The Summer of the Bear

by Bella Pollen

  ‘Georgie!’ he’d cry. ‘Did I tell you about the time I was away in Aldershot?’

  ‘Um, yes, actually, you did,’ Georgie said uneasily. Alick’s story of travelling to England to start his National Service, via tractor, hay baler, fishing boat, train, bus and finally hitchhiking was one of his favourites. He had eventually arrived two days late only to be bollocked by the signing-in officer, unimpressed by his explanation of having come from no small distance away. ‘Where from, laddie,’ he’d barked scornfully, ‘Glasgy?’

  ‘Och, no, Sir, ferther north.’

  ‘Well, where then,’ the officer rapped, ‘Callander? Dundee?’

  ‘No, no,’ again Alick demurred. After a prolonged and increasingly heated game of Guess which Scottish Town, a map of the British Isles was produced and Alick pointed to the tiny speck off Scotland’s north-west coast, which up until that point had been officially identified as a coffee stain. And how utterly in awe the signing-in officer had been! And hadn’t Alick been declared the very hero of innovative travel!

  Sober, Alick was a born storyteller. His head was a muddle of half-truths and whole truths and quarter-truths. Whether fabricating the reason why he’d missed the connecting bus or miming the Adjutant marching pompously up and down the room, Alick had the ability to spin the most riveting tale from the most commonplace happening. To begin with whisky enhanced his comic timing but as the bottle emptied, he slowly descended into the repeated telling of shaggy dog stories.

  ‘Now, Alba.’ He leant across the table. ‘Did I ever tell you I was only a two-pound baby?’

  ‘About a hundred zillion times,’ Alba replied brutally.

  ‘Although two pounds is a very small baby,’ Jamie compensated politely.

  ‘Aye, that’s right, very small,’ Alick mused, dropping his roll-up and fumbling for it under his chair. ‘But I’m strong as an ox now. Aye, strong as that great bloody bear of yours!’ He yanked up his wool jumper. ‘Come now, Jamie lad, hit Captain Alick of the SAS in the belly. Hard as you can.’

  ‘Alick, sit down,’ Letty intervened. ‘You’re spilling your coffee.’

  ‘I’ve no use for coffee, Let-ic-ia, we’ll take a dram together!’

  ‘No, we will not.’ Letty pushed the mug closer to him. ‘Now, drink up, Alick, for goodness’ sake.’

  ‘Let-ic-ia,’ he sing-songed, ‘did I tell you there’s a terrible rascal on the island?’ He looked around for matches, then, thrusting a hand into the lucky dip of his pocket, withdrew it clutching the prize of a dead mackerel. For a moment he gazed at it, truly confounded. The fish had been folded in half like a pound note and was stiff with rigor mortis. Then he stuffed it back in his pocket, winking at the children as though he were a co-conspirator in their efforts at schoolroom anarchy. Letty paid little attention. According to Alick, everybody was suddenly a thief or a tinker, out to get the better of him. But as the evening dragged on, as the children sloped off, one by one, to bed, it was always Letty left at the table, so tired it was as though her eyelids were lined with sand. She could not bring herself to send Alick away. As he talked and smoked and drank, she thought of all the years of selfless loyalty; she remembered every broken boiler or light he’d fixed, every errand he’d run. There was no question that Alick was the kindest, most capable man, but he was also a drunk. As she looked over at him, slumped at the kitchen table, the whites of his eyes veined with red, his oil-stained fingers hustling the wormy dregs of tobacco from his tin, she had a terrible premonition of an Alick to come: embittered and paranoid, his fierce spirit eroded, his independence drowned by alcohol. When the picture became too ugly to bear, she forced him to his feet and pushed him towards the sitting room with a pillow and a blanket.

  ‘Now, I don’t want to hear another word from you,’ she said firmly. ‘Just get some sleep and stop being so silly.’ Because what else was there to say? Once, many years earlier, after Alick had disappeared on a bender, she’d accused him of being unreliable and never had she regretted cross words more. Alick had taken himself off and not returned for a week. It hadn’t been his absence that had upset her, but the look of hurt bewilderment in his eyes. So, she would listen to all the long-winded stories. If necessary, she would even clean and gut the dead mackerel in his pocket, because she simply could not risk losing anyone else she loved.

