The Blackhouse

EIGHTEEN

It ruined the rest of the summer, the accident on the rock. I’m not sure it didn’t ruin the rest of my life. I was in the hospital for almost a week. They said I was suffering from severe concussion, and I had headaches for months afterwards. They suspected a fractured skull, although nothing showed up on the X-ray. My left arm was broken in two places and they put it in plaster for more than a month. My whole body was black and blue, and I could hardly move when I first regained consciousness.

Marsaili came to see me every day, but I didn’t really want her there. I don’t know why, but I found her presence disturbing. I think she was hurt by how cold I was, and all her warmth was lost on me. My aunt came a couple of times, but she wasn’t very sympathetic. She must have known by then that she was dying. I’d had a close encounter with death, but they said I would make a full recovery. Why should she waste her sympathy on me?

Gigs came, too. Just the one time. I vaguely remember him sitting at my bedside gazing at me with concern in those deep, blue eyes of his. He asked me how much I remembered of what happened. But it was still very hazy then. My memory of events was fragmented. Dislocated images. Artair’s dad climbing on to the ledge beside me. His fear. His body lying on the rocks beneath the cliff, the sea reaching out foaming fingers to drag him off. The whole fortnight was a blur, as if I were peering back at it through gauze. That was the concussion, they said. Only with the passage of time did the gauze dissolve and the focus sharpen.

The thing that I remember most clearly about my spell in hospital was that Artair never came to see me once. It was not something I was aware of during the first few days, but as my recovery continued and they began to talk about sending me home, I realized he had not been to visit. I asked Marsaili about it, and she said his mother had been in a terrible state. There had been a funeral. Without a body. An empty coffin carried all the way to Crobost cemetery, containing only a handful of treasured belongings. They say that closure is hard without a body. Since it was certain that the sea would never give him up, I could not see how closure would ever be possible on the death of Mr Macinnes, and I began to think that perhaps Artair blamed me. Marsaili said she didn’t think it was a question of blame. Just the pain of coming to terms with the death of a parent. I, of all people, should know about that. And, of course, I did.

The hardest time was between going home from the hospital and leaving for university. It was a dead time, full of long, empty days. We were into September now, and the summer was all but gone. I was hugely depressed, by what had happened to me on the rock, by the death of Artair’s dad. My enthusiasm for going to Glasgow had diminished, but I held on to the hope that leaving for the mainland would mark a change in the way I felt, that I would somehow be able to put everything behind me and start again with a clean slate.

I found myself avoiding Marsaili, regretting that we had ever arranged to share a room in Glasgow. Somehow she seemed like a part of that everything I needed to leave behind. And I simply avoided the issue of Artair. If he couldn’t bring himself to visit me in hospital, then I certainly wasn’t going to see him.

On the days when it wasn’t raining, I would go for long walks along the cliffs, heading south down the east coast, past the ruins of the ancient village and church at Bilascleiter, to the long, silver beach at Tolastadh where I would sit among the doons and watch the sea for hours. The only souls you ever saw were walkers on holiday from the mainland, the only company the thousands of seabirds that swooped and dived about the cliffs spotting for fish in the Minch.

It was when I got back one day from one of my walks that my aunt told me that Artair’s mother had suffered a stroke. She was in a bad way, my aunt thought. And I knew then that I couldn’t avoid him any longer. My arm was still in plaster, and I couldn’t ride my bike, so I walked. A journey that you would rather never end, always passes quickly. It took no time at all to walk down the hill to Artair’s bungalow. Which made it all the more absurd that I had not done it before now.

His dad’s car was sitting in the drive where he had left it before setting off for An Sgeir. A potent reminder that he had not come back. I knocked at the back door and stood on the step with my heart in my mouth. It seemed like an age before it opened. Artair stood there looking down at me. He was terribly pale, dark shadows smudged beneath his eyes. He had lost weight. He looked at me impassively.

‘I heard about your mum.’

‘You’d better come in.’ He held the door wide and I stepped up into the kitchen. The smell of his dad’s pipe tobacco still lingered in the house. Another reminder of his absence. There was, too, an unpleasant smell of stale cooking. Dirty dishes were piled up at the sink.

‘How is she?’

‘It would probably have been better for her if she’d died. She’s paralysed down one side. Lost a lot of her motor functions. Her speech is affected. Although the doctors think that might improve. If she survives. When she gets home from the hospital I’m told I’ll have to feed her with a spoon. She almost certainly won’t walk again.’

