by Peter May
‘Do you remember, Grampa, how I used to help with the gathering? When we brought the sheep in for the shearing.’
‘Oh, God, aye! The shearing. Back-breaking that was.’
‘I used to help out from when I was just four or five.’
‘Aye, you were a bonny wee laddie, Fin. Marsaili thought the world of you, you know.’
‘No, I’m Fionnlagh, Grampa. Fin’s my dad.’
He gives me one of those smiles I see people give me all the time these days. Sort of embarrassed, as if they think I’m daft.
‘I’ve been helping out Murdo Morrison for a bit of extra pocket money. Gave him a hand with the lambing too, this year.’
I remember the lambing well. That first year on the island. You never got snow, but it could be bloody cold, and the wind on a wet March night would cut you in two. I’d never seen a lamb born before, and was very nearly sick the first time. All that blood and afterbirth. But what an amazing thing it was to see that skinny wee thing, like a drowned rat, breathing its first breath, and taking its first wobbling steps. Life in the raw.
I learned a lot of things that winter. I learned that however hard I thought my existence had been at The Dean, there were much worse things in life. Not that anyone treated us badly. Not really. But survival was brutal work, and you weren’t spared it because you were a kid.
There were daily chores. Up in the pitch-black, long before we left for school, to climb the hill and fill our buckets from the spring. There was cutting the seaweed from the shore. So much a ton Donald Seamus got for it from Alginate Industries at the seaweed factory over at Orasaigh. Killer work it was, slipping and sliding over the black rocks at low tide, bent double with a blunt sickle hacking away at the kelp, crusted shells, like razors, shredding your fingers. I think they burned the seaweed and used the ashes for fertilizer. Someone once told me they made explosives and toothpaste and ice cream from it too. But I never believed that. They must have thought I was as simple as Peter.
After the lambing there was the peat-cutting, up over the other side of Beinn Sciathan, lifting the peats as Donald Seamus cut them with the tarasgeir, stacking them in groups of three. We would turn them around from time to time till they were dried hard in the wind, then fetch them in big wicker baskets. We shared our pony with a neighbour, so it wasn’t always available, and then we had to carry those baskets on our own backs.
After that there would be the hay, hand-cut with a scythe into long swathes. You took out the rough shaws and laid it out to dry, praying that it wouldn’t rain. It had to be turned, shaken and dried again, or it would rot in the stack. So you needed fine weather. Back at the stackyard it would be made into bales, and it wasn’t until the stackyard was full that Donald Seamus would be satisfied that there was enough to feed the beasts through the winter.
You wouldn’t think there was much time for school, but Peter and me were sent over with the other kids every morning on the boat to be picked up by the bus and taken to the corrugated-iron building by Daliburgh crossroads that was the secondary school. There was another building, the technical school, about a quarter of a mile down the road. But I only went until the incident at New Year. After that Donald Seamus refused to send me back, and Peter had to go on his own.
They weren’t bad folks, Donald Seamus and Mary-Anne, but there was no love in them. I knew some homers that got terrible abuse. That wasn’t us.
Mary-Anne hardly ever spoke. Barely acknowledged our existence, except to feed us and wash the few clothes we had. Most of her time was spent spinning, dyeing and weaving wool, and joining with the other women in the waulking of the cloth, all sitting around a long wooden table out front and turning and beating the weave until it was thickened and fully waterproof. As they waulked they sang to the rhythm of it. Endless songs to make bearable the mindless repetition. I’ve never heard women sing so much as I did during my time on the island.
Donald Seamus was hard but fair. If he took his belt to me it was usually because I deserved it. But I never let him lay a hand on Peter. Whatever wrong the boy might have done, it wasn’t his fault, and it took a confrontation between me and Donald Seamus to establish that.
I can’t remember what it was now that Peter had done. Dropped the eggs on the way from the henhouse and broken the lot, maybe. I remember he did that several times before they stopped asking him.
But whatever it was he’d done, Donald Seamus was in a fury. He grabbed Peter by the scruff of the neck and dragged him into the shed where we kept the animals. It was always warm in there and smelled of shit.
