by RL McKinney
‘They might be better off in the bin. Thanks though.’
‘That’s what we’re here for. However … ’ She pointed upwards. ‘Tell me why my husband is up there while you’re safely in here playing lumberjack.’ She reinforced her Essex drawl when she wanted to project a kind of jocular assertiveness. It seemed incongruous for a woman wearing jeans under a patchwork dress. Abby and Johnny had moved up from London to build a house around the same time Calum had come back from America, and her transition from urbane graphic designer to new age crofter was nearly complete. Children would come soon, and Calum figured they would be allowed to develop dreadlocks and run around in pyjamas and batman capes until they were twelve.
‘I had a wee panic to myself and he made me get down.’
‘It’s not very high.’
‘It’s high enough.’
‘Poor love. Take your mind off it. How are you and Julie?’
‘You know how we are, Abby.’
‘No I don’t.’
He glanced towards Julie’s empty cottage on the other side of the gravel drive they shared. ‘She’s away more than she’s here and that’s how she wants it.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Aye.’ He hoped a monosyllabic response would head off one of Abby’s deep, painful conversations. In her quest for a more meaningful existence, she gave herself permission to peer into your no-go areas. She was young enough to believe you could talk yourself into happy endings.
‘What about you? How do you want it?’
‘Part-time does me fine.’ He positioned a fat log on the block and took a swing.
‘Maybe all you have to do is ask for more.’
‘Would you give it a rest?’
Shock crossed her face so he straightened up again, sighed, swung the axe deep into the log and left it quivering. ‘Sorry. We’re not cosy domestic material. Neither of us. I’ve been there, I’m not going there again. Please just … stop trying to matchmake.’
Abby took his hand and squeezed it. ‘You try so hard to be a curmudgeon, and you fail miserably.’
‘No I don’t. I happen to think I’m quite good at it.’
She shook her head and led him by the hand out into the yellowy light. They stood back to watch Johnny descending the ladder.
He handed Calum the tools. ‘Done. She’s pretty sound.’
‘That’s another favour I owe you.’
‘I’m keeping a list.’ Johnny dusted cobwebs from his knees, wiped his hands on the belly of his shirt and glanced towards the house. ‘What’s for eating?’
Abby dusted his back. ‘Carrot and cardamom scones, just made.’
‘What’s the matter with plain old cheese?’ Johnny muttered.
‘No plain old anything for you, my love,’ she said, and kissed him on the lips. ‘Let’s go put the kettle on. So, Cal … when’s Mary coming to stay? She is, isn’t she? Obviously she won’t be able to go home for a while. If she needs help, you know, please ask us, right? We’re here for you.’
He snapped. ‘Don’t call me Cal.’
‘Ooh, I’ve hit a sore one.’
‘My wife called me Cal because she thought Calum sounded too foreign, and my mother is not moving in with me.’
‘She’s your mum, where else would she go?’
He let his hands fall helplessly to his sides and walked towards the house.
REMINISCENCE
From Jack’s spells in hospital, Mary remembered needles and beeping machines, tubes attached to pouches of fluid, a succession of nurses and doctors delivering bad news with brusque cheer. She remembered messages of hope: there was always another treatment, another medicine, another possibility. Chemo knocked the cancer into remission three times. Hope finally died when the coughing started and the shadows appeared in his chest. Then ifs became whens and years became months.
It was different for her. She felt no pain and the air came into her chest cleanly. And yet they treated her as if her tenure in the world was drawing to its end. They didn’t come with medications, they only came with questions. Questions about the past, about her family, about Jack and the boys, her home, her songs, her life on Skye and then in Glendarach. She might have been an old book they’d unearthed at the back of a library. As if her knowledge was of greater value than her body.
A woman called Fiona came and spoke in Gaelic with her. She wasn’t a nurse exactly, she had some title that meant nothing to Mary, but she was kind and conversation was easier without the hard edges of English. She knew some of the old hymns and they sang together and looked at the photographs that Calum had recovered from the flat. They lingered over one of Finn playing the pipes, kilted, perhaps thirteen years old.
