The Blackhouse l-1

by Peter May

  As they crossed the moor road towards Barvas, the sky was still light in the west, streaks of dark purple-grey and fading pink. Clouds, like billowing black smoke, were gathering out at sea, The sky in the east was dark. By the time they passed the green-roofed shieling, it was barely visible, and Fin became aware of Artair snoring gently in the seat beside him. The streetlights were on in Barvas, Fin swung the car north and they headed towards Ness.

  He had nearly twenty minutes to think, undisturbed by Artair’s drunken ramblings. Nearly twenty minutes to anticipate the moment when he would find himself face to face with Marsaili for the first time since his aunt’s funeral. Close to eighteen years. He had no idea what to expect. After all, Artair had changed so much. Would he even recognize the girl with the pigtails and the blue ribbons after all this time?

  They drifted through deserted villages, yellow lights in cottage windows the only sign of habitation. A dog came barking out of nowhere and Fin had to swerve to avoid it. The smell of peat smoke seeped in through the car’s ventilation system, and Fin remembered those long weekly bus journeys he and Artair had shared to their respective school hostels in Stornoway. He glanced across and saw, in the flash of the streetlights, Artair’s jaw slack, hanging open, a tiny dribble of saliva running from one corner of his mouth. Dead to the world. A drink-induced escape. Fin’s escape from the island had been physical. Artair had found other means.

  By the time they reached Cross, Fin realized that he had no idea where Artair lived. He reached over and shook him by the shoulder. Artair grunted and opened an eye and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He was disorientated for several moments, staring unseeing through the windscreen, before pulling himself upright in the seat. ‘That was quick.’

  ‘I don’t know where you live.’

  Artair turned to look at him, face distorted by disbelief. ‘You what? You can’t have forgotten where I live! I’ve lived there all my fucking life!.’

  ‘Oh.’ It had never occurred to Fin that Artair and Marsaili would have made their home in the Macinnes bungalow.

  ‘Yeh, I know, sad isn’t it? Still living in the same house I was fucking born in.’ The bitterness was back in his voice. ‘Unlike you, I had responsibilities.’

  ‘Your mother?’

  ‘Aye, my mother.’

  ‘She’s still alive?’

  ‘Naw, I took her to the taxidermist and had her stuffed so she could sit in the chair by the fire and keep us company at night. Of course she’s still alive! Do you think I’d have stayed here all these years if she wasn’t?’ He gasped his frustration, and the smell of stale alcohol filled the car. ‘Jesus. Eighteen years of spoon-feeding the old bitch morning noon and night. Lifting her to the toilet, changing her fucking nappies — sorry, incontinence pads. And d’you know what really fucks me off? She maybe can’t do much else, but she can talk nearly as good as you and me, and there’s a big part of her brain as sharp as ever it was. I think she just revels in making my life a misery.’

  Fin didn’t know what to say. He wondered who fed her and changed her when Artair was working. And almost as though he’d read his mind, Artair said, ‘Of course, Marsaili’s good with her. She likes Marsaili.’ And Fin had a sudden picture of what their lives must have been like for all these years, trapped in the same house, chained by family responsibility to the needs of an old woman robbed of most of her physical and mental faculties by a stroke she’d suffered when Artair was still in his teens. Again, as if he was inside Fin’s head, Artair said, ‘You’d think after all this time she’d at least have had the good fucking grace to die and give us our lives back.’

  Fin turned off on the single-track that took them up the hill to the streetlights of Crobost strung out for half a mile along the cliff road. They passed beneath the shadow of the church, and Fin saw lights on at the manse. Around the curve of the hill, the road rose steeply towards the Macinnes bungalow built into the slope of the land as it fell away towards the clifftops. Light spilled out from its windows, falling on to the peat stack, illuminating its carefully constructed herringbone pattern, built just as if Artair’s father had done it himself. A couple of hundred yards further on, Fin saw the dark silhouette of his parents’ crofthouse smudged against the night sky. No lights, no life there.

