He read much about the island over the following months, discovering the names of its cliffs – Conachair, Mullach Mor, Oiseaval – and the names of the few families that lived in their shadows. They began to invade his dreams and working life. He would be checking some newly constructed part of the city’s sewer system for cracks and repairs when he would find himself on a cliff-top, made giddy by height rather than the fetid atmosphere that was all around him. Sea air might waft in his direction, dissipating its foulness. His sight would be filled with the marvellous light that – he imagined – could be found in that far periphery off Her Majesty’s domains, relishing its freedom and space. He would be unaware of how his colleagues glanced in his direction, shaking their heads with concern.
‘What’s up with Bailie? The job seems to be getting to him.’
The following summer he arrived on the island, journeying with a few adventurous members of Scotland’s business class from Oban to its shores. Keeping his distance from them, he watched as they walked among the houses of Village Bay, offering cash for lengths of tweed or collections of seabird eggs.
‘And what variety are they?’ they might ask, turning a speckled shell around and around in their fingers.
He knew they didn’t like him. Women stepped away when they came near on deck, as if the smell of the sewer system was contaminating his breath and they had to keep their distance. Men recoiled when he stretched out his hand, avoiding the stink of human excrement that was, perhaps, tainting his skin. No matter. He sat on a stone and watched the birds that flocked around the island. Puffins congregated on Dun. Gannets dived into the bay. Fulmars nested on cliffs and the stone walls of cleits. He could even see a flurry of down and feather tossed about by the wind, gathered in mounds behind the houses. ‘All of Neptune’s birds-of-flight would soon brush his soul and fingers clean…’
When the others had gone, making their way to the cemetery and the island’s cliffs, he walked over to the Post Office where Fergusson was standing behind the counter, smoking his pipe.
‘I wish to buy one of the single women on the island,’ he declared.
He had seen them making their way around Village Bay. Slim and shy, they held themselves upright in the stiff wind that was blowing around the island, as if they were fulmars in flight. Little puffs of feather were stuck to their clothing, like snowflakes in their shawls and dresses. One even had a few in her hair, decorating her dark curls. They resembled white strands acquired early in youth, contrasting with her unlined face.
‘Don’t worry. I will marry her,’ he said when the silence grew too long. ‘I’ll look after her well. It’ll all be a respectable arrangement. It’ll benefit us all.’
Ferguson gaped, the thickness of his grey beard unable to disguise the fact his mouth was hanging open. ‘What nonsense is this? We do not sell our woman here.’
‘It would help you all if you did,’ he stammered, thinking of the coins he had pressed into Lydia’s fingers, buying her for the night. ’On the mainland, women can be purchased in that way. Lydia the love of my life…’
‘Not here! Not in this place!’ A hand waved in his direction. ‘You mainlanders think you can buy whatever or whoever you like, but that’s not the case here. Some things are still held precious in this place…’
‘But …’
‘Get out of here! Get out of here!’
He turned away, his head down as he wandered towards the school. He was muttering to himself as he did this, fingering the thick brown wallet he had in his inside pocket. Once or twice he even interrupted the progress of women who were walking past, carrying food and stores from a cleit to their home. His questions would follow as they made their way from him, slipping as soon as possible from his side.
‘How much then…? How much do you want?’
They found Lawrence later in the Feather Store, lying back among the sacks of seabird feathers they had gathered to sell on the mainland. He had taken off his clothes and was lifting up huge handfuls of plumage, casting them up into the darkness of the room. One of the passengers, a doctor from Greenock, managed eventually to coax him from within its walls, whispering to him again and again.
‘I’m sure it can all be arranged… We’ll speak to the islanders. I’m sure it can all be arranged.’
It was the beginning of a long voyage home. For much of that time, he was trussed up in a sack, his hands bound and fastened with rope.
A fortnight later, he was committed to the Glasgow Royal Lunatic Asylum in Cowcaddens, where he remained for the rest of his life.
A Mainland Visitor Provides
the Islanders With Underwear
They’d no notion how to wear these gifts of vests
– more holes than cloth, revealing too much skin –
and refused to ever slip them on their chests
but used them as nets to catch their pick of petrels in,
twirling simmits on their summits round and round,
synchronising movements in a strange network of kin
that involved full households trying to bring these small birds down
with nothings bound to nothings by small loopholes of string.
2
And soon, the women followed suit,
heading across to Dun in cold pursuit
of puffin. There they cast aside the trammels
of Victorian underwear, the whalebone corsets, bustles,
chemise they found difficult to bear.
Soon, trembling in the chill of dark, they stood and flayed the air
with pantalettes and bloomers, all lace, broderie anglaise,
that lassoed the beak and neck of birds,
not allowing them to slip away
till each was tight-laced in their fingers
and they had stripped all plumage,
made fine cutwork of their prey.
Gannet’s Nest
Much turned up within a gannet’s nest.