‘Jesus, Artair. I’m so sorry.’

‘They say it was the shock of my father’s death.’ Which made me feel even worse, if such a thing were possible. But he just shrugged and glanced at my plaster. ‘So how are you?’

‘Still getting headaches. The plaster’s coming off next week.’

‘Just in time for shooting off to Glasgow, then.’ There was an acid edge to his voice.

‘You didn’t come to see me in the hospital.’ I didn’t frame it as a question, but we both knew I was asking why.

‘I’ve been busy.’ He was tetchy. ‘I had a funeral to arrange. A thousand administrative things to take care of. Do you have any idea how much bureaucracy there is in death?’ But he wasn’t expecting an answer. ‘No, of course you don’t. You were only a kid when your parents died. Someone else took care of all that shit.’

His prickliness made me angry. ‘You blame me, don’t you, for your dad’s death?’ I just blurted it out.

He gave me such an odd look that I was completely discomfited. ‘Gigs says you don’t remember much about what happened out there on the rock.’

‘What’s to remember?’ I said, still off-balance. ‘I fell. Okay, so I don’t remember exactly how. Something stupid, probably. And your dad climbed on to that ledge and saved my life. If that makes me responsible for his death, then mea culpa. I’m sorry. I’ve never been more sorry about anything in my life. He was great, your dad. I remember him on the ledge telling me everything was going to be alright. And it was. Only not for him. I’ll always be grateful to him, Artair. Always. Not just for saving my life. But for giving me a chance at life. For all those hours he put into getting me through my exams. I could never have done it without him.’ It just poured out of me. All my misery and guilt.

I can recall Artair staring at me, still with that strange look in his eyes. I suppose he must have been weighing up just how much blame I deserved, because he seemed to come to a decision, and all the tension and anger suddenly drained out of him, like poison from a boil that’s been lanced. He shook his head then. ‘I don’t blame you, Fin. I don’t. Really. It’s just …’ And his eyes filled up. ‘It’s just hard dealing with the death of your dad.’ He sucked in a deep, tremulous breath. ‘And now this.’ He lifted his hands hopelessly, and then let them drop back to his sides.

I felt so sorry for him that I did something I had never done before. Something that big, macho Lewismen just don’t do. I gave him a hug. I sensed his initial surprise, and a momentary hiatus, before he hugged me back, and I felt the bristle of his unshaven face against my neck and the sobs that shook his body.

Marsaili and I left separately for Glasgow at the end of September and met up at the Curlers bar in Byres Road. We had each been to the flat in Highburgh Road to drop off our bags, but there were issues to be settled. For my part I had to confront and deal with my feelings, or lack of them, for Marsaili. I could not explain it then, and I cannot explain it now. I had escaped from An Sgeir with my life, but something of me had died on the rock, just as Marsaili said all those years later. And Marsaili was somehow connected with that part of me that had gone. I needed to rebuild and regrow, and I was not certain where Marsaili fitted into that process, if at all. For Marsaili, the issue was simple. Did I want us to be together or not? I have to confess to my cowardice. I am not good at ending relationships. When there is a chance for the break to be swift and clean, I am likely to dither, afraid of causing hurt. In the final event, of course, it always gets messy, and you end up hurting people even more. So I didn’t have the heart, or maybe was it the courage, to tell her it was over.

Instead we had a few drinks and went for a meal at a Chinese restaurant in Ashton Lane. We had wine with the meal, and several brandies to finish, and were drunk by the time we got back to the flat. Our bedsit was a large room at the front of the apartment, originally the sitting room I think. It had high ceilings with moulded cornices, and a gas fire in an elaborately carved wooden fireplace. Spectacular stained-glass oriel windows looked through trees on to the road below. Up a short flight of stairs was a shared bathroom, and at the back of the flat a large communal kitchen with a huge dining table and a television by a window overlooking the back court. We could hear the other students talking and playing music in the kitchen when we went in, but we weren’t feeling very sociable that night. We went straight into our room and locked the door. Light from the streetlamps outside filtered through the leaves and fell among dappled shadows across the floor. We did not even bother drawing the curtains before unfolding the bed settee and stripping off our clothes. I suppose if anyone was looking, we might have been seen from the flats across the road. But we didn’t care. A cocktail of alcohol and hormones spurred us into a bout of furious sex, brief and intense.