  He slowed and turned down on to the Macinnes drive and stopped the car in front of the garage doors. A blink of moonlight splashed a pool of broken silver on the ocean beyond. There was a light on in the kitchen, and through the window Fin could see a figure at the sink. He realized, with a start, that it was Marsaili, long fair hair, darker now, drawn back severely from her face and tied in a pony tail at the nape of her neck. She wore no make-up and looked weary somehow, pale, with shadows beneath blue eyes that had lost their lustre. She looked up as she heard the car, and Fin killed the headlights so that all she could see would be a reflection of herself in the window. She looked away quickly, as if disappointed by what she‘d seen, and in that moment he glimpsed again the little girl who had so bewitched him from the first moment he set eyes on her.

  SEVEN

  It was a whole year before I plucked up the courage to defy my parents and go to Marsaili’s farm on a Saturday.

  Telling lies was something I didn’t do very often. But when I did, I made sure they were plausible. I’d heard other kids spinning yarns to their parents, or their teachers, things that even I could tell weren’t true. And you could see immediately in the faces of the grown-ups that they knew it, too. It was important that you made the lie believable. And if you didn’t get found out, then you had a useful tool to keep in your locker for when the right, or wrong, moment arose. Which was why my parents had no reason to doubt me when I told them I was going down the road to play at Artair’s that Saturday morning. After all, what possible reason could a six-year-old have for lying about something like that?

  Of course, I told them in English, since we never spoke Gaelic in the house any more. I had found it much easier to learn than I could have imagined. My father had bought a television. Reluctantly. And I spent hours glued to it. At that age, I was like a sponge, soaking up everything around me. It was simple enough, there were just two words now for everything, where before there had only been one.

  My father was disappointed that I was going to Artair’s. He had spent all summer restoring an old wooden dinghy which had washed up on the beach. There was no name on her. All the paintwork had been bleached off by the salt water. All the same, he had put a notice in the Stornoway Gazette, describing her, and offering to restore her to her rightful owner should that person come forward to claim her. He was scrupulously honest, my father. But I think he was quite glad when no one did, and he was able to begin the rebuilding with a clear conscience.

  I spent long hours with him that summer rubbing the wooden hull down to the bone, holding the worktable steady while he sawed new lengths of cross-planking from yet more timber which had been washed up on the shore. He got rowlocks very cheaply at an auction in Stornoway and fashioned new oars for her himself. He said he wanted to put a mast in her and make a sail out of some canvas we had found on one of our beachcombing adventures. And he had an old outboard motor in the shed that he wanted to try to make serviceable. Then we could propel her by oars, wind or petrol. But all that could wait. Right now he just wanted to get her into the water on the first good day, and row her around the bay from Port of Ness to Crobost harbour.

  He had painted her inside and out to protect her from the salt. Purple, of course, like everything else in our lives. And on either side of the bow, in flamboyant white lettering, he had painted her name, Eilidh, which to the non-Gaelic ear sounds like Ay-lay. It was the Gaelic for Helen. My mother’s name.

  It was a perfect day for it, really. A fine September Saturday before the equinoctial gales kicked in. The sun was bright and strong, and still warm, and there was just a light breeze ruffling a tranquil sea. Today, my father said, was the day, and I was sorely torn. But I said I had to
ld Artair I’d be there and didn’t want to disappoint him. My father said we couldn’t wait until next Saturday, because it was probable that the weather would have broken by then, and that the Eilidh would have to stay under her tarpaulin in our garden until the spring. If I didn’t want to go with him, he was just going to have to take her out on his own. I think he was hoping that would make me change my mind, and that the two of us would take the Eilidh on her maiden voyage together. He couldn’t understand why I would pass up the chance just so that I could go and play with Artair. I could play with Artair any time. But I had promised Marsaili, in spite of being strictly forbidden by my mother, that I would come to the farm that Saturday. And though it broke my heart, and probably my father’s, I wasn’t about to break my promise.

