Bull Rock Bull RockI only slept for an hour or two, then I lay thinking and watching it get light. When I got up it was sunny and clear, with a new-washed feel to the air and pale sky. The sky was huge and the land was small; to the south I could see the mountains of Skye with a gauzy scarf of purple cloud about their tops. It was a purposeful, optimistic morning, reinforced almost immediately by a short V of five geese flying south. A tick of birds. Good luck. I hadn’t plumbed the depths of Calum’s knowledge yet. I went up to his house.
He was outside digging his garden. When he saw me he grinned like a pumpkin lantern. ‘Look what I f-found last night.’ His rucksack was sitting at the edge of the veggy patch. He opened it and pulled out a small grubby flat object about four inches long.
‘What is it?’ It was striped with ridges of dirt.
‘A comb. A Viking comb.’ He took it from me again and rubbed the top with his thumb. Under the dirt the comb was yellow-grey. Some of the teeth were broken.
‘Viking? How d’you know?’
He nodded, pleased as punch with himself. ‘My d-dad.’
‘You should wash it, then you’ll be able to see–’
He took no notice, just slid it back into the rucksack and put the rucksack on. ‘Treasure,’ he said. His bad eye was pointing right at the sky but his good one looked at me directly. ‘Going picking rowan for my mother. W-want to come?’
‘Where?’
‘Durris. The tide’s out, we can get across.’
‘OK.’ How was I going to outwit her? How could I catch her by surprise?
He put away his fork and fetched his stick and we went on along the lane. We discussed the fact that a Viking comb – if it was, which I doubted – was a very old thing and he could maybe take it to a museum. Turned out he didn’t know what a museum was. So much for his cultured mother. When I explained he became very excited.
‘But how come you’ve never been to a museum? Isn’t there one on Skye?’
‘I can’t go off the island.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s d-dangerous.’
‘Why?’
‘Does she go?’
‘To the hospital. Sometimes.’
‘So when did you last go to the mainland?’
He pondered in silence for a while. ‘Big school when I was eleven, f-for a week.’
‘A week! What happened then?’
‘My mother – she taught me.’
‘Why did she stop you going?’
He grinned. ‘Head in the clouds Calum. Head in the clouds.’ He started scuffing at something in the path with his boot. Then he knelt down and opened the rucksack and took out a rusty trowel. He chipped at something in the path for a bit then got his trowel blade under it and levered out a fist-sized rock.
‘What’s that?’
He turned it over and inspected it. ‘Thought it was a fossil.’ He stood and flung it out towards the sea.
At last we had passed the Neck, the narrow point of the island, and Calum pointed out Table Rock. It seemed a low small thing, I couldn’t believe a full tide wouldn’t cover it. We walked on and the path took us nearer to sea level again. The land to our left was flat and bare. It was a weird bald place, with pale rock in big flat slabs stretching the length of a football pitch or more before it came to the sea. Out at sea I could make out a distant rocky island, very steep and sheer.
‘Prayer ground,’ said Calum. He struck off from the lane, walking across the short-cropped grass until he came to the bare rock. It was like a pavement. ‘They came here for prayers. Before there was a church.’
It was fucking bleak.
‘Out there was the m-monastery.’
‘Out there?’
He was pointing to the distant rocks. ‘Y-you can see the ruined wall–’
It was true. What I had taken to be the sheer steepness of the rocks was in fact a high black stone wall. They had built upon the rock as it reared out of the sea, the monastery had perched there like a cormorant. ‘And they came over to convert the islanders?’
He shook his head. ‘You can’t get on or off. Only at high tide. Sometimes n-not for weeks. That’s why they built it there.’
So they couldn’t get on or off. Sure. We walked to the edge of the flat stones. The sea was calm but there was white spray around the base of the monastery crag.
‘People came to hear mass on Sundays.’ He knelt on the rock facing out to sea, a ridiculous sight with his rucksack still on his back. The monastery was half a mile away.
