The Blackhouse (20 page)

It was another world down there among the rock pools, hidden away from the realities of life. The only sound came from the gulls, and the sea rushing gently up to meet the shore. The water trapped in all the rocky crevices was crystal-clear and warming in the sun, filled with the colour of crustaceans clinging stubbornly to black rock, the gentle waving of seaweed the only movement apart from the scuttling of the crabs. We had collected nearly two dozen of them, dropping them into the sack, before we took a cigarette break. Although I had fair hair, I had my father’s skin and took a fine tan. I had removed my T-shirt to roll up under my head, and lay draped across the rocks, sunning myself, eyes closed, listening to the sea and the birds that fed off it. Artair sat with his knees folded up under his chin, arms wrapped around his shins, puffing gloomily on his cigarette. Oddly, smoking didn’t seem to affect his asthma.

‘Every time I look at my watch,’ he said, ‘another minute’s gone by. And then an hour, and then a day. Soon it’ll be a week, then a month. And another one. And then I’ll be clocking in on my first day.’ He shook his head. ‘And soon enough, I’ll be clocking out on my last. And then they’ll be putting me in the ground at Crobost cemetery. And what will it all have been about?’

‘Jesus, man. We’re talking sixty, seventy years. And you’ve just blown it all away in a heartbeat. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.’

‘It’s alright for you. You’re leaving. You’ve got your escape route all planned out. Glasgow. University. The world. Anywhere other than here.’

‘Hey, look around you.’ I raised myself up on one elbow. ‘It doesn’t come much better than this.’

‘Yeh,’ Artair said, his voice heavy with sarcasm, ‘that’s why you’re in such a fucking hurry to leave.’ I had no reply to that. He looked at me. ‘Cat got your tongue?’ He flicked his cigarette end off across the rocks, sending a shower of red sparks dancing in the breeze. ‘I mean, what have I got to look forward to? An apprenticeship at a rig construction yard? Years stuck behind a mask firing jets of frigging flame at metal joints? Jesus, I can smell it already. And then there’s all the years of travelling that fucking road from Ness to Stornoway, and a hole in the ground at the end of it all.’

‘It’s what my father did,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t what he wanted, but I never heard him complain about it. He always told us we had a good life. And he crammed most of it into all those hours he wasn’t working at the yard.’

‘And a fat lot of good it did him.’ The words were out before he realized it, and Artair turned quickly towards me, regret in his eyes. ‘I’m sorry, Fin. I didn’t mean it like that.’

I nodded. I felt as if the only cloud in the sky had just cast its shadow on me. ‘I know. But you’re right, I suppose.’ I let my own bitterness creep in. ‘Maybe if he hadn’t devoted so much of his time to his God, he might have had more of it left for living.’ But then I took a deep breath and made a determined effort to get out from under the shadow. ‘Anyway, there’s nothing definite yet about the university. It still depends on the exam results.’

‘Aw, come on.’ Artair was dismissive. ‘You’ll have walked it. My dad says he’ll be disappointed if you don’t get straight “A”s.’

It was then that we first heard the voices of the girls. Distant initially, chattering and laughing, and then getting closer as they came towards us along the beach. We couldn’t see them from where we were, and of course they couldn’t see us. Artair put a finger to his lips, then signalled me to follow. We scrambled barefoot over the rocks until we saw them, no more than thirty yards away, and we ducked down so as not to be seen. There were four of them, local girls from our year at school. We peered up over the edge of the rocks to get a better look. They were taking towels from baskets and laying them in the soft sand beneath the cliffs. One of them stretched out a reed mat and tipped bottles of ginger and packets of crisps on to it from her bag. And then they started stripping off T-shirts and jeans, to reveal white flesh and bikinis beneath.

I suppose I must have registered subconsciously that Marsaili was among them, but it wasn’t until I saw her standing there in her bikini, arms raised, tying her hair up in a knot at the back of her head, that I realized she was no longer the little girl I had jilted in primary school. She had grown into a very desirable young woman. And the sight of soft sunlight shading the curve of her bottom at the top of long, elegant legs, and the swelling of breasts barely contained in her skimpy blue top, caused something to stir in my loins. We dropped down again behind the rocks.

‘Jesus,’ I whispered.

