Island (15 page)

‘I like your room.’

He glanced around. ‘She doesn’t come here. She – she used to make me tidy up.’

I could imagine. Everything stuffed in drawers. The vacuum cleaner booming in the chilly hall outside my door. ‘Let’s go.’

‘I’ll show you where the b-boat came in to take them away.’

‘Them?’

‘The crofters. To clear the land for sheep and deer.’

I wasn’t there for a history lesson.
Any direction would do. We set off northwards then turned right along an unsurfaced track that rose and skirted the bottom of the mountain; its top was hidden in cloud.

‘I’ll take you up there when it c-clears.’

The path was already steep enough and rough enough for me. I was having trouble keeping pace with him. ‘You were saying. You didn’t tell her when you moved out?’

‘I knew she’d try to stop me and I just – I just–’

‘What did she say?’

‘She tried to kill herself.’

I stopped and he stopped and looked at me with his good eye. We sat on a broken-down stone wall, and I rolled us cigs. The rain had petered out but it was windy. ‘Why?’

‘Sh-she didn’t want me to move out.’

I was impressed by his heartlessness. But it didn’t make sense. Why would she try to kill herself? Of course, if she had succeeded she would have foiled my plan, but it seemed an extreme length to go to just to spite me. It would have been quite amusing, I suppose, imagining me putting time and effort into chasing her to the island, only to find she’d topped herself. She could have had a good laugh about that. If she hadn’t been dead. But she wasn’t dead. Which meant she probably never intended to be.

‘What happened?’

‘She thought I was just getting rid of the – the stuff she said was junk. But I cleared my room. She started crying and I j-just – I left.’ The lower
edge of the cloud was rising slightly around the mountain, just clearing the top of a tree, revealing a jutting-out rock, revealing a higher band of solid stuff behind the mist. ‘I hadn’t got any sheets so I went back after tea. I thought she’ll be watching the news and she won’t know if I go in. Take the sheets off my bed.’

‘You found her?’

‘A-all the doors were open. It was quiet, no TV. I looked in the sitting room and she was–’

‘What had she taken?’

‘Something she made. One of her brown bottles. They had to take it to the chemist to test.’

‘She must have known you’d come back.’ What was wrong with waiting till night and poisoning herself at bedtime, if she was
interested
in dying? What was wrong with assuming poison might take a few hours to work? She wanted to be found alive, to make him feel like shit.

‘What did you do?’

‘Phoned the d-doctor. The helicopter took sixteen minutes.’

‘So they took her to hospital and pumped her out and sent her home again.’ We sat in silence staring at the mist inching up the mountain like a magician very very slowly pulling a cloth off a something he has magicked out of emptiness. A girl in the secure unit killed herself when they locked her in solitary. She tried to hang herself from the window bar with her knickers, she looped them through one leg to attach them to the bar then stuck her head through the other leg hole, but they ripped they wouldn’t hold her weight. So
then when someone forgot to collect her plate after supper she smashed it and rubbed her wrists with the broken pottery. She wedged a shard between her feet and sawed away until she got through to the artery. She was more or less dead when they found her in the morning. They couldn’t resuscitate her. She
meant
to kill herself. What the old witch did was designed to bring Calum round, not to kill herself. ‘A cry for help.’

‘Now she has these tablets – anti-d-depressants. But she makes her own medicine, she says it’s better–’

‘Is she going to die?’

He looked at me gormlessly.

‘The cancer. Will it kill her?’

Calum’s good eye swivelled towards me then away. He set off along the path again. Was it unimaginable to him? We followed a track through a plantation of fir trees, they were huge and dark, their boughs flailing in the wind and showering us with drips. A baby dumped up there wouldn’t have stood a chance. You could see down the straight lines between them past trunk after trunk spinning away to darkness. The field in the light at the end of the track was luridly green, when we came out into it it seemed unreal.

‘Twenty-three families lived here,’ said Calum. It was empty, full of lumps and hummocks sloping down towards the sea and facing the steep blank hills of the mainland. He squatted down and began to probe with his fingers in the long wet grass.

‘Right.’

