They sang interminable Gaelic songs that clashed
with the upbeat rhythms of their parents’ psalms.
Aware no one understood them,
they dreamed of flying into exile on Boreray.
Their movement died away when they decided
they weren’t sufficiently distinctive,
and the widows out on Main Street
began scolding them
for stealing all their clothes.
2
You’d know them for their bovver boots,
drainpipe breeks, close-shaven skulls,
and the thin scrapes of guga bone
with which both cheek and loop and whorl
of ear was pierced. Often they wore chains
that once dangled the dark cauldrons
their grandmas hung above the flames
to boil and bubble puffin in.
But most of all, you’d tell them from the way
they used to spit globules of oil and scream
slogans at their elders, decry
the reactionary nature of their ancient régime.
3
From time to time,
there came a new generation
with the desperate need
to escape the way their lives
were locked in there;
Whose days blew round and round
like winds puffing clouds of puffin down,
who longed to wear flowers
and not plumage
in shawls that bound down hair;
who wanted to be lifted off
on fulmar wings
from Mullach Mor and Connachair,
to land and settle somewhere
like the South Uist machair,
where they’d heard legends of petals
shaded yellow as the gannet’s head,
the oyster catcher’s orange beak,
winged kaleidoscopes of colour
instead of rock and moorland,
stern, unflinching, bare.
Visitors / Coigrich
Triptych
‘How much for your most precious egg?’
The businessman stood before Calum in his tweed jacket and plus fours, the smallest pair of leather brogues he had ever seen on an adult’s feet. His dark eyebrows arched and eyes glinted as he stretched out his wallet in the direction of the islander’s stall.
‘I don’t know which one is most precious,’ Calum muttered.
‘The puffin? Guillemot? Storm petrel? Razorbill? Fulmar? There’s a tidy sum if you give it to me.’
It was then that Calum thought of the fulmar egg his son, Domhnall, had brought up from the cliff just moments before he ‘went over’. The first one of that year’s harvest, it was also the brightest Calum had ever seen, containing all the lustre of the moon.
‘I’ll go and get loads more,’ he had announced as he handed it over to his father. ‘It was just this one that caught my eye.’
Calum slipped it into his pocket at about the same moment he heard the cry, the rockfall, the splash into the water. When he reached home the following morning, knowing then his son had been lost, he placed the fulmar’s egg behind the clock on their fireplace in Village Bay. Bright as Domhnall’s spirit had once been, it still sat there, full of the warmth of the household flame, glowing like the constellations in the night sky.
‘How much will you pay?’ Calum asked.
‘A guinea.’
He rolled the sum round in his head, considering the extra food he could obtain for his family for that price. Tea. Potatoes. A jacket for the boy. Despite this, he sensed he could get a little more from the Glaswegian.
‘Two shillings more…’
‘You’re putting the deal in danger…’
‘Two shillings more.’
‘All right. I’ll pay it,’ the businessmen gleamed, reaching out his hand again to meet Calum’s calloused fingers. ‘You drive a hard bargain.’
‘All right.’
Calum went into the house again to bring the egg to him, placing it – warm and luminous – in the palm of his hand. Almost as soon as he saw it there, tarnished by the sweat of the mainlander’s fingers, he regretted the sale. What he had surrendered to the businessman was a pearl of great price, the soul that once belonged to the boy. Calum watched his visitor as he hobbled away on his tiny feet, a tail or some unnatural growth bulging in the seat of his trousers. It seemed to him that he had just given away the most precious gift his son had ever possessed to the Devil.
* * *
That summer the toymaker arrived on the island with the little clockwork models he had created in his shop. There was a dog that barked and wagged its tail; a soldier set to march, present arms and salute; some puffins that squawked and flapped their wings. They whirled, whirred and raced their way around Village Bay, rolling about from home to home until eventually, they stilled, their springs becoming broken, overwound, perhaps, by a child. When the last one halted, they thought that would be the end of the matter.
Until they arrived in August on the cliffs at Oiseaval.
When they clambered down the slope, tying their rope around the Mackinnon Stone, they discovered there were clockwork fulmars nesting on the crags there. They clicked their necks up and down, making loud, grumbling noises in their throats. One or two could even spit, gobbing out beakfuls of oil that had been used to lubricate their machinery.
Iain tried to eat one, but the tiny motor in the bird’s belly, the broken spring below its wing, got stuck in his throat.
* * *
Coinneach regretted it when he discovered his trick had turned out wrong.
But it had seemed a perfectly good notion at the time. A group of Americans had arrived on the island on a summer’s day. Walking around the houses of Village Bay, they had seemed charmed by its inhabitants. They nodded their heads in approval of the honest, humble ways of the people, how they lived so frugally, respecting the needs and wishes of one another.
‘They’re the nearest thing on this earth to angels,’ one lady declared. ‘You just feel blessed to walk the same ground as them.’
‘Yes… Yes… Yes… There’s no doubt they’re touched by Gabriel’s wings.’
