by Bella Pollen
Letty knew better than to argue with Alick’s conviction that the fairies or spirits were responsible for all of life’s unexplained phenomena so she’d left it at that, hoping that whatever they were, he would, in the very near future, be removing their little corpses from the carpet.
‘We’ll unpack the car in the morning, Alick. It’s late and I want to get the children to bed.’
‘Can we put out the flag for you?’ Jamie piped up.
‘Aye, first thing. Put her out.’ Alick ran a hand through his whorls of hair. ‘Put the flag in the stone and I’ll be down.’
‘Thank you, Alick.’ Letty gripped his arm.
‘Ah, mo gràdh.’ His sharp eyes softened. ‘Welcome to the country’
15
Ballanish was neither a pretty nor structurally interesting house but it was a tough one, designed to take no nonsense from the elements. It didn’t matter how violently it stormed – however hard the wind blew, the house simply arched its back, closed its eyes and blithely waited out each assault with such strength and patience that every time Letty drove up to find the roof intact and the doors on their hinges, she silently thanked the architect for his lack of creative inspiration.
‘Georgie, you take Jamie. Alba, help me with the food. Everything else can wait until morning.’
Alba lugged the cardboard box into the larder. She hated this room with its pinching cold and lingering smell of mutton. Bad things happened to good food in larders. Butter became sullied by traces of Marmite and jam; bricks of cheddar cracked like heel skin; even the faintest hint of jellifying soup was enough to make her gag, and she held her breath as the stale air hit her.
‘No, no,’ she heard her mother say, ‘not in there, Alba, put them in the fridge.’
‘Oh, six hearty cheers,’ Alba muttered. After the hours of proximity to her brother she needed to decompress in the sanctuary of her own room. In the fridge, she mimicked, backing out of the claustrophobic space. The fridge. She stood stock still.
Her mother was standing by the kitchen door, arm raised to the wall. ‘Ta-da!’ She pressed a switch and the room flooded with light.
‘I don’t believe it.’ Alba forgot the pounding in her head. She forgot the cabbage soup smell of the car’s upholstery. In the corner of the kitchen a brand-new Electrolux was humming with power. ‘The whole house?’
Pleased, Letty nodded, but Alba, already regretting her momentary lapse into enthusiasm, frowned. ‘Why?’
When, a decade earlier, electricity had finally made it to the Outer Islands, Letty had been one of the few to hold out against it. For what reason, no one was ever quite sure. ‘Nostalgia,’ Nicky diagnosed. ‘Your mother appears to think there’s some kind of romance to life in the Dark Ages.’
And life in the Dark Ages had been nothing if not impractical. While the rest of the township practised screwing in lightbulbs and flicking the on/off switch of kettles as though electricity was a mysterious foreign game recently adopted as the island’s national sport, the Flemings continued to rake dead flies off the floor with a push-me-pull-you carpet sweeper and strain their eyes reading with torches under their blankets.
‘I got some builders in from Skye,’ Letty said. ‘They made an awful mess, but they got the job done. What do you think?’
‘You’ve kept the gas lamps,’ Alba hedged.
‘I couldn’t bear to get rid of them. They give off such a pretty light. Besides . . .’ Letty hesitated. ‘Well, they remind me of your grandpapa.’
Up until then, Victorian glass sconces had provided the only light in the evening. Alba could picture her grandfather moving from one to the next putting a match to their muslin cones. The burning gas had emitted a comforting buzzing noise as though the whole place was inhabited by a swarm of beautifully house-trained bees.
‘Look in the outside room,’ Letty ordered.
Connected to the main house by a lethally draughty corridor, the outside room was home to an assortment of hardening oilskins and leaking gumboots. For as long as Alba could remember it had been the dumping ground for all family detritus. Shelves overflowed with fishing reels, amusingly shaped lumps of driftwood, splintered oars, duck decoys and a miscellany of unclaimed clothing items that had been soaked, dried and re-encrusted with sea water so many times they’d achieved the consistency of salted cod. Still, fishy, cardboard-ish, damp though it was, it smelt to Alba of freedom and summer. The new spartan hint of soap in the air unnerved her and beneath the virgin glow of overhead lighting, she saw that the shelves had been torn down and in their place stood a brand new chest freezer and state-of-the-art washing machine.
