Elizabeth could never forgive her husband for the way their son, Alexander Junior, reacted to the presence of eggs.
His fear of them was apparent even when he walked down a supermarket aisle. He would shield himself when he saw yellow cartons labelled with the words ‘Cheery Eggs’; recoil when he came across grey boxes with the brand-name ‘Nicelay’ scrolled on top.
‘It’s all your father’s fault,’ she would say, ‘He’s responsible for this.’
She remembered how it had happened. Her husband used to spend much of his weekends looking for crops of seabird eggs that clustered around the small harbour near where they lived. He would take them home in shopping bags, boiling them up in a small pan and setting them out before his children on the kitchen table.
‘They’re all free range,’ he’d grin, ‘None of that rubbish battery stuff.’
Both Neil and Flora had been content with all this. They could tolerate the slightly salty taste of the eggs these expeditions produced for their breakfast; the odd fleck of blood they sometimes found within the yolk, signs of an embryonic fledgling about to take shape. It was, however, unfortunate that it was neither of these children who discovered the membrane of a fulmar chick inside an egg-shell. Instead, it was their young brother, Alexander. He turned over the beginnings of that bird with his spoon, glimpsing shadows of tiny wings, a beak, a feather in its unfinished form. A moment or two later and he was sick, vomiting over the kitchen floor.
‘You would never have got off with that back on the island,’ his father declared. ‘There would have been no end to the teasing you suffered.’
After that, however, he tried his best to persuade Alexander Junior to enjoy the taste of these eggs. He mixed them occasionally with eggs bought from the supermarket, bringing them to the house in cartons marked with the words ‘Joyful Yokes’, ‘Happy Lay’ and ‘Goodyellas’. Sometimes he would mix chicken-eggs, duck-eggs and seabird-eggs in the most amazing recipes; ‘fulmar pancakes’; ‘seagull quiche’; ‘tern omelette’; ‘scrambled black-headed gull eggs’. At other times, he would play little jokes and jests on the young boy, removing the top of the egg and putting it carefully back in place, watching as Alexander Junior swung his spoon, scalping an empty piece of shell, watching it scuttle over the floor…
On one occasion Alexander Senior filled the empty shell with fulmar oil he had squeezed carefully from the throat of a bird on a cliff-edge. At its centre, there was a burning wick he had lit a short time before. He had placed the egg, warm and luminous, on the kitchen table, grinning as his son lifted up the spoon once again, breaking it open to see the strange light flickering within.
‘They used to play that trick all the time on the island,’ he chuckled. ‘It gave us such a warm glow it stayed with us for days.’
Alexander was largely okay in public until they unveiled a statue of a seabird in the town square. The moment he saw it, he took off his shoes and socks, clambering up sandstone to try and wrench it off its plinth, wrestling sculpted wings, chipping away with the edge of his hand at its feet. When he failed to do this, his fists drummed against its head, screaming with disappointment.
‘It isn’t real!’ he shouted, ‘It isn’t real!’
The following day, he was found sitting on the concrete model of an upturned boat that was found in the middle of one of the town’s main roundabouts. He was babbling about the island he had left years before, mentioning the sheep that had grazed around the doors and cleits, the waves a short distance away, the seabirds that had whirled and squawked around his head.
‘I want to go back there…’ he declared, ‘I want to go home.’
In the pocket of his wife’s dressing gown, Alexander found a note Elizabeth had clearly written in a hurry one morning.
‘As a child, Alexander grew up in a remote, isolated island where – according to himself – he spent many happy, carefree days. They were times he relived again and again in long, interminable conversations where he often spoke about the virtues and benefits of eating seabird eggs and feasting on their flesh. There was, for instance, the time he held a visiting politician spellbound by the rhapsodies he went into one wet Saturday afternoon during an election campaign, describing the delights of plunging his fingers into a sack of fulmar feathers and then letting them fall like giant snowflakes on his face. Needless to say, that particular politician has never attempted to win his family’s votes since that time. Instead, he has sent his opponents in the direction of Alexander’s home, telling them that some of their most fervent supporters lived there.
In his later life, this form of behaviour became more and more of a trial to his wife, Elizabeth. She bore the full brunt of his increasingly eccentric monologues and antics; his two children having, on medical advice, flown from their perch many years before.
In order to obtain a well-merited break from all his ramblings, Elizabeth decided to organise a long overdue visit to Ireland, the land where her distant relatives hailed from. During their time there, they visited the many natural and man-made attractions found in that country. These included the Giant’s Causeway, Mountains of Mourne, Ulster History and both Shankill and Falls Road; the last two locations were, she decided, both havens of peace compared with all she had put up with over the last decade or two.
Her visit culminated with a visit to the Cliffs of Moher in the far west of Ireland. In scale and size, these heights rivalled those found on the island Alexander had left many years before. Once again, he spoke lyrically about their wonders, speaking this time to an American tourist who wore a dark suit, dark glasses and carried – not unusually in that part of the world – a fiddle case in his hand. While he was listening to Alexander’s monologue, he suddenly and inexplicably removed a Thompson submachine gun (m3a1 version) and let loose a round or two of spontaneous, sudden gunfire in the direction of the speaker, killing him outright and depositing him over the edge of the cliff. It is said that a pair of gannets passing the scene dipped their wings in respect of the passing of one of their most respected former hunters.
Rumours that Elizabeth hired this hit-man at a cut-price, cut-throat rate are hotly denied by the family, who claim to be instead in mourning and shock over the loss of such a well-regarded husband and father. Allegations, too, that the sound of hysterical laughter has emerged time and time again at indecent intervals from the household have also been utterly refuted by all concerned …’
When Alexander read this note, he crumpled, remembering that Elizabeth had been going on for ages about visiting her long-lost relatives in Northern Ireland. She had also been talking for even longer about going to see the Cliffs of Moher.