Artair was gleeful. Gone in an instant was his depression, to be replaced by mischievous eyes and a wicked smile. ‘I’ve got a great fucking idea.’ He tugged my arm. ‘Come on.’

We picked up our T-shirts and the sack of crabs, and I followed Artair back over the rocky outcrop towards the cliffs. There was a path here that we sometimes used to climb down to the rocks without having to go around to the Port and then back along the beach. It was steep and shingly, a cleft cut deep into the cliff face by a glacial encroachment during some past ice age. About two-thirds of the way up, a narrow ledge cut diagonally across the face before doubling back on itself and leading up, finally, in a series of natural steps, to the top. We were thirty feet above the beach now, the turf soft and spongy underfoot, and liable to break away in treacherous peaty clumps if you got too close to the edge. We had achieved our goal of reaching the clifftop without being seen, and we made our way carefully along it until we reached a point above where we thought the girls were sunbathing. The edge sloped away steeply here, falling about twenty feet to a final sheer drop of around ten to the beach below. Grass grew in reedy patches on the thin layer of soil that clung to the rock. We couldn’t see the girls, but we could hear them talking to one another as they lay side by side on their towels. The trick was going to be making sure we were directly above them before releasing the hard-won contents of our sack. Nothing short of a direct strike would be acceptable.

We got on to our backsides and began inching our way down the steep, grassy slope. I went first, clutching the sack, and Artair followed, and then acted as a kind of anchor, digging his heels into the crumbling earth and holding me with both hands by my left forearm, so that I could lean out and try to catch a glimpse of the girls. We had to go almost all of the way down to the final drop before I caught sight of four pairs of heels lying in a row. They were a little over to our left, and I signed to Artair that we had to move across a bit. As we did, some loose earth and pebbles freed themselves from the fringes and dropped on to the beach. The chatter stopped.

‘What was that?’ I heard one of them ask.

‘A hundred million years of erosion.’ It was Marsaili’s voice. ‘You don’t think it’s going to stop just because we’re sunbathing below it?’

The heels were immediately beneath me now, like four sets of feet set out on a mortuary slab. I leaned out as far as I dared and saw that they were all lying on their fronts, bikini tops undone to avoid that tell-tale white line across the back. Perfect. I was probably twelve or fifteen feet above them. I grinned at Artair and nodded. I took the sack in my free hand, loosening the top, before shaking it out over the edge. Two dozen crabs went flying through space and out of sight. But their effect was immediate. Great shrieks of terror split the air, rising to us from below like rapturous applause for the success of our venture. Barely able to control our laughter, we inched a little lower, and I craned to catch a sight of the mayhem on the beach.

It was at that moment a great sod of dry earth chose to detach itself from the crumbling rock and send me sliding down the slope and over the edge, in spite of Artair’s best efforts to hold on. Like the crabs before me, I hurtled through space, dropping the last ten feet to the beach and landing, fortunately enough, on my feet, although gravity promptly induced me to sit down heavily.

Panicked crabs were scuttling in every direction. I found myself looking up at four startled girls looking down at me. Four pairs of naked breasts bobbing in the sunlight. We all stared at each other for a moment, all of us speechless, frozen in a moment of mutual disbelief. Then one of the girls screamed, and three of them crossed their arms over their chests in extravagant gestures of false modesty, giggling now and feigning coyness. In truth, I think they were not entirely dismayed by my sudden and unexpected appearance.

Marsaili, however, made no attempt to cover herself up. She stood for several moments with her hands on her hips, breasts thrust out defiantly. Firm, pert breasts, I couldn’t help noticing, with large, erect and very pink nipples. She took two steps forward and slapped me so hard across the face that I saw lights flashing. ‘Pervert!’ she spat contemptuously. And she bent down to retrieve her bikini top and strode away across the sand.

I didn’t see Marsaili again for almost a month. We were into August now, and my exam results had come through. As Mr Macinnes had predicted, I got straight ‘A’s in English, art, history, French and Spanish. I had given up maths and science after my O grades. It was strange. I had an aptitude for languages, but never any inclination to use it. My acceptance for Glasgow University had been confirmed, and I was going to do an MA. I wasn’t quite sure what that was, but anything to do with the arts interested me, and I never seemed to have to work as hard as I did with the more academic subjects.

