The Lewis Man (12 page)

The door opens and there is a young man standing there. I’ve seen him before somewhere. Does he work here?

‘Hello, Mr Macdonald,’ he says, and there is something comforting in his voice. Familiar.

‘Do I know you?’

‘It’s Fin.’

Fin. Fin. Strange name. Shark’s fin. Tail fin. French fin. ‘What kind of name’s that?’

‘Short for Finlay. I was Fionnlagh till I went to school, then they gave me my English name. Finlay. It was Marsaili who called me Fin.’ He sits down beside me on the bed.

I feel hope lifting me. ‘Marsaili? Is she here?’

‘No, but she asked me if I would take you out for a wee run in the car. She said you would like that.’

I am disappointed. But it would be nice to get out for a bit. I’ve been stuck in here for a while now. ‘I would.’

‘And I see you’re all dressed up and ready to go.’

‘Always.’ I can feel a smile creeping up on me. ‘You’re a good lad, Fin. You always were. But you shouldn’t have been coming round the farm when your folks had forbidden it.’

Fin is smiling, too, now. ‘You remember that, do you?’

‘I do. Your mother was furious. Mary was scared she’d think we’d been encouraging it. How are your folks, by the way?’

He doesn’t answer. He’s looking at my hands, and lifts my right forearm. ‘They tell me you cut yourself, Mr Macdonald.’

‘Did I?’ I look at my hands and see white bandages wrapped around them. Oh! What the hell happened? I feel a spike of fear. ‘God,’ I say, quite shaken. ‘You’d think it would hurt. But I don’t feel anything. Is it bad?’

‘They gave you some stitches, apparently. Up at the hospital. You were trying to escape.’

‘Escape?’ The very word lifts my spirits.

‘Yes. But, you know, Mr Macdonald, you’re not locked in here. You can come and go when you like. Just like a hotel. As long as you let people know.’

‘I want to go home,’ I say.

‘Well, you know what they say, Mr Macdonald. Home is where your hat is.’

‘Do they?’ Who the hell are
they
?

‘Yes, they do.’

‘Well, where’s my hat?’

Fin grins at me. ‘It’s on your head.’

I can feel my own surprise, and put my hand up to find my hat there right enough. I take it off and look at it. Good old hat. It’s been with me for many a long year. I laugh now. ‘So it is. I didn’t realize.’

He helps me gently to my feet.

‘Wait, I’ll have to get my bag.’

‘No, you’d best leave it here, Mr Macdonald. You’ll need your things when you get back.’

‘I’m coming back?’

‘Of course. You’ll need to come back to hang up your hat. Remember? Home is where your hat is.’

I look at the hat, still held in my bandaged hands, and laugh again. I put it firmly back on my head. ‘You’re right. I’d almost forgotten.’

I love to see the sun on the ocean, like this. You know that it’s deep out there, because it’s such a dark blue. It’s only in the sandy shallows that it’s green, or turquoise. None of that here, though. The sand shelves away almost immediately. It’s the undertow that does it. You always hear stories of folk drowning here. Incomers or visitors, mostly. The sand fools them, because it’s so soft, and fine, and yellow, and safe. The locals wouldn’t dream of going in the water, except in a boat. Most of them can’t swim, anyway. Dammit, what’s the name of this beach again?

‘Dalmore,’ Fin says.

I didn’t realize I’d said that out loud. But, aye. Dalmore beach, that’s right. I recognized it as soon as we turned down on the shore road, past the cottages and the wheelie bins to the cemetery. Poor souls laid to rest up there on the machair, the sea eating away at them.

These damn pebbles are big. Hard to walk on. But the sand’s easier. Fin helps me take off my shoes and socks, and I feel the sand now between my toes. Soft, and warmed by the sun. ‘Makes me think of Charlie’s beach,’ I say.

Fin stops and gives me an odd look. ‘Who’s Charlie?’

‘Oh, no one you’d know. He’s a long time dead.’ And I laugh and laugh.

On the sand below the reinforcements at the cemetery wall, he spreads the travelling rug he took from the boot of the car, and we sit down. He has some bottles of beer. Cold, but not chilled. All right, though. He opens a couple and passes me one, and I enjoy that stuff foaming in my mouth, just like the very first time on the roof of The Dean.

The sea’s a bit wild out there in the wind, breaking white all around those rock stacks. I can even feel a hint of spray on my face. Light, like the touch of a feather. Wind’s blown all the clouds away now. There were days out on the moor I’d have killed for a piece of blue sky like that.

