Peter May - The Blackhouse

It was years since I had broken up with Marsaili. I can look back now and wonder at my cruelty, and can only console myself with the thought that I had been so very young at the time. But, then, youth is always a handy excuse for crass behaviour.

Of course, she continued to be in my class until the end of primary school, although she had become oddly invisible to me. During the first two years of secondary, still at Crobost, our paths crossed fairly frequently. But after we moved to the Nicholson in Stornoway I hardly ever saw her. The occasional glimpse in a school corridor, or wandering The Narrows with her classmates. I knew that she and Artair had been an item through third and fourth years, even though he was at a different school. I would see them together from time to time at dances in the town hall, or at parties. They broke up in fifth year, when Artair was repeating his O levels, and I was vaguely aware of Marsaili going with Donald Murray for a time.

I went out with a succession of girls all through secondary, but none of them lasted very long. Most of them were put off when they met my aunt. I suppose she must have seemed pretty weird. I had just got used to her. Like the crap you leave lying around your room when you’re a kid, you just stop seeing it after a while. But as school finished I was footloose and fancy-free with no intention of tying myself down. Glasgow offered the prospect of boundless new possibilities, and I didn’t want to be bringing any baggage with me from the island.

It was sometime during that first week in July that I remember Artair and I going down to the beach together at Port of Ness. We shared markedly contrasting moods. During the run-up to my Highers I had spent long, difficult hours locked away in his dad’s study preparing for the exams. Mr Macinnes had been hard on me, driving me relentlessly towards success without letup. After Artair’s five failed O grades he had all but given up on his son, even though Artair had decided to go back for a fifth year to resit. It was as if Mr Macinnes was investing in me all the hopes and aspirations he had once harboured for Artair. It had created tension between Artair and me, born, I think, out of jealousy. We would meet up sometimes after my tutoring sessions and walk up through the village together in tense and difficult silence. I can remember us standing at the foot of the slipway at Crobost harbour throwing stones into the water for more than an hour without a word passing between us. We never talked about the tutoring. It lay between us like a silent shadow.

But all that was behind me now, and the day seemed to reflect my mood, brilliant sunshine coruscating across the still waters of the bay. Only the slightest of breezes ruffled the warm air. We had taken off our socks and sandshoes and rolled up our jeans, and ran barefoot along the gently sloping beach, splashing in and out of the small, briny waves breaking on the shore, leaving perfect footprints in virgin sand. We had one of those plastic sacks they use for bagging the commercial peat, and we were going to catch crabs in the pools left by the outgoing tide amongst the rocky outcrops at the far end of the beach. To me the summer seemed to stretch ahead, an endless succession of days like this, filled with the simplest pleasures of life, unhurried by age or ambition.

Artair, though, was gloomy and depressed. He had been accepted for a welding apprenticeship at Lewis Offshore, starting in September. He saw his summer slipping away, like sand through his fingers. The final summer of his boyhood, with only the drudgery of a dead-end job and the responsibility of adulthood awaiting him at the end of it.

It was another world down there among the rock pools, hidden away from the realities of life. The only sound came from the gulls, and the sea rushing gently up to meet the shore. The water trapped in all the rocky crevices was crystal-clear and warming in the sun, filled with the colour of crustaceans clinging stubbornly to black rock, the gentle waving of seaweed the only movement apart from the scuttling of the crabs. We had collected nearly two dozen of them, dropping them into the sack, before we took a cigarette break. Although I had fair hair, I had my father’s skin and took a fine tan. I had removed my T-shirt to roll up under my head, and lay draped across the rocks, sunning myself, eyes closed, listening to the sea and the birds that fed off it. Artair sat with his knees folded up under his chin, arms wrapped around his shins, puffing gloomily on his cigarette. Oddly, smoking didn’t seem to affect his asthma.

‘Every time I look at my watch,’ he said, ‘another minute’s gone by. And then an hour, and then a day. Soon it’ll be a week, then a month. And another one. And then I’ll be clocking in on my first day.’ He shook his head. ‘And soon enough, I’ll be clocking out on my last. And then they’ll be putting me in the ground at Crobost cemetery. And what will it all have been about?’

‘Jesus, man. We’re talking sixty, seventy years. And you’ve just blown it all away in a heartbeat. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.’

‘It’s alright for you. You’re leaving. You’ve got your escape route all planned out. Glasgow. University. The world. Anywhere other than here.’

‘Hey, look around you.’ I raised myself up on one elbow. ‘It doesn’t come much better than this.’

‘Yeh,’ Artair said, his voice heavy with sarcasm, ‘that’s why you’re in such a fucking hurry to leave.’ I had no reply to that. He looked at me. ‘Cat got your tongue?’ He flicked his cigarette end off across the rocks, sending a shower of red sparks dancing in the breeze. ‘I mean, what have I got to look forward to? An apprenticeship at a rig construction yard? Years stuck behind a mask firing jets of frigging flame at metal joints? Jesus, I can smell it already. And then there’s all the years of travelling that fucking road from Ness to Stornoway, and a hole in the ground at the end of it all.’

‘It’s what my father did,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t what he wanted, but I never heard him complain about it. He always told us we had a good life. And he crammed most of it into all those hours he wasn’t working at the yard.’

‘And a fat lot of good it did him.’ The words were out before he realized it, and Artair turned quickly towards me, regret in his eyes. ‘I’m sorry, Fin. I didn’t mean it like that.’

I nodded. I felt as if the only cloud in the sky had just cast its shadow on me. ‘I know. But you’re right, I suppose.’ I let my own bitterness creep in. ‘Maybe if he hadn’t devoted so much of his time to his God, he might have had more of it left for living.’ But then I took a deep breath and made a determined effort to get out from under the shadow. ‘Anyway, there’s nothing definite yet about the university. It still depends on the exam results.’

‘Aw, come on.’ Artair was dismissive. ‘You’ll have walked it. My dad says he’ll be disappointed if you don’t get straight “A”s.’

It was then that we first heard the voices of the girls. Distant initially, chattering and laughing, and then getting closer as they came towards us along the beach. We couldn’t see them from where we were, and of course they couldn’t see us. Artair put a finger to his lips, then signalled me to follow. We scrambled barefoot over the rocks until we saw them, no more than thirty yards away, and we ducked down so as not to be seen. There were four of them, local girls from our year at school. We peered up over the edge of the rocks to get a better look. They were taking towels from baskets and laying them in the soft sand beneath the cliffs. One of them stretched out a reed mat and tipped bottles of ginger and packets of crisps on to it from her bag. And then they started stripping off T-shirts and jeans, to reveal white flesh and bikinis beneath.