by Rob Ewing
Now the shelves are empty. Nearly. There are two farmer’s journals with red scribbled names on them. There’s swim-goggles, knitted jumpers, gloves. There’s a plastic cricket set no one ever wanted.
I tug on the string of the cricket set. It’s jammed. No, snagged at the back. Alex helps me push the shelf. It’s easy to do cos it’s empty and not stuck or nailed.
Dust, cobwebs, lentils. Then lucky kids on a mission: a packet of icing sugar! Squashed, yellow, but still sealed.
Me: ‘The latest gossip is – I got a plan!’
Alex: ‘I know your plan!’
We heave away the rest of the shelves. Some of the metal arms drop clanking. There’s more cobweb-dust – then treasure. A tin of Scotch broth (unbuckled). A tin of hot dogs in brine. A packet of pastry mix. A packet of balloons. A plastic box of paperclips.
The pastry packet is open, mouldy. But the tins are good. Eager beavers, we pull all the shelves. We can’t move the ones around the walls, they’re fixed.
Still, it’s been a good mission, one of our best.
‘We got so lucky,’ Alex says.
Calum Ian and Duncan are on the main street. We hide the things in our schoolbags, then shout on them. They’re on a mission as well: with the cars, sucking petrol for their bonfire. Duncan still has his hood up, zipped up high so it’s hard to see his eyes. From side-on I can only see his mouth: his lips are cracked and red from the petrol.
Calum Ian’s lips are red as well. He wipes his mouth and spits like a granddad. ‘A bheil am pathadh ort?’ he says, to Alex, joking, while holding up the plastic milk bottle he uses to collect. Then says to me: ‘You do it.’
He uses a stick to prise open the nearest petrol cap. When he gets the cap off I feed in the tube and suck, but I don’t have enough suck to get it going. Calum Ian gets it started – but when he hands it over it spills past my mouth and I’m nearly sick with the smell.
‘Gloic!’ Duncan points at me and laughs.
Calum Ian demonstrates perfectly how it should be done: suck, finger on the end, drop the tube down, pour. Once it’s started the petrol pours all by itself, and doesn’t even want to stop. It fills three bottles.
When he’s done Duncan uses gold spray-paint to write an on the windscreen, for mptied.
Seeing my bag he asks, ‘What you got?’
Trying not to sound boastful about it I show them our treasures. Both of them whistle, then look very interested. Calum Ian checks the dates on the hot dogs, then the broth.
‘Share and share?’ he says.
I look for getting something back. But all he does is take the hot dogs, and the broth, and the icing sugar, leaving us just with the balloons and paperclips.
Alex, looking disappointed, asks if he can dip his thumb in the sugar just once.
‘We’ll need it for emergencies,’ Calum Ian says, waving him away. ‘All right then – swap you for petrol?’
‘We don’t want petrol.’
‘All right. So have nothing.’
They pack our treasures away in their bags.
We follow behind, hoping to share back over as they suck more cars. It gets to me that I’m the smaller kid, and thinking of our reinforcement back at home I say, ‘Why’re you mean to Elizabeth at school?’
Calum Ian rubs his red mouth. ‘She’s fucking stuck-up.’
‘No she isn’t.’
‘Aye she is. She’s an incomer. Thinks she knows it all because of who her mam and dad were. But what did they do? Sat on their arses in the end. Never helped anybody. She only pretends being leader, I can tell it.’
‘You aren’t better.’
‘Gloic, you should stick up for the island folk.’
‘Stop calling me Gloic.’
Duncan gets between us. I think he’s trying to get us to stop arguing, but I can’t always feel he’s on my side if Calum Ian is standing near.
‘Just tell us your real nickname,’ Duncan says, ‘the secret one your mam used. What was it again? Then we’ll stop using that one.’
I think it might be a trick, so I don’t tell.
In the end it becomes a big deal. Duncan puts his hands together like he’s praying for me to tell any answer: and I get so annoyed at him for this that I say, ‘Your nickname is Scab Face.’
It makes him pull his jacket up high. He kicks at the wooden post of a fence, rather than me.
Calum Ian doesn’t stand up for him with his sadness, which makes it worse, really.
