The Gift

Bailemor, North Uist, 1953; the smooth grey-harled house on the machair, windows staring blankly at the Atlantic, without limit.

Roddy’s mother Ann-Mary would sit in the bay window searching the far sea, he thought, for his father; erect in the great wooden chair, that Grannie brought back from Glasgow before the Great War. Her delicate hands lay folded in her lap. His finger would trace the outlines of the fine leaf-shaped carving and the purple enameled flowers on the chair back. The clock on the mantelpiece, next to the photograph of the man in naval uniform, measured out the seconds.

“When will he be home?” he would ask.

She would walk with him to the map on the library wall, take a pin from the box that sat on the Indian elephant table with the real ivory tusks, push the pin into a black dot on the map, then loop the navy blue thread from one pin to the other, until the web almost hid the map. It was thickest around Liverpool, Bristol or Glasgow; points of return and departure; cities as strange, then, to Roddy as those farther-flung: Valparaiso, or Sydney, or Singapore.

“Bidh e dhachaigh fada gu leòr, Roddy,” she said. “He will be home soon enough.”

And he would run out onto the green turf like a calf at the smell of the spring; the fallow between the tattie drills and the barley, where the buttercups, thyme and poppies nod to the breeze, and the peewits whoop and swoop, cleaving the wind, with wings like spades.

“He’s got his leave,” Mother said, folding the letter and placing it behind the clock. “He’ll come tomorrow. We’ll motor to Lochmaddy and bring him home.”

Him coming off the ferry, the white and the gold of his cap blinding in the May sunshine. Lachie the deckhand, known as “beetroot” on account of his purple nose, touched his forehead as he came down the gangplank. And Lachie did not smirk to John-Angus the bus driver on the quay after he passed, like they would have with the Minister, or the Dominie. A first mate in the Funnel Line deserved a man’s respect.

After supper Father emptied his kit-bag: a shawl for mother, a silk painting of a Japanese garden for Kirsty, the “help.”

“And I got you a ship in a bottle, like you asked,” he said.

He passed the parcel to Roddy who felt it light in his hand. And when he unwrapped it, he saw it was plastic, like one he had seen in Oban, just. A thin clear plastic bottle, and you could feel the crude seam running around its curve. Inside, the boat: not a grand clipper, nor a queer pirate junk, or a bristling man-o-war. But just a beat-up fishing boat like you would get any day in the harbor, a scum of glue fixing it to the inside of the bottle. The red lettering on the wrapping said F W Woolworth.

Roddy wiped his eye with the cuff of his jumper. Disappointment drenched him like a basin of tepid water. Then, something more, deeper and scary, that he would later give a name to: shame. Shame for the man who sat before him: handsome, smiling, contented after a fine dinner, who knew so little and, worse, cared even less. Shame for the fact that he thought the gift was good, and pity, that a grown-up could make such a mistake.

When it was fine, he walked with Roddy on the beach, the smell of his pipe warm and honeyed, mixed with the sharp of the bladderwrack and the salt of the ebb. Mother asked Kirsty to make a picnic and father hitched Fergus the sheltie to the old trap, “just for the fun of it,” and they trotted across the sands to Claddich, mother laughing as Fergus’ hooves splashed the sea-spray on them. They sheltered behind the ruined croft and ate their sandwiches, and made sure for certain that they got back before the tide came in and marooned them for evermore.

But after a few days, a low came in from the west, weighted with rain, and he was off to Lochmaddy and not home until the wee hours, clattering and cursing among the sticks and shoes in the lobby, a reek on him sour and stale. Or perhaps he’d not come back at all. Mother turned the radio up loud while they ate their morning porridge; the kitchen speechless as the cold stone cellar.

In the night Roddy heard the murmuring from the bedroom or was it the wind in the whin bushes? The sound of shadows talking. Roddy woke in the morning with the sheets wet and cold. When he told his mother, she and father rowed again.

When he went away he kissed her on the cheek at the kitchen door. Roddy walked with him to the bus at the road-end, carrying his wee suitcase with two hands; the kit-bag was too heavy.

“I’ll see you in a few months, son. What would you like me to bring you this time?”

“Nothing,” said Roddy.

“Nothing?”

“Ay. I have need of nothing.”

And it was true, he would take nothing from anyone. Ever. He would owe no-one anything. To keep awaythe empty feeling in his belly.

As the bus was about to move off, a tide of ewes with lambs swept around it, bleating. Roddy’s father peered out through the rear window and shrugged, awkward for the departure delayed. Roddy pressed his foot on a bubble of soft tar at the road-edge, the tacky black goo tugging at the white crepe sole of his sandal. Through the dust of the window Roddy saw his father flip out a cigarette from the pack and, half-rising from his seat, take a light from a passenger in the row in front. Roddy could not quite make out who it was. A lassie from the Lochmaddy Hotel, he guessed.

Once the flock had passed, and the bus set off, his father smiled and circled his cap to Roddy, like ratings giving the salute. Turning away, he leaned forward, hitched his trousers at the knees, and said something to the other passenger. Then he laughed and blew out a long, thin cloud of blue smoke.

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