by RL McKinney
Mary stood in the kitchen, facing a glass wall where the mahogany dresser used to be. It was like someone had flayed the stone skin off the cottage and left it open to bleed. The woods seemed to have moved closer too, scavengers closing in. They could almost reach in with their branches and grab her. The woods had frightened her as a child, when they’d first moved from Skye. The trees were like old hags, oaks and birches that had been stunted and misshapen by the sea winds, coloured by lichens and fungi. Deep in the woods there were ruined crofts, steps obscured by moss, an old cemetery where the graves had been almost consumed by vegetation. At night animals prowled and called: owls, pine martens, foxes, wild cats that looked like they should curl up at your fire but would take your finger off if you cornered them. Her mother called these the witchy woods and said the Wee Folk would take her if she went into them at night.
She went into the woods alone at night for the first time when she was fifteen, to meet Jack. She remembered how she felt, hot inside like there were coals glowing in her belly, and light as a balloon as she ran along the path to the agreed meeting place. Remembering brought back a little of that heat. Just enough to remind her that it had actually happened.
She turned away from the window and it was gone. There was only Calum, sitting at the table, fingers tapping on his thin little computer. ‘What have you done with the blue teapot?’
‘It was in your kitchen. I’m afraid it had to go in the bin.’
‘That was my mother’s.’
‘I know.’
It was an ordinary thing, not fancy, cobalt blue, a stained and robust servant. Its loss pained her. Tea was important, objects from the family were important. A teapot held stories and stories were important.
‘All this glass will make the house cold.’
‘It brings the sun in. It’s a lot warmer now.’
‘Anyone can look in. You should at least put up blinds.’
‘There’s nobody here to look in. Julie’s away most of the time.’
‘Who’s Julie?’
‘The woman who lives in Donald’s house.’
‘Where’s Donald gone?’
‘He died years ago, Mum.’
‘Nobody told me,’ she snapped, but even as she said it something materialised like a figure from the fog. She had known. Of course she had, she’d been at his funeral. Where did these reactions come from? Sometimes it felt like someone else was speaking through her mouth, like there was another person inside her head, telling her lies, obscuring the facts of her life.
She turned away from the window and closed her fingers around the edge of the worktop, anchoring herself to something solid. ‘Ocht, what am I like? I’m a daft old woman.’
‘You’re not daft, Mum. You’ve had a trauma.’
‘Aye, I suppose I have. I don’t know how I managed to get out.’ She could still smell the smoke in her nose. ‘I’ll have to make you a mug of tea since you’ve thrown out my pot.’
He rose. ‘I’ll make it.’
‘I’m capable, Calum!’ She filled the kettle and switched it on. ‘Did they work out how the fire started?’
He looked at her strangely, mouth half open like he wanted to say something. Then he shook his head.
She could always tell when he was lying. ‘I’m sure it’s something to do with the phone calls and all this business on the telly.’
‘What business on the telly?’
‘This carry-on with the signs and the … people waving banners … ’ She faltered. The words darted away from her.
‘The referendum?’
‘Aye, that’s it.’
‘Jesus. It’s nothing to do with the referendum, I promise.’ He chuckled but stopped himself quickly.
Why would he laugh? ‘Calum, it’s not funny. Why can’t you ever take me seriously?’
‘Oh, I do,’ he replied, and closed his eyes. ‘There’s a meeting in the hall on Thursday about the referendum. A debate. There will be people from both sides, and everyone from the village will be there. Why don’t you come? You’ll see there’s nothing to be afraid of, and you’ll catch up with a few folk and get a wee cup of tea after. All right? That’ll be nice, won’t it?’
‘Angus MacBride will be there, I’d imagine.’
‘Oh, you bet he’ll be there. He’s a councillor now, did you know that? He’ll be at the top table. No doubt holding forth on the virtues of this great union of ours.’
