Table Rock Table RockI didn’t wake till ten, a very good omen, a deep still sleep a mark of approval for my plan. I could find out what I wanted from my simple brother. I could spy on her and winkle her out. I could have power over her and relish it.
I spent the morning with a pad of lined paper and a ring binder creating my Open University project. So I could pretend to be working on it at relevant moments; so if she ever thought of spying on me (she wouldn’t, complacent cow, she didn’t even consider I might be dangerous) then she would find I had a good excuse to be there.
She was in the kitchen first thing, I heard the radio, she went along the hall a few times but didn’t leave the house. I liked listening to her and her not knowing I was doing it or why. At 12.30 someone came in the front door and banged it. Calum. He called out ‘Hello?’ and she came past my door, I heard her saying something about the mud on his shoes and needing a new light bulb in the pantry. They both went along to the kitchen. Mother and son, how sweet.
She’d cooked him a proper dinner from the smell of it. I opened my back door and sat and had a fag to quell the pinpricks of rage I felt. Imagine someone cooking your dinner. Doing it for you, anticipating your arrival and your taste. Who ever did that for me? She did it when he was a kid and she was still doing it now. I should have gone in there and asked for fifteen years of meals. She owed me that at least.
I took myself off to the village I was managing myself like a teacher manages a rowdy last-lesson class, I was keeping myself on the straight and swooping, glide and flying line, I was going to do exactly according to plan and have no difficult or intrusive or inconvenient fall. The pub was shut at lunchtime – centre of the universe as the island was – so I bought a used-looking pie from the post office (narrowly; that was closing at 1 p.m.) and a couple of booklets with dingy old photos giving some type of history of the island. Useful for OU. The old bat who served me asked me where I was staying. She must have remembered me from yesterday.
‘Mrs MacLeod’s. Tigh Na Mara.’
‘Oh aye. Stayed there before?’
I shook my head.
‘And how’re ye findin’ it? All right?’ She was beady; suggesting she didn’t think it would be.
‘Why d’you ask?’
‘Och, no reason. It’s just some people find her – a wee bit standoffish. And Calum–’
‘Calum’s pretty strange.’
‘There’s no harm in the lad. But if ye were after another place to bide I’ve a wee room in ma cottage …’
‘Thanks. I’m not really sure how long I’m staying.’
‘Aye. Well.’ The woman busied herself spreading sheets of faded brown paper over the oranges and tomatoes in the window; the sun was beating in on them.
‘Is there a Mr MacLeod?’ I asked.
She glanced at me. ‘There was.’ There was a strange silence.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘Well may ye ask,’ she said bitterly. She finished with the brown paper and straightened up to face me, lowering her voice. ‘He fell into ma lady’s clutches and that wa’ tha.’
‘Someone told me he drowned.’
‘Aye. And would y’expect the best sailor on th’isle tae drown?’ She opened the door for me, followed me out and locked up behind us. ‘She hasnae a friend this side o’ Glasgow and tha’s god’s truth.’ Her voice rose to its normal pitch. ‘I’ll be off to ma dinner then. Gude-bye.’
I sat on the bench outside the pub to eat, and looked in the book at old photos of men with tools standing in front of a huge unidentifiable machine, and two men with guns guarding them. The caption said they were German prisoners of war working in the iron mine. Did they ever get home or were they still here, little old men behind grey net curtains, still imprisoned from their homeland? I thought it would be a bad place to be kept against your will, this.
When I got back to the house it was very quiet. Calum had gone. She was in the kitchen. I could hear the odd clink of dishes and scraping noises. I had been there 24 hours. OK. I had discovered she spent long periods of time on her own making witchy potions. It would be easy enough to pick a time to do it when nobody would find her for hours. Night. Night would be the best. But before I did it I wanted to make her talk. I wanted to know what the fuck she’d done with her life that was so vital I couldn’t have been in it.
