Much turned up within a gannet’s nest.
In his time out on the stacs, MacQueen had found an ancient arrow-head, a grubby lace handkerchief and a brass sun-dial (‘Useless in this part of the world,’ old Gillies had declared). Each one had somehow been skimmed off the surface of the waves; the birds diving from cloud to scoop up the item floating on the water or lodged, perhaps, in a crack in one of the rocks below in its beak. Yet the strangest discovery of all was the stained red coat draped on a ledge of the cliff-face, a few sticks laid on top of it for a makeshift nest. He had wrapped it round his waist after finding it there, showing the piece of clothing to all he came across when he came ashore.
‘Look at what I’ve found,’ he declared. ‘Wonder how on earth that got there…’
* * *
‘Red Riding Hood,’ Little Alexina declared when her father turned up, brandishing it in her fingers. ‘After she got away from the wolf…’
Her love of the story had been growing since the time she overheard the grown-ups whispering about where they might be able to go after they left the island.
‘They’re promising us jobs in the forestry scheme…’ she had overheard her father saying.
‘Whereabouts is that?’
‘In Argyll.’
‘And what will we do there? I’ve never even seen a real tree. Just pictures of them. They look like overgrown cabbages.’
‘Work there. Plant them. Chop them down.’
Her father shrugged his shoulders. ‘And how do you do that?’
Alexina had her own ideas of what the islanders might do there. She pictured her father like the wood-cutter in the story, using his blade to cut open the wolf that had swallowed Grandma whole. ‘You could learn to be wolf-killers,’ she said.
The rest smiled, wondering how these thoughts had come into her head.
‘She reads a lot. Spends most of her nights wasting fulmar oil, her nose stuffed in a book.’
‘She’s got an excellent imagination.’
But Alexina continued to believe in the truth of her story. There were wolves in the forest, beasts capable of gulping up any children that might appear on their path. The coat was proof of that – all the dangers that might be waiting for them on the mainland when they left. She might be walking to school when this creature came upon her. Smiling, it would show the sharpness of its teeth.
‘All the better to greet you with,’ it would say…
* * *
Mairead caressed it with her fingers, touching its buttons, brushing the label ‘McNamara Tailoring’ stitched within. Taking it into the privacy of her house, she waltzed with the grimy garment pressed against her, performing her own demented version of the Charleston and Military Two Step she had read about in some of the books that made their way to their shore. After he had overheard some of the women speaking about these dances, the missionary had even gone so far as to condemn them from his pulpit. They were both ‘evil and wicked, a temptation to the flesh’.
She lowered the coat, looking at it through the light of the fire. As flames flickered through the fabric, she imagined how she might be transformed if she wore a coat like this. Her small dumpy form might exude sex; the glances of men constantly shifting in her direction. It was a type of clothing she had never worn before, being all the time garbed in black, shapeless dresses and plain blouses, her only dash of colour a tartan shawl. She loved the luxury of its colour, this shade beside her skin.
It was all too much. She pictured the extravagant gestures of the rich and decadent woman who had first worn this coat. Not for her the creel tight and heavy on her back. Not for her the whirl of puffin feathers as she plucked that bird. Instead, there were nights when on the sands of the west coast of Scotland, she had cast off her coat, leaving it on the edge of the sea. After that there was the unpinning of her long river of hair, the removal of garments till she was wrapped instead in the arms of her lover stretched beside her, his skin as naked and shivering as her own.
And as they lay there together on the sand, the tide crept in, stealing the red coat from the shore.
* * *
The church elder Neil MacDonald saw it as a sign of other dangers, an omen of all the hazards waiting if they ever stepped on the mainland. For years he had scoured the pages of the Bible in the hope of coming across such warnings, coming across one in Chapter 17 of the Book of Revelations where St John the Divine warned of the arrival of a woman sitting on a scarlet-coloured beast, one that possessed seven heads and ten horns.
‘And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abomination…’
He saw it as yet more evidence of how the world outside the island threatened and menaced the community. If they ever stepped from its shores, they would be menaced and overwhelmed by its evil.
‘It’s yet another reason we should stay,’ he declared.
* * *
‘Macnamara… Macnamara…’ The words on the label chimed through Morag’s head. ‘The son of the sea’, it translated as, or so the schoolmaster had told them.
She recalled how similar words had been used to comfort her when she had been informed that her own eldest son had slipped and fallen from the crags.
‘He belongs to God now,’ Uilleam had told her, ‘God and the sea.’
She hated him saying it, imagining his blood spilling out into its waters, colouring the depths.
* * *
It was the missionary who persuaded them to give the coat to the captain of the first vessel who visited the island the following year.
‘It may be something the police are looking for. It could belong to a child who’s gone missing.’
MacQueen trembled. The thought had never occurred to him before.
‘Yes. Of course…’
He handed it over to the missionary, watching as his fingers placed it in the bottom of an old feather sack. He watched the old man lift it, marvelling at the lightness and fragility of the life that must have worn it at one time.
‘It won’t be long till a ship comes to land. We can hand it over then.’
‘That might be a good idea.’
