The Chessmen l-3

by Peter May

  He never appeared to know, though, when he had crossed the line between what was funny and what was offensive. I saw him get away with murder. Putting his hands on a girl’s breasts and somehow managing to make a joke of it. And then another time getting his face slapped for making some wildly inappropriate remark. Which would send him off into one of his moods. He had meant no offence. Why hadn’t anyone seen the funny side?

  He was brilliant and mercurial, talented and unpredictable. To be his friend you had to work at it. But you also had to be accepted by him. And I had been granted exclusive access to that club, a club with a membership of one.

  I didn’t often stay over at Whistler’s house. His father was seldom sober, and when he was drunk he was unpredictable, liked to throw things around the place and bellow at the top of his voice. He never did us any physical harm, but I was scared of him, and so was Whistler.

  Although already growing into the giant of a man he would become, Whistler was still no match for his dad, who was two sizes bigger. Derek Macaskill had spent half his life at sea, first in the merchant navy and later on the trawlers. But he was a man hopelessly addicted to the drink, and had become not only unemployed but unemployable. He was a liability aboard a boat. He had lost an eye in an accident on a trawler and was still, apparently, on some kind of disability benefit all these years later.

  The glass eye they had replaced it with never moved, and no matter where you were in the room, or where his other eye was pointing, it always appeared to be looking at you. Occasionally he would take it out and polish it in some filthy handkerchief, with a big malicious grin on his face. He only did it because he knew it gave us the willies.

  I’ve never seen such big hands on a man, fists you wouldn’t want to be on the wrong end of. His hair was cropped close to his scalp, dark once but rapidly turning grey. A long scar ran through it from his forehead to a point behind his left ear. Whether he had acquired it in the same accident that lost him his eye I never knew.

  Following the death of his mother, when he was just nine, Whistler had spent a couple of years living with relatives of hers at Miabhaig, until big Derek Macaskill, fresh from being banned from the boats, came one day to claim him and take him back to live with him at Ardroil.

  I’d always wondered where he got the money to buy his drink. He was, after all, an unemployed man on benefit. But I would find out soon enough.

  Solas were really beginning to make their name then, playing gigs all over the island, at ceilidhs and school dances, in pubs and village halls. It was how I spent most of my Friday and Saturday nights, and sometimes week nights, too. Humphing gear. Me and Big Kenny. Kenny had turned seventeen before me, and was the first to get his driving licence. So it was only natural that he would become the roadie.

  None of us knew it then, but Whistler had already taken his decision not to go to Glasgow, and his interest in the band had begun to wane. There were nights when he simply didn’t turn up. He never told anyone, not even me, and the band would frequently find themselves having to perform without their flute player.

  Not that it made a radical difference to the quality of their performance. They were always great. At least, I thought so. But the haunting wail of that Celtic flute, particularly in tandem with Mairead’s violin, was the grace note that made them better than great. It made them magical. And it made Roddy mad when Whistler didn’t show up.

  It all came to a head one night after a gig at the Cross Inn at Ness. After three straight gigs without showing, Whistler turned up as if nothing were amiss. He was in one of his manic good moods, and oblivious to the ill will festering towards him among the other members of the band. There had clearly been meetings to discuss his absences, discussions to which I had not been privy. But I knew that something was brewing.

  Kenny and I had gone into the bar behind the hotel for a pint while the band was playing. When we came out at the end of the show, night was leaching the last light out of the sky. We went to take the van around to the front. Kenny had parked it beside the big tree that grew in the car park then, the only real tree on the whole of the west coast. A giant of a tree. God knows how it had survived the winds that drove in off the Atlantic all these years, but it must have seen a few generations come and go.

  Roddy and Whistler were standing in its shadow almost screaming at each other. We heard them before we saw them. The crowds streaming out of the lounge bar in the hotel, to cars and minibuses, turned heads in their direction.

  ‘For Christ’s sake keep it down, boys.’ Kenny was self-conscious. But neither of them took any notice.

