by RL McKinney
‘Hey, I’m Julie. I live next door to your dad.’
‘Oh … hey.’ She wasn’t sure what to say. ‘You’re his girlfriend, right?’
Julie smiled, gave a soft laugh. ‘Is that how he described me?’
‘No, he hasn’t mentioned you at all. I saw him go into your house.’
‘Ah. Well … it’s a casual thing. No strings. We’re mostly just friends.’
‘My dad doesn’t like strings unless they’re on a musical instrument.’
Julie almost spat a mouthful of red wine. ‘That’s the truth. You’re definitely his daughter. You say it as you see it.’
‘Sometimes,’ Catriona replied. ‘There’s too much bullshit in this world already.’
‘Yeah there is. Pop over sometime, Cat. I go down to Glasgow a lot but I’m around the next couple of weeks.’
‘Okay … thanks, that would be nice.’ She said it to be polite, but Julie seemed all right. It would be a relief to have someone to talk to beside her Gran while her dad was out working. Someone who didn’t need to know what Catriona didn’t want to tell her.
Julie turned towards the stage and they both watched the band for a minute. Then she turned back and touched Catriona’s arm. ‘I bet you’ve never heard anything like that, eh?’
‘I really haven’t.’ Catriona watched Calum as he picked up a pint glass and took four or five big swallows. Then he put it back down on the floor beside the mic and met her eyes across the room.
STRIP THE WILLOW
Some days, Calum woke up in the wrong place, as if his bed had fallen through a wormhole while he slept and brought him out into a parallel universe where he was a well-disguised alien, just slightly at odds with everything. It was a fact of his life, and mostly bearable. It might not have been. It might have been a one-way journey, like Finn’s. He didn’t like to think about how bad it had been in the months after the incident on the rig: bad enough that Michelle had driven him down to that posh hospital in the hills above San Diego, like a country club where they gave you electric shock treatments instead of massages, and left him at the mercy of shrinks and art therapists.
Music carried him through the worst days, and there weren’t as many of those as there used to be. Ceilidh tunes were as easy to produce as breath, Virginia Reels and Dashing White Sergeants and Gay Gordons that had been imprinted into his psyche before he was old enough to hold a fiddle and repeated over nearly five decades. When he got bored he glanced at Johnny and went off on an improvised ride, driving the tempo with his boot and pushing the dancers into a blurred frenzy. Other times he played them straight and let his eyes wander through the hall, watching the interactions and groupings, the tensions, the drinking and posing.
For a while he watched Mary, who agreed to a Saint Margaret’s Waltz with Angus MacBride and steered him like a shopping trolley with a rogue wheel, scolding him for the placing of his hands. Then he watched Catriona, who spent most of the night sitting at a table with her back to the wall and her arms crossed, drinking Coke, black-lined eyes flicking nervously, refusing to make eye contact with any of the younger men in the room. The young guy who had spoken up about oil at the referendum meeting made a move and she visibly cold-shouldered him, got up and disappeared into the toilets for several minutes.
Then Julie sat beside her and some meaningful words seemed to pass between them. Calum was almost afraid to wonder what they were. When he took his break, he bought them drinks and sat beside them, retreating into his pint and hoping they wouldn’t notice that he was fading out. A few other people did floor spots: solo songs, self-penned poetry and pro-Indy speeches, which at the very least spared the need to make conversation.
‘You should get up for a song, Gran,’ Catriona said.
‘Nobody understands Gaelic here anymore. I’d be singing to myself.’
‘I apparently don’t count but I’m sure Angus would appreciate you.’
‘Ocht, Calum, away with you.’ She pursed her lips and brooded, then leaned across him to inform Catriona, ‘Angus courted me when we were young. He never forgave me for marrying Jack.’ A fond smile played on her lips. She turned to Calum. ‘You haven’t forgotten you’re taking me to Mass tomorrow morning, have you?’
He sighed. Of course she would remember church. ‘No.’
‘You should come for a change.’
‘No, I shouldn’t.’
‘Catriona?’
