by Rebecca Wait
“Yeah. But I still feel tired.” He poured cereal clumsily into a bowl, spilling some in the process.
“I’m not surprised.”
Malcolm took his rubber gloves off and returned the cleaning things to the cupboard. “I’ve got some shopping to do today,” he said. “And Kathy called to say a shelf has come down, so I’ll fix that for her while I’m there.”
“Need any help?”
“No, it’s fine.”
Tom nodded and took his bowl to the table. He’d already swallowed a couple of mouthfuls before Malcolm added, “But company would be nice.”
They set off half an hour later. Tom stared out of the car window at the scenery and asked himself what he was feeling, but came up with nothing; he was numb, as though he’d used up all the energy he’d ever have making his confession to Malcolm. He found he didn’t mind the feeling. It was not peace, but the effect was similar.
When they reached the east side of the island, it began to drizzle.
“You remember how Nicky liked the rain?” Malcolm said unexpectedly.
Tom was relieved to find he did remember. “He’d try to get me to run outside with him as soon as it started raining. Strange kid.”
“You preferred the sun.”
“Of course. I was normal.”
“Nicky would come back in sopping wet, and your mother would despair.”
Tom looked out of the window again, at the grey sea stretching alongside them through a haze of rain. Beth had liked water too. She’d loved paddling in the sea while he or Nicky held her up. Tom felt sensation returning to him; his chest was hurting now, a slow, dull ache.
He said, “I’ve never understood why he let me live. Why he didn’t search for me. Nicky was his favourite and Beth was only a baby. Why let me live and not them?”
“I don’t know,” Malcolm said. “But I doubt it was mercy.”
“It’s never felt like it.” Out of the window, he watched the landscape change as they approached Orsaig, the hills subsiding and houses starting to appear. He said, “I don’t know how to live with it.”
Beside him, Malcolm was silent for a time. Eventually, as the harbour came into view, he said, “Me neither. Never did work it out.”
In the shop, Kathy greeted them cheerfully and then popped next door to the post office, leaving Tom to man the till—which he did not know how to use—while Malcolm set about fixing the shelf. Tom leaned on the counter and watched his uncle bend the warped bracket back into shape.
“I think I should go soon,” he said finally. “Back to the mainland.”
Malcolm paused fractionally in his work. “There’s no rush.”
“I know. But I can’t stay here forever.”
“I don’t see why not.”
Tom smiled. “I wouldn’t make much of a farmer, Malcolm. And anyway, I need to sort myself out. Can’t keep putting it off.”
Malcolm nodded. Carefully, he refitted the bracket into the frame. “What’s your plan?”
“I think I’ll try Glasgow,” Tom said. “It shouldn’t be too hard to find a job there. I’m not fussy.”
“Aye. O.K. But like I said, there’s no rush, is there? Mull it over for a couple of days.”
“Yeah.” But he knew he had to go. He said, “Shall we have pasta tonight? I could do the mushroom thing again.”
“Good idea.” Malcolm picked up the shelf. “Could you get the other end now?”
Tom came forward and together they lifted the shelf up to lay it back across the restored brackets.
“Tommy, you’re holding your end up too high,” Malcolm said after a minute of ineffective manoeuvring. “It won’t go on like that.”
“You’re holding your end too low,” Tom said, eliciting a huff of amusement from his uncle.
“Bring it down a bit, will you?” Malcolm said. “No, not that much.” Then, finally, with mild exasperation: “Just stand back and let me do it. You’re more of a hindrance than a help.”
Tom obediently let go and stepped back, and, a moment later, Malcolm had fitted the shelf in place.
Returning at this point, Kathy inspected the shelf and beamed at them. “Good as new. You men have your uses after all. Thanks so much, both of you.”
“Aye,” Malcolm said dryly. “Tommy was a great help.”
As Malcolm chatted to Kathy and began to fill a basket with shopping, Tom glanced out of the window and saw a car pulling up by the post office. Watching Fiona McKenzie climb out, he hesitated, then said to Malcolm, “Just nipping outside for a moment. Back soon.”
He caught up with Fiona at the bottom of the post office steps.
“Fiona,” he said, raising his voice to catch her attention, and inadvertently making her jump. “Sorry. I just . . . wanted to say hi.”
“Hello,” Fiona said, somewhat coldly, meeting his eye briefly then glancing back to the post office door.
Seeing she was about to walk on, Tom said quickly, “Look, I wanted to say that I’m sorry about the other night. Sorry I was so rude. It was uncalled for.”
