The day Aram was released from Dungavel, after nearly five years without counsel or trial, he walked ten kilometres to get a milkshake. For weeks he had been thinking only of that thick dairy, the suck it took to earn the drink. He supposed it was a kind of perverse reach back to childhood, a substitute for a mother’s comfort. His own mother was in Sketimini, wherever that was – she had once pointed to it on a map, vaguely, and brushed him off when he’d asked her to point again – if she was still living at all. He had not heard. Anyway, she had never fed him from her breast. When he was very young, she had diluted the milk of their Highland goats with saltwater, while his father was at sea, shackled in the hold of some trawler.
Aram had not had many visitors to the castle. Only Euna, chaste and handsome Euna, and two or three of his other womenfolk. Though she had only visited once, a disastrous scene, Euna had never drifted far from his thoughts. He hallowed her. He wanted her. Even after she sent him that shocking postcard, a sketch of his own son with the note: Lachlan Iain Macbay. Born the first of October. Mother and mother and baby healthy.
In the first restaurant he found by the road, dingy but generously dotted with booths and tables, he chose a cramped stool at the counter. The stool was directly beside that of the only other patron, an older woman with a cherubic face, wiry, retreating hair, a lower half spilling well over the stool’s rim. On the sandwich board was a single flavour of milkshake, malted. A repulsive vinegar, the only condiment to be offered in the detention centre. But his craving was such that want trumped reason, and he ordered the shake. The woman slapped a few pounds onto the counter before he could pull out his slim money clip. Looks like you could use it, she said, with a smoker’s chuckle.
What a gift from a princess like you, Aram said.
The woman propped herself on an elbow and leaned in so that when she spoke, she grazed his stubble. Having double- and triple-bunked in the castle, he was most comfortable this close to others. Pressed like domestic creatures. No room for the holy ghost. You in a rough spot, sailor? the woman asked.
You could say that, he said, with a little grin. He knew he was a bit unkempt, not having showered or shaved in weeks, but he was sure his allure ran deeper than hair grease and grey sideburns.
I’m Fenella, she said. We’ve never met, which means you’re not from around here. And I like that. You haven’t seen my laundry on the line.
I like a bit of dirt every now and then, he said.
She flushed red. Though the years of being held without trial had been dismal, soul-dimming, they now offered him one advantage. He was not on parole. He was free without condition, and he could roam from home to home. He would call his womenfolk soon, at least those whose numbers he could remember, but in the meantime, it would do no harm to milk a few pounds from a kind stranger.
A television in the corner was showing a broadcast split into quarters, each with a splinter of the news. It seemed a new world had been forged in the five years he’d spent inside. The United Kingdom had been tabled and redrawn. His first thought was of Gainntir, of Muireall’s face the time he came to see Euna and she instead opened the door. The face had been stiff. So full of fear the actual skin had hardened, as in a mask.
His shake came, and he drank it down without pause. When he was finished, Fenella asked, Shall we go back to my shack?
He hoped she was ribbing him. But he had learned in this charming part of the country never to assume. By all means, he said.
I’ll get my mare, she said, as she went out the door. Again, he could not read her deadpan.
But indeed, as he gathered his trousers around him, which had become loose and unsuitable during his time at the castle, he heard the whinnying of a horse. Before heading out, he palmed some sachets of syrup and a set of cutlery. He was obeying his father’s adage: only a fool goes off on a stranger’s horse without some syrup in his pocket. Or some slight variation. The sachets and utensils went into a rucksack he had been awarded on his way out of Dungavel, though, with its blue tint, red stripe, and star, it clearly belonged to one of the men from the DRC. The guards had not seemed bothered.
Out front Aram was gratified to see, in newly pouring rain, his new friend Fenella. She sat on the grey mare with her head dramatically thrown back, looking as if she were going to erupt into an aria. With his waistband in one hand, he climbed onto the horse behind her. She smacked the horse’s flank and together they cantered down the road.
*
She had not been joking about the shack. Fenella lived in one room, without plumbing, and with only an occasional lurch of electricity from a small windmill. Her place was no larger than the Salmon Company hut had been, and it was certainly far more crammed. Inside were at least five hundred books, stacked to the ceiling in pilasters. The shack, not far from the shoulder of the road, was bounded by rows of wych elms. A single wildfire would have razed her whole realm.
So, she said. I like a man to cook for me and then read one of these books out loud in one sitting. I like when a voice gets hoarse from too much reading. So you must keep going, no matter what. I’ll pay you.
And sex?
Not really my thing, she said.
He had never cooked, and though he would never admit it to any of his womenfolk, he could only read at a rudimentary level. In the castle he had learned by reading the Bible, both in the worship group he had joined and on his own. That book had kept him sensible. If only he had discovered it before Euna came, maybe he could have shown her a forgivable version of himself.
There was a scratching at the shack door, a small set of claws raking up and down the wood. I have a pet, she said. Are you allergic?
He shook his head. He had never met anyone with a pet. Farm animals, of course, but never an impractical thing, kept as a companion. Fenella opened the door and in came a little mutt, no higher than Aram’s knee. The dog had a bird in his mouth that looked to be a crow, and he whiffed of the wet. Aram kept his distance from the dirty creature. He had grown too thin to get sick.
What’s your name, then? she asked.
Aram.
I like to change his all the time, she said, to keep him on his paws. Do you mind if I call him Aram for a while?
Aram had lost sight of the world for half a decade, sure, but this particular favour did not seem polite. Anyway, it didn’t matter whether it was polite, because he did not like it. He simply said no.
She happily accepted his no. And the rest of what I said? she asked.
