The Blackhouse (40 page)

His prickliness made me angry. ‘You blame me, don’t you, for your dad’s death?’ I just blurted it out.

He gave me such an odd look that I was completely discomfited. ‘Gigs says you don’t remember much about what happened out there on the rock.’

‘What’s to remember?’ I said, still off-balance. ‘I fell. Okay, so I don’t remember exactly how. Something stupid, probably. And your dad climbed on to that ledge and saved my life. If that makes me responsible for his death, then
mea culpa
. I’m sorry. I’ve never been more sorry about anything in my life. He was great, your dad. I remember him on the ledge telling me everything was going to be alright. And it was. Only not for him. I’ll always be grateful to him, Artair. Always. Not just for saving my life. But for giving me a chance at life. For all those hours he put into getting me through my exams. I could never have done it without him.’ It just poured out of me. All my misery and guilt.

I can recall Artair staring at me, still with that strange look in his eyes. I suppose he must have been weighing up just how much blame I deserved, because he seemed to come to a decision, and all the tension and anger suddenly drained out of him, like poison from a boil that’s been lanced. He shook his head then. ‘I don’t blame you, Fin. I don’t. Really. It’s just …’ And his eyes filled up. ‘It’s just hard dealing with the death of your dad.’ He sucked in a deep, tremulous breath. ‘And now this.’ He lifted his hands hopelessly, and then let them drop back to his sides.

I felt so sorry for him that I did something I had never done before. Something that big, macho Lewismen just don’t do. I gave him a hug. I sensed his initial surprise, and a momentary hiatus, before he hugged me back, and I felt the bristle of his unshaven face against my neck and the sobs that shook his body.

Marsaili and I left separately for Glasgow at the end of September and met up at the Curlers bar in Byres Road. We had each been to the flat in Highburgh Road to drop off our bags, but there were issues to be settled. For my part I had to confront and deal with my feelings, or lack of them, for Marsaili. I could not explain it then, and I cannot explain it now. I had escaped from An Sgeir with my life, but something of me had died on the rock, just as Marsaili said all those years later. And Marsaili was somehow connected with that part of me that had gone. I needed to rebuild and regrow, and I was not certain where Marsaili fitted into that process, if at all. For Marsaili, the issue was simple. Did I want us to be together or not? I have to confess to my cowardice. I am not good at ending relationships. When there is a chance for the break to be swift and clean, I am likely to dither, afraid of causing hurt. In the final event, of course, it always gets messy, and you end up hurting people even more. So I didn’t have the heart, or maybe was it the courage, to tell her it was over.

Instead we had a few drinks and went for a meal at a Chinese restaurant in Ashton Lane. We had wine with the meal, and several brandies to finish, and were drunk by the time we got back to the flat. Our bedsit was a large room at the front of the apartment, originally the sitting room I think. It had high ceilings with moulded cornices, and a gas fire in an elaborately carved wooden fireplace. Spectacular stained-glass oriel windows looked through trees on to the road below. Up a short flight of stairs was a shared bathroom, and at the back of the flat a large communal kitchen with a huge dining table and a television by a window overlooking the back court. We could hear the other students talking and playing music in the kitchen when we went in, but we weren’t feeling very sociable that night. We went straight into our room and locked the door. Light from the streetlamps outside filtered through the leaves and fell among dappled shadows across the floor. We did not even bother drawing the curtains before unfolding the bed settee and stripping off our clothes. I suppose if anyone was looking, we might have been seen from the flats across the road. But we didn’t care. A cocktail of alcohol and hormones spurred us into a bout of furious sex, brief and intense.

It seemed like a long time since we had last made love, on the beach at Port of Ness. That first night in Glasgow fulfilled some physical need, but when it was over I lay on my back staring at the ceiling, watching the reflected light move with the breeze among the leaves outside. It was not like it had been before. And it left me feeling empty, and knowing then that it was over, and that it could only be a matter of time before we would both have to face it.

