The Blackhouse

EIGHT

Marsaili turned from the sink as Artair came in the kitchen door. There was a simmering anger in her eyes, words of rebuke on her lips, before she saw that he had company. Fin had not come yet into the light off the top step, and so she had no idea who it was, just a shadow in Artair’s wake.

‘Sorry I’m late. Ran into an old friend in town. Gave me a lift back. Thought you might want to say hello.’

The shock on Marsaili’s face was clear for both men to see as Fin stepped into the harsh light of the kitchen. And beyond the shock was an immediate self-consciousness. She ran dishwater-red hands quickly down her apron, and one of them moved involuntarily to brush stray hairs away from her face. There was about her the sense of a young woman, not yet middle-aged, who had simply stopped caring about herself. Stopped caring, too, about what others might think. Until now.

‘Hello, Marsaili.’ Fin’s voice sounded very small.

‘Hello, Fin.’ Just hearing her speak the name she had given him all those years before filled him with sadness. At something precious lost and gone for ever. Marsaili’s self-consciousness was giving way to embarrassment. She leaned back against the sink and folded her arms across her chest, defensive. ‘What brings you to the island?’ There was none of Artair’s tone in a question that seemed prosaic in the circumstances.

Artair answered for him. ‘He’s investigating Angel Macritchie’s murder.’

Marsaili nodded a perfunctory acknowledgement, but showed no interest. ‘Are you here for long?’

‘Probably not. A day or two, maybe.’

‘Figure you’ll catch the killer that fast, eh?’ Artair said.

Fin shook his head. ‘As soon as they rule out a connection to the Edinburgh murder, they’ll probably send me back.’

‘And you don’t think there is one?’

‘Doesn’t look like it.’

Marsaili appeared to be listening, but still without curiosity. She kept her eyes on Fin. ‘You haven’t changed.’

‘Neither have you.’

She laughed then, genuine mirth in her eyes. ‘Same old bad liar.’ She paused. Fin was still standing in the open doorway and did not look as if he intended to stay. ‘Have you eaten?’

‘I’ll get a fish supper in Stornoway.’

‘Will you fuck,’ Artair grunted. ‘The chippys’ll all be shut by the time you get back.’

‘I’ve got quiche in the oven,’ Marsaili said. ‘It’ll only take fifteen minutes to heat up. I never know when Artair’ll be home.’

‘Aye, that’s right.’ Artair shut the door behind Fin. ‘Good old unreliable Artair. Will he be early, will he be late? Will he be drunk, will he be sober? Keeps life interesting, that right, Marsaili?’

‘It would be irredeemably dull otherwise.’ Marsaili’s tone was flat. Fin searched for some hint of irony but found none. ‘I’ll put the potatoes on.’ She turned away to the cooker.

‘Come and have a drink,’ Artair said, and he led Fin through to a small living room made smaller by a huge three-piece suite and a thirty-two-inch TV set. It was switched on, with the sound turned down. Some awful game show. Poor reception, and the colour up too high, made it almost unwatchable. The curtains were drawn, and a peat fire in the hearth made the room cosy and warm. ‘Sit down.’ Artair opened up a cupboard in the sideboard to reveal a collection of bottles. ‘What’ll you have?’

‘I won’t, thanks.’ Fin sat down and tried to see through to the kitchen.

‘Come on, you need something to whet the appetite.’

Fin sighed. There was going to be no escaping this. ‘A very small one, then.’

Artair poured two large whiskies and handed him one. ‘Slàinte.’ He raised his glass in a Gaelic toast.

‘Slàinte mhath.’ Fin took a sip. Artair gulped down half his glass, and looked up as the door opened behind Fin. Fin turned to see a teenage boy of sixteen or seventeen standing in the hall doorway. He wasn’t particularly tall, five ten or eleven, and slight-built. He had straw-fair hair, shaved short at the sides but longer on top, gelled into spikes. A single loop of earring hung from his right ear and he wore a hooded sweatshirt over baggy blue jeans that gathered around chunky white trainers. He had his mother’s cornflower-blue eyes. A good-looking boy.

‘Say hello to your uncle Fin,’ Artair said. And Fin stood up to shake the boy’s hand. A good firm handshake, and direct contact from eyes that were too much like his mother’s for comfort.

‘Hey,’ he said.