He had ten pounds in his pocket and a mental Rolodex, but nothing more. He wanted the woman’s money. Yes, princess, I’ll read to you. But you’ll have to pay me a hundred pounds a day.
Seriously? Get over yourself, Aram.
I’m a man with needs.
She thought about it for a while, absently petting the mutt’s head as she did. I’ll name him New Covenant, she said. You’ll take fifty pounds a day, no more, and I’ll teach you how to improve your reading.
How’d you get so rich? he thought to ask. And then, How’d you know I have trouble reading?
Inventor, she said. And you are a completely transparent man. You may as well have glass for skin.
And so it was that Aram found himself, a few hours later, peppering a pot of baked beans while Fenella reclined on a deeply grooved armchair, book in lap, waiting for him to finish. The woman had little in her fridge and pantry, and all he could find to supplement the beans was some tinned salmon. Now the sight of that pink tint disgusted him, having been linked to it for so many working years. But he wanted to do right by Fenella, who, for all her peculiarities, seemed genuinely to care for him. Baked beans alone made for a sad supper. They’d been given better meals in the castle.
So he prepared the dish as beautifully as he could, in her choice rice bowl. It was hand-painted with the likeness of her dog, in the manner of a royal portrait, the mutt even wearing a bustier. Aram’s mother had taught him to paint when he was young, and together they had mixed the dyes using iris root, sundew, peat soot, all collected on strolls through the Highlands, mother and son, preparing to make potions. His favourite part had been peeing in a jar, or collecting the goats’ pee in one, so they could use the urine as a fixative.
After they had been displaced by his father’s death from Scotland, and created a life for themselves on the sea – his mother insisted no country would welcome her, and she refused for obscure reasons to return to Sketimini – she had become creative with her tints. Ultimately she’d settled on red algae, maerl, salmon skin. But being forced from the Highlands, after the sacrifices she had made to get there as a young woman, truly washed her out. Her paintings were bad from then on, made as they were by insecure hands.
He brought the dish to Fenella, who slurped her tongue across her lips to show her appreciation. Where’s yours? she asked.
Oh, he said, I didn’t know that was part of the deal. I just wanted to make sure you were fed.
She rolled her eyes. You fancy yourself some kind of hero, don’t you, she said. Real rough-and-rugged Caledonian. It’s romantic, and it’s nonsense.
Awright, awright, he said, laughing. I’ll have a damn bowl of beans.
They ate together in amicable silence, while the dog licked the salmon tin clean. The beans were rubbish, but at least they were warm. You’re a pretty bad cook, she said, when they were done eating. I should probably have checked before I hired you.
If you think I’m a bad cook, wait ’til you hear me read.
Her laugh turned into a cough. We’ll start out easy, she said, and threw a thick work into his lap. The Hammer of Witches which destroyeth Witches and their heresy as with a two-edged sword.
Are you serious?
I told you I would help. And I will. I love to teach old dogs new tricks.
He opened the book, and already in the first sentence he found two words he could not understand. They seemed old and mouldy, and besides, he did not know any that were not in the Bible. Fenella patted the arm of her chair and he sat there, close to her, while she spoke the words he did not know and waited for him to repeat them several times, until he was comfortable recognizing them. For many hours and pages they followed this routine, until his voice was, as she had desired, hoarse. She did not forbid him to drink water, but he knew how to decipher the wants of womenfolk, so he kept his throat dry.
Very late at night, after hours of this exercise, she said, That’s plenty.
She went to feed and groom her horse while he brushed his teeth with a finger dipped in baking soda, using water from a bucket by the sink. There were separate cots in the shack, each with pillows and a duvet, and he curled into the smaller of them. He had never felt a more comfortable embrace. He listened to Fenella rustling around outside while he drifted toward sleep. He was happy here, in an odd way, and he knew he could hold on to that happiness for a while. But even with his every need met, some part of him remained phantom. Mother and mother and baby healthy. He hid the postcard under his pillow, hoping, as he slept, it would bring dreams of his son.
*
The weeks passed quickly as Aram and Fenella followed this same routine, riding around on her horse during the day, coming home so he could cook and read to her at night, all the while building his nest egg. The books she chose were many and varied: novels of Mishima, Müller, Mahfouz, memoirs of architects, office-bearers, old-world warriors, transcripts of important political meetings, translated screenplays, classical sheet music. Her tastes reflected a woman separate from the world but in love with its every nook and fork, and anything she had, he read. He felt he was receiving some kind of private tutorship, and though Fenella had the diction of a piece of fried cod, she was smart and thoughtful.
Aram found that when he flirted with her, in a way that worked on most women, even chaste and handsome Euna, he was chastised. Playfully, but still. Despite their first encounter, she did not seem interested in his magnetism or his advances. And so he had to find a way to relate to her that did not involve sex or any of its attendant tensions, and in so doing, he felt himself struggling, asking questions of himself that he had never asked.
One evening, as he was closing their novel for the night, he made the mistake of using the sketch of Lachlan Iain as his bookmark.
Who’s that? Fenella asked.
Just a dumb drawing I did, Aram said.
No, she said. That’s a real person.
How did she perceive so much? It was eerie, though mostly annoying. He dog-eared the page they were on and tucked the postcard into his breast pocket, where it belonged. He tried to put the book back into its pilaster, but by driving the spine too hard he caused the whole carefully erected tower to fall.
I’m going to sleep, he said.
Good luck with that, Fenella said.
The cot that had so comfortably embraced him before was oppressive that night, the pillows too full of down, the duvet stale and fusty. He did not dream of Lachlan Iain, as he sometimes did, but of his father. The conditions at sea had been dire, he knew, because his father would return from each fishing mission with gashes and infections, which his mother would clean as best she could with witch hazel and shredded potatoes. The trawler hold was said to be so fetid that fishermen, locked down there as punishment, would often suffocate.