Mary wasn’t sure which union Calum was referring to, so she refocused her attention on the tea. The blue teapot that usually sat beside the stove was nowhere to be seen, so she plopped the teabags straight into mugs and pried open a small biscuit tin. The pungent smell of coffee escaped, along with a handful of hard black beans. She didn’t know anyone else who ground their own beans. It was another one of Calum’s American affectations. She sighed and scooped them back into the tin. ‘Where are the biscuits?’
He came over and took a packet of digestives out of a cupboard. ‘He had his eye on you, didn’t he, Mum?’
‘Who?’
‘Angus MacBride.’
‘Angus?’ she laughed. ‘He fancied me something rotten. I never cared for him, I have to say. He was … puffy and soft. Like unbaked bread.’
‘He’s even puffier now.’
‘He was never very bright. My mother preferred him to Jack, of course.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Well, the MacBrides had money. And they had the Gaelic. She thought I should aspire to a man who wore a suit and tie. An apprentice electrician was common as muck.’
‘Granny was a snob.’
‘It wasn’t snobbery,’ she said sharply. Calum took so much for granted. ‘You’ve never known hunger.’ She studied her son and saw Jack’s wide cheekbones and coarse shoulders, her mother’s deep set blue eyes, something in the turn of his mouth that she had seen in the old faded photographs of her grandfather: familiar features that hung like ornaments over workings she didn’t understand. He had never been open to her like Finn. For all his troubles, Finn had been accessible in a way Calum never was.
Finn might come into the church someday.
No. She was forgetting again. Twenty years, more than twenty years, were folding in on themselves. Maybe she was trying to fold them out of existence like the way you used to fold a strip of paper into ever tinier squares until you couldn’t fold any more.
She looked into her tea, saw her own face and reminded herself, Finn is with God. His bones lie in the churchyard in Arisaig beside his father’s.
Two sons went up that mountain, one came down.
One came down. One. Why only Calum? What turn of events had led to that conclusion?
She stared at him. He saw what happened that day. He knew the truth.
He knew.
‘Calum … ’ she said, and stopped. There was a jangle in the lobby. The same doorbell her father had put in, attached to a pull cord. Mary’s heart skittered. ‘Goodness me. Who’s calling at this hour?’
Calum went away to answer it and there were voices in the lobby, male and female, the clatter of claws on the floorboards. Calum came back into the kitchen followed by a younger man, ginger and bearded, a girl with yellow plaits and a wiry brown terrier.
‘Hello lovely lady!’ the girl exclaimed, delivering a cake to the table and a kiss to Mary’s cheek. English. ‘I’m so glad you’re here safe and sound. How awful about your flat!’
‘They still don’t know what caused it,’ Mary said.
‘Oh … don’t they?’ The woman glanced at Calum.
‘They’re working on it,’ Calum muttered, then smiled brightly. ‘Mum, you remember my friends Johnny and Abby? We play in the band together. And this wee man is Oscar.’ He clapped the dog’s flank.
‘Of course she remembers us,’ Abby said, reaching for Mary’s hand and squeezing it. Mary resisted the urge to withdraw it rudely. Why would she remember these people? These incomers were always so forward.
Johnny held up
a guitar case. ‘We’ve come to coax a song out of you, Mary. It’s not often we get to sing with a legend.’
‘Och.’ Mary waved away the praise. Her cheeks grew a little hot. ‘I can’t remember any of the songs I used to sing.’
‘I don’t believe that for a minute,’ Abby said. ‘I bet when you open your mouth, they’ll all come pouring out.’ She flipped the catches on a rectangular case and lifted out a small button box accordion. Johnny took out his guitar without even waiting for tea and cake to be served, and they began tuning up. Fragments of melody fluttered out like songbirds from a cage, patterns of notes ascending and descending, rolls like dancing feet.
Mary sat and listened. There had always been instruments in the house, long sessions in front of the stove to pass the winter nights, songs passed from her grandmother to her mother to her. She’d fallen in love with Jack for his piping as much as anything else. The Highland pipes were fine, best outside at a distance, but when he first brought out his small pipes and played a set of reels, he transformed in front of her. A modest working man grew larger and more beautiful like a tree unfolding its leaves. It was a marvel the way his broad fingers flickered so swiftly over the holes.
