The Angel in the Stone

by RL McKinney

  ‘It’s not becoming. You could do better. Boys won’t look at you like you are now.’

  ‘I don’t want boys to look at me.’

  ‘Why not?’

  A dozen possible answers crashed around in her brain. Because looking is never just looking. Because whatever you wear, all they ever see is tits and a cunt. Because I’m spoiled, like meat left out in the sun. Because I’m never letting anybody get me unwrapped again. Because I can’t go around wearing a shark cage for the rest of my life, but if I could, I would. There was a potentially endless list that could be labelled: Hashtag: Things You Can’t Say To Your Granny. But right now, all she could manage was a shrug.

  ‘At your age, I had my pick of men. My Jack always came back from London with a dress or a blouse or a pair of stockings. Maybe you should ask your father to take you up to Inverness for some new things.’

  ‘I don’t want anything new.’

  More head quivering, indicating displeasure or lack of comprehension. ‘What girl doesn’t want new clothes?’

  Catriona exhaled sharply and got off the sofa. ‘Me. I don’t. I’m tired, I think I’ll just lie down for a bit. I’ll be upstairs, okay?’

  WHAT THIS IS

  Strong evening sun and thoughts of his mother and daughter next door stopped Calum from drifting off again. It was always strange to wake up in Julie’s bed in the daytime, blades of light hitting the prints on the walls: female nudes, disjointed and cut through with lines and blurs of colour. Like victims of a magician whose tricks kept going wrong. There were no angels in here, just women who had been broken and discarded. Disturbing sort of an allegory for the bedroom, he thought. It was just the kind of thing Julie would do to confront herself – and anyone else who might be in her bedroom – with the realities of the world as she saw them.

  He raised himself on one elbow and looked at Julie. She was lying on her stomach, face turned away from him, her hair falling to the sides revealing a few sweaty curls at the base of her neck, darker hair at the roots, strands of silver. He kissed the place where her hair parted, then lower down her neck towards the top of her vest, and she made a little noise into the pillow and turned over, rubbing her eyes with her fingertips, drawing away sleep and remnants of her make-up.

  ‘You feel better now?’ she asked.

  ‘A little.’

  She gave him a lazy smile and sang, ‘When I get that feeling, I need … ’ Her voice trailed off and her hand slipped down his chest and under the covers. ‘You know pygmy chimpanzees? Bonobos? They make love to make themselves feel better after fights. It’s not for mating. Sometimes they just do this … ’ Her hand moved lower.

  Calum shifted. ‘Julie, I should go home. I’ve been here too long as it is.’

  She nuzzled her lips into his neck, her breath tickling the little hairs. ‘Sometimes they do boy on boy or girl on girl. They don’t care as long as it feels good.’

  ‘How do you know so much about the sexual habits of pygmy chimpanzees?’

  ‘I had a girlfriend in London who was a primate biologist.’ Her hand crept down towards his groin again. ‘Pygmy chimps understand the importance of sensual contact for their emotional wellbeing. They never suffer from depression, so it must work.’

  She was definitely trying to distract him from conversation about that bloody statue, and everything else. He rolled away from her and sat up. ‘It kicks in quicker than Prozac but stops you getting anything done.’ He laughed. ‘How would you know if a chimpanzee was depressed?’

  ‘Because they turn into gruff, sulky buggers with saggy eyes and lines across their wee furry foreheads.’ She placed her fingertips at the corners of his eyes and pulled them gently upwards. ‘Just like someone else I know.’

  ‘I’m not depressed.’

  ‘Aye, pull the other one, Calum.’

  He reached for his pants. ‘I’m teetering, Julie. When I used to climb, sometimes I’d get the shakes. I’d hit a point where I didn’t think I could go on and I’d just … hang there, on the brink of letting go. That’s how I feel right now.’

  ‘It’s okay to feel that.’

  ‘No, it isn’t. I can’t afford to let go at this particular point in time.’

  She got up and took her silk dressing gown from the hook behind the door. Just before she slipped her arms into the sleeves, the sun caught the thin white scar on the outside of her left upper arm. She would deny that she was self-conscious about it, but she rarely wore short sleeves. My boyfriend beat me up. I kicked him in the balls and the bastard broke my arm.