When Aram’s father did not come home, rumours went round that his wounds had gone septic and, to avoid the same fate, the others had thrown him overboard. This was gossip, of course, but still Aram’s mother blamed herself. She had not cleaned the wounds properly. She had let him carry something foul and contagious to sea, where he had died for her sin.
Aram dreamed about his father’s last goodbye. He saw the man’s face in the night, on the deck of the trawler, windblown and brave. Disfigured by a brutal life, but not ill. His father waved from the growing distance and was gone. Aram woke with stunted breath.
You okay, sailor? Fenella asked from across the shack. Sounded like you were choking there.
I’m fine, he said. Then, after a bit more thought, I may need to borrow your horse.
We’ll talk about it in the morning, she said.
He found it hard to believe there would be a morning on the other end of this night. He heard the mutt walking around, and though it normally slept at Fenella’s feet, now the creature came to lick Aram’s fingers. He leaned over the side of the cot and picked up the dog, then let him lie down on the duvet. He climbed under the blanket beside Aram, and though he still reeked, his warm body was a kindness.
In the morning, Fenella made some cowboy coffee and said, without hesitation, This is the part where you leave me.
He had expected her to be forward when she, inevitably, asked him to move on, and she was. Consistency was a gift she had given him. Harder than the loneliness at Dungavel was the arbitrary way rules were applied. You never knew how your actions would be rewarded or punished – the same thing could get you released or sent to ad seg, depending on what the guard had to eat that morning.
Was I that obvious? he asked.
You want to borrow the horse. They always want to borrow the horse when they’re ready to go.
You’re right, of course.
That bookmark. I want you to find your kid. But I can’t give you my mare. I’d be stranded and dead here if I gave her to every man I cared about.
His throat felt tight again. It bothered him that he should have trouble breathing here when he had been fine through five years of inferior air, especially during the dirty protests, during which the other men in his block refused to use the latrine, instead rubbing their excretions on the walls.
If you want, I have an old tricycle. Thought I should pick it up in case a man tried to steal my horse one day.
He smiled. I’ll have to swallow some amount of pride. But I’ll try the damn trike, why not.
Sadness passed briefly across her face. You’ve been my favourite one, she said.
Tug in the gut. He asked for her address. She looked as if he were a bampot for thinking a shack would have a postcode. If it’s all right with you, she said, maybe we can leave this as it was – a lovely episode.
She unlocked the shed for him and produced from it a rusted red tricycle. It was adult-sized, with a wide basket between the back wheels. He did not have enough gear to fill the basket, but he put his rucksack in there, and the syrup, and a few more snacks that Fenella provided for him: salted crisps, gourds in brine, strips of beef jerky. She peeled off many pound notes and tucked them securely into his waistband. Then, maybe most importantly, she put in the basket a feedbag of books.
He gave the horse and the mutt a thumbs-up. These farewells were wearing on him. He had left everyone at the castle without fanfare; that was just how it was done. Now he sat on the saddle of the tricycle and started to ride toward the road. When he reached the shoulder, he heard Fenella call out, Your trousers fit much better now.
The wind picked up and he had to pick up with it. He did not turn. He could not see her charming smile, or the gloam of lamplight through the shack window. He would then have stayed forever. And his child could not be raised by women alone. He knew too well how that went.
*
On the long ride north, Aram kept his mind occupied. He had become remarkably good at that. At Dungavel he had studied Gaelic with one of the dirty protestors, holding his nose as he learned words for flowers, lus-taghte, cuiseag rosan. Now he cycled through all the man had taught him. He would be fluent by the time he reached the Highlands. It was, after all, Euna’s chosen language.
Any time he stopped to rest or ask for help – which he did often, as a man who valued comfort – he tried to use this Gaelic first. To pass as a son of native soil, more Scottish than the Scottish. He was still not a citizen, but if he tried hard to disappear, maybe he could avoid being outed.
He went into a corner shop to ask for a toilet instead of going by the road. Lots of cock’s-foot to piss in, but he was too good for that grass. If a mutt would water it, he would not. Inside the store, he noticed a telephone behind the counter and asked in Gaelic if he could make a few calls. The cashier said, Whit the buck ur ye sayin’?
Aram asked again, this time in English. The man lifted the receiver and hand-dragged it across the counter. Aram turned his back on the man and phoned his womenfolk one at a time. A half dozen picked up. Only a few were happy to hear his voice. With the cashier on the other side of the counter, he could not seduce the cranky ones as he normally would have. He couldn’t recite poetry, or say with gravitas how much he’d missed them, how long his lonely nights had been. He wondered, if the cashier had not been standing there, if God’s presence alone would have stopped him.
Eventually the cashier put a hand on Aram’s shoulder and whipped him around. What’s wi’ aw the callin’? Ye jist gie it ay jail?
Aram had been dialling the church in Pullhair, where he had last seen Aileen, but now he put the phone back into its cradle. You’d think so, he said. I lost my power for a few days and needed to let some friends know I’m doing fine.
Ur ye gonnae buy anythin’?
Not today, Aram said. I just want to use the toilet.
The cashier pointed to a door behind a rack of magazines and a chiller cabinet of drinks. Ower thaur, he said. Dornt flush anythin’ weird doon th’ lavvy.
Aram stopped briefly to thumb through the magazines on his way into the toilet. He had a satisfying piss and rinsed his hands with water. He stepped out of the little room still buttoning his trousers, which did, as Fenella had said, fit him more tightly now. He could barely tuck his clag all the way inside. While he had his head down, a group of teenaged boys hurried up and surrounded him.
