by Rebecca Wait
“Haven’t been back here for a while,” Malcolm said. “Didn’t see any seals last time either. Might be that they’ve moved on.”
Tom looked at the empty rocks and thought that finding seals had never been the point—not for him and Nicky. It had been an extra triumph to return home with, and their mother always seemed to think they were very clever if they did see the seals. But if they had to reply to her, “No, we didn’t see any today,” they might feign disappointment—perhaps to themselves, too—but it would not really be a blow.
No, the real point had been the rocks themselves. Tom studied them now, the black rocks biting into the cliffs and stretching out into the sea. They were slippery and treacherous, built up of many slanting layers and jagged edges. He and Nicky had loved to scramble over them, climbing up towards the clifftops or racing each other along them where two parallel outcrops rode out into the sea. Tommy, although younger, had always known he had the advantage here. Both he and Nicky were confident on the rocks, quick and sure-footed, using their hands only when balance was especially challenging or underfoot was too slippery. They each had the fearlessness of childhood and a keen instinct for where to put their feet and where to avoid, even when moving at speed. But Tommy was the faster of the two, and the rocks seemed to be his natural element, so that he was swifter and more graceful on the jagged rocks than he was on flat, dry land. Sometimes he had to stop and wait for Nicky to catch up with him.
Tom turned his eyes from the rocks to look at Malcolm.
“Did you and my father play together much as children?” he asked, and saw that look of fear cross Malcolm’s face, the one he always seemed to get when Tom’s father was mentioned. For a moment, it gave Tom a savage pleasure. If I have to live with it, then so should you. But of course Malcolm did live with it.
“When we were very young, we used to,” Malcolm said. “As we got older, I suppose we had different interests. And there was always work to be done on the croft, soon as we were strong enough.”
“Did you ever come here?”
“Just occasionally.”
Tom wondered if he and Nicky had really crossed the rocks as fast as he was picturing in his head. Probably not. But they had certainly been quick. He had felt the value of this skill the most when they were on family walks at the weekend. They rarely went as far as the northern coast of the island, but even on the east coast, only twenty minutes from their house, there were good rocks. They weren’t as big or as black or as jagged as the rocks at Craigmore, but this only meant Tommy could take them at an even faster pace, scrambling up a sloping cliff-face before the others had even reached the bottom. Nicky would catch him soon enough, but Tommy was usually first, and he liked to be first. Both children had intuited that their father needed them to be physically courageous. They taught themselves to be hardy and athletic, and if they hurt themselves, slashed open a knee or elbow on the sharp edge of a rock, they did not complain, although they could be sure of ready sympathy from their mother. But more than anything they wanted to be their father’s sons.
Tom said to Malcolm, “Nicky and I used to climb these rocks.”
“So you did,” Malcolm said. “I remember when Nicky broke his arm.”
Tom remembered too. “He didn’t break it. He dislocated it. His shoulder.”
“Ah, that was it. He was, what, seven or eight at the time?”
“I think he was just about to turn eight. I remember it was the week before his birthday, because we were supposed to go to the play centre in Oban with all the trampolines, but then we couldn’t because of Nicky’s shoulder.” Their mum had still taken them, once Nicky’s shoulder was better, but it hadn’t really been a birthday treat by then.
Tom could see the accident unfolding vividly, even at this distance of so many years, could see Nicky losing his footing and falling, as if in slow motion, down the narrow gully between two huge, slanting rock-faces. They had been high up at that point, level with the midpoint of the cliff. Nicky didn’t fall all the way down; the gully was so narrow he ricocheted off either side like a pinball, and landed with not too big a thump on the compacted sand at the bottom. But somewhere on the way down he had dislocated his shoulder and when Tommy finally reached him, Nicky was white with shock, winded and shivering. Tommy was shocked too, and more frightened than he’d ever been in his life, but the strange calm of catastrophe had come over him and he’d taken off his own jacket to put around his brother and told him they had better go home.
For an hour they’d hobbled along together, Nicky starting to cry as the shock wore off and the pain set in. Tommy had hardly ever seen his brother cry, or not for a year or more, anyway. He could almost feel the pain in his own body. He set his eyes grimly on the track ahead, told his brother to lean on him, and tried to distract Nicky by telling him every story from Greek mythology he’d learned from the large illustrated book he’d got for Christmas. Nicky seemed to be making an effort to focus on the stories.
“Then what?” he would pant if Tommy paused for a moment in his telling, and Tommy learned to keep the flow of words moving quickly.
Mercifully, when they were halfway along the farm track, and still nowhere near the main road that led to their home, Robert Nairne drove past in his truck and, seeing from a distance that something was wrong, stopped to pick them up. Nicky was almost incoherent with pain by the time they were deposited home, but was clearly making an effort not to cry too much or too loudly, while Tommy rubbed his brother’s good shoulder in useless reassurance. Dr. Brown was called and arrived swiftly to fix Nicky. It seemed like magic to Tommy, who saw Nicky go from agony to being almost pain free in a matter of moments. His mum said Tommy shouldn’t stay in the room to watch, but his father said Tommy had earned the right.
