He came down the stair with a pile of the slippery scented coloured rubbish falling out down between his belly and his forearms. When he got back, Jessie had shut the door from the kitchen into the front room, so he closed it too. On the table under the cloth lay stiff, thin Carla, her face cleaned off by Jessie, who was just wiping it around the forehead with a swab of cotton wool. The white fibre was like snow next to the red-brown skin whose colour was cooked deep in.
‘Find me the clearest chart you can. You know the kind of thing. “Getting ready to go out on a date.” Something like that. Don’t say it’s disgusting. It doesn’t mean the kids are doing anything. It’s practice.’
‘Eh?’
‘For courting.’
‘Rhona?’
‘Rhona’s fourteen. One day you’ll fall off the boat and find she’s a big girl. Let her learn. She’s safe here, at least. All she does is try out faces. Now, you hold that guide up for me and I’ll have a try with the stuff out of Carol’s handbag. She’ll feel better that way.’ Carla’s bag contained many pots and sticks and wands, all of them with complicated names that gave no sign of where on the face they were intended for. Jessie worked slowly, without confidence but with the care of a good cakemaker following a new recipe. Layer by layer, as the light for applying colour to a human canvas grew clearer with the rising of the sun, Jessie remade the face of an older Carol into that of a younger, easier, Carla. Ian sat beside the kitchen table and spooned trifle into his mouth, sops of sponge and sweet sherry and custard and dream topping with a delicate adornment of coloured sugar strands falling to his acidic stomach to lie there and counteract with soft bulk the headache that was forming in his head, a not wholly unwelcome reminder that he was alive, that it was a new day, that his brother lay quiet in the earth beyond the house and before the sea, and that two women he had known all his life were close to him in the morning’s light, one absorbed in kindness and the other returning to herself.
In the living room beyond the door, those mourners who had not yet left slept in the places where they had at last succumbed. The doctor and minister were away. A familial intimacy carried from body to body. Nothing was ugly. In the creek below the kirkyard the boat lay up on the hard brown sand. The sea was only a white rumour beyond the rocks.
The Only Only
The first ferry for a week was fast to the quay, the thick rope springs holding it to, looped fore and aft over iron cleats the height of children. The weather had been so hard and high that there was seaweed all over the island, brought in by the wind, and the east wall of each house was drifted up to the roof. The children dug in to these drifts and made blue caves to sit in, smoothing till the cave’s inner ice melted and set to a clear lucent veneer.
Seven children lived on the island and attended the school together. Sandy was the only only among them; the rest had brothers or sisters. She was a girl of eight born to the teacher Euphemia and her husband Davie, who set and lifted lobsterpots for his main living, though the ferry company kept him on a retainer to attend the arrival and departure of the ferry, three times a week when the sea would let it through. Davie’d to hook up and untie the boat, watch for the embarkation of livestock and the safe operation of the davits on the quay. He had an eye to the secure delivery of post and to the setting in place of the gangplank so that it would hold in a swell.
He liked his job. It involved him with everyone who lived on the island and he was careful to respect this. If he knew that the father of a child off just now inside its mother on the ferry to be born on the mainland was not the man with his arm around the woman as the ship parted from the land, he did not say. Davie was not an islander born, although Euphemia was; she could remember her grandmother skinning fulmars to salt them for the winter and she herself could feel if the egg of a gull might be taken for food or if it was fertilised and packed with affronted life. Davie had boiled up a clutch of eggs once and they had sat down to them with a salad and pink potatoes from outdoors; the tapping and the faint window of membrane had seemed right enough, but when he’d got through to the boiled halfmade chick with its eggtooth sticking out like a sail needle’s hook, he’d got sick. He still looked away when a seal heaved up the rocks to die after a gashing; the thickness of the blubber inside gave him a lurch, like seeing the legs above an old woman’s stocking tops. In death a seal keeps its enthusiastic expression; the human face falls to neutral peace, but the seal appears to trust even death.
