by RL McKinney
‘You mean to say your fancy private shrinks in California can’t cure you?’ Jenny shook her head slowly, the queen of the post-punk sneer. ‘What do you want, Calum?’
He looked out the window, like he wished he could fly through it. ‘It’s probably a lot to ask, but I was kind of hoping you’d let me stay for a wee while. Michelle and I broke up, and I’ve decided to come back to Scotland. It would just be … you know … until I get somewhere else.’
Jenny softened. Her shoulders lowered and her arms dropped from her chest. She might have given a different answer if she’d been allowed to have her way.
‘You can’t stay here.’ Catriona flounced off the settee. ‘We only have two bedrooms. Mum, tell him. What about Alec? He wouldn’t like it.’
‘Who’s Alec?’ Calum asked.
‘Mum’s boyfriend,’ Catriona took delight in the word. ‘Anyway, we’re going away soon. He’s taking us to Cyprus for the New Year.’
‘Jesus, Cat, you haven’t half lived up to your name.’ Calum’s laugh was painful. It was the first time he’d registered any emotion since he’d come through the door.
Jenny exhaled. ‘If you’re really stuck, you can have my bed for a couple of nights. Catriona and I can share.’
‘No we can’t! Oh my God, Mum!’
‘Just for a few days, sweetie. Your dad knows that’s all it’s going to be.’
‘Oh no way. That’s so unfair.’ She felt herself withering with humiliation and injustice. The unfair thing was him showing up like this, all fat and slow and ill in some way he hadn’t fully explained but which Jenny seemed to understand. The broken promises were unfair. He was always going to fly her out and take her on a road trip up the California coast. He promised that every year and every year there was some reason why it didn’t happen. And it was unfair how he’d proved Jenny right in everything she’d said about him. He’d promised Disneyland and surfing and San Francisco and sea otters and redwood forests, but he only ever sent pictures of himself seeing those things with his wife. The wife with the plastic tits and fake white teeth.
She wanted to slap him and pull that horrible greasy grey hair out of his face. ‘Mum doesn’t want you, here, okay? She just feels sorry for you, that’s all.’
‘Oh come on, Cat, give us a break, eh?’
‘Why don’t you give my nose a break. You’re stinking. No wonder Michelle dumped you.’
He clapped his hands slowly, five or six times. The pocket of air between his palms made a deep, percussive pop. ‘Nice kid you’ve raised there, Jen. Good job.’
Jenny stood up and lifted the mug from between his hands. ‘I think you’d better go.’
‘Jenny … ’
‘No, she’s right, I don’t want you here. I’m sorry for whatever you’re going through, Calum, but I can’t help you.’
He didn’t move from the chair. Jenny carried the cups into the kitchen and Calum sat there, breathing heavily, staring at the table top. Catriona was afraid to look at him. She stood against the wall and chewed her lip.
When Jenny returned, she was carrying his coat. ‘Here.’
Calum stood up and took it, lifted his eyes momentarily and offered Catriona a shaky, apologetic smile. ‘I’ll call you when I’ve got somewhere, and you can come stay anytime you want.’
‘Aye, that’ll be right. Don’t bother.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Jenny said. She touched his shoulder, but he brushed past her and let himself out. When the door shut, she turned on her daughter and said, ‘You stupid little brat.’
Lately Catriona wondered if she’d thrown her lot in with the wrong parent. Most of the time they’d got on well, the two of them together in their closed little unit. Jenny was younger than most of her friends’ mums, sometimes more like an older sister or a youthful aunt. She was lively and fashionable enough to impress Catriona’s friends. She was a friend, sometimes her best friend. But other times she got so angry that she became a snake who shot venom from her mouth. She could knock you down with a word. She could make you so tiny you might disappear through the cracks between the floorboards. She could make you believe that everything wrong with her life was your fault.
Calum had never done that. With the exception of that day, his words to her had only ever been kind. No wonder he never wanted to see her again after that day. Jenny had done her job well; with her judgements, pronouncements about his character, labels she recycled over and over until they stuck, she had turned Catriona hard and fast against him. He hadn’t even been there to defend himself.