‘We called him Fionnlagh.’ It was Marsaili’s voice, and Fin looked round to see her standing in the kitchen doorway watching, an odd expression on her face, colour in her cheeks where there had been none before.

It was a shock for Fin to hear his own name. He looked at the boy again and wondered if they had named him after him. But why would they? It was a common enough name on the island. ‘I’m pleased to meet you, Fionnlagh,’ Fin said.

‘Are you going to eat with us?’ Artair asked him.

‘He’s already eaten,’ Marsaili said.

‘Well, he can have a drink with us, then.’

‘I’m still trying to sort out the problem with the computer,’ Fionnlagh said.

‘I think maybe the motherboard’s blown.’

‘Motherboard, you’ll note,’ Artair said to Fin. ‘Never the father board. It’s always the mothers that cause the trouble.’ He turned to his son. ‘So what does that mean?’

‘Means it’s buggered.’

‘Well, can you not fix it?’

Fionnlagh shook his head. ‘I’d need to replace it. And that would probably cost as much a buying a new computer.’

‘Well, we haven’t got the money to go buying another fucking computer,’ Artair snapped. ‘When you get a job you can save up for one yourself.’

Fin said to him, ‘What kind of computer is it?’

‘It’s an iMac. G3. One of the old jellybeans.’

‘And what makes you think it’s the motherboard?’

Fionnlagh exhaled in frustration. ‘The screen’s gone blue and dark so you can hardly read it, and the image is all sort of squeezed up, like it’s been compressed.’

‘What system are you on?’

‘Oh, I’m miles behind. I just upgraded from nine to Jaguar. Need a better computer to run Snow Leopard.’

Artair snorted. ‘Jesus Christ, boy! Can you not speak a fucking language we can understand?’

‘There’s no need to talk like that, Artair,’ Marsaili said quietly. Fin stole a glance at her across the room and saw her discomfort.

‘You any idea what he’s talking about?’ Artair said to Fin. ‘It’s all double Dutch to me.’

‘It’s a degree in computer studies I’m doing at the Open University,’ Fin said.

‘Well, la-di-fucking-da. The boy who couldn’t speak English can speak Computer now.’

Fin said to Fionnlagh. ‘Is that when the problem started, when you installed the new system?’

The boy nodded. ‘Yeh, the day after I did the upgrade. Cost a fortune for the memory card, too.’

‘I should know, I bloody paid for it,’ Artair growled and emptied his glass. He stooped to refill it.

‘Where is the computer? In your room?’ Fin said.

‘Yeh.’

‘Can I have a look at it?’

‘Sure.’

Fin laid his glass on a coffee table and followed Fionnlagh out into the hall. A staircase led up to an attic room. ‘Place has changed since your day,’ Artair said, coming out after them. ‘I put in a bedroom for the kid up in the attic. Me and Marsaili are in my parents’ old room, and my mother’s in mine. We keep my dad’s study as a guest room.’

‘Not that we ever have any guests,’ Fionnlagh muttered as he reached the top of the stairs.

‘What was that?’ his father called after him.

‘Just telling Fin to watch that loose carpet on the top stair.’ Fionnlagh briefly caught Fin’s eye, and in that moment it was as if they had become complicit in a subterfuge that only they would ever know about. Fin winked and got a tiny smile in return.

Fionnlagh’s room ran from one side of the attic to the other at the north end of the house. There was a dormer window at each side cut into the slope of the ceiling. The east dormer had an unrestricted view out across the Minch. The computer was on a table set against the north gable. It sat in a pool of light from an Anglepoise lamp that seemed to intensify the darkness in the rest of the room. Fin was only vaguely aware of posters stuck to the walls. Football players and pop stars. Eminem was whining at them from a stereo system Fin couldn’t see.

‘Turn that shit off.’ Artair had come in behind them and was leaning on the door jamb, his drink still in his hand. ‘Can’t stand that rap. That’s rap with a silent C.’ He snorted at his own joke. ‘Know what I mean?’

‘I like Eminem,’ Fin said. ‘It’s all in the lyrics. He’s kind of like the Bob Dylan of his generation.’

‘Jesus,’ Artair exploded. ‘I can see you two are going to get on just great.’

‘I store most of my tracks in the computer,’ Fionnlagh said. ‘But since the screen went …’ He shrugged hopelessly.

‘Are you online?’ Fin asked.