It seemed like a long time since we had last made love, on the beach at Port of Ness. That first night in Glasgow fulfilled some physical need, but when it was over I lay on my back staring at the ceiling, watching the reflected light move with the breeze among the leaves outside. It was not like it had been before. And it left me feeling empty, and knowing then that it was over, and that it could only be a matter of time before we would both have to face it.

Sometimes when you don’t want it to be your fault, you engineer situations where fate, or even the other party, can be blamed for the break-up of a relationship. It was like that with me and Marsaili that first term at Glasgow University. I look back now, and I’m not sure who the person was who inhabited my body during those autumn weeks leading into our first winter in the city. But he was a truculent bastard, moody and difficult. He drank too much. He smoked too much dope. He made love to Marsaili when he felt like it, and treated her like shit the rest of the time. I am ashamed to say that I knew him, or was associated with him in any way.

I discovered lots of things about myself. I discovered that I wasn’t really interested in the arts, or getting a degree. In fact, I wasn’t interested in studying, full-stop. When I think of the hours that poor Mr Macinnes wasted on me! All that time and effort squandered. I discovered that I was what Lowlanders call a teuchter, a hick Highlander, immediately identified by my ugly island accent, and I made a determined effort to iron it out. It seemed that Gaelic sounded absurd to the non-Gaelic-speaking ear, and so I stopped speaking it to Marsaili, even when we were alone. I discovered that I was attractive to girls, and there appeared to be no shortage of them willing to sleep with me. Those were in the days before AIDS had made its first big impact, and sex was still very casual. I would go to a party with Marsaili and leave with someone else. When I got back to the flat, I would find her on her own in the dark. She would never confess to spilling tears over me, but I saw the mascara stains on her pillow.

It all came to a head towards the end of our first semester. There were two girls who shared the room across the hall from us. One of them had a fancy for me. She had never made any secret of it, even when Marsaili was around, and Marsaili hated her for it. Her name was Anita. She was a good-looking girl, but for all her encouragement I had never really taken an interest. She was too keen. Like Sine. And I had always backed away from that.

I got in early one day from university. I had skipped lectures and gone to the pub. I had already spent most of my grant for the year, but I just didn’t care. I was hell-bent on a course of self-destruction. It was bitterly cold, a heavy sky over the city pregnant with snow. The shops were full of Christmas. My parents had died exactly two weeks before Christmas, and every one of them since had been miserable and depressing. Compounded by my aunt, who had never attempted to make it special for me. While all the other kids had looked forward to the Christmas holiday each year with great excitement, I only ever contemplated it with a sense of dread. And all the commercially motivated ersatz gaiety of the big city, the lights and trees and garish window displays, the endlessly repeating Christmas songs in shops and pubs, seemed only to heighten my sense of dislocation.

I was gently tipsy and consumed by self-pity when I got into the flat. Anita was in the kitchen on her own. She was rolling a joint and looked up, pleased to see me.

‘Hi, Fin. I just scored some great dope. You wanna smoke?’

‘Sure.’ I turned on the TV, and there was some God-awful animation dubbed into Gaelic, buried away in the afternoon schedules on BBC2. It was odd hearing it spoken again. Even although they were cartoon voices, they made me feel homesick.

‘Jesus,’ Anita said, ‘I don’t know how you can understand that stuff. It sounds like Norwegian on speed.’

‘Why don’t you go fuck yourself?’ I said to her in Gaelic.

She smiled. ‘Hey, what did you say?’

‘I said I’d like to fuck you.’

She raised a coy eyebrow. ‘What would Marsaili say?’

‘Marsaili’s not here.’

She lit her joint and took a long, slow pull at it, before passing it to me. I watched the smoke slowly leak from her mouth as I filled my lungs. When eventually I blew it out, I said, ‘Has anyone ever made love to you in Gaelic?’

She laughed. ‘In Gaelic? What do you mean?’

‘If they had, you wouldn’t need to ask.’

She stood up and took the joint from me and filled her mouth, pressing it then to mine so that we could share the smoke. I felt her breasts pushing up into my chest and she slipped her free hand down between my legs. ‘Why don’t you show me?’

If we had gone to her room instead of mine, things might have been different. But between the drink and the dope, and a girl with her hand down my trousers, I didn’t really care. The bed hadn’t been made from the morning. I turned on the gas fire, and we stripped off and climbed between the same sheets Marsaili and I had shared the night before. It was cold, and we pressed ourselves together for warmth, and I spoke to her softly in Gaelic.