Fin’s taking something out of his bag to show me. A photograph, he says. It’s quite big. I bury the base of my beer bottle in the sand to keep it upright, and take the photograph. It’s a bit awkward with my hands bandaged like this.

‘Oh.’ I turn to Fin. ‘Is this a coloured man?’

‘No, Mr Macdonald. I thought it might be someone you know.’

‘Is he sleeping?’

‘No, he’s dead.’ He seems to wait, while I look at it. Expecting me to say something. ‘Is that Charlie, Mr Macdonald?’

I look at him and laugh out loud. ‘No, it’s not Charlie. How would I know what Charlie looks like? You daft
balach
!’

He smiles, but he looks a bit uncertain. I can’t think why. ‘Take a good look at the face, Mr Macdonald.’

So I look at it, carefully, like he asks. And now that I see beyond the colour of the skin, there is something familiar about those features. Strange. That slight turn of the nose. Just like Peter’s. And the tiny scar on his upper lip, at the right-hand corner of the mouth. Peter had a little scar like that. Cut himself on a chipped water glass once when he was about four. And, oh … that scar on his left temple. Didn’t notice that before.

Suddenly it dawns on me who it is, and I lay the photo in my lap. I can’t bear to look at it any more. I
promised
! I turn to Fin. ‘He’s dead?’

Fin nods, looking at me so strangely. ‘Why are you crying, Mr Macdonald?’

Peter asked me that same thing, too, once.

Saturdays were the best. Free of school, free of God, free of Mr Anderson. If we had some money we could go up into the town to spend it. Not that we had money very often, but that wouldn’t stop us going. Just a fifteen-minute walk and you were in another world.

The castle dominated the town, sitting up there on that big black rock, casting its shadow on the gardens below. And people all along the whole length of the street, in and out of shops and cafes, motor cars and buses belching great clouds of exhaust fumes into the air.

We had a wee scam going, me and Peter. We would sometimes go up into town on a Saturday morning, wearing our oldest clothes and our scruffiest shoes with the soles flapping away from the uppers, and we hung a little cardboard sign around Peter’s neck, with the word BLIND scrawled on it. It’s a good job we had a half-decent education and knew how to spell it. Of course, we had no idea then how hanging a cardboard notice around our necks would come back to haunt us.

Peter closed his eyes, and put his left hand on my right forearm, and we would move slowly among the weekend shoppers, Peter with his cap in his hand held out in front of him.

It was always the good ladies of the town who would take pity on us. ‘Awww, poor wee laddie,’ they would say, and if we were lucky drop a shilling in the cap. That’s how we got enough money together to pay for Peter’s tattoo. And it took all our ill-gotten weekend gains for a month or more to do it.

Peter was Elvis-daft. All the newspapers and magazines were full of him in those days. It was hard to miss the man, or the music. Everything back then, in the years after the war, had to be American, and before we started saving up for the tattoo, we used to go to the Manhattan Cafe next door to the Monseigneur News Theatre. It was long and narrow, with booths that you slid into, like an American diner. The walls were lined by mirrors etched with New York skylines. Considering how we spent the other six days of the week, it was like escape to paradise. A tantalising glimpse of how life might have been. A coffee or a Coke would use up all our cash, but we would make it last and sit listening to Elvis belting out on the jukebox.

Heartbreak Hotel. It conjured up such romantic images. New York city streets, flashing neon lights, steam rising from manhole covers. That slow walking bass, the jazz piano tinkling away in the background. And that moody, mouthy voice.

The tattoo shop was in Rose Street, next door to a working man’s pub. It was a pretty seedy single room, with a space off the back separated by a vomit-green curtain with shredded hems. It smelled of ink and old blood. There were brittle and faded sketches and photographs pinned around the walls, of designs and tattooed arms and backs. The tattoo artist himself had tattoos on both forearms. A broken heart with an arrow through it, an anchor, Popeye. A girl’s name, Angie, in fancy curlicued lettering.

He had a mean, underfed face, with fusewire sideburns. The last shreds of head hair were scraped back from a receded hairline across a shiny, almost bald, pate, to a luxuriant gathering of Brylcreemed curls around his neck. I noticed the dirt beneath his fingernails, and worried that Peter would catch some horrible infection. But perhaps it was just ink.