‘Yeh, we just switched to broadband a couple of months ago.’

‘Can I take a look?’

‘Go ahead.’

Fin sat in front of the iMac and moved the mouse, waking the computer from its sleep mode. The screen came up dark blue and distorted, just as Fionnlagh had described. The desktop was barely visible, with its Finder window and dock bar along the bottom. ‘When you loaded in the new system, did the screen ever come up normal?’

‘Yeh, it was working great that first night. It was when I opened up the next day it was like this.’

Fin nodded. ‘Bet you didn’t upgrade your firmware.’

Fionnlagh frowned. ‘Firmware? What’s that?’

‘It’s kind of like the stuff in the computer’s brain that allows the hardware and the software to talk to one another. Apple really screwed up by not telling people that a system upgrade on a G3 required a firmware upgrade as well.’ He saw the consternation on Fionnlagh’s face and grinned. ‘Don’t worry, you’ve got about half the Mac-owning world for company. People were throwing away their computers when all they needed to do was download a simple firmware upgrade. There was a lot of anger about it out there.’

‘And we can do that?’ Fionnlagh asked, as if it were too good to be true. ‘We can download a firmware upgrade?’

‘Yep.’ Fin opened up a squashed web browser and tapped in a URL address. A moment later he was on the Apple website clicking on the firmware download for a G3. It took less than two minutes to download, and when the icon appeared on Fionnlagh’s screen, Fin double-clicked on it to install. ‘Takes about thirty seconds. Then, hopefully, after we restart it’s going to be working just fine.’ When the installation was complete, he dropped down the Apple menu and selected restart. The screen went black, the iMac delivered its welcome chorus, and then began reloading its operating system. Half a minute later the desktop screen appeared, bright and sharp and undistorted. ‘Et violà.’ Fin sat back, pleased with himself.

‘Aw, man, that’s brilliant!’ Fionnlagh could hardly contain his joy. ‘That’s just brilliant.’ His delight was shining in his eyes.

Fin stood up to vacate his seat. ‘It’s all yours. Enjoy. It’s a neat system. Any problems, just let me know.’

‘Thanks, Fin.’ Fionnlagh dropped himself into his chair and within moments had the arrow darting about the screen, opening up windows, pulling down menus, eager to explore all the possibilities he thought had been lost.

Fin turned to find Artair watching thoughtfully, still leaning on the door jamb. He had not said a word since the Eminem put-down. ‘Pretty fucking smart,’ he said quietly. ‘I could never have done that for him in a million years.’

Fin shifted uncomfortably. ‘It’s amazing what you pick up on the Open University.’ He cleared his throat self-consciously. ‘I think I left my drink downstairs.’

But Artair didn’t move, transferring his gaze, instead, to the quarter-inch of amber liquid in the bottom of his glass. ‘You always were smarter than me, weren’t you, Fin? My father knew that. Which is why he spent more time on you than he ever did on me.’

‘We both spent a lot of time in that room down there,’ Fin said. ‘I owe your dad a lot. I can’t believe how generous he was, giving up all his spare time like that.’

Artair cocked his head and gave Fin a long, hard look. Searching for what? Fin felt discomfited by his gaze. ‘Well, at least it worked for you,’ Artair said finally. ‘Got you off the island and away to university. Didn’t get me any further than a dead-end job at Lewis Offshore.’

The silence between them was broken only by the clacking of Fionnlagh’s keyboard. The boy seemed barely aware of them, lost in his own ether world of computer and internet. Marsaili called from downstairs that their quiche was ready, and the awkwardness of the moment passed. Artair snapped out of his dwam.

‘Come on, we’ll get your glass topped up, and some food in your belly.’

At the foot of the stairs, a voice called faintly from the far end of the hall. ‘Artair … Artair is that you?’ The feeble, tremulous voice of an old woman.

Artair closed his eyes, taking a deep breath, and Fin saw the muscles in his jaw working. Then he opened his eyes. ‘Just coming, mamaidh.’ And, under his breath, ‘Shit! She always knows when I’m fucking home.’ He pushed brusquely past Fin and headed towards the room at the end of the hall. Fin went into the living room to retrieve his glass, and then into the kitchen. Marsaili was sitting at a gateleg table she had opened up from the wall. There were three plates of quiche and potato, and three chairs pulled up around them.

‘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?