  She’d told him the first night they slept together, when he was too drunk not to ask about it. That’s not all he broke. So he’d showed her the scar on his knee and told her about Finn. These ugly souvenirs brought them together and kept them apart: Julie didn’t do monogamy and Calum didn’t do responsibility.

  ‘You can go in a minute. I have something for you.’ She went barefoot down the hallway and came back with a little blue plastic bag. ‘Here. Courtesy of my pal Matthew, guaranteed to get you over the crux.’

  He opened the baggy, looked at the dried green leaves and buds, took a sniff. Mary would go off her trolley if she caught a whiff of this in the house, and he had no idea about Catriona.

  ‘A wee walk in the woods may be in order later. Thank you. This is a timely gift.’

  ‘I thought it might be. And I wanted to say sorry. I should have told you about the angel. Still though, you shouldn’t have been snooping in my studio.’

  ‘I wasn’t snooping, I was checking, and I got curious.’ He sighed and lifted his fingers to her cheek. Her skin was so thin and clear, sometimes it seemed almost translucent. She was only a few months younger than he was, but her face was barely lined and she seemed as ageless and ephemeral as one of the fair folk his Granny Ina used to tell stories about. But he was reasonably certain the fairies wouldn’t have Glasgow accents.

  ‘What is this, Julie? What are we doing?’

  She turned her head and kissed the inside of his hand. ‘It is what it is. Why do we have to name it?’

  ‘You know me. I like to call a spade a spade.’

  ‘Mmm. What if it only looks like a spade and it turns out to be something else?’

  ‘Until it’s empirically demonstrated to be something other than a spade, it’s a spade in my book.’

  ‘Okay … so … how do you feel about that?’

  ‘If you want to dig a hole, a spade is exactly what you need.’

  ‘Enough.’ She sighed and folded his hands around the bag of weed. ‘I’ll see you at the ceilidh on Saturday, if not before.’

  He groaned. ‘I forgot the ceilidh.’

  ‘You’re kind of the main attraction.’

  Sometimes the idea of being on stage made him want to dissolve. ‘My brain hurts. I’m fed up with the politics. I know my mind, I can’t be bothered trying to change anybody else’s.’ He pulled his crusty work trousers up and slipped his shirt over his head.

  ‘Abby told me what you said at the meeting. She said you made the best point of the night.’

  ‘It was nothing compared to my mother calling Angus MacBride a fat bastard.’

  ‘Aye, I heard about that too.’

  ‘The thing is, we can write a new constitution, we can call ourselves the People’s Republic of Scotia and get rid of this big old chip we have on our shoulders, and that’s all fine and good. I’ll still have a mother with Alzheimer’s and a daughter who looks like she’s on the brink of a meltdown.’

  ‘She might not be.’

  ‘I know what it looks like, Julie. I’ll still have days when I wake up and feel like it’s too daunting to even get out of bed. None of that is going to change. I know you understand this.’ He thumped his fist against his forehead. ‘Yes or No, none of this in here is going to go away on the nineteenth of September.’

  ‘No it isn’t.’ She kissed his lips. ‘Go home and see your family. I’ll see you later. Let me know if you fancy company on that wa
lk you mentioned.’

  It was after eleven when he slipped on his trainers and jogged silently into the woods. He took the little path that led up over the headland, bypassing Julie’s house and only turning on his head torch when he was well hidden from view. Catriona and Mary were both in bed but he didn’t want to cause any kind of panic by being seen. He moved as fast as he could. Lately his knee hurt when he ran, but the midges were thick in the woods, biting his forehead whenever he slowed his pace.

  When he reached the beach below Georgie and Bert’s house, he climbed right out onto the long spill of rounded stones at one end of the crescent and sat in the breeze, the waves lapping below him. The sky to the north-west was a dark teal blue, laced with silver and pink. He lit the joint he’d rolled in his bedroom, sucked in deeply and looked across to Skye. The profile of the Cuillin ridge was still just visible. He thought about that trip with Finn and Andy. Then, as the dope worked its way into his blood, he thought about Dougie and Alison.

