by Selja Ahava
Then she and Dad sit down again, looking thoughtful. No one mentions a Jackpot Cake.
‘I think I’ll go and get some sleep,’ Auntie Annu says eventually.
She glances at Dad and a giggle escapes from both of them, which stops as abruptly as it started. Looks like the argument’s over.
‘Blimey,’ Dad says.
And then Auntie climbs up to the room in the tower and falls asleep.
In the afternoon, Dad sends me to ask if Auntie would like to come and have coffee, but Auntie just snores. In the evening, Dad knocks on the door and makes a lot of noise on the steps to the tower, but Auntie doesn’t move.
‘I wonder if she’s got a migraine,’ Dad says.
In the morning, Dad goes to shake Auntie, but she just whines, pushes Dad’s hand off her shoulder and turns over.
‘Are you all right? It’s Thursday,’ Dad says.
‘I’ll just sleep for a bit,’ Auntie Annu murmurs.
All Dad’s attempts to rouse Auntie Annu fail.
Finally, he rings the health centre.
‘How am I supposed to bring her there?’ Dad snaps into the phone. ‘She sleeps in a tower on the second floor. She’s heavy!’
Dad’s put on hold. He drums his fingers against the kitchen window.
At last the nurse comes back and says a doctor will make a home visit in the afternoon.
‘I thought something like this would happen,’ Dad mutters to himself.
‘Like what?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know,’ Dad answers. ‘Something serious.’
The doctor listens to Auntie’s heart and breathing, pinches her ear and claps his hands, takes a blood sample from Auntie’s arm and looks into her eyes with a torch.
Auntie’s blood flows along a red pipe into a tube, and I memorize this thought: even when a person’s asleep, their blood moves.
‘Is it her heart?’ Dad asks from the doorway. ‘Annu’s always eaten quite unhealthily. And we’ve got a history of heart and circulation problems in our family.’
‘Her heart sounds quite normal,’ the doctor replies.
‘Will you also look into her sugar levels?’ Dad continues. ‘It just crossed my mind last night it could be sugar.’
‘Did anything particular happen before she fell asleep?’
‘A lottery win,’ Dad answers.
The doctor raises his eyebrows. He doesn’t say anything at first.
‘For the second time,’ I say from behind Dad.
‘That’s right,’ Dad mutters.
‘I see,’ the doctor answers.
‘She didn’t fall asleep when she won the first time,’ I explain. ‘We all had cake then.’
‘That’s right,’ Dad says.
‘In that case, it’s probably a reaction induced by a shock,’ the doctor said. ‘The mind needs a rest and battens down the hatches, as it were. Let her sleep. She’ll wake up when she’s ready. Put a glass of fruit juice and some easy-to-digest food on the bedside table once a day.’
Then the doctor leaves.
And so Auntie Annu sleeps on. We bring her juice, rusks and jelly. Auntie eats and drinks in her sleep. Sometimes she even opens her eyes a little, but they’re drowsy and vacant. Auntie bites a rusk, turns over and sinks into sleep, crumbs on her lips.
25
So I’m all alone now. Auntie sleeps, Dad fixes the barn ceiling, Mum’s dead and the summer holidays aren’t over yet.
Dad cooks bad food, like sausages still frozen on the inside. He can’t make pancakes, either. He gets a recipe off the internet, but the result is still a pulpy mess. We eat greasy, sugar-coated pancake-pulp.
Dad huffs, annoyed. ‘Must have been a bad recipe. I did everything just like it said. And these pans of Annu’s! Why doesn’t she buy new pots and pans, what with all that money she’s got? But then, there’ve been none on special offer anywhere. Still, they taste kind of…Don’t you think they taste like pancakes, Saara?’
‘I suppose.’
Dad takes to banging his feet against the bars of the bed again, and the doctor grants him more sick leave. Dad forgets to enrol me for swimming lessons; I was supposed to learn front crawl this summer. By way of consolation, he buys me a bagful of autumn clothes.
I stand in front of the mirror in a new turquoise shirt. My wrists poke out of the sleeves. The legs of the jeans are long enough, but I can’t do the button up.
‘They’re quite nice, aren’t they?’ Dad says, looking at my mirror image.