There were five in total, four white and one black. They stank and had pocked skin. They punched Aram in the jaw. One kicked him in the back of the head, then struck his right kidney. The clerk stood silently outside the circle, looking a bit shaken. No one at the castle had ever tried to beat Aram, despite his fears of that happening. He would have fought men, but these were not men. He protected the organs he needed and waited for the boys to get tired. They were riled that they couldn’t get a rise from him. Witless fucking cocksplat. Shitgibbon. They spat on his sweater, now sullied with blood. Shunted him onto his knees, knocked a tooth clean from the gum.
One smashed his hand through the chiller cabinet and took out a few cans for his friends. The cashier said, Cannie noo. That’s mah merchandise.
The store went blank. A minute later, the scene appeared again to Aram, but without any depth. When he was these boys’ age he used to fight for money, and it was common for an eye to swell shut like this. Above his one seeing eye were Catherine wheels, a few clear floaters. These kids had hazed his brain and halved his sight. They could have killed him.
Isaiah 56:10. Israel’s watchmen are blind, they all lack knowledge; they are all mute dogs, they cannot bark; they lie around and dream, they love to sleep.
The cashier got a broom from the toilet and swept up the broken glass, then with a wet mop cleaned the gore and drool. The boys seemed to be in light spirits, laughing and grabbing magazines from the rack, saying obscene things about a singer on one of the covers whose name Aram knew well: Euna. He stayed on the ground.
The boys, bored, turned to leave. At no point did they break from jeering and hollering, calling each other worse names than they had called Aram. Everything to them was a put-on, a prank, a future story. On the way out the door, one of them turned back to look at Aram, still on the ground, heavy as a buck carcass. The boy did not say anything. But no divine witness could deny. He, at least, had looked back.
*
That night, Aram slept twenty paces from the road in a little copse of gorse trees, with a rock thick enough to crack a skull beside his head. Even perfect Gaelic, it seemed, would not be enough to protect him. Words would only hold weight if he were precise in his use of them. If he could politic his language, sharpen it into a fillet knife. And not just with women who already wanted him.
Isaiah 42:16. I will lead the blind by ways they have not known, along unfamiliar paths I will guide them; I will turn the darkness into light before them and make the rough places smooth.
His eye was still swollen shut. He needed to get his vision back before he could lead others, or else they would all fall into a proverbial pit. So he went to sleep praying his sight would restore itself, and swiftly. When he woke up, as the morning came coursing through the gorse trees, he saw its bands with a clear eye. No wheels or floaters. Just pure and faithful sunlight. This was enough to bolster his belief that someone was watching over him. And that called into him a fullness he rarely felt. Only in moments of physical pleasure had he known this vital, holy swell. Silently, he named the feeling sàimh.
He rolled up the pullover he had been using as a pillow and put it into the tricycle basket. He was still a few days south of the Hebrides, but he had the strong and sudden sense of being close to his destination. He could smell the grouse the women in town used to roast on certain Sundays, feel the moor cold as a witch’s tit under his feet. In the saddle now he pedalled hard and merged onto the empty road.
Nice day. Pretty birds. A bit of fear buzzed in him from the night before, but not much. He trusted something. And that something was slowly taking shape. It was not a person; or at least, it did not have a body. It was more like the sea, essential, merciless. And no injustice, no deportation or death, would go unseen by it. Nice day. Pretty birds. On that fair morning, the road ahead was clear.
*
In Moneydie, in Perthshire, he chose a house at random and stopped by for tea. It had started to rain again, and Aram was cold, his sweater a dead weight. A man with outdated hearing aids answered the door. Aram knew he looked a little unkempt, now with bruises and abrasions on his face. But his charm ran deeper than all that. He asked, Can I trouble you for a cup?
Miserable out there, the man said. Come in.
Aram gladly obliged. The house had just a few rooms, one each for eating, sleeping, reading, and peeing. The old man had unwashed dishes on his dining table, and more in a corner sink. In the bedroom, which Aram glimpsed on his way to the toilet, were great tangles of clothing, bunched bedsheets, plants knocked out of their pots. Something wretched about seeing soil indoors, on carpet, no less. The place looked as if an intruder had come in and rummaged, but Aram had a hunch this was not so.
With the toilet door closed, he took off his dirty sweater and wrung it out, working to get the red down the drain. With soap, he scrubbed and scrubbed, and still a faint spot remained. He hung his sweater over the shower rod and came back to the eating room in his undershirt. The old man was fretting over a hotplate, muttering about boiling water, babbling water, always too hot, never quite hot enough. He didn’t want to put his finger in and burn it, but he couldn’t see any bubbles on the surface, and she always used to do this for him, where was that little tin of tea leaves anyway, and it’s been raining so much but the bloody holly hasn’t bloomed.
Are you okay? Aram asked.
The man looked up. Put a shirt on, he said. I’ve got loads.
Aram noticed a bandage around the man’s hand. A burn on his palm was clearly visible outside of the binding. Why don’t you get me a shirt and I’ll make the tea?
This seemed to suit the man. Aram waited until he had left the room to turn on the hotplate. While the water warmed, he fumbled in the cupboards for the tin of tea, which he found behind a hoard of expired crackers. He wondered how many people in this country were living like this, with burned hands and soil on the carpet, no one coming to visit or brew tea. From the kerb this place had looked lovely, blackthorn bushes and a rock garden in front. Inside was a whole other earth. Aram looked in the fridge for milk and instead found greening cheese and some jars of mint jelly.
The man came back carrying a lovely cable-knit sweater and pulled it down over Aram’s head. The fit was snug, but not suffocating. My gift to you, he said. You can’t be going around in a dirty shirt.