“He just sort of pushed it back in,” Tommy told Nicky afterwards. They were sitting side by side in Nicky’s bed, eating white chocolate. Nicky was still groggy, but cheerful.
“What, just like that?” Nicky said. Nicky did not remember anything after the injection Dr Brown gave him, though he’d been awake the whole time, and had cried out when Dr Brown did his amazing trick.
“Yeah, just like that.”
“Well, if it was that easy, we could have done it ourselves,” Nicky said. “You could’ve just done it on the beach.”
“We’ll do it that way next time,” Tommy said, though he had some doubts. “Now I’ve seen how it’s done.”
Tommy had been granted a share in the invalid’s privileges, for being brave and for keeping calm in a crisis, as his father put it. Perhaps the best part of the whole thing (even better than the white chocolate) was how proud their father was of them. Their mum was tearful at Nicky’s suffering and relieved to have them home safely, but their dad was proud. They knew because he told them. They were tough lads, he said, to have got themselves home.
“My father . . .” Tom started to say to Malcolm. He stopped, having no idea how to continue. He felt Malcolm watching him, waiting for him to go on. Patient or apprehensive? “My father said Nicky could have broken his neck. He said he’d known a boy who’d fallen on the rocks and broken his neck.”
“Really?” Malcolm said. “Someone on the island? I don’t remember that.”
“I suppose he was trying to make us be careful,” Tom said. He didn’t believe it had been that. He thought that his father had liked to talk about violence.
“Shall we head for home,” Malcolm said, “before the weather closes in?”
“Yeah.”
They turned back towards the cliffs, away from the dark sea.
The next day, Nicky had gone to Oban on the ferry with their mum to get an X-ray, but they came back saying everything was fine. As Nicky was in no further pain, and as there was more white chocolate that night, and as they had pleased their father, both boys were glad overall that the incident had occurred, and often discussed it together afterwards
. But mixed with the satisfying sense of drama and their own heroism was an aftertaste of fear: the knowledge which was new, but felt old, that terrible things could happen, and did happen, from out of nowhere, under a seemingly blue sky.
9
On the night that everyone died except for Tommy, they had chicken for tea, with broccoli and baked potatoes.
Afterwards, Tom would remember the food in detail, though he would not, as an adult, remember most parts of the conversation, every interaction, every nuance of feeling. He retained a general sense of it, with the ending clear and the rest blurred.
There had been no sauce. There always had to be sauce with chicken because otherwise it was too dry and his father didn’t like it. Tommy’s mother seemed distracted so perhaps that was why she’d forgotten the sauce. It made Tommy anxious. There was plenty of butter for the baked potatoes, but nothing at all to go with the chicken. Tommy waited all through the meal for his father to notice and say something about it. He could feel the prickle along his arms and in his chest and he glanced across at Nicky, who was eating his food with that expression of concentration he sometimes wore when he was doing maths (Nicky was brilliant at maths). Tommy thought Nicky was worried too.
Tommy wolfed his own chicken down quickly, to show everyone it was delicious and not dry at all. “Slow down, bairnie,” his mother said, “you’ll make yourself sick,” and for a brief moment Tommy was annoyed with her for not seeing how he was trying to help her.
Then Nicky started to talk about Viking longships, which irritated Tommy further because he was the expert on Vikings, not Nicky. But he thought he knew what Nicky was trying to do: keep everyone happy, keep everyone busy, keep their father from getting annoyed.
And it was true that their father hardly ever got annoyed with Nicky, except for the way his hair wouldn’t lie flat on his head before church. Their father liked Nicky best, and Tommy knew this, and so did Nicky, and so did their mother, even if they all pretended they didn’t. His father said Nicky would be an accountant like him one day because he was so good with numbers. Tommy thought Nicky should be talking about maths instead of Vikings, but he supposed that Nicky had the Vikings in his head because of the project on longboats they were doing at school.
As Nicky talked on about how they built their ships—Tommy could see how cleverly he’d chosen the bit most likely to interest their father—Tommy looked at his mother. He thought she would at least acknowledge that the Vikings were his by turning to him at some point, but she kept on watching Nicky, and when she did turn it was only to look quickly at Tommy’s father, before she returned her attention to Nicky, giving him that special smile that Tommy loved, and saying, “Did they really? That’s very interesting.”
“So they built the outside first,” Nicky went on. “And then put the frame in the middle. It’s called . . .” And here he broke off. “I can’t remember what it’s called. The name for how they make the ships. We learned it today.”
It’s called clinker, Tommy was about to burst out, but before he could speak his father said, “Carvel.”
“It’s not,” Tommy said, without even thinking about it. “It’s clinker.”
All of them turned to look at him. Tommy felt the silence pushing at his sides. “The other kind is carvel,” he said. “The non-Viking kind.”
“Well, I haven’t heard of either,” his mother said, “so all of you are much cleverer than me.”
Tommy waited for his father to speak. He didn’t dare look up, and he knew Nicky would be staring down at his plate too, thinking how stupid Tommy was, how he always ruined things.
“Do you think you know better than everybody else?” his father said. He didn’t sound angry. He sounded curious.
