The Blackhouse l-1

by Peter May

  And he hadn’t. He had only ever had eyes for Marsaili.

  ‘If only I’d known then what a shit you were, I could have saved us all a lot of heartache.’ She popped another piece of quiche in her mouth and grinned, the same upward curl of her mouth at the corners that he remembered so well. The deep dimples in either cheek. The same mischief in her eyes.

  ‘I was right,’ Fin said. ‘You haven’t changed.’

  ‘Oh, but I have. In more ways than you could ever know. Than you would ever want to know.’ She seemed lost in contemplation of her quiche. ‘I’ve thought about you often over the years. How you were. How we were, as kids.’

  ‘Me, too.’ Fin inclined his head, a tiny smile on his lips. ‘I’ve still got that note you sent me.’ She frowned, not remembering what note. ‘Before the final year primary dance. You signed it, The Girl from the Farm.’

  ‘Oh, my God.’ Her hand shot to her mouth as the memory came back from someplace she had buried it long ago to save herself the embarrassment of remembering. ‘You’ve still got that?’

  ‘It’s a bit grubby, and torn around the folds. But, yes, I’ve still got it.’

  ‘What have you still got?’ Artair came into the kitchen and dropped himself heavily into his chair. The mood between Fin and Marsaili was broken immediately. Artair shoved a mouthful of food in his face and looked at Fin. ‘Well?’

  Fin summoned the strength for another lie. ‘An old school photograph from primary seven.’ He glanced up to find Marsaili avoiding his eye.

  ‘I remember that one,’ Artair said. ‘It’s the only one I wasn’t in. I was sick that year.’

  ‘Yeh, that’s right. You had a really bad asthma attack the night before.’

  Artair shovelled more food into his mouth. ‘Nearly died that time. Close-run fucking thing.’ He glanced up from one to the other and grinned. ‘Might have been better for all of us if I had, eh?’ He washed his food down with whisky. Fin noticed that he had topped it up again. ‘What? Nobody going to say, naw, Artair, it’d have been a terrible thing if you’d died back then. Life just wouldn’t have been the same.’

  ‘Well, that’s true,’ Marsaili said, and he shot her a look.

  They ate, then, in silence until Artair had cleared his plate and pushed it away. His eyes fell on Fin’s empty glass. ‘You need topped up, son.’

  ‘Actually, I’d better be going.’ Fin stood up, wiping his mouth on the paper napkin Marsaili had laid out.

  ‘Going where?’

  ‘Back to Stornoway.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I’ll call a taxi.’

  ‘Don’t be fucking stupid, man. It’ll cost you a bloody fortune You’ll stay over with us tonight, and I’ll give you a lift to town in the morning.’

  Marsaili stood up and lifted the empty plates away from the table. ‘I’ll get the bed in the spare room ready.’

  By the time Marsaili came back in from the spare room, Artair had installed Fin and himself in the sitting room, glasses refilled, a football match playing on the television, the sound still down. Artair was well gone now, his eyes glazed and half-shut, slurring his words, relating some story from childhood about a bike accident of which Fin had no recollection. Fin had said he’d needed water in his whisky, and when he’d gone into the kitchen to get it, poured half of the whisky down the sink. Now he was sitting nursing his glass uneasily, wishing he had not given in so easily to Artair’s insistence that he stay over. He looked up eagerly, hoping for rescue, when Marsaili came in. But she looked tired. She glanced at Artair, a strange, passive expression on her face. Resignation, perhaps. And then she went into the kitchen to turn off the lights. ‘I’m going to bed. I’ll clear up in the morning.’

  Fin stood up, disappointed, as she left the room. ‘Goodnight.’

  She paused for just a moment in the doorway and their eyes met fleetingly. ‘Goodnight, Fin.’

  As the door closed, Artair said, ‘And good fucking riddance.’ He tried to focus on Fin. ‘You know, I’d never have fucking married her if it hadn’t been for you.’

  Fin was stung by the vitriol in his voice. ‘Don’t be daft! You were chasing Marsaili from that first week at school.’

