by RL McKinney
He showered, shaved for the first time in days, dressed, put on shoes and a jacket. Mary was still in the kitchen, the messages still in their bags, the dishes still unwashed. She was sitting at the table, hands wrapped around a mug of tea, her eyes and nose red.
He pointed at her and punctuated each word. ‘It. Was. Not. My. Fault.’
Mary looked up at him. He didn’t want to know if she was going to accept this or renew her accusation. He didn’t want to hear her equivocate or try to justify. He didn’t want to hear her voice at all.
‘If you ever try to blame me again, you will lose your other son as well. Do you understand?’
She only looked at him, neither confirming nor denying.
‘I’m going out.’
Mary took a deep, shaky breath. ‘Would you like me to leave?’
‘Do what you like. I’m going out.’ He ignored the crutches, mostly hopped down the stairs and tried as hard as he could not to limp as he walked up the street. The bright, clear air brought the smells of ice and the North Sea, coal smoke and petroleum (or maybe the smell of petroleum was so permanently up his nose already that it would flavour everything for the rest of his life). Two blocks away was a pub he liked, unselfconscious and functional, wooden floorboards cured with beer, a lively hum of conversation, music sessions which he joined when he was onshore. It was quiet this afternoon: a couple of old guys at the bar, a group of younger women in the snug, bags of shopping around their feet.
He ordered a pint and a nip of Grouse.
‘Fit like, Calum, ma man,’ Louise said as she pulled his pint. ‘Havena seen ye for donkey’s.’ She tilted the glass under the tap and it looked tiny in her hand. She was oversized in every feature, from her breasts to her put-on North-East patter, but also had a barmaid’s expansive kindness. ‘Are ye back among the living?’
He reckoned it was obvious to anyone looking that he wasn’t, so he didn’t bother to lie. ‘I can see the living from where I am, but I’m not sure I’m quite there yet.’
Louise squeezed his hand as he handed over a fiver. ‘We’ve been missin’ yer tunes, doll. Get yourself doon this week.’
‘Aye, maybe. Ta, Lou.’ He let the whisky slip down his throat, then picked up his pint and turned around. The girls in the snug were very young, probably barely old enough to be in here. Oversized jumper and legging types, teasing each other, laughing, vigorously living the life of new students. One of them looked up and met his eyes. Her hair was short, bleached almost white, her eyes heavily framed with black make-up. They were pretty though. Big and shiny, and her face was shaped like a heart, with wide cheekbones and a small, delicate chin. Plump red-painted lips, which smiled at him.
He smiled back.
He took the kayak out, fixed his sights on the Sgùrr of Eigg and paddled hard. He wanted to exhaust himself enough to sleep tonight. He wanted to clear his mind but the conversations continued, tipping into arguments, going round and round just like the debates about Scotland’s future. Mary was firm on that one: there was no such thing as independence. Human beings relied on each other, communities were woven together over centuries. In a muddled, not-quite-clear-on-the-concept sort of way, she was right. He couldn’t cut her loose, either to live alone or to be looked after by strangers. You couldn’t simply walk away this time. You couldn’t tick a box on a paper and turn your back on your family.
Except for Finn. Finn, the mad, laughing poltergeist.
She blamed him for Finn. He’d be within his rights to dump her in a nursing home and wash his hands of her.
Did Mary remember that? What did Mary remember? Did she remember how blame and threat had formed a kind of magnetic force between them, locking them into a tense, quivering stasis? They hadn’t discussed it for years. He thought about it, though. He thought about it every time he looked at her.
Had she forgiven him? Had he forgiven himself? You shouldn’t have to forgive yourself for something that wasn’t your fault.
But.
But what if it was? Because maybe it was his fault, strategically if not technically. Because maybe his plan had been wrong from the beginning. Because he’d thought climbing could make Finn better and he should have known that was never going to happen. Because maybe climbing was only a display of testosterone-driven arrogance and you deserved to be smacked down for it. Like she said, maybe God didn’t think kindly of men who tried to conquer his handiwork. Maybe.
