The Blackhouse

‘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.

The grate in which she had lit her final fire still contained its ash and burned-out embers, grey and impossibly cold. I sat for a long time in her seat, staring at the fire and thinking about all the years that I had lived with her. It was extraordinary how few memories of her I had collected in that time. What a strange, cold childhood I’d had.

In my bedroom I found all my old toys that she had stuffed in boxes and piled up in the wardrobe, a sad reminder of a past I was only too anxious to leave behind. I thought about Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. All those Sabbath hours spent in the Crobost Free Church had left their traces. I took the boxes of toys downstairs and piled them up at the bin.

I had no idea what to do with my aunt’s things. I went into her bedroom and opened the wardrobe. Her clothes hung in silent rows, colours obscured by the shadow of her death. She had kept trousers and skirts and blouses years beyond her ability to wear them. It was as if she had harboured somewhere the hope that one day she might find again the person she had been in the sixties. Young, slim, attractive, her whole life ahead of her.

I did not want to spend a single night in this house. But I had nowhere else to stay, and so as night fell I lit a fire, wrapped myself in a blanket and slept on the settee in front of it, flitting in and out of strange dreams in which my aunt and Mr Macinnes were dancing together across an empty dancefloor.

I wakened to the sound of banging. It was broad daylight. I looked at my watch and saw that I had slept for nearly ten hours. There was someone knocking at the door. I answered it, still wrapped in my blanket, screwing my eyes up against the glare of sunshine to find myself squinting at a woman called Morag. She was a second cousin, I think, but much older than me. I’m not sure that I had seen her since my parents’ funeral.

‘Fin. I thought it must be you. I could smell the peat smoke, so I knew there was someone at home. I’ve got a key, but I didn’t like to use it if there was somebody in. You know the funeral’s today?’

I nodded blearily, and remembered that my aunt had never had a good word to say for Morag. But as it turned out it was Morag, in the absence of anyone else, who had organized everything to do with the funeral. ‘You’d better come in.’

And it was Morag who solved the problem of my aunt’s things. There was stuff, she said, that her family could use, and what they couldn’t, she would take to the charity shop in Stornoway. ‘You know, someone’s thrown out all your old toys.’ She was indignant. ‘I found them at the bin. I’ve put them in the boot so they don’t go to waste.’ And some other kid, I thought, would build a new set of memories around them. I just hoped they would be happier ones than mine.