  ‘I’d never even have fucking noticed her if she hadn’t got her claws into you. I was never after her. I was only ever trying to keep her away from you. You were my pal, Fin Macleod. We were friends, you and me, from just about the time we could walk. And from that first fucking day, there she was trying to take you away from me. Driving a wedge between us.’ He laughed. A laugh without humour, corrosive and bitter. ‘And fuck me if she isn’t still doing it. Think I didn’t notice the lipstick, eh? Or the mascara? You think that was for your benefit? Naw. It was her way of raising two fingers at me. ’Cos she knew I’d see it, and know why she’d done it. She’s not wanted to make herself attractive to me for a very long time.’

  Fin was shocked. He had no idea what to say. So he just sat clutching his watered-down whisky, feeling the glass warm in his hands, watching the peat embers dying in the hearth. The air in the room seemed suddenly to have chilled, and he reached a decision. He knocked back the remains of his whisky and stood up. ‘I think maybe I’d better go to bed.’

  But Artair wasn’t looking at him. He was gazing off into some distant place in a whisky-fogged mind. ‘And d’you know what the real fucking irony is?’

  Fin didn’t know, and didn’t want to. ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’

  Artair tilted his head up to squint at him. ‘He’s not even mine.’

  Fin felt his stomach lurch. He stood frozen in suspended animation. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Fionnlagh,’ Artair slurred. ‘He’s your fucking kid, not mine.’

  The anaglypta wallpaper had been painted sometime recently. One of those whites with a hint of peach, or pink maybe. There were new curtains and a new carpet. And the ceiling had been painted, a plain matt white. But the water stain in the corner had come through it, insidious, invasive, and still in the shape of a gannet in flight. The crack was still there, too, in the plaster, running through the gannet and across the cornice. The cracked window pane had been replaced by double glazing, and a double bed was pushed against the wall where Mr Macinnes had had his desk. The shelves of the bookcase opposite still groaned with the same books Fin remembered from those long evenings of maths and English and geography. Books with exotic, distracting titles: Eyeless in Gaza, The Case of the Black-eyed Blonde, Boys Will Be Boys, Smeddum. And the even more bizarre names of their authors: Aldous Huxley, Earl Stanley Gardner, Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Mr Macinnes’s old armchair was pushed into one corner, the fabric on the arms worn shiny by his elbows. Sometimes people leave their traces on this earth long after they are gone.

  Fin was almost overwhelmed by a sense of melancholy. But, then, he thought, melancholy did not really describe it. Some great weight seemed to be bearing down on him, crushing him, making it difficult to breathe. The room itself felt like a dark and disturbing place. His heart was racing as if he were afraid. Afraid of the light. He turned off the bedside lamp. Afraid of the dark. He turned it on again and realized he was shaking. There was something he was trying to remember. Stirred by something Artair had said, or a look he had given him, or a tone in his voice. Leaning against the wall behind the door, he noticed for the first time, was the card table at which he had spent so many hours preparing for his exams. The Cyprus-shaped coffee stain. He was sweating now, and he turned off the light again. He could hear the thump of his heart, the pulse of blood in his ears. When he closed his eyes he saw only red.

  How could Fionnlagh be his son? Why wouldn’t Marsaili have told him she was pregnant? How could she have married Artair if she had known? Jesus! He wanted to scream and to wake up back home with Robbie and Mona and the life he had known until just four short weeks ago.

  He heard voices raised in anger through the wall, and he held his breath to try to hear what they were saying. But the form of the words was lost in the br
ick. Only their tone made it through the mortar. Fury, hurt, accusation, denial. The sound of a door slamming, and then silence.

  Fin wondered if Fionnlagh had heard any of it. Maybe he was used to it. Maybe it was a nightly occurrence. Or was tonight different? Because tonight a secret had escaped, and was moving amongst them like a ghost. Or was it just that Fin was the last to see it, the last to feel its cold fingers of uncertainty turning his world forever upside down?

  NINE

  It was early in the July of the year I sat my Highers. School was out and I was waiting for my results to confirm a place at Glasgow University. It was the last summer I would spend on the island.

  I cannot begin to describe how I felt. I was elated. It was as if I had passed the last several years in the dark with a great weight pressed down upon me, and now that the weight had been lifted I was coming out, blinking, into the sunlight. It helped that the weather that year was sublime. They say that seventy-five and seventy-six were great summers. But the best summer I remember was that last summer before I left for university.