Maybe if he believed that, some part of this would make sense.
He stopped paddling and let himself drift, and slowly the current carried him away from shore. Out here, accompanied only by the sloshes and slaps of the water against the kayak, he could answer one question with confidence. With the absoluteness of English, not the relational bend of Gaelic. No.
No, he hadn’t forgiven himself. He had simply drifted away from the event, lame and dazed even if he no longer looked it to anyone else. Maybe this was where the vertigo came from. Maybe some part of him would be falling forever, until he found a way to absolve himself.
Where would an atheist seek absolution? It was a problem.
He and Mary couldn’t talk about it, and that was always going to be the other problem. That was the way it was between them: hierarchy and silence. They’d never had anything that might have been called a friendship. Finn would sit there between them, and he would laugh at them and squeeze them against the walls until they couldn’t breathe, but they wouldn’t talk about him. And maybe as the disease progressed Mary would properly forget and Finn wouldn’t exist anywhere except in Calum’s own head. Eventually, Calum would die or become senile, and it would all finally disappear. Individual losses eventually merged into something far bigger, and their own family’s grief would become part of that great collective absence. Death truly was the only socialist republic there was ever going to be.
BURGLARY
Calum said she had Alzheimer’s. He was lying. Once again, he was lying. He said she started the fire. He said nobody else had been into the flat.
He had forgotten that she had been the victim of a crime before. He had obviously forgotten about the burglary. He didn’t know she remembered that more clearly than he did.
At the time, he told her to call the police. He would have put his own brother in prison. Now he tried to tell her she was losing her memory. How could she be losing her memory when she remembered that perfectly well?
Fort William, 1992
What Mary noticed first was the smell. There was always a smell in the flat when Finn had been there: cigarette smoke, unwashed hair and something sweetish, almost like the stink of a dead animal. It was repulsive and embarrassing. When he stayed with her she gently reminded him to shower every few days, but he ignored her more often than not. His hair was long and matted, nearly forming itself into dreadlocks. His beard sprouted in thin, dark tufts on his pale cheeks. Such a beautiful boy he’d been; it was heartbreaking to look at him now.
‘Finn?’ she called into the flat, putting down her bags and hanging her coat on the hook. ‘Are you here?’
There was no answer. That in itself wasn’t unusual; he could be sleeping or locked in his room with headphones on. She hadn’t been expecting him. Normally he stayed in Aberdeen when Calum was offshore. He seemed to get by well enough on his own there, although Calum complained about the mess he left behind.
‘Finlay?’ She went into the kitchen, the living room, Finn’s bedroom. The bathroom door was open. There was no sign of him or any of his usual clutter, but the door to the hall cupboard was ajar. She wouldn’t have left it like that. Open cupboard doors were one of her pet hates, along with toilet seats left up and clothes sticking out of drawers. She’d nagged the boys about these things on a daily basis all their lives, to no avail. She opened the door fully and looked in. Her stacks of tidily folded towels and linens had been knocked over, some of them crumpled on the floor as if someone had shoved an arm past them to pull something out from the back.
The wooden b
ox containing her silver cutlery set had been removed from its safe place behind her old towels.
It had to be somewhere. She moved the remaining towels and sheets aside, knocking most of them onto the floor in her growing distress. Maybe she’d moved the box last time she’d tidied. She searched the other shelves.
Her legs felt as weak as they did when the doctor broke the news of Jack’s cancer. She began to shake all over and sweat broke out on her forehead. She went into her bedroom and knew immediately that he’d been here too. The quilt was rumpled and two of the photographs on top of her chest of drawers had been knocked over. She opened her jewellery drawer.
She’d never had much; she’d never been one for jewels and gold, apart from her plain wedding band and the little crucifix she kept close to her heart. What she had was mostly sentimental and she rarely wore it: her engagement ring, her mother’s pearls, the elegant silver necklace Jack had bought her for their twentieth anniversary. He was already ill by then and knew they wouldn’t make it to their twenty-fifth. It was gone, all of it.
