Island, p.7
Island, page 7
Was it hers or the man’s, MacLeod’s? I pulled a book off the shelf. Culpeper’s Complete Herbal. Inside the front cover was handwritten ‘Phyllis Lovage’. I looked in another further along – it was in Italian – then one from the opposite bookcase, a book about identifying medicinal plants. Her name was in all of them. It was her stuff. As I closed the plant book I noticed something brown poking out from between its pages; I let it fall open at the centre and there was a squashed brown rose. I picked it up by its flattened stem, it was brittle and dry and impossibly flat. She was keeping a dead rose.
I pulled open one of the drawers under the display cabinet. It was overflowing with papers. Bills, letters, receipts. I started to read a letter from someone called Anita thanking her for the lotion and saying her skin had cleared up completely now. There were receipts for the sale of lambs; bills for sheep dip, mortgage information. The bottom drawer was full of knitting patterns, absolutely stuffed so it wouldn’t open properly. Mixed in with the patterns were more photos, of a fat-faced rather odd-looking toddler. Calum.
I sat on the floor next to the cabinet. All this stuff. All this life of hers. All this past that she had that was hers and not mine all gathered together and hoarded like it was something, like it meant something, that had been kept hidden from me so I wouldn’t know about it or have any of it. All these things she had done and people she had known all excluding me. I had one box of left luggage with nothing in it but crap, cheap paperbacks, some boots that hurt my feet and a pair of polyester sheets.
She had books she’d had since she was a kid; pictures, ornaments, photos. There are no photos of me except from school, a little face people skim over looking for their own children. To have photos, there has to be someone who wants to look at you. It was too huge to swallow it was too much.
On the ornate little table next to the red chair there were two brown prescription bottles with her name on. Good, she deserved to be ill. She deserved to have this prised off her all this accretion she’d coated herself in as if she had a right to some kind of happiness or meaning. What the hell right did she have?
When she was dead it would belong to me. All this stuff in this house. To me and dopey Calum. We were her heirs. I was shaking with fury. It would never be mine. I would never have a mantelpiece like that casually full of stuff accumulated over years. I would always be flimsy and unreal and not backed up by anything; nothing would ever stick to me.
A desire was growing in me a huge red flaming lust to pick up the poker and start smashing that room that complacent cosy lifetime of a room. Crash through the glass cabinet doors smash the china smash the glasses smash the vases and the toby jugs, rake the old prints off the walls and let them shatter in their frames, stab the poker through the thin fabric of the chaise-longue and chair, drag the drawers out spill them on the ground scuffle the papers and photos and trinkets with my feet swipe the poker along the mantelpiece hit at the pipes and shepherdess until they were in tiny fragments break it up and smash it all.
It was what she deserved.
I had to get myself up and walk stiff-legged to the door my mouth was dry my tongue was thick I was swollen with lust to lay about me and annihilate that room. I made myself switch off the light and close the door and edge down the hall to my own anonymous room. I made myself lie on the bed and I pulled the covers over me and I fell asleep immediately.
9 Table Rock
I didn’t wake till ten, a very good omen, a deep still sleep a mark of approval for my plan. I could find out what I wanted from my simple brother. I could spy on her and winkle her out. I could have power over her and relish it.
I spent the morning with a pad of lined paper and a ring binder creating my Open University project. So I could pretend to be working on it at relevant moments; so if she ever thought of spying on me (she wouldn’t, complacent cow, she didn’t even consider I might be dangerous) then she would find I had a good excuse to be there.
She was in the kitchen first thing, I heard the radio, she went along the hall a few times but didn’t leave the house. I liked listening to her and her not knowing I was doing it or why. At 12.30 someone came in the front door and banged it. Calum. He called out ‘Hello?’ and she came past my door, I heard her saying something about the mud on his shoes and needing a new light bulb in the pantry. They both went along to the kitchen. Mother and son, how sweet.
She’d cooked him a proper dinner from the smell of it. I opened my back door and sat and had a fag to quell the pinpricks of rage I felt. Imagine someone cooking your dinner. Doing it for you, anticipating your arrival and your taste. Who ever did that for me? She did it when he was a kid and she was still doing it now. I should have gone in there and asked for fifteen years of meals. She owed me that at least.
I took myself off to the village I was managing myself like a teacher manages a rowdy last-lesson class, I was keeping myself on the straight and swooping, glide and flying line, I was going to do exactly according to plan and have no difficult or intrusive or inconvenient fall. The pub was shut at lunchtime – centre of the universe as the island was – so I bought a used-looking pie from the post office (narrowly; that was closing at 1 p.m.) and a couple of booklets with dingy old photos giving some type of history of the island. Useful for OU. The old bat who served me asked me where I was staying. She must have remembered me from yesterday.
‘Mrs MacLeod’s. Tigh Na Mara.’
‘Oh aye. Stayed there before?’
I shook my head.
‘And how’re ye findin’ it? All right?’ She was beady; suggesting she didn’t think it would be.
‘Why d’you ask?’
‘Och, no reason. It’s just some people find her – a wee bit standoffish. And Calum–’
‘Calum’s pretty strange.’