Tommy shook his head. A throbbing had started up in his ears.
“He doesn’t think that, Dad,” Nicky said, and Tommy was astonished at his brother’s bravery, his loyalty.
Their father held up his hand to silence Nicky, but Nicky added all the same, “It’s just that he really, really loves the Vikings. They’re his favourite. Dad, will you take us to a museum to look at Viking things sometime? Mrs Brown says they have some stuff in Glasgow.”
The cleverness of him. Tommy couldn’t look at his father, so he kept his eyes on Nicky instead. Nicky looked entirely innocent.
There was a long pause, and then their father said, “Yes, we can do that.” After a moment, he added, “Tommy. Nobody likes a know-it-all.”
Tommy nodded quickly, staring down at his plate.
Their father picked up his cutlery and put a piece of chicken in his mouth. “It’s dry, Katrina,” he said. But he spoke calmly. After a few minutes of eating in silence, he pushed the plate away from him and stood up. “Better get back to work,” he said, and left the kitchen.
Tommy felt himself letting out a slow, shaky breath, and thought his mother and Nicky were doing the same.
Their mother said, “Crumble for pudding. Finish up, boys.” She reached over to ruffle Tommy’s hair, and feeling this, and thinking of the crumble, and of how Nicky had saved him, Tommy felt a surge of joy so pure and keen it was like the rush in your stomach on a swing.
Later, when they were upstairs in their bedroom, Nicky said, “It is clinker, Tommy. I knew you were right.”
Tommy nodded. He heard without Nicky needing to say it what lay behind his brother’s words: we got away with it this time. Be more careful in future. Nicky went back downstairs and Tommy stayed in their room, reading his book about the Vikings.
They hadn’t got away with it, of course. They had got away with nothing. Much later, a succession of counsellors would tell Tommy it was normal for children to blame themselves after a tragedy, to obsess over what they could have done differently, as though they could somehow go back in time and prevent it. Magical thinking. Tommy would nod and pretend to be reassured. But his mind threw it out again: clinker, clinker, clinker. If only he hadn’t corrected his father. If only he had been clever like Nicky.
It wasn’t your fault, the counsellors said.
Clinker, clinker, clinker.
Of course, they didn’t know what had happened next. Tommy would never tell them. He knew this even at eight, still knew it at ten, knew it at fifteen and at twenty. Clinker wasn’t the real trouble. Clinker was a displacement thought he clung to. The Vikings were bearable—almost, almost bearable—where the rest was not. It was so terrible that most days he couldn’t even look at it. Couldn’t look away either. Always, he would catch a glimpse of its edges and then the awful darkness rose up in him again.
I’m sorry, he tried to say to Nicky in his head. Often he woke up with the words at the front of his mind. Caroline told him one time that he’d spoken them aloud, still half asleep.
If only he could go back. If only he could go back, and know what was coming, and do everything differently. Do only one thing differently. It would have taken just the tiniest of whispers, the smallest fraction of a second, a different decision, a different outcome.
Clinker, clinker, clinker.
If only, if only, if only.
10
Tommy had been staying with Malcolm for nearly a week, and their days had fallen into a kind of rhythm. Malcolm rose early, Tommy generally rose late. Some days Malcolm went out to work with Robert, but would mostly be back by the afternoon. Then, before the light faded, he and Tommy would go for a walk. Malcolm didn’t know what Tommy did with his mornings. Sometimes he’d find him lounging in an armchair in the sitting room with one of Heather’s novels. Tommy had finished The Way of All Flesh now and moved on to Thomas Hardy. Most days Tommy would have made lunch and left some for Malcolm: a cheese sandwich wrapped in cling film in the fridge, or pasta and tomato sauce to be heated up.
Once they were back from their afternoon walk, they would sit at the kitchen table, drinking tea and not saying much. Tommy might ask a few questions ab
out the croft in the years before it was broken up, or about the state of farming on the island now. He remained knowledgeable, Malcolm thought, about their ways. You’d know he’d grown up here if you heard him talk about sheep farming. It surprised Malcolm how much Tommy knew, since John had been so intent on distancing himself and his family from the farming life. John had shown no interest in the croft after he left home, not even after their father was dead and Malcolm was working it. In fact, Malcolm had to admit now that John had sneered at it; there had been something self-conscious, something deliberate in the lack of interest he would display if Malcolm or anyone else brought the subject up. No, John was an accountant, John worked with his brain, not with his body, not his muscles and sinews; he was not interested in the rough, gruelling existence the rest of them eked out on the island, breaking their backs day after day in the mud and the rain. Malcolm had heard mutters about this in the bar, how John thought he was better than everyone else. Still, there was no real harm in it; people liked John—were impressed by him even. But now John’s son, his grown-up child, sat across the table from Malcolm and talked of foot rot and subsidies and silage.
What they never discussed was Tommy’s life over the past twenty years, or his plans for the future. The longer this went on, the more anxious Malcolm felt about it, and the more impossible it became to say anything important. He had asked Tommy so few questions, had been so afraid of prying.
You’re both as bad as each other, he imagined Heather telling him. You never get to the point, you men. It was the sort of thing she might have said when she was alive.