The Chessmen

It all came to a head one night after a gig at the Cross Inn at Ness. After three straight gigs without showing, Whistler turned up as if nothing were amiss. He was in one of his manic good moods, and oblivious to the ill will festering towards him among the other members of the band. There had clearly been meetings to discuss his absences, discussions to which I had not been privy. But I knew that something was brewing.

Kenny and I had gone into the bar behind the hotel for a pint while the band was playing. When we came out at the end of the show, night was leaching the last light out of the sky. We went to take the van around to the front. Kenny had parked it beside the big tree that grew in the car park then, the only real tree on the whole of the west coast. A giant of a tree. God knows how it had survived the winds that drove in off the Atlantic all these years, but it must have seen a few generations come and go.

Roddy and Whistler were standing in its shadow almost screaming at each other. We heard them before we saw them. The crowds streaming out of the lounge bar in the hotel, to cars and minibuses, turned heads in their direction.

‘For Christ’s sake keep it down, boys.’ Kenny was self-conscious. But neither of them took any notice.

‘It’s just not fair on the rest of us,’ Roddy shouted. ‘All our arrangements, all our rehearsals, are based around us being a six-piece band. A lot of it built around your fucking flute. There’s a big bloody hole in our sound when you’re not there. It’s embarrassing.’

Whistler stood his ground, unfazed apparently by their embarrassment. ‘Maybe you should have thought of that before you started trying to ease me out.’

Which came with the unexpected force of a slap in the face to Roddy. ‘Ease you out? What are you talking about, man? No one’s trying to ease you out.’

‘You blew into Uig with your mainland money in your pocket and just took over. Everything. The band, the girls, the limelight. A real fucking star.’

Roddy shook his head in exasperation. ‘There was no band!’

‘Aye there was. Me and Strings and Mairead were playing together long before you showed up.’

Roddy was scathing now. ‘That wasn’t a band. That was just kids playing about in someone’s front room.’

Whistler took a dangerous step towards him. ‘What would you know? You were an incomer. You knew nothing about us, or the way we were. You just took over. Took it all. Mairead, too.’

Which was the first time I became aware of any tension between them over Mairead.

‘Mairead?’ Roddy gasped. ‘Don’t make me laugh. Mairead wouldn’t be seen dead with a loser like you.’

And that tipped Whistler over the edge. He leapt at Roddy, big hands grabbing handfuls of shirt and face, and the two of them went tumbling backwards to roll over several times in the dusty gravel of the car park, feet and fists flying. Roddy was an altogether more delicately built boy, and stood no chance against the monster that Whistler was becoming. I heard him cry out in pain, and saw blood on his face, and Kenny and I were on to them in a flash, dragging the flailing Whistler off him, ducking and diving ourselves to avoid the flying fists.

The crowd which had gathered around scattered backwards like displaced water. I heard girls screaming and some of the boys shouting encouragement. Kenny and I pushed Whistler up against the tree and pinned him there, the three of us breathing hard, almost growling, like animals. Roddy scrambled to his feet, bloodied about the lips. But his biggest injury was the one inflicted on his pride.

‘You fucking idiot!’ he screamed. ‘This is the end. You’re finished. You’re fucking finished!’ Strings and Skins and Rambo pushed through the group of fascinated spectators, and pulled him away, casting hostile backward glances at Whistler. And the crowd, sensing that it was over, started to dissipate.

Me and Kenny let Whistler go then, and he snarled, ‘I’ll kill him.’

‘No you won’t.’ The solitary voice came out of the dark, a lone figure left standing as the crowd melted away. It was Mairead. She was looking at him with an extraordinary intensity. ‘We’ve worked too bloody hard to get this far, Whistler. We’re not going to throw it all away now. Not because of you.’

To my amazement he was almost cowed by her. He looked at the ground, unable to meet her eye.

‘We’ve got rehearsal Wednesday night. You’ll be there, right?’ And when he didn’t respond, ‘Right?’ More forcefully this time.

He nodded. Still without looking at her.

‘I’ll speak to Roddy. We’ll just put this behind us and move on, okay?’ There was such authority in her tone, such complete confidence in her ability to manage these boys who brawled over her. It was something to see, the power that she possessed. And I think, too, it was the first time I saw in her that naked ambition. We’re not going to throw it all away now. Mairead was going places. She knew it even then. And nothing was going to get in her way. Certainly not Whistler.

Someone with a car gave the rest of the group a lift back to Uig, and Whistler wandered off in the dark, to sit brooding on a wall at the south end of the car park. Kenny and I packed up and carried everything to the van in silence. It wasn’t until we had finished that I said, ‘So what’s the story with Whistler, Roddy and Mairead, then?’

Big Kenny just shrugged. ‘You knew that Whistler and Mairead were an item before Roddy showed up?’

Of course, I’d heard about Whistler and Mairead being childhood sweethearts, but not about how it ended. I nodded.

‘Ever since primary three. Inseparable, they were.’

‘So what happened?’

‘Roddy happened.’

‘I didn’t know he wasn’t from Uig originally.’

Kenny lit up a cigarette and offered me one, and we leaned against the van and smoked them. ‘His grandparents were. But his folks were born on the mainland somewhere. His dad made a fortune in something or other, I’ve never been quite sure what. And they came back and built that beautiful big house on the road up to Baile na Cille that looks out over the sands. He still goes back to the mainland from time to time, doing whatever it is he does, and Roddy’s never been short of a bob or two. That’s how he could afford the synth, and the Marshall stack. And who do you think’s paying up the PA, and coughed up for the deposit on the van?’

I have to confess, I had never really thought too much about where the money came from. The band was paid, of course, for the gigs, but when I thought about it then, I realized their earnings would never have been enough to cover the costs.

Kenny said, ‘Whistler was right. Roddy was like a star that fell from the sky. Exotic, rich, talented. And Mairead was attracted to him like a moth to the light.’ He flicked his cigarette into the night sending a shower of sparks skittering across the car park. ‘End of Mairead and Whistler.’

It didn’t take much to persuade Whistler to stay over at Crobost that night. I knew that he was hurting inside, in his own self-destructive way, and I couldn’t bear the thought of him going back to the blackhouse in Uig, with his drunken father sitting polishing his eye in front of the fire. It was a Friday night and the band wasn’t playing on the Saturday, so we had the whole weekend ahead of us. I knew my aunt wouldn’t mind. There was a spare room at the end of the upstairs hall. No one ever came to stay, but there was always a bed made up in it.

Kenny dropped us off, and we went into the house to find my aunt sitting on her own in the front room, in her favourite armchair by the fire. She seemed a million miles away. The room was a nod to the sixties. Orange and turquoise curtains, boldly patterned wallpaper, big brightly coloured china pots that she bought from Eachan the potter at the bottom of the hill. She was listening to what I recognized as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on her old stereo system. Vinyl! It was so dated now. Everyone had cassette players in those days, or CD players, the new big thing if you could afford it. And she was smoking. She appeared to be pleased by the thought that we would have a visitor for the weekend and told Whistler he could use our phone to let his folks know that he wouldn’t be home.

Whistler was embarrassed. ‘It’s just my dad. He won’t notice.’ She gave him an odd look.

Afterwards, when we left the house to wander down the track to the shore for a smoke in the dark, he said to me, ‘She smokes dope, your aunt.’

I looked at him in amazement. ‘What makes you think that?’

‘Don’t you smell it?’

‘That’s incense,’ I said.

He laughed. ‘That’s what she burns to cover the smell of the dope, you idiot. Maybe she thinks you’d disapprove.’