‘It’s not really my thing, Gran.’
He glanced over the chin rest of his fiddle towards Johnny, then the other way at Abby and mouthed the words last time, his arm aching as he pulled his bow faster over the strings. He was slightly drunk, sweat dripped into his eyes and the dancers on the floor in front of him were a blur of flying hair and colours. They played the reel through a final time and he lifted his right boot from the floor to indicate its conclusion, and finished with a stomp and a final reverberating G chord.
‘Thank you everybody. Mòran taing. See you next time. Good night.’
Dizzy people parted hands, laughed, clapped and stumbled off towards their tables, and Calum stepped away from the mic and stood for a moment as the current of music drained from his body. Then he picked up the pint glass beside his mic stand and downed it in three deep draughts.
Johnny had already settled his guitar into its case and begun to unplug mics and wind up cables. He looked at Calum with quiet eyes, assessing his frame of mind by the set of his jaw and the little tic beside his left eyebrow.
‘All right?’
‘Aye.’ Calum squatted beside him, wincing as his knee cracked, and put his fiddle away. It would be painful to stand up again, so he lingered there on his heels, dusting rosin from the instrument’s dark, cracked shellac finish, his mood deflating like a punctured tyre.
Just keep moving, Son, his dad would’ve said, draping a heavy arm over his shoulders, encouraging him as they toiled up a hill. Don’t look back and, whatever you do, don’t look at what’s coming for you.
‘Dad.’ A hand landed on his shoulder. ‘Oh gross, you’re all sweaty.’
He looked up at Catriona; it might have been the first time since she’d arrived that she hadn’t called him by name. Her hair had collapsed with the humid air and there were black make-up smudges on the pale skin below her eyes.
‘It’s hard work. You surely didn’t dance much.’
‘Nobody to dance with.’
‘That guy was interested. What’s his name? I’ve seen him around a few times.’
‘Dunno. Didn’t like him.’ She shuddered. ‘Creepy. I’m gonna take Gran up the road, okay? She’s wanting her bed.’
‘Okay. I’ll help tidy up here.’
‘Don’t wake us up when you come in.’ Obviously she didn’t expect him to come straight back.
‘Don’t worry, Sleeping Beauty.’
She nodded. ‘You sounded good tonight.’
He stood up with a grunt. ‘Thank you.’
‘I just thought, you know … you needed to hear it. You haven’t seemed seventy-six per cent okay today.’
Unexpected insight: he’d considered himself a better actor and her a less astute observer. He would hug her for it, if he had a dry shirt. ‘Down to about fifty per cent today, kiddo. Tomorrow will be better.’
Or not, he thought, watching her take Mary’s arm as they stepped out the door. Then he squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again, trying to refocus on things outside his head. Cat was good with her gran. She was tolerant and gentle and she hid her frustration at having to answer the same questions over and over. She wasn’t opening up though. At least not about anything that mattered, and certainly not about whatever had gone on at university. When he looked at her, he could see himself before his breakdown, trembling and fearful, clinging to a tenuous hold on sanity but knowing it was only a matter of time before he had to let go.
She wanted him to help her, otherwise she wouldn’t have come. Finn had wanted his help too, when he’d called and asked to go c
limbing. Finn had wanted to patch things up but Calum didn’t know how. He still didn’t know how. The only thing he could do now was speak to Jenny.
SKIMMING STONES
Even here, Kyle insinuated his way into her sleep, appearing in dreams that should have had nothing to do with him, laying a hand on her shoulder and turning her around, laughing in her face, calling her Sleepy Cat and Kitten. Sometimes she woke with a surge of fear and knew he’d been there, stealing through like a thief even though she couldn’t remember the content of the dream.