I don’t know how much regulation there was in those days, or if it was even legal to tattoo a boy of Peter’s age, but the Rose Street tattoo artist didn’t care much about it if there was. He was taken aback when we said we wanted a tattoo of Elvis Presley. He’d never done one before, he said, and I think he saw it as a sort of challenge. He gave us a price: £2, which was a fortune in those days. I think he thought there was no way we could afford it, but if he was surprised when we turned up with the money nearly six weeks later he never showed it. He had prepared a sketch, from a photograph in a magazine, and worked the lettering below it,
Heartbreak Hotel
, into something like a banner blowing in the breeze.

It took hours, and a lot of blood, and Peter bore it without a single word of complaint. I could see in his face how painful it was, but he was never going to admit it. Stoic, he was. A martyr to his dream.

I sat with him the whole afternoon, listening to the whine of the tattoo gun, watching the needles engraving flesh, and admired my brother’s fortitude as ink and blood got wiped away with every other stroke.

I would have done anything for Peter. I knew how frustrated he got sometimes, aware of his limitations. But he never got angry, or swore, or had a bad word for anyone. He was a good soul, my brother. Better than me. I never had any illusions about that. And he deserved better in life.

By the end of the afternoon, his arm was a mess. It was impossible to see the tattoo for the blood, which was already starting to dry in a patchwork of scabs. The tattoo man washed it with soapy water and dried it off with paper towels before wrapping it in a lint bandage which he fixed in place with a safety pin.

‘Take this off in a couple of hours,’ he said, ‘and wash the tattoo regularly. Always pat it dry and don’t rub it. You need air for the wound to heal properly, so don’t cover it up.’ He handed me a small jar with a yellow lid. ‘Tattoo Goo. Rub this into the wound after every washing. Just enough to keep it moist. You don’t want a scab to form. But if it does, don’t peel it off, you’ll pull the ink out. As the skin heals it will form a membrane. And eventually that will flake off. If you look after it carefully it should be fully healed in about two weeks.’

He knew his stuff that man. It took about twelve days to heal, and it was only then that we saw what a good job he had done. There was no doubting that it was Elvis Presley on Peter’s right forearm, and the way he’d worked in the banner lettering of
Heartbreak Hotel
it looked like the collar of his shirt. Very clever.

Of course, we had to go to some lengths to keep it hidden during that time. Peter always wore long sleeves around The Dean, and at school, even though it was still summer. On bath night he bandaged it up again and kept it out of the water. I told the other boys that he was suffering from psoriasis, a skin condition that I’d read about somewhere in a magazine, so the tattoo remained our secret.

Until that fateful day in late October.

Peter’s problem was that just as a leaky bucket can’t hold water, he couldn’t keep a secret. So open was he, so incapable of dishonesty or concealment, that sooner or later he was bound to tell someone about the tattoo. If only for the pleasure he would derive from showing it off.

He used to sit sometimes just looking at it. Holding his arm in different positions, twisting his head this way and that to see it from various angles. The biggest kick he got was from gazing at his reflection in the mirror. Seeing it in full context, as if it were someone else, someone worthy of admiration and respect. There was a tiny broken heart between the
Heartbreak
and
Hotel.
Red. The only colour in the whole tattoo. He loved that tiny splash of crimson, and I sometimes found him touching it, almost stroking it. But most of all he loved the sense that, somehow, Elvis belonged to him, and would always be with him. A constant companion for the rest of what turned out to be his short life.

There was early snow that year. Not a lot of it. But it lay on the roofs, and in ledges along the walls, and dusted the branches of trees newly naked after unusually strong autumn winds. Everything else seemed darker, blacker, in contrast. The fast-flowing water of the river, the soot-blackened stone of the old mills, and the workers’ tenements in the village. There was a leaden quality about the sky, but a glow in it, too. Like a natural lightbox diffusing sunshine. It cast no shadows. The air was crisp and cold and stung your nostrils. The snow had frozen and it crunched underfoot.

It was morning break at the school, and our voices rang out, sharp and brittle in the icy air, breath billowing about our heads like dragon smoke. I saw Peter at the centre of a small clutch of boys near the gate. But by the time I got there it was too late. He could hardly have chosen to show off Elvis in more dangerous company. They were the three Kelly brothers, and a couple of their friends. Equally unsavoury. We only ever hung out with the Kellys because they were Catholics, too, and we were all made to stand out in the cold waiting for the Proddies to finish their morning service. It bred a sort of camaraderie, even among enemies.