‘They wouldn’t have been able to hear.’
He didn’t move.
‘The monks couldn’t see the islanders and the islanders couldn’t hear the monks and they sang mass together?’
The great Fount of Island History nodded. You can see it can’t you: pious natives muttering their prayers while on the other side of the water stark-bollock-naked monks yell bawdy songs and piss themselves laughing. True son of the isle Calum appeared to be praying so I left him to it and wandered on along the natural pavement. Wouldn’t it be nice to be Calum. Able to believe in the people all sweetly gathered here at the last stroke of the bell, their brains filled with the chanting of the monks drifting across the waves. They couldn’t see their faces and couldn’t hear their voices but still they all kept time. What a pleasure it would be to be so simple.
When he joined me we walked on in silence, heading north. It became much more bleak, just rock barely scattered with tufts of grass, no trees or bushes. The rock was black now, it was poking out of the sea wet and slimy and plastered with strips of weed like slicked-down strands of hair on a baldy. It must all be under water when the tide was in. We weren’t on a track any more we were picking our way across slippery black rocks with puddles in their hollows and disgusting little red blobs of what looked like raw liver. I nearly lost my footing twice, it was stupidly dangerous.
‘The ch-children had to cross this to go to school.’
‘People lived here?’ There didn’t look much to recommend it unless you were a bird. Or a lump of raw liver.
‘Six families. They asked for a bridge but … If school ended when the t-tide was high they just had to wait.’
The track climbed steeply up onto the end island, up a grassy ridge. From the top of it you looked down into a wide basin, where the ruins of some cottages stood, and three trees laden with bright red berries. The cottage roofs had gone but walls and lintels and doorways were still there.
‘See?’ He stood next to me looking down. Nobody would’ve known you were there till they climbed the outer ridge.
‘It’s like a fort.’ He ran down the slope to the nearest ruin, then walked around it patting the top of the wall. I watched him and he went on to the next one and did the same, like a superstitious kid walking home from school has a routine of tapping lucky fences or pulling leaves off the hedges. He went round them all, with that air of complete conviction mad people always have. Then he bent down, took off his rucksack and began chipping at something on the ground. I went down to join him.
‘What have you got?’
‘Part of a b-bowl. Look.’ He held it up like it was the crown jewels. It was another blue bit of pottery. He carefully brushed the dirt off with his fingers and put it in his rucksack. Then he started on something that had been under it.
‘How long till the tide covers the path?’
‘We’re OK for an hour or two.’ He got his trowel under the edge of it and prised up an old bit of metal, looked like the back of an alarm clock. He put it in his rucksack and stood up. ‘C-come and see Bull Rock.’
We crossed the basin and climbed the rim on the far side. When we reached the top the wind hit us. The sky had clouded over but it was still bright, almost as if the sea was shining. Ahead was reedy grass and bare rock spreading down to the sea. On the horizon cloudy outlines of two other long low islands. There was a sudden real sense of space. ‘Bull Rock!’ He pointed to a humped black rock in the silvery grey water, very close to shore. There were two smaller ones beside it.
Calum sat down and patted the grass, taking his thermos out of his rucksack. I rolled us both a fag. I was going to find out every single thing about her. I was going to find her weak spot. ‘Your mother was very worried about you last night.’
He glared at Bull Rock. ‘She’s always worried.’
‘What d’you mean?’
He carefully poured the tea and passed it to me. ‘She wants me at the house. Sh-she said paint the woodwork and it doesn’t even need it.’
‘You go there every day, don’t you?’
‘For dinner. I g-go there every day.’ He had a stone in his hand and he began to pound a tuft of grass with it, bang bang bang. ‘Once when it was foggy she took away my boots.’
‘Your boots?’
‘I went back to my house in my socks and I took two boots off the pile. They were stiff with salt, I got t-terrible blisters.’ He went on bashing at the pulverised grass, grinning happily to himself.
