Island (7 page)

Then when the ferry brings you in, spluttering black exhaust, you come to this neat wooden jetty. Which turns into a road, which trundles off across grassy wasteland towards a village. There’s a yellow plastic salt and grit container at the bend in the road. It is blindingly ordinary. There’s a field (unfenced) with a handful of scruffy sheep then the road grows a pavement and a terrace of grey houses. A post office shop, a dwarfish bus stop and a dingy pub.

I went up the road into the grim little village. A few cars from the ferry drove past me. I felt OK, as if I knew what to do. I liked the calm brightness in the air. There were a couple of old bids outside the post
office in large stiff coats (brown and green respectively, one with grey woolly hat). I went into the post office for something to eat and the back of the door was covered in small ads. BICYCLE FOR SALE, ORGANIC POTATOES, ROOM TO LET.

ROOM TO LET. £45 PER WEEK. MRS MACLEOD, TIGH NA MARA. TEL. 5763.

Who wrote the plot? Who wrote the plot?
Me
. I made all this happen. Like magic. I am in control.

I got directions to the phone box from the ancient post office hag, and I dialled her number. As before, the distant voice, posh accent, no trace of Scots. I could come and see the room now. And that is how I walked out of the village of Ruanish along the main road past fields of sheep and cows until I came to a house on the left standing alone with a fenced front garden and a white gate. My mother’s house.

I had some preconceptions, obviously. Which had been influenced by the phone voice. Partly I imagined her already dead, since that was without doubt coming to her. Chalk-faced with staring eyes. But also – you know,
mother
. Like in the books. Soft curly brown hair and comfortable clothes, hands floury from baking. Maybe even an apron. Tallish and thinnish like me, definitely she would be like me.

I broke into a sweat because I was in sight of the house and couldn’t turn back and I was suddenly convinced she would recognise me. I hadn’t worked out what to do. If she said for example, ‘It’s already let’ or ‘I’ve changed my mind’ or even, ‘You’re my long-lost daughter’, what the hell on earth would I do?

The door came lurching towards me in hot slow motion, I was on a fairground ride that wouldn’t stop and I did not want to be there. Then it opened and
it wasn’t her. It was an old woman with a bun and a pleated skirt and cardigan so I was able to get my breath. ‘Hello, I’ve come about the room – I phoned Mrs–’

‘That’s right, come in.’ She spoke with the voice from the phone.

‘Are you–?’

‘Phyllis MacLeod. Your first time on the island, is it? It’s just along the hallway here.’

I was walking through a dark panelled hall behind a woman whose head I could see over, her hair was white her back was stooped she was sliding her sheepskin moccasins along the floor as if there was something wrong with her legs, she was supposedly my mother. Supposedly fifty. She looked about seventy. Her eyes were brown and she wasn’t fat but those were the only two things we had in common in the entire universe.

The place smelt of plants, not flowers but old leafy smells, soggy boiled leaves, musty dried herbs, strange kinds of tea maybe. There was an underlying compost odour, a strange complicated smell filling up the whole still atmosphere of the house.

We did the stuff – deposit, keys, heating, sheets. The room was big and light, it had an internal door and my own external door, both lockable from inside. It was possible to be private. I avoided looking at her. She asked me nothing – not how long I’d stay or why, just a week’s rent in advance and the firewood’s in the shed. Then she pointed to the shelves above the bed. ‘Will you be wanting to use the shelves?’ They were full of stones, rocks and bits of driftwood.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘I can get my son to clear them. He should
have taken all that away with him. Let me know if you change your mind.’

Thus I discovered my brother.

I had an ancient and unrecognisable mother, and a brother I never dreamt of. But I was in my mother’s house. My
mother’s
house. There she was, just down the hall, shuffling around in her weird-smelling kitchen. With no more idea than fly in the air, who the fuck I was. I was as unknown to her as the babe unborn. As I had once been in her power to dump, trash – so she was now in mine to shatter.

I unpacked the rucksack. The wardrobe and drawers were anonymously empty; my brother had cleared out very thoroughly. My unlooked-for unnecessary usurping bastard of a brother.
Never were two children so happy …
I filled the kettle and boiled it, there was a jar of tea bags and box of long life milk in the tiny yellowed fridge. Under the sink a cupboard with crockery and a couple of pans and a wooden felt-lined tray of heavy old cutlery. No TV but there was a decent radio. Also electric ring and toaster. With food supplies and a bucket you could hole up in that room for days. Barricade yourself in. But there was nothing personal there. I went through everything, sniffing, turning stuff over. Nothing in the table drawer. Nothing under the bed. No clues, nothing.

