Our Fathers Page 5

  4

  Later that afternoon, Tommy said to Malcolm, “Would it be all right if I used the washing machine?”

  He stood in the doorway of the kitchen, holding his arms across his body: a self-protective gesture, it seemed to Malcolm.

  “Of course.”

  Tommy appeared to hesitate. “I didn’t bring many clothes. I’m not sure why. I suppose I was hurrying and . . . I wasn’t thinking.”

  “We can put a load on now,” Malcolm said. “But I have some things I can lend you, too.”

  He saw Tommy hesitating again over this, presumably weighing the awkwardness of borrowing his uncle’s clothes against the awkwardness of having no clothes at all. Finally, he said, “O.K. Thanks.”

  While Tommy sorted out his washing, Malcolm went through the drawers in his bedroom, pulling out old jeans, T-shirts, a pullover, socks, and underwear (this part felt especially uncomfortable, but better Tommy had it than didn’t, he decided). He left the clothes in a small, neat pile on Tommy’s bed and went downstairs to see how Tommy was coping with the vagaries of his ancient washing machine.

  “So connect the two tubes to the taps and check for leaks before you turn the taps on,” he told Tommy.

  “The kitchen taps?” Tommy said.

  “That’s right. It’s not plumbed into the mains. And check the bungee cord’s securing the door before you switch the machine on. The catch is broken. And sometimes it stops halfway through the cycle, and then you just whack it a few times and it’ll usually start up again.” He paused, then added, “Oh, and ignore the rattling noise. There’s some part loose but it doesn’t seem to do any damage.”

  “Malcolm,” Tommy said, frowning at the frayed bungee cord. “I don’t want to overstep the mark, but . . . do you think it might be time you got a new washing machine?”

  “You sound just like Heather,” Malcolm said. “And I’ll say to you what I always said to her. If it’s getting the clothes clean, then what’s the problem?”

  “She was a patient woman,” Tommy murmured, checking the door was secured, before gingerly turning on the taps and then the machine itself. The kitchen was immediately filled with a deafening rumbling and churning. Tommy leapt in shock and then laughed.

  “This is a ridiculous machine,” he said.

  Malcolm decided not to be offended. He liked seeing Tommy laugh. Tommy was still grinning and shaking his head as he went back upstairs.

  By the time Tommy reappeared, Malcolm had made a start on tea. Tommy was now dressed in an assortment of Malcolm’s old clothes, and it seemed to embarrass him. Malcolm carefully avoided commenting, but he was glad to see Tommy wearing more sensible clothes, and especially a thick jersey.

  “Beans on toast O.K.?” he said.

  “Aye,” Tommy said. “That’d be nice. Thank you.” His accent had thickened slightly, Malcolm thought; he sounded more like a Scotsman now.

  While Malcolm heated up the beans, Tommy hung around the kitchen, offering help sporadically, turning the pages of the newspaper that lay on the table without seeming to read any of it, and generally putting Malcolm on edge. Should have picked up beer in the shop, Malcolm thought. Something to offer Tommy, something to ease the atmosphere of awkward formality that seemed to have returned. But when he apologized and suggested getting some beer the next day, Tommy said, “No. Thank you. I don’t drink.”

  “Are you sure you’re a Baird man?” Malcolm said, then immediately regretted it. “I don’t drink much myself, truth be told,” he amended.

  “I used to,” Tommy said. “Used to drink a lot, actually. I stopped recently. It was . . . getting out of hand.”

  Oh Jesus, Malcolm thought. So perhaps that was part of it.

  “Wise decision,” he said, keeping his voice neutral.

  After Malcolm had served the food, Tommy said, “This is nice,” and then made no further comment for some time.

  Eventually, his plate nearly finished, Tommy said, “Do most people . . .” and then stopped, began again. “Do you think everyone round here remembers me?”

  Malcolm glanced up at him. “Yes.”

  “There was a man on the ferry with me,” Tommy said. “He lives here. Ross something.”

  “Ross Johnston, I suppose that’ll be.”

  “He talked to me,” Tommy said. “A lot.”

  “That’ll be Ross then.”

  “He seemed to recognize me. And then when I said my name . . .”

  Better get used to that, Malcolm thought. At least they could rely on Ross to spread the news round the whole island within a couple of days, even without any help from Kathy and Fiona, so people could meet Tommy face to face without staring too much. “You don’t remember him from when you were little?” he said.

  “Not really.”

  “He can certainly talk, that man.”

  “Yeah,” Tommy said, with feeling.

  “We’re all used to it now, I suppose,” Malcolm said. “He used to drive me mad, though. I got in a fight with him once.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Is it so hard to believe? We were teenagers. It’s the only fight I’ve ever been in.” He didn’t count his father.

  “What was it about?” Tommy said.

  “I can’t remember.”

  “A girl?”

  Malcolm laughed at this. “There were hardly enough girls on the island to have fights over. No, I can’t remember what it was over. Something stupid, I’m certain of that.”

  Tommy took a swig of water and said, “I can’t imagine you fighting with anyone.”

