Calum Macdonald’s pebbledash bungalow sat amongst a cluster of three houses just over the brow of the hill. When Fin was last in Crobost it had been semi-derelict, an old single-storey, tin-roofed whitehouse left to rot. Someone had spent a lot of money on it since then. A new roof, double-glazing, a kitchen extension built on the back. There was a walled garden, the wall sprayed with the same pebbledash as the house. And someone had spent a lot of time taming the wilderness, laying lawns and planting flowerbeds. Fin knew that there had been some kind of compensation paid, although no amount of money could compensate for a lifetime in a wheelchair. He assumed that the money had gone on the house, or that at least a part of it had.
Calum’s mother had been widowed before Calum was born — another fatality at sea — and the two of them had lived in a row of council houses near the school. Fin knew that Calum had never told her about the bullying, or about what happened the night he broke his back. They had all lived in terror of what would happen when the full story came out. But it never did. Like everything else in his life, his fears, his dreams, his secret desires, Calum kept it to himself, and the expected storm never broke.
Fin parked by the gate and walked up the pavings to the kitchen door. There was a ramp there in place of a step. He knocked and waited. There were two houses behind Calum’s, and a large breezeblock garage with rust-red doors. An overgrown yard was littered with the remains of cannibalized tractors and broken-down trailers. A stark contrast with the neat and tidy garden on this side of the wall. Fin turned, as the door opened, to find an elderly woman standing at the top of the ramp. She was wearing a print apron over a woollen jumper and tweed skirt. When he had last seen Calum’s mother her hair had been the purest black. Now it was the purest white. But it was carefully arranged in soft curls around a face almost as colourless, a face scarred by a tracery of fine criss-crossing wrinkles. Her eyes were a pale, watery blue, and they peered at him without recognition. Fin was almost startled to see her. He could never quite get used to the fact that people his age had parents who were still alive.
‘Mrs Macdonald?’
She frowned, wondering if she should know him. ‘Aye.’
‘It’s Fin Macleod. I used to live up near the harbour with my aunt. I was at school with Calum.’
The frown faded, but there was no smile. Her mouth set itself in a hard line. ‘Oh,’ she said.
Fin shuffled awkwardly. ‘I wondered if it might be possible to see him.’
‘Well, you’ve taken your time coming, haven’t you?’ Her voice was hard, the Gaelic giving it a steely edge. It also had the rasp of an inveterate smoker. ‘It’s almost twenty years since Calum broke his back, and none of you even had the decency to visit. Except for Angel, poor boy.’
Fin was torn between guilt and curiosity. ‘Angel came to see Calum?’
‘Aye, every week. Regular as clockwork.’ She paused to draw a wheezing breath. ‘But he’ll not be coming any more, will he?’
Fin stood for a moment, uncertain how to respond, before deciding there was no adequate response he could make. ‘Is Calum there?’ He looked beyond her into the house.
‘No, he’s not. He’s working.’
‘Where can I find him, then?’
‘In the shed, round the other side of the house. Angel built it for the loom.’ She took a packet of cigarettes from the pocket of her apron and lit one. ‘You’ll hear it when you go round. Just knock.’ She blew out a cloud of smoke and closed the door in his face.
Fin followed the path around the bungalow. The paving stones had been carefully laid and cemented to smooth out the passage for the wheelchair, and Fin wondered if Angel had been responsible for that, too. He ducked under a clothesline heavy with washing blowing in the wind, and saw the shed in the lee of the house. It was a simple breezeblock structure, harled to protect it from the rain, and had a steeply pitched tin roof. There was a window in each face, and a door facing out to a hump of peatstack and the moor beyond. Sunlight reflected in momentary flashes on fragments of water gathered in all its hollows.
As he approached the door he heard the rhythmical clacking of the loom, the turning of wheels turning wheels, sending wooden shuttles shooting back and forth across lines of spun wool almost faster than the eye could see. When he’d been a boy, it was nearly impossible to walk down any street in Ness without hearing a loom in action somewhere, in someone’s shed or garage. Fin had always wondered why tweed woven on Lewis was called Harris Tweed. Whatever it was called, its weavers had never made much money at it. Harris Tweed was not Harris Tweed unless woven by hand, and at one time islanders had laboured at home in their thousands to produce the stuff. The mills in Stornoway paid them a pittance for it before selling it on to markets in Europe and America for a handsome profit. But now the bottom had fallen out of those markets, tweed replaced by more fashionable fabrics, and only a handful of weavers remained, still earning a pittance.
Fin raised his hand to knock on the door and hesitated, closing his eyes, and feeling again a surge of the guilt that had haunted him through all the years since it happened. For just a moment he wondered if Calum would remember him, before dismissing the thought as foolish. Of course he would remember. How could he forget?