The Blackhouse (17 page)

‘Are you sure you’re okay?’

‘Sure I’m sure.’

‘You’re not infectious or anything?’

‘Of course not. Why?’

‘Because you look bloody terrible.’

‘Thank you. That makes me feel a whole lot better.’

It was early February. The rain was really no more than a smirr, so light you could hardly see it. But it made us very wet, blowing in on the edge of an icy north wind. It got in around my neck and my collar so that the fabric rubbed my skin, my cheeks were burning and my knees were red raw. I loved it. For the first time in two whole weeks I felt alive again.

‘So, what’s been happening while I was off?’

Artair waved a hand vaguely in the air. ‘Not much. You haven’t missed anything, if that’s what you’re worried about. Oh, except the times tables.’

‘What’s that?’ It sounded very exotic. I imagined tables laden with clocks.

‘Multiplication.’

I had no idea what that was either. But I didn’t want to appear stupid, so all I said was, ‘Oh.’

We were almost at the school before he told me. Very casually, as if it were nothing. ‘I’ve joined the country dancing group.’

‘The what?’

‘Country dancing. You know …’ And he raised his arms above his head and made a funny little shuffle with his feet. ‘The pas de bas.’

I was beginning to think he’d lost his marbles in my absence. ‘Paddy Bah?’

‘It’s a dance step, stupid.’

I gawped at him in amazement. ‘Dancing? You? Artair, dancing’s for girls!’ I couldn’t imagine what had come over him.

He shrugged, making lighter of it than I could have imagined possible. ‘Mrs Mackay picked me. I didn’t have any choice.’

And I thought for the first time that, perhaps, I had been lucky to be off with the flu. Otherwise she might have picked me. I felt truly sorry for Artair. Until, that is, I discovered the truth.

We were walking up the road at three that afternoon with Marsaili. I hadn’t been at all sure that she was pleased to see me back. She’d said a cool hello when I took my seat beside her in class, and then proceeded to ignore me for the rest of the day. At least, that’s how it appeared to me. Every time I looked at her, or tried to catch her eye, she seemed to be studiously avoiding mine. In the playground at break times she stuck close to the other girls, skipping and chanting rhymes and playing peever. Now, as we headed towards the main road, other groups of primary kids strung out before us and behind us, she said to Artair, ‘Did you get the date of the Stornoway trip from Mrs Mackay?’

He nodded. ‘I’ve got a note for my parents to sign.’

‘Me, too.’

‘What Stornoway trip?’ I was feeling distinctly left out. It’s amazing how much you can miss in two short weeks.

‘It’s a dancing competition,’ Marsaili said. ‘Schools from all over the island are competing at the town hall.’

‘Dancing?’ For a moment I was confused, and then like the haar lifting along the northern coast on a warm summer’s morning, all became clear. Marsaili was in the country dancing group. And that’s why Artair had joined, even at the risk of ridicule from his male peers. I gave him a look that would have turned milk. ‘Didn’t have any choice, eh?’

He just shrugged. I caught Marsaili looking at me, and I could tell she was pleased by my reaction. I was jealous, and she knew it. She rubbed salt in the wound. ‘You can sit beside me on the minibus if you like, Artair.’

Artair was a little self-conscious by now and so played it cool. ‘Maybe. We’ll see.’

We crossed the main road to the Mealanais road end, and I wondered if he had been walking her all the way home in my absence. But we stopped, and it was clear that she did not expect us to be going with her. ‘See you on Saturday, then,’ she told Artair.

‘Yeh, okay.’ He shoved his hands deep in his pockets as he and I turned away towards the Crobost road. As I glanced back, Marsaili was skipping off along the Mealanais road with a lightness in her step. Artair was walking much faster than usual, and I almost had to run to keep up with him.

‘Saturday? Is that when the dancing competition is?’

He shook his head. ‘No, that’s on a schoolday.’

‘So what’s happening on Saturday?’

Artair kept his eyes fixed on a point somewhere on the road up ahead. ‘I’m going to play at the farm.’

I couldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t have been able to identify them accurately then, but I was suffering from all the classic symptoms of jealousy. Anger, hurt, confusion, melancholy. ‘Your parents won’t let you!’ I was grasping at straws.

