The Blackhouse (19 page)

‘Has he gone to see her?’

Fin nodded and saw that there was just a trace of red on her lips now, and colour around her eyes. She had released her hair from its clasp and taken a brush through it. It had changed her. Not enough for comment, but enough to be noticed. She indicated the chair opposite and he sat down. ‘So how have you been?’

There was a weariness in her smile. ‘As you see.’ She began eating. ‘Don’t bother waiting for Artair. He could be long enough.’ She watched him take a mouthful of quiche. ‘And you?’

Fin shrugged. ‘Things could have been worse.’

She shook her head sadly. ‘And we were going to change the world.’

‘The world’s like the weather, Marsaili. You can’t change it. And you can’t shape it. But it’ll shape you.’

‘Ah, yes, always the philosopher.’ And unexpectedly she reached across the table and ran the tips of her fingers lightly down his cheek. ‘You’re still very beautiful.’

In spite of himself, Fin blushed. He half-laughed to cover his embarrassment. ‘Isn’t that what I’m supposed to say to you?’

‘But you never could lie convincingly. And, anyway, you were always the beautiful one. I remember seeing you that first day at school and thinking I’d never seen anyone so beautiful. Why do you think I wanted to sit beside you in class? You’ve no idea how jealous the other girls were.’

And he hadn’t. He had only ever had eyes for Marsaili.

‘If only I’d known then what a shit you were, I could have saved us all a lot of heartache.’ She popped another piece of quiche in her mouth and grinned, the same upward curl of her mouth at the corners that he remembered so well. The deep dimples in either cheek. The same mischief in her eyes.

‘I was right,’ Fin said. ‘You
haven’t
changed.’

‘Oh, but I have. In more ways than you could ever know. Than you would ever want to know.’ She seemed lost in contemplation of her quiche. ‘I’ve thought about you often over the years. How you were. How we were, as kids.’

‘Me, too.’ Fin inclined his head, a tiny smile on his lips. ‘I’ve still got that note you sent me.’ She frowned, not remembering what note. ‘Before the final year primary dance. You signed it,
The Girl from the Farm
.’

‘Oh, my God.’ Her hand shot to her mouth as the memory came back from someplace she had buried it long ago to save herself the embarrassment of remembering. ‘You’ve still got that?’

‘It’s a bit grubby, and torn around the folds. But, yes, I’ve still got it.’

‘What have you still got?’ Artair came into the kitchen and dropped himself heavily into his chair. The mood between Fin and Marsaili was broken immediately. Artair shoved a mouthful of food in his face and looked at Fin. ‘Well?’

Fin summoned the strength for another lie. ‘An old school photograph from primary seven.’ He glanced up to find Marsaili avoiding his eye.

‘I remember that one,’ Artair said. ‘It’s the only one I wasn’t in. I was sick that year.’

‘Yeh, that’s right. You had a really bad asthma attack the night before.’

Artair shovelled more food into his mouth. ‘Nearly died that time. Close-run fucking thing.’ He glanced up from one to the other and grinned. ‘Might have been better for all of us if I had, eh?’ He washed his food down with whisky. Fin noticed that he had topped it up again. ‘What? Nobody going to say, naw, Artair, it’d have been a terrible thing if you’d died back then. Life just wouldn’t have been the same.’

‘Well,
that’s
true,’ Marsaili said, and he shot her a look.

They ate, then, in silence until Artair had cleared his plate and pushed it away. His eyes fell on Fin’s empty glass. ‘You need topped up, son.’

‘Actually, I’d better be going.’ Fin stood up, wiping his mouth on the paper napkin Marsaili had laid out.

‘Going where?’

‘Back to Stornoway.’

‘How?’

‘I’ll call a taxi.’

‘Don’t be fucking stupid, man. It’ll cost you a bloody fortune You’ll stay over with us tonight, and I’ll give you a lift to town in the morning.’

Marsaili stood up and lifted the empty plates away from the table. ‘I’ll get the bed in the spare room ready.’

