by Peter May
I’m not afraid now, though. I’ve waited all my life for this. Escape. From all those people who want to keep me in places I don’t want to be. Well, fuck them!
Hah! It felt good to say that. Well, think it, anyway. ‘Fuck them!’ I whisper it in the dark. And I hear it so loudly it makes me sit up straight.
If anyone comes in now, the game’s up. They will see my hat and coat, and notice my bag sitting packed on the end of the bed. They’ll probably call for Mr Anderson, and I’ll be in for a hell of a leathering. I wish they would hurry up and put the lights out. I’ll need to be long gone by morning. I hope the others haven’t forgotten.
I don’t know how much time has passed. Did I fall asleep? There is no light beneath the door any more. I listen for a long time and hear nothing. So now I lift my bag from the bed and slowly open the door. Damn! I should have gone for a pee before now. Too late. Doesn’t matter. No time to lose.
Old Eachan’s room is next door. I saw him in the dining room earlier. And remembered him immediately. He used to lead the Gaelic psalm-singing in the church. I loved that sound. So different from the Catholic choirs of my childhood. More like tribal chanting. Primal. I open the door and slip inside, and immediately hear him snoring. I close the door behind me and switch on the light. There is a brown holdall bag sitting on the dresser and Eachan is curled up beneath the quilt, sleeping.
I want to whisper his name, but somehow it eludes me. Dammit, what’s he called? I can still hear him singing those psalms. A strong clear voice, full of confidence and faith. I shake him by the shoulder, and as he rolls over I pull back the quilt.
Good. He’s fully dressed, ready to go. Maybe he just got tired of waiting.
‘Eachan,’ I hear myself say. Yes. That’s his name. ‘Come on, man. Time to go.’
He seems confused.
‘What’s happening?’ he says.
‘We’re running away.’
‘Are we?’
‘Yes, of course. We talked about it. Don’t you remember? You’re fully dressed, man.’
Eachan sits up and looks at himself. ‘So I am.’ He swings his legs out of the bed, and his shoes leave dirty tracks on the sheets. ‘Where are we going?’
‘Away from The Dean.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Shhh. Mr Anderson might hear us.’ I take him by the arm and lead him to the door, opening it to peer out into the dark.
‘Wait. My bag.’ Eachan lifts his holdall from the dresser and I turn off the light before we slip out into the corridor again.
At the far end I see a glow from the kitchen, and shadows moving around in the light that falls out into the hall. I wonder if one of the other boys has told. If so, we’re done for. Trapped. I can feel old Eachan hanging on to the back of my coat as we shuffle closer, trying not to make a noise. I hear voices now. Men’s voices, and I step smartly into the doorway to surprise them. Someone told me that once. Surprise is the best weapon when the numbers are against you.
But there are only two of them. Two old boys pacing around, all dressed with coats and hats, bags packed and sitting up on the counter.
One of them seems familiar. He is very agitated and glares at me. ‘You’re late!’
How does he know I’m late?
‘You said just after lights out. We’ve been waiting for ages.’
I say, ‘We’re making a run for it.’
He is very irritated now. ‘I know that. You’re late.’
The other one just nods, eyes wide like a rabbit’s in the headlights. I have no idea who he is.
Someone is pushing me from behind now. It is Eachan. What does he want?
‘Go on, go on,’ he says.
‘Me?’
‘Yes, you,’ says the other one. ‘Your idea. You do it.’
And the silent one nods and nods.
I look around, wondering what it is they want me to do. What are we doing here? Then I see the window. Escape! I remember now. The window leads out to the back. Over the wall and off across the bog. They’ll never catch us. Run like the wind. Over the asphalt to the trees.
‘Here, give me a hand,’ I say, and I pull a chair up to the sink. ‘Someone will have to hand my bag out after me. My mother’s ring is in there. She gave it to me to keep safe.’
Eachan and the nodding one hold me steady as I climb on to the chair and step into the sink. Now I can reach the catch. But it won’t move, dammit! No matter how hard I try. I can see my fingers turning white from the pressure.