They put the plastic milk bottles they filled in a shopping trolley, then begin to push it home.
We follow them for a bit, and I say they’ll not be wanted if they come to visit later. Calum Ian makes an O with his mouth to show he doesn’t care. Duncan has gone back to being invisible.
‘Why’d you even collect petrol?’ I shout. ‘Your last fire didn’t work.’
Calum Ian: ‘So we’re going to make the next one bigger. Plus I got a better idea for how to start it.’
‘Your ideas never work.’
Now I get annoyed that they won’t share food or plans. So when they’re not looking I throw a stone which whizzes past Calum Ian’s head. He just waves back.
Elizabeth is waiting for us at home. We tell her about the badly shared hot dogs and broth and icing sugar. She doesn’t say much, just tells us how clever we were with our mission in the first place. Turns out, though, she’s been New Shopping – and on her own.
There are new sheets on Alex’s bed, plus tins of fruit and peas and carrots, and packet soups and biscuits. It’s a very, very good result!
We don’t ask where she went shopping, and she doesn’t offer to tell. We look through some of the other things: candles, raisins, ancient treacle, coffee filter papers, even two packets of Jammie Dodgers.
Alex: ‘Were these from a good house? I mean, were they opened already or near to—’
‘All houses are good,’ Elizabeth says quick, holding up her hand for no more questions.
‘Can there be poison that gets—’
‘Shut up, OK?’
For dinner we have to put all the food we might eat in a square for choosing. With the power of three we decide on chicken soup, beans on crackers, then raisins dipped in treacle. I like to spend ages reading the sides of the packets. Ingredients. Contents. Est weight. Best before.
Me: ‘You know why they call them ingredients?’
Elizabeth: ‘What’s your idea again?’
Me: ‘Because it’s the stuff that makes you greedy. In-GREEDY-ents.’
Elizabeth does a half-and-half smile.
I go on reading the packets as she makes our soup. Wheatgerm, rice syrup, flavourings, colourings, E116. This is how clever the world once was! Not just cream with chicken. Your statutory rights. What about statutory wrongs? Customer queries, call this number. I’ve tried to call these numbers before, on our spare charged-up phone, but there’s never any answer.
Just when I think Calum Ian and Duncan aren’t coming because of the stone I threw, they do come.
They smell of bonfire. We don’t ask what they’ve been doing. Their knees are scuffed and dirty and Duncan has black scorches on his shoes. In the shadows made by our torches his skin looks even bumpier.
We’ve all got scars: on our faces, on our backs and necks, from the sickness. I remember a lady on TV saying that the worse your scars, the worse the illness.
Duncan got the worst of all of us. After that it’s Elizabeth, then Calum Ian, then me, then Alex.
Adults and littler kids had the worst scars of all. That’s why they became so sick. That’s why we have two separate places to go and remember them. See them.
We eat dinner, which is great because it’s warm, then Calum Ian takes the best seat on the couch and says, ‘Press play, Bonus Features.’
Alex gets called Bonus Features because that’s what he thought the seventh Star Wars film was called. He’s in charge of our battery-powered DVD player. Tonight he does adverts, by using some recordings we found
, and then we get a film: Tin Toy from the Toy Story DVD.
It’s very short though, and awful soon it’s over.
Elizabeth: ‘OK, batteries out.’
Both Duncan and Alex thump their arms and feet on the carpet.
‘No no no!’ shouts Alex.
‘You’re not the ruler of me!’ says Duncan.
Alex becomes unmanageable for a bit. We try to ignore him but then Elizabeth remembers: his injection. He’s in a different mood from this morning, though, and he struggles and cries and Calum Ian has to get involved to hold him down, which only makes things worse.
Afterwards Alex rubs his stomach and cries.
‘I forgot not to be angry,’ he says.
For a treat he’s allowed batteries in his DS. For me, I decide to draw, so I tear a stamp from the book of stamps we found, and stick it in my drawing jotter. Beneath it, under the Queen’s head, I draw a fat body with an old woman’s stern hands and knees. Mum once said that the Queen had jewellery dripping off her, so on her wrists I draw pearl bracelets with richness oozing.