He thought Fiona wasn’t going to reply, but after a moment she nodded and said, “We all have off days.”
Tom tried to smile at her. “I seem to have a lot of them.”
Fiona faltered. She half turned back to the steps, but then stopped and looked at him again. “You must understand that it’s nothing personal,” she said.
“No.”
“It’s just difficult for people to see you back here.”
Tom controlled himself, managed to nod and say in a measured voice, “It can’t be easy having it all stirred up again. What my father did—I know it affected everyone.”
“We all have our burdens to carry,” Fiona said. She frowned, then added, “It’s true that we were deceived in him.”
“Yes.”
“And it’s true,” she said stiffly, “that there were things that could have been done differently.”
“Yes,” Tom said again. He weighed his words carefully. “But it’s also true that nobody’s responsible except for him.”
As soon as he’d spoken, he wished he could take his words back, because Fiona now seemed on the edge of tears. “Aye,” she said. “That’s right.” But Tom thought there was something strange in her expression.
To comfort her, he said, “I know you were a friend of my mother’s. I’ve been wanting to thank you for that. I’m sure she appreciated it.”
Then he wondered why Fiona looked so stricken as she nodded quickly and hurried away.
Not feeling ready to go back into the shop, Tom wandered down towards the harbour, enjoying the feeling of the drizzle on his face. Through the mist, he could just make out Jura in the distance. He remembered standing here with Nicky when they were children, competing to see who could throw pebbles the furthest. Nicky usually won, but he was always magnanimous if Tom ever did, saying, “Well done, Tommy. Good throw!”
What a kind man he would have grown into, Tom thought.
Carefully, he tried to summon up his mother’s face, calling the old photograph to mind; it was almost all he had of her now. Part of his father’s legacy had been to draw all the attention towards himself, to put himself at the centre of everything. A few years back, Tom had finally looked up the news coverage. He never got beyond the first few paragraphs. Always, the focus had been on his father, on his supposed devotion to his family, his commitment to his community, speculation over his motives and what could have made him “snap”. Tom’s mother had been wiped out, painted over with the different faces that belong to murdered women: the helpless victim, the martyred saint, the wayward wife who somehow deserved it.
But Tom wanted his mother back. He was tired of his father’s company.
Though he was ready to leave the island, he knew that he could keep moving on forever and still never feel safe, never sto
p fearing men and distrusting himself around women. The old dread was returning, as it always did. There was no getting away from what had happened—not ever. He’d lived most of his life inside a wardrobe and he felt so tired and cramped; he longed for light and space. But again and again he came up against his father’s brutality. What kind of man could you be when that was your inheritance? You could not change if you had learned no alternatives.
Then he turned and saw his uncle coming out of the shop. Malcolm was a little stooped and shabby in his old waterproof, Heather’s canvas shopping bag slung over his shoulder; everything about him was familiar to Tom now. Malcolm smiled when he saw Tom, and Tom raised his hand in greeting, surprised at his rush of relief as he went to join his uncle.
8
Three days later, Malcolm stood with Tommy on the harbour watching the ferry approach. A couple of cars were waiting in the queue to board, but no other foot passengers that he could see besides Tommy.
It was a larger ferry than usual; they’d told them that as Tommy bought his ticket. The normal ferry was out of service. And now it approached, it did seem absurdly large to carry just a handful of people across the sea.
“Do you need money?” Malcolm said, annoyed with himself for not having thought of it before. “Until you get settled? I can help.”
Tommy shook his head. “I have savings. I’ll be fine. And I have a friend there, from university. I can stay with him a week or two while I look for my own place.” Seeing Malcolm’s surprised expression, he smiled. “I do have friends, you know.”
“Of course you do,” Malcolm said hurriedly.
They watched as the ferry docked, unwieldy and mechanical, as incongruous on Litta as a tower block.
Malcolm said, “You’ll come back, if it doesn’t work out?”
“Yes, I’ll come back.”
“O.K.,” Malcolm said. “Good.”
Tommy added, not looking at him, looking out to sea, “I thought I might come back for a visit anyway. In summer, maybe.”
“Aye,” Malcolm said, managing to match Tommy’s casual tone. “I’ll have your room ready.”
The bow doors had opened now and a few vehicles were emerging, islanders returning from Oban with their cars full of shopping, followed by the Royal Mail van. Ross was the only foot passenger to come down the steps from the deck. He paused as he reached them.
“You off now, Tommy?”
“Yes.”
