The Chessmen l-3

by Peter May

  At one point, I could feel her resting her head against my shoulder. I wanted so much to turn and look at her face, to find her eyes with mine, and her lips, and kiss her softly. But I daren’t take my eyes off the road.

  My mind was seething with conflicting emotions. Desire, fear, and a thousand imagined possibilities. What was I going to say to her when we got back to town? How was I going to make the moment last? Was there even the slightest chance that she had asked me for a ride back because she had always secretly fancied me? I rehearsed a dozen lines in my head. ‘What are you doing tonight?’ ‘Fancy going for a coffee?’ Each of them utterly banal and lacking in wit or inspiration.

  When we finally came over the top of Matheson Road and turned into Springfield Road, I pulled in at the pavement by the school gate. Most of the others had got there ahead of us. All soaked. But the rain had gone off by now, and they stood around in groups animated by conversation and laughter. Mairead swung her leg over my back wheel and smiled at me. Her hair was wet and smeared all over her face. She removed it from her eyes with elegant fingers, and I thought I had never seen her look more lovely.

  My eyes were immediately drawn to the flash of white blouse below her blazer. Soaked and made see-through by the rain, I was shocked to see the outline of her breasts, and the darker circles of her areolae visible through the flimsiest of bras. She looked down to see what I was looking at, but just smiled and buttoned her blazer shut. Slowly, without haste or embarrassment, her eyes fixed on mine, only too aware of the effect she was having. I think I must have blushed like a girl. And all the lines I had been repeating in my head disappeared in a sea of hormones. I couldn’t find a single thing to say.

  She said, ‘Thanks, Fin. See you later.’ And she hurried off to join her friends. It was one of those moments in my life that I have replayed many times. And each time I returned her smile, unblushing, and said something clever that won her over. How smart we can be after the event, how suave and sophisticated in our imaginations. Donald would have known what to say and do, and would no doubt have ended up sleeping with her. Not that night, perhaps, but sometime. And, who knows? Knowing Donald, maybe he did.

  My close encounter of the second kind came not long after that. I was down at Uig the following weekend. The band wasn’t playing, and Whistler and I had decided to take the tent up into the mountains to do a little illicit fishing for brown trout. We pitched it on the shores of one of the myriad lochs west of Brinneabhal. The land there opened up below the mountains, with views across the moor and the machair towards the cliffs, the Atlantic breaking creamy white all along the shattered coastline.

  The cloud was down so low you couldn’t see the tops of the mountains, and the rain drifted across the loch like a mist. We sat in our waterproofs and wellies among the rocks along the shore, rods raised, lines cast out across the dark, rippling water. Neither of us was in any great hurry to land a fish. That would come, we knew. The loch was teeming with them. As long as we had a couple of trout to roast on the fire by the time we were hungry we would be happy. Those are days in my life that I look back on with great nostalgia. Moments long gone, that I wish could be recaptured and lived again. Impossible, of course.

  We hadn’t spoken for some time. But it was a comfortable silence. The best friendships are the ones that don’t need words to fill the silences.

  Suddenly Whistler said, ‘How come you turn into such a bumbling idiot every time Mairead so much as looks at you?’

  I was so shocked I swung my head around to look at him and couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Eventually I muttered, ‘Do I?’

  Whistler gave me one of his looks. ‘Aye, you do.’

  Which gave me time enough to recover my wits and issue a hot denial. ‘I do not!’

  Now he laughed. ‘You fancy her, don’t you?’

  I could hardly deny it. ‘Who doesn’t?’

  He gazed out across the water. ‘She’s not like you think she is, you know.’

  ‘Isn’t she?’

  He gave a little shrug of his shoulders. ‘Everyone thinks she’s super-cool, super-confident, arrogant even. Self-obsessed and full of herself.’

  I didn’t say anything. I could hardly have summed her up better myself.

  But Whistler shook his head. ‘Truth is, that underneath it all she’s really very insecure.’

  ‘How would you know?’

  He kept his eyes on the point where his line entered the water and its reflection made an oblique angle with it. ‘Me and Mairead were together through most of primary school. I even took her to the qually dance in primary seven.’