  “Like I said, it was just the once.”

  Tommy looked away, looked out of the window, though there was nothing to see except darkness beyond it. “I used to get in fights, didn’t I? After I came to live with you.”

  “Aye,” Malcolm said carefully. “From time to time.”

  “I gave Angus MacIntyre a bloody nose. Broke it, I think.”

  “That’s right. You broke it.” It hadn’t been the final straw, but it had come close.

  “Always felt bad about that,” Tommy said.

  “You were just a child.”

  Malcolm had enough memories of his own to feel bad about. He had wondered often during that terrible final year with Tommy, and even more so after the boy had left the island, if Tommy had blamed them just as they had blamed themselves, if that was why he was so out of control, why he so often seemed to hate them. Heather had encouraged Tommy to resume his counselling sessions on the mainland during that final year—they had ended when he was nine and had refused to attend any more—but she had been forced to drop it after a lot of shouting and swearing from Tommy, and some hurling over of furniture.

  They should have insisted, of course.

  “He’s not angry with us, Mal,” Heather had said after one particularly bad row; they could hear the familiar thump-thump from upstairs as Tommy kicked his bedroom wall. “He’s just angry. And he’s in terrible pain. And we’re the only ones here to take it out on. Nobody else is left. He has nobody else left.”

  And still, still, they had failed him.

  5

  The next day Malcolm went out early, with some relief, to help Robert repair the fencing on the cliffs. He had asked Tommy, “Will you be all right, left to your own devices?” and of course Tommy had said yes.

  Up on the cliffs by the west coast, Malcolm and Robert worked for several hours in silence, driving fresh wooden posts into the ground and piling up the old rotten ones in the back of Robert’s truck. The wind was up and whipping at their faces, which made conversation difficult anyway. The sheep didn’t come too close, clearly not trusting what was taking place.

  Mid-morning, the two men sat side by side in Robert’s truck, sheltering from the wind and drinking coffee from a thermos.

  At last Robert said, as Malcolm
had known he would, “I hear Tommy’s back.”

  “That’s right.”

  Robert didn’t say anything else for a time. They sipped their coffee from the small plastic cups.

  Eventually Robert said, “It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Since you heard from him.” The closest Robert would ever come to prying.

  “A long while.”

  “He O.K.?”

  “Seems to be.”

  “Must be strange,” Robert said. “For him, I mean. Being back here.”

  “Aye.”

  “Strange for you too.”

  Malcolm nodded. The men drained the last of their coffee and got back to work on the fence. But Malcolm thought he could feel what was happening. With Tommy’s return, people were beginning to look at Malcolm and remember. It hadn’t felt like this for years. After Tommy had left, Malcolm had felt himself and Heather drifting loose from the connection. They would never break it entirely, but it had slackened. As the years passed, he felt himself become in the eyes of the others simply Malcolm again, not John’s brother. Still, though. Just every once in a while he’d feel Davey’s gaze on him in the bar, Kathy hesitating fractionally as she handed over his change, and he’d realize they were wondering what he knew.

  Heather would tell him, of course, that he was being too sensitive, manufacturing worries where there were none.

  They’re your friends, she would say. Nobody’s thinking of it.

  The first part was true, Malcolm accepted. But that didn’t mean the second part was as well.

  “Need some more wire,” Robert said, lifting a sagging piece with the end of his hammer.

  “I’ll get it,” Malcolm said, heading for the pickup. Hefting the roll in his arms, he wondered how Tommy was spending his morning. He felt uncomfortable now at the idea of having left this stranger alone in his house. But for God’s sake, what was he afraid Tommy might do? Burn it down? There was certainly nothing worth stealing.

  He and Robert stretched out the new wire between the fence posts, and Malcolm held it taut while Robert tightened it.

  “Gearing up for tupping time now,” Robert said. “We’ll move the ewes in a week or so. You’ll be around?”

  “Of course.”

  They would be moving the ewes down from the hills and into fields Malcolm had once owned. This fact would never be mentioned between them. Malcolm thought this was due less to any particular sensitivity on Robert’s part than to his immense pragmatism; for Robert, things were as they were, and there was no use looking back at how they had once been, or at how they might have been. Malcolm had known Robert a long time and had always respected him. But he couldn’t share his attitude, however hard he tried. He himself spent far too long looking back.

  Malcolm’s father had been a crofter, and his father before him, and his father too, and so on several generations back, all these Baird men working the same swathe of land, give or take a few acres, to the west of the island. Seventeen acres, comprising six acres of covetable in-bye in a shallow green valley, and the eleven acres lying across windswept moorland stretching inland. In addition to this, there was the common grazing, most of it rocky hill terrain, shared by all the crofters in the township.

  Malcolm was the oldest son, and had always known the croft would fall to him when his father died, but he hadn’t expected it to be so soon, when he was only twenty-two. They had sixty Hebridean sheep then, fifty-six breeding ewes and four rams when Malcolm took over the tenancy, though he would later manage to increase the flock size a little.