‘It’s like you’re casting a spell on me,’ she said. And in a way I was. Making magic with the language of my father. And his father. Coaxing, cajoling, promising her stuff I could never deliver. Slipping inside her to give her my seed. Of course, she was on the pill, and so it was a seed that would fall on stony ground. But for a moment it was an escape. Not for her, for me. A chance to connect again, with the Fin Macleod I had once been. Free to be the boy who had once spoken only Gaelic. Free to touch my ancestors and be with them again. But, really, I think it was just the dope.

I’m not sure when I became aware of Marsaili standing in the doorway. But when I did, I looked up sharply. Her face was chalk-white.

‘What is it?’ Anita said, and then she saw her, too.

‘Why don’t you just pick up your clothes and get out,’ Marsaili told her very quietly.

Anita looked at me, and I nodded. And with a great show of petulance, Anita climbed out of the bed, gathered up her things from the floor and stomped across the hall to her room. Marsaili closed the door behind her. She had the look in her eyes of a dog that has just been kicked by its master. Betrayal, hurt, shattered trust. I knew there wasn’t anything I could say.

‘You know, I never told you,’ she said. ‘The only reason I applied for a place at university was because I knew you had.’ And I realized that must have been before our encounter on the island at Great Bernera. And I thought about the letter she had sent imploring me not to take Irene Davis to the final year dance at primary school. Signed, The Girl from the Farm. And I knew then that she had never stopped loving me, for all those years. I had to look away, no longer able to meet her eye. For I understood what I had done, in the end, with my cruelty and my selfishness. I had robbed her of hope. The hope that one day she would get me back. That she would find the old Fin again. I didn’t know where that Fin was any more than she did, and I’m not sure that I had any hope of finding him myself.

I wanted to say sorry. To hold her, to tell her that everything would be alright. Just like Mr Macinnes had told me on that ledge on the cliff. But I knew it wouldn’t be, and I wondered if he had known that, too.

Marsaili didn’t say anything else. She took her suitcase down from the top of the wardrobe and started packing her clothes into it.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Home. I’ll get the train to Inverness tomorrow, and then the bus to Ullapool.’

‘Where’ll you stay tonight?’

‘I don’t know. Not in this house, that’s for sure.’

‘Marsaili—’

‘Don’t, Fin!’ She cut me off abruptly. Then more softly, with a catch in her throat, ‘Just don’t.’

I sat down on the edge of the bed, still naked and chittering with the cold, and watched her pack her case. When she had finished, she slipped on her coat and dragged the case out into the hall. She pulled the door shut behind her without a word, and after a moment I heard the front door open and close.

I went to the window and watched her as she struggled off down the street towards Byres Road. The little girl who had sat beside me that first day at school and offered to translate for me. The same little girl who had stolen a kiss from me high up among the bales in the barn at Mealanais Farm, and taken the blame for me when I dropped my sweets in church. After all these years, finally, I had hurt her beyond repair and driven her from my life. Big, fat snowflakes started falling, then, obscuring her from view before she reached the traffic lights.

I only ever returned to the island once after that, when my aunt died suddenly the following April. I say suddenly, only because the news came to me out of the blue. But, in fact, it had been a long, slow decline over several months. I’d had no idea she was ill, although it turned out that she had been diagnosed with terminal cancer the previous summer. She had refused the chemotherapy, telling doctors that she had lived a long and happy life, drinking the finest wines, and smoking the best cigarettes, sleeping with the most eligible men (and a few women), and spending their money with great abandon. Why spoil the last six months? As it turned out, it was nearer nine months, most of which had been spent in pain, alone, in the freezing cold of her final winter.

I took the bus out to Ness, and walked up the hill through Crobost to the old whitehouse by the harbour. It was a blowy spring day, but there was a softness to the wind cutting through the dead grasses, and a warmth in the watery sunlight that broke periodically through the racing hordes overhead.

The house still had the chill of winter about it, a smell of damp and disinfectant. All the colourful vases of dried flowers, the purple-painted walls, the pink and orange fabrics of her heyday, were sad and tawdry now. Somehow she had given them their vibrancy, and without her they just seemed cheap and nasty. She had always been a huge presence in the house, and it was hugely empty without her.

