by Rebecca Wait
Never mind.
He rested his arms on his knees and let his mind clear for a few moments. He would gather his energy and then make a plan.
But the stillness in his mind was dangerous. It was in these moments that other things found their way in. Tom had felt it coming closer and closer over the past few days, the memory of how his survival had come at the cost of Nicky’s. Now he felt his older brother, forever a child, standing beside him. He had never known why his father had spared him and not Nicky, who was his favourite after all. It was possible, Tom thought sometimes, that his father simply couldn’t be bothered to search for him. Perhaps if it had been Nicky, he would have searched.
Abruptly, Tom forced himself to his feet. He would not sit still. He would continue to walk, and not change direction. Even if he was going the wrong way, he would reach some part of the road eventually; he could hardly avoid it, given that it ran in a loop.
And he did eventually reach it, having stumbled in and out of pools in the darkness, his boots soaked and his ankle painfully twisted from where he’d stepped into a dip in the ground. Then he saw lights in the distance, and from the number of them he realized he must have come to the loop of the road on the eastern side of the island, where houses clustered around the port.
This was not good news. It would take him hours to walk home from here along the road, but it would be madness to go back on to the moorland. Tom felt very tired and foolish. He began to follow the road home.
To keep his thoughts at bay, he focused again on the steady trudge of his feet, but still he felt a rising panic in his chest that grew stronger every minute. It was because he was so tired, he thought. And he had been on the island too long. Of course he should have known better than to come back here, should have known better than to think it would solve anything. All it had done was make things worse.
As the panic seemed to be reaching its pitch, he realized where it came from: his feet were taking him closer and closer to the track leading to his old house. He would have to pass it soon. Then he was upon it.
Without making a conscious decision to do so, Tom broke into a run, but even the pain in his ankle and the sound of his own broken breaths in his ears were not enough to push out the other things in his head. Only when the house was long behind him did he allow himself to stop, bent double with his hands on his knees, his harsh breaths vocalized like sobs. He would never outrun this.
Tom walked for almost two hours without knowing what he was doing. He was unsure if the shaking was due to exhaustion or cold or fear. Eventually he was so tired and his ankle hurt so much that the pieces of Nicky grew hazy around the edges and then, finally, faded away.
At some point later he heard the sweep of a car approaching in the distance, the smooth rumble growing louder before the car appeared from around the bend up ahead, drenching Tom in the white of its headlights. Squinting, Tom moved closer to the edge of the road to ensure he wasn’t in its path. But instead of gliding past him, the car slowed and then pulled up a few feet ahead of him. As Tom limped towards it, the driver opened their door, and Tom saw it was Gavin McKenzie, with Fiona next to him in the car. Was there no escape from the woman?
“Tommy, it’s a wee bit late for a walk,” Gavin said as Tom drew level. “You going home? We’ll give you a lift.”
It was an agony to be caught like this. Tom tried to compose his face, to remember how to talk to others. He said, “No. I’m O.K.” Then, almost too late, “Thank you.”
“Nonsense,” Fiona said, leaning across from the passenger seat. “We’ll take you home.”
“It’s out of your way,” Tom managed. “The wrong direction.”
“It’ll only take us twenty minutes to drop you off, but it’s a long walk for you at this time of night,” Fiona said.
“No,” Tom said. He tried to give them a smile that he hoped looked casual and conclusive all at once. “It’s O.K., I’m happy to walk.” He made to move past the car.
“Don’t be silly, Tommy,” Fiona persisted. “Get in.”
Tom stopped again. “I don’t want a lift,” he said finally. He made sure to keep his voice very polite; he felt for a moment as though his mother was watching him.
“You can’t walk all that way in the dark,” Fiona said.
“Leave me alone,” Tom said. Being forced to have this conversation felt like having sandpaper scraped across his skin.
“We’re only trying to help.” Fiona sounded affronted now.
“It’s not help if people don’t want it.”
Gavin said softly, “It’s O.K., hen. He doesn’t want a lift.” He added, “Goodnight, Tommy.”
But Fiona said, “You should recognize when people are trying to help you, Tommy. Don’t be stubborn, now.” There was a note of self-righteousness in her voice that enraged Tom.
“Look,” he said, “will you just fuck off?”
A short, shocked pause, then Fiona began, “Now you listen—” but Tom ignored her and limped on past the car, grateful when the darkness became total again. He wasn’t sure, after a time, where the night ended and he began. He just needed to sleep, he told himself. He’d lived through worse than this.
He saw Malcolm’s house long before he was anywhere near it; all the lights were on. It floated brightly in the darkness.
When he finally reached it and limped through the front door, Malcolm came and met him in the hallway. Tom realized his uncle had waited up for him, and for some reason the idea made him angry.
Malcolm rubbed his hand across his face. “You’re back.”
“I got lost,” Tom said, wondering if he was about to get in trouble. He didn’t care.
“Are you O.K.?”
Tom shrugged. “Yeah.” His ankle hurt. He was too tired to think.
“You’re shivering,” Malcolm said. “Come and have a hot drink. There’s cocoa. I’ll make a hot-water bottle and get a blanket.”
