by Ken MacLeod
As for Free Church elders, well… the closest to that in the vicinity, by appearance at least, was Hugh’s father, in his usual get-up for a visit to the big city: Homburg hat over the bald pate that lay in Hugh’s probable future, close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair underneath the black brim at the sides and back, black natural-wool coat over a serge suit and blue cotton shirt and silk navy tie, polished brown brogues spattered with droplets of mud from the puddles of a recent shower. Hugh glanced away to hide his half-smile, his almost smirk. His father tried to dress the part, but he’d never quite get it right.
Fourteen years ago, half Hugh’s life ago, Nigel had without warning gone native in a big way: learning Gaelic, keeping the Sabbath, minding his speech, and regularly attending the local Free Church. He never publicly or privately professed its doctrines, but he never contradicted them either, and in Hugh’s university days had sometimes enjoyed baiting him with arguments against the mainstream understanding of biology and geology, with which sciences he shared with his son a purely pop-scientific acquaintance, and a certain disdain arising from their common study of electrical engineering. In all of these – the Gaelic, the Wee Free adherence, the Young Earth Creationism – Nigel was placing himself in an eccentric minority even for Lewis. Within that minority he was himself a minority of one, as a non-native Gaelic speaker, a non-native churchgoer, and a man whose first name was so unusual for Lewis that he didn’t need a nickname. (With only one Nigel in the parish, if not on the island, there was no need for a disambiguating ‘Nigel Turbine’ or ‘Nigel Sassenach’.) His surname was Leosach all right, traceable to an ancestor who’d been cleared off the land near Mangersta some time in the nineteenth century, and who, after many wanderings, had settled in Hendon. Hugh had never understood why his father had adopted his ancestral religion and way of life, like some black-faced sheep let loose upon the heather, but he occasionally surmised that it was some perverse revenge on the forces and interests that had driven that earlier Morrison from his croft and his wife from her spinning wheel and creel. Certainly Nigel had made no attempt to convince or convert Hugh, Hugh’s sister Shonagh, or Mairi, who, as a hereditary and incorrigible but entirely nominal adherent of the Church of Scotland, had taken it all with a detached, tolerant bemusement.
Hugh, of course, had reacted with all the self-righteous moral indignation and disappointment appropriate for a fourteen-year-old. Even today, he couldn’t recall the scene he’d made without an inward groan and an outward blush.
* * *
‘It’s those damned books you’ve been reading! You’ve been filling your mind with rubbish!’
‘I think you’ll find,’ his father said mildly, ‘if you care to look into them yourself, that they were written by men of some intellect, of parts and learning, to say nothing of shrewd psychological insight and worldly wisdom.’
‘There are better books in the house, and all the great literature of the world out there on the net, right at your fingertips. Wouldn’t it be a better use of your time to read them?’
‘Novels?’ said Nigel. ‘At my age you lose the taste for fiction. Read novels and plays and the classics yourself, while you can still enjoy them and you’re young enough to learn something from them about human nature.’
‘You could still read science, history, philosophy…’
‘Well I do,’ said his father. ‘As avidly as ever. Just not on a – not on the Lord’s Day.’
‘A day you waste completely!’
‘Waste it? I take a well-earned rest, one whole day in seven. One day when I not only don’t work, I don’t even think about work, or watch or listen to the news. And your mother appreciates not having to cook or clean that day. It stands us both in good stead for the other six, I can tell you that!’
‘Sitting about reading old books, and three hours listening to sermons and singing psalms? Call that a rest? Wouldn’t a walk do you more good?’
‘I can take a stroll up the glen, if it’s a fine afternoon, for a bit of quiet meditation. Not even the minister has a word to say against that. It’s not like the old days, though you might find the old folk raising their eyebrows.’ A sly smile lit his sombre face for a moment.