A noise downstairs. A door opening, closing. Footsteps. She lay rigid, frozen in that place between dreaming and waking. Bumps in the kitchen, the rush of water in the pipes. She breathed in, emerged fully from sleep, looked for reassurance in the now-familiar bookshelves on the far wall. Then she closed her eyes again to better tune in to the sounds downstairs. These were familiar morning sounds: Calum grinding his coffee beans, pouring cereal, clanking his spoon off his bowl, making a show of having breakfast as normal although she was almost certain he had only just come home. He’d been next door with Julie all night – her smell would be all over him – and this knowledge brought a flicker book of unwelcome images. Catriona had wanted to believe he was clean, above having sordid animal instincts even in spite of what she knew about her own conception, and now she would have to find a way not to be disgusted with him all over again.
She lay on her side and stared at the shelf of file boxes. These were neatly labelled according to date and content: mostly bills and invoices, tax forms and all kinds of other equally mind-numbing institutional documents by which adult life was apparently defined. However, at the far end of the top shelf was a box labelled Finn, and this often drew her eyes. When Calum spoke of his childhood he would say we instead of I, acknowledging the existence of a sibling, but otherwise he rarely mentioned his brother. Finn was a name, an evocation of loss, a mystery. Mary made reference to him more often, imbuing him with a saintly quality but never fleshing out the details. Maybe she couldn’t remember them, or maybe she was ashamed. Catriona could grasp only an echo from long ago, something she’d heard but which hadn’t been meant for her, Calum telling someone, Finn was looking for a good way to die.
She slipped out of the sofa bed and stepped as lightly as she could, touching the floorboards only with the balls of her feet, drew the box down and brought it back to the bed. It was like opening a forbidden book; she might almost have expected a dusty ghost or voices to rise out. The box of memories was disappointingly sparse, and the photographs she found were silent and mundane. She lifted the top one: Calum, long-haired and very much younger, standing with feet apart, holding a rope, staring up at the climber on the rock face above him. A more solid memory materialised. That was how he’d wrecked his knee, in some kind of climbing accident before she was born. He’d told her that once, or maybe her mother had. He was still recovering when they’d met. This was making sense, though she couldn’t remember ever having a conversation about any of it.
The climber’s face wasn’t clearly visible behind damp, blowing hair, but he looked almost feline on the rock, his hand reaching upward, the toe of one foot stretching down. Around them, the light of a golden evening, a shimmer of sea beyond the grey walls of rock.
A second photo of the two of them standing at the back of an old red Vauxhall, kitted up in parkas and gaiters, a snowy landscape spread around them. Finn was taller and slimmer than Calum, his cheeks hollow below prominent bones, his eyes very dark under his brows. His wide mouth turned up slightly at one side: more of a sneer than a smile. There was an old, faded picture of both brothers, kilted, playing the pipes at what looked like a Highland Games. Calum was already stretching towards his full height and Finn was pre-adolescent and very slight, maybe ten or eleven years old.
Below the photos she found an old cassette tape in an unlabelled box and five flat grey-brown pebbles. At the very bottom, a funeral programme for Finlay James Macdonald, 26 January 1972 –3 July 1993. Inside was a photograph of the same rock-star skinny, not-quite-smiling face, and then a poem or a song in Gaelic, an unfathomable assemblage of consonants. On the back, another photograph: Finlay as a black-haired boy on the beach just in front of the house. It was a perfect moment in time: the perpetual motion of a small boy frozen, imprinted on paper. His left hand was extended in front of him, balancing, while the right hand drew back, forefinger cocked around a flat, round pebble. The hair was blown back from his forehead, the face a scowl of effort and concentration. There was an impression of barely contained energy. Catriona stared at the picture and willed the hand to release the stone so that it could skim out over the water: six, seven, even ten bounces before disappearing.
Calum’s feet creaked up the stairs. She hid the box under the duvet and lay down, muffling thick breath in the pillow. Water ran in the bathroom. While he was in the shower, she replaced the box on the shelf and got back into bed, not much wiser about Finlay James Macdonald, the unsmiling young man who would have been her uncle, except that he was a climber and that he died at only twenty-one. She was more curious now, not less, and she wondered why she shouldn’t just ask straight out. Maybe she could, if Mary wasn’t here. The old woman’s presence made everything delicate, as though the wrong words could shatter her.