Well, Calum the teenage rebel. Calum the wild tearaway. The wind blowing in our faces off the sea was warm and sweet, it riffled the reedy grass like a hair-drier. I sipped my plastic-tasting tea and the foulness of her knowing receded. OK she knew I was her daughter. OK she was playing games with me. But she wasn’t god, if Calum could annoy her. There was no reason I shouldn’t regain the upper hand, and pretty quickly too.
‘You know about Bull Rock?’
Sure, everyone’s born with that knowledge. ‘No, Calum.’
‘Next to it is Cow. And Calf.’ ‘How sweet.’
This was received in silence. The rock did look a bit like a bull, it had heavy hunched shoulders and a tapering rear end.
‘Go on Calum, tell me.’
‘It was a bull once. It belonged to a hag who lived here.’ Long silence; around the black Bull the sluggish sea heaved and swelled at its surface tension, failing to break it, a lazy sea of mercury.
‘Go on.’
‘On the m-mainland there was a king and he fathered twins but they were – Their mother was his sister. It was bad. There were storms, the crops all failed and there were no f-fish to be caught. The people of his country got thin and poor and hungry. Then his advisers met and they called for the sinful twins to be k-killed.’
Incest again. No. There hasn’t been any incest yet. There was adultery at Table Rock, not incest. And a baby extra to requirements. Now there were two. If Angus had been my father he would’ve told me stories. I like it when you know a story’s shape, when the first few sentences seem to sketch a shape in the air, that gradually gets filled in. I worried that Calum might miss something out.
‘The twins’ mother was hiding with them, she put them in her bed to keep them safe. But the advisers came banging on the door and ripping everything up trying to find the babies, and they grabbed the first one and chucked him right in the fire. Then they came after the other one but a good man …’ Calum paused, ‘who was a – a–’
‘Wizard?’
‘Druid. Said he would take the baby away to another land and then the curse would be lifted. So he did. He brought him here. Right here to this beach and he gave him to an old hag who had nothing on this earth but her patch of potatoes and her three white cattle, the bull, the cow and the calf.’ He’d stumbled into a few sentences of his dad’s, like someone who’s battling across rough ground and they suddenly get onto the worn familiar path. You could hear the other voice coming through him. ‘And she promised to care for the boy as if he were her own. So next day she put him on the back of her great white bull and led the bull into the sea to w-wash the boy. And every day for a year she did that, put the baby on the bull’s back and bathed him in the sea. And when the year was up exactly to the day the bull turned black – completely black – and he rushed alone into the sea. And there he is, he stands there night and day, letting the sea wash him clean. And the boy grew up big and strong and clever, with no stain or spot at all, so that one day they sent for him from the mainland, to go over there and be king.’
‘That’s a terrible story. Terri-bull.’
Calum wasn’t quick on puns. He said, ‘What?’
‘Why should the bull get the dirt?’
‘It’s an animal.’ He screwed the lid back on the thermos and stood up. ‘The rowan.’
I’d forgotten. ‘Is there time?’
‘It’s quick to pick.’ He headed down to the ruined houses again. All three of the trees were stunted and misshapen, with their branches pointing towards the mainland. Calum handed me a plastic bag out of his rucksack and began stripping clusters of the red berries from a tree.
‘What’re they for? They look poisonous.’ I began to pick them anyway.
‘She makes jelly. Good for you.’
‘How does she know?’
‘Sh-she knows all the plants. She can make anything.’
‘Medicine, you mean?’
‘Good and b-bad.’
Sure, Calum. ‘What use is bad medicine?’
He shook his head mysteriously. ‘N-never touch it Calum it can kill you.’
‘She’s just trying to frighten you.’
‘N-no.’ He was so indignant he stopped picking and stood facing me, his bag dangling from his left hand. ‘She made me s-special medicine for my fits.’
‘Fits?’
He nodded. ‘I had f-fits nearly every month, she made me this special medicine out of h-hemlock.’
‘Really? Did it cure you?’
