The next day, like every other Sunday, a dead calm settled over Lewis. The entire population was off to church, in black coats and with devoutly bent heads. The peat bogs were deserted again. Scattered across the moor, like will-o’-the-wisps fluttering in the wind, were the plastic bags the peat-cutting families had brought their lunches in the day before. One would occasionally get caught on a bush, but never for very long; the wind always managed to tear it away.
I sat hugging my legs in the kitchen window, watching the grossly uneven tug-of-war.
Ludo and Duco were sitting by the Aga, engrossed in their books since breakfast. They had blisters as big as pigeon eggs on the palms of their hands, and they ached in places where, they said, they’d never known they even had muscles.
The peat sputtered and hissed pleasantly in the Aga. And, if you concentrated, you could see a dusty beam of light making its way in—not actual sunshine, of course, but definitely quite a bit more light than usual, as if someone up in heaven had kindly left a shutter open a crack.
Yesterday, Rowan had been delighted that I’d done the washing for her, and that I’d even mopped the kitchen floor. But she’d been even more delighted to see Iola chewing on one of my plaits as if it was a salami. She could see for herself I was a first-rate babysitter. She’d ask me to come back again soon, she’d said. I’d been so elated that I’d run all the way home.
I heaved my legs off the window ledge and, with my toes, poked Duco’s stockinged feet, which were roasting by the cooker’s open hatch. ‘Hey, Duke, old man. Anything fun on the agenda for today?’
‘I’m reading, pussycat.’
I gave a kick in the other direction. ‘Ludikins?’ I whined hopefully.
‘Lucy.’ He grabbed me by the ankle. With his other hand, he turned the page. ‘Will you make us a cup of coffee?’
I put the kettle on. I ground the coffee beans. I poured milk into the little pan. By then I’d had it with being the perfect daughter. ‘The weather’s super-duper nice, anyway.’
Ludo put his book away. He took his glasses off. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. ‘Such enthusiasm, all of a sudden!’
‘I think it’s pretty cool here.’ I poured the water on the coffee.
He gave me a probing look. Then he said with a smile, ‘I’m so glad.’ He picked up his glasses and his book again.
‘What are you reading anyway, egghead?’
‘A book, Lucy, I’m just reading a book.’
First I poured the whipped milk and then the coffee, because if you did it the other way round, according to those two, it didn’t taste nearly as good. Just as I was handing them their coffees, my mother entered the kitchen with a basket of peat. Briskly she began feeding the cooker with more peat. ‘Hey, lazybones,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘This would be a perfect day for starting that vegetable garden of ours.’
‘But it is the Lord’s Day,’ said Duco. ‘If you so much as stick a spade in the ground today, you’ll get lynched.’
‘You mean you don’t feel like it,’ said my mother, rather sharply.
‘Duco is right,’ said Ludo. ‘Surely you don’t want to …’
‘The two of you are always pooped before you’ve even begun.’ She tossed the basket into a corner. ‘It’s impossible to get you to do fuck all. All you ever want to do is sit around on your arses all day.’
I still wasn’t used to her using words like that. I quickly climbed back onto the window ledge.
Outside, the wind was still winning, the plastic bags still losing. A lonely sheep plodded past the stacks of peat.
I could hear my mother pouring herself a cup of coffee the wrong way—first the coffee and then the milk—and pull out a chair at the table. Her movements sounded brusque. ‘Well, in that case I suppose I’ll just sit around on my arse for a while, too.’
The mood in the kitchen had suddenly turned tense. I was terrified a fight was about to break out. If only the Luducos would say something to make everything go back to normal! But they were silent. Maybe their own fathers had always remained tight-lipped the same way, and that was because their fathers before them had done the same. It was something you never stopped to think about, really, but it turned out that everything was a consequence of something else. It suddenly made me feel terribly depressed, to think that the whole of existence was really just one big chain reaction. It wouldn’t surprise me if, in the future, I found myself doing stuff exactly the way my mother always did it. And what if I had children myself someday, what if they in turn had children, as well?
‘Goodness, Lucy,’ said my mother. ‘What are you brooding about? You look as if you’ve just seen the Loch Ness monster.’ Her voice had lost its belligerent tone.
I looked up. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that the Luducos, unruffled, had gone back to reading. Maybe I had just imagined it. ‘Nothing,’ I said curtly.
She stared at me across the kitchen table, with those eyes that had this hungry look in them these days.