‘He’d have made a fine piper,’ Mary said, and her finger trembled as she touched his cheek. ‘He gave up, not long after this.’ Her lip began to quiver and Finn’s face blurred. When she closed her eyes, she could only see his face as it was later, thin and shadowed, crossed by lines like tiny knife cuts.
Fiona handed her a tissue. ‘Would you tell me about him?’
‘Finn was sensitive,’ Mary said. ‘You know what I mean by that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Even as a tiny boy, he sensed things. He had a way of knowing things. Of feeling things. He saw angels. He … ’ she paused, closed her eyes, reached for solid memory. It eluded her, left her grasping echoes. ‘He suffered badly after Jack died. Sometimes he was … wild, and sometimes so sad he could barely get himself out of his bed. They said it was a disease. Manic depression?’
‘Bipolar disorder,’ Fiona corrected.
Mary shook her head, didn’t understand the need for such technical names. ‘He just … understood more than most people. I believe the Lord spoke to him, that’s all. He was picked for a reason.’ She smiled, moved her finger over Finn’s hair and tried to remember the feel of it under her skin. She tried to remember the tone of his voice, but all she could hear was Calum’s. Louder, stronger, always more dominant.
‘He was only twenty-one when he died.’
Fiona nodded, placed her hand over Mary’s. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Calum should never have taken him climbing.’
‘Calum told me he was a wonderful climber.’
A sudden anger filled Mary’s throat. Who was this woman and why was Calum telling her about the family? ‘Why have you been speaking to Calum? He has no business speaking to strangers about Finn.’
‘He and I had a conversation this morning, Mary. He told me that you’ve been having some problems with your memory. We need to know a little bit more, so we can work out how best to help you when you come out of hospital.’
‘It’s nothing to do with you, or Calum. He has no interest in helping me.’
‘He’s been here every day, Mary. He’s a good son. I wish my own son was as attentive to me.’
‘I told Calum not to take Finn climbing. He didn’t listen to me. He’s disregarded everything I’ve ever said to him. I knew what would happen. I knew.’
‘You can’t blame him, surely.’
‘If I was a better Christian, I would forgive him.’
The woman called Fiona, whoever she was, looked at her strangely and muttered some irrelevant response. Mary’s attention drifted to the sun coming through the window, the glimmer of light on the bonnets of the wet cars outside and the faint rainbow hovering over the town. The summer days were so precious and she was stuck in here. She couldn’t understand why they were keeping her here when there was nothing wrong with her.
‘I’m hungry,’ she said sharply. ‘It’s past two and they haven’t brought my dinner.’
‘They told me you’d had lunch already.’
‘Well I haven’t.’
‘I’ll see if I can get someone to bring you a cup of tea and some toast.’ Fiona stood, patted her shoulder. Mary flinched away from her. People were always touching you in here, poking and prodding, violating your privacy.
When Fiona had gone, she
got out of bed, pulled back the curtain and walked up the ward. Heads bobbled on feeble necks, cloudy eyes watched her walk to the window. She opened the latch and pushed the pane outward, drew in a deep breath of sweet, moist air. If she had her shoes, she could just climb out and go home. Her flat was only a few minutes’ walk away; she could practically see it from here.
Then suddenly a nurse was at her back, grasping her by the shoulders, saying, ‘Come on then, Mary dear, let’s get back to bed.’
‘Stop touching me!’ Mary wrenched herself free. ‘I’m only taking some air. Goodness knows what germs are circulating around in this horrid room. It isn’t cleaned properly. You people should be ashamed of yourselves.’
The nurse was smiling, nodding at her. ‘It’s all right, love. It’s all right. Come back to bed and have a little rest.’
‘Did you hear a word I just said? I don’t need a rest. I’m tired of resting. I should be going home, there’s nothing wrong with me.’