He nodded importantly and returned to his picking. ‘If you drink too much it makes you die.’
I remembered the eye dropper and saucer of dead leaves. ‘Does she make medicine for other people?’
‘Yeah. She knows everything.’
Sadly true. But might poison be less predictable than me crouched behind the bathroom door with my knife? I remembered what I’d been meaning to ask him before. ‘Calum, does your mother have many visitors?’
‘No.’
‘Never?’
He snorted. ‘Only me.’ Only him. All the rest of the time, she was alone. So even if it took me a while to polish her off – she couldn’t expect any help.
The berries came off in clusters. ‘Don’t the stems matter?’
‘She s-sieves them.’ We worked in silence for a space then he said triumphantly, ‘See? She knows the good and the b-bad.’
‘What’re you on about?’
‘The poison’s in the seeds. See? She told me.’ He came to me with a cluster in his hands, squashed a berry between grubby thumb and finger to reveal the little yellow seed inside. ‘She cooks it then she s-sieves it and all the seeds go in the sieve.’
‘The seeds are poisonous?’
‘Yeah. It’s t-time to go.’
How could I get her to eat a load of rowan seeds? Not exactly easy to disguise.
We got our feet wet going back to Aysaar, the tide was already coming in. I was thinking about poison. ‘Does she keep it in the kitchen?’
‘What?’
‘Your special medicine. Hemlock.’
‘On the t-top shelf in the pantry.’
‘How much does she give you?’
‘A little goes a long way,’ he recited like a parrot.
‘How much, Calum?’
‘One half-teaspoon every week.’
Probably he grew out of his fits anyway. Herbal remedies – crap. But it wouldn’t take much to polish her off. She looked half-dead yesterday when I brought her in from the shed. I had a sudden memory of her taking her medicine bottle from me; unscrewing the lid without even looking – putting it to her lips and tilting her head back. Glugging it like an alky.
What to do was as obvious as a gift. I was getting back on course.
Calum took the rowan berries to her. I sat in my room and read. I started One Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley, I got completely wrapped up in it until I noticed I was trembling with hunger. I made sandwiches and cocked an ear to the old cow’s movements. She was in the kitchen, her radio was on – and when I opened the outer door to have a fag her cat was stretched out on my doorstep as if it owned the place. I kicked it off and sat there for a couple of hours until it got too dark to read. I finished the book at ten, and spent a while pacing and listening out for her. At 10.20 she crept to the kitchen, at 10.31 she turned off the hall light and went creaking up the stairs.
Best to get in the kitchen straight away – maybe she was about to make a habit of rising at 11.30 p.m. I waited till she’d finished in the bathroom upstairs and I’d heard her bedroom door click shut, then I nipped along to the kitchen. Turned on the light and shut the door. Her medicine bottle was in its place over the sink, and the pantry door was a couple of inches open. There were rows of bottles on the top two shelves; I carried a chair into the pantry and climbed on it to see them properly. Calum was perfectly right. Four bottles in the corner on the top shelf labelled CONIUM MACULATUM HEMLOCK/WITH CARE. I took the back one, and went over to the sink. Don’t stop, don’t think, just do it. Her own medicine bottle was half full. I emptied it straight down the plughole and filled it to just over the same level from the hemlock bottle. I put her medicine bottle back in its place and the hemlock bottle behind the others in the pantry. Put the chair away and closed the pantry door. The medicine I’d poured down the sink smelt nasty – I went to turn on the tap and remembered just in time how noisy her plumbing was. Poured the contents of the kettle down the drain to swill the medicine away, and got myself back to my room all in under ten minutes.
Good.
I stood by my door listening for a while but it was perfectly quiet. She would have to be clairvoyant to know what I’d done. Which quite probably she was, but on the other hand – if she didn’t think about her medicine until she needed it – if she didn’t need it till she was as desperate as she was yesterday – then there was no reason on earth why she shouldn’t glug half a bottle of hemlock before she even noticed.
I felt good. I put myself to bed.