Mairi Bhan

This is a meeting that took place in Billy Forsyth’s. That’s a bakery but I went in there for mushrooms. Everything in Prestos or Safeways, or whatever the hell Liptons was called these days, was pre-packed in big quantities. The ones on the bottom would be liquid by the time you reached them. Running away through the drainage holes in the package. Forsyth’s hasn’t changed much. Don’t go looking for that name on the sign, though. It never said that. It was always Hugh Matheson’s. Same way Calum Sgianach’s had a sign that said Malcolm MacLean’s, but you probably knew that.

You know how it is, though. You always buy something else as well and they’d started to do rye bread. But I’ve got this vice. Maybe you share it, I don’t know. Maybe these quirks you hide because you think you’re the only one and it turns out every second cove is afflicted by the same thing. I can’t avoid looking into other people’s shopping baskets.

The queue is going down, getting nearer the till and your eyes are in there before you know it. This one had red and green peppers. I was looking for a jar of olives, thinking she was going to make pizza but there wasn’t any and no aubergine, though they’d been on offer, at a price. So it didn’t look like ratatouille, either. Maybe some colour for the winter salads. That tied in with all these mixer drinks, the ginger ale and tonic and other things you wouldn’t want to drink on their own.

My eyes must have lifted for clues then because the beret caught me. Decent wool, but it was the angle. You can only call it panache. It had to be Mairi Bhan. She always had style. My mates couldn’t see it. She was kind of petite but the wit was fast off the mark. Of course her hair was nearly black which was why she had the Gaelic nickname for ‘fair’. Short and wavy. But of course she was a year or two down the school and that was called babysnatching.

I was right back there. Something in her touch at the back of your neck, under the revolving reflective ball, with Whiter Shade Of Pale still lingering. Getting off with her at the SY YMCA.

And Fleetwood Mac before the boy Green got fat. Because I Need Your Love So Bad. And the walk to the lane up by the hostel. Which could get crowded on disco nights. It wasn’t a long walk but there was that one aberration of hers, the platform soled boots, which made it kind of slow. When she lost her own judgments to the pressures of marketing.

There was also a limit, though, in how fast I could walk, arm around Mairi, towards that lane. You might think twenty-six-inch flares, bought from an advert in Sounds, were enough for anybody. No but you could expand them by cutting the side gussets at the outside and sewing in an offcut of something else. A flash of colour to sweep and swirl from the black cotton. Flapping like hell on a course up Church Street.

There was a lot of sighing in the lane. It was a bit distracting hearing other people’s noises and wondering how far they were going. But then her tongue would get past my teeth like it was shoving them out of the way, roots and all, and I’d hold her and hug her. I liked her. Her nose. Her earlobes out from her curly hair, not the fashion of the day.

‘Garyvard. Hell, I could just about call in and see her by boat. Get hold of the Dangler’s launch and get hold of a mate and that was us sorted.’

‘Not quite m’atal. I’m going to be in Carloway for the holidays. Staying with my grannie. We take it turn about. My mother’s a Siarach.’

So she was a Siarach-Lochie cross, just like my olman.

‘Carloway. Loch Roag. Hell, that’s round the top. The Butt of Lewis,’ I said.

‘Or through the Sound of Harris’.

‘That’s worse. The Board of Trade will never let us take the boat outside Lewis Territorial Waters.’

But I’d see her at the Carloway dance all right. End of term, everything seems possible. How the hell was I going to get from town out there? I knew a few guys who could get hold of a car. But none of them wanted to go west on a Saturday night. Buses didn’t go that way after five p.m. and didn’t come back till the Monday morning. A cab was possible. The poaching money would have stretched that far. Kenny F took a cab to Brenish, once. End of the road. Then the girl wouldn’t see him. Or her father wouldn’t let her see him.

But I’d spent my share of the salmon money on Levi’s Originals. My olman thought I’d gone daft, sitting in the bath with them on. Shrink to fit. Took me two days to get the dye off the enamel. Then he’d caught me taking the scrubbing brush to them, against the roughcast. First time he’d seen me cleaning anything, he says. Maybe he shouldn’t moan.