Alex: ‘The Queen lived on a farm in London.’
For some reason Calum Ian and Elizabeth find this funny. I find it a bit ignorant.
‘D’you think the Queen died?’ Alex asks.
‘She was old,’ Elizabeth answers. ‘But her doctors would be the best. So maybe she didn’t.’
Alex puts down his DS. ‘I think she did die. I think she got sick. I think there’s no Queen.’
Calum Ian: ‘What about the Prime Minister? I bet they put him underground, miles under where there was no bad stuff could happen. I bet he’s still there, eating apples, drinking milk. And I hope he chokes on some of that milk, and a bit of apple gets lodged and kills him.’
He chucks a rubber ball against the wall. When it comes back he catches it, nifty.
‘Who’s stronger – Santa or God?’ Alex asks Elizabeth.
‘That’s a hard one …’
‘Do you think Santa died?’
‘No, of course he didn’t. Santa can’t die.’
‘So then why didn’t he come last Christmas?’
Elizabeth sits forward, sighs. ‘I suppose I could say … well he’s a supernatural being, like a god really, so he can’t truly die. He’s protected by force fields. He’ll come this year, just you wait.’
Duncan makes a sound of spit in his throat which is disrespectful to Santa. Elizabeth does her frown at him to tell him not to give the game away.
Alex goes back to his DS for a bit. We hear swooshes and a beep-countdown then the game-over theme.
‘I absolutely hate Santa,’ he says.
Elizabeth: ‘No you don’t.’
‘Yes I do. I hate him and I hate God. And I hate baby Jesus and I hate the tooth fairy.’
‘You forgot the Easter bunny,’ Duncan says, doing his sound of spit again.
Alex says nothing.
‘Who wants a bedtime snack?’ Elizabeth asks.
By bedtime snack she means supper. By dinner she usually means tea. And when she says lunch, really that means dinner. It’s her own habit. I learnt that Elizabeth is in a separate country, and time, when it comes to food, because she’s from England.
Now Calum Ian calls her an incomer – which is kind of true, but not truly kind.
‘Incomers like their own name for food,’ he says.
Elizabeth looks away sadly, so I decide to stand up for her at once: ‘When Elizabeth’s mum and dad came to the island, they decided it was too risky for babies to be born here,’ I remind Calum Ian. ‘This meant that I got born in Glasgow. Same with all the other kids at school. So we are all incomers. Which makes you the odd-one-out.’
Alex claps; Elizabeth smiles. Calum Ian gives me the rude two-finger sign.
We turn on the gas fire. It dances blue when I blow on it. I almost prefer it to the real fire. Elizabeth gets out the sleeping bags, and we gather in to toast biscuits.
In the fire-dark her skin looks bumpy like Duncan’s. You can’t tell where the black or the blue of her eyes are, which is kind of scary, so I try not to look.
‘Do you think your mum and dad are dead?’ I ask her, without even knowing I was going to.
This is against the rules. Nobody says so.
Elizabeth burns and burns her biscuit. The smoke of it gets up my nose. She could be waxwork.
‘They are dead,’ she says.
The ask was my fault: my bad idea. So it’s my job right away to make her feel better. I say, ‘When my mum comes back from the mainland, the worst thing will be telling her about Granny, and the cousins. And my aunts and uncles. It’s going to be terrible. I’ll be glad to see her, but it’ll be terrible all the same.’
Elizabeth says nothing. So I try again: ‘My school book last year said three new babies are born for every two people dying. So at the gates of heaven it’s: hullo, hullo, hullo. Goodbye, goodbye. That’s the rule.’
Elizabeth just stares at her singed biscuit.
‘Don’t know where my mum and dad are,’ Alex says, licking his biscuit. ‘The last time I saw Mum, she was just away for a minute. Wish they’d come home.’
‘Our dad’s away on his boat,’ Duncan says, before Calum Ian can stop him. ‘He was gone away to bring food back from the mainland. That’s why we can’t be staying with you lot. We were told to wait at home. Sorry, but he ordered us there.’
‘Always do as we’re told,’ Calum Ian says.