I had long since recovered from Marsaili’s slap, but it had left red weals on my face that I wore like a badge of honour for several days after. Artair had made me describe in great detail to him what I had seen when I landed on the beach. For his part, he had scrambled back up to the top of the cliff and not caught sight of so much as a nipple. The story spread like wildfire through the neighbouring villages, and I enjoyed a brief status as a cult hero among a whole generation of pubescent boys in Ness. But like the summer itself, the recollection was waning, and the day when Artair would clock in for the first time was approaching with unwelcome haste. He was becoming increasingly morose.

I found him in a black mood the day I called at his bungalow to tell him about the party on Eilean Beag. It was a tiny island just a few hundred yards off the north shore of Great Bernera, which was like the fire in a dragon’s mouth just to the west of Calanais, where the sea had eaten deep into the south-west coastline of Lewis. I don’t know who had organized it, but a friend of Donald Murray had invited him, and he invited us. There were to be bonfires and a barbecue, and if the weather was fine we would sleep on the beach under the stars. If it was wet, there was an old shieling where we could shelter. All we had to do was bring our own drink.

Artair shook his head grimly and told me he couldn’t go. His father was away on the mainland for a few days, and his mother was not well. He was going to have to stay in with her. She’d had chest pains, he said, and her blood pressure was through the roof. The doctor thought perhaps she was suffering from angina. I had never heard of angina, but it didn’t sound very pleasant. I was disappointed that Artair couldn’t go. Disappointed for him. He needed cheering up.

But my concern for Artair didn’t stay long in my mind. By the Friday it was already fading, and when Donald Murray arrived at my aunt’s house to pick me up on that afternoon, all thoughts of Artair were blown away by the roar of Donald’s exhaust, and the sulphurous cloud it emitted. From somewhere he had managed to acquire a red, soft-top Peugeot. It was old, and somewhat the worse for wear, but it was a wonderful, vivid red, and the roof was down, and Donald lounged behind the wheel looking like a film star with his bleached hair and his tanned face and his sunglasses.

‘Hey, bro,’ he drawled. ‘Wanna ride?’

And I certainly did. I wasn’t interested in where he had got it, or how. I just wanted to sit up there in the front beside him and cruise the island, and see the jealous looks on all the other kids’ faces. An open-topped car on the Isle of Lewis was almost unheard-of. After all, when would you ever be able to use it with the roof down? On a handful of days in any given year, if you were lucky. Well, that year we were big-time lucky. The good weather had scorched the island brown through July, and it was still holding.

We loaded four boxes of beer into the boot from my aunt’s lean-to, where I had been storing it. Donald’s father would not have permitted such contraband to be kept at the manse. My aunt came out to see us off. When I think back now, I can see that perhaps she was not well, even then. Though she never said a word to me about it. But she was pale, and thinner than she had been. Her henna-dyed hair was wispy and sparse, with half an inch of white at the roots. Her make-up was caked and pasty, crumbling in the creases of her over-rouged cheeks. Mascara was clogged in her lashes, and her mouth was a slash of pale pink. She was wearing one of her diaphanous creations, layers of different-coloured chiffon pinned into something resembling a cape, over cut-off jeans and pink open sandals. Her toenails were painted pink, too. Thick, horny nails in feet made ugly by arthritis.

She had been my mum’s big sister. Ten years older than her. And two more different people it would be hard to imagine. She must have been in her thirties during the hippy days of the 1960s, but that was her defining era. She’d spent time in London and San Francisco and New York, the only person I ever met who had actually been at Woodstock. It’s strange how little I know about her, really. The young are not curious about their elders, they just accept them for what they are. But I wish now I could go back and ask her about her life, fill in all those gaps. But, of course, you can’t go back. She had never been married, I knew that, but there had been some big relationship with someone famous. And wealthy. And married. When she returned to the island she bought the old whitehouse overlooking Crobost harbour and lived there on her own. As far as I knew she never told anyone what happened. Perhaps she confided in my mother, but I would have been too young for my mother to have told me. I think there was only ever one great love in her life, a life on which she seemed simply to close the door when she moved into the old whitehouse. I have no idea how she lived, where her money came from. We could never afford the luxuries, but I never wanted for food or clothes, or anything that I really desired. When she died there was ten pounds in her bank account.