He wasn’t there because he chose America. He chose a big money job and a big money wife. He made those choices, as Jenny was so fond of reminding her.
Neither of her parents had ever given her a satisfactory explanation for their breakup, or for their failure to get married in the first place. It wouldn’t have worked was as much as they would ever say. Or simply: because we didn’t. Non-reasons. Typical parental responses. They thought children didn’t need the truth.
The truth was that her mum got pregnant by accident and they never would have been together otherwise.
Not my accident though, Catriona thought.
She and Kyle might have had their own wee accident to deal with. The thought made her feel nauseous. Jesus freaking Christ, what if that had happened? She would have nipped it in the bud early, before anyone had to know, and there would be nothing to have to explain to anyone. It would be a non-person. A non-event. Kyle was a non-event.
She hid in her room until Jenny went to work, drifting between thought and dreaming so that they became indistinguishable from each other. Later in the morning, she got up and wandered from room to room, listening to empty sounds – the whir of the refrigerator, the tick of the wall clock – and imagining that these might be the sounds of the rest of her life. Something had to give. She went upstairs and took her big rucksack down from the loft.
VERTIGO
‘What will you do?’
‘No idea,’ Calum muttered around the nail he was holding between his teeth. He’d been telling Johnny the sorry tale of Mary and her flat to keep his mind off his present location, fifteen feet from the ground. A gust of wind pushed at him.
A distant echo of his own voice came down some kind of wormhole and battered him around the ear. Damn you Finn, would you slow down! Chill the fuck out! If you fall from there, you’re toast!
If you fall!
If you fall …
He focused his attention on his hands and knees, his points of contact with the sloping byre roof. Stay here, he repeated silently. The only way to get through these moments was to stay in the present. Mindfulness was the word he’d learned. Mind where you are, not where you’ve been.
On the roof. He was on the roof. The old slates were coming loose and many of them were cracked. The whole bloody thing would need replacing.
He could get someone to do it.
That would be a waste of money. He should be able to do it himself. Dad would have laughed to see him sweating up here. He’d have said, ‘Stop pissing yourself and get on with it, Son.’
He banged in a new fixing and secured another slate, then manoeuvred himself gingerly up towards the peak where Johnny sat straddled, apparently completely at ease on his perch. Behind him, the oaks bent in the breeze and the rising tide burbled into channels of sand. Calum kept his sights firmly affixed to the roof and the placing of his knees and hands.
‘Nursing home?’
‘What?’
‘Would you put her in a nursing home?’
‘It seems too soon, but … I don’t know what choice there is. She needs somebody with her every day.’
‘She could come and stay with you.’
Calum allowed himself to look up for a moment. ‘You’re having a laugh, right?’
‘It’s an option. You’ve got plenty of room.’ Johnny sounded uncharacteristically serious. He was only thirty-one and his life was still balanced in favour of shiny youth. Old age, with i
ts odours of stale soup and piss, was something that you read about in the newspaper.
‘Not happening. No way.’
‘Okay,’ Johnny replied slowly. He was silent for a moment, watching as Calum shifted his position and paused to wipe sweat from his forehead. ‘You’re white as a sheet. You really don’t like being up here, do you?’
‘No, I really bloody don’t.’
‘Get yourself down, then. I’ll finish this. You’ve broken the back of it.’
Calum thought he should protest, but didn’t bother. He took a deep breath and unbuckled his tool belt, handing it up to Johnny. Vertigo had claimed another victory and he knew when he was beaten. He uttered a breathless word of gratitude and crawled back down to the ladder, placed one foot squarely on each rung, then the other, and climbed down feeling like an old man. The afterburn of fear made him shake and he leaned against the wall for a moment, closed his eyes and waited for his legs to decide to support him again. Then, because watching Johnny crawl about on the roof was nearly as bad as being up there himself, he went inside the byre – which he now used as a shed for tools and wood – and began splitting logs. The hammering continued above him, moving from place to place as Johnny checked and secured the slates torn loose during a turbulent winter.
