The Chessmen l-3

by Peter May

  ‘Notice what?’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Finlay. This!’ And she waved her hand over the assembled garments. ‘They’re only fit for the bin.’

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I thought it was just his look.’

  ‘Holes in your socks aren’t a look, Finlay.’ She took me by the arm and steered me through to the living room and lowered her voice. ‘He lives with his father, he said. Where’s his mother?’

  ‘She’s dead.’

  ‘You’ve met his father?’ I nodded. ‘And been to the house?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She closed the door and said, ‘Sit down. I want you to tell me everything.’

  I said nothing to Whistler when he came out of the bathroom. I gave him a pair of baggy old pyjama bottoms that just about fitted him, and an XXL T-shirt that he stretched over his chest. He wrapped my old dressing gown gratefully around himself and went off to the spare room at the end of the hall muttering about bloody idiots who left dangerous objects lying about on jetties. We slept until almost twelve the next day.

  It was the sound of my aunt’s car pulling up at the front door that woke me. I screwed up my eyes against the midday sunshine and from my window saw her take several carrier bags from the back seat. There was a fresh blustery wind chasing random clouds across a broken sky, sunlight spilling from it in occasional pools and splashes. But it was dry and my spirits lifted.

  By the time Whistler and I got ourselves downstairs, she had a late breakfast sizzling for us in the kitchen. Porridge, followed by bacon, egg, sausage, black pudding and fried bread, all washed down with big tumblers of fresh orange juice. Whistler wolfed into it, and barely looked up until he had finished. Then the three of us sat around the table drinking tea, and Whistler told a tall story about two men trying to take a bull on a raft across to an island in Uig. He swore it was true. They were very nervous, he said, that the raft would tip over and the bull would drown. Then the thing did capsize, halfway across, and tipped all three into the sea. The men thought they were going to drown because neither of them could swim. But then it turned out that the bull could, and so they clung on to him, and he swam to the island and got them ashore. The way he told it, Whistler had us all in stitches.

  I watched my aunt as he spoke. There was more life in her eyes, I think, than I had ever seen in them before. And she laughed in a way I’d never heard her laugh. A laugh like running water, that flowed from smiling lips. I don’t know what it was about Whistler that attracted her. It was certainly more than feeling sorry for him. But I’ve often thought that she’d probably rather have had Whistler to raise than me. And although I had never loved her, I felt a disconcerting pang of jealousy.

  When we had finished eating, Whistler said, ‘I’d better get dressed.’ And he looked around for his clothes. My aunt flicked me a look.

  ‘I’ve put them in the bin, John Angus,’ she said.

  There was an odd silence in the kitchen as his jaw dropped and he stared at her in disbelief. I felt like someone watching a movie. Involved in the action, but with no influence over the way it was unravelling.

  ‘I’ve been to Stornoway to buy you some new. Nothing fancy mind. I went to the Crofters. They’ll do you for now.’ And she lifted the carrier bags she had brought from the car on to the table.

  Whistler still hadn’t spoken. He looked in the bags, one after the other. There was a sturdy pair of leather boots. Jeans. A chequered shirt. A waterproof jacket with a hood. And seven pairs of socks and underpants.

  ‘I wasn’t sure about sizes, so I just got the biggest I could.’

  Whistler’s mouth was still hanging open. He looked at her and shook his head. ‘I can’t afford this.’

  ‘I can,’ is all she said, and in a way that brooked no argument. ‘Now go and get dressed. I’d like to be on the road in fifteen.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked her.

  ‘To Uig.’

  I glanced at Whistler. His face had flushed pink, his big dark eyes filled with confusion. I could see an objection playing around his lips, but it never quite found voice. My aunt was not someone to be argued with.