‘What are you looking at?’
‘Your hair. Shouldn’t we try some different styles, more appropriate for secondary school?’
I wanted to say, Mind your own business and worry about you own hair, but of course I couldn’t.
‘Why don’t you start taking out your plaits? I’ll go fetch a hairbrush.’
Reluctantly, I stood up and started pulling the elastics off my plaits, thinking, I bet that without them Iola won’t recognize me anymore.
Coming up behind me, my mother said, ‘Here, come and stand in the light.’
Without turning round, I took a few steps back. ‘Like this?’ I asked sullenly.
‘Yes, Lucy.’ Then she began brushing my hair.
I held myself stock-still.
Her brushstrokes were calm and regular, but also so firm that my skull immediately began to sting. She still had the knack. A hundred brushstrokes before bed every night made your hair shiny, healthy, and strong. What great hair you have—such abundance.
Mum and I, in the rectory’s cavernous bathroom, wrapped in white terry towels, with dripping-wet hair, standing side by side in front of the mirror with determined looks on our faces, each holding a glass with a beaten egg. Ready, set, go! Shrieking with laughter. Rub it in quick, massage it in well. We’re a sight, oh stop it, what if the boys saw us looking like this! But the boys didn’t have to know our little secrets. Just us girls. What wouldn’t you do to make sure they loved you? And then finish it off with a vinegar rinse. Don’t forget, okay?
My hair crackled and squeaked from the roots to the ends so that I couldn’t even hear the Aga’s hiss anymore.
My mother grabbed my shoulders. ‘Turn around.’
Feeling self-conscious, I kept my eyes on the floor. She was standing so close to me that her chest nearly touched mine. I felt her lifting up the hair on either side of my face. She smiled. ‘I know, that’s what I’ll do.’ To my relief she let go, but only to pick up some hairpins lying on the table. Then she began to pin up my hair, quickly and firmly. Moments later, she was cupping my chin in her callused hand and turning my face to the side. I felt her eyes sizing me up. Probably a welcome change from Soldering and Epoxying, anyway, I thought, clenching every muscle in my body.
‘My lovely Lucy,’ she said softly.
Duco, by the cooker, whistled through his teeth.
Ludo said, ‘The boys had better stay home.’
My mother made a few more adjustments. ‘It looks really darling like that. Go take a look at yourself in the mirror.’
The way they were all beaming at me was embarrassing. I ran into the icy bathroom. I saw at once that she was right. My hair looked really good like that. I looked like a girl in a magazine. So that’s the way my mother wanted me to look; this was the Lucy she wanted. The elated grin vanished. The last time anyone had messed with my hair, I had fallen for it too. I’d believed Vanessa and her friends; I had really thought—what an imbecile!—that everyone would start being normal to me again once I changed the way I looked. In a frenzy, I began pulling out the hairpins. The hair fluffed down along my cheeks, shiny from the brushing. I braided it into two plaits again, as tightly and stiffly as I could. Iola liked it that way.
‘Oh,’ said Ludo, when I came back into the kitchen.
My mother said nothing.
I burst out, indignant, ‘Yeah, really! There’s no way I can go around looking like that!’
‘It looked good on you, though,’ said Duco.
‘What do you know about it, anyway? You of all people! Look around—nobody wears their hair up out here. What did you think—in this shitty wind? Do you really think you can walk around in a fancy hairdo in a gale? Dream on!’
‘Cool it, Lucy,’ he warned.
‘You want me looking like an idiot, don’t you! So that people will wonder, Is she a little cuckoo, or something? Because who wears their hair that way, in this weather? The hairpins will blow away the moment you step out!’
‘Nobody wants you to go around looking like an idiot,’ said my mother. ‘Why would we?’
‘That’s right,’ said Ludo, ‘why would we?’
‘Couldn’t you stick up for me just once for a change?’ I was fighting back tears. The traitor!
‘But you do have a point, about the wind,’ said my mother.
‘You said it!’ I cried, all discombobulated. ‘See? She said it, too! And when she’s the one saying it, you believe her, don’t you!’
‘What, exactly, are we talking about now?’ Duco asked in a put-upon tone.
‘That you always believe her!’ The words exploded from my mouth like bullets, but they flew right over the Luducos’ heads. They did hit my mother, however. ‘Okay, enough of this nonsense,’ she snapped. ‘We’re going to have lunch now. Why don’t you set the table.’
