness. I trust she isn’t knitting it for herself but fear the worst. ‘Sometimes the rain is so constant you forget what it’s like to be dry and warm.’ She shivers theatrically. ‘But the wind - och, the wind drives you mad!’ Shona clicks her needles, and shakes her head. As the whisky goes to mine, Calum speaks in a low voice.

  ‘Aye, we lie in our beds, listening to the howling and banging, waiting for a window to blow in - like shell-shocked tommies in trenches.’

  Eilidh giggles and bounces on the sofa. ‘Once the shed roof blew off! We found it half a mile away!’

  Aly looks up from his Gameboy momentarily and exclaims to me in Gaelic. Calum smiles and translates: ‘He’s telling you that's why my caravan is tied down.’

  ‘When it’s all over and the skies are blue again you’d think you’d dreamed it, if it weren’t for the trail of devastation,’ says Shona, making the most of the four syllables in her sing-song voice.

  ‘Aye.’ Calum refills our glasses. ‘Every so often the island throws a cosmic tantrum and reminds us of our place in the scheme of things.’

  ‘Pretty near the bottom!’ Shona puts the pink confection down and throws another peat on the fire. Calum asks if I am finding it a little too warm. I realise that one side of my face is indeed very hot and so we all move round, like musical chairs, with the minister’s wife being “out”.

  .

  ...Jean was delighted to recruit another neep-basher (that’s swede-masher to you) for the Burns Supper preparations. Calum and I ended up on the sofa with little Aly (and his infernal Gameboy!) but we managed to hold a conversation over his head. Like so many people on the island, Calum speaks quietly, in a restrained - perhaps I mean contained? - way, as if exhibiting too much facial expression would somehow be unseemly. It was probably the whisky beginning to take effect, but I found the Hebridean accent quite hypnotic. Occasionally one of the children spoke to him in Gaelic and he would answer, then translate for my benefit. It's such a musical language. I am determined to try and learn some. I think there are evening classes and that would be another way of getting to meet people...

  .

  Listening to Calum speak Gaelic, I am stirred by the different-ness of him. The guttural sounds seem to me to emphasise his otherness, his maleness. But he listens to the children intently and answers at length in a way that is rare in men - southerners anyway. I gather that he is explaining things to them, also that he is very fond of them...

  .

  ...Calum eventually asked why I had moved to the island but by then I was half-cut thanks to Donald's ministrations with the whisky bottle, so I don’t quite remember what I told him - the truth mainly since, with the awful clarity of drunkenness, I realised that I had nothing left to lose by doing so...

  .

  But I do remember how Calum listened... I deliver most of my monologue to the fire but whenever I look at him, I meet an unblinking, unnerving stare and am momentarily distracted from my story. When I finally grind to a halt he merely nods, toys with his almost empty glass. Eventually he says, ‘You’ve done the right thing, Rose. If you have it in you to be happy, there’s no better place to be than these islands. And if you do not...’ He looks around the room at his family. ‘There’s plenty folk here ready to catch you if you fall.’ My eyes swim. It's just the whisky. He smiles and raises his glass to me. ‘Slàinte mhath!’

  .

  ...With a little prompting Calum told me about himself. He teaches English and Gaelic at the High School on Benbecula, the island between North and Sout
h Uist. (There are causeways linking all three islands, like beads.) He climbs and works on Skye in the summer holidays...

  .

  I wonder, did he ever meet Gavin? ...

  .

  ...He is trying to get a bi-lingual community magazine off the ground (an expansion of the school magazine for which he is responsible.) He has an ex-wife in Glasgow...

  Oh God, what must I have asked to elicit that nugget of information? ‘Are you available for fucking?’

  .

  ...and he’s come back to the island to live after many years on the mainland. He writes but wouldn't be drawn on what he writes, so it's probably poetry. He has a semi-derelict croft house about a mile away which he’s doing up with Donald’s help, meanwhile he’s living in a caravan on site. Donald brings him home every so often for a square meal and to thaw out. While Shona cooks, Calum entertains the kids and helps them with their homework. The arrangement seems to suit everyone...

