Page 44 of Little Wing
‘You stay there, Florence,’ he says. ‘The both of you. You turn your back on here, on everything here, everything you have known – greet your new land with an open heart and you will be welcomed, you will be safe.’
‘I don’t come back?’
‘No.’
‘I stay there? I live there? With Baby? On an island?’
‘Yes.’
‘But what about everything here?’ And I start to cry. ‘When can I come back?’
His hand gently on my shoulder. ‘For now, everything for you is out there. In Harris. Bide your time.’
‘But when am I going?’
‘Soon.’
‘How soon? Will you take me?’ My voice sounds so young it shocks me. ‘Please, George?’
His look is reluctant and sad – and it says no. And this I do understand. I understand. He is already taking me, in a way. But he can only take me so far before he has to turn back because his place is here.
I’m looking at the map of the UK. I am looking at the Outer Hebrides; they look like a tattered feather on the edge, on the very edge. They are a scatter of islands in snips and bits, strewn like snags of seaweed. And so much water. It looks like the land hasn’t finished rising out of the sea.
Gordon
Gordon knew his wife would have called himamadan, a numpty. She’d have said it affectionately but she would have meant it. His wife would have made him sit down, have a wee dram and a proper think about it all. His wife would have changed his mind for him. She’d have put her arms around him and everything would have made sense, everything would have seemed all right. And he’d have laid his head against her and said, what’d I do without you?
His son, though, might well be appalled.
But too late for that now. His wife was no longer here and sometimes there’s so little comfort from the dead that poor decisions are made almost in protest.
No time for the boat and the train and he’d worry about the cost another day. Loganair would fly him to Edinburgh and British Airways onwards to Heathrow. And then he’d just have to find his way into the city.
Dougie hadn’t been paid from the last job yet, and that’s why he’d taken this one. There was a time when he would have seen it as demeaning, being assistant to someone else, but these days he simply totted up that it was money in the bank and therefore worth it. It was a fashion shoot, all week in an echoey studio near Earls Court. ‘Fashion’ was stretching it, but there were models and there were rails of clothes for a lowbrow but perennially popular catalogue. Last week it was womenswear, this week men’s. Dougie had worked with Len before and that’s why Len wanted to work with him again – because Dougie was efficient and capable and quiet. He wouldn’t lark around with the models, he wouldn’t make suggestions or raise an eyebrow or get precious or moody, he’d just get on with it and do what was asked of him. He was paying him to have no opinion.
Sometimes, when Dougie’s mind was so wired and active through the night, it was good to have the daytime to rest his brain. And it was very good not to have to lug all his own gear across London.
It was still cold at night – the warm drifts of spring that beguiled during the day were crushed by an invasive chill once the daylight had faded. There was something insidious about this when Dougie emerged from the fug of the underground – yet welcome if he was coming out of the gym. He liked the gym; he saw it as a place of amusing contradiction – the pursuit of health in a place where the air was cloyed with the taste of sweat, also the anonymity but amicability of everyone calling each other mate. Dougie liked to move, to really move, to move fast. It was just something he’d always done. When he was little he’d called it the jiggies – he’d call to his parents that he was going to get the jiggies away and he’d just go out the back door and run. Over the bibbled grass of the garden to the machair hinterland between land and beach and then on to the sand where time behaved in a strange way and his legs carried him indefatigably. Running had always been Dougie’s physical and mental release; barefoot on sand or a pair of trainers for the hills and off he’d go for mile after mile. He was a familiar sight. There goes the Munro boy. There he goes.
His favourite pair of trainers was one of the few things that came with him to London. But though he lived not far from Regent’s Park, from Primrose Hill or even the Heath, there was something about running in London that he just did not take to. He felt contained, enclosed and restricted in the vast city. For Dougie, when uneven paths and green collided with stretched tarmac and grey it was akin to running on glue. A rhythm eluded him in the parks but he felt nervous and irritated on the roads. He tried running the Outer Circle of Regent’s Park, just off the kerb, but the clashing cadence of other runners was so distracting it made him quite xenophobic. However, the gym around the corner had a treadmill and though this should have been an anathema to him, Dougie discovered how running evenly for an hour without getting anywhere could be strangely transcendental. With headphones on and gazing through his reflection without focus, a different zone altogether opened to him, one in which he didn’t have to think or notice or feel anything.