  So it was with mixed feelings that I said goodbye and headed off down the road towards Artair’s bungalow, the lie weighing heavily on my conscience. I had told Artair I was busy that Saturday, and not to expect me. And as soon as I was out of view of my house, I took off across country on a peat track, running until I was certain I could no longer be seen from the Crobost road. It took me about ten minutes from there, cutting back across the moor, to get on to the Cross-Skigersta road and turn west towards Mealanais. It was a route I knew well by now, having spent the last year walking Marsaili home after school with Artair. But this was the first time I had dared to go on a Saturday. A rendezvous arranged in secret during a snatched conversation in the playground. Artair was to know nothing about it. My stipulation. I wanted Marsaili to myself for once. But as I scrambled down the slope to the track that led to Mealanais farm, I felt the guilt of my deception like the sick feeling you get when you have eaten more than you should.

  At the white gate I hesitated with my hand on the latch. There was still time to change my mind. If I ran all the way, I could probably get back before my father had got the boat on to its trailer, and no one would be any the wiser. But a voice came to me on the breeze, bright and cheerful.

  ‘Fi-in … Hiya, Fin.’

  And I looked up to see Marsaili running up the path from the farmhouse. She must have been watching for me. And now there was no going back. She arrived, breathless, at the gate, her cheeks rosy red, blue eyes shining like flowers in a cornfield. Her hair was plaited in pigtails as it had been that first day at school, blue ribbons to match her eyes.

  ‘Come on.’ She opened the gate and grabbed my hand, and I was through the looking glass into Marsaili’s world before I even had time to think about it.

  Marsaili’s mum was a lovely woman who smelled of roses and spoke with a strange, soft, English accent that sounded almost musical to my ears. She had wavy brown hair and chocolate eyes, and was wearing a print apron over a cream woollen jumper and blue jeans. She had on a pair of green wellies, and didn’t seem to mind them shedding dried mud all over the flagstone floor in the big farmhouse kitchen. She shooed two lively border collies out into the yard and told us to sit at the table, and poured us tall glasses of cloudy home-made lemonade. She said she had seen me and my parents often at the church, although I didn’t really remember seeing her. She was full of questions. What did my dad do? What did my mum do? What did I want to be when I grew up? I hadn’t the faintest idea, but didn’t like to admit that. So I said I wanted to be a policeman. She lifted her eyebrows in surprise and said that was a good thing to want to be. I could feel Marsaili’s eyes on me the whole time, watching. But I didn’t want to turn and look at her, because I knew I would only blush.

  ‘So,’ her mum said, ‘will you stay for lunch?’

  ‘No,’ I said quickly, then realized that perhaps I had sounded a little rude. ‘I told my mum I’d be back by twelve. She said she’d have something ready. And then me and my dad are going out in a boat.’ I was learning early that the telling of one lie often led to the telling of another. And then another. I started to panic in case she asked me something else I had to lie about. ‘Can I have some more lemonade, please?’ I tried to change the subject.

  ‘No,’ Marsaili said. ‘Later.’ And to her mum, ‘We’re going out to play in the barn.’

  ‘Okay, just watch the mites don’t bite.’

  ‘Mites?’ I said when we got out into the yard.

  ‘Hay mites. You can’t really see them. They live in the hay and bite your legs. Look.’ And she pulled up the leg of her jeans to show me the tiny red bites on the leg underneath that she had scratched and made bleed.

  I was horrified. ‘Why are we going into the barn, then?’

  ‘To play. It’s alright, we’ve both got jeans on. And they probably won’t bite you anyway. My dad says they only like English blood.’ She took my hand again and led me across the farmyard. Half a dozen hens went skittering off across the cobbles as we headed for the barn. Away to the left stood a stone byre, where they fed and milked the cows. There were three large pink pigs snuffling about in a stye amongst scattered hay and chopped turnip. All they seemed to do was eat and shit and piss. The sweet, pungent smell of pig manure filled the air and made me screw up my face.

  ‘This place stinks.’

  ‘It’s a farm.’ Marsaili seemed to think it hardly worth commenting on. ‘Farms always stink.’

  The barn was huge inside, with baled hay piled up almost to the corrugated tin roof. Marsaili started clambering across the lower bales. And when she realized I wasn’t following, turned and waved me up after her, irritated that I hadn’t taken her lead.

  ‘Come on!’