  .

  Shona’s generous application of peats to the fire eventually causes Calum to shed some layers of clothing. His white T-shirt reveals brown arms almost bare of hair, odd for such a dark man, but I’ve noticed this is often the case with Celts. He has the typical climber's physique, top-heavy with muscle, particularly on his shoulders and forearms. His legs are by contrast slim and elegant (I think of Jeremy Fisher on his lily pad.) When he bends to tend the fire I try to drag my eyes away, but the combination of gently strained denim and moving fire-lit muscle proves too alluring. Aly lets out a yell of triumph as he scores on his Gameboy. Calum straightens up, slightly unsteady on his feet. He smiles at Aly, then at me.

  The Scots are right - whisky is indeed the best drink in the world.

  Eventually the Gameboy is confiscated and Aly is packed off to bed, protesting. Shona rounds up the other children and shoos them upstairs, leaving me with the men, but by now Donald is asleep. When Calum returns to the sofa we sit in companionable silence listening to snores from Donald, shouts and giggles from upstairs. After a while I say, without a great deal of conviction, ‘I’d better be going. Donald obviously needs to get to bed.’

  ‘I'll see you home.’ A statement not an offer. I make feeble noises of protest, which Calum ignores. ‘It’s on my way.’

  Shona reappears, sees her sleeping husband and is aghast. ‘Och, Calum, will you shoogle Donald awake now!’

  ‘Let him sleep, Shona. I’m seeing Rose home anyway.’

  ‘Och, will you no’ stay and have some tea, Rose?’ I decline and stand, unsteadily. ‘You see her right to her door, Calum,’ Shona says briskly, as if I am no longer in the room. ‘She’s no’ used to the whisky and I don’t want Angus the Post driving up tomorrow morning, telling me the poor wee woman’s been found upside-down, drowned in a bog!’ Upstairs a child begins to wail. Shona mutters something in Gaelic, raises her eyes heavenwards and ushers us out the front door. ‘Cheerio just now, Rose!’

  The cold hits like a slap in the face. As Calum and I walk away from the house, darkness enfolds us and seems absolute, apart from the odd square of light in croft house windows and the distant flash of the lighthouse, but there is a shaving of moon, obscured at times by cloud. No stars. The air is wet with the finest drizzle, the kind of non-directional rain they have in the Highlands that makes you feel as if you're walking through a cloud of vapour. I stumble into a hole in the road and Calum puts a hand under my elbow to steady me. ‘There's a few more of those... Would you be happier taking my arm?’

  ‘Yes, I would - if you don’t mind.’

  ‘No bother.’

  His leather jacket feels old and soft, yielding, like flesh. But cold. The flesh of a corpse. I say, conversationally, ‘I suppose if we were walking home through Glasgow we’d be stepping over broken bottles and puddles of vomit.’

  ‘Oh, aye. Pools of blood, used hypodermics and the odd, dead heroin addict. Och, there I go again, getting nostalgic.’

  ‘God, I’m glad I live here and not there!’

  ‘You think you’ll make a go of it here?’

  ‘I hope so. I don’t see why not. I can’t stand cities.’

  ‘Me neither.’ We walk on. ‘You pay a price for the beauty and peace, mind.’

  ‘How much?’

  He pauses. ‘They cost me my marriage. Alison wouldn’t come back and I couldn’t stick it in Glasgow.’

  ‘She made you choose?’

  ‘She didn’t have to. It was all taken out of my hands.’

  ‘What happened?’ Calum doesn’t reply. ‘Sorry - are you okay talking about this?’

  ‘Oh, aye. It’s ancient history now. I was teaching in a big tough Glasgow school. Head of English... One day one of my wee head-bangers went for me with a knife.’

  ‘Oh, my god!’

  ‘I was trying to break up a fight in the yard. Probably a drugs deal.’

  ‘Were you hurt?’

