Beautiful Just! (8 page)

Hamish's eyes lit up and he looked at me shyly. ‘It's funny you should say that,' he began. I saw that he was blushing fiercely and once again he began contorting himself on his chair. ‘You see, I've been suffering from terrible headaches for a good while now.' He cleared his throat several times. ‘I've been taking these aspirins night after night to try will it cure them; sometimes during the day too but then my head was getting so bad I couldn't sleep at all so I went with it to the doctor a week or two back.' Hamish looked straight at me. ‘He told me just the same you are telling me. “You should get married, Hamish,” says he. “It's only marriage will cure your headaches.”

‘Really!' I murmured.

‘Yes,' he admitted. ‘He said that was my only cure.' The rising wind flung a scatter of hail against the window and the suddenness of it made us glance at one another. I hoped the smile I gave Hamish was as reassuring and guileless as the smile he gave me. ‘Then we can expect to hear of wedding bells in the not too distant future,' I said. I saw his eyes flick to the window and turning glimpsed the headlights of the bus glaring through the darkness.

Three months later I received an invitation to Hamish's wedding.

‘Him that's been so feared of women all these years an' now he's in that much of a hurry to get married you'd think someone was after beatin' him into it!' exclaimed Morag disapprovingly. ‘What will he be doin' with a wife anyway when he has no cattle nor even a hen to see to.'

I smiled as I put the invitation back on the shelf. ‘I'm only wondering what he's going to do with all that aspirin,' I told her.

It was seven o' clock and the December morning was a welter of wind and rain and flung spray. Katac crouched in the forepeak of Angus Mhor's boat as it punched its way across the tossing black water of the sound towards the tiny creek where she could land and so begin the second stage of her journey to the mainland.

‘You'll need to be jumpin' for it, I'm thinkin',' Angus Mhor's voice reached her from the stem. ‘The swell is breakin' too close to the shore for me to go right in.'

There was no real landing place at the creek they were making for, only a cleared shingle-floored gully between piled boulders and except in the calmest weather it was possible only to nose the bow of a boat as far as the most seaward boulders when the passengers would jump from the forepeak and hope to land, if not on the shingle, then in water shallow enough not to fill their boots. Katac was in no way alarmed at the prefect of having to jump even on to a shore unlit by anything more effective than the wavering beam of Angus's torch but she was worried in case the sea came over the top of her gumboots and wet her stockings. Today it was important that she should not get her stockings wet.

‘Get yourself ready, Katac!' Angus warned. Katac tightened the tapes of her souwester, checked the knot of the rope which was tied round her waist over her father's old oilskin, picked up her bag and climbed up on to the forepeak, holding on to the mast while her eyes probed the darkness trying to discern the line of the shore. Angus slowed the engine and she saw the white line of surf and the wet shingle reflecting the beam of his torch. She waited while the sea surged past the bow of the boat, flung itself at the rocks and sucked back with a clatter of stones.

‘Now!' yelled Angus and immediately Katac leapt, landed on shingle, picked herself up and scrambled quickly out of the way of the next surge. At the top of the tide she stood gasping.

‘All right?' she heard Angus's voice faintly.

‘All right, Angus,' she called and pulling the torch out of her bag she flashed it twice – the pre-arranged signal to indicate that she had landed without mishap. The acknowledging two flashes came from the boat and were followed by the noise of the propellor thrashing the water as Angus turned and headed back for the island.

Katac sought the shelter of a pillar of rock while she stood for a few moments watching the mast light bobbing and swaying into the dark. She wriggled her toes inside her boots. Sometimes her gumboots were so damp she wouldn't notice an extra splash or two of water in them but, she smiled to herself, today she was confident she had managed to keep her feet dry.

In the light of her torch she picked her way over the shingle towards the steep path which led to the road and the scattering of croft houses which comprised the village. The wind was strengthening, tearing at her oilskin while the rain rattled deafeningly against her souwester. She began to worry that it might grow too stormy for the ferry to cross to the mainland.