It had to be Finn. If he’d been a little bit more careful, she might never have noticed anything for weeks. But he always left a mess behind him. And a bad smell.
Mary sat down on her bed and wept, wailing into her hands, overflowing with tears that she’d held in for so many years. She cried until the sun went down and she began to shiver with the cold, and then she got into bed and lay there until morning, drifting in and out of a troubled sleep.
The next day she folded all her linens and towels and organised what was left of her jewellery: glass beads and broken earrings. She opened the windows and cleaned the flat as thoroughly as she could, removing Finn’s smell and fingerprints. As she cleaned, she debated whether to confront him. He wasn’t a criminal, he must have been desperate to do it. He needed help and forgiveness and he could only steal things, not memories.
He wouldn’t do it again; there wasn’t much left of any value. Only Jack’s pipes: the Highland pipes which had belonged to his father during the war, and the small pipes that had made her fall in love with him. Surely Finn would never take those.
Just in case, she hid both sets of pipes inside an old suitcase and wedged it into the eaves behind the panel in the loft.
‘I’ve remembered where the pipes are,’ she said when Calum came in the back door, trailing his dripping gear after him. ‘Behind the panel in the eaves, inside a suitcase. I put them there after the burglary.’
‘So Finn wouldn’t take them,’ he said softly.
‘Finn would never have done that.’
He gave her a strange look and asked ‘You’re sure they’re there?’
‘Yes, I’m sure.’
‘Okay. We’ll go get them.’ He placed his hand very lightly on her arm. ‘Well done. That’s a relief.’
‘I’d hate to have lost them. I’m losing everything else.’
‘Oh Mum.’ His voice wobbled. ‘They’ll be all right. They’ll be safe up there.’
Tears rose in her eyes, and for the first time in years she stepped in close to him and allowed him to put his arms around her. He was sweaty and smelled of salt and mouldy waterproofs, but she didn’t mind.
LIFE CLASS
Calum worked Catriona hard, but it was a relief to be able to think about the ache in her arms and back, rather than the dark labyrinth inside her head. They were fixing up a shed for some rich guy’s yacht, and he had her carrying wood and tools, ripping out old rotted timbers, hammering and painting and varnishing, even climbing around on the roof. He didn’t chat very much when they worked, except to issue instructions and ask for things. Sometimes he sang under his breath, just like Granny Mary did, probably not even realising he was doing it. His voice brought her back to those nights in his flat in Aberdeen, when she was scared of the dark and he sang her to sleep. They were good times, maybe even the best of her life. She didn’t know anything then. She was too little to look into the future and understand what she was about to lose. The unfulfilled promises of California seemed insubstantial compared to that.
Sometimes she wanted to ask Calum why he never brought her over there like he promised, but she knew it would lead to an argument and she didn’t have the stomach for it. They had come to an unspoken agreement: he didn’t ask about that boy and she didn’t whinge about his paternal absenteeism. In this unquestioning silence, days slipped by more easily. The labour opened a valve in her skull and released some of the pressure. She began to sleep again.
Mary usually went to bed early. The efforts of social interaction seemed to weigh heavily on her by eight o’clock. A carer was now coming to help her while Calum and Catriona were at work. They went shopping or to the church, or sometimes just to the pub for tea or a bowl of soup. On Thursdays she was picked up in a minibus and taken to lunch with other pensioners in Mallaig, complaining as she departed and complaining as she returned, about the saltiness of the food, the senility of the company, the bingo, the mediocrity of the accordion player, the fact that Calum would rather pack her off with a load of elderly fools than have her in the house.
After tea Mary would watch the news, still trying to keep up with events the way she always had, and she would doze on the sofa until Calum turned the telly off.
Catriona was grateful for the evenings without her. She began to explore the woods and the beach, following the rocky headland as it curved out of the bay, opening up the view of the islands, and then in again to another smaller cove. She watched the waves, watched terns and gannets dive into the water, sometimes saw one of the sea eagles unfurl like a roll of dark cloth and rise over the far hillside. She almost never saw another person. Her fear subsided a little, although creaks and rustles in the woods still made her startle, pause and listen for footsteps.
