I'll Keep You Safe

Chapter Twenty-Two

It was with dread that I returned to Galashiels in the September following my summer at Linshader Lodge. A long demoralizing journey. Three-and-a-half hours across the Minch on the Suilven, from Stornoway to Ullapool. Then bus to Inverness, and on to Edinburgh. I recall what seemed like hours of waiting, stamping my feet in the cold of the old bus station at the St James Centre, waiting for the bus to the Borders.

My first year at the Scottish College of Textiles had been profoundly lonely. My room in the halls of residence, at Netherdale on the outskirts of the town, was little better than a cell: painted brick walls, a single bed, a wardrobe, a desk, and a view on to the back of the halls. The merest glimpse of grass and the road beyond, where the bus would drop me on my return from trips home. I felt like I had stepped on to the set of Prisoner: Cell Block H.

Some of the girls had arrived with duvet covers and towels, stereo systems and posters, transforming their rooms into little dens. I came down from the islands with nothing more than a suitcase. My room was as cold and impersonal when I left it as when I arrived.

I had cianalas, what we Gaels call homesickness, within the first five minutes, and it never left me the whole year. I remember queuing up on bitter cold nights for my turn on the shared payphone to call my folks, with the hope of catching maybe a breath of the sea somewhere in the background. It all seems extraordinary to me now. In these days of iPhones and every other kind of smartphone, keeping in touch with friends and family could hardly be easier. Back then, I might as well have been on the moon.

The girls on my floor shared a toilet and shower at the end of the hall, as well as a communal sitting room with a single TV set and fights every night over which channel we would watch.

The halls of residence were catered, which meant that we had to queue (again) with a tray in the canteen, and carry our food to shared melamine tables. Cell Block H (again). I was utterly miserable.

Gala, as everyone called it, was a friendly enough place, but on the downward slide after years of decline in the textile industry. It had once been a prosperous little mill town. But most of the mills were gone, and it felt seedy now, grey and depressed.

The college itself had retained its reputation, and most of the designers, salespeople and mill managers in the Scottish textile industry went there. It was the career I wanted, but as I returned for that second year, I was not at all sure that I could stay the course.

It was doubly depressing going back to Gala after events at Linshader. I was still hurting, and haunted by the memories of the halcyon summer I had passed in the weeks before the poaching incident on Loch Four.

I had, however, brought numerous personal items to dress up my cell for this second year, and was in the process of pinning posters of Runrig and Deacon Blue to the wall when there was a knock on the open door. I turned to see Seonag standing grinning in the doorway. I’ve often heard the phrase You could knock me down with a feather. But if anyone had so much as breathed on me in that moment I’d have fallen over.

‘Surprise,’ she said. And if she saw my dismay she gave no outward sign of it.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Switched courses. Joined the second year at Gala. The Dough School in Glasgow was a drag. And, anyway, I didn’t really make any friends there.’ She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. ‘I’ve got the room right opposite.’

In other circumstances I might have been glad of the company, but right now Seonag was just about the last person in the world I wanted to see.

‘Oh,’ I said, without the least enthusiasm.

She retained her cheerful façade. ‘So we’ll have lots of time to spend together. I know how fed up you were here last year.’ She sauntered into the room, folding her arms and casting eyes over Donnie Munro and Ricky Ross. ‘Cool posters.’ And without taking her eyes off them, ‘I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything from Ruairidh.’

‘No.’

‘Good riddance, eh?’ She turned towards me. ‘So are there any decent pubs in Galashiels?’

I don’t know how much she was aware of it, but I spent the next few weeks doing my best to avoid her. I took up running so that I had an excuse to get out on my own. Or I would simply tell her that I was studying and couldn’t be disturbed, shutting myself away in my cell. Of course, I couldn’t avoid her in class, or in the canteen, when she would invariably come and sit beside me. In a crowd, when a bunch of us would go to the student union, I would involve myself in conversation with one of the other girls as a discouragement to Seonag, and happily chat to any of the young rugby players who would come into the bar after matches at weekends.

Seonag was, as usual, Miss Personality superplus. The best-looking girl on the course. There were very few boys at the college, but I noticed how their eyes always seemed drawn in her direction. And the Gala boys would fall over themselves to buy her drinks in the pub, in return for which she seemed happy to flirt outrageously.

More than all that, I noticed how popular she was with the other girls. There would always be gatherings of them congregating around her in the common room, laughing and whispering. Or walking together across campus in giggling groups. Squeezing into a booth at the pub. A sisterhood from which I felt excluded. It seemed then that she was the one avoiding me, rather than the other way around.

We were two months into the term before I got my first real insight into something I had never even suspected. And when I look back on it now, I realize how naive and innocent I must have been.

At the weekends, when a lot of the girls went home, those of us left would often go to a pub called The Salmon. There was a rumoured connection between the owner and Linshader Lodge, where it was said he had once worked as a ghillie. Whether or not that was true I couldn’t say, since I never met the man. But it was a comforting sort of link with the island.

