The Loud Halo (16 page)

She stared reflectively out of the window and for a few moments the kitchen was sad with our thoughts. ‘Mind you,' she began again, ‘there aren't many like Ian. Most of them are firm enough at denying others the use of drugs but when they get a wee twinge of pain themselves they're soon after me to do something about it.'

While we had been talking the still water of the bay had become progressively shadowed and I could hear my hens questioning the delay of their evening feed. I asked the nurse to excuse me while I attended to them. She looked at the clock. ‘I suppose I ought to be going, really,' she said with obvious reluctance, ‘but I'm enjoying my wee ceilidh, and I've got to go and see to Willy again in an hour's time. It doesn't seem worth going home in the meantime.'

I suggested she should stay.

‘Well, I'll need to use your toilet,' she said. ‘That is if you've got one.'

‘Of course,' I said, a little indignant.

‘There's no “of course” about it,' she retorted. ‘I had a friend of mine staying with me last year and I left her in one of the houses while I was attending to a patient. She'd been drinking a lot of tea of course and when she got uncomfortable she asked if she could use their toilet. The woman looked at her and said straight out “I'm afraid we haven't one.” My friend was a bit put out and I suppose she couldn't help showing it. “You haven't one?” she gasped. The old woman gave her a haughty look and said, “No, we never felt the need of one yet.” Of course that made my friend think they'd only just moved into the house so she said, “Oh, I see, you haven't been here long, then?” “Why, yes indeed,” the old woman replied. “We've been here twenty-five years.” I just got back into the kitchen then and saw the look on my friend's face. We got out of the house and she turned to me. “Nurse,” she said, “that old woman's just told me they've lived here for twenty-five years and they've never needed a lavatory. Aren't they peculiar?” ' Nurse laughed. ‘I had to hurry up and explain that their peculiarity wasn't biological, it was just that they always used the calf shed.'

‘It amuses me the way they just cut a hole in the front and back of the little boys' pants so that they don't need to use nappies or train them to pot,' I said. ‘It's certainly very effective.'

‘Sheer bone-idle laziness!' snorted the nurse, who had water laid on in her own house and so was not burdened with the task of carrying every drop needed for washing.

I showed her my ‘wee hoosie' as I rushed off to feed the hens and put out hay, praying that Bonny would be waiting at the moor gate when Erchy went to let in his own cows, so that she would come home alone without having to go looking for her in the dark after the nurse had gone.

‘My goodness!' said Nurse admiringly when I came back into the kitchen. ‘You're quite civilised with your toilet.'

I laughed. ‘It seems a bit barbaric to me still.'

The problem of sewage disposal in Bruach was, as it must be in every sewerless and waterless village, a difficult and distasteful business. Chemical lavatories are not the answer, certainly where there is no man available for emptying them. They are too heavy for a woman to lift when they are even half full and somewhat wasteful of time and chemical if they are emptied more frequently. I had solved the sewage problem by having two adjoining lavatories; an ordinary chemical one for serious visits and an invention of my own for the more flippant occasions. The idea had come when I had started keeping a cow and found that though she was put into her byre sometimes about four o'clock in an afternoon and not let out again until ten o‘clock the following morning the shingle bottom of the trench behind her was always completely dry. At first I had thought of calling in the vet but after being adequately reassured by Bonny herself I realised that from the byre the land sloped down to the shore so evidently her urine just ran into the shingle and seeped its way into the sea. I worked on this principle for my second lavatory. First I dug a hole in the shingle floor of my ‘wee hoosie' and into the hole I lowered a section of chimney lining that I had begged from old Murdoch. An old galvanised pan with holes punched roughly in its bottom sat in the chimney lining and this was then topped with a substantial box seat. In the ‘wee hoosie' I also kept a pail of sea water so that it could be ‘flushed' immediately after use. It was a simple arrangement but it worked beautifully, and I use the adverb deliberately for on nights when the sea water was full of ‘noctiluca,' those minute organisms which give the sea its phosphorence, I have waited entranced until the last of the scintillating water has gurgled down from the pail, leaving it transformed by a luminous coating that still glowed greenly as I shut the door.