Calum brought a bottle of whisky and a jug of water. He poured a single finger-width and handed her the tumbler.
‘Mum?’
‘Put some water in it for me, love,’ she said. ‘Right up to the top.’
She watched him pour the water. She had been meaning to ask him something, but it was gone now. It nagged slightly, this lost question. How could something feel so urgent one minute and be forgotten the next? It would be the tablets that were making her so forgetful. The doctor had prescribed her so many tablets, she couldn’t remember what they were all for: acid reflux, thyroid, God only knew what else. So many chemicals going into her blood. They could be doing anything to her. They could be experimenting on her for all she knew.
But the whisky tasted good and she remembered the way its heat spread down through her arms and legs. It had been years since she’d drunk whisky, maybe even since before Jack died.
‘Come on Mary,’ Abby urged, ‘Give us a wee song.’
‘All right then. You may know this one.’ She began to sing ‘Fear a Bhata’, which she thought might be the only Gaelic song these people had heard before. Johnny quickly found the key and played along, a sparse and gentle accompaniment that responded to the boundaries of her voice without restraining them. Then Abby joined in. Mary closed her eyes and continued singing, waiting for Calum’s fiddle. At the end of the song, she opened her eyes again and looked for Calum. He had disappeared from the room.
Abby beamed. ‘That was beautiful. You still have the voice of an angel.’
‘I won the Mod when I was young,’ Mary said. ‘I could have been a professional singer.’
‘You were a professional singer, Mary.’
‘I mean, full time. I could have toured the world, if he hadn’t come along.’
‘Calum, you mean?’
‘Aye. Where’s he gone?’
‘Out,’ Johnny said, sipping whisky.
Mary’s stomach contracted. ‘Out where? He didn’t tell me he was going out.’
‘Only for a little walk.’
‘He’s always going off somewhere. He never tells me anything.’
‘He won’t be long.’ Abby patted her leg.
‘Stop touching me.’ Mary jerked away. She was tired of strangers touching her. They were never finished manhandling her in hospital.
‘I’m sorry.’
Mary stood and pulled the hem of her cardigan down more firmly over her waistband. ‘Och, I’ll make a cup of tea. Would you like tea? I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your names. Calum will be back shortly, I expect. I can’t think where he’s gone. You’re welcome to wait.’
MEETING
‘We’re isolated enough as it is,’ big Angus MacBride was saying, his voice slurred with what might have been drink or might have been the hangover of the stroke he’d recently suffered. ‘Our young people still move away to find work; we have no opportunities to offer them. How will independence change that, except to make it worse? You think London will still take them when we’re a foreign country? They’ll end up like refugees, in one of those detention centres.’
The village hall was crowded, overheated with bodies and arguments, some sensible and some less so. Calum shifted uncomfortably on the metal folding chair. His knee complained about the cramped position, his belly complained about the lack of food and the debate, now well into its second hour, showed no signs of concluding. He’d never known such contention in the village, or heard such political passion from people who generally kept the contents of their minds safely veiled. Mary sat beside him, hands folded in her lap, turning her head right and left like a spectator at a tennis match. Her eyes were very bright, but it was difficult to know how much of this she was taking in. She nudged Calum’s arm.
‘Is that Angus MacBride?’
‘Aye.’
‘I didn’t recognise him. Look how fat he’s got.’
‘Mum … ’
‘Why is he at the top table? What makes him an authority?’
‘He’s a councillor. They’re all councillors.’
She replied with a surprised, ‘Hmm,’ and fell silent, fidgeting a little.
‘They already are foreigners in London, Angus,’ Johnny was saying, ‘And enough of them are sleeping under bridges. I know that too well because I was one of them. If we were independent, we could build our economy properly so they wouldn’t have to leave. Westminster will never invest in the Highlands. They’ll never fund roads and railway extensions up here, they don’t even bother to get us proper broadband. It’s in their interest to keep us remote, so the rich buggers can have their pretty playgrounds. Folk down south used to tell me they’d like Scotland if it weren’t for all the Sweaty Socks. That’s what we’re up against.’