  We drove down to Uig in silence. Me in the front with my aunt, Whistler filling most of the back seat and unusually subdued. It was a typical day in late March, the wind blowing in strongly off the Atlantic all the way down the west coast, rain never far from its leading edge. But we could see the sky almost clear to the east, and sunshine falling in shifting patches somewhere across the dead, deserted interior. Far to the south we could see where the rain fell intermittently, rainbows fleetingly crayon-colouring the sky then vanishing again as the sunlight was swallowed by more cloud. And as we left Garynahine behind us, and followed the tortuous route down to the south-west, storm clouds gathered ominously among the mountains that rose up beyond Uig, a portent of coming conflict.

  A sense of dread was already growing in me. God knows what Whistler was feeling. I glanced in the mirror and saw him sitting uncomfortably in his new clothes, but his face gave nothing away.

  To my enormous relief, there was no sign of Whistler’s dad when we arrived at the croft. My aunt banged her car door shut and confidently pushed open the door of the blackhouse.

  ‘Hello?’ she called out, to be greeted by silence.

  Whistler and I followed her in and stood wordlessly watching as she cast an appraising eye about the place. Her nose wrinkled with disgust.

  ‘Show me where you sleep,’ she said, and Whistler led her into the tiny room at the back that was his bedroom. It smelled rank in here, his bed unmade, sheets sweat-stained and dirty. She went through the wardrobe, and a chest of drawers, finding little more than a pair of jeans with the knees out of them, and a couple of ragged old jumpers. There was a pair of mud-caked wellies, and a drawer with two or three pairs of threadbare socks and some underpants. Like the ones she had thrown away, the elastic was rotten. ‘Where are the rest of your clothes?’ she demanded.

  He shrugged. ‘In the laundry.’

  ‘And who does your laundry?’

  ‘I take it with me to Stornoway during the week.’ It was the first time I had realized the importance of the student lodgings to Whistler. It was the one place he could keep himself clean, where he could shower and do his laundry. I glanced at my aunt and saw a look that I knew well. A contained rage. She turned and marched back out to the living room. There was an old refrigerator next to a sink filled with unwashed dishes. She threw it open and stood looking inside. The interior bulb was long gone. ‘Turn on the lights,’ she instructed, and Whistler obeyed without a word. She peered into the dark interior of the fridge. ‘There’s nothing but beer in here. Where’s the food?’

  Whistler shrugged and opened a wall cupboard on the other side of the sink. There was some chipped and broken crockery, a half-empty bag of sugar gone solid from the damp. Teabags. A jar of instant coffee. A jar of jam which she opened to find mould growing inside. On a worktop below it, there was a bread tin with half a loaf of stale bread inside it. I could see the horror on my aunt’s face.

  ‘What do you eat?’

  Whistler blew air through loosely pursed lips. ‘Fish, mostly. At the weekends. Whatever I can catch.’ He glanced at me, and I felt his embarrassment for him. ‘But I do most of my eating during the week.’ And I remembered how he had devoured my aunt’s late breakfast that morning as if he hadn’t eaten in a week, and maybe he hadn’t. It had never occurred to me that the only place he got a square meal was at school. It was a miracle he was growing at the rate he was.

  ‘What the fuck’s going on here?’

  We all turned at the roar of Whistler’s dad’s voice. Mr Macaskill’s big frame seemed to fill the room, casting its shadow across us.

  ‘You will not use language like that in the presence of the children!’ My aunt’s voice scythed through the fetid air of the Macaskill blackhouse and reduced the big man by several inches. He looked confused. It was the first time in a long time that either
of us had been called children, and I doubted if any woman had ever spoken to Mr Macaskill like that in his life.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’

  She took several steps towards him, and Whistler and I moved aside to let her past. The difference between them was almost comical. This tiny lady confronting a giant of almost biblical proportions. David and Goliath. But there was no question of who was the more dominant. ‘You filthy brute of a man!’ Her voice was shrill and intense and filled with fury. ‘You send your child out into the world hungry and dressed in rags, while you drink your life away. Maybe it’s a worthless life anyway. And maybe you don’t care about it.’ She flung out a clenched fist, finger pointed at Whistler. ‘But here’s a young life that’s worth something. A young life that needs nurtured and fed. Not neglected and abused.’