‘Yes, they will. My mum and dad and Marsaili’s mum and dad are friendly from the church. My mum even gave me a lift over to Mealanais last Saturday.’

I think my mouth must have been hanging open. Had it been June, I’d have caught flies. ‘You’ve been before?’ I was almost incredulous.

‘A couple of times.’ He flicked me a look, a smug little smile on his face. ‘We played cowboys and Indians in the barn.’

I had nightmarish images of Marsaili tying Artair up with the same length of rope, blindfolding him with the same red hanky. I asked, my mouth so dry I could hardly speak, ‘Did she kiss you?’

Artair’s head snapped around to look at me, an expression of pure disgust and incomprehension written across his face. ‘Kiss me?’ I could hear the horror in his voice. ‘Why on earth would she want to do that?’

Which was, if nothing else, a crumb of comfort in the depths of my misery.

The wind was blowing in from the north-east on Saturday. A bitter February gale with sleet on its leading edge. I stood by our gate in my yellow oilskins and sou’wester and my black wellies watching for the Avenger going past. My mother called to me several times, saying I’d catch my death out there and that I should come and play in the house. But I was determined to wait. I think, perhaps, there was a part of me hoping that Marsaili and Artair had just been playing some kind of cruel joke. And I’d have stood out there happily all morning if only that car had never passed. But it did, just after nine-thirty. Artair’s mum driving, and Artair’s face pressed against the window in the back, blurred by the condensation, but clearly grinning. His hand gave a little triumphal wave, like royalty in training. I glowered at him in the wet, the sleet stinging my face red and disguising my tears. But I could feel the hot tracks they made down my cheeks.

On Monday morning I surprised Mrs Mackay by suggesting to her that since I was now almost self-sufficient in English I no longer needed a translator, and that she could rearrange our seating alphabetically as she had originally intended. The idea must have appealed to Mrs Mackay’s sense of orderliness, because she readily agreed. I was shifted from the first row to the second and was now several desks removed from Marsaili. Her dismay was undisguised. She turned and lowered her head slightly, raising doe eyes to give me her injured animal look. I steadfastly ignored her. If her plan had been to make me jealous, then it had succeeded. But it had also backfired, because from now on I was going to have nothing to do with her. I caught Artair smirking his satisfaction from two desks away. From now on I wasn’t going to have anything to do with him either.

I gave them both a wide berth at playtime, and when the bell rang for the end of school I was the first out of the door, and halfway up the road before Marsaili and Artair had even left the playground. At the main road I looked back and saw Marsaili hurrying to try to catch me up, with Artair trailing a little breathlessly behind her. But I turned determinedly away, and headed off up the Crobost road as fast as I could without actually running.

The trouble with jealous revenge is that while you might inflict hurt on the other party, it does nothing to lessen the effect of the hurt you are feeling yourself. So everyone ends up unhappy. And, of course, once you have adopted a certain attitude, it is hard to change it without losing face. I had never been as unhappy as I was through the next two days, and never more determined to stay that way.

On the Thursday at midday the country dancing group left for Stornoway in the school minibus. I watched from a window in the dining hall, rubbing a little clear patch in the misted glass so that I could see them standing by the gate waiting for the minibus to come around from the garage. Four girls and two boys, Artair and Calum. Artair was talking animatedly to Marsaili, trying hard to hold her attention. But she was clearly distracted, peering towards the school, hoping to catch a glimpse of me watching. I felt a certain masochistic pleasure. I saw Artair fumble for his puffer and take two long pulls at it, a sure sign that he was under pressure. He was losing her focus.

But that was no consolation to me during what seemed like an interminable afternoon. The five of us left in class were set the task of copying out words from the blackboard. Capital letters then small letters. I kept gazing from the window at the low cloud blowing in off the Atlantic, tearing itself ragged along the coastline and throwing out squally little showers in between very occasional blinks of sunlight. And Mrs Mackay gave me a right rollicking for not paying attention. That was my problem, she told me, I had no concentration. I was a dreamer. Plenty of ability, but no will to work. In truth, I had no will to do much of anything. I was like some sad, love-sick little puppy locked away on its own in a cupboard. It is strange, looking back, to remember how early I was afflicted by such emotions.