Outside the cottage which was also the village post office she sheltered in the lee of a convenient peat stack beside the road from where through the rain she glimpsed the fitful glare of headlights as the bus wound its way round the loch. It was not long before it came labouring up the hill to stop outside the post office. Although it was always referred to as the bus it was in reality no more than a covered lorry whose primary function was the collection of mails from the outlying villages and houses for delivery to the sorting office some twenty miles away. Passengers were a secondary consideration, the only concession to their comfort being the provision of two long wooden benches, one on either side of the lorry, but since these benches were not secured in any way and the rough road was full of twists and turns, Hamish, the driver, thoughtfully saw that the sacks of mails were dumped on the floor between the two benches so when the lorry lurched or swooped to left or right the full sacks acted as a buffer between the two rows of dislodged passengers.

Katac stepped out from behind the peat stack into the beam of the headlights. Hamish got down from his cab. ‘Ach, it is yourself, Katac,' he greeted her. ‘Are you for comin' on the bus, then?'

‘I am so,' she told him.

‘Aye, then seein' there's no likely to be any other passengers you might just as well sit yourself in the seat beside me.' He opened the door of the cab. ‘See an' get in just an' be out of the rain while I get the mails.'

He ran into the post office and Katac slipped off her oilskin before climbing into the cab. Once seated she took off her gumboots, replacing them with her best hill boots which she had been carrying in her bag. From her bag also she took her hat which she normally wore only on the Sabbath and after pulling it into shape she set it carefully on her head.

‘Ach, it is terrible weather,' panted Hamish as he jumped into the driving seat after having stowed the mails in the back of the lorry. ‘I'm thinkin' all the islands will be sailin' away from the mainland with all the rain there's been just.'

Katac smiled her reply. The bus started with a jolt that set her well back on her seat and knocked her hat askew. She adjusted it hastily and settled herself more firmly into her seat while her thoughts roamed over the day ahead.

Today was her twelfth birthday and this was her first journey alone to the mainland. Such trips were rare enough even with her mother, and it was eighteen months since she had seen a shop of any kind, their small island boasting only a post office which was really no more than a couple of littered shelves in Marie Bheag's kitchen. Under the stolid calm she was affecting Katac was wildly excited not only by the prospect of a day's shopping but because today she was to collect a pair of birthday present boots from Old Donald, the cobbler. It would be the first time she had ever had a birthday present from her parents and what was more important it would be the first time she had ever had a pair of light boots. For months now she had been looking forward to her new boots and when walking sedately to church between her mother and father she had sometimes found herself glancing surreptitiously down at her feet and seeing in imagination not the well polished but heavy hill boots which her father deemed the only suitable footwear for girls of her age, but the shiny black, light boots which today she was going to possess.

As the bus rounded the loch she could feel the strong wind buffeting the lorry and she began again to worry lest the ferry might not be able to cross. Hamish's voice broke into her thoughts.

‘You will be doin' some shopping?' he asked.

‘Aye,' she replied.

‘Are you goin' across?'

‘I hope so,' she said, struggling to keep the anxiety out of her voice.

‘Ach, you'll get across all right,' Hamish assured her. This sou-westerly isn't bad over the other side.'

Katac relaxed. Hamish knew a lot about winds and tides and how they affected the ferry so he wasn't likely to be wrong. The bus lumbered on while Hamish chatted sporadically about the weather or the poaching or the fishing; stopping at the home-made red painted pillar boxes which stood at the entrance to each isolated croft where he collected mails and parcels and threw them into the back of the lorry. Once a dark shape loomed grotesquely in the headlights and when Hamish stopped Katac saw it was an oilskinned and oil-coated fisherman who handed Hamish two parcels of fish, telling him there was one for himself and requesting that the other be delivered to another cottage further inland.

‘I'm no askin' what it is,' jested Hamish.

The fisherman looked at Katac and winked before he merged again into the darkness.