‘There’s no harm in the lad. But if ye were after another place to bide I’ve a wee room in ma cottage …’
‘Thanks. I’m not really sure how long I’m staying.’
‘Aye. Well.’ The woman busied herself spreading sheets of faded brown paper over the oranges and tomatoes in the window; the sun was beating in on them.
‘Is there a Mr MacLeod?’ I asked.
She glanced at me. ‘There was.’ There was a strange silence.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘Well may ye ask,’ she said bitterly. She finished with the brown paper and straightened up to face me, lowering her voice. ‘He fell into ma lady’s clutches and that wa’ tha.’
‘Someone told me he drowned.’
‘Aye. And would y’expect the best sailor on th’isle tae drown?’ She opened the door for me, followed me out and locked up behind us. ‘She hasnae a friend this side o’ Glasgow and tha’s god’s truth.’ Her voice rose to its normal pitch. ‘I’ll be off to ma dinner then. Gude-bye.’
I sat on the bench outside the pub to eat, and looked in the book at old photos of men with tools standing in front of a huge unidentifiable machine, and two men with guns guarding them. The caption said they were German prisoners of war working in the iron mine. Did they ever get home or were they still here, little old men behind grey net curtains, still imprisoned from their homeland? I thought it would be a bad place to be kept against your will, this.
When I got back to the house it was very quiet. Calum had gone. She was in the kitchen. I could hear the odd clink of dishes and scraping noises. I had been there 24 hours. OK. I had discovered she spent long periods of time on her own making witchy potions. It would be easy enough to pick a time to do it when nobody would find her for hours. Night. Night would be the best. But before I did it I wanted to make her talk. I wanted to know what the fuck she’d done with her life that was so vital I couldn’t have been in it.
The kitchen door opened and she came along the hall and started creaking up the stairs. Going for a pee; she seemed to be leaving the downstairs bathroom for my sole use. I stood inside my door waiting to bump into her accidentally when she came back downstairs. But everything went quiet; I kept my eyes on my watch and ten minutes passed. I went out into the hall and halfway up the stairs – the bathroom door was open up there. The bloody woman’d gone to bed.
I stood on the stairs waiting for another five minutes. Not exactly easy to engage her in casual conversation when she’s taking an afternoon nap. I stood in a wave of heat with my nails making white dents in the heels of my palms, torn over whether to go for it there and then or wait for a chance to talk to her first. Once she was dead there’d be no chance of finding anything out.
The house was throbbing with quietness. At last I went out again, there was nothing else to do; I set out along the lane and just walked, in the opposite direction to the village. Passed the place where Calum and I had turned right yesterday and carried straight on. To my left the sea curved in towards the road. It was a shallow pebbled bay. I could see a figure standing on an outcrop of black rock. Calum again. Manky Calum. Catatonic Calum. With his rucksack on his back like a hunchbacked stork. I climbed down to the bay. He was staring out to sea. When I got closer I could hear he was muttering to himself. I got close before he turned and even then he just kind of nodded in recognition then went back to his staring and muttering. I sat on a rock. The sea was completely flat with a few black rocks sticking up. Some of those black birds, cormorants, standing on the most distant one. Nothing moving. The sky was grey and the sea was grey and right out in the distance was the grey silhouette of another island. It was a dreary view. At last Calum turned to me.
‘OK?’ I said.
He nodded. I thought of asking him who he’d been talking to but that would make me as mad as him.
‘I can’t find a coastal path. Is there one?’
‘No. You can walk, but n-not always along the shore.’
I already knew that much. I wondered if he spent the whole time wandering about. He obviously had no employment. If his father was an islander … ‘Have you got many relatives here?’
‘I had a sis-sister, she died.’
It was a minute before I could speak. ‘When?’
‘Before I was born. She was c-called Susan.’
Well. So she was. I stared at the cormorants thinking one of them might go for a dip or do a tap dance or anything that might give me a slight diversion.
‘It’s her birthday next week.’
I looked at him but he was perfectly oblivious. Yes. It is. My birthday. October the 2nd. ‘What d’you do on her birthday?’
‘We have a cake for her, and sing.’
You evil cow Phyllis MacLeod, you monstrous evil cow. I have to remember to breathe.
‘People shouldn’t forget. Even b-babies who die.’
Excellent. Now I realise the root of my problems. All these years here’s me been struggling along imagining I’m alive. Silly me. I’m dead. That explains it all. That explains why I haven’t got a mother or a father or a home or a life because people who’re dead don’t have those things. Silly silly me. I get up and go over the rocks to the narrow pebbly shoreline. Just to be moving. He comes after. He’s got a stick like a blind man.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing.’
‘D’you want a d-drink of tea?’
‘No.’
He starts to take his rucksack off. ‘Look what I found this morn–’
‘Fuck off! Fuck off you moron and leave me alone!’ I scramble away across the stones leaving him standing there gawping. Catching flies in his gormless gob. There’s nothing but my feet crunching angrily and the slurge and suck on stones of the sea. What the hell is this about? I am quickly up to the lane again.