By the time Marsaili came back in from the spare room, Artair had installed Fin and himself in the sitting room, glasses refilled, a football match playing on the television, the sound still down. Artair was well gone now, his eyes glazed and half-shut, slurring his words, relating some story from childhood about a bike accident of which Fin had no recollection. Fin had said he’d needed water in his whisky, and when he’d gone into the kitchen to get it, poured half of the whisky down the sink. Now he was sitting nursing his glass uneasily, wishing he had not given in so easily to Artair’s insistence that he stay over. He looked up eagerly, hoping for rescue, when Marsaili came in. But she looked tired. She glanced at Artair, a strange, passive expression on her face. Resignation, perhaps. And then she went into the kitchen to turn off the lights. ‘I’m going to bed. I’ll clear up in the morning.’

Fin stood up, disappointed, as she left the room. ‘Goodnight.’

She paused for just a moment in the doorway and their eyes met fleetingly. ‘Goodnight, Fin.’

As the door closed, Artair said, ‘And good fucking riddance.’ He tried to focus on Fin. ‘You know, I’d never have fucking married her if it hadn’t been for you.’

Fin was stung by the vitriol in his voice. ‘Don’t be daft! You were chasing Marsaili from that first week at school.’

‘I’d never even have fucking noticed her if she hadn’t got her claws into you. I was never after
her
. I was only ever trying to keep her away from you. You were my pal, Fin Macleod. We were friends, you and me, from just about the time we could walk. And from that first fucking day, there she was trying to take you away from me. Driving a wedge between us.’ He laughed. A laugh without humour, corrosive and bitter. ‘And fuck me if she isn’t still doing it. Think I didn’t notice the lipstick, eh? Or the mascara? You think that was for your benefit? Naw. It was her way of raising two fingers at me. ’Cos she knew I’d see it, and know why she’d done it. She’s not wanted to make herself attractive to me for a very long time.’

Fin was shocked. He had no idea what to say. So he just sat clutching his watered-down whisky, feeling the glass warm in his hands, watching the peat embers dying in the hearth. The air in the room seemed suddenly to have chilled, and he reached a decision. He knocked back the remains of his whisky and stood up. ‘I think maybe I’d better go to bed.’

But Artair wasn’t looking at him. He was gazing off into some distant place in a whisky-fogged mind. ‘And d’you know what the real fucking irony is?’

Fin didn’t know, and didn’t want to. ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’

Artair tilted his head up to squint at him. ‘He’s not even mine.’

Fin felt his stomach lurch. He stood frozen in suspended animation. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Fionnlagh,’ Artair slurred. ‘He’s your fucking kid, not mine.’

The anaglypta wallpaper had been painted sometime recently. One of those whites with a hint of peach, or pink maybe. There were new curtains and a new carpet. And the ceiling had been painted, a plain matt white. But the water stain in the corner had come through it, insidious, invasive, and still in the shape of a gannet in flight. The crack was still there, too, in the plaster, running through the gannet and across the cornice. The cracked window pane had been replaced by double glazing, and a double bed was pushed against the wall where Mr Macinnes had had his desk. The shelves of the bookcase opposite still groaned with the same books Fin remembered from those long evenings of maths and English and geography. Books with exotic, distracting titles:
Eyeless in Gaza
,
The Case of the Black-eyed Blonde
,
Boys Will Be Boys
,
Smeddum
. And the even more bizarre names of their authors:
Aldous Huxley
,
Earl Stanley Gardner
,
Lewis Grassic Gibbon
. Mr Macinnes’s old armchair was pushed into one corner, the fabric on the arms worn shiny by his elbows. Sometimes people leave their traces on this earth long after they are gone.

Fin was almost overwhelmed by a sense of melancholy. But, then, he thought, melancholy did not really describe it. Some great weight seemed to be bearing down on him, crushing him, making it difficult to breathe. The room itself felt like a dark and disturbing place. His heart was racing as if he were afraid. Afraid of the light. He turned off the bedside lamp. Afraid of the dark. He turned it on again and realized he was shaking. There was something he was trying to remember. Stirred by something Artair had said, or a look he had given him, or a tone in his voice. Leaning against the wall behind the door, he noticed for the first time, was the card table at which he had spent so many hours preparing for his exams. The Cyprus-shaped coffee stain. He was sweating now, and he turned off the light again. He could hear the thump of his heart, the pulse of blood in his ears. When he closed his eyes he saw only red.

