Ghost Moon

by Ron Butlin

  By the time she’d found out what bus she should take, it had already departed and the next wasn’t due to leave until the following morning.

  A taxi?

  She’d no money for taxis.

  But then she’d no money for hotels either.

  The boarding house Maggie was directed to overlooked Stornoway harbour. The landlady, a woman who introduced herself as Mrs Stewart, ushered her into the sitting room, talking all the while about the promise of a good summer to come and asking if she’d be taking a cup of tea with them?

  ‘This is my son Michael,’ she added, indicating a man in his thirties seated by the fire.

  Maggie was surprised when son Michael made no move to get up from his chair to greet her; instead he simply held out his hand, letting it waver slightly as he fumbled the empty air to make contact.

  ‘Pleased to meet you.’ His voice had such unexpected warmth and assurance that she let her hand remain in his as he invited her to lean towards him. Next moment, he had reached up to pass his fingers over her face. It only took a few seconds, his fingertips were so gentle she hardly felt their touch. His eyes meanwhile remained still, seeming to be permanently awash with milk. She kept expecting him to blink to clear his vision, but he never did.

  While she and Mrs Stewart discussed terms, Maggie noticed that the glass on the mantelpiece clock had been removed. Hours later, lying sleeplessly upstairs, she was to imagine the blind man getting up from his chair, taking a few steps across the well-charted darkness to hold his hands up to the clock face in front of him, feeling for the time.

  The cost of one night’s lodging settled, she was shown up to the first-floor bedroom. Having pointed out the bathroom and WC at the end of the corridor, the older woman then lowered her voice to explain about her son returning from the war, blinded for life. ‘But at least he came back. Not like my husband.’ Adding, as if to remind herself: ‘We count ourselves lucky.’

  Dinner was fish and chips, sitting on a bench that overlooked the sea. Then Maggie took a walk round the harbour before returning to the boarding house. It was still light when she went to bed.

  ‘A grand summer’s morning, sure enough. On holiday, are you?’ Mrs Stewart had come through to offer more tea.

  ‘Just a short break.’

  ‘That’ll be nice – a few days to yourself before your husband joins you.’

  Though her porridge hadn’t had time to cool properly, Maggie at once doubled her spooning rate. ‘I’ve never been to Lewis before and hear it’s beautiful.’

  ‘Aye, when the rain’s crossed to the mainland and the midges are safe in their beds, it has a beauty like nowhere else on earth. You could try visiting the west coast, over Bernera way.’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘You’ll have folk to visit, more like?’ The teapot was positioned on its protective cork mat, the tea-cosy replaced.

  Hot spoonful after hot spoonful was being cleared rapidly under Mrs Stewart’s steady gaze.

  ‘Can I get you some toast, Mrs Davies?’

  ‘No thank you, Mrs Stewart. I’d best be getting my things ready.’ One last spoonful and she was finished. ‘Thank you for the lovely breakfast – a great start to the day.’ She got to her feet. ‘I’ll look in before I go, to settle up.’

  Ten minutes later Maggie made her way to the terminus where the bus waited to take her to the Eye Peninsula.

  Once out of Stornoway, the Portnaguran bus rattled and bumped along the single track road sounding its horn every few minutes to warn slow-moving horse-and-carts to pull into the nearest passing place. It stopped to let off passengers at small villages, at road ends and junctions, at single houses even. When it crossed the open stretch of causeway the bus seemed to fill with light and, on either side, there was a glitter of sun-splashed waters and endless sky. The peninsula itself was flat moorland, utterly treeless. Maggie began keeping watch for road signs announcing the next huddle of cottages and the occasional black house with its turf roof – the village of Knock . . . then Melbost . . . Sleebost . . .