  ‘He’s been taking the oil from you,’ Donald John finally blurted out.

  Letty stared at him. Had Donald John told her that Alick was wanted for war crimes she would have been less shocked.

  ‘He’s been stealing oil to pay for the drink.’

  ‘I see.’ Letty picked miserably at a mussel beard, untangling it strand by strand.

  ‘Oil is terrible expensive,’ Donald John commented.

  ‘Yes. It is.’ She hung her head and tried not to cry. Alick’s drinking always meant trouble, but she had imagined a run-in with the church minister or a spat with his father, not this sucker punch of betrayal.

  ‘Working at the croft all these years and nothing to show for it. Oh, boo boo, it’s little wonder. And now with the cattle gone. Poor Alick never got a penny for all he did. Not a penny, no, indeed.’

  No, quite,’ she said hollowly. Then, more sharply, ‘What do you mean the cattle gone, Donald John?’

  Donald John raised troubled eyes to hers. ‘I was sure he would have told you.’

  ‘Told me what?’

  ‘Murdo has sold his father’s cattle.’

  ‘He’s done what?’

  ‘Aye, every last one of them, at the cattle sales.’

  ‘But the cattle are Alick’s livelihood. I don’t understand. Did Euan ask him to?’

  ‘Indeed, Euan had no idea, Letitia. No idea at all. Why, when poor Euan found out he took a terrible shock. Murdo had no right to them.’ Donald John began to rock backwards and forwards in agitation. ‘Murdo has the croft in his name but not the cattle.’

  Letty’s understanding of Scottish inheritance was hazy – crofting laws in particular were Gordian – but she dimly remembered talk of Euan turning the property over to his eldest son.

  ‘Aye, Euan left the croft to Murdo,’ Donald John’s voice rose, ‘but that didn’t mean he got the moveables along with it. Euan never meant for him to have the cattle, no indeed, and Alick has taken it bad, right enough, working all these years, day and night, and getting nothing for his trouble.’

  Letty bit her lip. ‘He never said a word.’

  ‘Well, it’s put him on the drink and little wonder. Wee Alick was always the first to do a hands-turn for somebody. Oh my goodness, yes he was. He has been a very good worker these many years, both inside the croft and out.’

  ‘Oh, Donald John, I wish you’d told me earlier.’ She felt a surge of exasperation, though of course she had little right. Alick was Donald John’s first cousin. God only knew what it had cost him to confide in her.

  ‘You have your own worries, Letitia, but now there’ll be bad blood in the family forever.’

  ‘But why would Murdo do such a wicked thing?’

  ‘They say he needs the money for his contracts, yes indeed Letitia, that’s it. His company is involved in building that new army base.’

  Letty frowned. The Eileandorcha army base was only a few years old. ‘Why do they need a new one?’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure if it’s an army base exactly,’ Donald John said thoughtfully. ‘Angus Post Office says it might be some kind of nucular station.’

  ‘Nuclear station! No, no. I don’t think so. I mean, I think there must be a muddle of some sort,’ she added tactfully.

  ‘No one knows what it is supposed to be,’ he conceded. ‘Alisdair the fisherman had a letter from his cousin Duncan over in Lochbealach who said he’d heard it was a missile-testing range – like that one they built down on south island right enough – but old Jackson up in Clairinish thinks it’s an early warning system for Russian bombs.’

  Letty was staring at him. ‘Donald John, are you quite sure?’

>   ‘Well, that’s what I hear anyways, and they’ll be starting with the building of it pretty soon.’

  ‘But it will be the ruin of Eileandorcha,’ she whispered.

  ‘Oh, tse tse, Let-ti-cia, it’s not going to be in Eileandorcha, no, indeed.’ Donald John appeared fussed that he’d muddled her so comprehensively. ‘It’s going to be situated right here in the township.’

  ‘In Ballanish?’ Letty stammered.

  He screened his eyes from the sun and pointed east. ‘On the hill above the church loch. Yes, that’s where they’re going to build it, right enough, Letitia, just over there, at the very top of Clannach!’