The water had boiled. Aram poured it into a pot with two bags of Assam and let the drink steep. He wanted to lift the man from this sad condition, but without the man knowing. It would take some sleight of hand. Where are you headed? the man asked.
Up north. I’m going to see my girlfriend.
In that case, you should probably wash first.
Aram laughed. If you’re offering to let me use your shower, I’m game. It’s been a while since I’ve had hot water.
Help yourself, the man said. He took two cups from the sideboard, one that said Alban and one that said Jane. I know you think it’s untidy in here. I don’t entertain much. I watch the six o’clock news and I do puzzles and that’s plenty. Brings a certain peace to know the end is coming.
Come now, Aram said. That’s a bit morbid.
When I watch the news I don’t have to stew too much about it. You worry about the rising sea levels and failing crops and all that. I’ve already got one foot in another place.
Aren’t you lonely?
I wasn’t unhappy to see you. But this is how I live. No need to get precious.
I’ve always liked having people around, Aram said. Actually, I kind of wilt without them. I was just in a spot without friends for quite a long time, and it made me crazy.
So you’d be lonely in my place. Good thing that I’m in my place, then, and you’re in yours.
The tea was sufficiently strong. Aram filled both cups and took a drink from Jane’s. I’ll be honest, he said. My girlfriend doesn’t know I’m coming. Actually, I’ll be meeting my first child, whose mother is another woman.
Oh hush, the man said. I’m not interested in you young people and your sex triangles.
Nobody mentioned sex.
I worked forty years, he said. Earned a little privacy.
You see worse things on the news every night.
That, I can turn off.
Aram drank the rest of his tea in silence. He had expected some sage advice from the old man, some reassurance on his long journey. Instead he had received judgement. The tea, at least, was good. He fixed on that. By the time he reached the bottom of the cup, he was less upset. The insult had after all been minor.
The man went to find a towel in his bedroom and came back to give it to Aram. It was a plush bath towel, neatly folded. I have limited hot water, the man said. Enjoy your shower, but bear that in mind.
Aram nodded. In the shower he was careful to turn off the tap while he lathered his hair, angled his hands into his recesses. The old man had set out a razor in its original packaging, so Aram got to shaving. He ignored the pain that came from grazing his bruises and bumps with the fresh edge. Discipline, he knew, led to righteousness. He shaved his shoulders and the back of his neck best he could.
When he was presentable, he put on the cable-knit sweater and his own trousers and returned to the room intended for reading. The old man was there in a rocking chair, an afghan around his shoulders, halfway through Macbeth. In the corner a small television was showing the news. He asked if Aram would like him to read the play out loud. Aram reclined on a sofa beside the rocker, his feet hanging over the armrest as if he were a gangly teenager. Yes, he said. I love it when people read to me.
The old man stood and went to mute the television. He sat back down and carefully arranged the afghan about himself. Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood/Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather/The multitudinous seas incarnadine,/Making the green one red.
When he read, he affected a deeper voice, a lovely, resonant tone. Aram watched the images on screen while he listened to the script. A woman in a headscarf, a man with Odin’s Cross tattoos and a finger in her face, a police officer. The words of the play went a bit foggy, difficult to understand. Maybe Aram was getting sleepy. He forced himself into the room, into his body, again.
Lamentings heard i’ th’ air, strange screams of death,/And prophesying with accents terrible/Of dire combustion and confused events/New hatched to the woeful time.
On the back of the sofa was a tartan blanket, and Aram covered his body with its welcome weight. The man kept reading, and the news kept reeling on, until it was finished and deposed by a gardening show. A nice nannyish type, pulling hemlock by its roots. Aram was sure now that he was drowsy, and that was why he was feeling overwhelmed. That had to be why. He was a man of God and men of God did not worry that evil had prevailed; they trusted that there was a greater plan. He asked the old man if it would be all right for him to turn the lights off and get some rest.
The man shelved the play and said, You can stay the night. Happy to help a tired traveller back onto his feet. But just the night. I like my solitude.
Perfectly fair, Aram said.
The man stood and turned off the television, tucked the tartan more tightly around Aram’s shoulders. If you get hungry, he said, leaning toward him tenderly, toughen up and go back to sleep.
Aram laughed. Get to bed, you old dingleberry, he said. The man flashed his teeth and turned off the floor lamp. In the near dark, Aram could hear him shuffling out of the room and into the next, knocking some furniture over in the process. He felt, briefly, sad, or maybe guilty. Then he remembered what the man had said, about not needing to get precious. And so a certain peace came over Aram.
He dreamed that night of Euna. He was in a boneyard with her, boiling over with great and unutterable anger. He knew why he was mad, though he couldn’t make his mouth say it: Euna and Aileen had named the kid Lachlan Iain, set him up to be more Scottish than the Scottish. The child was all them and only partly Aram. It was clear now in the dream that his mother had died – Euna was putting myrtle on her grave, reading a eulogy. He still couldn’t find his voice so he kicked Euna in the throat to stop hers from coming out. In the dream it was all he could do.
When he woke up in the morning, he felt terrible about being so violent with his love, even if it had only been a dream. He’d kicked her just like those kids in the corner shop had kicked him. He lay on the sofa and let himself suffer from the guilt for a while. He tried to shift the fault to Aileen, for getting pregnant, trapping him, but he could not. So he bottled the feeling up and sent it to sea, like any good fisherman.
*
He made a crock of oatmeal for the old man, flecked it with the only dried fruit he could find in the cupboards, redcurrants. He had become a decent cook while living with Fenella, and that was a good thing. It increased the value of his stock, made him welcome in more places. Better, food offered him another source of physical pleasure, helpful for a man with such strong appetites.