‘But – it’s the hypocrisy of it all! How can you pretend to believe… all that… and put up with and conform to a load of stupid rules that don’t have any justification but—’
‘You will not tell me, boy,’ said Nigel, shaking his forefinger at Hugh with an odd flash in his eye, a mixture of anger and irony, ‘what I do or do not believe. And I do not pretend to believe anything.’
‘That must make it difficult, when you hang out with Wee Frees!’
‘Look, Hugh, I already know the men of the congregation, from the sites and the locality. Most of them make no more claim to be godly than I do. The few that do, the communicant members, the elect, are not a problem. They don’t exactly proselytise, you know! When spiritual matters come up in conversation, I keep my own counsel.’
‘Silence is consent!’
‘Not around here, it isn’t. As for the rules – well!’ Nigel spread his hands. ‘What am I losing? Sunday television? Give me a break! To put it exactly! And the rest? Swearing is vulgar, and offensive in mixed company. Theft and murder are wicked by the light of nature, likewise dishonouring your parents. Drinking and dancing? There are no pubs except in town, and the Stornoway pubs are not my scene at all, at all. I was never much of a one for the shebeen, the bothan or the ceilidh, and all your Hielan’ fiddle-de-dee music can set my foot tapping but it doesn’t move me more than that, never has. I’m free to drink in moderation and within my means, which I do, to smoke if I want to, which I don’t aside from the occasional pipe, and the thought of adultery has never crossed my mind.’
‘You’re still upholding a morality that’s oppressive to women and gay people and young people.’
‘Young people!’ Nigel laughed. ‘When have they ever given a thought to morality in these matters? Women? Ask your mother or your sister, or the lassies on the site. That’s the women I have to do with – and you too, come to think of it. If you’re concerned about the oppression of women, you might consider getting off your lazy arse around the house when you’re at home, and being a bit less of a lout and a boor when you’re away, at school and in town.’
‘Hey, come on,’ said Hugh. ‘That’s a bit—’
‘Personal? Unfair? I hope so! And as for gay people…’ Nigel’s face clouded for a moment, then cleared. ‘Do you know any?’
‘There’s Ms Merton, the geography teacher, she’s a lezzie. And—’
‘Personally, I mean. Of your own age, or thereabouts.’
Hugh shook his head. ‘That’s not the point.’
‘Ah, but it is,’ said Nigel. ‘You see, you do know some.’ He leaned back in his chair, folded his arms, and looked quizzically at Hugh. ‘Statistically, it’s close to a certainty. Have you ever wondered why you don’t know who they are?’
Hugh scratched the back of his head. ‘Not exactly. I never thought of it that way.’
‘Well, you go off and think about it. That would be something… worth thinking about. You might even say it would be Christian.’
Hugh didn’t know where to look.
Hugh and Nigel slung the baggage in the back of the Nissan and they all piled in, after an awkward round of mutual assured deferring for the front passenger seat that ended with Mairi and Hope sitting in the back, Hugh between them, and Nick up front with Nigel. Nigel had brought a booster seat for Nick, so he had a view as well as being safe. Hugh couldn’t see nearly as much from where he sat, an arrangement that suited both him and Nick. Nick was fascinated by the peculiar local variant of New Trees, whereas Hugh was somewhat depressed. What would become part of Nick’s childhood memories was a wrenching dislocation of Hugh’s. He missed the moors, not so much for what they were as for the views they had afforded, of the hills to the west and south.