The kitchen door opened and she came along the hall and started creaking up the stairs. Going for a pee; she seemed to be leaving the downstairs bathroom for my sole use. I stood inside my door waiting to bump into her accidentally when she came back downstairs. But everything went quiet; I kept my eyes on my watch and ten minutes passed. I went out into the hall and halfway up the stairs – the bathroom door was open up there. The bloody woman’d gone to bed.
I stood on the stairs waiting for another five minutes. Not exactly easy to engage her in casual conversation when she’s taking an afternoon nap. I stood in a wave of heat with my nails making white dents in the heels of my palms, torn over whether to go for it there and then or wait for a chance to talk to her first. Once she was dead there’d be no chance of finding anything out.
The house was throbbing with quietness. At last I went out again, there was nothing else to do; I set out along the lane and just walked, in the opposite direction to the village. Passed the place where Calum and I had turned right yesterday and carried straight on. To my left the sea curved in towards the road. It was a shallow pebbled bay. I could see a figure standing on an outcrop of black rock. Calum again. Manky Calum. Catatonic Calum. With his rucksack on his back like a hunchbacked stork. I climbed down to the bay. He was staring out to sea. When I got closer I could hear he was muttering to himself. I got close before he turned and even then he just kind of nodded in recognition then went back to his staring and muttering. I sat on a rock. The sea was completely flat with a few black rocks sticking up. Some of those black birds, cormorants, standing on the most distant one. Nothing moving. The sky was grey and the sea was grey and right out in the distance was the grey silhouette of another island. It was a dreary view. At last Calum turned to me.
‘OK?’ I said.
He nodded. I thought of asking him who he’d been talking to but that would make me as mad as him.
‘I can’t find a coastal path. Is there one?’
‘No. You can walk, but n-not always along the shore.’
I already knew that much. I wondered if he spent the whole time wandering about. He obviously had no employment. If his father was an islander … ‘Have you got many relatives here?’
‘I had a sis-sister, she died.’
It was a minute before I could speak. ‘When?’
‘Before I was born. She was c-called Susan.’
Well. So she was. I stared at the cormorants thinking one of them might go for a dip or do a tap dance or anything that might give me a slight diversion.
‘It’s her birthday next week.’
I looked at him but he was perfectly oblivious. Yes. It is. My birthday. October the 2nd. ‘What d’you do on her birthday?’
‘We have a cake for her, and sing.’
You evil cow Phyllis MacLeod, you monstrous evil cow. I have to remember to breathe.
‘People shouldn’t forget. Even b-babies who die.’
Excellent. Now I realise the root of my problems. All these years here’s me been struggling along imagining I’m alive. Silly me. I’m dead. That explains it all. That explains why I haven’t got a mother or a father or a home or a life because people who’re dead don’t have those things. Silly silly me. I get up and go over the rocks to the narrow pebbly shoreline. Just to be moving. He comes after. He’s got a stick like a blind man.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing.’
‘D’you want a d-drink of tea?’
‘No.’
He starts to take his rucksack off. ‘Look what I found this morn–’
‘Fuck off! Fuck off you moron and leave me alone!’ I scramble away across the stones leaving him standing there gawping. Catching flies in his gormless gob. There’s nothing but my feet crunching angrily and the slurge and suck on stones of the sea. What the hell is this about? I am quickly up to the lane again.
If he knows about his sister, did his father know? Does that make his father my father?
I walked fast and blind along the lane – thinking about going into her sitting room. I’d often imagined revealing myself to her, but now with the real woman, her real room in my mind’s eye I could see how it would be. Well not exactly because she could do a number of things, she had a variety of options like believing me or not believing me or pretending to believe or not believe me; but I’d burst in there without knocking. (Why throw me away then pretend to be sad? If she regretted leaving me why not look for me?)
She would jerk her head up from her book as if she was blind and take off her glasses to rub her eyes. She might even have been asleep.
‘I want to talk to you.’
‘I see.’ She would fold her glasses carefully, set them on the little table at her elbow. I would sit on the rounded red velvet chair, straight backed, facing her. Like on a stage.
‘I have something to tell you.’
Her hand would dart nervously to her glasses then fall back, she would peer at me closely. ‘Calum?’