In his time out on the stacs, MacQueen had found an ancient arrow-head, a grubby lace handkerchief and a brass sun-dial (‘Useless in this part of the world,’ old Gillies had declared). Each one had somehow been skimmed off the surface of the waves; the birds diving from cloud to scoop up the item floating on the water or lodged, perhaps, in a crack in one of the rocks below in its beak. Yet the strangest discovery of all was the stained red coat draped on a ledge of the cliff-face, a few sticks laid on top of it for a makeshift nest. He had wrapped it round his waist after finding it there, showing the piece of clothing to all he came across when he came ashore.
‘Look at what I’ve found,’ he declared. ‘Wonder how on earth that got there…’
* * *
‘Red Riding Hood,’ Little Alexina declared when her father turned up, brandishing it in her fingers. ‘After she got away from the wolf…’
Her love of the story had been growing since the time she overheard the grown-ups whispering about where they might be able to go after they left the island.
‘They’re promising us jobs in the forestry scheme…’ she had overheard her father saying.
‘Whereabouts is that?’
‘In Argyll.’
‘And what will we do there? I’ve never even seen a real tree. Just pictures of them. They look like overgrown cabbages.’
‘Work there. Plant them. Chop them down.’
Her father shrugged his shoulders. ‘And how do you do that?’
Alexina had her own ideas of what the islanders might do there. She pictured her father like the wood-cutter in the story, using his blade to cut open the wolf that had swallowed Grandma whole. ‘You could learn to be wolf-killers,’ she said.
The rest smiled, wondering how these thoughts had come into her head.
‘She reads a lot. Spends most of her nights wasting fulmar oil, her nose stuffed in a book.’
‘She’s got an excellent imagination.’
But Alexina continued to believe in the truth of her story. There were wolves in the forest,
beasts capable of gulping up any children that might appear on their path. The coat was proof of that – all the dangers that might be waiting for them on the mainland when they left. She might be walking to school when this creature came upon her. Smiling, it would show the sharpness of its teeth.
‘All the better to greet you with,’ it would say…
* * *
Mairead caressed it with her fingers, touching its buttons, brushing the label ‘McNamara Tailoring’ stitched within. Taking it into the privacy of her house, she waltzed with the grimy garment pressed against her, performing her own demented version of the Charleston and Military Two Step she had read about in some of the books that made their way to their shore. After he had overheard some of the women speaking about these dances, the missionary had even gone so far as to condemn them from his pulpit. They were both ‘evil and wicked, a temptation to the flesh’.
She lowered the coat, looking at it through the light of the fire. As flames flickered through the fabric, she imagined how she might be transformed if she wore a coat like this. Her small dumpy form might exude sex; the glances of men constantly shifting in her direction. It was a type of clothing she had never worn before, being all the time garbed in black, shapeless dresses and plain blouses, her only dash of colour a tartan shawl. She loved the luxury of its colour, this shade beside her skin.
It was all too much. She pictured the extravagant gestures of the rich and decadent woman who had first worn this coat. Not for her the creel tight and heavy on her back. Not for her the whirl of puffin feathers as she plucked that bird. Instead, there were nights when on the sands of the west coast of Scotland, she had cast off her coat, leaving it on the edge of the sea. After that there was the unpinning of her long river of hair, the removal of garments till she was wrapped instead in the arms of her lover stretched beside her, his skin as naked and shivering as her own.
And as they lay there together on the sand, the tide crept in, stealing the red coat from the shore.
* * *
The church elder Neil MacDonald saw it as a sign of other dangers, an omen of all the hazards waiting if they ever stepped on the mainland. For years he had scoured the pages of the Bible in the hope of coming across such warnings, coming across one in Chapter 17 of the Book of Revelations where St John the Divine warned of the arrival of a woman sitting on a scarlet-coloured beast, one that possessed seven heads and ten horns.
‘And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abomination…’
He saw it as yet more evidence of how the world outside the island threatened and menaced the community. If they ever stepped from its shores, they would be menaced and overwhelmed by its evil.
‘It’s yet another reason we should stay,’ he declared.
* * *
‘Macnamara… Macnamara…’ The words on the label chimed through Morag’s head. ‘The son of the sea’, it translated as, or so the schoolmaster had told them.
She recalled how similar words had been used to comfort her when she had been informed that her own eldest son had slipped and fallen from the crags.
‘He belongs to God now,’ Uilleam had told her, ‘God and the sea.’
She hated him saying it, imagining his blood spilling out into its waters, colouring the depths.
* * *
It was the missionary who persuaded them to give the coat to the captain of the first vessel who visited the island the following year.
‘It may be something the police are looking for. It could belong to a child who’s gone missing.’
MacQueen trembled. The thought had never occurred to him before.
‘Yes. Of course…’
He handed it over to the missionary, watching as his fingers placed it in the bottom of an old feather sack. He watched the old man lift it, marvelling at the lightness and fragility of the life that must have worn it at one time.
‘It won’t be long till a ship comes to land. We can hand it over then.’
‘That might be a good idea.’