  Reluctantly I followed her up towards the roof, to where a narrow opening took us into a space where the bales created an area the size of a small room, almost totally enclosed except for where the large hay-bale steps led up to it from below.

  ‘This is my space. My dad made it for me. Of course, I’ll lose it once we have to start using the hay to feed the animals. What do you think?’

  I thought it was great. I had nowhere I could really call my own, except for the tiny attic bedroom my father had made, and you couldn’t do anything in there without the whole house hearing. So I spent most of my time outdoors. ‘It’s brilliant.’

  ‘D’you ever watch cowboys on telly?’

  ‘Sure.’ I tried to be nonchalant. I’d seen something called Alias Smith and Jones, but hadn’t found it very easy to follow.

  ‘Good, I’ve got a great game of cowboys and Indians for us to play.’

  At first I thought she meant it was some kind of board game, until she explained that I was to be the cowboy, captured by a tribe of warriors, and that she would be the Indian princess who had fallen in love with me and was going to help me escape. It didn’t sound like any of the games I had ever played with Artair, and I wasn’t very keen. But Marsaili had it all worked out, and took charge in a way that left me little room for dissent.

  ‘You sit here.’ She led me into the corner and made me squat down with my back against the bales. She turned away for a moment to retrieve something from a little hidey-hole in the hay, before turning back with a length of rope and a large red handkerchief in her hands. ‘And I’ll tie you up.’

  I didn’t like the sound of that at all and started to get to my feet. ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’

  But she pushed me back down with an unexpected firmness. ‘Of course it is. You have to be tied up so that I can come and untie you. And you can’t tie yourself up, can you?’

  ‘I don’t suppose so.’ I conceded the point with great reluctance.

  Marsaili proceeded to tie my hands behind my back, and then looped the rope around to tie my ankles together, my knees folded up under my chin. I felt trussed and helpless as Marsaili stood back to survey her handiwork and smile her satisfaction. I was beginning to have serious doubts about the wisdom of having come to the farm at all. Whatever I had imagined we might get up to, it was not this. But worse was to come. Marsaili leaned over and began tying the red handkerchief around my head like a blindfold.

  ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ I pulled my head away to try to s
top her.

  ‘Hold still, silly. You have to be blindfolded, too. The Indians always blindfold their prisoners. And, anyway, if you were to see me coming, you might give the game away.’

  By now I was beginning to doubt her sanity and panic was setting in. ‘Give the game away to who?’ I looked around the hay-bale room. ‘There’s no one here!’

  ‘Of course there is. But they’re all sleeping now. That’s the only reason I can sneak up in the dark and set you free. Now, hold still while I tie the blindfold.’

  I was hardly in a position to resist, since I had already allowed her to tie me up, so I sighed loudly and submitted with indignant resignation. She leaned over again, placing the folded handkerchief over my eyes and tying it behind my head. The world went black, except for where the light leaked in around the edges of the hanky, and then it was red.

  ‘Okay, don’t make a sound,’ Marsaili whispered, and I heard the rustling of the hay as she moved away. Then silence. A very long silence. A silence so long that I began to be scared that she had run off and left me there as a joke, all tied up and blindfolded. At least she hadn’t gagged me as well.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  And from somewhere much closer than I had expected came an answering ‘Shhhhh! They’ll hear you.’ Marsaili’s voice was not even a whisper. More like a breath.

  ‘Who will?’

  ‘The Indians.’

  I sighed and waited. And waited. My legs were beginning to seize up now, and I couldn’t straighten them out. I wriggled to try to shift my position, and rustled the hay.

  ‘Shhhhh!’ Marsaili’s voice came again.

  Now I heard her moving, circling around me in her secret straw room. And then more silence, before suddenly I could feel her breath hot on my face. I had not realized she was so close. I almost jumped. I could smell the sweetness of the lemonade still on it. And then soft, wet lips pressed themselves against mine, and I could taste it, too. But I was so startled, I pulled my head back sharply and banged it against the bale at my back. I heard Marsaili giggling. ‘Stop it!’ I shouted. ‘Untie me now!’ But she just kept giggling. ‘Marsaili, I mean it. Untie me. Untie me!’ I was close to tears.