Bruach Blend (9 page)

There were peals of delighted laughter and Marjac had to wipe the tears from her eyes with the sock she was knitting.

‘An' tse voice of him,' went on Hector, ‘Dear God! But it was so bad I told him he should give it a good skelpin'.'

‘A male nurse?' murmured Johnny. ‘No wonder you got a shock when you saw him. I was forgettin' there were such things.'

‘Ach tsey was all male nurses in tsat ward,' complained Hector.

‘I never saw a woman except for a cleaner an' she was English. Tse bloody hospital was worse tsan tse accident.'

The wind seemed to be strengthening if anything and a flash of lightning cut across the window. I began to button up my coat again and pulled on my gloves as an indication that I was ready to leave.

‘You'll no be goin' yet, surely,' said Marjac with polite remonstrance. ‘It's only at the back of midnight just.'

‘It's late enough for me,' I replied, rather regretfully. ‘Anyway, the weather seems to be worsening and I'd like to try to get home before the next squall comes.'

Morag too stood up, ‘I'll be coming with you,' she said.

‘Oh, don't!' I protested, thinking she was deserting the ceilidh simply so I should not have to walk home alone. ‘I'm perfectly happy to go by myself,' I insisted.

‘It's no' that,' said Morag. ‘It's just that I'm feelin' myself tired, though the Dear knows why I should be.'

Janet also began to pull her coat round her and belt it with a length of rope.

‘Ach, but this is terrible,' Marjac reproached her. ‘Whatever is takin' you away at this hour?'

But before she could reply Willy also stood up.

‘An' if I'm to get away on the bus in the mornin' then I'd best get home myself,' he said.

Marjac looked so disappointed I felt guilty at having been the first to make a move, though I knew Bruachites did not leave a ceilidh unless they wished to. ‘Oidhche mhath!' we called, and quickly opening and closing the door we dashed outside into the full thrust of the gale.

‘Oh, my, but it's coarse,' gasped Morag as she stumbled against me.

Not even trying to converse, we pushed against the wind, one hand holding our coats tightly around our bodies while the other held scarves or collars snugly up to our chins. I could feel my cheeks pulling tighter and tighter with the cold and as I looked up at the sky where the last squall could be seen disgorging itself over the hills, the full moon which emerged sporadically from behind throngs of racing dark clouds looked as harassed as if it was trying to apologize for the execrable weather.

‘It won't be so bad when we've topped the hill,' panted Janet. ‘We should have the wind at our backs then.' But even in the lee of the hill the wind was only a little less tyrannical and already over the sea another squall was fast approaching, looming blackly against the palely lit water. A few intermittent hailstones sent us hurrying to reach the shelter of one of the shallow rock caves beside the road. The caves were known as ‘Slochlachans' after Lachlan, a one-time Bruach roadman, who was reputed to have hewn them out of the cliff so as to provide himself with handy refuges where he might rest and smoke a pipe in the intervals between working on the long length of the sinuous Bruach road.

Janet and Morag and I crouched close together and back as far as we could against the rock wall, but Willy, spurning such womanishness, stood protectively in front of us, hunching his back to the wind. We heard the hailstones begin to hurry against his oilskins like an introductory drumbeat rolling to a crescendo. And then it came: the full force of storm-driven, hurtling, hissing hailstones, blotting out land and sea and sky with a harsh impenetrable black curtain. But even as we watched, wide-eyed in the blackness, the curtain was suddenly rent by a double flash of lightning and for the time it took me to gasp I could see the hailstones pouring from the sky in swirling, graceful, silver columns before they were once more engulfed by darkness. And then almost as swift as had been its onslaught the squall ceased, leaving us in a cloistered silence which was accentuated by the distant roar of the sea.

‘What else will the sky be after throwing at us tonight?' said Willy, shrugging and beating the hailstones off his oilskin.

Janet looked up at the scudding clouds. “That's it over for a whiley,' she announced. ‘We'll maybe get back before the next one is on us if we're sharp.'

‘I do believe they're gettin' further apart,' said Morag. ‘Maybe tomorrow will see the end of this storm.'

‘We'll be lucky,' said Willy without optimism.

As our feet crunched and skidded on the crisp carpet of hailstones, I was silent, remembering the brief and secret splendour of the storm which the lightning had revealed, but my companions, taking advantage of the lull in the wind, began immediately to converse.

