The Lewis Man

TWO

I don’t need to look at the clock to know the time.

It’s odd how the brown stain on the ceiling seems lighter in the mornings. The crystalline traces of mould that follow the crack through it seem somehow whiter. And strange how I always wake at the same hour. It’s not the light that creeps in around the edges of the curtains that does it, because there are so few hours of darkness at this time of year. It must be some internal clock. All those years rising with the dawn for the milking, and everything else that would fill the waking daylight hours. All gone now.

I quite enjoy looking at this stain on the ceiling. I don’t know why, but in the mornings it resembles a fine horse, saddled, and waiting to take me away to some brighter future. While at night, when it gets gloomy, it has a different mien. Like some rampant and horned creature ready to carry me off into darkness.

I hear the door open and turn to see a woman standing there. She seems familiar, but I can’t quite place her. Until she speaks.

‘Oh, Tormod …’

Of course. It’s Mary. I’d know her voice anywhere. I wonder why she looks so sad. And something else. Something that turns down the corners of her mouth. Something like disgust. I know she used to love me, although I’m not sure that I ever loved her.

‘What is it, Mary?’

‘You’ve soiled the bed again.’

And then I smell it, too. Suddenly. Almost overpoweringly. Why didn’t I notice it before?

‘Couldn’t you have got up? Couldn’t you?’

I don’t know why she’s blaming me. I didn’t do it on purpose. I never do it on purpose. The smell is worse as she pulls back the covers, and she puts a hand over her mouth.

‘Get up,’ she says. ‘I’ll have to strip the bed. Go and put your pyjamas in the bath and take a shower.’

I swing my legs over the side of the bed and wait for her to help me to my feet. It never used to be like this. I was always the strong one. I remember the time she twisted her ankle up by the old sheep fank when we were gathering the beasts for the shearing. She couldn’t walk, and I had to carry her home. Almost two miles, with arms aching, and never one word of complaint. Why does she never remember that?

Can’t she see how humiliating this is? I turn my head away so that she won’t see the tears gathering in my eyes, and I can feel myself blinking them furiously away. I draw a deep breath. ‘Donald Duck.’

‘Donald Duck?’

I glance at her and almost shrink from the anger I see in her eyes. Is that what I said? Donald Duck? That can’t have been what I meant. But I can’t think now what I did mean to say. So I say again, firmly, ‘Aye, Donald Duck.’

She pulls me to my feet, almost roughly, and pushes me towards the door. ‘Get out of my sight!’

Why is she so angry?

I waddle through to the bathroom and slip out of my pyjamas. Where did she say I was to put them? I drop them on the floor and look in the mirror. An old man with a scribble of thin white hair and the palest of blue eyes stares back at me. I wonder for a moment who he is, then turn and look from the window out across the machair towards the shore. I can see the wind ruffling the heavy winter coats of the sheep grazing on the sweet, salty grass, but I can’t hear it. Neither can I hear the ocean where it breaks upon the shore. Lovely white foaming seawater full of sand and fury.

It must be the double glazing. We never had that at the farm. You knew you were alive there, with the wind whistling through the window frames and blowing peat smoke down the chimney. There was room to breathe there, room to live. Here the rooms are so small, sealed off from the world. Like living in a bubble.

That old man is looking at me from the mirror again. I smile and he smiles back. Of course, I knew it was me all along. And I wonder how Peter is doing these days.