The Blackhouse l-1

by Peter May

  His aunt’s house was all closed up, neglected, willed to a charity for cats which had been unable to sell it, and then ignored it. He felt as if he ought to have some emotional response to the place, considering how long he had lived there. But it left him cold. His aunt had never treated him badly, and yet still he could only associate it with unhappiness. No single memory. Just a dark, amorphous cloud of despondency that he found hard to explain, even to himself. It stood looking out across the bay, where fishing boats had once brought their catch for processing in the salt houses built into the hill above the shore. Only the stony remains of their foundations provided testimony now to the fact that they had ever existed. Out on the headland stood three tall cairns. They had fascinated Fin as a boy, and he had visited them often, replacing stones occasionally displaced by unusually ferocious storms. Three men returning from the Second World War had built them there, his aunt had told him. No one knew why, and the men were long dead. Fin wondered if anybody bothered to repair them now.

  He walked down the hill to the tiny Crobost harbour, where he and Artair had sat so often throwing stones into deep, still water. A stout steel cable snaked down the slipway from the winchhouse above the harbour, a large hook on the end of it. The winchhouse was a square, harled box of a building with two openings at the front and a door in the side. Fin pushed the door open, and the big, green-painted diesel motor sat in silent witness to the thousands of boats it had lowered into the water, or pulled from it. The key was in the ignition, and from impulse he turned it and the motor coughed but wouldn’t start. He adjusted the choke and tried again, and it spat and spluttered and caught this time, thundering away in the dark enclosed space. Someone was still maintaining it in good order. He switched it off, and the silence seemed deafening in the aftermath of its roar.

  Outside, half a dozen small boats were pulled up along the edge of the slipway, angled against the foot of the cliff, one behind the other. Fin recognized the faded sky blue of the Mayflower. Hard to believe it was still in use after all these years. Above the winchhouse, the skeleton of a boat long since fallen into desuetude lay tipped over, keelside up. The last flakes of purple paint lay curling along her spine. Fin stooped down to wipe away the green slime covering the remaining planks on her bow and saw there, in faded white letters, his mother’s name, Eilidh, where his father had carefully painted it the day before he launched her. And all the regrets of his life rose up inside him like water in a spring, and he knelt beside the boat and wept.

  Crobost cemetery was out on the machair above the west shore beyond the school, where the village had buried its dead in the sandy soil for hundreds of years. Gravestones rose up like prickly spines over the brow of the hill. Thousands of them. Generations of Niseachs with a last and eternal view of the sea which had both given them life and taken it away. Rings of white foam broke upon the shore below as Fin picked his way through all the names of those who had gone before. All the Macleods and Mackenzies, Macdonalds and Murrays. The Donalds and Morags, Kenneths and Margarets. It was exposed here to the full fury of the Atlantic gales, and little by little the sea had eaten away at the machair until it had been necessary for the villagers to build defences against it to stop the bones of their ancestors being washed away with the soil.

  Fin finally found the graves of his parents. John Angus Macleod, thirty-eight years old, loving husband of Eilidh, thirty-five. Two flat stones laid in the grass side by side. He had never been back since the day they were put in the ground and he had stood and watched the first spades of earth rattling across the coffin lids. He stood now with the wind blowing full in his face and thought what a waste it had been. So many lives had been touched by their deaths. Changed by them. How very different everything might have been.

  FIFTEEN

  Usually I slept the sleep of the dead. But that night I was restless. Not that I could claim in any way to have had a premonition of what was to come. It was more likely to have been the bed. It was my old bed, where I had slept the first three years of my life, before my father made the attic rooms. It was built into a recess of the wall in the kitchen where we spent most of our lives. It was a kind of wooden stall with cupboard space below it to store linens, and a curtain that pulled over to screen it off from the rest of the room.