  ‘It’s just not fair on the rest of us,’ Roddy shouted. ‘All our arrangements, all our rehearsals, are based around us being a six-piece band. A lot of it built around your fucking flute. There’s a big bloody hole in our sound when you’re not there. It’s embarrassing.’

  Whistler stood his ground, unfazed apparently by their embarrassment. ‘Maybe you should have thought of that before you started trying to ease me out.’

  Which came with the unexpected force of a slap in the face to Roddy. ‘Ease you out? What are you talking about, man? No one’s trying to ease you out.’

  ‘You blew into Uig with your mainland money in your pocket and just took over. Everything. The band, the girls, the limelight. A real fucking star.’

  Roddy shook his head in exasperation. ‘There was no band!’

  ‘Aye there was. Me and Strings and Mairead were playing together long before you showed up.’

  Roddy was scathing now. ‘That wasn’t a band. That was just kids playing about in someone’s front room.’

  Whistler took a dangerous step towards him. ‘What would you know? You were an incomer. You knew nothing about us, or the way we were. You just took over. Took it all. Mairead, too.’

  Which was the first time I became aware of any tension between them over Mairead.

  ‘Mairead?’ Roddy gasped. ‘Don’t make me laugh. Mairead wouldn’t be seen dead with a loser like you.’

  And that tipped Whistler over the edge. He leapt at Roddy, big hands grabbing handfuls of shirt and face, and the two of them went tumbling backwards to roll over several times in the dusty gravel of the car park, feet and fists flying. Roddy was an altogether more delicately built boy, and stood no chance against the monster that Whistler was becoming. I heard him cry out in pain, and saw blood on his face, and Kenny and I were on to them in a flash, dragging the flailing Whistler off him, ducking and diving ourselves to avoid the flying fists.

  The crowd which had gathered around scattered backwards like displaced water. I heard girls screaming and some of the boys shouting encouragement. Kenny and I pushed Whistler up against the tree and pinned him there, the three of us breathing hard, almost growling, like animals. Roddy scrambled to his feet, bloodied about the lips. But his biggest injury was the one inflicted on his pride.

  ‘You fucking idiot!’ he screamed. ‘This is the end. You’re finished. You’re fucking finished!’ Strings and Skins and Rambo pushed through the group of fascinated spectators, and pulled him away, casting hostile backward glances at Whistler. And the crowd, sensing that it was over, started to dissipate.

  Me and Kenny let Whistler go then, and he snarled, ‘I’ll kill him.’

  ‘No you won’t.’ The solitary voice came out of the dark, a lone figure left standing as the crowd melted away. It was Mairead. She was looking at him with an extraordinary intensity. ‘We’ve worked too bloody hard to get this far, Whistler. We’re not going to throw it all away now. Not because of you.’

  To my amazement he was almost cowed by her. He looked at the ground, unable to meet her eye.

  ‘We’ve got rehearsal Wednesday night. You’ll be there, right?’ And when he didn’t respond, ‘Right?’ More forcefully this time.

  He nodded. Still without looking at her.

  ‘I’ll speak to Roddy. We’ll just put this behind us and move on, okay?’ There was such authority in her tone, such complete confide
nce in her ability to manage these boys who brawled over her. It was something to see, the power that she possessed. And I think, too, it was the first time I saw in her that naked ambition. We’re not going to throw it all away now. Mairead was going places. She knew it even then. And nothing was going to get in her way. Certainly not Whistler.

  Someone with a car gave the rest of the group a lift back to Uig, and Whistler wandered off in the dark, to sit brooding on a wall at the south end of the car park. Kenny and I packed up and carried everything to the van in silence. It wasn’t until we had finished that I said, ‘So what’s the story with Whistler, Roddy and Mairead, then?’

  Big Kenny just shrugged. ‘You knew that Whistler and Mairead were an item before Roddy showed up?’

  Of course, I’d heard about Whistler and Mairead being childhood sweethearts, but not about how it ended. I nodded.