  She spun around and returned to the fridge, throwing open the door and reaching inside to scoop all those cans of beer into the crook of her arm and sweep them out and on to the floor. The noise of it was startling, and we all three of us looked at her in amazement.

  ‘Next time I come, I want to see this fridge filled with food, not alcohol. And I want to see clothes in the drawers of that boy’s room, and clean sheets on his bed. And if you are not capable of doing that, Mr Macaskill, then I will make it my personal crusade to have this young man removed from your care, and whatever benefits you scrounge from the state taken from you as well.’ Her face was flushed now, and she was breathing hard. ‘Is that clear?’ And when the dumbstruck Mr Macaskill failed to respond she raised her voice in pitch. ‘Is that clear?’

  The big man blinked, cowed and subdued, in just the way I had seen Mairead dominate Whistler. ‘Aye.’

  ‘Call yourself a father? You should be ashamed of yourself.’

  Whistler’s dad glanced at his son, and I was astonished to see that there was, in fact, shame in his face, as if perhaps he had always known what a lousy father he was. But it had taken my aunt to make him see it.

  ‘Come on,’ she said suddenly. ‘Coats off, all of you.’ and she took off her own. ‘We’re going to make this place habitable.’

  We spent the rest of that Saturday afternoon cleaning the house from top to bottom. There was no washing machine, but once the big Belfast sink had been cleaned, my aunt stripped the beds and hand-washed the sheets. They dried in no time on the line she got Mr Macaskill to put up outside.

  Mountains of rubbish accumulated against the exterior wall as she went ruthlessly around the house selecting stuff for the bin. Boxes of full and empty cans of beer, piles of bottles. Filthy clothes and sheets. Broken and cracked crockery. The detritus of lives neglected and in decline. And as Mr Macaskill washed the floorboards with an old brush, like scrubbing the deck of a boat, Whistler and I set about cleaning years of grime from the windows. My aunt sat at the table and wrote out a shopping list.

  When she had finished she thrust it at Whistler’s dad. ‘Priority stuff,’ she said. ‘Food, clothes, bed linen. You don’t look after that lad of yours, trust me, your life won’t be worth the living of. And I’ll be back to make sure of it.’

  He took it from her and nodded.

  When we left that day, I was full of trepidation for my friend, and I could see, too, that he was afraid of being alone with his father. He never talked in detail to me about what happened when we’d gone, except to say that they had sat for a long time in silence that night, his father sober for the first time he could remember. And that finally, unbidden, Mr Macaskill had looked at his boy and said, ‘I’m sorry, son.’

  After that weekend my aunt encouraged me to spend as much time there as possible. I don’t think she needed me to be her eyes and ears, because I am almost certain she made frequent trips down to Uig herself during the week when we were at school, but I guess she wanted me to be around as a constant reminder to Mr Macaskill that an eye was being kept on him. And that is how I came to be there the weekend we decided to go fishing up at Loch Tathabhal.

  It was early in April that year, and there had been an uncommon amount of rain, even for the west coast of Lewis. A slow-moving front which had been picking up moisture over three thousand miles of Atlantic Ocean had settled itself over the island and was shedding its accumulated cargo in copious amounts. It was mild, though, with soft warm winds blowing up from the south-west. Excellent early-season fishing weather. There were lots of young brown trout up in the lochs, that would be delicious slow-roasted in tinfoil over the glowing embers of a peat fire, and Whistler and I were determined to bag a few.

  Of course, we’d have been in trouble if the water-bailiff had caught us, though they weren’t so bothered in those days. Poaching wasn’t the problem it became, and the rivers and lochs were teeming with trout. The worst that might have happened would have been a kick up the backside and getting our fish confiscated. But if they’d caught us with salmon that would have been another story. So we contented ourselves with the trout, and kept our eyes skinned for the water-bailiff or the gamekeeper.