  I had always felt warm and secure there, hearing the murmur of my parents’ voices in the room beyond the curtains before I went to sleep, and waking to the smell of the peats, and toast, and the sound of porridge bubbling on the stove. It had taken me a long time to get used to the cold isolation of my new room in the roof of the house, but now that I had, I found it hard to sleep again in my old bed. But that is where I was that night, because my aunt was babysitting, and she did not want to have to run up and down stairs all evening.

  I must have been drifting in and out of sleep, because the first thing I remember was the sound of voices out in the hall, and a cold draught that found its way through the house and into my stall from an open door somewhere. I slipped barefoot out of bed, wearing only my pyjamas. The room was lit by the glowing embers in the hearth, and by a strange blue light that flashed around the walls. It took me a moment to realize it was coming from outside. The curtains weren’t drawn, so I padded to the window to peer out, and saw a police car sitting on the road, blurred by rain running down the glass. The blue flashing light on its roof was almost mesmeric. I saw figures in the path, then heard the sound of a woman’s voice, wailing as if in pain.

  I had no idea what was happening, still half asleep and disorientated when the door opened. Lights came on in the room, nearly blinding me. My aunt was there, pale as a ghost, and chill air rushed in behind her to wrap itself around me like a big cold blanket. I saw a police officer, and a woman in uniform behind her. But these are just fragments of recollection. I can give you no really clear account of what happened. I remember only the sudden soft warmth of my aunt’s breasts as she knelt in front of me and clutched me to her, and the sobbing that punctuated her breathing as she said, over and over, ‘The poor laddie. The poor wee laddie.’

  It was really the next day before I understood that my parents were dead. If an eight-year-old can ever understand what death is. I knew that they had been to a dance in Stornoway the night before, and I knew now that they weren’t ever coming back. It is a difficult concept to handle at that age. I recall being angry with them. Why weren’t they coming back? Didn’t they know I would miss them? Didn’t they care? But I had spent more than enough time in church to have a decent grasp of the notion of Heaven and Hell. They were places you went when you died. Either to one or the other. And so when my aunt told me my parents had gone to Heaven, I had a sort of rough idea where that was, somewhere beyond the sky, and that once you went there it was for ever. The only thing I couldn’t grasp was why.

  Looking back, I’m amazed my aunt told me any such thing, given her feelings about God and religion. I suppose she thought that maybe it was the best way of breaking it to me gently. But there is no way that the death of your parents can be broken to you gently.

  I was in shock. All that day the house seemed full of people. My aunt, some distant cousins, neighbours, friends of my parents. A succession of faces fretting and fussing over me. It is the only time I ever heard any explanation of what happened. My aunt never spoke to me about it once in all the years I lived with her. Someone said — I have no idea who, just a voice in a crowded room — that a sheep had jumped up from the ditch, and that my father had swerved to avoid it. ‘By that shieling on the Barvas moor, you know, the one with the green roof.’ Voices were lowered, and in a hush of whispers I could barely make out, I heard someone else say, ‘Apparently the car turned over half a dozen times before it caught fire.’ There was a gasp, and another voice said, ‘Oh, my God, what a way to die!’

  I think sometimes there are folk who take an unhealthy interest in death.

  I spent a lot of time alone in my room, barely aware of the comings and goings downstairs, cars drawing up at
the path and then driving off again. I had heard people time and again saying how brave I was, and my aunt telling them how I hadn’t spilled a single tear. But I know now that tears are a kind of acceptance. And I was not ready for that yet.

  I sat on the edge of my bed, numbness insulating me from the cold, and looked around the room at all the familiar things that filled it. The panda that shared my bed, a snow globe with a santa and reindeer that I had got in my stocking the previous Christmas. A big box of toys dating back to the days when I could barely crawl, coloured plastic shapes and disconnected pieces of Lego. My Scotland football shirt with Kenny Dalglish and the number 7 on the back. The football my father had bought me in the sports shop in Stornoway one Saturday afternoon. A rack full of board games. Two shelves laden with children’s books. They might not have had much money, my mother and father, but they had made sure that I never wanted for anything. Until now. And the one thing I wanted most they couldn’t give me.