The grate in which she had lit her final fire still contained its ash and burned-out embers, grey and impossibly cold. I sat for a long time in her seat, staring at the fire and thinking about all the years that I had lived with her. It was extraordinary how few memories of her I had collected in that time. What a strange, cold childhood I’d had.

In my bedroom I found all my old toys that she had stuffed in boxes and piled up in the wardrobe, a sad reminder of a past I was only too anxious to leave behind. I thought about Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. All those Sabbath hours spent in the Crobost Free Church had left their traces. I took the boxes of toys downstairs and piled them up at the bin.

I had no idea what to do with my aunt’s things. I went into her bedroom and opened the wardrobe. Her clothes hung in silent rows, colours obscured by the shadow of her death. She had kept trousers and skirts and blouses years beyond her ability to wear them. It was as if she had harboured somewhere the hope that one day she might find again the person she had been in the sixties. Young, slim, attractive, her whole life ahead of her.

I did not want to spend a single night in this house. But I had nowhere else to stay, and so as night fell I lit a fire, wrapped myself in a blanket and slept on the settee in front of it, flitting in and out of strange dreams in which my aunt and Mr Macinnes were dancing together across an empty dancefloor.

I wakened to the sound of banging. It was broad daylight. I looked at my watch and saw that I had slept for nearly ten hours. There was someone knocking at the door. I answered it, still wrapped in my blanket, screwing my eyes up against the glare of sunshine to find myself squinting at a woman called Morag. She was a second cousin, I think, but much older than me. I’m not sure that I had seen her since my parents’ funeral.

‘Fin. I thought it must be you. I could smell the peat smoke, so I knew there was someone at home. I’ve got a key, but I didn’t like to use it if there was somebody in. You know the funeral’s today?’

I nodded blearily, and remembered that my aunt had never had a good word to say for Morag. But as it turned out it was Morag, in the absence of anyone else, who had organized everything to do with the funeral. ‘You’d better come in.’

And it was Morag who solved the problem of my aunt’s things. There was stuff, she said, that her family could use, and what they couldn’t, she would take to the charity shop in Stornoway. ‘You know, someone’s thrown out all your old toys.’ She was indignant. ‘I found them at the bin. I’ve put them in the boot so they don’t go to waste.’ And some other kid, I thought, would build a new set of memories around them. I just hoped they would be happier ones than mine.

There weren’t many people at the church. A few distant relatives, a few diehard villagers who went to every funeral, a handful of nosy neighbours, curious perhaps to learn a little more about the weird old woman who had lived in splendid isolation in the whitehouse by the harbour. It wasn’t until the end of the service when I rose and turned towards the door, the Gaelic psalms still ringing in my ears, that I saw Artair and Marsaili slipping out together from a pew at the back. They must have known I was up there at the front, and yet they turned away quickly through the door, almost as if they were trying to avoid me.

But then they were there among the group of mourners outside the house fifteen minutes later when a dozen of us gathered on the cliff to take the frail remains of my aunt on her final journey. Artair acknowledged me with a nod and a shake of the hand, and we found ourselves shoulder to shoulder when we lifted the coffin off the backs of the chairs placed out on the tarmac. I’m sure the coffin was heavier than my aunt was. I saw Marsaili standing in black among the group of women who watched as the men began the long walk to the cemetery. This time I caught her eye, but only for a moment. She glanced quickly down towards the ground, as if overcome by grief. She had known my aunt only a little, and liked her even less. So it couldn’t have been my aunt she mourned.

It wasn’t until we had put my aunt in the ground, and left the gravediggers to cover her over, that Artair spoke to me for the first time. A small group of us straggled back through the headstones towards the gate of the cemetery, battered by the wind shearing in off the Atlantic. He said, ‘How’s university?’

‘Not what it’s cracked up to be, Artair.’

He nodded as if he understood. ‘You like it down there, in Glasgow?’

‘It’s alright. Better than here.’

We were at the gate before anything more was said. We let the others through, and I hung back with him as he closed it. He turned to look at me, and it felt like a very long time before he spoke. ‘Something you should know, Fin.’ He took a deep breath and I heard the rattle of phlegm in his tubes. ‘Marsaili and I got married.’

I don’t know why — I mean, I had no right — but I felt a hot flush of anger and jealousy. ‘Oh? Congratulations.’

Of course, he knew I didn’t mean it. But what else could I have said? He nodded acknowledgement. ‘Thanks.’ And we set off across the machair to catch up with the others.