I turn to face him, then tear off the clothes. The shirt collar is so tight I can barely get my head out. Hasn’t he bothered to look at me all summer?
‘Stupid! You can’t do anything right!’ I shout, marching out of the room.
I’m so annoyed I don’t talk to Dad all evening. Even though he’s made macaroni bake for tea. The macaroni is hard and white. It stands on the plate, a cube cut out with a knife.
26
Auntie’s sheep are in the pasture. They smell of Auntie Annu, and that gives me a cosy feeling. I sink my hands into Bruno’s brown, or black, wool and stroke his head. He twitches his ears, one straight, the other one wonky, to shoo away flies. Bruno has become an ordinary sheep, and he can’t comfort me. He still follows me, but he’s stopped skipping and being a sweet, funny lamb. Now he’s boring, and looks as stupid as the other sheep in the enclosure. He chews grass and dashes around.
Auntie once said that she can’t eat mutton. According to Auntie, sheep is the only animal whose butchered meat smells the same as the living animal. A pork chop doesn’t smell of pig, minced beef doesn’t smell of cow, but a rack of lamb smells of sheep. And that’s why Auntie Annu won’t touch lamb casserole.
I don’t know if the sheep have noticed Auntie Annu’s absence. They have stupid eyes, their mouths chew stupidly away, they’re startled by the smallest thing and they fire out droppings without even noticing it. One day, a white sheep got caught in the barbed-wire fence. There it stood, having been there all night, for all I knew, looking as if it had decided to lose all hope and die.
When I got there, the sheep took fright and gave a small, startled skip. And that little skip was enough to free the wool from the barbed wire and so the sheep ran back to the others as if nothing had happened. I looked at it and thought: you could have made a bit of an effort, if that was all it took. But sheep don’t really do effort.
I scratch Bruno’s neck. I’ve heard that there’s a spot on every sheep’s neck that is so itchy that the animal just has to lift its head higher and higher if you scratch it there. And when a sheep looks up long enough, blood stops flowing to its brain and it passes out.
I see if I can make Bruno pass out. I scratch his neck, looking for the itchy spot. After a couple of attempts, I do manage to make his head rise. Bruno’s eyes stare up at the sky, but then he suddenly turns and slips through my fingers. He skips round once and comes back for more scratching.
I try again. The scratching has to be carried out with just the right amount of force. If it’s too light, the head doesn’t go up; if it’s too heavy, Bruno will run off. I scratch; Bruno raises his head.
The fourth attempt is going well. Bruno’s brown head stretches up higher and higher; I scratch and scratch. And at last, unexpectedly, Bruno slumps to my feet, unconscious.
I stare at the passed-out sheep. His eyes are open, and you can see his teeth in his mouth, which gapes a little. A moment goes by, then Bruno comes to. He stands up, skips sideways, runs to a stone and back, then returns to me.
Don’t you understand anything, thicko? I ask in my head, stroking Bruno behind his wonky ear. But he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand, and he can’t offer comfort. He has a hard, bony skull, and nothing hurts him. I’ve heard that you can hit a sheep on the head with your fist, and all that happens is your knuckles get bruised.
Auntie Annu doesn’t wake up. She’s been asleep for two weeks now and has stopped eating the snacks we’ve been leaving her. She still drinks a lit
tle water. She seems to have sunk into a deeper sleep than last week. Her breathing is slow and even, and she doesn’t change positions as often as she did in the beginning. The doctor visits again, but he can’t wake Auntie up, either. He thinks she can sleep if she feels like sleeping. But in a week’s time, she’ll be taken into hospital for drip-feeding if she’s still not eating.
I’m a bit worried about Auntie Annu’s teeth. She hasn’t brushed them for days, and she’s eaten biscuits and jelly. If Dad remembered to buy xylitol pastilles, I could leave them out for Auntie, but he doesn’t remember anything.
I sit on the floor of the secret room. Usually, I sit here and think about the pieces of Mum, but this time, I pretend I’m walled in. This room isn’t surrounded by any line; this room is as free as a line between things. Here you can imagine you’re a white sheep stuck to a fence, preparing for a slow death.