It was one of those bright, cold November Saturdays, with a haze of frost on the grass and a mist on the hills. A group of us had gone to the pub after lunch and sat there drinking all afternoon. There was an international rugby match on the telly. Scotland versus someone or other. I didn’t know, or care. I had never been turned on by rugby, but wouldn’t have dared give voice to my indifference here, of all places. It would have been like denouncing God from the pulpit of the Free Church.

I remember that Seonag had been there when we arrived, but she was gone by the time we left. I hadn’t noticed her leaving. I had been feeling sorry for myself, with the prospect of another month before the Christmas break and the chance, finally, to go home. As a result of which I had drunk more than was good for me and was almost overcome by melancholy. The prospect of another Saturday night sitting reading alone in my cell was very nearly unbearable, and I decided that maybe it was time I gave Seonag another chance. In truth, although I was the one who had started out avoiding her, it was me who was now feeling excluded. Time to address all those things that had come between us. The misunderstandings and petty jealousies.

So it was with an alcohol-fuelled courage and determination that I climbed the stairs to the girls’ floor and walked along the hall to Seonag’s door. I hesitated, resolution deserting me only for a moment, before I knocked once and walked in.

At first, I didn’t really understand what I was seeing. And the moment passed so quickly I couldn’t be sure in the immediate aftermath that my eyes had not deceived me. An English girl called Jane, who had also been with us earlier in the pub, was lying naked on Seonag’s bed, dark hair splashed across the pillow. Seonag, too, was naked, lying on her belly between the other girl’s legs, Jane’s fists tightly clasped around bunches of Seonag’s burnished red hair. Milky white bodies impossibly conjoined.

They broke apart immediately, startled by my sudden appearance, and sat up, grasping at sheets to cover their nakedness. I was so taken aback I had no idea what to say. I felt the colour rising on my cheeks, and stammered something stupid like ‘Sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt.’ And closed the door quickly as I stepped back into the corridor.

I stood breathing hard for a moment, trying to process what I had just seen. Then hurried back along the hall to the common room, and slipped inside, shutting the door behind me. The other girls had not yet returned, and I stood there trembling and dreading the thought of having to face Seonag alone. How naive had I been never even to suspect? And, yet, nothing in my God-fearing sheltered island upbringing had prepared me for such a moment. I had no idea how to deal with it. It seems ridiculous to me now, in the wake of all the years of experience I have clocked up since. But I was shaken to my core.

I heard a door opening and then closing further down the hall. A knock. And then silence. Before soft footsteps came hurrying along the linoleum. I stepped away from the door as it opened, and Seonag stood there with her dressing gown wrapped around her. Bare feet, tousled hair, bright spots of red high on her porcelain cheeks. She pushed the door shut behind her and her green eyes sought mine, imploring, filled with fear and longing. I found it impossible to maintain eye contact and looked away towards the floor. She reached out to grab both of my arms. ‘You really didn’t know?’

I forced myself to look at her. ‘No.’

She sighed heavily and seemed distraught. ‘My poor, innocent Niamh.’

‘It’s disgusting!’

She let me go and stepped back, almost recoiling, as if from a slap. ‘No, it’s not! It’s the most natural thing in the world if that’s how you feel.’ I could see the emotion bubbling up inside her. ‘All those times cuddling together in the bothag with the dollies, playing mums and dads. All those nights in the same bed, sharing the heat of our bodies, arms around each other for comfort.’

‘Like sisters!’ I was horrified that she could ever have seen it as anything else. ‘I never thought...’

‘I’ve had a crush on you, Niamh, ever since we were little. Just wanted to be with you. You and nobody else. I looked up to you. I loved you.’ She sighed. ‘As far back as I can remember, I was hoping that one day you would feel this way, too.’

‘Well, I don’t.’

It was as if she didn’t hear me. She stepped towards me again and took both of my hands. I was too distracted to resist. ‘It wasn’t until we were teenagers that I realized why. What it was I wanted from you. That no boy could give me. I can’t tell you how disappointed I was by your infatuation with Ruairidh. How much it hurt me.’ She turned her head back towards the door. ‘There’ve been other girls like Jane. But that was just physical. Satisfying a need. I don’t care about her. Or any of the others. Only you, Niamh. Just you.’

It took a moment for me to realize as she drew closer that she meant to kiss me. I jerked away, pulling my hands free. ‘Don’t!’ I was seething with anger and confusion. And uncertainty. I know now that our sexuality is just an extension of ourselves. We don’t choose to be, we just are. Somewhere deep inside, a part of me wanted to take her in my arms and tell her everything was going to be okay. She was my best friend. We had shared the better part of our lives together. But it was never going to be okay the way she wanted.

I saw her tears through mine before I brushed past her, out into the hall, and ran all the way along to my room. I closed the door behind me and locked it, before throwing myself on the bed and crying into my pillow, stifling my sobs in case anyone would hear me. I felt... and I can’t think of any other way to describe it... bereaved. I had just lost the part of me that was Seonag. A part of me that, clearly, I had never really understood. But loved all the same. I couldn’t see, then, how I would ever get over it.