  It had taken us nearly two hours to walk up to the loch. The peaks of Mealaisbhal and Cracabhal and Tathabhal above us were lost in the clouds. Water was cascading down the track in gushing rivulets, exposing the bed of big sea pebbles that were its foundation, swirling in frantic eddies and churning up potholes that could break an axle. Deep drainage channels dug in the peat were overflowing with the thousands of gallons of brown rainwater running off the mountains.

  Although we wore waxed jackets with hoods, and wellies, and waterproof leggings, we were both soaked by the time we got there. I could see Whistler’s big plump cheeks, pink and shining with the rain, grinning at me through the circle of hood that left his face exposed, black hair smeared across his forehead. But I also saw caution in his eyes, and he nodded towards the gate at the foot of the track leading up to Loch Tathabhal.

  There was a Land Rover parked there. We scanned every horizon, then, but saw no one, and approached the vehicle in silence. Whistler put his hand on the bonnet. ‘Cold. It’s been here a while.’ I wiped the rain away from the side window and peered inside. The keys were dangling in the ignition. On the passenger seat there was a copy of that day’s newspaper, and a fisherman’s woollen cap with homemade flies pinned all along its skip. Useless as protection in these conditions. But I recognized it immediately.

  ‘It’s big Jock Macrae’s,’ I said. The water-bailiff.

  Whistler nodded. ‘Better be careful, then.’

  We made our way up the track towards the loch, following the line of a stream that in summer was not much more than a trickle. Now, though, it was a thunderous flow of water, breaking and splashing over the rocks and boulders that tumbled down the slope in a series of dramatic drops towards Loch Raonasgail below. The stream had burst its banks where the land levelled out towards Loch Tathabhal, swelling to a width of ten or twelve feet where it left the loch, sweeping in full spate towards the falls.

  By the time we reached the loch itself, we saw that the level had risen to the point where the water was passing just inches below the old wooden bridge. Normally it had a clearance of four or five feet. If it got any higher, it would sweep the flimsy structure away, leaving just the drystone stanchions at either side. But even those were in danger, water flowing around them with a power that filled the air with its fury. Whistler raised his voice to shout above it. ‘Let’s cast from the bridge. Loch side. The currents are bound to draw the fish this way.’ We were rank amateurs in those days.

  I nodded, and we clambered up over the stones and on to the bridge itself. There was a wooden rail that ran along the loch side of it that we could lean on and cast. We dropped our bags and assembled our rods, the water rushing beneath our feet in a torrent. Scary in its power and proximity. I didn’t dare look at it, or it made me giddy.

  Whistler grinned. ‘This is the life, eh?’

  I grinned back, and for some extraordinary reason took a step backwards before casting. I was gone in a second. A momentary sense of flying through
thin air, before hitting the water and feeling the power of it sweep me away. The cold took my breath with it and I couldn’t even cry out. And then I was under, and knew with absolute certainty that I was going to die.

  I have heard people say that in the seconds before a crash, or a life-threatening accident, time seems to stand still and you have all that you need of it to rewind your life, spooling back through those moments that exist only in your memory and are about to be lost for ever. I didn’t experience it like that.

  The first thing I felt was pain as I was dashed against a rock dividing the flow of water. The force of the impact and the current of the water itself lifted me out of it for a few vital seconds. I could see how the stream dropped away below me, white water breaking over boulders and cascading in spumes and spray through the rain that continued to fall. And I found myself almost beached on the slab of rock which had broken my downward momentum, sliding over its slippery black surface, face down, feet first, knowing that unless I could hold on to it I would certainly be smashed and broken by the succession of drops that lay ahead.

  As I slid inexorably across the angle of its face, water breaking all around me, I tried desperately to find a handhold, fingers seeking anything they could grab. I felt myself going, and the conviction of death returned before, at the very last, my fingertips found a seam that broke across its smooth surface, and they locked into the two inches of ledge it provided.

  For those few vital seconds, I felt my body washing about below me in the flow, as if hands were trying to grab me and pull me down. But my tenuous grasp on the rock stopped that downward drag. At least long enough for me to swing my right arm across the rock and find a crack in the gneiss that gave me something more substantial to hold on to.