‘Ocht, Johnny, there’s plenty Scots hate the English as well,’ Davina Nicholson replied. She had the tone of a grandmother already. She had been in Finn’s year at school and was as prim and dull now as she had been then. ‘What makes anyone here think Edinburgh will invest in the Highlands? Holyrood has no more interest in us up here than London does, and they’ll have an awful lot less money at their disposal.’
Mary nudged Calum again. ‘How much longer will this go on? I need the toilet.’
‘Just go, Mum.’
‘I don’t want to be rude.’
‘It isn’t about having more or less money, it’s about what we choose to do with it,’ Georgie Richardson shouted, half rising from her seat. ‘We need a government that listens to our priorities. Like when we tell them where they can stuff their bleeding weapons of mass destruction.’ This evoked appreciative whoops and applause.
‘You’d leave us as an isolated backwater with no military deterrent,’ Angus said.
Georgie’s voice crackled with emotion. ‘Is the capacity to launch a retaliatory strike after our whole country has been annihilated really a deterrent? You’re talking about mutually assured destruction. Surely the best deterrent is to be a small, peaceful nation which has moved on from its colonial past.’
‘An independent Scotland would need its own defences, nuclear or not. Where would the money come from?’
‘There’d be plenty of money if we kept the oil,’ said someone else, a young man Calum didn’t recognise. ‘It’s our oil, isn’t it? It comes out of our sea.’
‘Anyone who banks on the oil is a fool,’ Calum said.
The room turned to look at him and the young guy looked disgruntled. ‘What do you mean, pal?’
Calum crossed his arms over his chest. ‘Oil is the past. You all know that, even if a lot of you don’t want to admit it.’
‘I thought you were a Yes man, Calum,’ said Angus, ‘or are you coming to your senses at last?’
‘I support independence, but certainly not because I think we’re going to get r
ich on oil. We have an opportunity to create an economy based on fairness and equality and sustainability. We have a chance to say to the world that we respect ourselves and each other, and that we value people who are vulnerable just as much as the people who do well for themselves. It’s not about money, it’s about the kind of nation we want to be. It seems to me we’ll never get this chance again in our lifetimes.’
Angus MacBride pursed his lips. ‘Don’t pretend you didn’t go away as well, to make your money from the oil.’
‘Aye, I did, Angus, that’s no secret. And I’ve seen how it works with my own eyes. The big money goes into the pockets of a very few rich men, who are getting richer by the day while the rest of us scrape by. The industry is merciless and I guarantee you, the bottom line is all that matters. The people whose lives are destroyed by the spills, the accidents, not to mention climate change … you think they’ll ever see a benefit? We’re not Norway; we haven’t been intelligent with our oil profits.’
‘So what are you saying?’
‘I’m saying the sooner we move away from dependence on fossil fuels, the better. We’ll have wind and wave power forever in Scotland. Energy generation should be for the common good, not for corporate profit. I’ll vote yes even if I think we might be poorer for a while, because we may well be.’
Angus’s wattles vibrated. ‘I see you’ve come into Red Jack’s idealism late in life, Calum Macdonald, but we’ve got to eat.’
At this point, Mary sat up and said in clear, haughty Gaelic, ‘You eat very well these days, by the look of you, Angus.’
Angus huffed and shook his head, cheeks wobbling, while the four or five other people in the room who understood tried to stifle their laughter. Whispered translations made their way around the room. Calum covered his eyes with his fingers and laughed until tears ran down his cheeks.
When the debate was drawn to a non-consensual stopping point, people congregated around plates of shortbread and tea and coffee in paper cups. Many of the younger ones were eager to continue the discussion, while others seemed grateful to return to village gossip and more mundane concerns. Mary explained competently to successive neighbours that she was staying for a couple of weeks while the painters and decorators were in. Calum trailed after her, wondering who she was going to insult next.