If he knows about his sister, did his father know? Does that make his father my father?
I walked fast and blind along the lane – thinking about going into her sitting room. I’d often imagined revealing myself to her, but now with the real woman, her real room in my mind’s eye I could see how it would be. Well not exactly because she could do a number of things, she had a variety of options like believing me or not believing me or pretending to believe or not believe me; but I’d burst in there without knocking. (Why throw me away then pretend to be sad? If she regretted leaving me why not look for me?)
She would jerk her head up from her book as if she was blind and take off her glasses to rub her eyes. She might even have been asleep.
‘I want to talk to you.’
‘I see.’ She would fold her glasses carefully, set them on the little table at her elbow. I would sit on the rounded red velvet chair, straight backed, facing her. Like on a stage.
‘I have something to tell you.’
Her hand would dart nervously to her glasses then fall back, she would peer at me closely. ‘Calum?’
‘No.’ She would be relieved. Ha, she would have no idea.
I’ve rehearsed it in my dreams and in my wakings a thousand times and a thousand ways but the rehearsal and the repetition don’t matter because whatever I say – whatever predetermined sentence I let out into her stuffy cluttered room will have the same effect; the fingernail under the corner of the mask, the start of the unpeeling. And once it starts it won’t stop, it will go on to the same result no matter what and how we do it, it will rip or slip or jolt or tear or slide off easily but whichever course, the result will be the same: she’ll be unmasked. Whether she denies me or admits me whether she constructs an elaborate castle of lies or falls open at the truth with a single blow.
I was walking fast but suddenly aware of being cold. It wasn’t a wind it was a wedge of cold air like when you’re swimming in the sea and you move into an area of water that’s suddenly much colder. Looking up I noticed the sea and rocks had disappeared behind a bank of mist.
She says I’m dead. So she can have the virtuousness of remembering me without the inconvenience of keeping me. Why? The lane in front of me disappeared. Literally. The mist – fog, cloud, whatever – was white and thick enough to touch; it smeared coldly against my face, it stuck in my throat and made me cough. It was right up against my eyes, everything around me blocked out. I stopped. The coldness flowing all around me made me shiver. I took one step forward, but I couldn’t see my foot. I couldn’t see my own legs. The vanishing of everything made me dizzy. It was absolutely quiet.
She makes a cake!
I couldn’t remember how close to the edge of the lane I was. I shuffled sideways a couple of steps then realised I wasn’t even sure if there was a hedge – or a ditch – or even a straight drop over a cliff to the sea. I hadn’t been looking. I turned around slowly on the spot, nearly overbalancing. Nothing but thick white fog. A feature of the island presumably. A delightful characteristic; fog rolls in from the sea. Cloud falls down from the sky. Hooray for nature.
I assumed it was temporary, like interference on TV. That it would clear or lift. But the minutes crawled past and nothing happened. My eyes began to ache from peering. My legs began to ache from standing. I turned round again. Nothing. I took a few steps but it was completely pointless. I had no idea where the lane began or ended; where it curved; which way I was facing; whether I was close or far from the shore. The only thing to do was sit it out. I sat down carefully and felt the road surface around me. A rough pebbly lane. The fog seemed if possible to be thickening – not that it blotted out more (it couldn’t, it already blocked the lot) but that it was less white, it let less light through. I strained to hear the sea but there was nothing.
Suddenly I heard or felt a sound. A tapping. Felt it in the surface of the road and heard it muffled in my ears. Almost immediately something invisible hit me and the tapping stopped. I screamed.
‘N-Nikki?’
‘Calum!’ I scrambled to my feet. He was a dark shape. His arm grasped mine. ‘How did you know the way?’
His disembodied voice came out of the fog, he was tapping the ground with his stick. ‘You turned up the lane.’
He was watching me. Now I was alone in zero visibility with a mental retard I’d just told to fuck off. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Home. You hold m-my arm.’
‘But you can’t see–’
‘I know the way.’ He linked his left arm through my right and half turned me round.
‘I don’t even know which way I’m facing.’
‘It’s OK – h-here.’ He tapped with his stick feeling for the edge of the lane – and we moved off together into the invisible world.
The journey lasted hours. From time to time he’d raise his stick and slash out to either side, hitting hedgerow or clacking stone wall or sharply rapping a gate. It was as if the rest of the world had been completely removed, leaving not even a shadow of itself, not even a whisper of sound. There was nothing but solid whiteness and us toiling through it. Once he stopped and said, ‘Cigarette?’ I rolled a couple blind and we stood and puffed our white smoke into the thick white air.
‘I was going to sit and wait for it to clear.’
‘It gets cold.’
Well yes. I was already shivering. ‘How long will it last?’
‘Tonight. Maybe tomorrow.’
While he thrashed his stick about looking for walls or turnings I let go his arm and I was helpless. I wouldn’t have dared to take a step. When he tap-tapped back to me and bumped his extended arm into mine (outstretched, supplicant) I felt nothing but relief. He could have been leading me to the edge of a cliff; mummy’s boy could have been taking me to the sharks.