‘Well?’
At the touch on her shoulder, Alba recoiled.
Letty dropped her hand, suddenly sideswiped by the memory of her daughter as a little girl. Hadn’t she once been the most demonstratively affectionate of her three children? Granted, she’d presented herself as a foil to Georgie who, with an eldest daughter’s classic obedience, had accepted her role as model daughter with good grace, studiously playing with dolls, assembling intricate and cosy homes for her teddies and freezing water in shoe-boxes to make fairy ice rinks. But then along came Alba with her piercing cries and colicky screams. As a baby, Alba had little power of veto over the smocked dresses and embroidered nighties foisted upon her, but she’d taken care to vomit on them regularly enough to ensure they could never be part of any future child’s suffering. Then, as soon as she was old enough to discover she had a gender – and that some accident of nature had decreed it should be female – she turned suffragette, demanding sexual equality, staking her claim for muddy knees and bruising play. She had no problem with dolls, providing she was allowed to butcher their hair into amusingly asymmetric styles or remove their heads altogether. Only her father had ever been privy to her more malleable side. In the mornings she would leap onto his bed and wrap herself around him, revelling in his minor imperfections -tugging at a hair sprouting from a chest wart or fondly rubbing the wasteland of his bald patch. As he moved from bedroom to bathroom, brushing his teeth, or searching for socks, she would cling to him, forbidding his departure before he had been kissed two or three times and hugged many more. ‘Oh, goodbye, Dada, I love you, I love you,’ she would trill, but as her sucker limbs were forcibly pruned from him one by one, the wail would begin to rise, ‘Oh no, please, don’t go, Dada, please don’t go,’ until finally she would collapse in defeat on the floor, weeping and despondent. ‘Oh, when are you coming back, Dada? When will I ever see you again?’
‘In about half an hour,’ Nicky would remind her sternly, whereupon Alba would dissolve into shameless giggles.
‘Dada is my love-beetle,’ Alba had once explained matter-of-factly. ‘I love you too, of course, but I love Dada a little bit more.’ And Letty had smiled. ‘All girls love their father a little bit more. It will probably be like that the rest of your life.’
Now she could only stare in bewilderment at Alba’s hard little face. The day before leaving London she had locked herself in the bathroom with a pair of needlepoint scissors. As Letty’s eyes shifted to the blunt line of her daughter’s newly shorn hair, she felt something twist in her heart. When had Alba become so hard, so lacking in compassion, and how had she not noticed it before?
‘It must have cost a fortune,’ Alba said accusingly.
As Letty’s hand fluttered unconsciously to her throat, Alba noticed for the first time that it was bare.
‘You sold Dada’s necklace? Your anniversary necklace?’
‘It was worth it, don’t you think?’
Alba didn’t know what to think. The significance of electricity was not lost on her. Even in their family’s uncharted future, one thing was certain: without light and heat, life became untenable on the island after October, when daylight downed tools at three in the afternoon and did not punch its work card until ten the following morning. She had always loved summers on the island, but electricity lent a permanence to their situation that she’d been s
tudiously ignoring. Holy hell, the present was a world she hadn’t yet made sense of, let alone the future. She eyeballed her mother, willing her to answer all the suspicions she didn’t dare voice. Were they poor? Were they in exile? How long was this for? And was it really conceivable it could be forever?
16
Within the laws of nature there is a hierarchy of elements and on the island it was the wind that ruled. It blew, gusted, breezed and roared, a soundtrack to everyday life, like a man with a terrible grievance he couldn’t help airing. In the far north of the world, where evidence of a rising and setting sun could not be relied upon to mark the beginning and end of each day, the wind was always there to perform this task with enthusiasm. It was the last thing Georgie listened to before falling asleep and the first thing she heard on waking and she found it comforting or menacing depending on its mood. Sometimes it sounded like a ghost moaning or a tractor grumbling or a soldier with an agonizing war wound. On occasion it became so loud she would dream a tidal wave was rolling towards her and then she would wake, expecting to find an immense wall of water bearing down on the house, but there was always the same view on the other side of her window: the mist collecting over Loch Aivegarry, the rolling flats of the machair and the silver line of the sea beyond. Ballanish was perched on the western tip of the island, already Scotland’s westernmost archipelago, and the only thing between the house and America was the vast emptiness of the Atlantic.
