Island (16 page)

Just what I needed now, a history lesson.

‘You know they cleared them off?’ he said.

‘Go on. Why?’

‘The landlord wanted all the land for grazing. He wanted as many sheep as he c-could get – not little sheep but those b-big ones, the ones as big as cows that can’t get up when they fall over. They don’t come from here.’

‘Why?’

‘More profit.’

I let him carry on.
But I wanted to interrupt all the way through. I like stories but not those bleeding heart ones you’ve heard a thousand times before. Not the ones where things simply go from bad to worse. What’s the point of a story like that? Oh the wicked landowner and oh the poor peasant. Why isn’t there a story about the poor oppressed landowner who’s struggling to do his best for his tenants? Trying to get them to modernise and stop all this stupid spinning and weaving lark because the cloth they weave is lumpy itchy shit and no one wants to buy it. He wants them to breed up some good hefty sheep with a bit of meat on them to sell as mutton at the market. And the peasants haven’t got the wit to do anything different than their parents and grandparents ever did. If the land can’t be made more profitable the landlord can’t afford to keep it because his income from it’s still only the same as what his grandfather was getting but he’s just had to pay his grandfather’s death duties. He’s had to sell half his land and the roof of his house (alright, mansion) is leaking and last year’s harvest was crap and he simply can’t afford to keep the island if it won’t yield a bit more. The peasants are a dozy bunch and they can’t be doing with these big sheep or with not having the wife busy over her loom so they carry on as usual and the extra dosh the landlord’s invested in fifty big sheep for them to fatten is wasted because they don’t fence off the cliffs and don’t bring the big sheep under shelter in the gales and object to giving them extra feed in winter.

‘It’s worth it,’ pleads the landowner. ‘If you give them hay over the winter they’ll fetch an extra florin each at the spring markets.’

But that’s too hard for the dim old peasants. So the landowner makes a year’s spectacular loss on the island and his roof falls in. He has to sell the island and it’s bought by evil landlord X. Who knows the profitable
thing to do is to clear off the fucking useless peasants and put in four competent shepherds to look after an island full of big sheep.

There. What’s wrong with that? Whose fault was that?

Calum was intent on the pathos of his tale. Roof beams. These innocent crofters owned little or nothing. Not the land they farmed nor the earth their homes stood on nor even the stones and roofs of their own houses.
However
, they did own the roof beams.

How? Why?

Calum didn’t know – but he knew it was tradition that the crofters had no rights to fell trees on the island (being as every scrap of it was the landowner’s). They (or their parents, or their parents’ parents, or some old and scabby Viking thirty generations back) imported, stole or bought the roof beam, without which the building of a croft was impossible, from somewhere the other side of the sea, in all probability Norway. So when the factor and his men came (as we all knew they would from the beginning of this story) to the village this used to be and told the villagers to leave, a number of men said they wouldn’t leave without their roof beams. So there were stricken women weeping and tearing their hair, bewildered children running about screaming, brave men dashing back into their burning homes to drag out the looms with the cloth still in them, and the factor and his men demolishing the crofts. And when the roof beams crashed to the ground the crofters dragged them charred and splintered from the burning rubble and hauled them over the rocks to the sea.

This lot didn’t all get on a leaky ship for Australia or Canada, they got in their own little fishing boats with their roof beams tied up with ropes,
bobbing along behind them in the water, and they rowed across to Durris which is the little rocky crag island to the north; to that very settlement Calum and I had walked around only the day before. The landlord had no designs there because you couldn’t run cattle or sheep on it or grow oats or anything useful because it was just a lousy barren windswept little crag. And there these poor indomitable crofters rebuilt their homes in the only sheltered spot available using the ancient charred roof beams and lumps of rock which were plentiful nearby. They planted three rowan trees for the magic, and went fishing and ate fish and stayed alive and from time to time traded fish for other kinds of food. Or from time to time (when the shepherds were busy) raided the north of Aysaar and poached a rabbit, a deer, a big meaty sheep.

Then came the Great War, and the men of rocky Durris, whose government had done nothing for them, not provided healthcare or street lights or even a street, let alone a bridge to the big island, were called upon to fight for king and country. Which they did.

And when they came back from the Great War (some of them did come back from the fields of mud and blood to the barren rocky island) they’d had enough. And they got in their boats and rowed to the south of Aysaar, where the land is most fertile and where the outlines of their ancestors’ strip fields were still visible under the surface and they dug the earth and planted crops: oats, barley, potatoes, greens. They built a little hut and each night two of them would stay there to guard their crops while the others rowed back to the crag they called home. They didn’t hide anything or steal anything, they simply grew fodder on the fertile land which had been cleared and farmed by their ancestors.

I knew of course that the story would end
badly because these tales of heroic working folk always do. Calum the Brain
honoured
them for being victims. If I’d survived the trenches I would’ve gone straight back to my old home on the big island and I would’ve rounded up those giant sheep and had a barbecue. And I would’ve chopped down the landlord’s trees for new roof beams and built a load of new houses, a Barratt estate. I would’ve tied the arms and legs of the scab shepherds and set them off in a boat with no oars. And when anyone came to get me I would’ve said I was a shell-shocked war hero and refused to take orders from anyone but my General.

Why were they so creepily God-fearingly decent and humble? Why didn’t they raise hell?

Calum proceeded to the end of his pathetic tale. The police came from the mainland and asked them to leave. A party of crofting men came over from Skye to support them against the police. The men
refused
to leave (non-violently) and the police removed them by force and took them in boats to the mainland, and charged them with trespass and resisting arrest.