The old man was still in his room with the door closed when Aram left the house. Either he was sleeping or he was avoiding idle chatter. This suited Aram just fine. He took a spoonful of oatmeal from the crock and left the rest for the old man to enjoy whenever he chose to wake up.
Back on the road he felt invigorated. The rest had been lovely, even vital, but he was energized now in a way he hadn’t been then. The biting air. The scenes of crimson leaves and common oaks with their necks gone stark. He pedalled out the bad spell that had controlled him the night before. He pedalled, in fact, for a full day, until suddenly the muscles in his legs cramped. They got hot and tight so fast he had to pull over, stretch in a patch of marram grass.
He had almost resisted visiting any of his womenfolk, as a way of proving to himself his devotion to Euna. That had been fairly easy, since most of them had sounded pretty pissed off with him, and he had never been one to beg. But need had a way of warping one’s character. Now Aram was in pain on the roadside grass, in front of a sign for Inverness, where Effie the Embalmer lived.
She had never been his favourite woman. He had met her at a pub in town, where he had gone on a weekend trip. They had got sloshed and messed around in the bathroom, then her flat. She had caked on makeup, foundation, false lashes – even drunk, this had embarrassed him, to see how hard she was trying. But he was dog-tired in front of that divine sign for Inverness, and crisps weren’t going to make for much of a supper, not now that he was in touch with his deeper appetite. He had worked to put his weight back on, to get his clothes to fit him nicely, and he refused to sacrifice those gains so gamely.
He punched his quads to get the blood pumping again and forced himself back into the saddle. Before long he was in town. He had been to Effie’s flat just that once, though they had since spoken on the phone, and now he strained to remember where it was. He knew the name of the street, Douglas Row, and the colour of the door, emerald. Her place was right beside the river, and he remembered her walking to the window after they’d slept together. Thank ye, she had said, with too much breath, to the water. Then she’d turned to him and said, Isn’t it enchanted?
Well, no, he did not think water was romantic. Actually, it was a murderer and a lunatic. If he could drink milk and whisky alone for the rest of his life, he gladly would. To Effie he had said, It pales beside you.
He found Douglas Row without much trouble, and on the street there was only one emerald door, so he knocked on it. Bless her, Effie stomped down the stairs in a terry bathrobe, and when she saw him she yelled, You bassa!
Forgive me, he said.
She looked furious. But her flat smelled of meatballs and masala, and he knew already she was going to invite him in. He waited while she unleashed a tirade of insults, knowing she would tire herself. It did not take long. When she stopped cursing, he told her she looked pretty, which she did, probably because she hadn’t known he was coming.
My face is naked, she said. You don’t give me any warning, and you expect me to be beautiful?
I just said you were.
She slammed the door. She opened it. Is that a tricycle?
He nodded. I’ll let you ride on the handlebars.
She rolled her eyes. Still, she moved aside so he could enter the small, vaguely familiar foyer. You look like horse testicles, she said.
They ate curry and rice while they watched the water through her one window, rain-streaked and marked by dead insects. He asked insignificant questions and she offered brief and guarded answers. After dinner, he rinsed the dishes and thanked her for sharing her food. She cast a slanted look at him. Trying to be a hero now? she asked.
He began to knead her shoulders while he whispered sweetnesses into her ear, more of habit than desire. As he massaged her, she stiffened. After a moment she breathed out and her shoulders, rigid buds, went loose as blooms.
You can’t do this to me, she said.
Do what? he asked. He was not playing innocent. He said what he meant.
Pretend to care about me. I cried over you, you tit. You can’t come back and erase all that.
He turned her so she was facing him and then let go of her shoulders. He had been thinking of himself as a found man, but it was plain she was blind to the change. Either he had deluded himself into believing a person of flesh could become one of spirit, or, likely, she had been licking her wounds all these years to keep them moist. It was such a brief encounter, he said. I didn’t know you were still raw about it.
So now it’s my fault, innit. You’re an animal. You must have kids all over the goddamn country.
Effie had stumbled on the one put-down that actually had power over him. He was filled with a bitter ire he held tightly behind his teeth. He felt the sudden and strong need to be alone. He went into the other room and lay face down on the couch, muttering his mood into a tweed cushion. When Effie came into the room a while later, he was punching that same cushion with two precise fists. In between, he was not sure what had happened. He had sort of lost focus.
The hell is going on in here? That’s an heirloom pillow.
Aram calmed, came back into his charm. He sat upright on the couch. Nothing at all, my treasure, he said.
Something wrong with ye, she said, snatching the cushion from beside him and cocooning it as if it were an infant. It’s time ye went home.
I will, he said. But I need to sleep here for one night. I promise I’ll be good. He knew this would work. If he could rely on anything in the world, it was that lonesome women lived for promises.
She tapped a finger on her cheek, as if thinking. But she proved that to be fake when she soured her expression suddenly and said, Get the hell out.
Aram saw that she was serious. He had no choice but to limp down the stairs, his legs even tauter than before, and lace his boots. He looked up with his eyes wide and childlike in a last effort to convert Effie. She stepped over him and opened the door, revealing the river, silent and snakeblack. For a second, she seemed to reconsider the send-off. Then she took him by the neck of his cable-knit sweater and hauled him into the street. Good luck with yourself, she said, and locked the emerald door.
*
Aram slept on a bench beside the river that night, too tired to ride his tricycle any farther and too stunned by Effie’s tantrum to think of another plan. For the first time in his life he, having tried in earnest, had failed to seduce a woman. Whatever charm, whatever – to quote one of Fenella’s esoteric books – furor poeticus had led to his perfect track record seemed now to be gone. He suspected he had wanted to fail, and only in part to please the Almighty.