  Ben Alder, July, 1994

  MacCaig got it right in that poem about the Green Corrie, it was the descent that killed you. His knee had carried him up Ben Alder, slower than any of them would have liked, but painlessly enough. Now, as afternoon tipped into evening, he hobbled downhill, leaning on boulders and peaty embankments whenever he could, wishing he’d had the sense to buy himself a pair of trekking poles. The scramble down to the bealach was hairy; he slipped and stumbled, his balance gone along with his confidence. If he looked more than two feet beyond the toes of his boots, he felt himself falling forward. Dougie and Alison could have been halfway home by now but they went at his pace, chatting politics to keep his mind occupied, never rushing him.

  Calum hadn’t been sure about this trip, but they’d threatened to drive to Aberdeen and kidnap him if he didn’t agree to come. It was a year to the day since Finn died, and this was his first big hill walk on his reconstructed knee. Dougie and Alison were down to their last few Munros, picking off the ones that required long treks in and overnights. They’d hiked in from Dalwhinnie yesterday and stayed in the Culra bothy, songs and bottles to keep themselves cheery, a pot of bean and chorizo chilli on the stove, recitations of Dougie’s latest poems as hail clattered against the windows.

  ‘Your poetry’s worse than the bloody weather, man,’ Alison told him.

  ‘For better or worse means nurturing my creative efforts, woman.’

  ‘Well thank almighty God you didn’t bring the banjo, that’s all I can say.’

  ‘Who in their right mind would carry a banjo out here?’

  ‘You would, Doug.’

  The banter continued all night, and by the wee hours Calum had laughed so much his stomach hurt. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d laughed like that. Not since he was a kid, probably. Some people kindled a happy fire in your belly even though you’d known them only a short time. They were Geordies, a decade older than him, childless by circumstance rather than choice. He was a printer and she was a social worker, but they were headlong in their passions: socialism, mountaineering, poetry. Alison would shrug and say that without bairns to look after, they could afford to invest in their hobbies and their friends. She wasn’t bitter but it was obvious that she wished it could be different.

  Calum had known them for a year, to the day.

  This morning the mist had been thick as wildfire smoke, but by the time they’d paused for lunch it had started to lift. They had reached the summit under a baby blue sky and a sharp, cold northerly breeze. A stolid lump bang in the middle of Scotland, Ben Alder looked west across the expanse of Rannoch Moor towards the familiar profiles of Glencoe, the Mamores and Nevis. This time of year, the land was a lush palate of greens, yellows and purples, although there were still dirty patches of snow on the highest tops. To the east, the glacier-rounded humps above Drumochter, and beyond that the Cairngorm plateau. From this distance it looked blue-grey and innocuous. Dougie and Alison hadn’t been back either. They’d asked him if he wanted to go with them, to hike into the corrie together, but he couldn’t. Not yet.

  After surveying the panorama, he sat in the lea of the cairn and wept for Finn. Alison and Dougie left him alone for a while, drinking tea and turning over their own memories of that afternoon. They’d seen more of it than he had.

  Walking back to the bothy, Calum’s knee felt like broken glass but he refused to let Dougie carry his pack. He told them the history they didn’t yet know: about Finn’s hallucinations, his conversations with non-existent characters, his angel. He told them about the drugs, the self-harming, the suicide attempts. He told them what he had only told one other person about Finn’s death.

  ‘I wish he was still here, but not the way he was. He didn’t want to be here the way he was, and he knew he was never going to get better. He wanted to die. It’s a relief, in a way. He believed … I don’t, but he did. He knew where he was going.’

  Alison slipped her arm around his waist and they walked like that for a couple of minutes.

  ‘Does that sound awful?’ Calum asked her.

  ‘No.’

  He turned to look at her face. She only shrugged.

  ‘There are worse places to die than the Corrie of the Snow,’ she said, afraid to mangle the Gaelic pronunciation in front of him. ‘Believe me, pet, I’ve seen them.’