Because there had been no boat for some time, everyone was on the pier today. It was a social occasion although it was so cold. Something seemed to have slowed the sea, its salt particles surrendering to the grip ice has on water. On the Atlantic coast of the island, rockpools were freezing over, the crabs moving in under sea lettuce to escape seizure by the ice. Among the blue-brown mussels that clustered around the stanchions of the pier hung icicles at low tide. The sea was unusually quiet, hushed by the cold from lapping or thrashing the shingle or the harbour walls. Only the hardiest boats were still down in the water, fishing boats and a clam skiff that had been neglected and had taken in water that was now a hard slope of grey ice halfway up to the gunwales.
On the slip where the smaller boats came alongside there was a tangle of nets and a pile of polythene fishboxes. Yellow, orange, mauve and electric blue, the nets were neatly trimmed with a white buzz of rime. The impression of a deserted, frozen harlequinade was emphasised by a pair of red heavy-duty gloves lying on the weed next to a single yellow seaboot.
Sandy stood with Euphemia in a group of women. People asked the teacher about their children; in such a community there was no chance of going unnoticed. Talk was the pastime, talk and work the currency. Euphemia was pleased to be among women, with her daughter. When, as now, she was irked at her man she did not tell, or it would have been round the place before tea.
She wanted him to give up the boat and come into teaching at the school with her. She could not see the future in working on the pier. It took up a good day three times a week, when the following up had been done, the cargo counted, the letters sorted and settled in the red Land Rover to be taken round the only road by the post; and by the time drink had been taken, with the purser maybe, or with whoever came off the boat or was in the bar off a fishing boat.
He was a good man, but where did these boat days go? Whereas, should he come in with her at the teaching, they would see their work as it grew day by day. And he could still do the lobsters, if there were any left in the sea. With the French and the Russians and the warm-water breeders at it, the sea was full of mostly red herrings, forget the silver darlings.
Sandy now, she would see more of her father if he came in with the teaching, and then Euphemia maybe, when it was all settled, would get down to having another baby.
The purple line at the horizon lay over the slow grey sea. The air smelt of weed, cigarettes and diesel; the post office van was idling and the men gathered around it in their oilskins, smoking for the warmth. The children of the island were standing against the rail at the end of the pier, their feet kicking against the robust wire barrier with a bright harsh chiming. Six of them red-headed, in shades of red from orangeade to a bracken mixed with rough briar brown, and one of them with the crow-black hair that does not shine and goes with blue eyes. The children were waiting to wave, even those who were waving no one off; it was the boat, which was the presiding event of their lives, that they wished to acknowledge.
Against the folding evening clouds, and frosted by their departing rims of hard light, the shining ruby-juice red of Sandy’s straight hair and the drained white of her face seemed to Euphemia to be stamped like a royal seal set to important words. It was not easy to think of Sandy with a brother or a sister. But Euphemia did not approve of only children; especially not here, where circumstances were already isolated in the world’s eyes. It was not possible to imagine loving Sandy any less or loving any child more than Sandy was loved; it was hard to imagine the love that Davie and she bore for their c
hild stretching to accommodate more, but Euphemia was convinced that this would occur naturally, without pain, like passing through a door into a new room with open windows.
The ferry was loaded. The gangplank was lifted on its ropes and let down to the pier for rolling and storage in the metal waiting room at the end where the children hung and bobbed and cuffed one another’s bright heads. A long plaintive blast warned that the boat must soon go and the children hollered back to it through cupped hands. Lights were coming on in the boat; soon the dark would land over them all, steaming across the water from the purple edge of the sea.
Davie was checking that goods had been properly exchanged, the gangmower sent to the mainland for fixing by June time, the cowcake fetched up out of the hold, the canned goods and frozen gear stowed ready for the shop, the box of specially requested medicaments boxed up for the doctor, the beer rolled into the pub’s Bedford van; detail was what mattered in this job, and he took a pride in it.