By the time the bell went I was almost suffocating. I couldn’t wait to get out into the blast of icy wind and fill my lungs with fresh salt air. I scuffed and dragged my feet all the way up the road and went into Crobost Stores to buy some tablet with the last of my pocket money. I felt the need of something sweet to comfort me. There is a gate there, just opposite the store, that takes you on to a tractor track leading up the hill to peat trenches which have been dug there by generations of Crobosters. I climbed over the gate and, with hands sunk deep in my pockets, trudged up the boggy track to the peat cuttings. From there I had a view of the school in the distance, and I could look down on both the Mealanais and Crobost single-tracks. You could see the main road all the way up to Swainbost and beyond, and I would be able to see the minibus returning from Stornoway. I had been up here the previous May, cutting peats with my father and mother; hard, back-breaking work slicing down into the soft peat with a special spade, and then stacking the turfs in groups of five along the top of the trench to dry in the warm spring winds. You had to go back later and turn them, and when they were properly dried, you went with a tractor and trailer and took them back to the croft to build your great, humpbacked peat stack, herringboned for drainage. Once properly dried, the peats became impervious to the rain, and would fuel your fire throughout the long winter. The cutting was the worst bit, though, especially if the wind dropped. Because then the midges would get you. Tiny biting flies. The Scottish curse. The single midge is so small you can hardly see it, but they gather together in clusters, great black clouds of them, getting in your hair and your clothes and feeding on your flesh. If you were to be locked in a room filled with midges you would go insane before the day was out. And sometimes that’s just how it was at the peat cutting.

There were no midges now, though, in the depths of a Hebridean winter. Just wind blowing through dead grass, and the sky spitting its anger. The light was going fast. I saw the headlights of the minibus coming over the rise from Cross before I realized that’s what it was. Where the road turned down to the school, it stopped, orange emergency lights flashing, to let off the kids from Crobost. It was just Marsaili, Artair and Calum. They stood talking for a moment after the minibus drove off, then Artair and Calum hurried off in the direction of the Crobost road, and Marsaili started up the farm road towards Mealanais. I sat on for a minute, sucking on the crumbling, sugary sweetness of my tablet, watching Marsaili on the single-track below. She looked tiny from here, lonely somehow in a way that it’s hard to explain. Something in her gait, something leaden in her steps that suggested unhappiness. I suddenly felt unaccountably sorry for her and wanted to run down the hill and give her a big hug, and tell her I was sorry. Sorry for being jealous, sorry for being hurtful. And yet something held me back. That reluctance to give expression to my feelings which has dogged me most of my life.

She was almost out of sight, lost in the winter dusk, when for once something overcame my natural reticence and propelled me down the hill after her, arms windmilling for balance as I stumbled clumsily in my wellies across the squelching moor. I snagged my trousers on the barbed wire as I fell over the fence, sending sheep running off in a panic. I clopped along the road after her at a half-run. By the time I caught her up, I was breathing hard, but she didn’t turn her head, and I wondered if she knew I had been on the hill watching her the whole time. I fell in beside her and we walked some way without a word. When, finally, I had got my breath back, I said, ‘So, how did it go?’

‘The dancing?’

‘Yeh.’

‘It was a disaster. Artair panicked when he saw all the people, and he had to keep puffing on his inhaler and couldn’t go on stage. We had to go on without him. But it was hopeless, because we’d practised with six and it just didn’t work with five. I’m never going to do it again!’

I couldn’t help feeling a sense of satisfaction that verged on elation. But I kept my tone sombre. ‘That’s a shame.’

She flicked me a quick look, perhaps suspecting sarcasm. But I looked suitably saddened by her news. ‘It’s not really. I didn’t like it, anyway. Dancing’s for daft girls and soft boys. I only joined because my mum said I should.’

We lapsed into silence again. I could see the lights of Mealanais farm ahead of us in the hollow. It would be pitch-black on the road home, but my mother always made me carry a small torch in my schoolbag because there was so little daylight in winter that you never knew when you would need it. We stopped at the white gate and stood for a moment.

Eventually she said, ‘Why have you stopped walking me up the road after school?’