Morag said, ‘You mind Willy you was speakin' of yon fellow that was on your boat an' got religion?'

‘Square Eyes you mean? The one with the thick spectacles? Aye, I mind him well enough,' Willy replied.

‘You didn't say what became of him,' said Morag, to whom an uncompleted story was as pestering as a ragged fingernail.

‘He went to a home, that's all that happened to him,' Willy told her.

‘An' is he himself again now?' asked Morag solicitously.

‘How would I be knowin'?' retorted Willy. ‘I didn't keep in touch with the man. All I know is what his brother was after tellin' me about takin' Square Eyes to the home.'

‘What did they do with him there?' pursued Janet.

‘Well, seemingly this doctor took a look at Square Eyes and then he had a word with the brother. ‘We've put him in the Jesus Christ room,' he tells him. ‘He'll be all right there for a while.'

‘The Jesus Christ room?' Morag sounded appalled. ‘How would they have such a place?'

‘That's just what the brother was thinkin', said Willy. ‘ “D'you mean to say there's others after goin' the same way?” he asks the doctor. “Aye,” says the doctor, “there's four of them there already.” “Good God!” says the brother. “What happens when you put them all together in the same room then?” “Ach,” the doctor tells him, “by the time they've finished trying to convince one another they're all bloody atheists anyway.” '

The rainwater tank was full to overflowing and the drowned moth lay on the surface of the water, pitifully dead, its outspread wings semi-transparent as if they had already begun to disintegrate. I paused, captivated by the beauty and fragility of the insect, and, dipping a finger gently under it, lifted it out so as to examine more closely the intricacy of its wing pattern. It adhered damply to my finger, totally inert, and yet after only a moment I sensed the faintest tremor of life, so vague that I was not sure at first whether the tremor emanated from the moth or from my own skin. With a kind of doubting surprise I held out my hand, letting the warm sun shine directly on to it and though there was not the smallest movement discernible to my eye again there passed between the moth and my finger a perceptible thrilling of life. I watched intently, still trying to detect some movement and at length was rewarded by a tiny quivering of the wings; a sporadic quivering which grew momently into a tentative fluttering though the moth was still anchored to my finger by its wet body. As the moth gained strength, I felt as if I was witnessing a small miracle of resurrection and I was aware of a feeling of elation. Had new life been imparted to the moth through some emanation from my finger, I wondered, or had it not been truly dead and so had needed only the warmth of the sun to give it a resurgence of life? If the latter then why is it that a cow or sheep, even a human, can so hastily relinquish the will to challenge death on its approach while this tiny insect, which must have struggled for many hours since it was a creature of the night and it was now well into the afternoon, should show such resistance? Can an ephemera like a moth have a stronger sense of survival than a cow? I wondered.

My musings were interrupted by a voice. ‘See what I've found!' announced Ian Beag. Putting down a rusted tinker-made pail and a heavy but much-cherished hazel fishing rod he slid a cautious hand up under his flannel shirt and produced a fluffy, moist, grey and black gull chick which looked so new and dazed if Ian had said he had just hatched it rather than found it I would have had no great difficulty in believing him.

‘Ian!' I exclaimed, my reaction fading from pleasure to reproval as I caught sight of the slimy smears the chick had left on Ian's bare stomach. Hastily he pulled down his shirt.

‘I wasn't wantin' him to get cold,' he explained.

On such a tranquil almost sultry warm day I doubted if there was any danger of that, and Ian, who had clearly been indulging in a far more strenuous activity than fishing, was flushed and shining with sweat. The gull chick too appeared to be feeling the heat. Its beak was gaping and when I took it in my hand its fluff felt damp. Since I doubted if birds could sweat so copiously, I surmised that much of the dampness was due to the chick having been confined for some time between Ian's stomach and his thick flannel shirt. The rest of the dampness was explained by the smell. The gull began to cheep.

‘He's nice,' enthused Ian tenderly.

‘He's lovely,' I agreed. ‘But how did you come to find him?' I strongly disapproved of chicks being taken from their nests and though I was reasonably certain Ian would be party to no such barbarism I wanted to make certain.

‘Aye, well, see when I'd done fishin' I went over to Cairn Mhor to try would I get some gulls' eggs an' it wasn't until I was back at the shore that I found this little fellow, I'm thinkin' he was after fallin' from the nest.'