By the time I got there my brother’s trousers were already down around his ankles. Donald Seamus had him bent over a trestle and was in the process of slipping his belt out of its loops, ready to give him a leathering. He looked around as I came in and told me in no uncertain terms to get the hell out. But I stood my ground and looked around me. There were two brand-new axe handles leaning up against the wall in the corner of the shed, and I lifted one, feeling the cool, smooth wood in my palm as I wrapped my fingers tightly around it and tested its weight.
Donald Seamus paused, and I met his eye, unblinking, the axe handle dangling at my side. He was a big man was Donald Seamus, and I have no doubt that in a fight he could have given me a good hiding. But I was a sturdy kid by then, almost a young man, and with a stout axe haft in my hand, there was no doubt in either of our minds that I could do him a lot of damage.
Neither of us said a word, but a line was drawn. If he laid a hand on my brother he would answer to me. He buckled up his belt and told Peter to clear off, and I laid the axe handle back in the corner.
I never resisted when it came my turn to feel his belt on my arse, and I think maybe that he belted me twice as much as he might otherwise have done. Like I was taking the punishment for both of us. But I didn’t mind. A sore arse passed, and I kept my word to my mother.
It was during our second lambing that I rescued one of them from certain death. It was a feeble wee thing, barely able to stand, and for some reason its mother took against it, refusing it the teat. Donald Seamus gave me a bottle with a rubber teat and told me to feed it.
I spent nearly two weeks feeding that wee beast, and there was no doubt she thought I was her mother. Morag I called her, and she followed me everywhere, like a dog. She would come down to the shore with me when I went to cut the kelp, and when I sat among the rocks at midday eating the rough sandwiches Mary-Ann had wrapped up for me in an oiled paper parcel, she would coorie in beside me, sharing her warmth and soaking up mine. I could stroke her head, and she would look up at me with adoring big eyes. I loved that wee lamb. First loving relationship I’d had with any other living creature since my mother died. Except, perhaps, for Peter. But that was different.
Funny thing is, I think it was the lamb that brought about my first sexual experience with Ceit. Or, at least, her jealousy of it. Seems daft to think of someone being jealous of a lamb, but it’s hard to overestimate my emotional attachment to that wee thing.
I’d never had sex of any kind, and some part of me figured that it was probably just for other people, and that I would likely spend the rest of my life beating the meat below the sheets.
Until Ceit took me in hand. So to speak.
She’d complained on several occasions about the amount of time I was spending with the lamb. I had always been at the jetty to meet her and Peter off the boat after school, and we’d go skimming pebbles in the bay, or cross the hill and make our way down to what she always called Charlie’s beach on the west side of the island. There was never anyone there, and we aye had great fun playing hide-and-seek among the grasses and the ruined crofts, or racing each other along the compacted sand at low tide. But since Morag came along, I’d been a bit preoccupied.
‘You and that bloody lamb,’ Ceit said to me one day. ‘I’m sick of it. Nobody has a pet lamb! A dog, maybe, but a lamb?’ It was well past the point where it needed me to feed it, but I was reluctant to let it go. We walk
ed in silence up the track that led past Nicholson’s store. It was a fine spring day, a soft breeze blowing out of the south-west, the sky streaked with high cloud, like wisps of teased wool. The sun was warm on our skin, and winter seemed at last to have retreated to crouch in the dark, quietly awaiting the autumn equinox, when it would send word of its imminent return on the edge of savage equinoctial gales. But all that seemed a long way away during those optimistic days of late spring and early summer.
Most of the women were out on their doorsteps spinning and weaving. Most of the men were away at sea. The sound of voices raised in song drifted across the hills on the breeze, strangely affecting. It raised goose pimples all across my shoulders every time I heard it.
Ceit lowered her voice as if someone might overhear us. ‘Meet me tonight,’ she said. ‘I’ve got something I want to give you.’
‘Tonight?’ I was surprised. ‘When? After dinner?’
‘No. When it’s dark. When everyone else is sleeping. You can sneak out of your window at the back, can’t you?’