  59

  ‘Roddy, does everything get to be a ghost?’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure I know what you mean.’ Roddy wiped the blood from his knife onto a piece of paper.

  ‘This rabbit, for instance.’ Jamie looked at the opaque, milky eyes of the dead animal. ‘Will it get to be a ghost now it’s dead?’

  ‘No, no, I don’t think so.’

  ‘What about lobsters?’

  ‘Lobsters . . .’ Roddy appeared to give the matter of shellfish spirits some serious thought. ‘Well, now, I can’t say I’ve ever heard tell of a lobster ghost.’

  ‘What about the bear, then? Would the bear get to be a ghost if it’s dead?’

  ‘Ghosts are for humans,’ Roddy said firmly ‘Now, that’s not to say that humans can’t turn into rabbits or lobsters after they die, because they can and that’s a fact.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Jamie said eagerly. ‘Mrs Macdonald says that fishermen come back as seagulls after they die and that they have the whole sea to fish in.’

  ‘Folks can come back as all kinds of animals, why, seagulls, rats, cockroaches even.’

  ‘But how does anyone know if they’re going to come back as a ghost or an animal?’

  ‘Now that depends entirely on the circumstances. If someone’s been very brave, they might come back as an eagle, or a horse. But if they’ve been very bad and disliked by enough people, then they might come back as a fly, or a mosquito.’ Roddy tugged at a hair sprouting from his ear. ‘Indeed, lad, there’s many a wicked man I’ve ground under the heel of my boot.’

  ‘But you’ve seen ghosts too, haven’t you, Roddy?’ Jamie tried not to be distracted by the creases in Roddy’s earlobes. It was as though he had slept on a pillow of nails.

  ‘Aye, plenty of them.’

  ‘Alick thinks there’s a ghost in mum’s bedroom.’

  ‘Well then,’ Roddy said lugubriously, ‘I’m very sure there is.’

  ‘Roddy, where do people go when they don’t go to heaven?’

  ‘To hell,’ he said serenely.

  ‘And where is hell exactly?’

  ‘Down in the depths of the earth.’

  ‘Where the earthquake people live!’

  Roddy lifted his cap and scratched his head. ‘I don’t rightly know about that, Jamie, but there’s plenty of room down there for all sorts. Hell is where the wicked spend eternity. It’s where the devil lives, right enough. Ach, the stories I could tell you about the devil.’

  Jamie was well aware that Roddy boasted a special kinship with the devil, that he seemed suspiciously privy to the devil’s itinerary on any given day of the year, which he was happy to report to anyone who cared to ask, but Jamie had no intention of getting sidetracked. Roddy might choose to fraternize with the devil, but there was really no question of his father doing the same. In fact he imagined his father would take a very dim view of that sort of thing.

  ‘What if you’re not a wicked person, but you haven’t made it to heaven yet?’

  ‘Could be that a soul has unfinished business on earth. Folks can get trapped somewhere between the two until they see to whatever it is that’s been bothering them.’

  ‘Roddy,’ Jamie took a deep breath, ‘do you think it’s possible my father’s being a ghost or an animal somewhere?’

  The hunchback eyed him thoughtfully. ‘Well, that’s hard to say, Jamie, indeed it is.’

  ‘So who decides whether you get to come back as a person ghost or an eagle ghost?’

  ‘It depends what you believe.’

  ‘Yes, but what do you believe?’

  ‘Well, now, I say if a man wants to come back as a ghost or an eagle, then that’s his choice,’ he pronounced philosophically. ‘If it’s a question of unfinished business, I would imagine it’s whatever suits a man’s purpose best, and if he’s been a good enough fellow, why, who’s to say he won’t get what he wants?’