It was past midnight but darkness never truly fell during the summer. Instead, it was as though a rubber had been taken to a charcoal drawing of the sky, smudging the lines between night and day. Georgie loved her room with its brass bed and candy-stripe curtains. Every inch of wall space was covered with watercolours of island birds painted by her father. ‘This red, black and white gentleman over your head is an oystercatcher,’ he had told her, ‘my favourite wader, and next to him is a red-throated diver – another delightfully elegant water bird.’ Above the chest of drawers he had hung two studies: the head of a golden plover complete with scale measurements of its beak and a painstakingly detailed wing of a mallard.
‘Why would you draw only the wing?’ Georgie had asked, faintly revolted.
‘To study the mechanics of it,’ Nicky had said. ‘I like to know how things work.’ And this Georgie knew to be true. Her father devoured specifics and data with the same relish he reserved for smoked oysters on toast. Her eyes moved to the dawn landscape over the door. Underneath the birds, Nicky had recorded the minutiae of the morning’s flight. Widgeon rising, approx. 50-100 with small groups of teal and a few shoveller . . . tense nervous feeders, he had gone on to note, the marsh area is obviously the place that local birds come during high tide.
‘You know something, my little George?’ he would whisper as he kissed her goodnight. ‘That noise you hear at sunup is the drumming of the snipe, and have you noticed that the call of the corncrake sounds exactly like someone running their fingernail along the teeth of a comb?’
Even as she thought about it, Georgie picked up a faint rasping outside the window, but it didn’t sound much like a corncrake. After a while she realized that the noise was coming through the walls of the next-door room and she fetched Jamie into her bed and curled herself around his trembling body.
‘What is it, Jamie, why are you crying?’
‘I don’t know where Dada is.’
‘Oh, Jamie.’ She tightened her grip on him. ‘Dada’s in heaven.’
‘No, no.’ He pulled away, agitated. ‘Why do people keep saying that? Dada didn’t get to heaven.’
‘Jamie, don’t be silly! Of course Dada got to heaven.’ But she was shaken. What did Jamie know? Had he heard something? Who knew what careless spills that absorbent little brain of his had mopped up.
‘No, you’re wrong,’ Jamie wept. ‘I looked for him there.’
‘You looked for him in heaven?’
‘Yes, but I couldn’t find him. He wasn’t there. He wasn’t there.’
‘Okay, Jamie,’ she soothed, relieved to know what she was dealing with. ‘It’s okay now, it was a bad dream, that’s all.’ She stroked his damp hair and launched into a complex rationalization of heaven’s geography and how its size and the distribution of its population made the locating of one individual impossible without maps and directions, not to mention a stringent set of rules and by-laws, until Jamie was sufficiently baffled to drop the subject. But even as it poured out of her, she couldn’t help but wonder. What were heaven’s rules of entry? Just how bad a crime did you have to commit to be denied? She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. She was always careful not to cry in front of Jamie. Besides, what good were tears anyway? As a liquid manifestation of pain, salt water was hardly adequate for what she was feeling. There should be something stronger coming out of a person’s eyes. Blood or poison or the molten steel of knife blades. ‘Go to sleep now.’ She buried her face in his neck. ‘Take a big breath.’
Jamie rasped wetly.
‘And another.’
Obediently, he gulped down air and immediately started hiccupping.
‘Oh, Jamie,’ Georgie said helplessly.
‘I can’t help it.’ He hiccupped again. ‘You’ll have to scare me.’
‘Don’t be silly’
‘Tell me a story then. Tell me the Flora Macdonald story’
‘Oh, no, any one but that.’
‘Please, Georgie.’ His voice caught pitifully.