He thought about that coat incessantly till the morning the ‘Marquess’ came into the bay, recalling the touch of the fabric, the label within, the little girl that might have been wrapped tight in it. He watched as the missionary gave it to the captain; the pair of them standing near the feather-store while the bag was passed between their fingers. The captain took it and stood there with the bag in his hands, folded behind his back, nodding occasionally as the passengers went by, making their way to Conachair or crowding into the graveyard with its collection of stones edging their way through the weave of grass.
His own children lay below some of them.
Time and time again, the same thing had occurred to them. His wife, Catriona had strained and buckled, bringing them into the world. There had been six of them; two boys, four daughters. After a few days of life, their breath had faded and faltered, their souls ‘going over’ into darkness. A few muffled words had been muttered over their bodies as they had been laid to rest.
He suddenly thought of the couple who might have lost their child, sending her out one day wrapped in her new red coat – courtesy of ‘McNamara Tailoring’ – and never seeing her any more. Perhaps she had gone down to the shoreline or the harbour. Perhaps she had braved a nearby cliff. Perhaps, too, she had gone out to the shops, clutching a penny to buy sweets for herself.
And then what might have happened? He did not know, for all a thousand thoughts and theories crammed his mind. She might have fallen off the end of a pier somewhere. She could have slipped on seaweed, falling off a rock. Perhaps someone had killed her, that red coat drawing a murderer’s attention as she skipped and danced through the main street of a town. Perhaps…
It was to stop these thoughts tormenting him that he decided to walk towards the captain as he stood there, ordering the crew around as they unloaded the boat. He watched the tea they had come to value being brought to shore. Sugar. A length or two of timber. Nails. New ropes for the cliffs.
‘You will let us know,’ he stammered. ‘You will tell us what happened.’
The captain’s face looked bemused when he saw the islander in front of him. His forehead became a ripple of waves. His white beard did not conceal the way his mouth was gaping.
‘About what?’ he barked.
‘About the red coat. I’m the one who found it, out there on the crags. If the police find out anything about it, can you let us know?
‘Oh, that…’
‘I’d like to know.’
‘Of course I’ll tell you. I’ll be giving it to the police when I get to Oban.’
‘Good, good. I’d be worried otherwise.’
‘Fine,’ the captain nodded, his attention back on his cargo once again.
MacQueen strolled away, certain he had made a good case for himself. It would not be too long till he heard about what had happened to the girl whose red coat he had discovered that day. Not that long at all.
It was not a thought with which he consoled himself for long. It troubled him throughout the winter, times like when he heard the missionary delivered a sermon about Joseph and his brightly coloured coat, how his brothers had attacked him, stripping the cloth from his back and selling him to a group of merchants (‘Agus thubhairt iad ri cheile, Feuch, tha an t-aislingiche so a’ teachd…’). He wondered if perhaps the girl’s brothers and sisters had come together to punish their father’s chosen one, throwing both her and the coat into waves once they had punished her.
Or the time when they lost the next child Catriona carried into life; the sight of that red garment coming back to him as they lowered another daughter into the earth.
He edged up to the missionary when the worship was over, whispering his question: ‘Have you heard anything about the red coat?’
‘No. No. No…’
‘Nothing in the papers?’
‘Not a word.’
‘You’d
think they’d let us know…’
He directed the same words to the fishermen who began arriving on the island the following spring. They would shrug in response. One or two even smirked and giggled at the notion that someone from the mainland would know about a red coat.
‘You’ve no idea how big the world is out there, have you? Not a bloody clue.’
He’d pause when he passed the graveyard, thinking of the children he had laid out there. He could recall all their names – Morag, Effie, Iain, Angus, Catriona – and the despair he had felt at the sudden end to life. Cradling each one in his hands, he had grieved over their stillness, the inevitable way in which the earth had stolen them away from him. It was hard enough to cope with that emptiness when the child had not yet stirred from the cradle or the womb. What must it be like to see one stepping to school or shore one morning and never see them again? Small wonder that the day Joseph had gone missing, his father Jacob had torn his clothes, put on sackcloth, and refused to be comforted. MacQueen himself would go down to the grave in mourning for his lost sons and daughters, the legacy that would not survive his own life-span.
The day came when the ‘Marquis’ arrived. MacQueen watched the visitors making their way along Main Street, fingering the goods on display outside their homes. One or two took pictures of the island women sitting at their spinning wheels, the rhythm of feet magicking thread out of air. A number of the braver ones scattered, heading outwards the Camber, wanting to see the Lover’s Stone, Mistress Stone, the birds skirling through the air. They paused as they passed the graveyard, looking over its walls at the rough stones that marked the island’s missing sons and daughters.
It was then that he saw the Captain walking along the pier where the boat had been tied. MacQueen ran to catch up with him, his feet stumbling in his hurry, swerving from side to side to dodge the tea-chests and timber that had been unloaded. Breathless, he stood before his quarry, stammering out his question
‘What happened about the red coat?’
‘Sorry?’
‘The red coat. Did the police find out anything about it?’
The Guga Stone Page 10