Suddenly there is a light in the corridor. I hear footsteps and voices, and I can feel panic rising in my chest. Someone’s clyped on us. Oh God!
It’s black on the other side of the window as I turn back to it. I can see the rain still running down the glass. I’ve got to get out. Freedom on the other side. I start pounding on it with my clenched fists. I can see the glass bending with each blow.
Someone’s shouting, ‘Stop him! For heaven’s sake stop him!’
Finally the glass breaks. Shatters. At last. I feel pain in my hands, and see blood running down my arms. The blast of wind and rain in my face nearly knocks me over.
A woman is screaming.
But all I can see is the blood. Staining the sand. Effervescent foaming brine turning crimson in the moonlight.
FOURTEEN
Fin drove them past the Crobost Social Club and the football pitch beyond it. Houses climbed the hill in sporadic groupings at Five Penny and Eòropaidh, facing south-west to brave the prevailing winds of spring and summer, and huddled low along the ridge with their backs to the icy Arctic blasts of winter. All along the ragged coastline, the sea sucked and frothed and growled, tireless legions of riderless white horses crashing up against the stubborn stone of unyielding black cliffs.
Sunlight flitted in and out of a sky grated by the wind, chaotic random patches of it chasing each other across the machair where headstones planted in the soft, sandy soil marked the passing of generations. A little way to the north, the top third of the lighthouse at the Butt was clearly visible. Fin supposed that in retirement Marsaili’s mother had followed some basic instinct that took her back to childhood. Remembered moments of unexpectedly sunny days, or violent storms, the wildest of seas crashing all around the rocks below the lighthouse which had been her home.
From the kitchen window at the back of the modern bungalow that the Macdonalds had chosen as their retirement home, she could see quite plainly the collection of white and yellow buildings where she had once lived, and the red-brown brick of the tower that had weathered countless seasons of relentless assault to warn men at sea of hidden dangers.
Fin glanced from the window as Mrs Macdonald made them tea, and saw a rainbow forming, vivid against a bank of black cloud off the point, a dazzle of sunlight burnishing the troubled surface of the ocean, from here like dimpled copper. The peat stack in the small patch of garden at the back was severely diminished, and he wondered who cut their peat for them now.
He was barely aware of the old lady’s inconsequential babbling. She was excited to see him. So many years it had been since the last time, she said. He had been struck, the moment he entered the house, by the smell of roses that had always accompanied Marsaili’s mother. It brought back a flood of memories. Home-made lemonade in the dark farmhouse kitchen with its stone-flagged floor. The games that he and Marsaili had played amongst the hay bales in the barn. Her mother’s soft English cadences, alien to his ear then, and unchanged now, even after all these years.
‘We need some background information about Dad,’ he heard Marsaili saying. ‘For the records at the care home.’ They had agreed that it might be better if they kept the truth from her for the moment. ‘And I’d like to take some of the old family photo albums to talk through with him. They say photographs help to stimulate memory.’
Mrs Macdonald was only too happy to dig out the family snapshots, and wanted to sit and go through the albums with them. It was so rarely these days that they had company, she s
aid, speaking in the plural, as if the banishing of Tormod from her life had never happened. A kind of denial. Or a coded message. Subject not up for discussion.
There were nearly a dozen albums. The most recent were bound in garish floral covers. The older ones were a more sombre chequered green. The oldest had been inherited from her parents, and contained a collection of faded black and white prints of people long dead, dressed in fashions from another age.
‘That’s your grandfather,’ she told Marsaili, pointing at a picture of a tall man with a mop of curly dark hair behind the cracked glaze of a faded and over-exposed print. ‘And your grandmother.’ A small woman with long, fair hair and a slightly ironic smile. ‘What do you think, Fin? Marsaili’s double, isn’t she?’ She was so like Marsaili it was uncanny.
She moved, then, on to her wedding photographs. Lurid Sixties colours, flared trousers, tank-tops and floral shirts with absurdly long collars. Long hair, fringes and sideburns. Fin felt almost embarrassed for them, and wondered how future generations might view photographs of him in his youth. Whatever is à la mode today somehow seems ridiculous in retrospect.