In the restful numbed cold silence, people began to prepare themselves to make farewell and to depart for their homes. The moment the children loved was coming, when they could wave to the boat as it pulled out and away from the island, seagulls over the wake like bridesmaids. They stood and waited at the pier end, looking out to sea.
There was a creak, a sodden tugging groaning. The seagulls gathered. The eighty people on the pier experienced the shared illusion that it was they and not the boat who moved. The rudder of the ship was churning deep under the water which, astern, showed silvery green below its surface and white above. The air was still enough for a hundred separate lifted voices to reach the ears intended as the twenty souls on the boat looked down to the crowd on the pier. The children waited.
The stern spring of the boat cracked free of the cleat from which Davie had forgotten to lift it. After the first tearing report of the bust rope came the whipping weight of sixty yards of corded hemp and steel, swinging out through its hard blind arc at the height of a good-sized child.
‘Lie down, get down, for God’s sake,’ yelled a man. The women fell to the ground. Unless they were mothers, when they ran for their little ones to the end of the pier as the thick murderous rope lashed out, rigid and determined as a scythe to cut down all that stood in its way.
Sandy lay under her mother’s heart, hearing it in the coat that covered them both. The concrete of the pier seemed to tremble with the hard commotion of the rope’s passing over them.
Snapped out of her dreams, Euphemia held her only child.
The boat continued to move away, its briefly lethal rope trailing behind it, a lone seaman at the winch above, coiling it in to usefulness. The black ferrous patina on the big cleat had burned off under the seething tension of the rope; its stem was polished by force through to a pale refined metal blue. The children from the end of the pier comforted their mothers, who stared out to the disappearing ship seeing, abob in the water, the heads of children cut off at the neck, their frozen sweetness of face under the streaming curtailed hair; red, red, red, red, red, red or black, and to grow no more.
Those American Thoughts
‘There’s places over there you’d not thank me if I took you right enough when all’s said and done. The people are different, not like here. They’re different. They’d cross the road before they would talk to you on the public street. And it’s five highways wide.’ Craig soaked up a good bit of his lager.
‘The street?’ Elise fiddled with the kirby in her hair. It was chosen from a selection at Boots to be the shade closest to the colour of her hair. Her bobcut was dark brown with a halo where the pearlised restaurant lamp over their table was reflected.
‘The road.’
‘Is the street not the road then?’
‘No the way it is here. And no way is the road the street. They use roads for getting places, not for living in. If you’re walking along the cars’ll give you a wide berth because anyone walking along must be mad. Or not have a car, which is the same as mad right enough. There it’s. There’s your food. Looks warm any road.’
Craig was having a bad evening. He’d come all the way North back home to Aberdeen to let Elise know he wanted out from their engagement and he was giving a talk about attitudes to vehicles in the United States, where, he’d given it out, he’d been these last two months. On an engineering job, another lie. They couldn’t get enough bridges, he’d said. Over water; inland waterways. Great demand for Scottish know-how. The Scots had a name for bridges.
In actual fact, he’d been washing up in a tourist hotel on Loch Lomondside, with occasional bar work after the last bus took away the nonresident staff. There’d been a large number of Americans at the Girning Stramlach Inn, right enough. And he must stop saying right enough. His mouth was operating against his brain. It did that around the women. Then again, he’d been with Elise seven years, since she was fourteen, so he owed her the gentle letdown.
They were in the Edwardian Bar at Lillie Langtry’s. She was having a mince masala pitta surprise and Craig had stuck with what he knew and gone for a mixed grill, not noticing until too late that it’d come under ‘Vegetarian’. So his plate looked like what the papers showed found in old burial sites to prove that Caledonian man had once been a grain eater or what have you. He’d catch up on his meat intake with a poke of scratchings after he’d fetched Elise off his conscience.