‘Calum, you’re going to make me late for Mass.’ Mary was banging on the bathroom door.
‘It doesn’t start till ten, Mum,’ came the reply.
Catriona glanced at the clock. It was half-past seven.
‘Where have you been? I heard you come in the door.’
‘I went for a paddle.’
Liar. Cat bit her lip.
‘I want to buy flowers for the graves.’
There was a pause before he said, ‘I’ll be out in a minute, all right? You’ll wake up Cat.’
‘Who?’
‘Catriona. Your granddaughter. Could you wait till I come out, please?’
Mary waited a moment, then knocked again and said something in Gaelic. Calum didn’t reply this time, and Mary tried again. She was like a child who couldn’t wait. The shower switched off and eventually he emerged, presumably to find Mary waiting outside the bathroom door.
‘We’re going to be late,’ she said again. ‘I have to go to Morrison’s for flowers.’
‘Pick some outside. I’m not driving to town this morning.’
‘They die as soon as you pick them.’
‘Oh for Christ’s sake.’
‘Calum! You’re so unhelpful. I don’t know why you’re so unhelpful.’
‘Would you please just let me get dressed?’
‘I’ll make porridge.’
‘I’ve had my breakfast.’
‘You don’t want porridge?’
‘No. Thank you. S’cuse me.’
Cat heard him creak along the short landing and shut his bedroom door, and Mary’s lighter but slower footsteps making their way down the stairs. She clattered around in the kitchen, opening cupboard doors and closing them noisily because she forgot where things were from one day to the next. Cat lay a bit longer, guilty at her eavesdropping, guilty for being an added complication in Calum’s life. He’d been noticeably downbeat yesterday and she wondered if it was her fault, even if he would never say so. How far down might he go?
As if her questions had seeped through the wall, he knocked on the door and called softly, ‘Cat? You awake?’
She sat up and ran her fingers through her hair. ‘Yeah. Come in.’
He pushed the door open. ‘Sorry about that before.’
‘It’s fine. Granny doesn’t give you much of a break, does she?’
‘Not much, no.’ He shut the door behind him and sat on the edge of the bed, seeming to relish a moment of refuge. ‘This is only the beginning. I never thought much about getting old until she came to stay, and now it scares the crap out of me. Anyway … how are you? Did you sleep all right?’
‘I guess.’ She saw shadows under his eyes. ‘I take it you
didn’t do much sleeping next door.’
He closed his eyes, laughed softly. ‘Oh, we slept … a bit.’
‘Oh my God. Too much information.’
‘Uh huh. Sorry.’
‘When were you going to tell me about her?’
‘I don’t know. I just hadn’t got around to it yet. Julie and I are … ’
‘Fuck buddies. Yeah, she told me.’
‘Jesus, Catriona.’ His eyebrows shot up and his cheeks flushed visibly. ‘You don’t have to be so rude, and I think you’re old enough to respect my privacy.’
‘Fine.’
‘Fine,’ he repeated.
She hesitated and stared at her fingers. The cuticles were torn and red. ‘So … are you better?’
‘Better than yesterday, you mean?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Probably.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m all right.’
‘Is it me? Is it because I’m here?’
‘No, of course it isn’t.’
‘You’d tell me, right? If you didn’t want me here?’
‘I do want you here.’ He patted her knee through the duvet and stood up. ‘I’ll be taking Mary to church in Arisaig this morning. You can come or you can stay, it’s up to you.’
‘I don’t do church.’
‘Neither do I. But you can see where five or six generations of our family are buried, if that interests you. There are Macdonalds stacked upon Macdonalds in that churchyard. My dad’s there. And my brother.’
‘What happened to your brother?’
‘I thought you knew about that. Your mum never told you?’
‘Not properly, no.’
‘He had a climbing accident.’ He paused and corrected himself. ‘We had a climbing accident.’
‘So you were with him when he died?’
He sighed. ‘Yup.’
‘Oh.’ What were you supposed to say? ‘So is that why you’re afraid of heights?’