“No,” Tom said, the word coming out more harshly than he’d intended. “I’m fine. I just want to go to bed.”
Malcolm put out his hand to touch Tom’s arm. His voice was quiet and insistent. “I was worried.”
“No need,” Tom said, stepping back, out of reach.
He looked at Malcolm, and heavy in the air between them was what Tom thought but did not say: What am I to you anyway?
He turned from Malcolm and went up the stairs.
3
Returning from Robert’s farm at six to find Tommy absent had not concerned Malcolm at first. It was almost dark outside, but Tommy knew the island well, and in any case it was easy enough to navigate the road in the darkness. Malcolm made himself a cup of tea and settled down to wait.
But by the time it had got to seven thirty, he was uneasy. Tommy had never stayed out beyond dusk before, and if he’d known he’d be gone, why hadn’t he left a note? He might have his phone with him, Malcolm supposed, but it didn’t seem likely Tommy would call; Malcolm was quite sure Tommy didn’t have his number, just as Malcolm didn’t have Tommy’s. He made another cup of tea and tried to read the paper.
Eventually it occurred to him that it was a ferry day; Tommy might have gone for good. Perhaps it was always going to be this way, that Tommy would disappear as suddenly as he’d arrived, without even saying goodbye. Malcolm experienced the sense of relief he might have anticipated at this realization, but it was faint. Overlaying it, and far stronger, was his dismay. He was surprised, in fact, at how hurt he felt. And it was too soon for Tommy to have left. Malcolm was afraid. He knew too little about Tommy to be confident he would be O.K., and now Tommy was gone, Malcolm had no way of contacting him. He cursed himself for not having asked for a phone number or an address while he had the chance, for letting Tommy slip through his fingers again. What would Heather have said?
The house felt very empty to him this evening, even though he’d lived alone
in it for nearly six years now. He felt he couldn’t bear to go upstairs and check Tommy’s room, but he made himself do it in the end. And there, to his surprise, he found Tommy’s rucksack, as well as his canvas trainers, placed neatly at the end of the bed. Tommy’s phone was on the bedside table.
Malcolm’s relief at this didn’t last long. It was almost nine o’ clock by then. Perhaps, he thought, Tommy was simply out on a long walk, needed to clear his head, something like that. But he couldn’t push away the visions of Tommy lying hurt, or in trouble. And beneath it all was a bigger fear that he hadn’t known he carried: he believed there was a chance that Tommy might be a risk to himself. He believed Tommy might be looking for a way out; he believed—but why all these euphemisms? What good were euphemisms to a man who’d seen what Malcolm had seen? He believed that Tommy might kill himself.
So what now? There were no police on the island, and besides, Tommy had only been missing for a few hours. Malcolm did not even know that Tommy was missing. He could ring up his neighbours, ask them to help him search, but where would they search now in all this darkness? He knew what Ross would say, and Davey: Wait till morning. We’ll find him then. They could do nothing before dawn. At night the darkness here was total: dense and heavy, an almost solid thing.
So Malcolm sat in his small kitchen and waited. And as the time wore on, it seemed inevitable that his brother would come to him. There was no escaping John. To be related so closely to someone who had committed such a crime—it was difficult to get your head around.
Sometimes it made things easier if Malcolm pretended there had been a sudden change in his brother: that the man who murdered his wife and children was not the one Malcolm had grown up with. He tried to think of it as the other islanders did, as a bolt from the blue, a moment of madness, all those neat phrases that packaged up what had happened into a more manageable form. But Malcolm knew that not having seen it coming was not the same as being amazed by it.
He had always noticed, for instance, that the boys were unusually quiet around John. They were different, sillier and more childlike, when their father was not around, but in front of John they took on a curious frozen quality, almost as though they were holding their breath. Malcolm had said as much to Heather once, and Heather had replied that John was a strict father, but that wasn’t a bad thing. And anyway, it wasn’t as though he hit them. But Katrina always had her eye on John too, Malcolm thought. Even when she was talking to someone else, her gaze would slip sideways to her husband. It surely wasn’t normal for a woman to be so watchful around her own husband, though Malcolm could never have put this part into words to share with Heather. John watched Katrina too, but his watching had a different quality to it. Malcolm had seen that as well. He had seen enough. The brutal paradox was that the warning only appeared after the event; it was only revealed by the event. The worst needed to happen before Malcolm could make sense of the signs that had been there all along. But a warning that came afterwards was no warning at all.
Malcolm hadn’t even known his brother owned a shotgun. What use did an accountant have for a gun? But John had had it for years, they discovered afterwards, since not long after he moved back to the island. There was a gun cabinet bolted to the wall of John’s study. Malcolm had never seen it, had never been in there until afterwards. He couldn’t imagine why John had gone to the trouble of acquiring the shotgun certificate in the first place, and then the trouble of renewing it. Their father had taught them to shoot years before, out on the croft, but John had never been much good: he could no more hit a tin can than a rabbit. He needed his targets closer, Malcolm thought.
At last, not long after ten, the sound of the door came and a moment later there was Tommy in the hallway, pale and shivering. Malcolm’s relief made him take refuge in practicalities. He heard himself offering Tommy a blanket, offering him cocoa, a hot water bottle. None of this was what he really wanted to say. In any case, Tommy would accept nothing from him.