  The dope wakened his senses and dulled his thoughts. He lay back and let himself feel: the cold, solid stone under his back, the briny night on his tongue, the wind pushing his hair back from his forehead, touching his scalp. He had to be open to the elements and allow them to touch him, even if they were uncomfortable. He listened to his breath, thought about the molecules of air entering his nose and lungs. Dr Rosen, the shrink who came so highly recommended by Michelle’s friends, tried to make him believe that loss and trauma had reprogrammed his brain. He couldn’t fathom it. If that was true, he was broken, well and truly, forever. It only depressed him even more.

  Back in Scotland, free of Dr Rosen and his medicine chest, free of California and its film-set realities, free of Michelle, free of the corporate overlords he’d worked for since he was twenty-three, he’d learned slowly to earth himself. He was alive because he could feel. He was alive because he could pull horsehair over fiddle strings and make that wooden box sing. He learned to check himself when his thoughts began to take over, to return to what he could see and touch and hear. He had set to work refurbishing the house that his grandfather had built, ripping the walls back to the stonework, pulling up floorboards, putting in insulation and new windows, and it was like he was rebuilding himself. It took a full two years before he was ready to welcome anyone in to the house or his life, but he was proud of the outcome.

  Right now the house felt a lot more solid than he was. He didn’t want to share it with Mary and let her reassume her matriarchal position above him. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to share it with Catriona. Maybe they were right about him, maybe he was selfish. Maybe it went all the way back to his decision to leave for university right after his dad died. Maybe he should have stayed home with Mum and Finn. He could have worked the croft, driven the post van, gone onto the fishing boats, made ends meet and put thoughts of bigger achievements out of his mind. Maybe if he’d stayed home, a whole chain of other things would never have happened. Maybe.

  Maybe.

  There were always maybes, and they were pointless.

  He took a final drag and flicked the roach into the sea.

  CEILIDH

  Calum, Johnny and Abby seemed to have captured the rhythms of the land and shaped them into melodies: the bubble of water over stones, the rush of waves onto the shore, the wind moving through tall grass. Just three people produced a sound as immense and changing as the sky. They played with eyes locked together, improvising, sometimes laughing at each other’s efforts or exchanging brief words and cues. Catriona possessed no musical expertise at all but understood that this was a display of virtuosity. She watched the muscles of Calum’s arms and broad shoul
ders flex and his face shift from concentration to joy as the music moved in ways that seemed to surprise him, as though it came from the instrument almost without his input.

  They played a few tunes from their record in the break between dance sets, while people queued up for stovies and drinks. Catriona backed her chair further into the corner, positioning herself a little behind Mary, and tried to avoid eye contact with anyone. A guy with a big mouth planted himself when Mary got up to chat with neighbours. The smell of beer off him threatened to make her ill, but he didn’t even take the hint when she brought her hand over mouth and nose.

  ‘Who are you, then?’ he asked, leaning in closer. ‘I’ve never seen you before.’

  ‘I’m staying with my dad,’ she said, then regretted it.

  ‘Who’s your dad?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Come on, who’s your dad?’

  ‘Calum.’

  ‘Calum who?’

  ‘Calum Macdonald. Him.’ She nodded toward the stage. ‘The fiddle player.’

  ‘Oh aye.’ The guy watched Calum for a minute. ‘He’s no bad. Got a high opinion of himself, though, eh?’

  ‘Not unlike you, then,’ she said, crossing her arms over her chest and leaning as far back as she could. ‘I’m not interested, right?’

  ‘Are you a dyke, aye? You look like a dyke.’

  ‘I might be but you’ll never get to know. And that’s my granny’s seat, so you don’t get to sit there.’

  He let out a laugh and a high pitched, ‘Ooof,’ and stood up. ‘Shame,’ he muttered and wandered off.

  Catriona bolted out of her seat and went to the bathroom, locked herself in the cubicle and sat on the toilet until some woman knocked and asked if she was all right.

  When she came back to the table, another woman sat down beside her: petite and funky in a tartan mini skirt and platforms. She wasn’t young: on second glance, you could see the fine lines around her mouth and eyes. The outfit would have looked ridiculous on a bigger woman, but she was delicate as a songbird. Her curly hair was tied up on top of her head and fell around her face.