He examined a few stones and shards and slipped a couple of them into his rucksack. ‘The grass grows different, over the ruins.’

It was empty, emptier than empty. I
didn’t much care about his twenty-three families but I was beginning to be impressed by his enthusiasm. People with enthusiasms are glamorous. How do they get them?

I mean, I can see the world is a fascinating place full of all sorts of things and I could be obsessive about say Indian miniatures or jazz. But I’m not. It’s a lack (another). Either they’re groupy enthusiasts and they belong to a gaggle of birdwatchers/bikers/born again Christians – or they’re lone enthusiasts like Calum. The lone ones are best because they’re pure, they’re not doing it to be one of the gang, they’re doing it out of genuine insanity. Genuine love for seventeenth-century snuffboxes. I would like to be passionate about something, have a hobby, an obsession: cake decorating, tap dancing, topiary. But I don’t. Which makes us Rejects excellent fodder for all the groupy enthusiasts. We’ll join things because we want to belong. We’ll fake enthusiasm, we’ll swear black is white to be allowed
in
to some charmed circle. From my peer group at the Underwood home Cathy G. joined the scientologists when she was seventeen and Billy Josephs struck up with a bunch of evangelicals who after a couple of months took him to live in their retreat in north Virginia. He was never seen again. I haven’t fallen into the religious slime (despite the best efforts of the Hare Krishnas who pursue me for miles down the street – like dogs’ll follow a bitch on heat, they
know
if you’re susceptible) but I did join a kind of farm. It never had a name we could agree on until in the last weeks Peter began calling it Stalingrad and that stuck because they needed it to, it wasn’t true but they needed it to be. Stupid to join something. Yeah. Idealistic people working together and sharing the proceeds and not exploiting each other or the land. In your
dreams
.

Gerald was the only one who
wasn’t a nutter or inadequate; in fact, he was probably the only real enthusiast. Certainly if it hadn’t been for his enthusiasm we wouldn’t have reached that point, of being on a real farm. There was a lot of money tied up in it and most of that must have been Gerald’s because I didn’t put any in and I can’t imagine many of the others did. And it wasn’t just the money. At weekly meeting Gerald would have the ideas and make the suggestions, and the rest of us would try to look intelligent and kick them around for a while and say OK. Then Gerald would implement them.

Needless to say it didn’t work. Because of people like me? I fancied Gerald. I knew it wouldn’t happen because he was too classy for me, also he cared more about making the farm work and he didn’t want people to screw everything up with personal relationships, he wanted us to ‘make the big picture work to begin with’. Which was saintly but still people like to have an intrigue and fuck from time to time and he seemed to rather frown on all that which made it thrive the more. It was great for the summer, there were loads of people around, we grew veg and hay and we mowed the hay and dried it and we kept goats and milked them and made cheese and we kept hens and in the autumn we harvested the apples. A week of picking and packing and lugging the crates to the road, rich with them, laughing, getting drunk on our own achievement.

Then in the autumn people started to drift back to other places, other work, and it got smaller and tighter and grimmer and the jobs Gerald was putting up on the week’s list were things like
Clean out and disinfect hen houses, creosote exteriors
and
repair fencing and replace rotten posts in field bordering main road
and
chop firewood
. And they’d still be there on the list the next week. I always did
stuff, I didn’t not do stuff, but I didn’t choose things like that because it was too cold and would have taken all day. He started making us take jobs then, dividing them up between us but there were rows. ‘The thing’s got to work because people want to make it work’ was the main bone of contention. And Gerald became the taskmaster. Then the guilt-Meister. We’d sit in the kitchen and he’d be striding off across the yard with a coil of barbed wire over his shoulder and the clippers. He wouldn’t be in till after evening meal and he’d eat on his own and fall asleep at table.

By New Year it was feeling bad. I knew I’d leave quite soon. People living together and respecting each other and respecting the land and sharing the proceeds was coming down to: you can’t sit near the fire tonight unless you’ve chopped some wood, and only people who can pay in extra for wine can have it because the apple money’s all spent now and there’s a red electric bill. We were supposed to have pooled all our resources. Why were some people still able to
pay
for wine?