I was nonplussed. ‘Well, I could, I suppose. But why? Whatever it is, why can’t you just give me it now?’
‘Because I can’t, stupid!’
We stopped at the brow of the hill, looking down over the little bay, and out across the Sound, back towards Ludagh.
‘Meet me down at the quayside at eleven. The Gillies will be in bed by that time, won’t they?’
‘Of course.’
‘Good. No problem, then.’
‘I’m not sure that Peter’ll be up for it,’ I said.
‘For fuck’s sake, Johnny, can you not do something without Peter for once!’ Her face was flushed, and she had the strangest look in her eyes.
I was taken aback by her sudden passion. We always did things together, me and Ceit and Peter. ‘Of course I can.’ I was a bit defensive.
‘Good, just you and me, then. Eleven o’clock at the jetty.’ And she stomped off across the hill towards the O’Henley croft.
I don’t know why, but I was strangely excited by the idea of sneaking out at night in the dark to meet Ceit. And as evening fell, and the wind dropped, I could barely contain my impatience. Peter and I completed our evening chores and then ate with Mary-Anne and Donald Seamus in the silence that always followed grace. It wasn’t that they didn’t talk to us on purpose. They never had a word for each other either. In truth, none of us had anything to say to one another. What was there to talk about? The cycle of life hardly changed from day to day. From season to season, yes. But one thing followed another quite naturally and never required discussion. It wasn’t from Donald Seamus Gillies or his sister that we learned the Gaelic. Peter picked it up from the other kids at school. In the playground, of course, not in the classroom where only English was spoken. I picked it up from the other crofters, some of whom hardly spoke any English at all. Or if they did, they weren’t going to speak it to me.
Donald Seamus smoked his pipe for a while by the stove, reading the paper while Mary-Anne washed the dishes and I helped Peter do his homework. Then at ten on the dot it was off to bed. The fire was tamped down for the night, lamps extinguished, and we went to our rooms with the smell of peat smoke, tobacco and oilwick in our nostrils.
Peter and I shared a double bed in the back room. There was a wardrobe and a dresser, and hardly enough room to get the door open. Peter was asleep in minutes, as he always was, and I had no fears about disturbing him by getting dressed again and climbing out of the window. But I had no idea how well or badly Donald Seamus or Mary-Anne slept. And so just before the clock struck eleven and I had committed myself, I opened the door a crack and listened carefully in the dark of the hallway. Someone was snoring fit to register on the Richter Scale. Whether it was brother or sister I didn’t know, but after a while I became aware of another, higher-pitched, intermittent snoring that came from the throat rather than the nose. So, both were asleep.
I closed the door again and crossed to the window, drawing the curtain aside to unsnib the sash and slide it up as quietly as I could. Peter grunted and turned over, but didn’t wake. I saw his lips moving as if he were talking to himself, perhaps using up the words that were never required of him at mealtimes. I sat on the ledge, swinging my legs over to the other side, and dropped down into the grass.
It was still surprisingly light out, a faint glow dying in the west, the moon already spilling its colourless light across the hills. The sky was a dark blue rather than black. In full summer it would still be light at midnight and later, but we had some weeks to go before then. I reached back in to pull the curtains shut, and slid the window closed.
And then I was off down the hillside like a greyhound out of the trap, sprinting through the long grass, feet squelching in the bog, exhilarated by an extraordinary sense of freedom. I was out, and the night was mine. And Ceit’s.
She was waiting for me down at the jetty, nervous I thought, and a bit impatient. ‘What took you so long?’ Her whisper seemed excessively loud, and I realized that there was no wind, just the slow, steady breathing of the sea.
‘It must be all of five past,’ I said. But she just tutted and took my arm and led me up the track towards Rubha Ban. There wasn’t a single light burning in any of the crofts across the hillside, an entire island asleep, or so it appeared.
Visibility was no problem in the wash of moonlight, but it made us feel vulnerable, too. If anyone should venture out we would be clearly visible.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked her.
‘Charlie’s beach.’