This makes the MacNeil brothers remember about leaving. They want to get back before it’s dark. I ask Elizabeth if I should follow them and get back our food, but she tells me just to forget about it.
Our house is the shape of a loaf tin. It’s good because it doesn’t have any wrong smell. Also, there are three beds in one room, so we can sleep together. Also, it has a gas stove (Calum Ian changes the cylinders) and thick walls and a roof with flat bits for collecting rainwater.
Also, it’s not any of our old homes. This helps us to become a fresh family. Which is especially good for Elizabeth, who has no family of her own.
Before bed it’s tick-check time, then we do the routine with the radios.
Same static-noise as always.
We unpick the cereal boxes from the skylight, and lie heads together under the window. I forgot that in the summer stars don’t exist. In wintertime you can even see them going to school in the morning.
Now Elizabeth tries to remember all the things her dad said about the stars, and the sky. It doesn’t last very long. Usually if I’ve run out of memories I make stuff up, but she has a rule for herself against that.
‘The past is precious,’ she says. ‘It has to be correct.’
It’s when she starts remembering about planets going around the sun, and moons going around the planets, that I remember – the riddle that Mum told me. And because it’s a true memory, I want to tell it.
It must be a good one, a good riddle, because it gets them quiet. I know the answer but I won’t tell them.
‘You could give us a clue,’ grumbles Alex.
‘OK, here.’
For one clue only, I hold up my drawing of the Queen.
When Elizabeth puts on the night light I promise to tell them the next day if they still haven’t guessed.
Back Bay
Time – now
It’s not a very good day for seeing far out to sea. I sometimes forget to keep watching.
This morning the rain was marching adults in my dream. Mum used to call that sort of thing ‘wishful thinking’. She never said if wishing worked.
Then there are other things: things you didn’t wish for. Like the Gaelic weather sticker at the end of my bed. It said, ‘Tha i grianach’. I had to tear it, right through the happy face of the sun underneath.
All around the ferry building I put cups. Some of the plastic ones blew over, so I put round smooth stones from the shoreline in to steady them better.
Then I waited. And waited. I saw the sky go bright in a place I’d n
ever seen bright before. So what did that mean?
Did you think it was a good idea, Mum, or not?
After the light got halfway I could see my reflection in the water under the pier.
A girl with long hair. Looking like she had a beard: her hair down in straggles, covering her face.
A reminder of who we found after we saw the painted dogs.
‘Looks like you’re facing your worst enemy,’ I say to the girl. But she wins in the end by hiding herself in ripples.
Later, I went to put flowers on the sea, to remember my friends, but the tide got me, up to my waist. That was a slip-up. I have to be more careful nowadays.
I have to think of everything.
It’s too easy to make mistakes. Two days ago, when I was on watching duty, I accidentally looked at the sun with the telescope. Since then there’s been a black moon in the middle of what I’m seeing.
Even so, I’m a smarter kid for having it. I won’t make the same mistake twice. Because the more mistakes I make, the smarter I’ll get.
Still, the thing to worry about is this: how many mistakes is a person allowed? How many mistakes can a single person make and still be? There isn’t a rule, or none that Mum ever told me.
She’s telling me the answer to her riddle. It’s time to pay attention: everything else can wait.
Now I see her, and I bury down to the bottom of my sleeping bag as the sound of her starts to become real: ‘What goes around the world but stays in the corner?’
Mum’s wearing her red and blue post office jacket. She asks the question in English so we know it’s a riddle.
We pass by Mr MacKinnon’s blue-eyed collie, the one that’s always on guard. Then the phone box. Then the forest of fifteen trees, then Orasaigh, the island where the rats used to live. Floraidh MacInnes once told me that there was a storm and all the rats came ashore and ate the annoying cats, but she’s a liar, I never believed her.
‘A shy man on a boat?’ I answer.
‘Works fine. I accept it works fine, but it’s not the answer I was looking for. Try again.’
It’s my work to get the bundles together. Mum’s fingers are inky from the packets. She whistles up for hills and down for dips. She keeps spare elastic bands in a coil around her wrist which make her hand go puffy.