  The photograph showed a stone-built house set well back from the road. The Callanders were distant family. Maggie had never met them, but for as long as she could remember there’d been an exchange of Christmas cards between the two households. On taking over their croft a year or so before, they’d written to her parents inviting them to visit any time, adding that their daughter, if she was still living at home, might fancy coming over for a longer stay. She could help around the croft and with the peat-cutting, they’d suggested – and there were more than enough local men back from the war who were still looking for a wife! ‘Maybe you’d have better luck in the Hebrides than in these awful dance halls,’ her mother had remarked as she’d propped up the photograph on the mantelpiece, next to some postcards. ‘John and Isobel – Céad mile fáilte’ was scribbled on the back, ‘a hundred thousand welcomes’.

  Maggie peered once more at the photograph, holding it up close to the bus window to see better the weathered-looking building with its storm windows set deep in the wall, the cement path with vegetable patch on one side, drying green on the other, and the moorland stretching beyond the fence. Not a tree in sight and hardly a bush even, nothing to relieve the emptiness of the landscape. While pacing the ship’s deck she’d gone up that front path a score of times at least, trying to decide how she’d introduce herself – and she’d still no idea.

  Mr and Mrs Callander, John and his wife Isobel, had done their best to take up a happy-family pose on the front step of their new property – arms round each other, the promise of kindness showing in their faces, and Callander squinting into the sun’s glare with a hand raised to shield his eyes. Maggie tilted the photo to catch the best light.

  ‘clachtarvie!’ The driver had to call out several times before she realised she’d come to her stop – she’d been far too engrossed in what she could make out of Mr Callander’s face and in the cheerful smile his wife was giving to the camera.

  The bus drove off leaving her in the middle of nowhere. There was a scattering of cottages, the peat bog, and a clear-sounding peewit, peewit from high up in the sky – no bird to be seen, however. Ahead lay the dazzling sheen of sunlight caught by the sea. Like the landscape in the black-and-white photograph but friendlier-looking, and with the pleasing warmth of the sun on her skin.

  To her left an unpaved road led down towards a bay. There were no street signs, but this had to be the right direction. She began walking. The houses on either side stood a good fifty feet apart, each on its own patch of ground. She made her way down the street inspecting them as she passed. It was hot now, but with a chill undercurrent blowing in from the sea. At the last house on the right, she stopped. Yes, here was the place she knew so well from the photograph. Someone had made a start on pebble-dashing the front wall and small stones lay heaped nearby. Maybe she could offer to help them finish? A life-sized jigsaw where all the pieces were the same – easy! The wreck of a dark-blue car, wheel-less, with its axles up on blocks and one of the side doors missing, squatted over by the fence. Its bumper trailed in the uncut grass.

  Pushing the gate so that it swung open to admit her . . . Waiting for it to close with a dull thwack of wood against wood . . .

  Forcing herself the three, four, five, six steps up the path.

  The door turned out to be varnished a dark brown. There was no bell. She put down her suitcase.

  A deep breath. Her hand lifted ready to knock . . .

  Her last chance to turn back.

  Her firm rap on the wood panel echoed inside the house. Such a dull hollowness was nothing like the cheerful tongue-and-clapper jingle made by a city tenement doorbell swinging on its wire to announce that she’d arrived at a friend’s and was waiting downstairs, eager to be let in. Back home, in a decade that had seen parts of Edinburgh and Glasgow turned to rubble, the purely physical summons of bare
knuckles battering on someone’s door would have suggested urgency and alarm, a warning that something terrible was happening or had already taken place – a house bombed, the danger of fire, escaped gas or the building’s imminent collapse. Here on the Outer Hebrides, however, her knock would hold no such threat. It was a friendly tap on a door, nothing more. This was how things were done here and always had been, she told herself, a commonplace gesture of neighbourliness. Having knocked once, she lifted her hand away . . . and took a step back.

  No need to repeat the knock. Maggie could hear someone coming, calling ahead in a rush of Gaelic as they made their way from the back of the house. In time, she thought to herself, she’d probably have to learn the language.

  The door swung open. A man stood in the half-darkness of the interior. John Callander, it had to be. Red hair, red face. Smaller than in the photograph, dressed in a collarless shirt and waistcoat. Slippers. What had probably been intended as words of welcome were broken off in mid-phrase.

  Now they were face to face, was he about to greet her, to smile and shake her hand?