  ‘Ever since primary three. Inseparable, they were.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Roddy happened.’

  ‘I didn’t know he wasn’t from Uig originally.’

  Kenny lit up a cigarette and offered me one, and we leaned against the van and smoked them. ‘His grandparents were. But his folks were born on the mainland somewhere. His dad made a fortune in something or other, I’ve never been quite sure what. And they came back and built that beautiful big house on the road up to Baile na Cille that looks out over the sands. He still goes back to the mainland from time to time, doing whatever it is he does, and Roddy’s never been short of a bob or two. That’s how he could afford the synth, and the Marshall stack. And who do you think’s paying up the PA, and coughed up for the deposit on the van?’

  I have to confess, I had never really thought too much about where the money came from. The band was paid, of course, for the gigs, but when I thought about it then, I realized their earnings would never have been enough to cover the costs.

  Kenny said, ‘Whistler was right. Roddy was like a star that fell from the sky. Exotic, rich, talented. And Mairead was attracted to him like a moth to the light.’ He flicked his cigarette into the night sending a shower of sparks skittering across the car park. ‘End of Mairead and Whistler.’

  It didn’t take much to persuade Whistler to stay over at Crobost that night. I knew that he was hurting inside, in his own self-destructive way, and I couldn’t bear the thought of him going back to the blackhouse in Uig, with his drunken father sitting polishing his eye in front of the fire. It was a Friday night and the band wasn’t playing on the Saturday, so we had the whole weekend ahead of us. I knew my aunt wouldn’t mind. There was a spare room at the end of the upstairs hall. No one ever came to stay, but there was always a bed made up in it.

  Kenny dropped us off, and we went into the house to find my aunt sitting on her own in the front room, in her favourite armchair by the fire. She seemed a million miles away. The room was a nod to the sixties. Orange and turquoise curtains, boldly patterned wallpaper, big brightly coloured china pots that she bought from Eachan the potter at the bottom of the hill. She was listening to what I recognized as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on her old stereo system. Vinyl! It was so dated now. Everyone had cassette players in those days, or CD players, the new big thing if you could afford it. And she was smoking. She appeared to be pleased by the thought that we would have a visitor for the weekend and told Whistler he could use our phone to let his folks know that he wouldn’t be home.

  Whistler was embarrassed. ‘It’s just my dad. He won’t notice.’ She gave him an odd look.

  Afterwards, when we left the house to wander down the track to the shore for a smoke in the dark, he said to me, ‘She smokes dope, your aunt.’

  I looked at him in amazement. ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Don’t you smell it?’

  ‘That’s incense,’ I said.

  He laughed. ‘That’s what she burns to cover the smell of the dope, you idiot. Maybe she thinks you’d disapprove.’

  I was stunned. Kids my age smoked dope. Adults didn’t. Or so I thought. And my aunt seemed ancient to me. Later, I realized that Whistler was probably right, and that she almost certainly acquired her marijuana from Eachan, who sold her his pottery and was a well-known dopehead. It wasn’t until much later, when I found out that she was suffering from terminal cancer, that I wondered if perhaps she had been taking it for the pain. But then I figured that more likely she’d been smoking it since the sixties, or earlier. Those heady days of youth and optimism when she must have felt that her whole life stretched endlessly ahead of her. A habit she never kicked, until those endless days finally came to the close that none of us ever quite believes in.

  It was not April yet, and so it was not warm. We sat down among the rocks, huddled in our coats, and smoked a couple of cigarettes, watching periodic moonlight flit across the swell in the bay. It was more sheltered here, facing northeast, and protected from the prevailing wind. The collar of orange crustaceans on the rocks along the high-tide mark glowed in the dark.

  At length I said to him, ‘Is this all about Mairead? You not turning up for gigs, getting into fights with Roddy?’

  He gave me one of his looks.

  ‘It is, isn’t it? She’s got you and Roddy and every other boy in the school running around after her. Fighting over her now.’