‘I'Il be coming here more often now that I know you've a nice little place like that,' threatened the nurse, ‘I usually have to wait until I get to Janet's up the road there. She lets me use the toilet they have for the tourists in summer,' she explained. ‘But you know, Miss Beckwith,' she continued, ‘that's where you have it with these people. They've gone to the trouble of building a “wee hoosie” so that the tourists have somewhere to go and they even keep a toilet roll in it. But they have the toilet roll fixed to the ceiling instead of the wall.'

‘That's a funny place for it,' I commented.

‘Isn't it?' agreed the nurse. ‘I said to her: “Janet,” I said, “why on earth do you keep the toilet roll up on the ceiling? It's awful hard for a wee body like myself to reach up there when I want it.” “Well, Nurse,” she told me, “it's like this. Shamus keeps his pet sheep in there at night and if I don't have the toilet roll way up out of its reach the beast has eaten the lot by morning.”'

‘If they have a shed it mustn't be wasted,' I observed with a smile; ‘and really I suppose it's understandable. A “wee hoosie” is only a status symbol that their children insist on when they come home from university. You'll notice that a house where there are no young folk doesn't usually have even the crudest of privies. The old folk seem to find it unnatural to shut themselves up in a confined spaces to relieve themselves.'

‘Yes.' The nurse nodded vigorously. ‘But when they're getting older and they don't want to face the storms, that's when the trouble begins. Then it's “Nurse, Nurse, I haven't cacced for days, will ye give me a dose?” You'd wonder too at the amount of calomel it takes to shift them.' She sighed. ‘Oh, well, I suppose I must go and give Willy his injection——' She broke off. ‘Goodness, I've just remembered I'd promised the teacher I'd go' down and inspect the children's heads today. She's been complaining about them.'

I looked at her without speaking.

‘They were in a shocking state when I attended to them before.'

‘How do they get them?' I asked. ‘Most of the houses seem to be pretty clean.'

‘It's just the one or two that aren't that cause the trouble,' she said. ‘I always have to undress on a sheet when I've been anywhere near them.' She moved a few steps towards the door, still loath to say good night. ‘Dear knows what time I'll get home tonight,' she said with her hand on the latch. ‘I have to go and see Barabal yet. I suppose you've heard about Barabal?'

‘No!' I said with some surprise. ‘Is she ill?'

‘No,' replied the nurse with a look that was meant to convey something out of the ordinary. ‘She's not ill but the doctor went to see her last week.'

‘But why did the doctor go to see her if she's not ill? I felt foolish the moment the question was off my lips.

‘Well, I mustn't say in my position, must I? But you'd think she'd have had more sense at her age.' The nurse's mouth collapsed into a droop of disapproval but her eyes regarded me eagerly from above the spectacles.

‘Well, I never!' I said, lapping it all up without a qualm of conscience. ‘Is Barabal married?'

‘Not at all.' The nurse's tone implied that no man would have been fool enough to marry Barabal.

‘Who's the father supposed to be, then?' I asked, overcome with curiosity.

‘Nobody here anyway. They say she went to Glasgow for it.' The nurse was still contemptuous. ‘She was there for a couple of months in the summer, anyway.' She opened the door and stepped out into a drizzle of dusky rain. ‘I wish I'd remembered about Barabal being Alistair Beag's sister when he was shouting insults at me the other day,' she said. ‘I could have told him if anyone had been anywhere too long it was his sister in Glasgow.' She got halfway down the path and I stood in the doorway watching her. ‘Change the nurse like they change the bull, indeed.' she was muttering as she went out through the gate. ‘I wish I'd remembered it.'

‘Ach, that woman!' commented Morag.

I had just told her that I was on my way to visit Kirsty, Johnny Comic's sister, to see if she would sell me a bag of potatoes.

‘Aye,' went on Morag, ‘I doubt she'll sell you a bag, though she'd have but one left to do herself. Let her see your money an' she'll not be able to say no to you.'