The collecting of gulls' eggs in spring was a regular and much anticipated ploy for the more intrepid of the Bruachites, the eggs providing welcome relief from the monotony of a winter diet of salt herring and potatoes. It sounds a reprehensible practice but there is no doubt that isolation and the consequent frustrations of shopping do much to help one overcome one's scruples as to the source of one's food, so even I who had always regarded the plundering of birds' nests as execrable had soon ceased to be concerned at the annual toll of gulls' eggs.

‘You'll have no need to worry,' the Bruachites assured me when I had expressed my concern.… ‘We take only the infertile just.' Since the Bruach population of gulls appeared in no way to diminish I felt justified in accepting their comforting assurance even to the extent of enjoying the occasional gull's egg omelette.

I pursued my questioning of Ian. ‘Are you sure there were no adult gulls near which might have been its parents?' I probed.

‘Not a one save a blackback or two.' Ian's eyes, soft and brown as dripping jelly, regarded me with complete candour. ‘He was a good way from any nest we could see so I'd say the old birds had given up lookin' for him.' Ian put out a grubby finger and touched the chick. ‘Right enough I believe the blackbacks would have got him if I hadn't found him first.'

The fate of a chick at the mercy of a blackback was too horrible to think about. ‘He appears to be a lucky little chick, then,' I said.

‘Indeed he is so.' Ian pulled a handful of grass and lifting up his shirt, rather belatedly wiped the smears of gull mute off his stomach, and as an afterthought from the inside of his shirt. ‘The cailleach's not goin' to thank me for it when she comes to washin' my shirt,' he admitted with a rueful grin. In Bruach it was not disrespectful for a boy to refer to his mother as the ‘cailleach', the literal translation of which is ‘old woman'. Indeed to me it sounded rather more affectionate than the alternative ‘Maa', the Bruach rendering of which was like the bleat of a hoarse sheep.

I asked one or two more relevant questions before holding out the chick for Ian to take from me. ‘Thank you for letting me see him,' I said.

‘Ach, you can keep him,' he told me with lofty generosity and before I could demur he continued, ‘Seein' the school doesn't take its holiday for a whiley yet I wouldn't be able to look after him anyway.'

Momentarily at a loss, I continued to regard the chick as it sat cheeping in my hand. In Bruach there were gulls everywhere; their cries accompanied the earliest dawn and died only after a lingering dusk. They patterned the sea and the sky and drifted like white feathers against the dark background of the hills. Unlike inland gulls, however, they remained mostly wild and aloof. A few of the less timid ones tended to range in the vicinity of the crofts to forage for hen food, but the main flocks limited their territory to the sea and the hills and even in savage weather sought no closer sanctuary than the distant moors. The nearest I had previously come to familiarity with a seagull had been when a lesser blackbacked gull had taken it upon himself to police my hen run. Why he came and why he eventually deserted his self-imposed guardianship I do not know, but for the best part of the year he had hovered around the hen run at feeding times, and though he stole as much of the hen food as he wanted during the whole of that time he allowed no other gull nor even a hoody crow to intrude upon what he considered his domain. Apart from this my experience of gulls was limited to observation and the discouraging of their presence near the hen run, and certainly I had no desire to embark on the rearing of a gull chick to adulthood. Seeing my lack of enthusiasm, Ian rooted in his trouser pocket and offered me what was presumably his day's catch of four tiny brown trout.

‘I was thinkin' maybe you would like these,' he said with an ingratiating smile. ‘If you would be doin' without them yourself they would be fine for feedin' the chick likely.' Watching him wiping the fish on his shirt sleeve to clean them of the debris of his pocket, I knew I could easily be doing without them. It was by no means the first time I had been confronted with a gift of burn trout, for though the children of Bruach loved to snatch an hour or two from their allotted chores to go fishing, the fish they caught were considered by their mothers to be too small to be worth cooking and they were returned to the burn or, as occasionally happened, they were bestowed on me, partly I suspect because of the belief which seemed to have gained a hold in Bruach that because I ate such things as wild mushrooms and watercress I was cranky enough to eat almost anything. Admittedly the first time I had been presented with an over-warm handful of flabby, much-fondled trout I had managed to feign a degree of pleasure and, resolutely overlooking their sad state, had cooked and eaten them, but the small amount of flesh I had been able to glean from the bones was so strongly impregnated with the flavour of peat and mud that subsequent gifts of brown trout were surreptitiously mixed in with the hens' mash.