  It occurred to me, sitting there, that one day I would die too. It was not something I had ever thought about before, and it nudged up against my grief for space in my little locker of horrors. But you can’t dwell on the thought of your own death for long, and very soon I had banished it altogether by deciding that since I was only eight it was a very long way off, and I would deal with it only when I had to.

  And still I couldn’t cry.

  The day of the funeral, the weather was like a reflection of the anger and despair with which I had not yet come to terms. Rain tipped down, verging on sleet. December gales blew it in off the sea, under our umbrellas and into our faces. Stinging and cold.

  I remember only black and grey. There was a long, sanctimonious service in the church, and I am haunted still by the sound of the Gaelic psalm-singing, those plain, unaccompanied voices such a potent evocation of my grief. And afterwards, outside the house, with the coffins placed side by side on the backs of chairs set in the middle of the road, more than a hundred people gathered in the rain. Black ties and coats and hats. Black umbrellas fighting with the wind. Pale, sad faces.

  I was too small to help carry a coffin, and so I took my place at the head of the procession immediately behind it, Artair at my side. I could hear his distress in the phlegm that crackled when he breathed. And was unaccountably moved when his cold, wee hand slipped into mine and squeezed, a silent expression of friendship and sympathy. I clung on to it tightly for all the length of that walk to the cemetery.

  Only men are allowed to accompany the dead to their place of burial on the Isle of Lewis, and so the women lined the road to watch us go as we left the house. I saw Marsaili’s mum, her face a picture of misery, and I remembered how she had smelled of roses that first day when I had gone to the farm. Marsaili stood beside her, clinging to her coat, black ribbons in the bunches of her hair. I noticed that she wasn’t wearing her glasses that day. She reached out to me in the rain with her soft blue eyes, and I saw such pain in them that I had to look away.

  That was when the tears came, hidden by the rain. The first time I cried for my parents. And I suppose it was then that I accepted that they really were gone.

  I had not thought beyond the funeral, or even wondered what would happen next. If I had, I doubt if I could ever have imagined how brutally my life would change.

  Barely had the last person left the house, than my aunt took me upstairs to pack a suitcase. All my clothes were stuffed unceremoniously inside it. I was permitted a small bag to carry a selection of toys and books. We would come back another time, she said, and go through what was left. I didn’t really understand that this was no longer to be my home, and as it happened we never did come back for the rest of my things. I have no idea what happened to them.

  I was hustled out to my aunt’s car which was standing in the road, engine running, wipers scraping the rain from the windscreen. It was warm inside, but smelled damp, and the windows were all misted. I never even thought to look back as we drove away up the hill.

  I had been in my aunt’s house before, and always thought it a cold, miserable place, for all the colourful pots of plastic flowers and fabrics she draped around. There was a chill damp in that house that got into your bones after a while. There had been no fire on all day, and so it seemed even more wretched than usual when she pushed open the door to let us in. The naked bulb in the hall was harsh and bright as we struggled up the stairs with the bag and the case.

  ‘Here we are,’ she said, opening the door to an attic room at the end of the hall, sloping ceilings, damp-stained wallpaper, condensation on rusted windows. ‘This is your room.’ There was a single bed pushed against one wall, draped with a pink candlewick bedspread. A wartime utility wardrobe stood with its doors open, empty hangers and bare shelves awaiting the contents of my case. She hefted the suitcase on to the bed. ‘There you are.’ She threw open the lid. ‘I’ll leave you to put away your things in the wardrobe the way you like. It’ll just be kippers for tea, I’m afraid.’

  She was almost out the door when I said, ‘When will I be going home again?’

  She stopped and looked at me. And although there was pity in her eyes, I’m sure there was a degree of impatience there, too. ‘This is your home now, Fin. I’ll call you when tea’s ready.’