  To step aside, perhaps, ready to throw the door wide open?

  Was he about to take charge of her suitcase, and invite her in?

  Was he hell.

  John Callander stared at her and said nothing. There was a movement in the dimly lit hallway behind him, a suggestion of sweeping yellow hair and pale-coloured jersey. This would be Mrs Callander. Leaning against the inside of the door, she, too, seemed in no hurry to do anything.

  Maggie looked from one to the other and back again. Red man. Yellow woman. John and wife Isobel. Their combined silence blocking her entry.

  She cleared her throat. ‘Hello, I’m Maggie Davies. I’ve come from Edinburgh and — ’

  ‘Yes, we know who you are . . .’

  The contempt in his voice, the disgust.

  As if a charge of electricity had found a hateful circuitry already in place inside her, she felt her body seize, her every muscle lock tight. She couldn’t breathe even, the next few seconds swelling up in her chest, her throat – a solid, choking mass.

  ‘. . . and we know all about you.’ Callander took a step back into his house. And slammed the door in her face.

  Stumbling over to the derelict car to slump against its rusted bonnet, tears running down her face. Not even the strength to wipe them away.

  The partly pebble-dashed stonework, the vegetables planted in their rows, the trackless moorland, the very sky itself – everything around her suddenly reduced to a meaningless slapdash.

  She’d come to where the world stops.

  She stayed there.

  It was not until later, when she heard the sound of a vehicle going past on the main road, that she glanced up to see a van crossing the featureless landscape – she watched it getting smaller and smaller, its windscreen catching the sun’s glare for a moment as the road curved. Finally it vanished. At one point a teenage boy wearing an oversized army coat came out of the cottage opposite. He took his bicycle from where it leant against the wall and wheeled it across the garden before mounting. A last wave to someone at the window before he set off across the peat bog, his too-long coat tails flapping with each pedal thrust. Like the car earlier, he too grew smaller and smaller as he headed further into the flat, empty landscape. Finally he too vanished.

  The Callanders remained indoors all this time. What did they do while waiting for her to leave? Did they flick through the newspaper? Listen to the radio? Read their Bibles? Did they glance at each other every few minutes: Has she gone yet? Or did they sit completely at their ease, secure in their faith, confident that sooner or later they’d hear her footsteps retreat back down the path, followed by the thwack of their wooden gate as she took herself and the disgrace of her unwanted pregnancy out of their lives – helter-skeltering herself straight back to Hell where she belonged?

  When Maggie eventually managed to haul herself to her feet and stumble out onto the unpaved road, she was aware of being observed from behind the tight little window – no doubt the Callanders were making sure she hadn’t left her suitcase behind.

  With only the unseen peewit for company, she dragged herself and her suitcase all the way up to the main road. Four hours later, a bus appeared. She stared out the window all the way back to Stornoway, seeing nothing.

  Having returned to the bench where she’d eaten her fish supper the night before, Maggie sat watching the comings and goings on the small ferry tied up at the dockside. From time to time smoke came in casual puffs from its funnel. Through the large window she could see two men on the bridge having a long conversation. Passengers weren’t boarding yet. Every few minutes a red-headed sailor staggered up the gangway carrying a box or a crate; the bulkier-looking packages he balanced on his shoulders. Another sailor was coiling rope on the rear deck while a third looked on, smoking a cigarette. Everyone, it seemed, had something to do.

  Should she take the ferry back to the mainland, then the train to Edinburgh? She was in good time to board, if she wanted to.

  But did she?

  Back home? Back to her parents?

  Back to Edinburgh, at least?

  Stay on Lewis?

  For what?

  But . . . back to Edinburgh?

  After a while she felt like she’d been sitting there for ever, her suitcase at her feet.

  Eventually the small ship cast off, and soon there was only a slow trail of smoke drifting above the bay. The faraway rumble of the engines grew fainter and fainter.

  Why hadn’t she gone on board? She didn’t know.

  Why had she stayed? She didn’t know that either.

  She got to her feet and made her way along to Mrs Stewart’s boarding house.