It was the missionary who told Coinneach more about their visitors. Apparently, they all belonged to this strange sect called The Reformed Angelic and Apostolic Church of The Coming Millennium. The central core to their faith was that angels would be arriving soon to take them to a place where they would be prepared for flight before being lifted up to Heaven.
‘They will guide us there,’ a man said, ‘ready for Salvation.’
It was then that an idea occurred to Coinneach.
‘You’ll need wings,’ he said, ‘if you’re going to reach the place the Lord has prepared for you.’
When they looked at him with puzzled expressions, he spoke once again.
‘I know exactly where you might find them.’
He took them to the Feather Store, opening its door and showing the Americans all the birds’ plumage gathered there. There were quills and pinions from the wings of gulls and gannets; little puffs of black or grey from razorbills, guillemots and puffins; a huge collection of feathers from the birds of all shapes and sizes that had settled, however briefly, on their shores. He watched as the Americans plunged their hands into the sacks containing all the fine plumes that had been stored there, casting them heavenwards in clouds above their heads.
‘It is a sign… A revelation…’
‘There is little doubt that we have been sent here for a reason.’
‘Hallelujah! The great day is at hand!’
His pockets weighed down by money, he watched them climb towards Conachair. They dragged heavy sacks behind them. One or two even had feathers sewn into the shoulders of their jackets, puffing from the crowns of their hats. Some of them were dancing as they scaled upwards, the quills of gannets tight in their hands.
‘Best of luck! Best of luck!’ Coinn
each kept shouting as he watched them on their trail.
It was the following morning he felt guilty, when they were found on the crest of Conachair, trembling with the fierce chill of a rain-lashed wind, the disappointment that the day they so much longed for had been delayed once again…
Exhibits
The famous showman Mr Benjamin T Bradshaw made an unusual request when he arrived on the island. He ran a small travelling circus which journeyed around the towns and cities of mainland Britain, displaying ‘Amusements, Amazements and Curiosities’ to all and sundry who stepped within the entrances of his various tents and halls. He asked for three exhibits from the island to be placed alongside Brenda the Mermaid, Henry the Human Worm and The Infant Drummer 4 Years Old – An Amazing Fat Infant. After much discussion with the Island Parliament, three individual items were taken from Village Bay to become part of Bradshaw’s ‘Educational and Entertaining Enterprise’.
The first of these was a puffin which Lachlann MacQueen had taught to perform dance steps to accompany the psalm tunes sung and precented by his father at early morning worship in their home.
The second was Murdo Murray Gillies, a slow-minded teenager who was too clumsy and lumbering to survive for long on the cliffs.
The third was the fulmar – a bird at that time only found on the island cliffs. All three exhibits obtained mixed receptions from the visitors who congregated around them. The puffin was greeted with yawns and snide comments.
‘Can’t it do the waltz or the Charleston?’
‘It’s boring…’
Murdo Murray Gillies was looked upon with disgust and disapproval.
‘Such a fowl-smelling young man…’
‘An elephant ankled biped. Such appalling toes.’
Over time, the fulmar became the spokesman for the trio. Whenever visitors came into range, it would squirt oil in their direction, staining all the finery they wore for their visit.
‘Math fhein…’ Murdo would chuckle. ‘Very, very good…’
These Nights With Lydia
These nights with Lydia marked the beginnings of his delusion. His head reeled each time she came to his bed, enthralled not only by her nakedness but also by the power of flight his knowledge of her body gave him, her presence allowing him to soar above the confinement of the grubby basement room where he lived. There was the way she brushed his chest with the feather boa that adorned her neck, touching and teasing him with light, playful touches, whisking away the stench that clung to him after his day’s work. She would blow white plumes down his thighs, giggling as their lightness became trapped in the thick hairs that matted his skin, laughing as he held her in his arms, calling her his ‘Little Chick’, ‘Flamingo’, ‘Madame Kingfisher…’
‘Mr Baillie, you’re making my little heart go all a-flutter,’ she would chuckle in response.
At times like these, he would grin, noting how quills and down seemed to cluster everywhere in her presence. They even edged out of the insides of his pillow; little grey feathers that might have been plucked from some of the many seabirds that thronged the fields and shoreline near his childhood home in North Berwick. It all reminded Lawrence of the life he had been forced to leave behind, the way he had exchanged the farm with its view of Bass Rock for the dirt and sprawl of the city where he worked as a sanitation engineer, spending much of his time in the murky darkness below its streets. His eyes would moisten as he thought of the geese pecking the stubble of its fields, the sparrows and small birds chirping in the garden, the gannets challenging gravity as they plunged into the sea. Instantly, she returned him to all of that, escaping the dark suit that confined his flesh, allowing him to become once again the farmer that previous generations of his family had been.