Sometimes when you don’t want it to be your fault, you engineer situations where fate, or even the other party, can be blamed for the break-up of a relationship. It was like that with me and Marsaili that first term at Glasgow University. I look back now, and I’m not sure who the person was who inhabited my body during those autumn weeks leading into our first winter in the city. But he was a truculent bastard, moody and difficult. He drank too much. He smoked too much dope. He made love to Marsaili when he felt like it, and treated her like shit the rest of the time. I am ashamed to say that I knew him, or was associated with him in any way.

I discovered lots of things about myself. I discovered that I wasn’t really interested in the arts, or getting a degree. In fact, I wasn’t interested in studying, full-stop. When I think of the hours that poor Mr Macinnes wasted on me! All that time and effort squandered. I discovered that I was what Lowlanders call a
teuchter
, a hick Highlander, immediately identified by my ugly island accent, and I made a determined effort to iron it out. It seemed that Gaelic sounded absurd to the non-Gaelic-speaking ear, and so I stopped speaking it to Marsaili, even when we were alone. I discovered that I was attractive to girls, and there appeared to be no shortage of them willing to sleep with me. Those were in the days before AIDS had made its first big impact, and sex was still very casual. I would go to a party with Marsaili and leave with someone else. When I got back to the flat, I would find her on her own in the dark. She would never confess to spilling tears over me, but I saw the mascara stains on her pillow.

It all came to a head towards the end of our first semester. There were two girls who shared the room across the hall from us. One of them had a fancy for me. She had never made any secret of it, even when Marsaili was around, and Marsaili hated her for it. Her name was Anita. She was a good-looking girl, but for all her encouragement I had never really taken an interest. She was
too
keen. Like Sine. And I had always backed away from that.

I got in early one day from university. I had skipped lectures and gone to the pub. I had already spent most of my grant for the year, but I just didn’t care. I was hell-bent on a course of self-destruction. It was bitterly cold, a heavy sky over the city pregnant with snow. The shops were full of Christmas. My parents had died exactly two weeks before Christmas, and every one of them since had been miserable and depressing. Compounded by my aunt, who had never attempted to make it special for me. While all the other kids had looked forward to the Christmas holiday each year with great excitement, I only ever contemplated it with a sense of dread. And all the commercially motivated ersatz gaiety of the big city, the lights and trees and garish window displays, the endlessly repeating Christmas songs in shops and pubs, seemed only to heighten my sense of dislocation.

I was gently tipsy and consumed by self-pity when I got into the flat. Anita was in the kitchen on her own. She was rolling a joint and looked up, pleased to see me.

‘Hi, Fin. I just scored some great dope. You wanna smoke?’

‘Sure.’ I turned on the TV, and there was some God-awful animation dubbed into Gaelic, buried away in the afternoon schedules on BBC2. It was odd hearing it spoken again. Even although they were cartoon voices, they made me feel homesick.

‘Jesus,’ Anita said, ‘I don’t know how you can understand that stuff. It sounds like Norwegian on speed.’

‘Why don’t you go fuck yourself?’ I said to her in Gaelic.

She smiled. ‘Hey, what did you say?’

‘I said I’d like to fuck you.’

She raised a coy eyebrow. ‘What would Marsaili say?’

‘Marsaili’s not here.’

She lit her joint and took a long, slow pull at it, before passing it to me. I watched the smoke slowly leak from her mouth as I filled my lungs. When eventually I blew it out, I said, ‘Has anyone ever made love to you in Gaelic?’

She laughed. ‘In Gaelic? What do you mean?’

‘If they had, you wouldn’t need to ask.’

She stood up and took the joint from me and filled her mouth, pressing it then to mine so that we could share the smoke. I felt her breasts pushing up into my chest and she slipped her free hand down between my legs. ‘Why don’t you show me?’

If we had gone to her room instead of mine, things might have been different. But between the drink and the dope, and a girl with her hand down my trousers, I didn’t really care. The bed hadn’t been made from the morning. I turned on the gas fire, and we stripped off and climbed between the same sheets Marsaili and I had shared the night before. It was cold, and we pressed ourselves together for warmth, and I spoke to her softly in Gaelic.

