Peter May - The Blackhouse

‘I remember that one,’ Artair said. ‘It’s the only one I wasn’t in. I was sick that year.’

‘Yeh, that’s right. You had a really bad asthma attack the night before.’

Artair shovelled more food into his mouth. ‘Nearly died that time. Close-run fucking thing.’ He glanced up from one to the other and grinned. ‘Might have been better for all of us if I had, eh?’ He washed his food down with whisky. Fin noticed that he had topped it up again. ‘What? Nobody going to say, naw, Artair, it’d have been a terrible thing if you’d died back then. Life just wouldn’t have been the same.’

‘Well, that’s true,’ Marsaili said, and he shot her a look.

They ate, then, in silence until Artair had cleared his plate and pushed it away. His eyes fell on Fin’s empty glass. ‘You need topped up, son.’

‘Actually, I’d better be going.’ Fin stood up, wiping his mouth on the paper napkin Marsaili had laid out.

‘Going where?’

‘Back to Stornoway.’

‘How?’

‘I’ll call a taxi.’

‘Don’t be fucking stupid, man. It’ll cost you a bloody fortune You’ll stay over with us tonight, and I’ll give you a lift to town in the morning.’

Marsaili stood up and lifted the empty plates away from the table. ‘I’ll get the bed in the spare room ready.’

By the time Marsaili came back in from the spare room, Artair had installed Fin and himself in the sitting room, glasses refilled, a football match playing on the television, the sound still down. Artair was well gone now, his eyes glazed and half-shut, slurring his words, relating some story from childhood about a bike accident of which Fin had no recollection. Fin had said he’d needed water in his whisky, and when he’d gone into the kitchen to get it, poured half of the whisky down the sink. Now he was sitting nursing his glass uneasily, wishing he had not given in so easily to Artair’s insistence that he stay over. He looked up eagerly, hoping for rescue, when Marsaili came in. But she looked tired. She glanced at Artair, a strange, passive expression on her face. Resignation, perhaps. And then she went into the kitchen to turn off the lights. ‘I’m going to bed. I’ll clear up in the morning.’

Fin stood up, disappointed, as she left the room. ‘Goodnight.’

She paused for just a moment in the doorway and their eyes met fleetingly. ‘Goodnight, Fin.’

As the door closed, Artair said, ‘And good fucking riddance.’ He tried to focus on Fin. ‘You know, I’d never have fucking married her if it hadn’t been for you.’

Fin was stung by the vitriol in his voice. ‘Don’t be daft! You were chasing Marsaili from that first week at school.’

‘I’d never even have fucking noticed her if she hadn’t got her claws into you. I was never after her . I was only ever trying to keep her away from you. You were my pal, Fin Macleod. We were friends, you and me, from just about the time we could walk. And from that first fucking day, there she was trying to take you away from me. Driving a wedge between us.’ He laughed. A laugh without humour, corrosive and bitter. ‘And fuck me if she isn’t still doing it. Think I didn’t notice the lipstick, eh? Or the mascara? You think that was for your benefit? Naw. It was her way of raising two fingers at me. ’Cos she knew I’d see it, and know why she’d done it. She’s not wanted to make herself attractive to me for a very long time.’

Fin was shocked. He had no idea what to say. So he just sat clutching his watered-down whisky, feeling the glass warm in his hands, watching the peat embers dying in the hearth. The air in the room seemed suddenly to have chilled, and he reached a decision. He knocked back the remains of his whisky and stood up. ‘I think maybe I’d better go to bed.’

But Artair wasn’t looking at him. He was gazing off into some distant place in a whisky-fogged mind. ‘And d’you know what the real fucking irony is?’

Fin didn’t know, and didn’t want to. ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’

Artair tilted his head up to squint at him. ‘He’s not even mine.’

Fin felt his stomach lurch. He stood frozen in suspended animation. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Fionnlagh,’ Artair slurred. ‘He’s your fucking kid, not mine.’

The anaglypta wallpaper had been painted sometime recently. One of those whites with a hint of peach, or pink maybe. There were new curtains and a new carpet. And the ceiling had been painted, a plain matt white. But the water stain in the corner had come through it, insidious, invasive, and still in the shape of a gannet in flight. The crack was still there, too, in the plaster, running through the gannet and across the cornice. The cracked window pane had been replaced by double glazing, and a double bed was pushed against the wall where Mr Macinnes had had his desk. The shelves of the bookcase opposite still groaned with the same books Fin remembered from those long evenings of maths and English and geography. Books with exotic, distracting titles: Eyeless in Gaza, The Case of the Black-eyed Blonde, Boys Will Be Boys, Smeddum . And the even more bizarre names of their authors: Aldous Huxley, Earl Stanley Gardner, Lewis Grassic Gibbon . Mr Macinnes’s old armchair was pushed into one corner, the fabric on the arms worn shiny by his elbows. Sometimes people leave their traces on this earth long after they are gone.

Fin was almost overwhelmed by a sense of melancholy. But, then, he thought, melancholy did not really describe it. Some great weight seemed to be bearing down on him, crushing him, making it difficult to breathe. The room itself felt like a dark and disturbing place. His heart was racing as if he were afraid. Afraid of the light. He turned off the bedside lamp. Afraid of the dark. He turned it on again and realized he was shaking. There was something he was trying to remember. Stirred by something Artair had said, or a look he had given him, or a tone in his voice. Leaning against the wall behind the door, he noticed for the first time, was the card table at which he had spent so many hours preparing for his exams. The Cyprus-shaped coffee stain. He was sweating now, and he turned off the light again. He could hear the thump of his heart, the pulse of blood in his ears. When he closed his eyes he saw only red.

How could Fionnlagh be his son? Why wouldn’t Marsaili have told him she was pregnant? How could she have married Artair if she had known? Jesus! He wanted to scream and to wake up back home with Robbie and Mona and the life he had known until just four short weeks ago.

He heard voices raised in anger through the wall, and he held his breath to try to hear what they were saying. But the form of the words was lost in the brick. Only their tone made it through the mortar. Fury, hurt, accusation, denial. The sound of a door slamming, and then silence.

Fin wondered if Fionnlagh had heard any of it. Maybe he was used to it. Maybe it was a nightly occurrence. Or was tonight different? Because tonight a secret had escaped, and was moving amongst them like a ghost. Or was it just that Fin was the last to see it, the last to feel its cold fingers of uncertainty turning his world forever upside down?

It was early in the July of the year I sat my Highers. School was out and I was waiting for my results to confirm a place at Glasgow University. It was the last summer I would spend on the island.

I cannot begin to describe how I felt. I was elated. It was as if I had passed the last several years in the dark with a great weight pressed down upon me, and now that the weight had been lifted I was coming out, blinking, into the sunlight. It helped that the weather that year was sublime. They say that seventy-five and seventy-six were great summers. But the best summer I remember was that last summer before I left for university.