  That was the first time I had heard about their past relationship and I looked at him with jealous awe. ‘Wow. What happened? I mean, why aren’t you still together?’

  He pushed out his lower jaw and cocked his head to one side. ‘All good things come to an end.’

  Of course, Kenny told me later that it was Roddy coming between them that brought about the end. But Whistler wasn’t about to confess that then.

  ‘The thing is, I know her. Grew up with her. She’s not really like that. She’s confused and mixed up, and. . well, trying to be something she’s not.’ He glanced at Fin. ‘That’s why she and Roddy are off and on like a hot-water tap. Roddy’s girl is who she’d like to be. The image, I mean. But it’s not really her.’ He grinned then. ‘I think maybe she’s got a wee bit of a fancy for you.’

  I felt myself blushing to the roots of my hair. ‘Crap!’

  ‘Is it? She could have picked anyone for the ride back to Stornoway the other day. But she chose you, Fin. And I’ve seen the way she looks at you.’

  ‘Aw, give it a break!’ I stopped being embarrassed and figured he was just winding me up now.

  He shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’ And he turned his eyes back to the loch. ‘Just thought you should be aware of it, so you don’t miss your big chance next Friday.’

  I frowned. ‘What’s happening next Friday?’

  ‘Big Donald Ruadh and Ceit “Cat” Mackinnon are getting married over at Mangurstadh. You’ve been invited, haven’t you?’

  ‘Oh. Yes.’ I’d forgotten all about it. Donald Ruadh was from Ness, a second cousin or something. I never quite knew. It was not uncommon to be related to folk without knowing it. He was ten years older than all of us, of course, and a bit of a Jack the Lad. The last thing anyone expected was that he would get married. Least of all to a lassie from Uig that he hadn’t even got pregnant. The marriage was to be conducted at the church at Baile na Cille, and the celebrations held afterwards at Ceit’s house at Mangurstadh. One of those weddings that would go on all through the night and end up with breakfast the following morning. Which is why it was on the Friday, and not the Saturday. Because then the party would have had to end at midnight with the coming of the Sabbath.

  Whistler said, ‘Well, me and Roddy and Mairead are invited, too. And no doubt Roddy’ll be taking Cairistiona.’ Cairistiona was Roddy’s latest flame. A flame that would flicker and die the moment Mairead wanted him back again. But for the moment Mairead was unattached, and Whistler added, ‘Which means that Mairead’ll be available to whichever of us is the first to ask her to dance.’ His eyes were gleaming now, his smile mischievous. ‘Are you up to the challenge, boy?’

  ‘Challenge?’

  ‘Aye. To the victor the spoils. Or maybe you don’t have the balls to ask her.’

  It was easy, sitting up there, to enter into the spirit of the dare, imagining myself walking up to Mairead and asking for a dance. And, even better, the thought of her saying yes, and me holding her close and feeling the heat of her body against mine and the softness of her breasts pressing into my chest as I held her in my arms. Easy to dream when you are a million miles from the reality. But the memory of her sitting behind me on the bike, her arms around me, was still fresh in my mind, and for a moment I believed that anything was possible.

  I grinned back at Whistler. He’d had her and lost her. Maybe it was my tu
rn.

  The little church at Baile na Cille sat up on the hill above the machair and had panoramic views out over Uig sands. It was packed for the ceremony. Standing room only. It was late on the Friday afternoon, and by the time everyone got back to the house at Mangurstadh it was almost seven. Broad daylight, of course, since midsummer was only just by, and it would be hours before the sun dipped into the ocean beyond the far horizon. And even then it would never get fully dark.

  Ceit Mackinnon’s parents lived in a whitehouse at the end of a rough track heading out towards Mangurstadh beach. There had been two extensions built on to it, front and back, and there was a large stone barn with a rustred corrugated roof where the dance would be held. There were cars parked everywhere along the track, as far up as the road, and in the field next to a disused sheep fank.