The lights were low, the music soupy. In the corner a group of big men emptied pints of Murphy’s. Outside in the main road the Mercedes-Benzes of these men waited to be re-entered. On the curled coatstand in the corner their full-length Antartex sheepskin coats hung. They wore square rings of gold and bracelets whose links looked as if they might be useful in a fight. Hard shrewd faces crested their big bodies. They were off the rigs, in Lillie Langtry’s to get in the mood before a night onshore with the dalls and the drink. They had the stilted gentleness of athletes. It made them the nearest thing to heroes the evening could offer, in a place making so high a bid for atmosphere as Langtry’s, with its purple plush and brass lamps and oldness slapped on over the same new underneath as anywhere else.
Elise looked at the burned sweetcorn, not even took off the husk, that Craig had ordered. He’d changed in America, right enough. Perhaps there were a lot of things new about him now. Loving someone was like that. New things happened to them and it was a new thing for you too. Bringing you together, in a sense. She wondered, even if she did go to America, if she could ever fancy a whole green pepper scared out of its wits like that, looking like a frog’s got stepped on.
Her Diet Lilt came in a tall glass with a line at the top to control spurts of generosity on the part of the bar staff. The line came off if you scratched it with a knife, not if you did so with a fingernail. She didn’t want to find these things out but Craig was making all this silence, and she had to do something. In their own home there’d be things to do if he took silent, but out like this, now, it was harder. Plus, she was shy of the pitta bread. Would you eat it like a carry-out or, being here, use the knife and fork provided since the two of them were sitting down not walking along or snogging in between mouthfuls?
She preferred a reunion by the sea or at the chippy, always had. It took them back to their beginning. She never had to bother then with the people they’d become on top of the ones they recognised at once in each other, efficient Elise who remembered her calculator and Craig who’d not and needed one for his maths exam so he’d took it off her and brought her for a cod-roe fry with pineapple fritters to follow after school. They ate walking along the sea edge, the food and, it seemed, the air hot and crisp and sweet and salt in their mouths and hair, with the smell of iron and fish and ships coming down damp with the night.
‘It’s a calculator works by the sun’s rays,’ said Elise, for something to say, because Craig was that old, sixteen, and she thought it might be greedy to pass comment on the fritters. Her fingers were grease to the bone, and there was salt in her papercuts and sugar in her bunches. It was brilli
ant, but she’d no idea what to say to her mother when she got in late that night.
‘Just tell her you’ve been to America,’ said Craig, but he took her home good as gold and explained about the calculator and the examination and the obligation he’d felt to give Elise a wee something to say thanks. After that he was in her house most days. Her parents bought him a calculator for his seventeenth birthday. She began to worry they’d put him off by being keen. He showed no sign of this however and seemed to like being asked to do the things a son does, but for her parents, not his own, who were busy with their garden pond and fixture concession. They travelled sometimes, for the sculptures, that arrived twice a year in a big lorry, wrapped in blankets, looking like a grey extended family arriving at hospital, complete with pets.
Craig cleaned her parents’ old lawnmower, even though his own mum and dad had a Hayter Hovercut, on summer sabbaths, easing its tired blades and joints with 1001 oil, before pouring the bin of fine clippings into the compost tip. Before going home on a Wednesday night, if he’d been over to her house, he’d save her mother and put out the dustbin, a drum of hefty pale shineless metal, ribbed like something military. She’d kiss him after that and be at once interested and bored by the possibilities that lay in so adult a routine so early in her life. It seemed dignified and glamorous to be kissing someone who knew that her mother disinfected and dried the bin on a Thursday, someone who now smelled of the peelings and papers in that bin. It was exciting to imagine being with Craig so long that she knew everything about him. The feeling that they were both old and young was good. The being old was a fantasy like being beautiful or dying, things that could never happen.
Never did she feel that she had leapfrogged something she might miss, for she saw her friends who went from boy to boy looking old and messed, like babies too late for bed.
Wait Till I Tell You Page 3