‘Saara? Food’s ready.’ It’s Dad’s voice in the passage.
But the walled-in girl and the sheep stuck to the fence are so weak by now that they haven’t got the strength to answer.
‘Saara!’ Dad’s voice rises then grows more distant as he walks back to the stairwell. ‘Where are you?’
The girl is inside a wall. The sheep hangs from barbed wire. Auntie sleeps, unconscious, in the tower. Bruno lies in the grass, passed out.
The girl has been shouting for a while, but now her strength has gone and all she can do is lie and listen to the bleating of the sheep. All evening she also hears the calls of her idiot Dad but she doesn’t feel like wasting her last bit of energy on answer-ing him. There she lies, her wool tangled in barbs, and waits.
Once upon a time, there was a prince whom a witch changed into a frog. The prince’s disappearance was mourned by his servant Bruno. Bruno mourned so hard that, eventually, three iron hoops were needed to compress his heart and prevent it from breaking.
One day, the prince changed back into a human being and found himself a princess. The pair jumped into a carriage driven by Bruno and travelled towards the prince’s castle. Three times during the journey, a loud metallic bang rang out. The prince and princess thought the carriage was falling apart, but Bruno told them that the sound was only his heart being freed from the hoops of grief.
And that’s the end of that.
THE FIVE LIGHTNING STRIKES OF HAMISH MACKAY
Hamish MacKay was born fifty-eight years ago in the village of Crossbost on the island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. He owns a fishing boat and catches lobsters and crabs for a living.
Hamish MacKay has only left his village four times: once with the school as a sixth-former, to go to Glasgow; once to attend his sister’s wedding; once to buy a van. And when his wife Mary had her fiftieth, Hamish MacKay and Mary sent off for passports and flew to Thailand for a fortnight.
Thailand was hot. Breakfast involved the same sort of food as lunch and dinner did, and bread was nowhere to be had. For souvenirs, Hamish bought a T-shirt adorned with a map of Thailand, a tortoise shell and decorative dolls dressed in glittering clothes. Then he and Mary came back home.
Our story begins on a Sunday evening in 1988. The wind changed direction, to the north-east, thunder rumbled above the sea, and rain clouds gathered on the horizon.
Hamish MacKay decided a couple more ropes were needed on the boat. He walked to the sea, noticing that the landscape had turned yellow. The wind filled his ears. Suddenly, all colour vanished and the sea sank into darkness, though it was only six o’clock.
The first lightning struck and lit up the open sea. In the light, Hamish saw small, sharp, hissing ripples on the surface of the water, as in a film shown at high speed. The wind rose so fast that not even the waves could keep up. Darkness returned, and Hamish ran to the boat, which was tossing restlessly between the buoy and the shore, a green bucket clattering along its deck. Hamish jumped on to the deck, attached the extra ropes, shut the trapdoor securely and put the bucket inside.
It began raining. The water poured over him like a water-fall and made the ground steam. It had been a hot week.
As Hamish MacKay was starting back, lightning struck. Like a bright, fiery nail, it pinned him down. The whole landscape exploded.
Darkness returned, and Hamish was lying there, limbs trembling uncontrollably, momentarily incapable of any action. His hair had been burnt, and his boots had flown off his feet. His muscles were struck by cramp and his pulse throbbed in his throat. Nevertheless, he remained conscious. The boots turned up later among the stones on the shore.
Without hair, eyelashes or shoes, Hamish staggered home and asked Mary to give him a glass of milk. Mary stared at her husband, who smelled of electricity and burnt hair, and rushed out to start the car.
Mary drove Hamish to the hospital in Stornoway. They examined the man’s heart, memory and soles. No serious injuries were found, and Hamish MacKay went back the following morning to clean his bait fish.
During the August storms of 1992, lightning struck for the second time. Hamish MacKay and his fishing companion Timothy McCallum managed to shelter from the storm close to a nearby island, but lightning struck the boat’s aerial. Electrical discharge ran down the sides of the boat and spread along the metal railings over the whole vessel. Hamish burnt his hand on the aft rail. But Tim flew into the sea, propelled by the lightning, and drowned. His body was only found two days later, having drifted into the next bay along.