Early the next morning, Malcolm called up Robert and said he couldn’t come out to work on the farm that day. He wasn’t well, he said, the lie feeling strange in his mouth. Then he made a cup of tea—interminable tea—and sat down once more to wait.
When Tommy finally came into the kitchen, Malcolm said, “Morning. You get some sleep?” and Tommy said, “Yeah,” and went over to put the kettle on.
He didn’t look like he’d got much sleep.
“Feeling O.K.?” Malcolm said.
“Yeah.”
Tommy waited in silence for the kettle to boil, made his tea and brought it over to the table. He sipped it but did not speak.
Malcolm wasn’t sure how to overcome this impasse. He’d never known how to bridge the gap between himself and others, and now there was no Heather to help him. He imagined her watching this scene now. You men, she would have scolded. You men never talk to each other.
No, they had not been taught how. And yet Malcolm had never really felt like a man. He had always carried a guilty feeling of subterfuge, as though he might be found out any moment. His outside was right; his father had always approved of him in this way—of his height, his strength, his hardiness and his facility with the croft. But beneath the skin, Malcolm had never been sure what was expected of him. He was sensitive, Heather had said to him once; he thought about things deeply. She had said it fondly (perhaps with the faintest hint of exasperation too), but it had stung Malcolm. He had felt almost embarrassed, as though he’d been caught out doing something illicit. Heather had been more masculine than Malcolm in many ways, in her bluntness and her pragmatism, her ability to brush things off, to just get on with things. (She could still speak honestly, though, when she needed to. She could still say, This hurt my feelings, or, This made me happy. She could still say, I love you.)
Malcolm knew he had plenty of animal courage, the kind of physical strength his father admired. He would battle on through a storm or work through the freezing night without complaint, but he was certain, after more than sixty years on this earth, that he lacked moral courage. He had often thought he recognized in his brother a manliness that he himself lacked: John had determination and purpose where Malcolm was weak and wavering. But John had been smaller and skinnier, and their father said he was soft. Malcolm had always known this wasn’t true, that their father had them the wrong way round. He could never have said any of this out loud. It probably wouldn’t have made a difference.
Malcolm had only half learned the lessons of his father and of the world, and where did that leave him? As a kind of piecemeal man, a Frankenstein’s monster, his masculinity patched and tattered. Nonetheless, he wanted to ask now—but ask who?—whether being a man always required you to have power over somebody else. Did it have to? Were there not other ways?
Christ, Malcolm thought, looking across at Tommy. This couldn’t go on forever. He tried to hold his nerve as he said, “Tommy, you know you’re welcome here. As long as you like. But what do you want to do? What’s your plan?” He couldn’t believe how long it had taken him to ask this.
Tommy looked up at him. “Plan?” he said. “Malcolm, I’ve never had one of those.”
“I don’t mean to sound like . . .”
Tommy shrugged. “I promise I won’t stay much longer. A few more days, that’s all.”
“I’m not trying to get rid of you,” Malcolm said. “I just wondered what . . .” He stopped.
“What was going on in my head,” Tommy finished for him.
“Something like that.”
“Most days,” Tommy said, “I don’t even know myself.”
Tommy was upstairs in his room when the doorbell went that afternoon. Malcolm wasn’t especially surprised to see Fiona standing there; of all the people he knew, she was the most likely to drop round unexpectedly. This didn’t mean he was pleased to see her. He had enough on his plate, he felt, without having to make conversation with Fiona today.
> “Fiona!” he said, aiming for heartiness and stumbling closer to hysteria. “This is a nice surprise.”
She said, hovering on the doorstep with uncharacteristic hesitancy, “Is Tommy in?”
“He’s upstairs. Asleep, I think. I’d probably best not wake him.” He thought of the dark circles under Tommy’s eyes.
“No,” Fiona said. “Don’t wake him.” Appearing more decided now, she stepped across the threshold.
“Can I get you a cup of tea?”
“Yes, thank you.” She followed him into the kitchen and for a while they made stilted conversation about the weather and Gavin’s bad back, which had apparently flared up again.
Malcolm started to feel that Fiona had something particular she wanted to say. There was something strange in her manner, something a little more forced and awkward than usual. He couldn’t for the life of him work out what was up.
Still she did not get to the point, even when he’d handed her a mug of tea and shepherded her through to the living room.
“Are you warm enough?” he said. There was a definite chill in the air. It was the first day of November, he realized. “Shall I light the fire?”
“No, don’t trouble yourself on my account.” She pulled her thick woollen cardigan more closely around her, and the slight theatricality of the gesture irritated Malcolm.
“I’ll light the fire,” he said. “It’ll be nicer for Tommy, too, when he comes down.”
This, at least, gave him something to do with his hands, and allowed him to turn his back to her for a while as he laid the logs and got the kindling in the centre going.
Finally, as Malcolm sat back on his heels surveying his handiwork, the small orange flames licking the edges of the larger logs now, Fiona said, “Actually, Malcolm, there’s something I wanted to speak to you about.”