How could Fionnlagh be his son? Why wouldn’t Marsaili have told him she was pregnant? How could she have married Artair if she had known? Jesus! He wanted to scream and to wake up back home with Robbie and Mona and the life he had known until just four short weeks ago.

He heard voices raised in anger through the wall, and he held his breath to try to hear what they were saying. But the form of the words was lost in the brick. Only their tone made it through the mortar. Fury, hurt, accusation, denial. The sound of a door slamming, and then silence.

Fin wondered if Fionnlagh had heard any of it. Maybe he was used to it. Maybe it was a nightly occurrence. Or was tonight different? Because tonight a secret had escaped, and was moving amongst them like a ghost. Or was it just that Fin was the last to see it, the last to feel its cold fingers of uncertainty turning his world forever upside down?

NINE

It was early in the July of the year I sat my Highers. School was out and I was waiting for my results to confirm a place at Glasgow University. It was the last summer I would spend on the island.

I cannot begin to describe how I felt. I was elated. It was as if I had passed the last several years in the dark with a great weight pressed down upon me, and now that the weight had been lifted I was coming out, blinking, into the sunlight. It helped that the weather that year was sublime. They say that seventy-five and seventy-six were great summers. But the best summer I remember was that last summer before I left for university.

It was years since I had broken up with Marsaili. I can look back now and wonder at my cruelty, and can only console myself with the thought that I had been so very young at the time. But, then, youth is always a handy excuse for crass behaviour.

Of course, she continued to be in my class until the end of primary school, although she had become oddly invisible to me. During the first two years of secondary, still at Crobost, our paths crossed fairly frequently. But after we moved to the Nicholson in Stornoway I hardly ever saw her. The occasional glimpse in a school corridor, or wandering The Narrows with her classmates. I knew that she and Artair had been an item through third and fourth years, even though he was at a different school. I would see them together from time to time at dances in the town hall, or at parties. They broke up in fifth year, when Artair was repeating his O levels, and I was vaguely aware of Marsaili going with Donald Murray for a time.

I went out with a succession of girls all through secondary, but none of them lasted very long. Most of them were put off when they met my aunt. I suppose she must have seemed pretty weird. I had just got used to her. Like the crap you leave lying around your room when you’re a kid, you just stop seeing it after a while. But as school finished I was footloose and fancy-free with no intention of tying myself down. Glasgow offered the prospect of boundless new possibilities, and I didn’t want to be bringing any baggage with me from the island.

It was sometime during that first week in July that I remember Artair and I going down to the beach together at Port of Ness. We shared markedly contrasting moods. During the run-up to my Highers I had spent long, difficult hours locked away in his dad’s study preparing for the exams. Mr Macinnes had been hard on me, driving me relentlessly towards success without letup. After Artair’s five failed O grades he had all but given up on his son, even though Artair had decided to go back for a fifth year to resit. It was as if Mr Macinnes was investing in me all the hopes and aspirations he had once harboured for Artair. It had created tension between Artair and me, born, I think, out of jealousy. We would meet up sometimes after my tutoring sessions and walk up through the village together in tense and difficult silence. I can remember us standing at the foot of the slipway at Crobost harbour throwing stones into the water for more than an hour without a word passing between us. We never talked about the tutoring. It lay between us like a silent shadow.

But all that was behind me now, and the day seemed to reflect my mood, brilliant sunshine coruscating across the still waters of the bay. Only the slightest of breezes ruffled the warm air. We had taken off our socks and sandshoes and rolled up our jeans, and ran barefoot along the gently sloping beach, splashing in and out of the small, briny waves breaking on the shore, leaving perfect footprints in virgin sand. We had one of those plastic sacks they use for bagging the commercial peat, and we were going to catch crabs in the pools left by the outgoing tide amongst the rocky outcrops at the far end of the beach. To me the summer seemed to stretch ahead, an endless succession of days like this, filled with the simplest pleasures of life, unhurried by age or ambition.

Artair, though, was gloomy and depressed. He had been accepted for a welding apprenticeship at Lewis Offshore, starting in September. He saw his summer slipping away, like sand through his fingers. The final summer of his boyhood, with only the drudgery of a dead-end job and the responsibility of adulthood awaiting him at the end of it.