He woke to rain barraging a bare part of his body, near the notch of his collarbone. Effie had torn the neck of his sweater when she had thrown him into the street, leaving this small place exposed. But one person’s spite did not undo another’s kindness. The old man had still given Aram a sweater. Just then he saw Effie leaving her house in her embalming uniform, clutching a large cosmetics bag. She saw him, too, and started to hurry down the road without looking first, narrowly missing the grille of an oncoming car. Once she had disappeared, he wanted her as he had not before. She was the fish just past the hook. Though he wanted to, wanted her, Aram resisted following Effie down the street to her funeral home.
1 John 2:16. For all that is in the world – the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions – is not from the Father but is from the world.
He was single-minded about forgetting her. And then, after a few minutes focused on the badness of his lust, his body distracted him: his lower back hurt from sleeping on the hard bench all night. So he stood and stretched, and when he was looser, found the groove in his tricycle seat.
If he rode hard, he would make it to the Ullapool ferry by mid-afternoon, and depending on the boat schedule, he could be in Pullhair by night-time. He pedalled off into a sudden downpour. From the dirty striker, Aram had learned the word baisteadh, both rain and baptism. With this term in mind, the rain went from a discomfort to a kind of ceremony. What had been odourless before now smelled floral, like a spray of daylilies, or like Euna, nude, in his fishing hut.
By noon, the baisteadh did not seem all that benign. It came down to this: he did not know much about Sketimini, except that its official language, according to his mother, was Assyrian Neo-Aramaic. And, though he could have surely found a way to explore that obscure tongue, he had chosen Gaelic. Had he wanted to impress Euna? to cross out his mother and the thorny feelings he fastened to her? to disappear in a country that sometimes needed, and other times shunned, imprisoned, him?
Yes he had yes he had Yes.
In Fenella’s shack he had noticed a heavy university text, Neo-Aramaic Grammar. He had picked the book up and set it down immediately, as if it were made of white flame – he found it both compelling and repellant, in a way he could not begin to explain. Now he remembered that Fenella had left a feedbag of books in the tricycle basket, which he had covered with the clothes those boys had savaged. He pulled onto the side of the road and scrambled in the bag to find the book that would spark when he held it in his hands. Fenella, who noticed everything, must have seen his unusual connection to the text, because there was her frayed copy.
He knew what the disciple John had said. The book was not from the Father but from the world. And yet, when Aram held it, something eternal firmed in him.
He made the ferry with minutes to spare, which was fortunate. In autumn the boat only crossed the water once a day, and it was now the end of October, five weeks past the equinox. As he used his last pounds to pay his fare, he imagined what might be waiting for him in town. He hoped there would be fishing work and a hut with room enough for him, so he could stay to raise his boy. He hoped that Euna still lived there, and that she would agree to see him despite the way their visit at Dungavel had gone. Mostly he expected to find the same place he had left, a conservative town of eighty well-meaning people, deeply enmeshed in one another’s lives.
The wind on the ferry deck was harder than it had been on land, and it nipped through his cable knit. Aram crossed his arms tightly over his chest. The warmth he had earned on his long trip north – he would not let it leach out so easily.
*
All through Pullhair the land looked burned. Beauty bushes were bowed, barberry trees short and scarred. Each yard Aram passed was clogged, the post office’s with creeping thistle, the guest house’s with selfheal. He did not hear or see a single animal. He had stayed in Stornoway overnight so he would first see Pullhair in morning sun. Truth was it would have been finer in full shade.
While in Stornoway, at a folk museum, he had read a plaque about the history of Pullhair. A century before, its population had been close to a thousand. After the First World War, the herring fishing industry lost certain European markets, so many of Pullhair’s residents found themselves stripped of their livelihood. They lived in overcrowded crofts, or they had no land at all, and over time the population dissolved as folks left to find work farther south. Having read this, Aram rode through Pullhair with a feeling of grief, latent sorrow. It was curious he had never heard anyone talk about that culling. The town had a history they held in grieving silence, and so it lived under the moors and blunted every grass blade.
He rode down the one paved road looking for abandoned houses or farms, fragments of that time long gone. When he lived here five years before, he had never seen crosses marking sea graves, or tablets paying tribute to the people who had settled then left the town. Books had been written of lesser exoduses. He found it hard to believe that so many people could suddenly migrate, with no one to tell their stories.
During his time inside, he had craved the quiet of this island. And now that he was here, it did not seem quiet at all; rather, it emitted a strange white noise. At least in the castle pain had not been held in confidence. Wrath had been rewarded, just as aggression had been aired. Here the earth hummed with a kind of tacit sadness, a note pitched so only dogs could hear it, if there were any dogs left.
Aram went first to what had been his fishing hut. He wanted to root himself there before going to the church or to Gainntir. He wanted to know if he would have work and a home before he presented himself to his family, so he could be precise in what he promised them. From the outside, the hut looked the same as it had then. Built of stone on a concrete foundation, not even a gale storm could stir it.
Rucksack in hand, he opened the front door and found an animal had taken over the space. A small, furred marten, with one lost eye. Aram remembered something clawing at the door when he and Euna were in there together. Though they’d shielded themselves from it then, the creimeach had since got in. Aram caught it by the tail, and it snarled at him, clearly alarmed. He opened the hut door and threw the creature as far as he could, into a spread of charred heather. Only after he had done this did he remember wild animals, increasingly rare here, held a new place in the order of things. Anyway, this one was a living tie to his day with Euna. He squinted into the heather, trying to recoup what he had lost, but the lapse had cost him – the bush was flush with the ground, free of any creimeach.