  You could just see the beach from here, and beyond it a tendril of headland at the south end of the bay, slabs of cliffs rising out of the ocean where they had stood firm for eons against the onslaught of the Atlantic. This was green, rolling machair land, peppered with occasional crofts and meandering drystone dykes that had long since tumbled into desuetude. To the south and east, the mountains rose up into a gathering of clouds. To the west, the sea lay shimmering in sunshine. The young couple had been lucky with the weather.

  In the crowd at the church I had only caught the briefest glimpse of Mairead. I had arrived in a white minibus with a group of guests from Ness, and was tied to them for my lift to the house. By the time I got there, Mairead was with all the Uig women in the kitchen preparing the meal.

  They had set out two long tables in the house. One in the sitting room, another in the dining room. But it still wasn’t enough to seat all the guests at once. We knew we would be called in to eat in shifts, and so contented ourselves with hanging about outside, smoking and laughing and drinking beer from big casks that they’d brought down from Stornoway. It was a long wait.

  A number of guests had arrived with chickens and rabbits for the meal. You never took a dead animal to a wedding, so they had to be killed, and plucked or skinned, then gutted and cooked. But there was no hurry, since no one would be leaving until the following morning.

  I saw Whistler once or twice, but he was busy with the Uig crowd. You hung about in your own village groups, like factions at a tribal gathering. The real mixing wouldn’t start till the music kicked off and the dancing began. Then the beer, and the whisky which had come in half-bottles in the back pockets of most of the men, would have loosened inhibitions, and a good time would be had by all.

  By the time the Niseachs had been called in to eat it was late, and the light was fading. I’d had quite a few beers already, and was flushed and a little unsteady on my feet. A lot of the men were dressed in kilts. But I didn’t have one and was wearing my good suit, which was shiny around the arse and the elbows. My conservative dark-blue tie was pulled loose at the open collar of my white shirt. I could barely eat for nerves, because I knew that sooner rather than later I was going to have to face Mairead with the big question.

  Girls have no idea how hard it is for a teenage boy to pluck up the courage to ask for a date or a dance. They must always take the initiative, with the ever-attendant risk of refusal, and therefore humiliation. And so I found myself putting off the moment.

  When I had finished eating, I sought out the Ness boys who were out back, and we stood talking and smoking, and watching the sea turn from dimpled copper to blood red before fading to a dark-blue haze, the smudge on the horizon that was St Kilda vanishing in the dusk. I heard the music starting up in the barn. An accordionist and a fiddler. I had kept an eye out for Whistler, but had only caught the occasional glimpse of him. It seemed like a long time since he had winked at me and given me the thumbs up across the heads of the other guests before disappearing into the barn.

  Now I saw him coming out, head down, hands thrust deep into his pockets. He pushed past us and wandered off towards the old cart track that ran down to the beach. I stamped out my cigarette and hurried after him. ‘What’s wrong?’

  He didn’t even turn his head. ‘Fuck off,’ he said in a low growl.

  I tried to grab his arm to stop him walking, but he shook it free of my grasp. ‘What happened, Whistler?’

  ‘She wouldn’t dance with me.’ He turned to look at me, his eyes lost below a gathering of his brows. ‘Nearly six years I went with her at primary, and she just blew me off. Said she was waiting for someone else.’ He looked away again. ‘I suppose that would be you.’

  ‘No way!’

  ‘Well, who else, then? Roddy’s sitting in there smooching in a corner with that Cairistiona. Strings is with some girl from third year. And Mairead would never even look at Skins or Rambo, I can guarantee you that.’ He turned a contemptuous sneer in my direction. ‘It can only be you. Why else would she have asked you for that ride back to Stornoway?’

  I could scarcely believe it. Could Mairead Morrison really be waiting in the barn for me to ask her to dance?

  ‘Go on, you daft bastard. Better get in there before she gets fed up and says yes to someone else.’

  The barn had felt huge when I looked in earlier and it was still empty. Now it was filled to the gunwales and appeared tiny. Folk stood two or three deep around the walls, the Drops of Brandy being danced with great relish in the centre of a mud floor strewn with hay. Couples spun up and down the lines of facing men and women waiting for their turn to go birling along the aisle arm-in-arm with their partners.