Tormod himself would have been around twenty-five then, with a fine head of thick hair curling around his face. Fin might have had difficulty recognising him as the same man whose glasses he had fished out of the urinal only yesterday, if it hadn’t been for the vivid memories he had from his childhood of a big, strong man in dark-blue overalls and a cloth cap permanently pushed back on his head.
‘Do you have any older pictures of Tormod?’ he said.
But Mrs Macdonald just shook her head. ‘Nothing from before the wedding. We didn’t have a camera when we were winching.’
‘What about photographs of his family, his childhood?’
She shrugged. ‘He didn’t have any. Or, at least, never brought any with him from Harris.’
‘What happened to his parents?’
She refilled her cup from a pot kept warm in a knitted cosy, and offered refills to Fin and Marsaili.
‘I’m fine, thanks, Mrs Macdonald,’ Fin said.
‘You were going to tell us about Dad’s parents, Mum,’ Marsaili prompted her.
She blew air through loosely pursed lips. ‘Nothing to tell, darling. They were dead before I ever knew him.’
‘Was there no one from his side of the family at the wedding?’ Fin asked.
Mrs Macdonald shook her head. ‘Not a one. He was an only child, you see. And I think most, if not all, of his family had emigrated to Canada some time in the fifties. He never talked much about them.’ She paused and seemed lost for a moment as if searching through distant thoughts. They waited to see if she would come back to them with one. Eventually she said, ‘It’s strange …’ But didn’t elucidate.
‘What’s strange, Mum?’
‘He was a very religious man, your father. As you know. Church every Sunday morning. Bible reading in the afternoon. Grace before meals.’
Marsaili glanced at Fin, offering him a rueful smile. ‘How could I forget?’
‘A very fair man. Honest, and without prejudice in almost everything except …’
‘I know.’ Marsaili grinned. ‘He hated Catholics. Papes and Fenians, he called them.’
Her mother shook her head. ‘I never approved. My father was Church of England, which is not that different from Catholicism. Without the Pope, of course. But, still, it was an unreasonable hatred he had of them.’
Marsaili shrugged. ‘I was never sure whether or not he was entirely serious.’
‘Oh, he was serious, all right.’
‘So what’s strange, Mrs Macdonald?’ Fin tried to steer her back to her original thought.
She looked at him blankly for a moment before the memory returned. ‘Oh. Yes. I was going through some of his things last night. He’s accumulated a lot of rubbish over the years. I don’t know why he keeps the half of it. In old shoeboxes and cupboards and drawers in the spare room. He used to spend hours in there going through stuff. I have no idea why.’ She sipped her tea. ‘Anyway, I found something at the bottom of one of those shoeboxes that seemed … well, out of character somehow.’
‘What, Mum?’ Marsaili was intrigued.
‘Wait, I’ll show you.’ She got up and left the room, returning less than half a minute later to sit down again between them on the settee. She opened her right hand over the coffee table in front of them, and a silver chain and small, round, tarnished medallion spilled on to the open pages of the wedding album.
Fin and Marsaili leaned closer to get a better look, and Marsaili picked it up, turning it over. ‘Saint Christopher,’ she said. ‘Patron saint of travellers.’
Fin craned and tilted his head to see the worn figure of Saint Christopher leaning on his staff, as he carried the Christ child through storms and troubled waters. Saint Christopher Protect Us was engraved around the edge of it.
‘Of course,’ said Mrs Macdonald, ‘as I understand it, the Catholic Church removed his status as a saint about forty years ago, but it still belongs to a very Catholic tradition. What your father was doing with it is beyond me.’
Fin reached out to take it from Marsaili. ‘Could we borrow this, Mrs Macdonald? It might be interesting to see if it stimulates any memories.’
Mrs Macdonald waved a dismissive hand. ‘Of course. Take it. Keep it. Throw it away if you like. It’s of no use to me.’
