Page 72 of Little Wing
Up in his room, Dougie searched through the cupboard, not allowing himself to be waylaid by unfurling posters and alluring glimpses of Kim Wilde and Clare Grogan. Nor was he distracted by the see-through box in which a mass of ribbons and their clank of medals documented his sporting prowess. He shoved everything onto his bed, knowing that the box would be right at the back. It was one of four, sizeable and stout, made of acid-free cardboard. They’d been expensive and he’d had to send away for them. The top two he dumped on his bed. It was the third that he wanted. The fourth, however, needed to stay where it was, right at the back, at the bottom, in the dark. He barely glanced at it.
Dougie sat on the rug by the bed with the box next to him. He lifted the lid and immediately the scent accosted him. Photographic paper and leaves of treated tissue. If he closed his eyes, the darkroom came through, a heady mix of vinegary fluids, the three trays, the lines and the pegs and even the dimness itself. It occurred to him that everything in one’s past has a scent even if it went unacknowledged at the time. All these years later, it was this that came to the fore; this was the key to travelling backwards – regardless of whether the more obvious details were remembered.
In the box was his project for his final year at art college. A collection of photographs perpetuating his chosen theme,On the Edge. He read his mission statement.
I grew up on the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides.
Like many my age, I have left for the mainland.
Who is left to watch for the weather and to judge the tides, to buain the peats and gather the crotal, to walk up the high hill and run over the white sand?
Here are the faces that know.
They know that while I may perceive opportunity to lie further and further away, my heart and soul will always be that of a Hearach.
Dougie remembered sharply how the five sentences had taken him almost as much time to develop as the photographs themselves. He looked away from the box and over to the window. How long he stayed there, lost in thought, he did not know but when his focus returned his father was standing there, puzzled, in the doorway.
‘Spring cleaning, Douglas?’
‘I wanted to find my photograph of Duncan MacAskill. I thought about him this morning.’
‘Now there’s a name I’ve not thought about for many a year.’ Gordon chuckled. ‘MacAskill, eh! Will we bring that box downstairs, then?’
And Dougie thought, why not. The projects by all the final-year students had been exhibited, after all, for anyone to see. His parents had come to his graduation, walked quietly around the show, wearing the same polite expressions for all the works. Nudes, graffiti, decaying food, abstracted trees, the Notting Hill Carnival, people living in boxes under a bridge in London. And Dougie’s Harris. It was the time they spent that gave away what they liked and what they didn’t. They nodded and smiled at all Dougie’s fellow exhibitors. Very good, they said, very good.
‘Yes,’ said Dougie, content that his father should want to carry the box. ‘Let’s.’
The portrait of Duncan MacAskill was third from the top.
‘There he is!’ Gordon chuckled, then sighed. ‘You know he was Tarbert’s oldest shopkeeper when he died? Never left the island again once he came home from Gallipoli.’
Dougie knew. He’d spent quite some time with the man, a number of days; judging the light outside and watching for the light behind his subject’s eyes until he knew the portrait was ready to capture. They looked at the photo. Duncan MacAskill in his shop, his wares in a higgle in the background. Wearing his shirt and tie under a thick hand-knit jumper, over it all his Harris Tweed jacket that may even have belonged to his father. Peaked cloth cap and the kindly, craggy face beneath, eyes darkened by the war he wouldn’t speak about.
‘Remember how he’d jump over the counter?’
‘Aye. Remember how there was no chair – he’d pull out a drawer from the counter, pop a cushion over it and sit there.’
‘I’d give him 10 pence,’ said Dougie, ‘and he’d give me a line and fish hooks and I’d catch eels on the shore.’
‘God rest him,’ Gordon murmured. ‘Did all right, so he did. You’d go in the shop for one thing and come out with seventeen others.’ But Dougie didn’t comment; he was absorbed with all the prints. He could still remember the precise conditions when he pressed the shutter for each.
Black-face sheep.
Isobel in the bakery, aproned, hands on hips.
The cruachs – the herringbone stacks of peats.
Slabs of striated, folded, compressed Lewisian gneiss.
Lobster creels.
The carvings at Rodel Church.
Bolts of tweed.
A nurse vaccinating alarmed children at school.
Sanderlings in a frolic on the beach.