  ‘Not badly. But I couldn’t carry on after that. I’d had enough. I was fair sick of being a social worker instead of a teacher, you know? A teacher can’t put the world’s problems to rights.’

  ‘No... But you tried anyway.’

  A silence. In the darkness I feel him smile. ‘Aye, I did. But enough’s enough. I’ve come back home and I’m teaching again. The divorce was neat and tidy, we’d no children. And I’m happy here. It's not some kind of Hebridean holiday camp - we have our problems too. But somehow they’re manageable, you get support. In Glasgow folk seemed to have lost the meaning.’

  We arrive at my front door. As I unlock it I say over my shoulder, avoiding his eyes, ‘Would you like a coffee? I’m afraid I don't have any booze.’

  He hesitates. ‘I’d love a coffee, and God knows I need a coffee, but if I sit down I’ll talk you into the ground. That’s teachers for you - love the sound of their own voice. I’d rather leave you wanting more...’ He pauses, hears himself, sways a little. ‘Do you?’

  ‘Do I what?’

  ‘Want more?’

  ‘What’ve you got?’ The words are out before I realise that this ill-considered response is open to a variety of interpretations, all of them compromising. ‘Sorry, Calum, I’m treating you like a doorstep salesman.’

  He laughs. ‘And I’m behaving like one. I must away home...’ He doesn't move. Drops of moisture have collected on his dark fringe, now clinging to his forehead. They dangle briefly, like jewels, before dropping onto his nose. He pushes his hair back out of his eyes. ‘There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you, Rose. A favour.’

  Yes. Whatever it is, the answer is ‘Yes’. Darn your socks, sew on your buttons, undo your buttons, help you off with your wet clothing...

  ‘Shona’s been telling me about your work. I wondered, will you come and show some of it to my pupils? I'm trying to encourage them - well, goad would be a more accurate term - into writing poems about their environment. I want them to think about the problems for visual artists, the kind of decisions they have to make - choosing a colour instead of a word. You know, an empty canvas instead of the blank page. I thought it might get them going... Would you do it?’ The dancing eyes cloud suddenly. ‘There’s no money in it, I’m afraid, but they’re a great bunch of kids. They’d make it worth your while.’

  You’ll make it worth my while.

  ‘Yes, I'd love to. I’m very flattered that you should ask, especially when you haven’t seen my work.’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Glasgow. Alison taught art. She dragged me to a textile exhibition - bloody feminist textiles! - at some tiny, god-forsaken gallery.’

  ‘Good heavens, did you go to that? I was exhibiting with a group of very right-on women artists.’

  ‘Aye, as I recall there was a quilted vagina - and a pink satin foetus attached to an embroidered placenta.’

  ‘There was no placenta! Don’t exaggerate!’

  ‘Honest to God, there was! I had nightmares for weeks! Yours was the only work I could take seriously.’


  ‘I don’t remember now what I was exhibiting. It was years ago.’

  ‘It appeared to be a landscape, just a beach with dunes, but as you looked at it you could see the figure of a woman.’

  ‘Dunes, Luskentyre.’

  ‘Aye, that's right! The dunes formed the reclining body of a naked woman. She had tufts of marram grass embroidered in her armpits and between her legs... and I think there were bunches of pink thrift for her nipples... There was a great mass of bladderwrack for her hair and she was just lying there on the beach with her legs apart... being pleasured by the watery fingers of the incoming tide. Fantastic.’

  ‘I can’t tell you how many people have looked at that wall-hanging and never even seen the woman.’

  ‘Seriously? Alison had to drag me away. It had never occurred to me that textiles could be an erotic medium - tactile obviously, sensual maybe - but erotic?... It was pure dead brilliant!’ He grins, school-boyish. ‘That’s what I wrote in the visitor’s book. Alison wrote a short thesis, I seem to remember. Your work changed the way I looked at a landscape I’d grown up with. And I remembered your name. Teachers remember names... So you’ll maybe come and talk to my pupils then?’

  ‘After that superb review I think I have to! No, really, I’d love to. When?’