It was getting worse, the vertigo. It was like you could feel the thing happening: the loss of contact, the flight, the fall. It was a flashback into a distorted memory. It seemed crazy so long after the fact, but that’s exactly what it was. Crazy. A part of him was crazy. Michelle had pestered him for years to see someone. There was no shame in it, she said. Until he lost the plot completely and there was no choice but to see someone. She was ashamed then.
It might have all panned out differently if he’d taken her advice sooner, but it was what it was now. Most likely they would have ended up apart anyway, and he was always going to be a little bit crazy.
Mum was crazy too, that much was apparent, a kind of crazy that wasn’t going to get better with any amount of counselling. The connections in her brain were slowly disintegrating, taking with them memory, reasoning, songs, stories, humour, love, all of the things that defined who she had once been. And it was all connected, her craziness, his, Finn’s. This was the thing to really send you spinning: not down but out and away into space. The vertigo got worse when he thought of Finn, and he was thinking of Finn far more than usual lately. If Finn hadn’t fallen, he wouldn’t now be facing their mother’s illness alone. Damn that boy, he thought. Damn his childish, beautiful mad soul.
Coire an t-Sneachda (The Corrie of the Snow), July 1993
Finn stepped over a large stone and took no notice of the mountain hare that darted out from behind it. He was oblivious to everything except his destination. The shoulder of the corrie rose steeply and became littered with scree, but his strides quickened. Even burdened by the weight of his climbing gear, he almost ran up the hill. Calum kept a steady pace behind him, refusing to be rushed. He watched the hare scamper towards the brow of the corrie and disappear into the heather. Then he let his eyes move up the slope of Cairn Gorm far to the left, following the line of the chairlift. In summer, the lift looked derelict and the mountainside disfigured by human pursuits.
We shouldn’t be here, Calum thought. He looked back to Finn. He watched Finn’s head twitch from one side to the other, a jerky tic that started when he was agitated. Periodically Finn’s voice punched out a single detached word in response to a conversation he was having with someone in his head. Agitated was an understatement. Today he was crazy, bordering on unhinged. You weren’t supposed to say that, especially about your own brother, but that’s what he was.
We really shouldn’t be here, he thought. Not today. Maybe not at all.
‘Finn!’ he called.
Finn didn’t reply. He probably hadn’t even heard. This trip had been a mistake from the start. It had been Finn’s idea, his way of trying to make amends for the guitar. Calum wished he hadn’t allowed himself to be talked into this, but Finn was so cut up about the guitar he said he couldn’t live with himself until they made up.
It was only a guitar. Calum had been trying to remind himself for weeks. A wooden box and six strings, not worth disowning your unhinged brother for.
But it was a Martin. A Martin D-28, the guitar he’d wanted since he’d first learned to play, and its loss still caused a pain akin to grief. His birthday present to himself in March, it had been his for such a short time. It had cost him close to a month’s pay, but he had money to burn and it sang like a honey-throated woman in his arms. Five weeks ago he had returned from a stint offshore to his flat reeking of smoke and unwashed bodies, and an empty corner in the living room where the guitar should have been.
Finn didn’t even try to deny responsibility. His illness made him chronically untruthful but also incapable of telling a convincing lie. He betrayed himself like a guilty dog. Some mates came round with a few cans and a few pills; it got loud and he went for a lie down in the bedroom. He didn’t mean to sleep all night but he crashed out hard and when he got up in the morning everyone was gone. It was Cookie who took the guitar; Cookie had debts he couldn’t pay.
‘You tell me where I can find this Cookie,’ Calum had barked. Words erupting from him like vomit. Finn could only shake his head; he had no idea where Cookie stayed. He didn’t even know Cookie’s proper name.
‘He’s your dealer. You gave it to him.’ Calum wanted to break his brother’s nose. ‘You gave it to him, didn’t you, Finn? Didn’t you?’
Finn wept. He melted into a gelatinous heap on the sofa, covered his face with his hands and wept, incomprehensible words spewing from his mouth. Calum raged, a pot burning empty over too hot a flame.