‘But surely nobody’s denying that it can be extremely windy here,’ said Ludo, apparently trying to pick up the thread again. ‘It’s what the Hebrides are known for. Everyone knows …’
‘Oh, stop it,’ said my mother.
She had brought me here on purpose, to this windy island, where it was always just as stormy as it had been that terrible night. So that I’d be constantly reminded of that other stormy night. And also of the fact that we two were forever sworn to silence. Not only did I have the power to crush her with a single word; she could also destroy me the exact same way.
Over the next several days I was kept on my toes by a host of self-imposed penances that made life pretty difficult. I had to jump through all kinds of hoops in order to comply with them without attracting too much attention.
I cleared off and just wandered around the island without any particular goal or plan in mind. At Callanish, little blue flowers that looked too delicate to survive came poking out of the ground, as the death-defying broom put forth its first plucky blossoms. I discovered several new rock-strewn bays, but everywhere it seemed to be the same story: the sea battering the beach with the same dumb, stubborn force; the same scrawny birds running along the shoreline on their tall, spindly legs, furiously pecking at the sand; and the same danger of getting trapped in the mudflats’ quicksand. I almost lost a boot in it, once.
One morning I spied Rowan and Iola in front of their cottage. Rowan was balancing the baby on the gate. I waved, but neither of them saw me. I stood there watching them until they went back inside, back to the cold cooker and the stinky bucket in the corner. Knowing how they lived in there made me feel a part of their lives, as if we had known one another intimately for the longest time.
And every day when I got home, just before the school let out, I’d find my mother in what she now called ‘the vegetable garden’ but which was still just a boggy piece of ground. She dug and turned the soil as if she never got tired. She was going to plant the radishes over here, and over there, the potatoes. And then she’d wipe her hands on her blue jeans, pick up her hatchet, and spend a couple of hours cutting peat. When I saw her striding across the moor, it struck me that, with all the fresh air and exercise, she was rapidly getting back to her former shape, although with a difference—not quite as slender, not as soft. She looked a bit like a tree buffeted by the wind, sturdy and unbending.
From my window lookout I kept a close watch on the comings and goings of the peat-cutting families, who got started every day around four o’clock, when their work was done. Rowan was never with them. I was dying to tell her that I’d gladly babysit for Iola any afternoon, but was terrified that doing so would immediately create an Iola-taboo, once the other penances noticed that that one would hurt me the most.
I had tea with Lude and Duke, who’d come downstairs for a brief break, oblivious. I seemed to be the only one who noticed that my mother and Iain were deep in conversation by one of the drainage ditches they had excavated together. Iain had his hands raised to the sky and my mother was shaking her head.
‘Don’t you think it’s time Mum started drawing again?’ I asked, slicing the fruitcake. ‘It isn’t fair, you men having to earn all the money.’
Duco said she had a lot of catching up to do.
Ludo pulled me toward him by my plait and started tickling me in the ribs.
But I wouldn’t play along.
A few days later—it had been raining buckets all day long, but now a pale sun had broken through—I found her waiting for me at the gate with a big orange kite. The exact same kind as the one in the drawing she’d made for me in Stornoway, I noticed immediately.
‘Look, Lucy!’ she whooped, barring my way. ‘It’s suddenly occurred to me that the wind is good for something after all.’
First the business with my hair, and now this; surely she wasn’t trying to make up for all the lost years? But Mrs Iedema used to tell us that every new day gave us a fresh chance to be a good person, so I let her thrust the spindle into my hand.
‘Isn’t it great?’ My mother smiled at me.
When I still refused to answer, she walked onto the moor with long strides, dragging the kite along by its bridle.
Caught off guard, I remained by the gate as the string started whirring, unspooling rapidly in my hand. She had used a rolling pin from the kitchen as a winder, the kind of thing only she would think of. Suddenly the string was taut. ‘Ho, stop!’ I called; I couldn’t help it.
The string between us was stretched so tight that I felt it humming. Every movement my mother made was transmitted along the string to me, as through an umbilical cord. Then she let go of the kite.
It shot up into the cloud-streaked sky like a comet, with such a strong tug that the rolling pin was nearly yanked out of my hands. I clutched the handles tightly and tried to let out some line. The kite was already up as high as it would go, right over my head; if I didn’t watch out, it would flip over. Its pull was as strong as a team of oxen. I was standing on tiptoe; my arms were just about getting pulled out of their sockets.