On what had been open moorland of bog and peat, t
hat thin post-glacial deposit over the pre-Cambrian gneiss, a covering tattered with innumerable lochs – some little more than puddles, others wide and deep enough to sustain their own lake monster or crashed aeroplane – and outcrops, there now grew dense plantations of modified pine. The trees grew like weeds until they reached a height of ten metres, whereupon an enzyme was activated to weaken the trunk about half a metre above the ground. Any force greater than a puff of wind on that fracture line and they’d topple, silently felled, leaving a neat stump. If the fallen tree wasn’t harvested within about a week, further phased activation of enzymes changed its colour to a muddy yellow and started a rapid disintegration into a crumbly woodchip, which could itself be harvested for its fibres or left to consolidate, with unnatural rapidity like the unrealistic processes fancied by Flood Geology, into peat. The trees’ propagation was limited by sensitivities to sand in the soil and salt in the air. That to sand kept them off reclaimed land and off the fertile machair predominant on the east coast; that to salt stunted their growth in the west. These intrinsic safeguards were themselves fine-tuned by brute-force genetic overrides that kept the trees out of sites of special scientific interest and out of the island’s scenic areas: in the west, on the Ness peninsula and around Stornoway.
But the trees had the formerly bald central patch of the island to themselves, and to the communities that had likewise sprung up out of nowhere to process them. A network of new roads, noded with villages, spread through the synthetic forest. Every so often a log-laden truck would emerge from one of these side roads to trundle along toward Stornoway. Less often, other trucks of about the same size rumbled by with long cylindrical loads made up of spindled reels of cable, or with windmill blades as big as the wing of a small airliner, or with girders from their towers. Hugh recalled how when he’d been growing up he’d seen many trucks with the same loads, going the other way, from Stornoway to the moors and hills, and to assemble rather than dismantle. Even on the main road Nigel would, from habit rather than strict necessity, give each truck a wide berth as it passed, along with a wave to the driver.
He did this, Hugh noticed, even when the truck had no human driver. Perhaps his father was in his heart as much a mechanist as he was himself.
An hour after they’d left Stornoway, the car went around a bend and the village came into view, on the other side of a tongue of the sea-loch. There on the hillside opposite stood the house, the former manse, grey-walled and tile-roofed, sprawling, no trees New or old near it but a couple of tall pines in its sloping glebe and a cluster of smaller trees nearby. Amid the scores of houses and other buildings clustered around the shore and up the other hillsides it looked isolated, set apart, as if it were still a manse.
The car swung around another bend, revealing the narrow, dark glen, then across a bridge and back towards the village, past the craft shops, B&Bs and small restaurants and the two remaining churches. Nigel asked Nick, as if for a great favour, to hop out and open the gate, then close it again behind them. After Nick had proudly climbed back in, the palms of his hands reddened with rust, Nigel drove up the wee brae on the crunching gravel of the drive, to park between the peat stack and the shed.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘here we are.’
‘Home,’ said Hugh.
Hope gave him a look as they got out.
17. There Are Many Rooms in My Father’s House
Nick had been right: the house did smell, every room different. As they trooped through the back door into the short hallway, and then on through the house to drop off the baggage, freshen up and reconvene for dinner, Hope paused for a moment on the threshold of each room and passage to inhale its distinctive odour, familiar from her past visits, redolent of the place. The big difference from her own flat and from most of the others she knew was the number of rooms, the sheer volume of available space.
The hallway had the curious feature of a frosted-glass window in the ceiling, a relay for the skylight in the room immediately above. Its smell was of coats, anoraks, overalls and waxed jackets, all of which had many times been hung there wet and left to dry. The scullery on to which it opened smelled of laundry detergent and washing-up liquid. The adjacent kitchen-living-room, in which armchairs, other chairs, a dresser and a folding table huddled around an ancient stove, smelled at this moment of roast lamb, and generally of baking and boiling, of peat smoke and of peat ash. Through that room and out in the house’s main hall, the smells of old wood and recent floor polish took over. At the end of that corridor, the downstairs bedroom that had been assigned as before to Nick – its door faced that of Nigel and Mairi’s, he’d always slept soundly in it, and it was only a few steps and no stairs from the bathroom – had a warmer and more inviting smell of wool blankets and duvet fluff.