“But you’ll be back to see us soon.”
“Aye,” Tommy said. “Summer, probably.”
“Good lad,” Ross said, clapping Tommy’s shoulder, and Malcolm forgave him in that moment for all the irritations he’d ever caused him. Ross smiled, windswept and open faced in his waterproof. “It’s been great seeing you,” he said to Tommy. “And Malcolm, will we see you in the bar tonight?”
“I’ll come for one.”
“Great,” Ross said, moving off. “Well, I’ll be seeing you later then.”
There was a short silence after he’d gone, then Malcolm said, “Well, I suppose you’d better embark.”
“Wouldn’t want to miss it.” Tommy hoisted his rucksack on to his shoulder and put his hands in his pockets. He seemed awkward now. “Thanks for everything,” he said.
Malcolm nodded. “You take care.” He felt this wasn’t really enough, that there was more he needed to offer Tommy. But it had always been so difficult to say what he meant.
“You too,” Tommy said. They looked at each other for a few moments, then Tommy said, “Well—bye.” And he made to move off.
“Tommy,” Malcolm said, reaching out to touch his arm. “It’s . . .” He stopped, hesitated. “You probably know this already. But you’re nothing like your father.”
He watched his nephew pause at these words. Then Tommy nodded, and smiled briefly. “Thanks. I don’t want to be.”
Malcolm remained where he was as Tommy boarded, waiting for him to appear on deck so he could wave goodbye. He remembered seeing Tommy and Heather off on the ferry twenty years earlier, waving to his nephew as he left the island for the last time. Jill was meeting them in Glasgow to collect Tommy, and then Heather was to return to Litta alone. Tommy, small and pale and stern beside Heather on deck, had not waved back at Malcolm. And who could blame him?
Malcolm wished more painfully than ever that Heather was alive to meet Tommy again. It would have made her so happy. But you couldn’t live your whole life only looking to the dead. Life was a hard struggle, a long dark night, and we had best be thankful for those left to us to love.
When Tom boarded, the ferry seemed even more ridiculously oversized than before. It was almost empty. As he waited for the engine to start up, he got his bearings by walking from empty lounge to empty lounge, each almost indistinguishable from the one before, all of them carpeted in tartan and faintly suggestive of a conference centre: a series of large, abandoned rooms with long windows in which Tom stood alone, surrounded by sea.
An elderly couple came to join him in the lower lounge, each holding a coffee cup. Tom didn’t think he recognized them, but left anyway in case they tried to speak to him. He bought a coffee from the counter in the corner, served by a man so old Tom was worried he wouldn’t survive the crossing. Then, feeling the juddering as the ferry started up, he went out on deck to look back at the island as they moved away.
He was surprised to see Malcolm still standing where he’d left him on the shore, and raised his arm briefly to wave. Malcolm waved back, and then remained where he was, watching as the ferry moved unhurriedly away from land.
Tom breathed in deeply, inhaling the freshness of salt. He had a clear memory of leaving the island the last time, tightening his hands on the cold rail as he stood beside Heather and thinking, furiously, that he would never return. Or he thought he remembered this moment, but what, in the end, could be relied on? Many of his memories he knew he must have changed or embellished, as everyone did: drawing our fragments together into a pattern that made sense, telling ourselves the story of our lives.
Malcolm’s figure was growing smaller now, the shoreline blurring, replaced all around by open water. Tom watched the gannets flying back and forth on to the black rocks further from shore. The islanders had never been awed by the sea, though it defined the limits of their existence. But they had always turned away from it, looked inland. Perhaps this wasn’t weakness after all but defiance.
As the sky started to clear, Tom leaned on the rail and stared out at the water churned up in a white trail behind them. A moment later, the sun came out, turning the sea a rich, deep blue. He could no longer see Malcolm, but he could just about make out the landscape of Litta, its ragged moorland rising up in crests and ridges, its cliffs leaning over the sea. The island was receding fast now, its terrible beauty fading. A few moments more and it would vanish completely. As he watched it go, Tom was not surprised to feel Nicky beside him again, and then his mother, with Beth in her arms. They were mute, his companions, watchful and patient. He didn’t know them well, not at this distance of so many years, hardly knew them at all in truth, but they remained with him. Quiet strangers. He no longer wished to chase them away. Oh my ghosts, he thought. My lovely ghosts. Come with me; we’ll try Glasgow.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rebecca Wait is the author of critically acclaimed novels The View on the Way Down (2013) and The Followers (2017). She writes and teaches in London.
>