Morag was standing in the doorway of her cottage, bending over a rubbing-board which stood in a zinc bath of soapy water. The washed clothes she had flung aside into another tin bath which stood outside catching the wind-harried douche of water from a piece of leaky guttering, for it was still raining torrentially. (In Bruach where there was no piped water we washed on wet days and, if it was calm enough, optimistically hung out the washing on the line to wait for the dry day that would come. With this treatment—sometimes hours, sometimes days, of crystal clear rain coursing through them—our clothes needed no artificial bleaches to get that ‘extra whiteness'.)

‘You do dislike Kirsty, don't you?' I said. Morag looked shocked.

‘Ach, it's no' that I mislike her at all. It's just the way of her.'

‘What way?' I asked.

‘Well, mo ghaoil, I'm tellin' you, she's that grand seemin' an' whenever any of us women hereabouts that's been in service go to speak to her we always get the feelin' that the first thing she's goin' to say to us is, “And can you do a little flannel washing, my dear?” ' She stretched her neck and screwed up her lips to convey the condescension of a duchess and looked at me to see if I understood.

‘It's what the mistresses always used to ask when I was girl in service,' she supplied by way of explanation.

‘Was Kirsty never in service herself?' I asked.

‘No, indeed, she was not. Not service as we knew it, anyway. All my fine Kirsty did was to push one of them rich invalid ladies around in a wheelbarrow.' She tossed her head haughtily. Drawing aside the bath so that I could step round it, she resumed, ‘I saw you comin' so I called Erchy to pour out a cup of tea for you.' Erchy was sitting on the bench under the window with his elbows resting on the back of it. He had taken off his oilskins but his cap was still on his head, pushed well back so that it would not drip over his face. With a limp gesture, of acknowledgement he indicated that the cup of tea beside him on the bench was for me.

Opposite Erchy and within convenient spitting distance of the fire sat Neilly Ally, an old uncle of Morag's, who had arrived unheralded on the bus one evening, as crofters' relatives appeared to have a habit of doing, and who had been in semi-residence with her ever since. He took his pipe out of his mouth briefly to say ‘Aye' by way of greeting. Although Neilly had lived in Glasgow for over fifty years he had not shed the aura of the croft and, sitting there with his disordered white hair, his blue seaman's jersey and his dark crumpled trousers he looked as though he might just have come in from the shore after hauling his boat. There was a bowl of soapy water on the floor beside him—another acknowledgement of bounteous rain—and his newly washed feet resting on the of slab driftwood that did duty as a kerb looked as though they had been more accustomed to paddling in peaty burns than treading Glasgow's pavements. In the intervals of puffing his pipe and spitting uninhibitedly he was engaged in scraping the tar off a netting needle, a task which appeared to require a disproportionate amount of concentration.

‘Well,' said Erchy, rousing himself, ‘are you pleased with the weather?'

‘I am not,' I replied. ‘I'm tired of this rain, rain, rain, day after day. I can't get anything done.'

Neilly Ally ceased his scraping momentarily. ‘'Tis no' as bad as in the Bible when it rained forty days and forty nights,' he soothed.

‘How do you know? You weren't there,' said Erchy pertly.

The old man stared aloofly through the window above Erchy's head. ‘Was I no', then?' he enquired in a tone that implied there could be some doubt about it, and glancing again at his white spongy-looking feet I almost believed there might be.

Morag came in, wiping her hands on the edges of her coat. “You're not sittin' down, Miss Peckwitt,' she chided me.

‘Not as wet as I am,' I told her. ‘I'm more comfortable standing.'

She picked up the teapot and tilting it drained the remains of the tea into her own cup.

‘This weather,' she grumbled. ‘You'd think the sky would have got tired of flingin' the rain at us the way it's been doin'. I don't remember weather like this when I was a girl. Wind we had, but not all this rain.'

‘They say the bombs has changed it all,' put in Erchy, ‘but ach, I don't believe it's that at all.'

Neilly, who had been sitting in an offended silence since Erchy's previous remark, now sat up. With great deliberation he put the netting needle on the table and placed his pipe beside it.

‘'Tis no' the bombs,' he pronounced, fixing us with an impressive blue gaze. ‘It started before the bombs, I can tell you.'