  It was years since I had broken up with Marsaili. I can look back now and wonder at my cruelty, and can only console myself with the thought that I had been so very young at the time. But, then, youth is always a handy excuse for crass behaviour.

  Of course, she continued to be in my class until the end of primary school, although she had become oddly invisible to me. During the first two years of secondary, still at Crobost, our paths crossed fairly frequently. But after we moved to the Nicholson in Stornoway I hardly ever saw her. The occasional glimpse in a school corridor, or wandering The Narrows with her classmates. I knew that she and Artair had been an item through third and fourth years, even though he was at a different school. I would see them together from time to time at dances in the town hall, or at parties. They broke up in fifth year, when Artair was repeating his O levels, and I was vaguely aware of Marsaili going with Donald Murray for a time.

  I went out with a succession of girls all through secondary, but none of them lasted very long. Most of them were put off when they met my aunt. I suppose she must have seemed pretty weird. I had just got used to her. Like the crap you leave lying around your room when you’re a kid, you just stop seeing it after a while. But as school finished I was footloose and fancy-free with no intention of tying myself down. Glasgow offered the prospect of boundless new possibilities, and I didn’t want to be bringing any baggage with me from the island.

  It was sometime during that first week in July that I remember Artair and I going down to the beach together at Port of Ness. We shared markedly contrasting moods. During the run-up to my Highers I had spent long, difficult hours locked away in his dad’s study preparing for the exams. Mr Macinnes had been hard on me, driving me relentlessly towards success without letup. After Artair’s five failed O grades he had all but given up on his son, even though Artair had decided to go back for a fifth year to resit. It was as if Mr Macinnes was investing in me all the hopes and aspirations he had once harboured for Artair. It had created tension between Artair and me, born, I think, out of jealousy. We would meet up sometimes after my tutoring sessions and walk up through the village together in tense and difficult silence. I can remember us standing at the foot of the slipway at Crobost harbour throwing stones into the water for more than an hour without a word passing between us. We never talked about the tutoring. It lay between us like a silent shadow.

  But all that was behind me now, and the day seemed to reflect my mood, brilliant sunshine coruscating across the still waters of the bay. Only the slightest of breezes ruffled the warm air. We had taken off our socks and sandshoes and rolled up our jeans, and ran barefoot along the gently sloping beach, splashing in and out of the small, briny waves breaking on the shore, leaving perfect footprints in virgin sand. We had one of those plastic sacks they use for bagging the commercial peat, and we were going to catch crabs in the pools left by the outgoing tide amongst the rocky outcrops at the far end of the beach. To me the summer seemed to stretch ahead, an endless succession of days like this, filled with the simplest pleasures of life, unhurried by age or ambition.

  Artair, though, was gloomy and depressed. He had been accepted for a welding apprenticeship at Lewis Offshore, starting in September. He saw his summer slipping away, like sand through his fingers. The final summer of his boyhood, with only the drudgery of a dead-end job and the responsibility of adulthood awaiting him at the end of it.

  It was another world down there among the rock pools, hidden away from the realities of life. The only sound came from the gulls, and the sea rushing gently up to meet the shore. The water trapped in all the rocky crevices was crystal-clear and warming in the sun, filled with the colour of crustaceans clinging stubbornly to black rock, the gentle waving of seaweed the only movement apart from the scuttling of the crabs. We had collected nearly two dozen of them, dropping them into the sack, before we took a cigarette break. Although I had fair hair, I had my father’s skin and took a fine tan. I had removed my T-shirt to roll up under my head, and lay draped across the rocks, sunning myself, eyes closed, listening to the sea and the birds that fed off it. Artair sat with his knees folded up under his chin, arms wrapped around his shins, puffing gloomily on his cigarette. Oddly, smoking didn’t seem to affect his asthma.

  ‘Every time I look at my watch,’ he said, ‘another minute’s gone by. And then an hour, and then a day. Soon it’ll be a week, then a month. And another one. And then I’ll be clocking in on my first day.’ He shook his head. ‘And soon enough, I’ll be clocking out on my last. And then they’ll be putting me in the ground at Crobost cemetery. And what will it all have been about?’

  ‘Jesus, man. We’re talking sixty, seventy years. And you’ve just blown it all away in a heartbeat. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.’