In the weeks that followed I felt trapped in a nightmare. My unhappiness in Gala compounded now by the fractious end of my relationship with Seonag. Who was still just across the hall, who still attended the same lectures, who was still Miss Personality superplus in a crowd at the union. But behind the face that she wore for the world I could see her pain. The tears of the clown behind the mask. We avoided each other like the plague.

Then, mid-December, entirely out of the blue, I received a letter from Ruairidh. He had put his name and a return address on the back of the envelope. Some student accommodation in Aberdeen. It was a Saturday morning, and I sat in my cell and tore it open with trembling fingers. Inside was a printed card. An invitation to the student Christmas dance at Aberdeen University. Clipped to it was a return air ticket from Edinburgh to Aberdeen in my name. Not a cheap purchase for someone on a student grant. I turned over the card, and saw that he had handwritten on the back of it, Saving the last dance for you. Beneath it a phone number.

It took me all of half a second to decide that I was going. I ran along the corridor to the pay phones and dialled the number on the back of the card. The phone rang several times at the other end before someone picked it up, and a woman’s voice said, ‘Yes?’ It seemed very abrupt and I was momentarily taken aback.

‘Can I speak to Ruairidh Macfarlane, please.’ I heard the receiver being set down and then the same voice calling off into the distance.

‘Ruairidh... Phone!’

‘Coming,’ even more distantly, then hurried feet on stairs. When he picked up the phone and said, ‘Hello?’ I very nearly hung up. I’m not sure why. Except that I knew this was very possibly a watershed in my life. One of those crossroads you arrive at without any certainty of which road you are going to follow, always with the possibility in your mind that you could just turn around and walk back to the safety of everything you have known up until then.

I said, ‘It’s Niamh.’ I could almost hear him hold his breath at the other end.

‘Hi.’

‘Hi.’ I closed my eyes and took the plunge. ‘I got your letter.’

‘Yes?’

‘I’ll be on the flight.’

A long silence, then, ‘I’ll meet you at the airport.’

‘Okay... See you then, then.’

‘Yes.’

A hesitation. What else to say? Nothing. ‘Bye.’

‘Bye.’

I hung up and stood breathing rapidly. The butterflies were back. And the palpitations. All the things I had felt during those weeks at Linshader when Ruairidh and I were together. I hurried back along the hall to my room and stood by the window, gazing out at the distant bus stop where I would board the bus to Edinburgh to catch my flight to Aberdeen in just ten days’ time. I would rearrange my transport home for Christmas from there. Bus from Aberdeen to Inverness. Then Inverness to Ullapool. And the Suilven back across the Minch. I had not felt this good in months. Which is when I realized that I had left the letter with the ticket and invitation on the table beside the phones. I turned to go back and get them but was stopped in my tracks by a knock at the door.

It swung open and Seonag stood there, with the letter and ticket and invitation in her hand. She held them out and said, ‘You left these by the phone.’

I stepped forward to take them. ‘Thanks.’

She shrugged, and the sadness in her face in that moment very nearly broke my heart. She said, with a tiny smile, ‘Guess I lose.’

As it happened, I never did go home for Christmas that year. Ruairidh met me off the plane at Aberdeen, and he saved not only the last dance for me, but every other dance that night. We went back to his digs and made love in his room, trying hard not to make a noise and disturb the other students, or his landlady. We spent half the night cooried up together beneath the duvet, stifling laughter and whispering conversations. I told him, as if he hadn’t heard it before, how unhappy I was at Galashiels. And he was shocked to hear about Seonag’s unexpected arrival, and how that had only compounded my misery. I didn’t tell him then, or ever, about what had actually transpired between us, only that the dissolution of our friendship seemed final, and that I didn’t see any way I could go back to Gala.

He said, ‘You know, I’ve heard that the RGU Dough School at Kepplestone runs a really good course in home economics.’ He shrugged as if it were just a casual or throwaway thought when he added, ‘If you could get in there for the second term, then we could be in Aberdeen together.’ He grinned. ‘And miles away from Seonag.’

I phoned and went to Kepplestone for an interview the next day. It was my good fortune that someone else was dropping out, and they were happy for me to step in and fill her place. And so Ruairidh and I stayed in Aberdeen all across the festive season. I remember it as probably the happiest Christmas of my life.

When term resumed I took up my new place at the Aberdeen Dough School and completed my degree over the next year and a half.

After graduating I surprised even myself by returning to Gala to do a Master’s in Clothing Management. Just six months at the college, and then six months on release at Mackays in Paisley, my first real job in a fashion buying office, while I researched and wrote my dissertation on the Harris Tweed industry and its marketing.

By the time I got back to Gala Seonag was long gone. She had abandoned her flirtation with the textile and clothing industry, and left to take a course in business and computer studies at Manchester, which I discovered later just happened to be Jane’s home town.