Peter was, too. We were glued to the window for the whole journey, watching the city give way to rolling green countryside, stopping at smaller stations with exotic names like Linlithgow and Falkirk, before another city grew up out of the earth. An altogether different city. Black with industrial pollution. Factory chimneys belching bile into a sulphurous sky. A long, dark tunnel, then the roar of the steam engine in the confined space of the station as we pulled into the platform at Queen Street in Glasgow, the screech of metal on metal ringing in our ears.
Several times I had glanced at Catherine, trying to catch her eye, but she had steadfastly refused to meet mine, staring at her hands in her lap in front of her, never once glancing from the window. I had no way to read what was going on in her head, but sensed her fear. Even at that age I knew that girls had much more to be afraid of in this world than boys.
We sat waiting for nearly two hours at Queen Street before boarding another train. A train that took us north this time and further west, through the most spectacular countryside I had ever seen. Snow-capped mountains, and bridges spanning crystal-clear tumbling waters, vast forests and viaducts over gorges and lochs. I can remember seeing one tiny whitewashed cottage in the middle of nowhere, mountain peaks rising up all around it. And I wondered who on earth lived in a place like that. It might as well have been on the moon.
It was getting dark by the time we arrived in the west coast port of Oban. It was a pretty town, with the houses painted in different colours, and a huge fishing fleet berthed at the quayside. The first time I’d seen the sea. The bay was ringed by hills, and a vast stone cathedral stood on the shore looking out over waters turned blood-red by the setting sun.
We spent the night in a house not far from the cathedral. There was another priest there. But he didn’t speak to us. A housekeeper led us to two rooms up in the attic. Tiny rooms with dormer windows in the slope of the roof. All we’d had to eat all day were sandwiches on the train, and a bowl of soup when we arrived. I could hear my stomach growling as I lay in bed, keeping me awake. If Peter heard me, it didn’t affect him. He slept like a baby, as he always did. But I couldn’t get Catherine out of my mind.
I waited until after midnight, when all the lights went off in the house, before getting quietly out of bed. For a long time I stood at the door, straining to hear the slightest sound, before opening it and slipping out into the hall. Catherine’s room was just a few paces away. I hesitated outside her door, listening to what sounded awfully like stifled sobs coming from the other side of it, and I had a feeling of sick anticipation rising from my stomach. She was a real hard case, was wee Catherine. If something had reduced her to tears then it had to be bad. I had never seen her cry once in the year I’d known her, except for that time in the moonlight on the roof of The Dean. But I’m sure she didn’t know I’d noticed that.
I turned the handle and ducked quickly inside. Almost immediately the bedside light came on. Catherine was sitting up in the bed, her back against the headboard, knees drawn up to her chest, and a hand mirror from the dresser raised up in her right hand like a weapon. Her eyes were black with fear, her face the colour of the sheets.
‘For God’s sake, Catherine, what are you doing?’
Her relief at seeing me almost overwhelmed her. She allowed her hand to fall to the bed again and let go of the mirror. I could see her lower lip trembling, her tear-stained cheeks catching the light from the lamp. I crossed the room and slipped on to the bed beside her, and she turned her face into my shoulder to choke off her sobs, her arm across my chest, holding on to me like a child. I slipped my arm around her shoulder.
‘Hey girl. It’s okay. I’m here. What can be so bad?’
It took a long time for her to find her voice and trust herself to speak. ‘That dirty fucking priest!’
I frowned, not yet understanding. How naive I was. ‘The one with the comb-over?’
She nodded, her face still pushed into my shoulder. ‘He came into my room last night. He said he thought I might need a little comfort … given the circumstances.’
‘And?’
‘And what?’
‘What happened?’
She turned her head up to look at me now in disbelief. ‘What the fuck do you think?’
And it dawned on me.
At first I was shocked, that a priest of all people might do something like that. Then incensed that he had. And then almost overcome by the most powerful physical and mental urge to kick the living shit out of him. And I think, had he been there I would, and could, have killed him.
‘Oh shit, Cathy,’ was all I could say.
She buried her face in my shoulder again. ‘I thought the other one was coming for the same thing. I’m scared, Johnny. I don’t want anyone to touch me again, ever.’
‘No one will,’ I said. And all I could feel was anger and outrage.
I sat with her all night that night. There was no more talking. I felt her finally drift off to sleep after about an hour, and her body became a dead weight against mine.
We never ever spoke of it again.
The RMS
It wasn’t until we got to the pier that I realized we were going on the boat, and that the nuns weren’t coming with us. That came as a bit of a shock. The presence of the nuns these last two days, cold black shadows though they’d been, had provided a sense of safety and purpose. The thought of setting sail on this big boat that smelled of oil and salt water, all alone and with no idea of where we were going, filled me with an unaccountable dread.
While one of them stood aloof and silent, the other lined us up in the terminal and knelt down in front of us. Her face seemed softer, somehow, than at any time since they had picked us up from The Dean. She almost smiled, and I saw something that looked close to sympathy in her eyes. From somewhere beneath her skirts she drew out three pieces of card, about nine inches by six. They each had a loop of string hanging from the top edge, just like the notice we’d fashioned to hang around Peter’s neck when we were pretending he was blind. The ones she gave to me and Peter had the name GILLIES scrawled on them in bold black letters. Catherine’s read O’HENLEY.
‘When you get off the boat,’ she said, ‘put these around your necks and wait on the quayside. Someone will be there to meet you.’
Finally I summoned the courage to ask the question that Peter had been demanding of me for the last two days. ‘Where are we going?’
Her face darkened, as if a cloud had passed overhead and cast a shadow on it. ‘It doesn’t matter. Just stay off the deck. The sea can get rough out there.’
She gave us our tickets then, and stood up, and we were shepherded through crowds of people on to the pier and up a steep gangplank to the deck. The
Desolate is how I felt in that first hour as the boat slid out across the grey waters of the bay, leaving a pale emerald trail in its wake, seagulls wheeling and cawing all around the masts like so many scraps of white paper flung into the wind. We became aware for the first time of the swell of the ocean, and watched the mainland retreating behind us. Until, in time, the green of the hills became smudged and distant, before vanishing altogether. And all that we saw around us was the sea rising and falling, with no idea of where we were going or when we would get there. Or what might be waiting for us when we arrived.
In the years to come I learned about the Clearances. How, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, absentee landlords, encouraged by the government in London, cleared the people off the land to make way for sheep. Tens of thousands of crofters evicted from their homes and forced aboard boats that took them off to the new world where many had been pre-sold, almost as slaves. I know now how they must have felt as they saw their homes and their country vanish in the haze, with nothing ahead of them but mounting seas and a hopeless uncertainty.