‘Why?’
‘You’ll see.’
There was only one moment when it might all have gone wrong. Ceit yanked suddenly on my sleeve, and we flattened ourselves into the long grass at the side of the track as a light flared in an open doorway, and we saw an old man stepping out into the moonlight with a shovel and a newspaper in his hand. Most folk used a chanty during the night, which got emptied in the morning. But old Mr MacGinty must have thought it was a fine night to relieve himself out on the moor. And so we had to lie there, giggling in the grass, while he dug himself a shallow hole and crouched over it, with his nightgown up around his neck, grunting and groaning.
Ceit put a hand over my mouth to shut me up, but she could barely contain her own mirth, air escaping through tightly pressed lips in tiny explosions. So I put my hand over hers, and we lay like that, pressed together, for nearly ten minutes while Mr MacGinty did his business.
I suppose that must have been the first time I became aware of her body in a sexual way. Her warmth, the softness of her breasts pressed against my chest, one leg crooked over mine. And I felt the first stirrings of arousal, both surprising and scary. She was wearing a sort of pale print dress with a V-neck that showed her cleavage. And I remember she was barefoot that night. There was something sensuous and tempting in those bare legs exposed in the moonlight.
She wore her hair a lot longer now than she had at The Dean, and it fell in soft, chestnut curls over her shoulders, a too-long fringe constantly in her eyes.
I noticed, too, as we lay in the grass a faint smell of flowers about her, aromatic, with a low, musky note, different from the smell she’d had at The Dean. When Mr MacGinty had finally gone back to his bed and we took our hands from each other’s mouths, I sniffed and asked her what the scent was.
She giggled. ‘It’s Mrs O’Henley’s eau de cologne,’ she said.
‘What’s that?’
‘Perfume, silly. I sprayed a couple of puffs of it on my neck. Do you like it?’
I did. I don’t know what it was about it, but it set butterflies free in my stomach. Her eyes seemed very dark as we lay there in the moonlight. Her lips full, with an almost irresistible allure. I found myself so much wanting to kiss them. But before I could succumb to the temptation, she was on her feet, holding out her hand and urging me to get up quick.
I scrambled to my feet and she took my hand, and we ran then up over the hill, past the primary schoo
l and along the road above the beach. We stopped, breathless, to take in the view. The sea simmered in a shimmering silence around the curve of the bay below us, rolling gently in to break in soft silver foam along the sand. The reflection of moon on water stretched away into a never-ending distance, the horizon broken only by a handful of dark islets and the brooding shadow of Barra.
I had never seen the island like this. Benign, seductive, almost as if it were colluding in Ceit’s grand plan.
‘Come on,’ she said, and led me down a narrow path through the heather to where the remains of an old ruined cottage looked out across the sands, and we picked our way through the stones to its grassy interior. She promptly sat herself down in the grass and patted a place beside her. I sat down, immediately aware of the warmth of her body, the soft sighing of the sea, the vast firmament overhead, the sky black now and crusted with stars. I was full of breathless anticipation as she turned those dark eyes on me, and I felt her fingertips on my face like tiny electric shocks.
I have no idea where we learn how to do these things, but before I knew it I had my arms around her and we were kissing. Lips soft and warm, parting to let our tongues meet. Shocking, thrilling. I felt her hand between my legs, where I was already straining at my trousers, and mine slid beneath the cotton of her dress to find it filled by a soft, pendulous breast, a nipple as hard as a nut grazing my palm.
I felt intoxicated. Drunk. Swept away on a sea of hormones. Completely out of control. We undressed in a kind of frenzy, clothes discarded in haste, and then we were skin to skin. Soft, warm, hot, wet. I had no idea what I was doing. Boys never do. They just follow some crude instinct. Ceit was much more controlled. Taking me in her hand, guiding me gently inside her. Gasping, almost crying out. I wasn’t sure if it was from pain or pleasure. Then all my primal instincts took over, and I performed as I suppose I was programmed to do. Her cries only aroused me more, driving me on towards the inevitable, which of course came far too soon.
