Page 60 of Little Wing
‘Fancy a walk, Da? Will we go up Beinn Dhubh?’
Gordon thought at first that he’d misheard. ‘You’ll never keep up with me, son.’
Dougie spooned porridge into his mouth. ‘Want to bet on that?’
Gordon smiled, gathered up the breakfast things and whistled his way over to the sink.
Watching his father stride so confidently, negotiating the boggy terrain to the vast slabs of the ascent, it struck Dougie how much bigger his father looked here. This was the man he remembered, not the small man shrouded in a coat against the cold in a slump on his doorstep last week. Here he looked right; in the city he’d looked all wrong. In London, Dougie had felt his father to be embarrassing. On the hill, today, he felt in awe and proud to be his son. Gordon was robust for his age, confident in his surroundings, at ease. Strong and invincible. Dougie thought that those two adjectives were what every father should aspire to and what every son should see. They walked almost shoulder to shoulder, Dougie mindful for Gordon to lead.
Gordon had noticed that Dougie had brought his camera. Nothing unusual about that. What was unfamiliar was walking a good two hours without a single photo being taken. He glanced at his son, all that hair flopping around the place, flicking at his eyes, catching in his mouth. The lad tended to tie it back when he was in the still house yet let it fly wild in the open.Amadan gòrach.
‘Loch a Siar not good enough for you?’ Gordon chuckled darkly.
‘Huh?’
‘Views not what they were?’
‘Da?’
‘Sea a bit nothingy, is it? Sunlight wanting?’
‘What are you going on about?’
‘Your camera, Douglas.’
Dougie laughed. ‘I forgot I had it with me.’
‘Like your mother—’
‘—with her handbag!’
‘Took it everywhere. Took it upstairs and back downstairs too.’
‘Took it to the beach.’
‘Took it to the end of the garden. She took that thing everywhere. Saidyou’ll bury me with this bag.’
Ahead, a slab of stone roared up from the heather and Gordon sat while Dougie stood, hands on hips, his face to the sun, breathing in sweet air, his eyes closed. When he opened them his father was munching on oatcakes. He sat down beside him and, as he ate, he wondered what it was in the air that changed the flavour from its perfunctory norm on a plate at the kitchen table to some kind of delicious and energizing manna. The stone beneath him was that ageless contradiction of hardness and warmth. And Dougie thought if I could be only one place in the world with only one food ever to eat, it would be right here with these oatcakes. He took another to keep the concept alive a little longer.
‘Did it strip it?’ Gordon wanted to know. ‘College? Your job? Is that what happened to the pleasure, the passion?’
Though he knew exactly what his father meant, Dougie gave it space before he answered with a shrug.
‘I don’t know,’ he said quietly and he thought about it some more. ‘When I’m looking, when I’m seeing, it’s a sensation. I feel my eyes focus in on the subject, assess the light, find the form and understand the spaces, sense the sides you can’t see. The camera takes it one step further. It stills it all. If it captures anything, it captures a dimension that’s hidden.’
Dougie could feel Gordon looking at him. His answer was erudite but it wasn’t what his father was looking for, he knew that.
‘It has to start with the eye,’ Dougie persevered. ‘Not gadgetry.’
And he wondered, do I sound like a bit of a prick?
‘And you get all this, do you?’ Gordon asked. ‘When you photograph the hidden forces of a wheelbarrow? For acatalogue? You experience all those complex things about light and form when you photograph models in bad clothes for mail order? You sense the sides you cannot see – you attain that stillness?’
Dougie started to laugh partly because he knew his dad was being quite serious and it was unsettling. ‘It’s ajob, Da,’ he shrugged. ‘The money is good.’
‘That’s an excuse,’ Gordon said, ‘and in the long run, it’ll cost you more than it pays you.’
Dougie didn’t like where the conversation was going precisely because he had no idea of its path. Usually, he and his father conversed so benignly, avoiding contention. It wasn’t their style to chatter either, that had been his mother’s speciality and oh, how she could draw it out of him and Gordon. Today it was uneven, uncharted ground. Dougie didn’t like it. More so because it appeared his father knew where he was headed.