‘No.’ She would be relieved. Ha, she would have no idea.
I’ve rehearsed it in my dreams and in my wakings a thousand times and a thousand ways but the rehearsal and the repetition don’t matter because whatever I say – whatever predetermined sentence I let out into her stuffy cluttered room will have the same effect; the fingernail under the corner of the mask, the start of the unpeeling. And once it starts it won’t stop, it will go on to the same result no matter what and how we do it, it will rip or slip or jolt or tear or slide off easily but whichever course, the result will be the same: she’ll be unmasked. Whether she denies me or admits me whether she constructs an elaborate castle of lies or falls open at the truth with a single blow.
I was walking fast but suddenly aware of being cold. It wasn’t a wind it was a wedge of cold air like when you’re swimming in the sea and you move into an area of water that’s suddenly much colder. Looking up I noticed the sea and rocks had disappeared behind a bank of mist.
She says I’m dead. So she can have the virtuousness of remembering me without the inconvenience of keeping me. Why? The lane in front of me disappeared. Literally. The mist – fog, cloud, whatever – was white and thick enough to touch; it smeared coldly against my face, it stuck in my throat and made me cough. It was right up against my eyes, everything around me blocked out. I stopped. The coldness flowing all around me made me shiver. I took one step forward, but I couldn’t see my foot. I couldn’t see my own legs. The vanishing of everything made me dizzy. It was absolutely quiet.
She makes a cake!
I couldn’t remember how close to the edge of the lane I was. I shuffled sideways a couple of steps then realised I wasn’t even sure if there was a hedge – or a ditch – or even a straight drop over a cliff to the sea. I hadn’t been looking. I turned around slowly on the spot, nearly overbalancing. Nothing but thick white fog. A feature of the island presumably. A delightful characteristic; fog rolls in from the sea. Cloud falls down from the sky. Hooray for nature.
I assumed it was temporary, like interference on TV. That it would clear or lift. But the minutes crawled past and nothing happened. My eyes began to ache from peering. My legs began to ache from standing. I turned round again. Nothing. I took a few steps but it was completely pointless. I had no idea where the lane began or ended; where it curved; which way I was facing; whether I was close or far from the shore. The only thing to do was sit it out. I sat down carefully and felt the road surface around me. A rough pebbly lane. The fog seemed if possible to be thickening – not that it blotted out more (it couldn’t, it already blocked the lot) but that it was less white, it let less light through. I strained to hear the sea but there was nothing.
Suddenly I heard or felt a sound. A tapping. Felt it in the surface of the road and heard it muffled in my ears. Almost immediately something invisible hit me and the tapping stopped. I screamed.
‘N-Nikki?’
‘Calum!’ I scrambled to my feet. He was a dark shape. His arm grasped mine. ‘How did you know the way?’
His disembodied voice came out of the fog, he was tapping the ground with his stick. ‘You turned up the lane.’
He was watching me. Now I was alone in zero visibility with a mental retard I’d just told to fuck off. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Home. You hold m-my arm.’
‘But you can’t see–’
‘I know the way.’ He linked his left arm through my right and half turned me round.
‘I don’t even know which way I’m facing.’
‘It’s OK – h-here.’ He tapped with his stick feeling for the edge of the lane – and we moved off together into the invisible world.
The journey lasted hours. From time to time he’d raise his stick and slash out to either side, hitting hedgerow or clacking stone wall or sharply rapping a gate. It was as if the rest of the world had been completely removed, leaving not even a shadow of itself, not even a whisper of sound. There was nothing but solid whiteness and us toiling through it. Once he stopped and said, ‘Cigarette?’ I rolled a couple blind and we stood and puffed our white smoke into the thick white air.
‘I was going to sit and wait for it to clear.’
‘It gets cold.’
Well yes. I was already shivering. ‘How long will it last?’
‘Tonight. Maybe tomorrow.’