Hope left Nick there to bounce on the bed, open and shut the wardrobe door, climb into the window’s deep internal sill, rediscover the stacks of two generations’ worth of children’s books and toys, and generally settle in. She went back down the corridor and up the narrow staircase by the kitchen door to the attic, a big, dimly lit, cluttered space off which three doors opened: to a bedroom at each end, and to the room at the side that Nigel and Mairi used as an office and workroom, and which the house’s previous occupant, the minister, had used as a study. At the moment its door stood open, letting in daylight from the same big window that indirectly illuminated the hallway downstairs. The daylight was partly blocked by Hugh, standing in the doorway looking into the room.
Hope dropped her bags in the first bedroom beside Hugh’s and padded to the study door.
‘What are you looking at?’ she asked.
Hugh turned and smiled. ‘Something that isn’t there.’
Hope looked past his shoulder.
‘Cameras?’
‘There are no cameras in this house, but it’s something else, something you couldn’t see isn’t there.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The paper snowdrift.’
He stepped aside and waved her into the room, a bright but cramped space, half of whose ceiling sloped in parallel with the house roof, and a quarter of whose floor was fenced off by an oblong box of chicken wire over the horizontal window that relayed light from the big skylight set into the sloping ceiling. Under the window were a sewing machine and a bright red cardboard box of drawers, all partly open and overfilled with fabrics and sewing equipment. To the right of the door was a desk with a screen and keyboard, the adjoining corner and walls lined with bookshelves.
‘When I was a kid,’ Hugh went on, sweeping his hands at waist level, ‘this was all piled with the old minister’s secular books. When he retired he took his volumes of theology and sermons and Bible commentaries with him, you see, but he left all his non-religious books behind. Some of them anti-religious, even.’
Hope felt puzzled. ‘Why would a minister have anti-religious books?’
Hugh shrugged, with a forced downturn of the mouth. ‘Know your enemy, I suppose. And dropping in the odd allusion to the awful things the godless say must lend a bit of credibility and spice to a sermon. Besides, quite a lot of them were attacks on the Catholic Church.’ He smiled. ‘I remember finding one that listed the degrees of punishment for clergy who engaged in illicit intercourse, starting with, you know, a monk with a quadruped…’
‘Quite eye-opening, I should imagine.’
‘Yeah. I had great fun in that heap.’
Hope peered at the thick spines of the books on the shelves, many of which were illustrated with small grey photographs of churches or stern, bearded men.
‘Looks like Nigel has made up for the loss of the minister’s books… What happened to the others?’
‘Oh, they’re still around somewhere, as far as I know.’ He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Probably stacked in a dusty corner of the attic.’
Hope sidled past him to stand under the window, turning over the patterns and pads on top of the cardboard cabinet – ooh, sketchbooks! – and gazing out at the
hill behind the house and at the sky behind it, still bright with the sun high in the west at eight o’clock.
‘You should dig them out,’ she said.
‘Hmm,’ said Hugh. ‘Don’t know if the old man would be too pleased. Anyway… time to go downstairs.’
Mairi didn’t do pinnies. She wore an embroidered denim shirt loose over denim jeans, and walked with quick clicks of cowboy-boot heels. Her brown hair had not a strand of grey, but the shade looked natural. Hope guessed that, unlike Nigel, Mairi wasn’t too proud or too conservative to swallow the gene-tampering tabs that kept the colour flowing from the follicles. She kept a small shop down by the shore, selling local craft-made tourist tat, some of it her own, and local delicacies: oatcakes, black puddings, smoked gannet chicks, barrel-salted meat so salty that just thinking about it made Hope’s mouth water, even though she didn’t like the stuff. Mairi dished up a late dinner with an impressive economy of effort and means: for the adults, slow-roasted mutton that had been in the bottom of the oven all afternoon, for Nick, a fast-baked tray of crumbed processed-meat shapes from the top of the oven; boiled potatoes and carrots on the side. As the plates steamed beneath their noses, Nigel said a slow-spoken but brief grace that concluded: ‘We ask this in the name of the Son. Amen.’
Or was it, Hope wondered, ‘in the name of the Sun’?