  60

  His body ached. Hunger had dried out his eyes and stolen the marrow from his bones. It had morphed into a fiend inside him, one that grew bigger and more demanding every day and as it growled and whined, raking its claws up and down the inside of his stomach, he was overcome with the doubt that freedom and choice brings. Why not end it? Go home. Lumber into the township and wait for the net to close around him. Strength was something he’d always taken for granted, but as he began losing control over his body, something surprising happened. The shape and pattern of his thinking began to change. Idea overlapped idea. Was it possible to maintain life through will alone? He began to hallucinate. In a rush his head filled with memories he didn’t recognize, images of places he had not seen and feelings he had never experienced. He didn’t fully understand the journey he was on, but he sensed its magnitude and so he fought hunger and doubt as he’d never before fought any opponent.

  From time to time, when energy returned to him in short concentrated bursts, he left the cave, slaked his thirst in the small burn that trickled into the loch, then made his way to the house, staying as long as he dared. He leant against the stone wall for support and reassured himself with the comings and goings of the family. But these forays tired him and were followed by extended periods of weakness spent in a trance-like state back in his cave.

  Every night now he dreamt of the boy – that serious little face, his puppet and string form on top of the cliff, silhouetted against a thundery sky.

  ‘Hello bear,’ the boy said.

  ‘Come to me, boy,’ he begged and reached out, but in his dreams the boy could not hear him. In his dreams, the boy had yet to work out that he even existed.

  61

  Letty sat on her bed, chewing the inside of her cheek as wind rattled the glass in the window. She tried to imagine herself walking downstairs, picking up the receiver and dialling the Foreign Office. Yet it was eight months since they’d spoken, so how could she just say his name then stumble through small talk as if nothing had happened between them, as if nothing had been said? Still, what choice did she have? The long arm of the government had snaked north and tightened its acquisitive fingers around this tiny space, this one-third of a solitary acre that she’d carved out for her family, and she was damned if she was going to allow them to take it from her. The storm gave the window another shake in its frame and it was then she heard it, an eerie keening coming through the wall. She held her breath. It was as though the wind was tearing the grief out of her own chest and playing it back to her as a warning. Dear Lord, it wasn’t Flora’s ghost who would never be able to rest in peace, she thought wildly, it was her.

  It had taken four telephone calls to secure the correct number for the MP for the Highlands and Islands and a further two to break through the protective guard of his staffers. Marriage to a diplomat had endowed her with an unusually high tolerance for bureaucracy and she was prepared for further filibuster from the man himself, but Edward Burgh had been depressingly forthcoming. Indeed, he confirmed, most people had little idea of the extent of MoD activities in Scotland. In the Highlands and Islands alone was St Kilda, the army base on Shillaig, the missile range at Gebraith. There was also the watch radar station in Theaval and a patrol boat stationed down in Loch Baghasdail. ‘Over and above these,’ he added, ‘a number of other proposals are being considered. With those that do not offer significant job gains or threaten extensive upheaval, we are already a
rguing a perceived threat to the faith, language and culture of island people, but I have to advise you that the government is vigorously committed to the expansion of its military presence in Scotland.’

  So Donald John had been right. After his visit that afternoon she’d gone straight to see Euan. ‘Oh yes, Let-ic-ia, there’s been talk of it,’ the old man had said.

  ‘On Clannach.’ Her throat constricted.

  ‘Aye, right up on the top.’

  ‘But you’d be able to see it all over the island!’

  ‘Aye, that’s the truth.’

  ‘But why Clannach?’ She’d paced round the croft’s smoky interior. ‘Of all places, why here?’

  ‘They say it’s a very convenient place for tracking the enemy right enough.’

  Euan looked ill, Letty thought. His eyes were watery and his whole physiology had changed, as though the iron spirit that had always supported him had been forcibly extracted leaving only a shell of flesh and blood. He’d taken his son’s treachery hard, Donald John had warned her, and God knows, she understood. Why was it that the people you loved were capable of betraying you with such apparent ease?

  ‘Have you talked to the town council? Surely if there was enough opposition, they could stop it.’

  ‘Why, there’s plenty of opposition, Let-ic-ia. There’s many a crofter who’s been complaining.’

  ‘Yes, but to whom?’ She knew perfectly well there would have been a great deal of sitting around in crofts, but precious little action. Was it fatalism or idleness, she thought bitterly, the islanders’ utter inability to question authority, this placid acceptance of even the most outrageous impositions and restrictions to their lives?