He thought about that coat incessantly till the morning the ‘Marquess’ came into the bay, recalling the touch of the fabric, the label within, the little girl that might have been wrapped tight in it. He watched as the missionary gave it to the captain; the pair of them standing near the feather-store while the bag was passed between their fingers. The captain took it and stood there with the bag in his hands, folded behind his back, nodding occasionally as the passengers went by, making their way to Conachair or crowding into the graveyard with its collection of stones edging their way through the weave of grass.
His own children lay below some of them.
Time and time again, the same thing had occurred to them. His wife, Catriona had strained and buckled, bringing them into the world. There had been six of them; two boys, four daughters. After a few days of life, their breath had faded and faltered, their souls ‘going over’ into darkness. A few muffled words had been muttered over their bodies as they had been laid to rest.
He suddenly thought of the couple who might have lost their child, sending her out one day wrapped in her new red coat – courtesy of ‘McNamara Tailoring’ – and never seeing her any more. Perhaps she had gone down to the shoreline or the harbour. Perhaps she had braved a nearby cliff. Perhaps, too, she had gone out to the shops, clutching a penny to buy sweets for herself.
And then what might have happened? He did not know, for all a thousand thoughts and theories crammed his mind. She might have fallen off the end of a pier somewhere. She could have slipped on seaweed, falling off a rock. Perhaps someone had killed her, that red coat drawing a murderer’s attention as she skipped and danced through the main street of a town. Perhaps…
It was to stop these thoughts tormenting him that he decided to walk towards the captain as he stood there, ordering the crew around as they unloaded the boat. He watched the tea they had come to value being brought to shore. Sugar. A length or two of timber. Nails. New ropes for the cliffs.
‘You will let us know,’ he stammered. ‘You will tell us what happened.’
The captain’s face looked bemused when he saw the islander in front of him. His forehead became a ripple of waves. His white beard did not conceal the way his mouth was gaping.
‘About what?’ he barked.
‘About the red coat. I’m the one who found it, out there on the crags. If the police find out anything about it, can you let us know?
‘Oh, that…’
‘I’d like to know.’
‘Of course I’ll tell you. I’ll be giving it to the police when I get to Oban.’
‘Good, good. I’d be worried otherwise.’
‘Fine,’ the captain nodded, his attention back on his cargo once again.
MacQueen strolled away, certain he had made a good case for himself. It would not be too long till he heard about what had happened to the girl whose red coat he had discovered that day. Not that long at all.
It was not a thought with which he consoled himself for long. It troubled him throughout the winter, times like when he heard the missionary delivered a sermon about Joseph and his brightly coloured coat, how his brothers had attacked him, stripping the cloth from his back and selling him to a group of merchants (‘Agus thubhairt iad ri cheile, Feuch, tha an t-aislingiche so a’ teachd…’). He wondered if perhaps the girl’s brothers and sisters had come together to punish their father’s chosen one, throwing both her and the coat into waves once they had punished her.
Or the time when they lost the next child Catriona carried into life; the sight of that red garment coming back to him as they lowered another daughter into the earth.
He edged up to the missionary when the worship was over, whispering his question: ‘Have you heard anything about the red coat?’
‘No. No. No…’
‘Nothing in the papers?’
‘Not a word.’
‘You’d think they’d let us know…’
He directed the same words to the fishermen who began arriving on the island the following spring. They would shrug in response. One or two even smirked and giggled at the notion that someone from the mainland would know about a red coat.
‘You’ve no idea how big the world is out there, have you? Not a bloody clue.’
He’d pause when he passed the graveyard, thinking of the children he had laid out there. He could recall all their names – Morag, Effie, Iain, Angus, Catriona – and the despair he had felt at the sudden end to life. Cradling each one in his hands, he had grieved over their stillness, the inevitable way in which the earth had stolen them away from him. It was hard enough to cope with that emptiness when the child had not yet stirred from the cradle or the womb. What must it be like to see one stepping to school or shore one morning and never see them again? Small wonder that the day Joseph had gone missing, his father Jacob had torn his clothes, put on sackcloth, and refused to be comforted. MacQueen himself would go down to the grave in mourning for his lost sons and daughters, the legacy that would not survive his own life-span.
The day came when the ‘Marquis’ arrived. MacQueen watched the visitors making their way along Main Street, fingering the goods on display outside their homes. One or two took pictures of the island women sitting at their spinning wheels, the rhythm of feet magicking thread out of air. A number of the braver ones scattered, heading outwards the Camber, wanting to see the Lover’s Stone, Mistress Stone, the birds skirling through the air. They paused as they passed the graveyard, looking over its walls at the rough stones that marked the island’s missing sons and daughters.
It was then that he saw the Captain walking along the pier where the boat had been tied. MacQueen ran to catch up with him, his feet stumbling in his hurry, swerving from side to side to dodge the tea-chests and timber that had been unloaded. Breathless, he stood before his quarry, stammering out his question
‘What happened about the red coat?’
‘Sorry?’
‘The red coat. Did the police find out anything about it?’
‘About what?’
MacQueen noticed it then – a fragment of red cloth in the hands of one of the vessel’s engineers as he made his way along the dock. Stained with oil and grime, he knew right away what had happened to the coat he had found in the gannet’s nest.
‘You forgot about it, didn’t you?’ he shouted, ‘A child – and you didn’t even do anything about it. Did you? Did you?’