While he thrashed his stick about looking for walls or turnings I let go his arm and I was helpless. I wouldn’t have dared to take a step. When he tap-tapped back to me and bumped his extended arm into mine (outstretched, supplicant) I felt nothing but relief. He could have been leading me to the edge of a cliff; mummy’s boy could have been taking me to the sharks.
‘You c-cold?’
‘A bit.’
He stopped and let go my arm. His rucksack bumped against my shoulder as he took it off. ‘I’ve got a spare jumper.’ He passed it to me, it felt rough and loose and it smelt of seaweed as I pulled it over my head, but it added a layer of warmth. He held out his arm and we moved off again. ‘You were angry–’
‘Nothing. It doesn’t matter.’ There was a silence.
‘D-did you see Table Rock?’
‘What?’
‘Table Rock.’
‘I didn’t notice much at all, to be honest.’ Dense fog in your eyes upsets your balance. You want to pitch forwards into it. You think you’ll fall and fall. I tried to concentrate on his voice. The fog was definitely darkening. It was turning blue. It would be night.
‘It’s a flat rock, level with the sea. You can walk out to it at low tide.’
‘That’s nice.’ It was so easy to crush him. I felt bad clinging to his arm and ploughing through the opaque air in stupid silence. I made an effort. ‘You like going there?’
‘There’s a story. B-belonging to Table Rock. My father told me.’ Anything was better than concentrating on the deepening blue thickness, the dizzying loss of vision and of the world. His voice was something to hold onto just as much as his arm was. A thread to lead us out.
‘Tell me.’
‘It seems to float on the water at high tide. L-like a raft. But in a storm the waves crash over it – it’s awash.’ I tried to visualise the Table Rock. Its warm flat surface on a sunny day. ‘A long time ago there lived a fisherman and his wife. In a little c-cottage at the top of the cliffs. Just above that cove.’ So there were cliffs. I’d thought I was near cliffs. ‘One day when the fisherman was out in his boat, the w-wife was feeling ill. She had a baby in her belly and it was time for it to be born.’ His voice was explanatory, kindly, as if I might not know about such things. Then I realised it was perhaps the tone his father had used to tell him the story.
‘She went down to the beach and she had the b-baby there. It didn’t belong to her husband. She carried it across the shingle and laid it on Table Rock. Then she went s-slowly back up to the cottage and made her husband’s tea.’
I imagined her. Staggering around the bare little cottage, heaving the black kettle onto the fire, leaning her dizzy weight against the table as she sliced the bread. Sitting to gut the fish before she put it in the pan; staring frozen at its milky eye as if she’d never seen a fish in her life.
‘After his supper, it’s a fine c-calm evening – the fisherman goes down to spread out his nets. He hears a kind of mewing. Is it the cry of the gulls? Is it a bleating calf? Or is it the wind m-moaning over the rocks? Then he spots a little naked thing out on Table Rock. The tide’s coming in by now but he doesn’t stop to take off his boots and trousers. He wades out to the rock and gathers up the child. He carries it up the cliff path and into the little cottage, all dripping wet. He holds out the ch-child to his wife.
‘“See what I found on Table Rock. A gift from the sea! We must look after her, wife, as if she were our own.” And the woman takes the child from her husband and nods. She puts her to the breast.’
‘Is that the end?’ I didn’t want it to end.
‘Yes.’
The fog was black now, it had been midnight blue but then it went black. Not like normal darkness though because it was smothering, cold to your face. Like being under thick cold blankets and someone sits on the bed. I thought about Table Rock. I was in blind darkness being led along a lane which might have been cliff edge or skirting mine shafts, god knows what or where it was, I listened to the story and I turned it in my mind. As you turn a penny in your pocket, as you fiddle with a matchstick and use it to pick under your dirty nails. I retold it to myself.
Maybe the husband is a stupid man, brutal and dangerous. Maybe he beats his wife. And the man she loved, who would have taken her away, is drowned. When she has given birth she leaves the child on Table Rock because she cannot bear to kill it. When the tide comes in she thinks the waves will carry it away, carry it to its true father. Although she has concealed everything, her morning sickness by going out early to fetch him fresh water from the spring, her belly and breasts under tight swaddling bands, although she has even rinsed and hung out to dry her woman’s rags each month for him to see: something has made her forgetful. She forgets that Table Rock is not covered at high tide.