‘Can you hold on?’ Stumbling over the rutted ground, my mother came racing back to where I stood. She slung an arm round my waist just as I felt myself being lifted off the ground, and lunged for the spindle with the other hand. ‘No, don’t!’ I screamed. The kite promptly began to flounder. It’s sometimes possible to reel in the slack as it plunges, but not with someone pulling at you. I began hauling in the limp line as if my life depended on it; hand over hand, I towed it in. ‘Start winding!’ I yelled, my eyes fixed on the line flopping back and forth in a big loop. When I was little, we’d sometimes send a message on a piece of paper up into the sky along with the kite. One time I wished for reindeer mittens, and the next night, when I went to bed, I found a pair on my pillow. They must have blown in through the open window, Mummy said.
As I clawed the string in, hand over hand, she rewound it swiftly onto the spool. Slowly but surely the string stretched tight again. I snatched the spool out of her hand and started running in order to make the kite catch the wind again. Okay, let it out slowly now. The kite began climbing obediently. It rose, nice and diagonal, and without any abrupt jerks. It ended up so perfectly steady, high up in the sky, that it seemed to be pinned to that cloud up there with a pushpin.
My mother came and stood next to me.
I could hardly speak, bursting with pride. ‘You gave it too much line, at first,’ I managed. ‘They zoom like rockets when you do that.’
‘Oh, was that what went wrong? Strange though, you wouldn’t think a person could forget how to fly a kite, would you? Oh well, well done.’
Together we gazed up at the sky.
‘Do you like it?’
I nodded.
After a while, she asked, ‘Are you starting to feel at home here?’
‘Yeah, it’s okay.’
‘And have you met any nice kids yet?’
I launched into an enthusiastic description of Iola. About that darling little skull of hers, not much bigger than an upside-down teacup, and how happy she’d been, sitting in the bucket. Once she got me started, I could hardly stop.
She coughed. ‘Okay, but what about kids your own age? Have you met any?’
‘Not yet, but I’m in no hurry.’
‘Lucy …’ She hesitated. ‘Listen, it isn’t good for you to be by yourself all the time. We need other people, so that our own thoughts don’t start to drive us crazy.’ She looked at me out of the corner of her eye.
The kite needed all my attention just then.
‘There’s no reason on earth why anyone would want to make your life miserable out here. That’s another reason we moved, you know. To give you a fresh start.’
I felt her hand on my neck. With her rough fingers she started rubbing the little hollow in my neck, between my two plaits. ‘You never confessed to the boys how bad it was for you at school, did you?’
‘Oh, it wasn’t that bad,’ I said, agitated. Next thing, she was going to say, ‘Is this what I went to prison for? So that you could make an even bigger mess of your life?’ I gave the string an unnecessary tug.
‘Were you afraid that … er … bad things would happen if Ludo and Duco knew how badly you were getting teased?’
I bit my lip. I started hauling in the kite.
‘Oh, not yet! Hand it over, if you don’t feel like it anymore. Oh, look, up there, a rainbow!’
On Lewis you could see a rainbow at least sixty times a day.
‘I think that rainbow ends right at Iola’s cottage. Oh, by the way’—her voice changed—‘you should never give toffees to a little tot, you know. Rowan was quite upset, Iain told me.’
‘But she said I could come back another time!’ I cried. I’d thought Rowan hadn’t noticed me digging the stringy toffee out of Iola’s throat in the nick of time, just before she walked in the door. Maybe she’d been peeking in the window, to make sure I was doing everything exactly to her liking.
‘Are you sure you understood what she told you?’
‘Yes, Mum, I swear!’
‘That, by the way, is another reason you should be making friends with other children, to improve your English. The fastest way to pick up a language is by speaking it. Then you don’t run the risk of any misunderstandings.’
I was almost sobbing, ‘I swear, it’s true, she said I could come back and babysit Iola anytime.’
She pinched my neck. That meant she would help me. She’d go to Rowan and tell her I knew how to get a huge kite to fly even in the worst kind of weather—so, if there was anyone you could trust with a baby, it was me. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘here comes Iain. Let’s talk it over with him.’ She let go of me. ‘Iain!’ she called.
And then it dawned on me that I’d been tricked. She had distracted me on purpose, so that I’d forget what time it was. Because it was four o’clock; people were suddenly swarming onto the fen from all directions. They were all gazing up at the kite dancing in the wind, and then they all looked down and straight at me, caught like a fish on the end of my mother’s line.