Making her way home one evening, she saw Julie digging in her garden, man’s shirt knotted at the waist, hair tied up in a forties-style headscarf. She waved and Catriona went over hesitantly, smoothing her sweaty T-shirt and raking her fingers through putty-spiked hair.
Julie hugged her as if they’d known each other for years. ‘How you doing, my love? Sorry, I’m covered in muck.’
‘I’m permanently covered in muck now,’ Catriona said, showing Julie her broken and stained fingernails. ‘You still look glam, though. Most people don’t look that good hoeing a garden.’
‘Oh,’ Julie looked down at herself, ‘I’m just a scrawny waif and a slave to my red lippy. I’d give anything for a pair of decent tits.’
Catriona allowed herself to laugh. ‘You can have some of mine.’
Julie looked at them, let her speech broaden comfortably. ‘You’re a sculptor’s dream, hen.’ Then she ran her hand up Catriona’s arm. ‘You’re a braw lassie. Calum says you look just like your mam.’
‘Aye, I guess I do. More than him, anyway.’
‘There’s something about the eyes. Maybe the shape of the forehead.’ She scrutinised Catriona’s face for a few seconds, then smiled. ‘I was just about to crack open a bottle of red Spanish plonk. You want some?’
‘I was just on my way home.’
‘Oh, go on. Just the one.’
Catriona glanced over her shoulder. ‘Yeah, okay.’ She followed Julie in through the kitchen door and copied her in removing her shoes. The kitchen was small, plain and square, and when Julie opened the cupboards to bring out the wine and glasses, Catriona noticed that they were nearly empty: a couple of boxes of muesli, a few jars of spices, a packet of chocolate biscuits. She must barely eat. There were, however, at least twenty wine glasses.
The living room was mismatched and chaotic. It led your eyes on a manic ramble from one thing to another: art that didn’t adhere to any kind of theme, surreal contemporary paintings next to folksy driftwood crafts, ethnic rugs, old wooden chairs that had been painted and covered with beads and bottle caps, conflicting colours and textures. Nude women, lots of them: little statuettes on the shelves, paintings and drawings on the walls. The smell of incen
se covered up something more pungent, probably cannabis.
Julie motioned to a worn lime green velvet sofa. ‘Have a seat. Is it warm enough in here? Should I make a fire?’
‘I’m fine,’ Catriona said, trying not to stare at the painting of a naked pregnant woman on the wall directly opposite her. She sipped her wine and her gaze darted from place to place.
‘I know it’s a bit of a riot, but I can’t live without colour.’
‘I like it.’
Julie laughed. ‘It’s not everybody’s taste. I’m not exactly an accent wall and matching cushion kind of woman. My landlord won’t let me paint the walls. If I did, I’d have every one different. The only thing he’s ever let me do to the house was put the shells around the front door.’
‘They’re beautiful.’
‘He thinks they look traditional, whereas purple and yellow walls are just … you know … ’ she shrugged, ‘vandalism.’
‘So how did you end up here? You seem more of a city person.’
‘I am, but I need my bolthole.’ Julie drank deeply, put her glass down and picked up a pencil and a small sketchpad from the table beside her chair. She opened to a blank page and began to draw. ‘May I?’ She glanced up at Catriona.
‘You’re drawing me? Why?’
‘Because you’re bonny.’
‘Hardly.’
‘Aye, you are. You’re right, I am a city person. My heart belongs to Glasgow, as they say. I do a lot of teaching and workshops down there, but … I can’t live there all the time. I don’t have a place there, I stay in my pals’ spare room. I’m a migratory bird, I guess. Glendarach is my sanctuary when my head starts to overload.’
‘Doesn’t it feel weird to move back and forth so much?’ There was something intriguing about Julie, something deep and magnetic like a blossom full of nectar. Catriona wasn’t sure how much curiosity was acceptable.
