Page 91 of Little Wing
‘I worried a lot when I was young,’ she said. ‘I had the most amazing, loving, unforgettable mum who just wasn’t able to be amazing and loving all the time. And those are also the times that, unfortunately, are unforgettable.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘She lives close by – in a care home. She’s safetherebecause she’s not oftenherethese days.’ She looked at Dougie and shrugged sadly. ‘So, really, I have two lost mothers. One lost in a different time, one lost in a different place.’
Dougie thought about this. ‘No, Nell, no,’ he said. ‘Youhave lost two mothers.’
She listened to his words. She’d never thought about it this way.
‘And I really feel for you,’ he said.
I’m not going to cry I’m not going to cry I’m not going to cry.
They sat quietly. There was just a gentle breeze and the sound of the water lazily slapping the shore was soothing. And Dougie thought, I never knew the beach could be like this. He thought, I’m always using it as a running track, I’m only ever running away from it. And then Dougie thought, perhaps for the first time, how to sit still, to justbe, might give him more power and strength than running at full pelt. And he thought about what was then, what had happened all those years ago. How he’d left the island for college without a backward glance yet six years later it had received him home without question at a time when he couldn’t stand up and he couldn’t talk and he couldn’t distinguish between day and night. And hadn’t he turned his back on all that it had given him, all that was here, ever since, really?
Dougie glanced at Nell; she was gazing out over the sea to the velvety form of Taransay. His home hadn’t had ornaments and trinkets and shawls and people who danced on furniture. His home, his family, was plain and strong and always there.
And yet.
‘I went to art college in Manchester and I met a girl and fell head over heels and I didn’t properly notice her depression because I didn’t want to see it and she committed suicide when she was twenty-two and then I got heavily into the rave scene and I fucked myself up on drugs and had a nervous breakdown.’
Nell stared at Dougie aghast. He’d said it in one breath and now she held hers. His eyes were closed and he was swallowing hard. Who was this man she’d met only yesterday whom, it seemed, she had known all her life?
So this was his story?
She put her hand between his shoulder blades and let it rest there.
‘That’s why I don’t shoot portraits any more,’ Dougie said. ‘Because of the time when I couldn’t see what I should have seen.’ He glanced at Nell. ‘The camera should be an extension to the eye – not a substitute. If I saw emotion, fear, love, secrets, pain, dreams in a person I could capture it with my camera – a hidden moment that not even the subject was aware of.’ He looked away from Nell, away from the sea, down the beach to the looming growl of the North Harris hills, a bank of bruised clouds hunkering on the peaks. ‘I don’t trust myself with a camera these days. For work, yes. For the inanimate, yes. For vast landscape and crammed cityscapes – yes. That’s it. Photography is my wage, not my calling. Because it lied. It lied the same time as my eyes failed me – when I took all those portraits of her, when I couldn’t see what was staring back at me in black-and-white and vivid colour.’
‘What was her name?’
‘Daisy.’
Nell moved her hand and swept her arm around his shoulders.
He turned to her and gave her a little nudge. ‘So I take your bonkers mum,’ he said, ‘and I raise you one suicide girlfriend.’
Dougie’s words hung emphatic in the air. And yet, as callous as they could have been, they weren’t. Somehow, they worked. They worked because he’d said them to someone who he’d sensed wouldn’t judge, who’d empathize, whoknew.
Nell was the first to go. With a snort, laughter wracked her body so hard that she was soon lying on the sand in a twisting side-stitch of giggles. Dougie joined shortly after and there they stayed with their glee and their grief, with the tears and the laughter and the understanding and the connection and the sand in their hair and the unseen eagle high overhead and the sea, always the sea, rolling in to take a little of their sorrow deep into the water and away.
‘My bum’s wet,’ said Nell.
‘So’s mine,’ said Dougie.
He got to his feet, held his hand out for Nell to pull her up. This time, she let her hand be held and on they walked.
‘It was 1990,’ Dougie said. ‘It feels like a lifetime ago. Like someone else’s life. MDMA. Acid. Whatever, really. Getting off your face – that’s the way you grieve when you’re twenty-three.’ Dougie nodded. ‘My poor da.’ The memories were still too stark to focus on for more than a moment, like the spiked dazzle of looking straight into sunlight. ‘He brought me back here, me and my rucksack of Prozac. And all I remember of that time was that day became night became day became night. Again and again and again. God, I was a mess. I probably still am.’
‘I like your dad.’
‘My Mum had died not two years before. He’d had all that. And then he had to have me and all my shit. I’ve never really thanked him and I’ve never really said sorry.’
Nell listened quietly. ‘But you know, I doubt he thinks you’ve anything to apologize for.’
‘I should say sorry for being such an arse more recently,’ Dougie said. ‘Ignoring his calls, feeling irritated by his concern. Being insensitive – bigging up the merits of life in a place as far from my upbringing as it’s possible to be.’
Nell gave Dougie a poke in the ribs. ‘But look at you now,’ she said. ‘I mean, yes, your hair is all over the place and a bit of a tousled cliché – but it seems to me that you’re pretty bloody fine. You’re strong,’ she said. ‘You’re kind. You care.’
