Питер Мэй - I'll Keep You Safe

Aunt Rita had vanished again from sight, and the horrible thought began to worm its way into my brain that neither she nor Anndra would ever be seen again. Not alive, anyway.

And then there she was, on her back, arms around Anndra’s chest, kicking for shore, before turning to push her legs down in search of traction, finding it and pulling Anndra behind her.

This time we all ran into the water to help her. Everyone except Uilleam, whose abject fear of the stuff wouldn’t permit him to set so much as one foot in it. Anndra was a dead weight. Unlike Ruairidh before him, there was no coughing or gasping for breath.

Panic propelled us up on to the firm sand left by the receding tide, and Anndra lay on his back, head tipped towards the water. His eyes were wide open, just like Grampa’s that time by the caravan. Except that water foamed backwards out of his mouth, washing over his open eyes as if trying to flush all the life out of them. But with a terrible constriction of my chest I knew that he was already gone.

Aunt Rita, though, hadn’t given up hope just yet. Her sodden dress clung to every contour of her body, and I could see her underwear beneath it. Her usually coiffured hair hung down in rat’s tails over her face as she knelt down by the prone form of my brother and began pumping at his chest with both hands. Gouts of water spurted from his mouth, before she leaned over him to pinch his nostrils and breathe into his mouth. Then more pumping. I remembered that Rita had been a nurse before she married my uncle, which was how they had met, and I willed her to breathe life back into Anndra.

She carried on long beyond the point where all of us knew there was no longer any hope. A desperate reluctance to accept that he was dead. Maybe because she was the only adult there, she felt in some way responsible for what had happened.

Ruairidh, meantime, had struggled to his knees, still retching, tears streaming from his eyes, watching with horror as Rita pumped and pumped with despairing hands on Anndra’s chest.

I understood even then that Ruairidh was going to get the blame. The fact that it was Uilleam who had kicked the ball into the water and goaded Ruairidh into going after it would get lost in the telling. All that anyone was going to remember was Ruairidh’s stupidity in going into the sea to get it, causing Anndra to risk and lose his life in the process of trying to rescue him.

I glanced up at Uilleam. He was gazing in disbelief on his younger brother lying dead in the sand, and whatever guilt he was busy tucking away somewhere deep inside him, I knew he would never admit it to the world. His eyes flickered towards Ruairidh, and I saw hatred there. He sensed my eyes on him, and when he turned to look at me, I knew in that moment that I had lost not one brother, but two.

Of course, there were no mobile phones in those days. No one to call for help, and no help to be given anyway. And so the boys carried Anndra up past the cemetery, where just a few days later we would put him in the ground. When I looked back I could still see the football being washed remorselessly out to sea. I was sobbing uncontrollably, Seonag with an arm around my shoulders, Aunt Rita following behind us, stooped with grief and crying silent tears. When we got to the car park, the boys laid Anndra out on the back seat of the Humber Hawk, while Seonag and I squeezed into the front with my aunt.

There was no room in the car for Uilleam and he returned to the village with the other boys, one of them giving him a backie. But not before, I heard later, he had taken out his wrath on Ruairidh. Punching him into the long beach grass and kicking him until the others pulled him off. From all accounts Ruairidh didn’t lift a finger to defend himself, and in all the years that followed, not a word ever passed between him and me on the events of that day.

I can’t even begin to describe how awful things were in our house over the next few days. I don’t think I have ever witnessed grief like it. Or anger. As I suspected, no blame was ever apportioned to Uilleam. Teflon Uilleam. All the shit stuck to Ruairidh.

Anndra’s coffin was laid out in the front porch, just as our grandfather’s had been before him. Everyone in the village, and from a good way beyond, came to pay their respects. But when the Macfarlanes turned up, my mother wouldn’t even let them past the gate. She must have had her hate radar set, because somehow she sensed them coming before any of the rest of us.

The first I knew about it was when I heard her screaming at them in Gaelic from the doorstep. They and their son would never be welcome in our house again. Not that they had ever been regular visitors anyway. She hoped that their God would forgive them, because she never would. That, in spite of the fact that while she blamed their son for the death of hers, it was Ruairidh who had saved my life all these years before. Which is when I first began to suspect that maybe my mother valued Anndra’s life above mine. The preference for a son over a daughter.

The funeral was held on the Saturday. A long procession that followed the hearse down that single-track road to Dalmore Beach and the cemetery that overlooked it. Still the good weather had not broken, and the sea in its innocent blue lay calm and still in the bay, breaking in only the gentlest of waves upon the sand.

Things had changed somewhat since my grandfather’s funeral and the women came right down now to the car park, but remained on that side of the fence as the men carried Anndra across the machair, between the headstones of all the dead who had gone before him, to a freshly dug grave in a plot that commanded a view of the very spot in the bay where he had drowned.

I stood by my mother’s side, Seonag holding my hand tightly, and let silent tears roll down my face as we said goodbye. Goodbye to the brother who had taunted and tormented me all through my childhood. What I wouldn’t have given in that moment to find one of his spiders in my pocket, and hear him stifling laughter from some hidden place as I screamed in panic.

Which was when I noticed the lone figure silhouetted on the clifftops away to our right. Ruairidh, too, had come to pay his last respects. I’m sure he was riddled with all the guilt that everyone felt was justified. For he certainly knew that but for Anndra it would have been his funeral here today. And I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him, blamed and excluded, a pariah among his peers.

At the far end of the cemetery the minister had delivered his final words, and the mourners were picking up spades to shovel the sandy soil over the coffin and fill the grave. The headstone was not raised for another six months, and although I am not sure if my mother ever visited his grave, I went to see Anndra often over the years, just to sit with him and pray that he would forgive me for marrying the man who everyone blamed for his death.

Uncle Hector and Aunt Rita made their delayed departure on the Monday morning. A solemn affair, in which there were few words spoken and more tears spilled. Just before they left I noticed my aunt covering the back seat of the Humber with a tartan travelling rug. The leather had been ruined by the salt water from Anndra’s body, which had left its pale imprint in the green. A permanent reminder of the tragedy of that summer’s day on Dalmore Beach.

They never came to stay with us again, and I heard much later that my uncle had put his beloved car up for sale as soon as they got home.

Niamh and Uilleam drove in silence along Bayhead, past the inner harbour, slowing over the speed bump and then accelerating up towards the roundabout. Trees in the golf course to their left were already taking on their autumn colours.

The rain clouds that Braque and Gunn had seen earlier gathering out at sea off the west coast were now sweeping their way across the island, rain falling in dark, fast-moving patches that Niamh could see in the distance across the Barvas Moor. For the moment it was just spitting at their windscreen.