With his old broom, Aram swept up the dung and prey bones the animal had left behind. Then he stopped to look at his digs. Whitish light fell through holes in the door, revealing a few familiar details. Aram’s cot was still there, and even his thin blanket, though now it was in utter tatters.
He took the postcard of Lachlan Iain from his sack and ironed its edges. He had no pillow to slip the card under, so he put it directly onto the cot, facing down. From the tricycle basket outside he gathered his other effects, his books and snacks and syrup, and established in the hut a library, a pantry. It had been simple before for him to live here without trim or ornament. He had never felt the need to mark out rooms, to establish that particular level of comfort. But since then the world had tugged at his red nerves and caused a swerve in him. He could no longer live as a simple organism, surrounded by plain stone walls.
*
An hour later, Aram walked to the edge of the sealoch. He was thrilled to see, down the shore, equipment still standing where the farm had been: automatic feeders, mechanical filters, scareherons. A half dozen men were in the loch, wet as high as their thighs, casting fly lines. Whatever had spoiled the earth had mostly spared the water, and to Aram this was a miracle. He did not care if the bog cotton rotted, the harebells turned amber and fell from their stems, as long as nothing harmed his beloved salmon.
He walked to the farm. He did not recognize any of the fishermen, but that was not a surprise to him, since they were presumably only there for the season. Most were in the loch, but there was one younger man standing on land, with his line cast into the water from that dry distance. He was wearing a cap with a white eagle. In the castle, Aram had learned this was Poland’s coat of arms. He asked the man where his supervisor was.
She’s at home today, he said.
She?
Yes, he said. Why, you some kind of chauvinist?
This town really had been turned over. He thought of all the things he used to say to his friends about women, right here, on the bank of this lake, while they smoked and took their brief lunch breaks. No one had tried to shame him for speaking freely. Not in the slightest, he said.
You looking for work?
That I am.
Bad timing, the man said. Season’s already over. Most people have gone home already. We’re just here catching some of the escaped fish for our families.
Shite, Aram said. How had he forgotten such an obvious detail? His life for so many years had submitted to these seasons – hard work until Samhain, hibernation, then, till Earrach – that they had once been ingrained in him. Now he had fallen out of touch with all nature, and that, for a man who had come of age at sea, was a deeply disorienting thought. Of course, he said.
Grab a few fish for yourself, if you want.
The water would be bitter, and Aram’s boots were not weatherproof. But crisps and brined gourds would not carry him through the winter. He walked into the loch, already starting to clot with frost. He did not have a net any more, and he knew better than to draw attention to himself by asking to borrow one, so he looked in the cold, clear water for a smudge of orange. Seeing colour, he reached under the surface. He was out of the habit, his impulses dimmer now than they had ever been, and he came up empty.
From some distance away, he heard a fisherman call, Trying to bare-hand your dinner?
A few others laughed. The young man in the Polish eagle hat told Aram to come back to the shore, and once he had done that, he offered Aram his rod. I’m freezing, he said. Use this and split your catch with me fifty-fifty.
Aram did not like to share his catch, but he would not snag a single fish without a line. He nodded, and with this new means hauled a huge sum of salmon. They were more abundant than he remembered them being in the wild – nearly as abundant as they’d been on the farm, where they had been forced to spawn.
Each time he caught one he threw it to the fisherman whose rod he was borrowing. The man was waiting by the lochside to pack the pink slipperies into a cooler. By the time the sun started to sink, just past four in the afternoon, Aram was frozen up to his taigeis. In a strange way the sting delighted him, as a token of his long commune with the elements. Better still, he had filled four coolers, and two of them were his to take to the hut and eventually to the church. He was connected, proud.
You’ve done this before, the fisherman said, when Aram was beside him on land.
A few times.
I wish you had come sooner. It’s been a bizarre year. Feast and famine.
Why’s that?
No idea. I swear the salmon are demented. You’d think on the farm, at least, we could regulate them. That’s why we have a farm in the first place, so we can control the conditions.
But your supervisor should have sorted all that out, no?
Moody bitch. Some days she’d come and scream at us, tell us we were worthless and she was going to ship us home. Other days she’d bring us bowls of boiled sea lettuce and fawn over what a brilliant job we were doing.
On the horizon Aram saw a pelican, a bird he had never noticed in the Outer Hebrides. Growing up at sea, he’d seen them routinely. They would then appear to him in dreams, while he was huddled beside his mother in the boat hold, always opening their bills to swallow him, or using their sharp tips to drill his eyes deep into his skull. Bed-wetting nights, crying-dry nights. This pelican loomed over the water until it dropped, spurring only a faint splash, and came back into the air with its beak bloated.
Anyway, the other fisherman said, good riddance to her. I’m heading to Lisbon for the winter. I can work at a call centre there.
Aram nodded. If it weren’t for his family, he might have asked to come along. Instead he asked if the other fisherman could show him the supervisor’s house. He could not explain her strong lure, but he felt it, in his pulse and his damp palms he felt it.
Sure, he said. She’s home for some creep holiday, though, and she’ll poison me if she finds out I brought you there. So keep my name out of your mouth.
That’ll be easy, since I don’t intend to know your name.
They set off together toward the hut with their arms laden with fish. They dropped the coolers in the pantry area, and once they had left, Aram secured the door tightly so the marten could not steal this hard-earned fare. After a brief stop at the other man’s boat – a bowrider with five on board, shouting at the man in an unknown tongue – they followed the loch toward a headland, an isolated cut of the coast. All at once Aram’s skin itched, and he tried to tear his sweater from his body. He was sure the shirt was infested, that there were living things crawling inside. He had been this way before.