And then Gerald said we all had to come out and help prune the orchard. Now, in January, we couldn’t leave it till spring. Everyone had to come and help because each tree took about an hour and there was no way one person could cover them all – also while they were dormant they needed spraying for aphids. And Liz said the cold set off her asthma so she’d cook for the rest of us and Rich said he’d promised his agent he’d write four more songs before Easter and he was sorry but that had to come first and Geri said she was scared of heights and couldn’t go up a ladder and did Gerald want her to break her neck and Si said he was fucked if he was working outside all day in this weather and Peter said fine he’d do it but then he never got up till three in the afternoon and
Sandy and Karen said they had to go visit her mum because her angina was bad and they’d promised to go before Christmas. And Gillie said who the hell was going to look after the kids or must two- and three-year-olds go and prune trees in sub-zero temperatures too? And I didn’t say anything (why the fuck should I?) and in the morning Gerald came into my room begging.

‘Please Nikki, come and help me – you know how good the apples were this year, you know how much we need that crop and that cash –
please
’ and because he guilted me I went (although I know he tried the same thing with Sandy and Sandy told him to fuck off this life was meant to be about contributing what you could not being hassled night and day) and the two of us spent a bitter freezing day holding the ladder for each other in a tearing gale and snipping away at apple twigs and we did a row and a half, which left about 400 still to do. And on the way back to the house (I was so cold when I dropped the secateurs my fingers wouldn’t bend to pick them up again) I said ‘Those bastards’d better help us tomorrow or I’ll kill them.’

Gerald said, ‘I’ve worked it out. It’s my fault – it’s because I assume responsibility. We have to leave the apples and let the crop fail. Then everyone’ll realise next winter that pruning is important. They’ve got to
want
to make it work.’

And I said (I was really angry. I was frozen to the marrow) ‘How can you be so fucking stupid? They won’t still be
here
next January if the apples fail – they’ll all fuck off and not give it a second thought’ and he didn’t reply and I looked at him and there were tears running down his face.

When I woke up next morning I saw him through my window walking
across to the orchard carrying the ladder all on his own in the driving rain. And I got up and packed my rucksack and left. It wasn’t ever my bloody enthusiasm so why should I have to feel guilty about it failing? I would have pruned the apples. I would have pruned the apples all day and night if it’d been just for Gerald and me. But I was fucked if I was pruning them so that those idle wankers could get the benefit next autumn.

Gerald went to India after that. When the farm was repossessed. That’s what happens to political enthusiasts. They attract people like me and we shit on them. It’s better to be like Calum. With an enthusiasm that’s just your own. His mother could complain about his junk but she couldn’t destroy his obsession. The treasure and the stories they were real to him and the reality didn’t depend on anyone else’s contribution.

Calum paced about over and round the hummocks like an animal, making sure it was still his territory. When he was ready he came back to me and spread his mac on a mound. It wasn’t raining at all anymore but it was damp, low skied and dingy. I was worried she might die before I could kill her. I perched myself beside him. ‘When does she go to hospital?’

His good eye moved from my face down to my neck and he stretched out his hand.

‘What?’ It was unnerving the way he did that.

‘Neck-lace?’ I’d forgotten I was wearing it – cheap Indian beads. I undid it and let the string slither into a green coil on his grubby palm. He held it close to his eyes for inspection.

‘Calum. Does she go for treatment often?’

‘She’s making herself better.
She knows how to.’ He passed me back my necklace.

Sure. The first herbal cure for cancer. It was good she was ill I was glad she was suffering but I had to get in there before nature wiped her out. I couldn’t wait for her to get around to a sip of hemlock. OK. I’d definitely do it that night; whether she knew about it or not. Even if she was awake and trotting round the house I was still stronger than her. That first night I should have stabbed her going up the stairs – it was just the thought that she knew that fazed me.

Calum wanted to talk about the ruins. ‘This was the village. Twenty-three houses here, you see?’

‘I see.’

‘They grew all their food, oats and barley and greens my dad said. And the men went fishing and they kept sheep that were more like little goats. Th-the women had to spin and weave the wool, then the men took it to the mainland to sell.’