‘They’re not your mates! You don’t have any mates, Finn. I’m not your mate. Not anymore.’
‘You’re my brother, Calum.’ A stalactite of mucus extended from his lower lip.
‘Unfortunately so, but it doesn’t make us friends.’
He’d driven Finn from Aberdeen back to Fort William, re-installed him in their mother’s flat and told her that he needed a break. He didn’t tell her about the guitar and he doubted that Finn would. The last month had been one of solitude and only the faintest murmur of guilt. When Finn finally phoned two nights ago and said he wanted to go climbing, Calum nearly hung up.
Now he wished he had. They’d bickered all the way up the road this morning, Calum strafing Finn with accusations and advice, Finn responding with semi-rational promises. He’d been reading Orwell, which couldn’t be a good thing. He was paranoid and jittery, his heavy black eyebrows twitching, his fingers flexing, grabbing his trousers or rubbing his face. Anxiety danced in Calum’s stomach.
Finn reached the base of the climb, let his pack thump down onto the scree and stared up, fingers raised towards the grey rock chimneys, feeling the route. He was conversing with someone, probably the infamous guardian angel. Calum pretended not to notice. He stepped up beside Finn cautiously, afraid of spooking him, eased off his own pack, took out his water bottle and sipped while he waited for his breath to settle.
‘I could solo that,’ Finn said.
Calum studied him. ‘Not on my watch.’
‘God, you’re so boring.’
‘Find someone else to climb with, then.’ He found a flattish boulder and sat down, dug out a bar of chocolate and nibbled on it.
Finn swapped his walking boots for his climbing shoes and scrambled around on the lower rocks, muttering, giggling and showing off. He climbed up seven or eight feet, shouting ‘Big Brother! Oi, Bro! Calum! Caaaallluuummm … ’
Calum had learned from experience that attention only fuelled the mania, so he ignored Finn as well as he could and watched the sunlight glinting on the surface of the lochan. The air was unusually still for the Cairngorms, the sun soft on his bare arms. He filled his lungs and tried to exhale the sense of foreboding. Far below, a fleet of little sailboats bobbed lazily around Loch Morlich. Aviemore had been thron
ging with people, but up here they were alone.
Finn jumped off and strapped himself into his harness. ‘Oh for the love of God, would you get off your arse!’
Calum crumpled his chocolate wrapper and shoved it into the pack, put on his own climbing shoes and began the process of roping up. He checked Finn’s harness and knots like a drill sergeant inspecting a recruit’s uniform.
‘You want to lead for a change?’ Finn asked. It was a rare offer.
‘No, I want you where I can keep an eye on you.’
‘You know you don’t have to, right?’
‘You know she’s in your head, right? This angel of yours?’ He tapped the side of his brother’s skull. ‘She’s only real in there, poor creature.’
‘You are mistaken, Big Brother. You are sadly and pathetically mistaken.’ Finn gave him a saintly smile and turned to face the rock.
‘Take it easy Finn,’ Calum said. ‘Just … please, go easy.’
‘As you wish, Big Brother,’ Finn said, and then he took off, straight up. He moved like a cat: graceful, nimble and so fast his fingers and toes barely touched the rock. Within a few seconds, he was fifteen feet up.
Calum cursed. ‘Damn you Finn, would you slow down and get some protection in! Chill the fuck out! If you fall from there, you’re toast!’
Finn ignored him.
‘Finn, get some protection in!’
Finn barely slowed. He inserted a cam into a crack, clipped on and shot up again. Calum took a single breath. The sun made his eyes water and he glanced away momentarily, squeezed them shut, then looked up again. Finn made a wild move, launching himself upwards at full stretch for a hold far above his head. His feet lost contact. His right hand grasped at slick stone and failed to gain purchase. He peeled off and fell backwards.
‘Oi, Macdonald.’
Calum lowered his axe and straightened up. Johnny’s wife Abby leaned in the doorway, her sleeves rolled above her elbows, her arms crossed over her chest. ‘I’ve hung out that last load of sheets, but I can still smell the smoke. It’s foul, it’s like burnt chemicals. They might all need another wash.’