Next it was an old woman they had to stop for, and Katac noticed that though she carried an oilskin it was draped over a bag of fleece while her own shoulders were protected by nothing more rain-proofed than an empty sack. Again it was an old man who signalled them to stop by brandishing a couple of rabbits in the headlights and once more it was with a ‘one for yourself, Hamish', along with the instruction that the other should be delivered to some relative in the next village. Another time they had to stop for a cow which had chosen to bed itself down in the middle of the road and unaffected by the revving of the bus engine or by long blasts on the horn refused to move until Hamish at last got out and belaboured the beast with empty mail bags and a selection of epithets.

‘The rain seems to be easin' off,' he said, getting back into his seat. Katac was relieved. She was by no means daunted by rain but in the islands rain was such a constant accompaniment that it was pleasant to be without it on occasion.

The dawn was threading itself between the peaks of the mainland hills before the bus eventually stopped at the post office where the mail was to be delivered. Katac bundled her gumboots and souwester inside her oilskin and asked Hamish to look after them until she returned with the bus that evening.

‘Do you think you may be needin' them before the day is out?' he asked her with mock concern since he knew that away from their own small territory no respectable islander would care to be seen in such attire no matter what the weather.

‘Indeed no.' There was a trace of indignation in Katac's chuckle. ‘I wore those to save my own clothes comin' over in the boat just,' she told him. She jumped down.

‘Aye, well now see an' don't be missin' the bus back now,' teased Hamish.

‘I'll mind,' she laughed back at him, knowing that having brought her in on the bus unless he received a message to the contrary he would delay his return until she did come.

Down at the pier Katac made her way over the sloping, weed-slimy jetty to the waiting ferry boat. Already the sea was spread with light though the land was still grey with the gloom of a laggard dawn through which the craggy hills reflected the polish of the night's rain. The crossing was lumpy; the sea sluicing over the bow every time the boat ploughed into a wave and Katac was glad when at last the ferry bumped and grated against the mainland slip. There was another weed-slimy slip to negotiate before she found herself with her two feet firmly on the tarmac of the road. Two minutes' walk and she was in what always appeared to Katac as a city with its twelve shops, its railway station and its fish pier. It was, she soon realized, a sale day and there seemed to be people everywhere, mostly crofters and shepherds who had come in to buy animals or to sell them and who stood meanwhile in little groups beside the road, talking and arguing while their lean, watchful dogs crouched at their heels.

Katac stood for a few minutes looking at the sparse display in the window of the chemist's shop and when she felt calm enough to go inside she made her purchases. Louse powder for the cattle; horse drench; foot rot ointment for the sheep and indigestion powder for her father. At the Marine store she got coir yarn for tying the haystacks; a new calf pail; a netting needle for her Uncle Padruig and a pair of rowlocks for her father's dinghy. Next she called at the bakery where she bought a bag of fresh cookies and some of the teabread her mother so much liked. Finally at the General Store after she had purchased needles and pins and writing paper and envelopes and all the other odds and ends which never seemed important until you ran out of them her shopping list was complete. Complete except for the most important item of them all, her new boots which she had purposely left until last.

The lazy bell clanged noisily as she opened and shut the door of the little dark shop which smelled so strongly of new leather, Donald's pipe and Donald's dinner. There came a shuffling noise and Old Donald himself appeared from a doorway at the back of the shop. He peered at her for a moment or two and then, ‘Why, Katac! It's yourself!' he exclaimed. (Old Donald was past eighty, knew everybody and never took long to recognize a face.) ‘Come away in, lassie.' As he shook her hand he called over his shoulder towards the doorway from which he had emerged. ‘Bella, see an' get a wee strupak now for Katac Mackenzie that's here.' Turning to Katac again he asked, ‘Are ye alone the day, lassie?' Concealing her pride Katac admitted she was. ‘My! My!' he said, ‘it's growing up fast you are then.' He led her through into a room where a bright coal fire was piled high in the polished range and Bella, Donald's middle-aged daughter was brewing tea. Bella greeted her and setting a chair near the fire told Katac to warm herself. She handed her a cup of steaming tea and on the hob beside her set a plate of cheese sandwiches and another plate of cookies spread with jam. Katac suddenly realized she was hungry and shyly stretching out her hand she helped herself to a sandwich.