  ‘It’s alright for you. You’re leaving. You’ve got your escape route all planned out. Glasgow. University. The world. Anywhere other than here.’

  ‘Hey, look around you.’ I raised myself up on one elbow. ‘It doesn’t come much better than this.’

  ‘Yeh,’ Artair said, his voice heavy with sarcasm, ‘that’s why you’re in such a fucking hurry to leave.’ I had no reply to that. He looked at me. ‘Cat got your tongue?’ He flicked his cigarette end off across the rocks, sending a shower of red sparks dancing in the breeze. ‘I mean, what have I got to look forward to? An apprenticeship at a rig construction yard? Years stuck behind a mask firing jets of frigging flame at metal joints? Jesus, I can smell it already. And then there’s all the years of travelling that fucking road from Ness to Stornoway, and a hole in the ground at the end of it all.’

  ‘It’s what my father did,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t what he wanted, but I never heard him complain about it. He always told us we had a good life. And he crammed most of it into all those hours he wasn’t working at the yard.’

  ‘And a fat lot of good it did him.’ The words were out before he realized it, and Artair turned quickly towards me, regret in his eyes. ‘I’m sorry, Fin. I didn’t mean it like that.’

  I nodded. I felt as if the only cloud in the sky had just cast its shadow on me. ‘I know. But you’re right, I suppose.’ I let my own bitterness creep in. ‘Maybe if he hadn’t devoted so much of his time to his God, he might have had more of it left for living.’ But then I took a deep breath and made a determined effort to get out from under the shadow. ‘Anyway, there’s nothing definite yet about the university. It still depends on the exam results.’

  ‘Aw, come on.’ Artair was dismissive. ‘You’ll have walked it. My dad says he’ll be disappointed if you don’t get straight “A”s.’

  It was then that we first heard the voices of the girls. Distant initially, chattering and laughing, and then getting closer as they came towards us along the beach. We couldn’t see them from where we were, and of course they couldn’t see us. Artair put a finger to his lips, then signalled me to follow. We scrambled barefoot over the rocks u
ntil we saw them, no more than thirty yards away, and we ducked down so as not to be seen. There were four of them, local girls from our year at school. We peered up over the edge of the rocks to get a better look. They were taking towels from baskets and laying them in the soft sand beneath the cliffs. One of them stretched out a reed mat and tipped bottles of ginger and packets of crisps on to it from her bag. And then they started stripping off T-shirts and jeans, to reveal white flesh and bikinis beneath.

  I suppose I must have registered subconsciously that Marsaili was among them, but it wasn’t until I saw her standing there in her bikini, arms raised, tying her hair up in a knot at the back of her head, that I realized she was no longer the little girl I had jilted in primary school. She had grown into a very desirable young woman. And the sight of soft sunlight shading the curve of her bottom at the top of long, elegant legs, and the swelling of breasts barely contained in her skimpy blue top, caused something to stir in my loins. We dropped down again behind the rocks.

  ‘Jesus,’ I whispered.

  Artair was gleeful. Gone in an instant was his depression, to be replaced by mischievous eyes and a wicked smile. ‘I’ve got a great fucking idea.’ He tugged my arm. ‘Come on.’

  We picked up our T-shirts and the sack of crabs, and I followed Artair back over the rocky outcrop towards the cliffs. There was a path here that we sometimes used to climb down to the rocks without having to go around to the Port and then back along the beach. It was steep and shingly, a cleft cut deep into the cliff face by a glacial encroachment during some past ice age. About two-thirds of the way up, a narrow ledge cut diagonally across the face before doubling back on itself and leading up, finally, in a series of natural steps, to the top. We were thirty feet above the beach now, the turf soft and spongy underfoot, and liable to break away in treacherous peaty clumps if you got too close to the edge. We had achieved our goal of reaching the clifftop without being seen, and we made our way carefully along it until we reached a point above where we thought the girls were sunbathing. The edge sloped away steeply here, falling about twenty feet to a final sheer drop of around ten to the beach below. Grass grew in reedy patches on the thin layer of soil that clung to the rock. We couldn’t see the girls, but we could hear them talking to one another as they lay side by side on their towels. The trick was going to be making sure we were directly above them before releasing the hard-won contents of our sack. Nothing short of a direct strike would be acceptable.