Fin dropped a reluctant Marsaili off at the bungalow. He had persuaded her it might be better if she let him talk to Tormod on his own first. The old man would have so many memories associated with Marsaili that it might cloud his recollection. He didn’t tell her that he had other business he wanted to attend to en route.
His car was barely out of sight of the cottage when he turned off the road, and up the narrow asphalt track and over the cattle grid to the sprawling car park in front of Crobost Church. It was a bleak, uncompromising building. No carved stonework or religious friezes, no stained-glass windows, no bell in the bell tower. This was God without distraction. A God who regarded entertainment as sin, art as religious effigy. There was no organ or piano inside. Only the plaintive chanting of the faithful rang around its rafters on the Sabbath.
He parked at the foot of the steps leading to the manse, and climbed to the front door. Sunlight was still washing across the patchwork green and brown of the machair, bog cotton ducking and diving among the scars left by the peat-cutters. It was exposed up here, closer to God, Fin supposed, a constant trial of faith against the elements.
It was almost a full minute after he had rung the bell that the door opened, and Donna’s pale, bloodless face peered out at him from the darkness. He was as shocked now as he had been the first time he set eyes on her. Then, she hadn’t looked old enough to be three months pregnant. She looked no older in motherhood. Her father’s thick sandy hair was drawn back from a narrow face devoid of make-up. She seemed frail and tiny, like a child. Painfully thin in skin-tight jeans and a white T-shirt. But she looked at him with old eyes. Knowing, somehow, beyond her years.
For a moment she said nothing. Then, ‘Hello, Mr Macleod.’
‘Hello Donna. Is your father in?’
A momentary disappointment flickered across her face. ‘Oh. I thought you might have come to see the baby.’
And immediately he felt guilty. Of course, it would have been expected of him. But he felt, in a strange way, disconnected. Unemotional. ‘Another time.’
Resignation settled like dust on her child’s features. ‘My dad’s in the church. Fixing a hole in the roof.’
Fin was several steps down when he stopped and looked back to find her still watching him. ‘Do they know?’ he said.
She shook her head.
He heard the hammering as he entered the vestibule, but it wasn’t until he walked into the church itself that he found its source. Donald Murray was at the top of a ladder up on the balcony, perched precariously among the rafters, nailing replacement planking along the east elevation of the roof. H
e wore blue workman’s overalls. His sandy hair was greyer, and thinning more rapidly now, it seemed. So concentrated was he on the job in hand that he didn’t notice Fin standing among the pews watching him from below, and as Fin stood there looking up, a whole history spooled through his mind. Of adventures on bonfire night, parties on the beach, riding down the west coast on a fine summer’s day in a red car with the roof down.
There was a pause in the hammering as Donald searched for more nails. ‘It seems you spend more time working as an odd-job man in this church than you do preaching the word of God,’ Fin called to him.
Donald was so startled he almost fell off his ladder, and had to steady himself with a hand on the nearest rafter. He looked down, but it was a moment before recognition came. ‘God’s work takes many forms, Fin,’ he said when finally he realized who it was.
‘I’ve heard it said that God makes work for idle hands, Donald. Perhaps he blew that hole in your roof to keep you out of mischief.’
Donald couldn’t resist a smile. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone quite as cynical as you, Fin Macleod.’
‘And I’ve never met anyone quite as pig-headed as you, Donald Murray.’
‘Thanks, I’ll take that as a compliment.’
Fin found himself grinning. ‘You should. I could think of much worse things to say.’
‘I don’t doubt it.’ Donald gazed down on his visitor with clear appraisal in his eyes. ‘Is this a personal visit or a professional one?’
‘I don’t have a profession any more. So I suppose it’s personal.’
Donald frowned, but didn’t ask. He hung his hammer from a loop on his belt and started carefully down the ladder. By the time he had descended into the church Fin noticed that he was a little breathless. The lean figure of the once athletic young man, sportsman, rebel, and darling of all the girls, was beginning to go to seed. He looked older, too, around the eyes, where his flesh had lost its tautness and was shot through with lines like fine scars. He shook Fin’s outstretched hand. ‘What can I do for you?’