‘Mary, there was a fire in your house. Do you remember the fire? You’ll not be able to go home for a wee while. We won’t keep you here long, we’ll find somewhere nicer for you.’
Another nurse came, a big woman with masculine hands. She gripped Mary’s arms and steered her away from the window. ‘Come on then, my love. Don’t upset yourself. Here we are.’ Mary found herself pushed firmly back onto the bed. ‘Let’s put the telly on for you.’
‘I don’t want to watch the telly,’ Mary said.
The second nurse nodded. ‘Oh here, it’s Cash in the Attic. You like this, don’t you? I’ll leave this on for you.’
‘I hate that programme, and you incompetents haven’t brought my dinner.’
‘You had your dinner, Mary. You had a lovely plate of mince, don’t you remember?’ She lifted Mary’s legs onto the bed and straightened the pillow. ‘And ice cream. I can tell you’ve been a feisty lady in your day, haven’t you, my love? A wee handful. I’ll be keeping an eye on you from now on.’
WRITTEN IN STONE
Calum arrived home from Fort William with another load of Mary’s smoke-cured possessions and foreboding like a lead weight in his gut. She would be discharged tomorrow and for lack of a better option, she would come home with him until her flat was habitable or another arrangement was made. He poured himself a whisky, opened the back door and looked over his patch of moss, rocky heather and wood. It looked wilder now, happier, finally recovering after generations of sheep that ate the vegetation down to the roots, caused erosion and prevented any possibility of regeneration. The grass had been short then, tidy, almost like a lawn. Mary had created a rock garden and planted bulbs and bedding flowers, an oasis of apparent cultivation in an incorrigible land.
Now you could just see the raised area of the rock garden beneath swelling vegetation. Mary would criticise his neglect. She would walk the perimeter of land, hemmed in by the memory of the barbed wire fence that Calum had taken down, her forehead creased by scowl lines, and she would make a list of everything he had failed to do. His failure to maintain the croft to her standards would come to symbolise all of his other failures, and his own failures mirrored the failures of his generation: selfishness, individualism, promiscuity, Godlessness. Everyone could see it, she would say.
Aye, he thought. One day archaeologists would come and they’d cut away at the peat and moss, survey the stones and determine that an atheist slob lived here in the age of David Cameron, and that he displeased his mother greatly. Might as well write it all out for them and bury the note in a glass jar to save the guesswork.
He wanted a cigarette. Michelle had convinced him to quit smoking, a condition for agreeing to move in with him. Even years later, moments of anxiety still brought on a craving more intense than the need for sex.
To distract himself, he wandered into Julie’s garden and surveyed the house, checked the doors and windows, then pushed open the door of her workshop and stepped inside the cold, dark building. The light flickered on and he paused in the threshold, breathing in the thick, moist smell of stone. There were chunks of raw granite and sandstone on the floor and workbench, and finished or partially finished sculptures standing around at the far end of the table or on the floor. This was an intrusion. Julie was very private about work in progress, even with her friends. He’d never been past the studio door before.
He walked around the sculptures without touching, unable to decide whether he liked the raw, angular figures, often only half emergent from their blocks. They were women, mostly, skinny with oversized hands and wide, tormented eyes: prostitutes, grieving mothers, anorexics, survivors of the myriad horrors that befell women. They were a commentary, effective if not particularly subtle, made for confrontation with people who were comfortable, fat and unhappy for reasons that were less than tangible. You have no idea, said these poor, demented souls. You have no clue, you bourgeois bastard, you don’t know you’re born.
Julie’s current commission was a greater than life-sized representation of James Young Simpson, the pioneer of anaesthesia, a man credited with transforming the experience of childbirth for successive generations of women. How would Julie, who had experienced the pain of childbirth but none of the joy of motherhood, portray him? Would he be the saviour who offered respite or just a dealer of fancy tricks and dodgy medicine? It was her biggest project yet, a bit of a breakthrough as she’d described it, though not without its irony. It was too big for her wee studio here; she had to work on it in Glasgow.