The end was completely unsatisfactory. When the thing came to court they were let off on a technicality so they were found neither innocent nor guilty. And when they came back they carried on exactly as before, farming on Aysaar and rowing home to their rocky crag to sleep, and the police couldn’t be bothered with them any more and neither could the landlord because he died and eventually the island came into the possession of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries and the
next
generation, the children of the Great War soldiers, were told they could buy crofts on Aysaar again if they liked. But as most of them were sick of crags and sea and fish and bored to death
with the whole bloody saga they went to the mainland to seek their fortunes, leaving the ancestral roof beams to fall into decay on the rocky island where not even holidaymakers would want to stay.

‘Very sad,’ I told Calum. He looked at me completely gone out.

‘Sad. They were a bunch of losers. Why didn’t they fight? What were they doing killing honest German peasants in the trenches and leaving evil bastard landlords alive?’

My clever brother sat with his mouth half open and his eyes looking east and west. What the fuck was I doing, sitting in a dripping field having history lessons? I was way off course. I got up and ran back into the forest.

I could hear him calling after me. ‘Nikki! Ni-ikki!’

‘Fuck off. Just fucking well fuck off!’

I hurt his feelings. Why not? It’s what I’m good at. Trashing things. Trash trashes things.

14
Mother’s weak spot

I looked back down to the abandoned
village once I had gone through the forest and gained some height. I could make him out, crouched over, digging at something I suppose. Looking for treasures. That was what he did, I thought – he had so bloody little life of his own that all he could do was collect the detritus of other lives and pore over the stories of ghosts.

When I got back the Life Source was audible in her kitchen. The Fat Controller (only she was skinny); the arch manipulator. I went straight to the kitchen, knocked and asked to borrow some milk. She was making pastry – she really was, her hands were all floury and she told me to help myself from the fridge. She was making steak and kidney pie for Calum.

‘D’you make his dinner every day?’

‘If he was left to his own devices he’d live on bread and cheese.’ She
gave a little laugh. Did she imagine it would amuse me? She went on rolling and cutting while I stood there. I noticed there was a nice row of jars of red jelly on the dresser. So those poisonous rowan seeds would be waiting in the compost in a squishy mass. I should go and find them later.

‘What exactly’s wrong with him?’

‘Nothing. Nothing. He’s just a bit different.’

‘Can’t he get a job?’

‘There’s not much on the island.’

‘It’s nice for swimming here in the summer isn’t it?’ I wanted to make her lose her temper. She poured a saucepan-ful of meat and gravy into the pastry shell. She was concentrating as if she hadn’t heard me. ‘Does he enjoy swimming?’ I needled.

‘Oh Calum can’t swim.’ She began brushing the edges of the pastry with water then spread the pie lid over it and crimped the edges. She was giving the pie 99 per cent of her attention.

‘Why not?’

‘It’s not a good idea.’ She broke an egg into a cup, beat it with a fork and began brushing the top of the pie with it.

‘But he fishes.’

‘Not from a boat.’

‘Why can’t he go in a boat?’

She didn’t reply.

‘Don’t you think his life’s a bit restricted?’

She put down the pastry
brush. ‘He comes and goes as he pleases. He has his food cooked and the run of the place.’ She picked up the pie ready to put it in the oven.

‘That’s not much more than you’d give a dog.’

There was a little silence while she stared at me and I waited for her to crack.

‘I’m glad you popped in,’ she said. ‘I wanted a word with you about your room.’

‘My room?’

‘Yes. I’m going to be needing it. I’d like you to find somewhere else.’

‘Needing it for what?’

She opened the oven, slid the pie in and closed the door. ‘I’m giving you notice.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t think I have to answer that question.’ She started scraping up the pastry scraps with the side of a knife.

‘What have I done? What have I done wrong?’

‘It’s unsettling for Calum to have someone in his old room.’

‘He’s enjoyed talking to me–’

‘I’d be grateful if you’d leave him alone from now on. He’s not used to young women.’

She turned to the sink and started running the water. I felt as if my head was going to burst. I ran to my room before I started screaming and swearing at the bitch.

She wanted me away from Calum. She knew
Calum was her weak spot. Calum was the only person who could hurt her or fool her, so Calum and I had to be separated. It was so obvious. And I had been playing into her hands (again) by falling out with him. I had been too stupid to realise the only way we could beat her was together.

Calum. Calum and I had to work together. Together we had a chance.

I set off at a run from the house; jogging back the way I’d come, up the track past the iron mine and down towards the dripping forest. I was sweating and gasping for breath, get back and make it up to Calum. Get back to Calum and win him round. Persuade the poor dope I never yelled ‘Fuck off!’

After a bit I had to slow down. There was a movement in the ditch beside the track – my eyes fastened to it before I realised what it was. Black. A crow, pecking away at something dead. Not a crow, please, not a crow. I turned my head away and walked on quickly and it didn’t fly up past me it didn’t force me to look at it, I hoped I might have got away with it.

I plunged into the still forest – when I came out Calum wasn’t at the ghost village. I walked across the empty lumpy field and the sound of laughter came to me – fractured jeering laughter. It was coming from the other side – the seaward side of the field. I went to the edge and looked down. It was a drop of a hundred feet or so to a rocky shoreline and the flat sea. Calum was on the rocks and there were three men with him – sitting, sprawling on the rocks. As I watched one threw a can to another and he missed; it crashed against a rock and burst in a shower of white froth.

‘Dickhead!’ The one who’d
missed the catch got up and went to fetch another can. He was young – they were all youngish, no more than twenty. Calum was drinking too, I watched him tilt his head back and drain the can. Calum’s friends?