Peter May - The Chessmen

‘Jesus!’ he shouted. ‘Some idiot left a bloody boobytrap on the quayside. I could have killed myself!’

I knelt down and flipped a big rusted metal boat ring over on its axis. It had been cemented into the stone long before either of us was born. And I couldn’t help laughing.

‘It’s not funny!’

‘It’s bloody hilarious, Whistler. You want to watch where you’re putting your big feet.’ I uncoiled a length of rope lying among the creels and threw him an end. He grabbed it and pulled himself up on to the ramp. Some of the cages had burst open, and there were crabs clinging to his coat. He stood chittering in the cold and cursing as I pulled them off him and threw them back into the water, laughing the whole time. Which only made him worse. ‘Come on,’ I said, pushing him up the slipway ahead of me. ‘Let’s get you out of these clothes before you catch your death.’

It must have been midnight before we got him out of his wet things and into a bath. My aunt fussed and faffed in a way she never did over me, making sure he had big soft clean towels, and taking his clothes away to put through the wash.

He was still in the bath, and I was in my pyjamas and ready for bed, when my aunt came to my bedroom door. She had a strange expression on her face.

‘I want you to come downstairs, Finlay.’

I knew immediately that something was wrong. ‘What is it?’

‘There’s something I want you to look at.’

I followed her down the steep narrow staircase, on uneven stairs that creaked like wet snow, and into the little hall at the front door. She turned into the laundry room. It was little more than a scullery, with a washing machine and a tumble dryer. A short pulley, usually laden with drying clothes, hung from the ceiling. Whistler’s wet clothes were spread out over the worktop above the machines.

She turned to me. ‘Look at this.’

I glanced at them, full of incomprehension. ‘What about them?’

‘Look!’ She lifted his socks. ‘They’re full of holes.’ And as she held them up I saw that they were. Worn to holes at the heel and the ball of the foot, and wafer-thin along the line of the toes, almost at the point of disintegration. ‘And these.’ She held up his underpants, stretched out between fastidious thumbs and forefingers. It took a great effort of will for her even to touch them, and there was a look of extreme disgust on her face. ‘The elastic’s perished.’ She dropped them. ‘And his trousers. Look how he keeps them up.’ She showed me the safety pin at the waistband where a button had once been. The zipper was broken. ‘And here.’ She turned them over and I saw where the seam between the legs had burst open, the stitching rotted and broken.

Then she held up his coat and turned it inside out. ‘And this isn’t much better. The lining’s all torn and worn thin. And look at his trainers for God’s sake.’ She stooped to lift them on to the counter. ‘You can’t see it at a glance, but the soles have come away from the uppers, and it looks like he’s used duct tape to stick them back together.’ She glared at me with accusation in her eyes. ‘How could you not notice?’

‘Notice what?’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Finlay. This !’ And she waved her hand over the assembled garments. ‘They’re only fit for the bin.’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I thought it was just his look.’

‘Holes in your socks aren’t a look , Finlay.’ She took me by the arm and steered me through to the living room and lowered her voice. ‘He lives with his father, he said. Where’s his mother?’

‘She’s dead.’

‘You’ve met his father?’ I nodded. ‘And been to the house?’

‘Yes.’

She closed the door and said, ‘Sit down. I want you to tell me everything.’

I said nothing to Whistler when he came out of the bathroom. I gave him a pair of baggy old pyjama bottoms that just about fitted him, and an XXL T-shirt that he stretched over his chest. He wrapped my old dressing gown gratefully around himself and went off to the spare room at the end of the hall muttering about bloody idiots who left dangerous objects lying about on jetties. We slept until almost twelve the next day.

It was the sound of my aunt’s car pulling up at the front door that woke me. I screwed up my eyes against the midday sunshine and from my window saw her take several carrier bags from the back seat. There was a fresh blustery wind chasing random clouds across a broken sky, sunlight spilling from it in occasional pools and splashes. But it was dry and my spirits lifted.

By the time Whistler and I got ourselves downstairs, she had a late breakfast sizzling for us in the kitchen. Porridge, followed by bacon, egg, sausage, black pudding and fried bread, all washed down with big tumblers of fresh orange juice. Whistler wolfed into it, and barely looked up until he had finished. Then the three of us sat around the table drinking tea, and Whistler told a tall story about two men trying to take a bull on a raft across to an island in Uig. He swore it was true. They were very nervous, he said, that the raft would tip over and the bull would drown. Then the thing did capsize, halfway across, and tipped all three into the sea. The men thought they were going to drown because neither of them could swim. But then it turned out that the bull could, and so they clung on to him, and he swam to the island and got them ashore. The way he told it, Whistler had us all in stitches.

I watched my aunt as he spoke. There was more life in her eyes, I think, than I had ever seen in them before. And she laughed in a way I’d never heard her laugh. A laugh like running water, that flowed from smiling lips. I don’t know what it was about Whistler that attracted her. It was certainly more than feeling sorry for him. But I’ve often thought that she’d probably rather have had Whistler to raise than me. And although I had never loved her, I felt a disconcerting pang of jealousy.

When we had finished eating, Whistler said, ‘I’d better get dressed.’ And he looked around for his clothes. My aunt flicked me a look.

‘I’ve put them in the bin, John Angus,’ she said.

There was an odd silence in the kitchen as his jaw dropped and he stared at her in disbelief. I felt like someone watching a movie. Involved in the action, but with no influence over the way it was unravelling.

‘I’ve been to Stornoway to buy you some new. Nothing fancy mind. I went to the Crofters. They’ll do you for now.’ And she lifted the carrier bags she had brought from the car on to the table.

Whistler still hadn’t spoken. He looked in the bags, one after the other. There was a sturdy pair of leather boots. Jeans. A chequered shirt. A waterproof jacket with a hood. And seven pairs of socks and underpants.

‘I wasn’t sure about sizes, so I just got the biggest I could.’

Whistler’s mouth was still hanging open. He looked at her and shook his head. ‘I can’t afford this.’

‘I can,’ is all she said, and in a way that brooked no argument. ‘Now go and get dressed. I’d like to be on the road in fifteen.’

‘Where are we going?’ I asked her.

‘To Uig.’

I glanced at Whistler. His face had flushed pink, his big dark eyes filled with confusion. I could see an objection playing around his lips, but it never quite found voice. My aunt was not someone to be argued with.

We drove down to Uig in silence. Me in the front with my aunt, Whistler filling most of the back seat and unusually subdued. It was a typical day in late March, the wind blowing in strongly off the Atlantic all the way down the west coast, rain never far from its leading edge. But we could see the sky almost clear to the east, and sunshine falling in shifting patches somewhere across the dead, deserted interior. Far to the south we could see where the rain fell intermittently, rainbows fleetingly crayon-colouring the sky then vanishing again as the sunlight was swallowed by more cloud. And as we left Garynahine behind us, and followed the tortuous route down to the south-west, storm clouds gathered ominously among the mountains that rose up beyond Uig, a portent of coming conflict.