He moved to the far end of the studio, where a number of smaller sculptures sat huddled on a dusty shelf. One towards the back caught his attention because its style was markedly different from the rest. It was smooth, polished, with fluid lines and soft curves. He pushed a couple of others out of the way and pulled it to the front of the shelf. Not quite two feet high, carved in sparkling grey granite, an angel leaned out of a rock face, extending her hand down toward a climber, a young man, reaching upward. Their fingertips, intricately rendered, just touched.
He wrapped his arms around the sculpture and carried it to the workbench to see it in better light. A strange flutter started in his stomach and moved to the tops of his legs. The story he had told Julie only once, an explanation of the dreams that still ripped his nights open, was written there in stone in minute detail. Finn’s eyes were enormous with fear, or possibly wonder. His left hand gripped the rock but his feet dangled: if the angel failed to lock onto his hand, he would fall.
Calum had replayed the scenario a million times but this was the first time he’d seen the angel’s face. She was dispassionate, almost bored. Maybe she had become complacent too: Finn never fell.
He expelled the breath he had been holding, left the sculpture on the workbench and pulled the studio door closed behind him. Brimming with anger, he went home and phoned Julie.
‘I was in your studio just now,’ he said when she answered, dispensing with the usual niceties. ‘Were you going to tell me about the sculpture of my brother before or after you put it on public display somewhere.’
There was a pause. He could hear her suck in a breath. She didn’t know what to say. Good, he thought.
‘I wasn’t going to display it anywhere.’
‘Why did you make it then?’
‘Because it’s a beautiful story.’
Artists were parasites. They grew fat on other people’s traumas. He should have known that.
‘No it isn’t, Julie. Finn died. I watched him die and it wasn’t fucking beautiful.’
‘Calum, I was going to give it to you.’
‘What do you want me to do with it, put it on the mantelpiece?’ She should have asked. She should have bloody asked.
‘Well that’s up to you.’ She sounded wholly unapologetic. ‘How are you, anyway? How’s your mum?’
He paused, not quite ready to give up on the argument. But it was pointless. The sculpture couldn’t be unmade.
‘Mum is coming to stay tomorrow, until we can figure out something else. Sh
e keeps forgetting about the fire and can’t understand why she can’t go home. Nobody thinks it’s a good idea for her to live on her own again, but that leaves us with a problem. I’m just … trying to hold it together, if you want to know the truth.’ He wasn’t sure she did.
‘You will. You’ll be fine.’
‘If you say so. How’s Mr Simpson coming on?’
‘Rough, huge and intransigent. Right now I hate him.’
‘He’s paying your rent.’
She laughed. ‘It violates a lifelong principle of mine to be dependent on a man for money. So tell me what you thought of The Angel, anyway? I was practising a more realist style.’
His brother’s death reduced to a practice piece, and she wanted his opinion on its technical merits? He floundered. ‘I … liked the hands.’
‘The hands?’
‘Aye. Finn had good hands. They were the only reliable part of him.’ He closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose, thought of the stack of bills and invoices he’d neglected since his mother’s fire. ‘I’ve got a bunch of work to do, so I’m gonna go.’
‘Right, well … good luck tomorrow.’
‘Aye.’ He was aware that his voice had become clipped and abrupt. ‘Have a good night.’
‘Bye then,’ she said, and terminated the call as tactlessly as he’d started it.
The laws of magnetism held as true for relationships as they did for everything else; as hard as Abby or anyone else might try to bring them together, he and Julie would always bounce off each other. Julie had her reasons for being the way she was, just as he did. Good reasons. On his better days he understood her, even loved her for her hardwired resilience but right now he just wanted somebody soft and accommodating. Julie’s response to this came through the inert telephone: If you want a woman without a backbone, Calum, buy a bloody Inflate-a-mate.
KITCHEN SESSIONS