He wasn’t getting to move much, assisting on the Earls Court shoot, so he ran for a good hour or so at the gym every evening after work.
Fuckin’ hell, mate – you training for the Marathon or what?
Gordon was an excellent walker. His pace was a jog for most and even now in his seventies his familiar routes took him no longer than they always had. There was a local walking group, a couple of his friends were in it and though they asked him to join he explained that walking slowly made him trip and swear which wouldn’t be good for any of them. But London did something strange to his legs; how does anyone walk in London? Not in a straight line, that was for sure. Gordon felt as though he was doing a jig, an arrhythmic and disjointed course to where he was headed. In London, it seemed to him, people were walking to a soundtrack of some very experimental jazz – avoiding each other with a quick-quick-slow, or dancing around one another, or getting right up against each other with too much apology or without any at all. On the train from Heathrow to Paddington, he’d looked at a map and thought he might walk to Camden along the canal but almost immediately there was vomit and rubbish and something dead in the water and skanky kids doing drugs so he took a taxi. His legs were twitching.
So here he was, standing in front of the street sign and reading it out loud. When he arrived at Dougie’s door, he said the number out loud too. He looked at the three doorbells for a long time, thinking to himself he never knew that Dougie’s neighbours were called Dr Ismail and J & U Loughrey, and that his son’s handwriting seemed to have changed. Douglas Munro. Small and contained. His son was anything but. He rang the bell to no answer. Waited. Rang it again. Backed up a little and looked up while the emanating dark from the first floor descended all over him. And just then Gordon thought perhaps this wasn’t such a good idea. What, exactly, was he here to achieve? How did he expect his son to react? He wondered how could it be that he had been at home this very morning and now look where he was. Did Dougie not feel the distance every day of his life?
Gordon rang the bell again. Told himself to go for a walk, so he walked. Around and around the block, stopping outside the building each time, looking up at the unchanged windows. And off he walked again. He had to keep walking, he was cold. He ventured further afield, along Camden High Street, but the olfactory clash of all those cuisines was maddening. He was very very hungry – when had he last eaten? But he didn’t want to stop anywhere because what if he missed his son? And anyway, what would he order and how much would they charge down here? He looked at his watch. It was half past six. Gordon kept walking.
At nine o’clock, emerging into the night’s aircon glowing hot from the gym, Dougie headed home for a shower, stopping off on the way for a takeaway curry. He was gratifyingly knackered now. He calculated that he could be asleep in an hour and a half. Ahead of him, a tramp in a dark grey slump on his doorstep; not an uncommon sight with the hostel just around the corner. Usually, if he had a bag of shopping Dougie would give a packet of biscuits, a carton of juice, but he was going to be selfish with tonight’s curry. The man appeared to be either blind drunk or fast asleep. Dougie thought, he looks a bit like my dad. The same soft beard of a lifetime, the hair once thick now tufty, spectacles so well known to the nose that the two appeared to meld. And when Dougie realized itwashis father, his heart jumped and his brain ceased working and all he could do was stand stock-still. The pain he felt at knowing that he was more horrified than delighted. The momentary instinct he had to turn and walk away. The collision of questions like a high-speed chase in his head. Dad? What’s happened? What’s he doing? Why are you here? Dad?
Gordon must have sensed all the thoughts directed at him. He looked up and saw his son and he scrambled to his feet and raised his hand and couldn’t find his voice.
‘Dad?’
As the blood flowed back into Gordon’s left leg, pain replaced the numbing. He raised his hand again and hoped desperately to be normal-looking. What was it the kids say? No biggie!