In these moments, he tried to forget how he had first met her, the moment he glanced across Jamaica Street near the Clyde to see her standing on the pavement. She had just left MacSorley’s with its etched glass windows concealing those within, those exiled Highlanders and onshore seamen seeking to escape the grimness of their lives for a short time within the walls of that drinking establishment. With her swift, delicate movements, she resembled a small, light-coloured bird. It was a comparison that he was inspired to use as a result of her dress. There was the red tippet decorating her hat, plucked, perhaps, from the breast of an exotic fowl nesting in either the colonies or the furthest, southern edge of the continent. The feather boa that – he discovered later – was a constant presence around her neck. The rest of her outfit had much in common with that worn by other ladies plying her particular trade – a neat, trim coat a little worn at the elbows, thick, tweed skirt, and black boots. Her face had the sallow countenance of those who were hungry; thin wisps of fair escaping from the edge of her hat like wings flapping.
It was all this that made him stop as he made his way down the street, an impulse reaching out and catching him as if he was tossed into mid-air. He crossed the road and made his bargain with her, placing a few shillings in the glove of her hand…
Tangled in sheets, they would sometimes talk to one another. She told him that her real name was not Lydia. Instead, it was something ordinary, commonplace, a secret she shared with no one but which belonged to her old life in the Highlands, a place it was clear she belonged to when her accent became lost or slipped. She spoke about this in vague terms, telling of how her father was a fisherman; his boat trailed by gulls as it came into port with a hold full of fish.
‘I would go and meet him on the harbour… Another little bird waiting for her share of the catch.’
She would mention, too, how she had married a man from Glasgow soon after she arrived in the city.
‘He gave me a child and precious little else. Disappeared as soon as he heard the first squall from the cradle.’
It was this that led her to her present trade. She claimed she only took a few clients, ones whose company she took on a first, hurried impression. She said this had been the case with him.
‘I knew you were shy and sweet, guessed it from the moment you stepped out from behind the carriage. It was even obvious it was the first time you had ever done anything like that… You stammered as if you were a virgin. I knew that right away.’
He blushed, aware that this was true. Shyness afflicted him each time he spoke to a woman. Words fumbled on his tongue; a result, perhaps, of his appearance. His head was a dark, grizzled brown. His eyes were much the same shade, small and beady and set beside his long beak of a nose. Small and thin with short, tapering legs, the rest of his body didn’t help his confidence much either.
But that’s changed a lot since then…’ She laughed at his reaction, drawing him towards her with the boa once more. He felt their brush, the touch of her lips on his own, a shade clumsy at first, but slowly becoming warm and certain, a quiet confidence transforming him, as if her fingers contained ‘all the perfumes of Arabia’ and granted him cleanliness once again…
She flew the coop sometime later.
One day he went to meet her in Hope Street only for her to fail to turn up. A procession of black hansom cabs, carts drawn by lumbering horses, passed him as he waited there to see her, rain and cold penetrating his clothes. As he stood puzzling over her absence, he realised how little he knew about her identity. He wasn’t even sure he knew her real name. (Once a woman whom they had met in Buchanan Street had greeted her with another – ‘Eloise’. The sound clearly startled her, but she said nothing, turning her head quickly away.) He knew none of her friends. There was no one he could ask about her whereabouts. He pounded the wall in frustration, blood seeping from his knuckles. He could not even be sure if she was alive or dead, if she had been snatched away or parted from him willingly. In their last conversation, she had hinted that the latter might be the case.
‘We might need to fly away from one another,’ she had said. ‘It wouldn’t be good for a young man with your prospects to be too involved with the likes of me.’
He had tried to joke her out of this,
but she had shook her head, picking up a feather and using it to tickle the tip of his nose.
‘Think of it, Lawrence… Think of it…’
There were other women after that. The mousy, timid daughter of a Glasgow businessman who it was hard to imagine even removing her clothes in the dark of their own bedroom, far less displaying herself, flourishing both flesh and feather in the way Lydia had done. He had even paid a few prostitutes to act like she had done, buying one a pair of large feathery fans which she drew back and forth before her body, revealing herself one moment, concealing herself the next. It was an act they all performed without flare or conviction. They lacked the delicacy of touch she had possessed, drawing feathers clumsily across his skin.
And there was, worse, an absence of laughter. They only displayed unease before this weird, little man and his odd, little fancies. He imagined the way they might talk about him when they met, discussing his behaviour.
‘He’s away with the birds,’ they would declare. ‘Gives me the creeps.’
He drank in order to stop himself thinking about Lydia, her features blurring when he took his fourth or fifth glass. Sometimes, though, her face would stay with him, remaining in his thoughts even as whisky plunged him deeper and deeper into despair.
‘Mr Bailie, you’re making my little heart go all a-flutter,’ she would say.
His spirits began to lift the day he first heard talk about the island. George Burnett, one of the partners in the firm, had gone to visit its shores on one of these steamships that travelled around the Scottish islands, stopping at each port on their route.
‘Strangest place I’ve ever come across in all my travels,’ he declared. ‘High cliffs. All these seabirds. Strange Gaelic-speaking folk who survive just by eating them. It’s a little like stepping back in time, Lawrence. One minute you’re standing, holding onto the iron rails of a modern steamship. The next you come to a shoreline where you feel the wheel was just invented a year or so back.’
The Guga Stone Page 9