When he goes out after supper she clears away his plate but has to lean against the doorframe, with the stabbing pains in her womb. Standing there, panting a little, she looks down over the cliff edge to the sea. There is Table Rock. There is a tiny dot, no bigger than a seagull, in the middle of the rock. And a man wading through the water, reaching out his arms to snatch up the child.
For a giddy moment she thinks she will die. Fall down here on the floor where she stands, let the darkness into her head.
But she sits at the table and prays, and hears his heavy boots crunching up the cliff path, his breath coming short with speed and effort.
When she sees his face she realises. Relief floods her and the sudden milk gushes from her breasts so she has to cross her arms and squeeze herself, to keep from dripping on the floor. He does not imagine. It does not enter his head to imagine, either that she could have been so disobedient, or that another could have wanted her. It does not enter his head that the child is hers. The child is his, by right of finding, and she, his slave, will tend his child. She takes it from him without a word, bowing her head to hide her scalding tears. She knows she has more than she deserves. A man, a home, a child.
After another hour or so Calum began swiping his stick out to the right and after a bit it clack-clack-clacked against a fence. He let go of me to undo the gate and I stood there thinking I still would have no idea how to reach the house without him, even though we must be no more than twenty feet away. The gate creaked and he took my hand again and I heard the dull bang of a door yanked wide open.
‘Calum! Calum!’ Her voice was distanced and muffled by fog but you could tell she was shrieking. He pulled me towards the noise and a yellowish light pierced the blackness. We moved in towards the door; she was a blurry outline on the step haloed in misty light. She plunged towards us out of the light and threw her arms around him.
‘I’ve been phoning the cottage, Mudie’s hadn’t seen you. Where did you get to?’ I think she noticed then that I was there because she stopped and ushered both of us into the house and shut the door. The fog had even poured into the hall, making the light cloudy and dim, filling the place like steam. It was only then I registered we’d come back to her house, that we must have walked right past his. ‘It’s half-past ten,’ she scolded. ‘I’ve been going out of my mind with–’
‘It came on s-suddenly.’
‘Where were you? What were you doing?’
He took off his coat and I realised how wet we were. ‘At the Neck.’
‘The Neck? Why?’
Calum didn’t reply and the silence seemed long. ‘I was walking,’ I said, ‘and bumped into Calum there. Which is lucky for me because I’d never have found my way back alone …’ She wasn’t listening to me.
‘Why were you up at the Neck?’ she asked Calum. ‘I told you to go to Mudie’s for the eggs. What were you doing at the Neck?’
He shrugged. ‘I was g-going on to Mudie’s.’
She didn’t seem able to take it in. ‘Why didn’t you say where you were going? I knew the fog was coming, I could have told you–’
We went into the kitchen and Calum sat down so I did the same, I was ready to drop. She fussed with the kettle. ‘In future you tell me where you’re going, Calum. Every time. You hear? Or I won’t let you out. It’s not safe – and we’ve got no eggs for breakfast.’
‘It was lucky for me,’ I said slowly. I felt in a dream, heavy with it. ‘Calum rescued me.’ She knew the fog was coming.
She glanced round as if she’d forgotten my existence (again). ‘Oh yes. Lucky for you. Tea? Shall I put a drop of whisky in?’
We both said yes.
‘Food. You haven’t had any food. There’s some soup on the stove.’ A big black pot with something thick and dark in it, steaming dully. She went on nagging him and it was as if I wasn’t there. I was hardly there, the fog had filled my head with thick drifts and Table Rock lay there flat and firm in the horrid insubstantiality, a place of safety I couldn’t quite grasp because it was also floating, floating like a raft.
My mother made supper and bedtime drinks for me and my brother, and sent us off to bed. She even made hot-water bottles. She told him to sleep in the spare room upstairs and he didn’t make any objection.