  There were storm lamps hanging from the rafters, and smoke rose into the roof space along with the music and laughter. I spotted Mairead standing on her own at the far end of the barn, peering anxiously over the heads of the dancers as if looking for someone. I took a deep breath and pushed my way through the crowd. She saw me coming at the last, and gave me one of her smiles. ‘Hi Fin. Having a good time?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, suddenly uncertain, and having to shout above the noise. But it was now or never. ‘Would you like to dance?’

  She grinned. ‘I’d love to.’ And for just a moment my whole world stood still. ‘But I came with someone, and I don’t think he’d be very happy if I did.’

  It was as if she had stuck a pin in me and I had just burst, like the balloon that I was. ‘Who?’ I couldn’t help myself.

  ‘Whistler, of course.’ And she smiled past me as Whistler appeared out of the crowd to take her hand and lead her away to the floor. I stood gaping after them in disbelief, and Whistler half turned to glance back in my direction, his face split by the widest of grins. He winked at me and slipped his arm around Mairead’s waist.

  The worst thing about it, I think, was that I was trapped there with my humiliation. All I wanted to do was go home. But I couldn’t. I had to endure a long night of male company, cigarettes and beer, catching all too frequent glimpses of Whistler and Mairead in and out of the barn.

  When finally we nursed our hangovers through breakfast the following morning and got into the minibus for the long drive home, my humiliation had been replaced by anger. I realized then that Whistler’s jealousy had been aroused the day Mairead rode back to town with me, and this whole elaborate charade at the wedding had been his way of warning me off. It took me a long time to get over it. I don’t think I spoke to him again until after the holidays.

  It is clear to me now, though, that he must have been trying desperately to win her back. That he had always been in love with her and always would be. And that all through her on-off relationship with Roddy, he had harboured the hope that one day she would come back to him. A hope that he had recognized, finally, in fifth year, was a forlorn one. That she was embarking on a journey he couldn’t make, on a road he could never follow.

  Which is why he took the decision to stay at home while the rest of us left for Glasgow. He had lost her, and wasn’t about to play the role of rejected lovesick puppy through all the university years. And when I look back now, with the understanding of hindsight, I feel no anger
. Only sadness.

  What I could never have dreamed back then was that my fantasy of a relationship with Mairead would finally be realized three years later during my second, ill-fated year at university in Glasgow.

  I had been roadying for the band for nearly a year and a half by then, paying less and less attention to my studies, and growing increasingly unhappy with my life and myself. I had fallen into a sort of tailspin in the wake of my final split with Marsaili. Driving for Amran was a mindless activity that earned me much-needed cash and gave me access to a succession of groupies who would sleep with the driver if that was the closest they could get to the band. A sordid and unsatisfying succession of sexual encounters that did nothing to increase my self-esteem.

  I was never one to seek escape in drink or drugs, but I did my fair share of drinking, and smoked more than my fair share of joints. My problem was one of lassitude. I just couldn’t bring myself to care. About anything.

  It was late winter, around February or March. We had played a gig somewhere on the south side of the city, and had been invited afterwards to a party in one of those huge, red-sandstone mansions in Pollokshields. It sat up proud at the top of a sprawling garden, surrounded by chestnut trees, black and stark in their winter nakedness. A corner site in a gushet that must have occupied a couple of acres.

  An enormous conservatory with elaborate curving roofs had been built on to the back of the house to contain an indoor swimming pool. The house itself was tastefully furnished. Thick-piled woollen carpets, signed prints on the walls, antique furniture. Hugely expensive crystal and china ornaments lined shelves and were displayed in cabinets. It was not the ideal playground for fifty or sixty young people high on dope and drink, and intent on having a good time.

  Mairead and Roddy, it appeared, had finally broken up for good, and Roddy was there with his new girlfriend, a beautiful blonde-haired girl called Caitlin. This was her parents’ house, and they were away on holiday. Self-appointed guardian in their place was Caitlin’s brother, Jimbo, an unpleasant young man with a designer haircut and a single ring in his ear. He appeared to have several girls on hand, and was strutting about the house in his Gucci shoes and Armani suit as if he owned the place.