I was lying on the bed idly stabbing the side of the mattress with my biro when there was a knock at the door. The outside door. I unlocked and opened it. There was a man – a kind of rural shambolic farm-idiot-type man, with a wall eye. He was blinking too much and
there was a hesitation – nearly a stammer – in his speech. Pale blue eyes. Island inbreeding, I diagnosed. ‘M-my mother asked me to sh-show you the woodshed.’

Whoa. Something nasty in the. ‘My name’s Nikki. Are you–?’

‘Calum. I live here. There. Up – up the road.’

He was wearing a long coat although it wasn’t cold, a long dirt-coloured coat with a ragged hem and holes in the elbows, and an old sagging rucksack on his back. Calum. My brother. The child my mother kept in preference to me.

First impression of Calum: a fool. Too tall, too thin, slightly stooped, and his clothes hang off him like someone’s dressed a stick. He’s nervy – jittery – standing still, his legs pulsing, his fingers drumming to some internal beat. What he made me think of was something that’s been grown in the dark, forced, like rhubarb under a flowerpot – tall and pale and spindly.

I’ve spent a lot of time with rejects.
Q.
Why are there so many weirdos in children’s homes?
A.
(1) Kids people don’t want are by definition weird. (2) Being in care makes us weird. Not that Calum had been in care. No. He was weird without benefit of care. Not a good advert for twenty-odd years of mother-love. He stood there like a dolt staring at his boots.

‘OK. Where is the woodshed?’

He turned around without speaking or looking at me and set off towards the garage. I followed. When he got to the edge of the scraggy lawn he stooped down so suddenly that I nearly fell over him. I swore but he didn’t even look at me. He was delving with his long dirty fingers in the soil, separating something out, brushing the
earth off it. Completely absorbed, as if I wasn’t there.

‘What are you doing?’

He turned it over in his palm then held it out to me. A dull fragment of pottery; as he kept rubbing it with his thumb you could make out intertwined blue flowers on a muddy white background. Two inches of the rim of someone’s old cereal bowl. I looked at it and then at him – he was beaming from ear to ear. He was a fucking nutter. He stood up slowly and took the rucksack off his back. It was drooping and clanking with weight. He ceremoniously undid the straps and put the shard inside. Slowly did them up again and hoisted it onto his back. I had been standing waiting for about ten minutes. He set off again like it was nothing.

The woodshed’s like a garage, with double doors. He pulled one open and I could see stacks of dark wood, near the door there was a chopping block and axe and pile of sawdust. It was dark at the back, no windows. ‘I g-get the wood,’ he said, not looking at me. ‘I fetch it all.’ He seemed pleased with himself.

‘Good.’

‘From the sea.’

‘Isn’t it wet?’

‘Wet on this side. Dry on that.’ He indicated.

There was a sudden movement in the darkness at the far end of the shed, a scrabbling. ‘Are there rats?’

He turned his head, one eye was on me one on the roof of the house behind me how could she? Was
even this preferable to me? ‘It’s my father.’

I stared into the darkness at the end of the shed. I could make out the dark silhouette of the woodpiles against the end wall. I couldn’t see a person, I couldn’t see the paleness of a face. How has he got a father? ‘Is he coming out?’

Calum shook his head quickly. He moved on into the darkness of the shed and I followed him out of the daylight; as my eyes adjusted I could see heaps of wood, some chopped, some in logs and planks and splintered packing cases, it smelt damp and briny and hotter than outside. But I couldn’t see the father. Tall scarecrow Calum was coming back out of the darkness the light beamed on his potato face. Then he suddenly took a lunging step and was right next to me, reaching out for my neck. I jumped out of his way and banged into the doorframe – crashed out and ran across the garden to my open door. A lunatic a sex maniac a fucking dangerous nutter hanging about, grabbing at me –
what
? He shouldn’t be there he should be locked up. It was beyond belief. There was a gentle knock on the outer door. I shouted ‘What?’

‘S-sorry if I scared you.’ Sorry if he scared me. The Addams family. Oh I’m not scared when a lunatic makes a grab for my throat in a pitch dark woodshed on a lonely island where no one knows me, it’s just fine. I wonder what happened to her last lodger.

‘Go away.’ I stood listening behind the door and after a bit I heard his heavy boots plodding away down the garden. I opened the door a crack to check he’d gone then sat on the doorstep and rolled a fag. It’s not overlooked – there’s a scrubby open garden and then over a fence and a broken wall, the sea.