The boat’s interior was totally destroyed by fire. Fittings flew off the walls, windows exploded, gauges and other electrical equipment splintered apart. Plastics melted, wood burnt. Black, dirty water lapped at the floor, and the air was acrid with the smell of burning. A jagged line, branded by lightning, ran across the whole of the wood-panelled wall. The bucket taken in by Hamish had melted to form a green blob on the cabin floor.
After Tim McCallum’s funeral, rumours began circulating in the village. Someone said Hamish MacKay must have done some wrong and been punished. Others felt he thought too highly of himself – he’d started learning French – while others still brought up that old quarrel between Hamish and his old man. People also saw fit to speculate as to why he and his blone had no wee ones, and why Hamish’s hair had turned white after the first strike.
Mary and Hamish carried on with their lives as best they could. Hamish bought a new, smaller trawler and named it Silver Darling. His white hair and eyebrows grew back.
None of the village men dared go out to sea with Hamish any more. He and Mary had to manage by themselves.
The third time lightning struck Hamish MacKay was in 1995 when he was mending the garden shed behind the cottage. This time the bang was so loud that Mary rushed out to the back, hearing it. She saw the neighbour’s horse first. It was running in fright, pulling a cart behind it. One of the wheels sank into a ditch and made the cart tilt. The cart got stuck and the horse reared and was propelled on to its side by the impact of this abrupt stop. From the garden, Mary could see the whites of the animal’s eyes, glinting in the dusk. The neighbour was somewhere in the background, running and calling for his horse, but that Mary didn’t see.
Hamish MacKay was standing at the edge of the garden. The same smell of burning wafted around him. His hair was scorched again. It had burnt part of his scalp. His eyebrows and eyelashes had disappeared, too. The nails had come off his fingers.
Mary tried to talk to her husband, but he didn’t reply. He just stood there on the spot, swaying, his gaze wandering round the garden. He didn’t seem to recognize his wife. Then he staggered to the water butt and dunked his head in its contents. Immediately afterwards, he passed out.
In the hospital bed, Hamish stared at his wife with vacant, lashless eyes. He wouldn’t let anyone touch him: if someone tried, he would scream instantly. The lightest touch seemed to hurt, as if a layer of skin had been burnt clean off. Mary suspected briefly that Hamish had lost his reason, but examinations revealed that her husband had in fact lost his hearing.
This time, Hamish MacKay was a
changed man. The joy drained out of him; with deafness came gloom. Hamish MacKay sank into silence.
The villagers grew afraid of both Hamish and his wife. People shunned them in stormy weather. The gossip had stopped, and so had theories about Hamish’s sins. People just shook their heads and fell silent.
But life went on. The blone cleaned the cod and the mackerel. The cove chopped up the waste and put it in the lobster traps. They laid the traps together in the sea and took them out two days later. They sold the lobsters and crabs to a supplier in Stornoway.
Lightning struck for the fourth time in 2007 as Hamish MacKay was returning home from his ma’s funeral. His Sunday suit caught fire and a burn the shape of tree roots marked his back. It zigzagged from his right shoulder to his left hip. This time, the nerves in his left leg were also damaged. Hamish developed a limp. His hair and nails grew back. His posture collapsed.
By 2012, Hamish MacKay had been struck by lightning more times than any other European. In global terms, he was number four for all time. He got a mention in Guinness World Records.
Hamish MacKay featured in an episode of a documentary series made by the BBC. The programme analysed the frequency of thunderstorms in the Outer Hebrides and compared Hamish to other fishermen working in the area. The case of Hamish MacKay remained a mystery to the programme makers.
Dear Mr MacKay,
I watched the documentary about you on television, and your story touched me greatly. I wanted to write to you because fate has also toyed with me. It is true my case is very different from yours, and involves no thunder. I have won the lottery twice, you see. (And you are the only person outside my family whom I have told.) Maybe after four lightning strikes you think two wins is not a big deal, but in any case, I have been thrown off course quite badly.
I hope you do not mind if I tell my story. Three years ago, I won the lottery. What a coincidence – my exact numbers in those plastic tubes! Incredible! But on the other hand, somebody’s numbers always drop into the tubes, and this time they just happened to be mine.