  It had been a hard life for Malcolm’s father, especially in winter. He was out before light, seven days a week, and not back until after dark. There was never enough money. You couldn’t really live off a croft, even back then. Malcolm’s father did some part-time work as the harbour master to make ends meet. Malcolm sometimes wondered if his father might have been a different kind of man if he hadn’t been a crofter, if he hadn’t lived on the island. In the evenings, like so many of the island’s men, its crofters and its farmers and its ferrymen, Malcolm’s father would drink, and then, from time to time, he would take out his exhaustion and rage on his wife and children. What a cliché that was, Malcolm thought. The drunk, disappointed man coming home to beat his family.

  But in truth, the beatings were hardly worthy of their name: a sudden cuff round the head that sent you flying and left your ears ringing, or a backhand to the face that smarted horribly but rarely left a bruise. It was their unpredictability that frightened Malcolm. His father could be in a rage and never so much as lift a hand to you, or he could be smiling one moment and grabbing you roughly by the shoulder the next. His shouting, too. It was mostly directed at Malcolm’s mother, who his father said was the most useless woman alive, but sometimes it encompassed the boys as well. Malcolm had only seen his father hit his mother once, but it had always been clear who was the chief object of his hatred.

  Malcolm had believed for a long time as a child that he and John were united in their loathing of their father. He was shocked to learn later that this was not the case. When they were teenagers, even during one of their father’s black moods, John would defend him, until Malcolm gave up saying anything in case his comments were reported back to their father. As an adult, John would not go so far as to say it had done them good, the way their father had laid down the law, but he would shrug if the subject came up and say, “He was tough on us, just like his dad was on him. Didn’t do us any harm, did it?”

  Malcolm wasn’t so sure. Far from toughening him up, it had only made Malcolm—the eldest son, the one upon whom everyone’s hopes rested—afraid; he was conscious all the time of his own weakness, flinching every moment at the blow about to fall.

  John had often seemed, if not to admire their father, then at least to understand him better. However many times he was clipped hard round the ear or shoved up against the wall (and perhaps, Malcolm thought later, he was exaggerating the frequency of these incidents in his own memory), John was never resentful. It sometimes seemed to be a point of pride with him, how well he could take it, how little he held it against their father. You might think that if their father had loved anyone (and how strange it seemed to use that word in relation to him), it would have been John, who was so silent and stoical, who even as a young boy never seemed to cry, and whose desire to please their father radiated from him. But their father had been impervious to this. He was disappointed with how small John was, how skinny and weak. “Lucky the croft won’t be going to him,” he would say. “He’s scarce stronger than one of the sheep.”

  “Leave him be, Jack,” their mother would say mildly. “Give him a chance to grow.” This was the furthest she ever went in defending her younger son, and in any case she didn’t hold much sway over her husband.

  For Malcolm, she would risk more, perhaps believing he was in greater need of her protection. Malcolm knew he couldn’t keep an impassive face like John while their father raged. He was not brave like his younger brother, even though he was bigger. His father terrified him, and their mother seemed to know this. Many a time when her husband was drunk or furious or both (perhaps the boys had not cleared up after themselves, had not done their chores, had committed some minor misdemeanour at school, or perhaps, as so often, there was no reason at all except that he hated his life and could do nothing about it), she would tell him Malcolm was out of the house, would be out till teatime, when in fact she had simply hidden her son in her bedroom, where he would remain until his father’s rage had cooled. She never exerted herself in this way for John, a fact that Malcolm took for granted as a child and only started to question when he was almost grown. He had always known his mother loved him more. She told him, from time to time, that he was her special bairn, that he was like her and that John was like their father. Malcolm could never see this: John was nothing like their father, and Malcolm couldn’t imagine anyone being afraid of John. But where
their mother was cool and distant with John, she adored Malcolm. She would reach for Malcolm to hug him or ruffle his hair, but he couldn’t recall her ever doing this with his brother. It brought Malcolm pleasure and shame in equal measure. He would wonder later if his mother was aloof with John because John seemed so detached himself, so self-contained and difficult to read, even before they were teenagers. It occurred to him later still that it was more likely this behaviour of John’s was simply a reaction to their mother’s indifference.

  Malcolm didn’t remember himself and John ever discussing their mother when they were young, except for one time when John came into the bedroom the two of them shared, threw down his bag (this part Malcolm remembered vividly, although he had no idea what age they must have been) and said, “She doesn’t like me. She’s never liked me.” Malcolm recalled, too, the rush of guilt he felt at this, of how he had lamely said, “That’s not true,” while knowing as well as John that it was. John had turned on him at that, shoved him hard and hissed, “Shut up! You don’t know what you’re fucking talking about.” Malcolm could still picture the way his face had been screwed up in anger. He really had seemed like their father then. The subject had not been mentioned between them again.

  Many years later, after their mother’s funeral, he and John had got drunk together in John’s sitting room after the other guests had left. Katrina and Heather had come in from time to time to bring them offerings from the cold spread—sausage rolls, crisps, and sandwiches to soak up the whisky—but eventually they’d given up and left their menfolk to it.