So. Free gift. Surprise in every
packet. A brother. And not just any old brother, but a sex-offending retard. A special half-wit of a brother; was there no end to my mother’s generosity? Why would you get rid of a baby that seemed to be all there and keep a defective?

OK. I would kill him too. The sun was shining on the stubbly grass and the flat wrinkling sea. It was a bald ugly place, she was mad they were both mad I was going to put an end to it. Brother. Father. Nuclear family invented after the disposal of item one, the unwanted child. Of, presumably, a different father. An absentee, unavailable for marriage. Too old. Too young. Married to someone else. In prison. Incarcerated. Dead. Related. The children of incest are meant to be peculiar. Like Calum.

Suddenly he was coming back, head down, fast, why is it you can always tell if they’re odd from a person’s walk? Clutching a big dirty plastic bag. He was a matchstick man, if I blew he would fall over he’d never bloody frighten me again. I stood up. He stopped in the middle of the lawn. ‘I b-brought you some veg.’

‘What?’

‘Potatoes. Carrots and stuff.’ He came towards me slowly, set the bag down in front of me then backed off again. I poked it open with my foot – I could see dirty yellow onions and orange carrots, a big earthy heap of vegetables.

‘Where d’you get them?’

‘Grow ’em.’ He was staring at me again gawping like a three-year-old.

‘What d’you want?’

He raised his hand and
touched his earlobe. ‘Pretty.’

I felt my ear. I was wearing the starfish earrings. Little dangly silver starfish with a green stone in the middle I got them from a crystal shop in Hebden Bridge the stone was – opal? Jade? Something with calming properties. Believe that and you’ll believe anything. ‘Is that what you wanted to look at?’

‘Mustn’t grab.’

I unhooked it and passed it to him and he dangled it from his skeleton’s thumb and forefinger and peered at it without speaking. Eventually he nodded and held it out to me.

‘Glad you like it.’

Sarcasm was wasted on him. He squatted down on his haunches like some famine-struck African peasant and began to comb through the grass with his fingers. I didn’t want his crappy veg his nutter’s occupational therapy veg and I didn’t want him sitting outside my door. Maybe he thought it was still his door. She kicked him out – but only just down the road. Couldn’t she get rid of him? She was good at getting rid of people.

‘I like s-smoking.’ He was watching me roll one. I held it towards him and he took it and sucked on it greedily. ‘She doesn’t let me.’

‘Smoke? Your mother?’

He nodded. Of course. She’d be worried about his health I suppose. About the lung-purity of a shambling gibbering mental defective. That makes sense.

‘This was my room.’

Very good. ‘Why did you
move out?’

‘She doesn’t l-like my treasure.’

‘What treasure?’

He waved his cigarette in the air. ‘Take it away. On Gerry’s trailer, p-pull it with the tractor.’

‘Where to?’

‘My house.’

I wanted to go in and start a conversation with the old witch, I wanted to get on with what I’d come for not be sidetracked by this ape.

‘It’s good. I’ll show you.’

I felt in my pocket my penknife was there if I needed it. I could already tell he wasn’t in fact dangerous – not like I thought in the woodshed; he wasn’t going to leap on me, he was just going to hang around and bore me to death like some thick snotty-nosed kid. ‘At your house?’

‘In the garden. Come on.’ He got up and dropped his stub. Ground it carefully into the grass with his heel then picked it up and put it in his pocket. I stood up and followed him, across the garden and along the narrow footpath that ran from there parallel with the shore, in the direction opposite to the village.

There was a little grey prefabricated bungalow ahead of us, surrounded by huge mounds of swedes or something. I thought winter feed for the cattle. As we got closer I realised the mounds weren’t swedes.

‘I get it from the sea.’ Around his
house were hillocks of junk, separated according to type. There was a mountain of footwear – shoes, boots, trainers; one of driftwood; one of plastic – bottles, food containers, floats, crates, broken toys, polystyrene. There was a smaller one of iron and metal, mostly orange with rust. There was a predominantly black rubber mountain (mainly tyres but some diving equipment, hosepipes, bits of dinghies, lifebelts). There were four hillocks of glass, clear, green, brown and blue. There was a stinking fly-buzzing mound of clothes and sacking, and a reddish pile of broken bricks and tile. There was a hill of bones and fossils. Like EC food mountains. He was grinning from ear to ear.