‘All right.’ She sat up, rubbing at her head with the knuckles of her fist. ‘Well . . . let’s see . . . years and years and years before Grandpa bought this house, it was owned by a rich islander called Captain Macdonald, and Captain Macdonald’ – she settled Jamie in the crook of her arm – ‘was a pig of a man.’
Jamie sighed in appreciation as Georgie went on. He loved this story, it didn’t matter how many times he heard it. Captain Macdonald had been a notorious baddie, employing many of the islanders for menial jobs, such as rowing him out to distant islands, sometimes in appalling weather, in order for him to shoot a few duck. He was already a snobbish man but when it fell to him to welcome the King to the island for an official visit, he began to harbour dreams of scaling the prestige ladder and sent his only daughter to the annual ball on Skye in the hope of her catching the eye of one of the posh boys attending.
Flora had indeed caught the eye of a boy – not a grandee, but a young fisherman on the quay, and the Captain had been horrified. Swiftly deciding to marry her off to his Factor – the man who collected rent on his properties – he lost no time in arranging the nuptials. Neilly McLellan, Flora’s fisherman, was heartbroken and sent word of his intention to rescue her from this unhappy fate. The plan was to wait for fine weather then row across the Minch and signal his arrival by shining a light from the mouth of Loch Aivegarry. Weeks passed while Flora pined, then finally, one moonless night, there it was, the beam of a lantern.
‘Without hesitation, she wrenched open the window and, as you know,’ Georgie said, ‘under Flora’s window – my window – is the only tree on the whole island and so Flora threw out her sack of belongings and climbed down it.’
‘Is it true, though?’ Jamie asked. ‘Did she really climb down your tree?’
‘Of course it’s true.’
‘But Alba says nobody could climb down that tree because it’s covered in thorns.’
‘A few thorns would never stop someone who was in love.’
‘Alba says that the tree is too far away from the window and that Flora wouldn’t have been able to reach it.’
‘Jamie, why do you care about anything Alba says?’
‘She doesn’t lie about things.’
‘Nor do I!’ Georgie said, stung.
‘You pretend, like Mum.’
‘Look,’ Georgie sighed. ‘How old is Alba?’
‘Fourteen.’
‘Right. That means she only knows about things that happened in the last fourteen years, okay? This story happened ages ago.’ Jami
e’s slavish adoration of his sister had always riled Georgie.
‘Did the story happen more than seventeen-and-three-quarters years ago?’
‘Oh, Jamie.’ Georgie kissed the top of his head. Her brother’s literalness, the unyielding pedantry that so enraged Alba, she had always found charming. She remembered him as a little boy, bursting into tears on his birthday after guests had been ordered to drink his health. ‘Oh, not all of it,’ he had pleaded. ‘Leave some for me.’ Another time, on being told to tidy up his room and use a bit of elbow grease, he had spent fruitless hours searching for the relevant tin in the cleaning cupboard. As he’d grown older, though, it worried her. Occasionally she caught a glimpse of something obscurely brilliant about her brother, but how would he survive in the adult world, with no irony or sarcasm, when his condition invited these very tools to be consistently used against him? She settled him back under her arm. ‘Just listen, would you? Flora escapes in the rowing boat with her fisherman and two of his cousins and off they sail to Skye, but unfortunately a gale picks up and they’re blown instead onto the southern shore of Harris. So, there they are, drenched, lost and scared. But they can see a light shining in the distance and eventually they get to a croft, knock on the door and guess who opens it?’
‘Flora’s auntie!’ Jamie supplied.
‘Exactly! Of all the bad luck! Of all the houses on all the islands! Flora’s auntie had not been best pleased to find such a bedraggled collection of runaways on her doorstep. Even less amusing was the moment she recognized her niece amongst them. “Why, whatever are you doing here, Flora, lass?” she demanded, then, incensed at their story, dismissed the boys with a disgusted wave and kept Flora under lock and key until she could be safely returned to her father. The lovers, however, did not give up. The second time around, the plan worked. Flora and her fisherman escaped to Skye and from there to the mainland, where they eventually boarded a ship bound for Australia.’