  Early next morning Maggie was woken by the sound of heavy rain. She climbed out of bed and closed her window. Standing barefoot on the cold linoleum, she watched the fishing boats manoeuvre towards the harbour mouth before passing, one by one, out into the open sea. The grey-white puff-puff-puffs from their smokestacks were flattened by the wind before being taken up, tossed into the air and shredded to nothing. The steady thud-thud-thud of the engines was blown towards the shore, and whenever an extra-strong gust rattled the glass in its frame she pressed her hand against the pane, and stilled it.

  Soon enough the storm seemed to become a live thing trying to force its way into the house. She could hear it battering its fists on the downstairs door and hurling itself at the walls, but she knew she was safe. Mrs Stewart’s house was pre-war, and by a good couple of centuries. It had outlasted many storms and would see this one out, too, no problem.

  The floor shook so much she almost expected to be lifted off her feet or else to see the walls billow in and out like the sails of a long-ago ship far out at sea . . .

  Yes, far out at sea – that was where she really was. No land in sight and her only cargo her unborn child. Men, it seemed, always had some sort of harbour to make for. That was the nature of their world – a map of place names like Normandy, Amiens, Berlin. For men it was enough to identify aims and objectives, and then draw co-ordinates – that done, and with bayonets fixed, they marched, marched, marched into the future, whatever the cost. But for her, after that reception at the Callanders’, what destination remained?

  Even though it was mainly the Leith docks that had been bombed, everyone’s life and routine had been smashed beyond repair. Something had got into the works – the grit of countless deaths, perhaps – and a new kind of routine had taken over. She herself had worked long hours in a factory making bombs she knew would kill and maim, she’d packed ammunition that would cause death to someone’s husband or son.

  The last fishing boat having gone, she returned to bed. It was only five o’clock. Back under the blankets she lay listening to the storm. Even before getting herself pregnant, what had she been hoping for? During the last year of th
e war when their housemaid Annie had left to join the WRACs, Maggie had been expected to assist her mother in running the house. She’d cooked and cleaned, she’d scrubbed floors and brushed shoes, beaten carpets, polished brass work and mopped the outside steps. She was given pocket money for tram fare, for the pictures and for the odd evening out at the dancing. By the time peace was declared, she had turned twenty-five. Would this be the way of it from now on? she’d sometimes wondered as she passed through the hall on her way back to the kitchen, carrying the dirty dishes, her footsteps falling all too readily in step with the slow relentless tick . . . tick . . . tick . . . of the grandfather clock standing at the bottom of the stairs.

  Even when she joined her friends in the packed dance halls on Princes Street or at Fairley’s Ballroom at the top of Leith Walk, she’d often been aware of that merciless tick . . . tick . . . tick . . . inside her, as if she herself had become the empty sounding-board for the hours and days and years being relentlessly sliced off her life. Twenty-five became twenty-six, became twenty-seven. Whatever the music, whatever the band, more and more she found herself alone at the edge of the floor, stranded there, waiting to be asked to dance and waiting in vain. Every man, of course, was guaranteed a partner. Ten times over. She was marking time merely.

  She turned twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty . . .

  He wore a tie-pin that was probably some kind of army crest. Having persuaded her to remain on the floor for a second dance, a slow waltz, he told her he was called Danny and invited her to have a drink with him at the bar. As they stood in the crush, he said how he’d sometimes pictured a girl like her when things had got difficult. Taking her hand, he murmured that he’d been lucky to get through it all and had come home hoping to find someone special – did she know what he meant? While he rubbed the back of her hand, almost nervously, unconsciously perhaps even, he’d added in a shy voice that he’d imagined someone who, in their turn, had been waiting and keeping themselves for someone like him. He didn’t want one of these would-be glamorous girls who paraded about like they had film-star looks and were interested only in silk stockings, cigarettes and ration coupons. He leant nearer and whispered that he wanted a quiet girl, someone trusting, affectionate – someone to care for and who would care for him in return. This was what he told her as they stood sipping their drinks between dances that first evening.