  She closed the door behind her, and I stood in the cold, cheerless room that was now mine. My sense of desolation was very nearly overwhelming. I found my panda in the bag of toys and sat on the edge of the bed, clutching him to my chest, feeling the damp of the mattress coming through my trousers. And I realized for the first time that day, that my life had changed inexorably and for ever.

  SIXTEEN

  I

  The car rumbled over the cattle grid and into the car park. Fin parked it at the foot of the steps to the manse. All light had been squeezed out of the late afternoon sky by those ominous clouds which had been gathering earlier over the ocean. Now they were rolling in from the north-west, contused and threatening, and casting a deep gloom over the north end of the island. There were lights on in the front room of the minister’s house, and as he climbed the steps, Fin felt the first spits of rain.

  He rang the bell and stood on the doorstep, wind tugging at his jacket and trousers. The door was opened by a young woman in her mid-thirties. She was a head shorter than Fin, with cropped dark hair, a white T-shirt tucked loosely into khaki cargo pants and white trainers. Somehow she was not what he had expected of Donald Murray’s wife. And she was oddly familiar. He looked at her blankly, and she tilted her head.

  ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ There was no warmth in her question.

  ‘Should I?’

  ‘We were at secondary school together. But I was a couple of years behind you, so you probably didn’t notice me. Of course, we all had a crush on you.’

  Fin felt himself blushing. So she was thirty-three, maybe thirty-four, which meant she was perhaps only seventeen when she’d had Donna.

  ‘I can almost hear the wheels turning.’ There was a seam of sarcasm in her voice. ‘Don’t you remember? Donald and I went out for a while at the Nicholson. Then we met up again in Glasgow after I left school. I went to London with him. He still hadn’t found God in those days, so marriage was something of an afterthought. After I got pregnant, that is.’

  ‘Catriona,’ Fin said suddenly.

  She raised her eyebrows in mock surprise. ‘Well done.’

  ‘Macfarlane.’

  ‘You do have a good memory. Is it Donald you want to see?’

  ‘Actually it’s Donna.’

  An invisible shutter came down. ‘No, it’s Donald.’ She was emphatic. ‘I’ll go and get him.’

  As he waited, the rain started to fall, and by the time Donald Murray came to the door Fin was already drenched. The minister looked at him impassively. ‘I didn’t know we had anything more to say to each other, Fin.’

  ‘We don’t. It’s your daughter I want to talk to.’

  ‘She doesn’t want to speak to you.’

&nbs
p; Fin glanced up at the sky, screwing up his face against the rain. ‘Look, can I come in? I’m getting soaked out here.’

  ‘No. If you want to talk to Donna, Fin, you’re going to have to make it official. Arrest her, or whatever it is you people do when you want to question folk. Otherwise just leave us alone, please.’ And he closed the door.

  Fin stood for a while on the step, choking back his anger, before pulling up his collar and making a dash for the car. He started the engine and set the blower going, and struggled out of his wet jacket, throwing it onto the back seat. He slipped into first gear and was lifting the clutch when the passenger door opened. Catriona Macfarlane got in, slamming the door shut behind her. Her hair was wet and plastered to her head. Her T-shirt had become almost see-through, a lacy black bra clearly visible beneath it. Fin couldn’t help noticing, and reflecting on how little God seemed to have changed Donald’s predilections over the years.

  She sat staring straight ahead, her hands clasped in her lap, fingers interlocked. And she said nothing.

  Fin broke the silence. ‘So did you find him, too?’

  She turned to look at him, frowning. ‘Find who?’

  ‘God. Or was that just Donald’s idea?’

  ‘You’ve never seen him like we have. When he’s angry. With God on his side. Full of sound and fury and righteous indignation.’

  ‘Are you scared of him?’

  ‘I’m scared of what he’ll do when he finds out the truth.’