‘It’s like you’re casting a spell on me,’ she said. And in a way I was. Making magic with the language of my father. And his father. Coaxing, cajoling, promising her stuff I could never deliver. Slipping inside her to give her my seed. Of course, she was on the pill, and so it was a seed that would fall on stony ground. But for a moment it was an escape. Not for her, for me. A chance to connect again, with the Fin Macleod I had once been. Free to be the boy who had once spoken only Gaelic. Free to touch my ancestors and be with them again. But, really, I think it was just the dope.

I’m not sure when I became aware of Marsaili standing in the doorway. But when I did, I looked up sharply. Her face was chalk-white.

‘What is it?’ Anita said, and then she saw her, too.

‘Why don’t you just pick up your clothes and get out,’ Marsaili told her very quietly.

Anita looked at me, and I nodded. And with a great show of petulance, Anita climbed out of the bed, gathered up her things from the floor and stomped across the hall to her room. Marsaili closed the door behind her. She had the look in her eyes of a dog that has just been kicked by its master. Betrayal, hurt, shattered trust. I knew there wasn’t anything I could say.

‘You know, I never told you,’ she said. ‘The only reason I applied for a place at university was because I knew you had.’ And I realized that must have been before our encounter on the island at Great Bernera. And I thought about the letter she had sent imploring me not to take Irene Davis to the final year dance at primary school. Signed,
The Girl from the Farm
. And I knew then that she had never stopped loving me, for all those years. I had to look away, no longer able to meet her eye. For I understood what I had done, in the end, with my cruelty and my selfishness. I had robbed her of hope. The hope that one day she would get me back. That she would find the old Fin again. I didn’t know where that Fin was any more than she did, and I’m not sure that I had any hope of finding him myself.

I wanted to say sorry. To hold her, to tell her that everything would be alright. Just like Mr Macinnes had told me on that ledge on the cliff. But I knew it wouldn’t be, and I wondered if he had known that, too.

Marsaili didn’t say anything else. She took her suitcase down from the top of the wardrobe and started packing her clothes into it.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Home. I’ll get the train to Inverness tomorrow, and then the bus to Ullapool.’

‘Where’ll you stay tonight?’

‘I don’t know. Not in this house, that’s for sure.’

‘Marsaili—’

‘Don’t, Fin!’ She cut me off abruptly. Then more softly, with a catch in her throat, ‘Just don’t.’

I sat down on the edge of the bed, still naked and chittering with the cold, and watched her pack her case. When she had finished, she slipped on her coat and dragged the case out into the hall. She pulled the door shut behind her without a word, and after a moment I heard the front door open and close.

I went to the window and watched her as she struggled off down the street towards Byres Road. The little girl who had sat beside me that first day at school and offered to translate for me. The same little girl who had stolen a kiss from me high up among the bales in the barn at Mealanais Farm, and taken the blame for me when I dropped my sweets in church. After all these years, finally, I had hurt her beyond repair and driven her from my life. Big, fat snowflakes started falling, then, obscuring her from view before she reached the traffic lights.

I only ever returned to the island once after that, when my aunt died suddenly the following April. I say suddenly, only because the news came to me out of the blue. But, in fact, it had been a long, slow decline over several months. I’d had no idea she was ill, although it turned out that she had been diagnosed with terminal cancer the previous summer. She had refused the chemotherapy, telling doctors that she had lived a long and happy life, drinking the finest wines, and smoking the best cigarettes, sleeping with the most eligible men (and a few women), and spending their money with great abandon. Why spoil the last six months? As it turned out, it was nearer nine months, most of which had been spent in pain, alone, in the freezing cold of her final winter.

I took the bus out to Ness, and walked up the hill through Crobost to the old whitehouse by the harbour. It was a blowy spring day, but there was a softness to the wind cutting through the dead grasses, and a warmth in the watery sunlight that broke periodically through the racing hordes overhead.

The house still had the chill of winter about it, a smell of damp and disinfectant. All the colourful vases of dried flowers, the purple-painted walls, the pink and orange fabrics of her heyday, were sad and tawdry now. Somehow she had given them their vibrancy, and without her they just seemed cheap and nasty. She had always been a huge presence in the house, and it was hugely empty without her.