Island (9 page)

‘Did you get his boat? Do
you
take tourists out?’

He looked at me with a strange face. ‘It sank. It broke up. I’m not allowed–’

‘On the sea?’

‘Near the water. No Calum.’

Well what a nice protective mother caring so deeply for her son’s well-being.

‘He was
ang-angry.’

I realised then that I could pump him all I liked. ‘Why?’

‘They were fighting and he j-just – he went out and banged the door.’

‘What happened?’

He shrugged. ‘Bits of the boat washed up around the shore.’

When I let myself back into my room there were lights on in the house. I opened my door to the hall a crack and I could hear the quiet burble of a TV. She was shut up somewhere watching telly. The room at the end of the hall, nearest the front door – that’s where I reckoned she was.

I ate beans on toast and paced and listened and heard every move she made which was few. At 10.15 she turned off the TV and went along the hall to the kitchen; she was in there maybe a quarter of an hour then I heard her shuffling back along the hall. There was a bitter herby smell. She drew the bolt on the front door and turned off the downstairs lights then went slowly up the stairs, a couple of them creaked. I could hear her moving about upstairs also the sound of running water and toilet flush, she had another bathroom up there. There was definitely only her in the place. The last noise I heard was about 10.45; after that she was quiet, sleeping the sleep of the ignorant who don’t yet know what’s coming to them. I noted down the times. A murderer would need to know all her moves; know her little routine. I imagined going upstairs when she was out, I would look in her room for traces of me. The fact that she didn’t know I was here, the fact that I had her in my power – it was a physical pleasure. It swelled me, making me tingle with pleasurable anticipation.

About an hour after
she’d gone to bed I crept out into the dark hall in my socks. The floor was tiled it was cold. I stood at the bottom of the stairs listening then went to the TV room. After I’d turned the handle the door swung open on its own. The floor was wooden and warmer as soon as I stepped on to it. There was a little glowing ash in the fireplace. My mother’s sitting room. I closed the door and waited. But my eyes couldn’t make sense of the inky blackness and after a minute I turned on the light. Sod it. If she found me I’d deal with her.

The room was full of old stuff. Not the sort of room I’ve ever lived in. I’ve seen it – in films, on telly – but I’ve never been in it. The walls were full of books, old hardback books with plain cloth covers, dull blues and reds and dusty black. In the gaps between the bookcases were prints, crummy old maps and pictures of old sailing boats, a big star-map, and drawings of plants and leaves and cross-sections of flowers with spidery writing on them. The furniture was old and none of it matched, there was a faded red velvet covered chair with a very straight back, rounded like a coin. Two tall black wooden tables with twisted carved legs. One of those sofas with one arm missing, in a dingy floral print. The mantelpiece was crammed: candlesticks, a china shepherdess, bits of paper, stones, dried leaves and twigs in a jar, squat brown bottles of liquid with labels in Latin, a mug with pipes and spills in it, photographs in silver frames. Photographs.

Her about twenty years younger next to a big solid man, staring calmly out of the picture. She was holding a bouquet, it looked like a wedding photo although she was wearing a dark dress. Her with a kid in a garden. Calum. Her with a kid on a bicycle. The man in the middle of a huddle of posed and grinning people on the deck of a boat. The man holding up a big fish.

Family snaps.

Fucking cow. I sat on the red velvet
chair facing the blank grey telly. The room was full of old junk like an antique shop or one of those rooms they have in a museum,
typical interior from the 1930s
. Where’d she got it? It was like a lifetime’s stuff. Parents’ and grandparents’ stuff. The rectangle of carpet on the polished wood floor was thin, it was worn and frayed under my feet where I sat on the red chair. But it didn’t feel poor it felt classy. There was a glass-fronted cabinet with stuff on display: thin old china painted midnight blue and orange; old pinkish wine glasses and a cut glass decanter, little crystal tumblers, all crammed in together probably worth hundreds.

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.