  ‘That’s not what we were fighting about.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘No!’ He almost bared his teeth. ‘Anyway, it’s none of your business.’ He flicked his cigarette end out over the water and stood up, signalling the end of our conversation. He walked away into the dark, and I sat there for a while wondering why I bothered. There didn’t seem to be much reward in a one-way friendship.

  I thought about Mairead, and those dark-blue flashing eyes, and the effect she had on every male around her. And I wondered if she realized the heartache she caused, and if she did, whether she did it on purpose, maybe even enjoyed it. I decided there and then that I didn’t really like her very much, even though I knew that she could reduce me to incoherence with just a look.

  Which is when I heard Whistler’s shout in the dark, and the sound of splashing, even above the wind and the wash of the incoming tide. I was on my feet in an instant, and running over the rocks towards the sound of his cry. I clambered up over razor-sharp shells crusted around the giant boulders supporting the harbour wall, and up on to the slipway that ran down to the jetty. Even in the dark, I could see white water frothing in the still of the sheltered pool where they kept the crabs. I ran down to the quay, and saw Whistler thrashing about, treading water and gasping from the cold.

  ‘Jesus!’ he shouted. ‘Some idiot left a bloody boobytrap on the quayside. I could have killed myself!’

  I knelt down and flipped a big rusted metal boat ring over on its axis. It had been cemented into the stone long before either of us was born. And I couldn’t help laughing.

  ‘It’s not funny!’

  ‘It’s bloody hilarious, Whistler. You want to watch where you’re putting your big feet.’ I uncoiled a length of rope lying among the creels and threw him an end. He grabbed it and pulled himself up on to the ramp. Some of the cages had burst open, and there were crabs clinging to his coat. He stood chittering in the cold and cursing as I pulled them off him and threw them back into the water, laughing the whole time. Which only made him worse. ‘Come on,’ I said, pushing him up the slipway ahead of me. ‘Let’s get you out of these clothes before you catch your death.’

  It must have been midnight before we got him out of his wet things and into a bath. My aunt fussed and faffed in a way she never did over me, making sure he had big soft clean towels, and taking his clothes away to put through the wash.

  He was still in the bath, and I was in my pyjamas and ready for bed, when my aunt came to my bedroom door. She had a strange expression on her face.

  ‘I want you to come downstairs, Finlay.’

  I knew immediately that something was wrong. ‘What is it?’
/>   ‘There’s something I want you to look at.’

  I followed her down the steep narrow staircase, on uneven stairs that creaked like wet snow, and into the little hall at the front door. She turned into the laundry room. It was little more than a scullery, with a washing machine and a tumble dryer. A short pulley, usually laden with drying clothes, hung from the ceiling. Whistler’s wet clothes were spread out over the worktop above the machines.

  She turned to me. ‘Look at this.’

  I glanced at them, full of incomprehension. ‘What about them?’

  ‘Look!’ She lifted his socks. ‘They’re full of holes.’ And as she held them up I saw that they were. Worn to holes at the heel and the ball of the foot, and wafer-thin along the line of the toes, almost at the point of disintegration. ‘And these.’ She held up his underpants, stretched out between fastidious thumbs and forefingers. It took a great effort of will for her even to touch them, and there was a look of extreme disgust on her face. ‘The elastic’s perished.’ She dropped them. ‘And his trousers. Look how he keeps them up.’ She showed me the safety pin at the waistband where a button had once been. The zipper was broken. ‘And here.’ She turned them over and I saw where the seam between the legs had burst open, the stitching rotted and broken.

  Then she held up his coat and turned it inside out. ‘And this isn’t much better. The lining’s all torn and worn thin. And look at his trainers for God’s sake.’ She stooped to lift them on to the counter. ‘You can’t see it at a glance, but the soles have come away from the uppers, and it looks like he’s used duct tape to stick them back together.’ She glared at me with accusation in her eyes. ‘How could you not notice?’