A Great Left Hook
by Kate Nicol
‘You’re going to have to start shutting the door. There’s no two ways about it.’
I stared at a tiny white hair clinging to a wrinkled shred of orange peel on the rim of a jar of Chivers Olde English; it was an unattractive prospect but better than staring at Granny Mack.
Staring was her forte. And I knew that if she sensed a challenge it would set her right off.
Funny how marmalade goes thick like that, I thought. You could practically sole your wellies with it…
‘Och! I’ve been dirling in there since 1966 and never shut the door once.’
Granny Mack was especially frightening when she was on the defensive. I winced as she slammed the hook, which had replaced her left hand since a childhood accident with a scythe, into the scarred leatherette back of her favourite armchair – her only armchair, in point of fact - by the fire. I suppose anyone else might not have winced. They might have jumped clean out of their skin and rushed headlong for the door, but I didn’t, because I was accustomed to the ways of Granny Mack. I won’t say I was inured to them. I couldn’t, for example, ever fully relax my guard; one had to be emotionally braced, always, because one simply never knew. Let us say that I had become sufficiently familiar with the early warning signs and likely conversational trigger points to enable me to weave in and out of her rages, ducking and diving, so to speak, and avoiding the hook-slammings, by and large.
‘Well I think it’s definitely time you started.’
‘Michties be here! What on earth for?’
‘You’ve been seen.’
‘Ach away and dirt.’
My nerve was failing me, so I bent down and pulled a ‘Daily Record’ from a dusty pile of papers spilling out of the half of the sideboard with the broken door, otherwise known as The Black Hole.
I’d been worrying about Granny Mack for some time. It was difficult to tell with someone like her, and there was no doubting that she was a tough character, or at least appeared to be, what with being a hard-working widow crofter and having a metal hook for a left hand and all, but I was pretty sure that she was starting to lose the plot in a major way. Granny Mack talked about a lot of things that sounded convincing on the surface because of the way she said them, glaring at you as she did with her one remaining hand on her bony hip and a roll-up sticking out of the side of her thin-lipped, wrinkled mouth, pink floral pinny fastened with an unlikely bow round her skinny waist, skinny brown legs braced in fight-or-flight readiness; but mostly they simply couldn’t have happened. Not the way she told it.
‘That paper will do in the toilet so don’t be getting marmalade on it. Stick it on the nail next time you go out.’
‘I was about to do just that.’
‘Standards dearie. We might be on a far-flung outpost, but this is still the British Isles, for goodness sake.’
That wasn’t Granny Mack losing the plot. That was Granny Mack being Granny Mack. She didn’t believe in spending on proper toilet paper - or on proper anything for that matter. And now that I’d been living with her for six months, neither did I. We wiped our bottoms, if we bothered to wipe them at all, on junk mail, council tax demands and copies of the Daily Record hoarded in the Black Hole. Milk spilt on top of the fridge would be left until it hardened into a yellow-green crust which could be scraped off with a knife, or indeed Granny Mack’s left hook, unless the cat got to it first. In which case all to the good, and it saved us a job; not that it was the sort of job that would be top of our priority list. Not that we had such high-flown, pointless things as priority lists. Muck trailed into the cottage on muddy shoes would be left there and trodden into what was still, technically, a carpet, leaving a shining patina of filth.
I drained my cracked cup of tea down to the last half undrinkable inch, dark brown and soupy with leaves, and replaced it in the cracked saucer.
‘Daily Record’ in hand I headed towards the front door, which was half open. It was almost always half open, except when there was a storm. Outside, an ancient, yellow-eyed ginger cat was perched on top of a rusting, abandoned fridge, staring vacantly at four scrawny brown hens scratching in the dirt between clumps of rough grass and fading daffodils for who-knew-what. Next to the fridge was a dwindling coal heap, and next to that were the ruins of a concrete coal bunker with nettles and foxgloves growing through the rubble.
Beyond the area at the front of the cottage was a narrow burn where otters sometimes wandered. It was bordered by a stretch of reedy grass thick with bog cotton and flag irises, and after fifty feet or so became wider, reedier and boggier before tumbling off a two hundred foot cliff onto black, barnacle-encrusted rocks. Beyond the rocks roared the dark green sea, turquoise on sunny days, and beyond that, the horizon, and an impenetrable line of grey haze where the Outer Isles were.
Nobody ever went to the Outer Isles except trash and dirt, according to Granny Mack, and that was another one of the things she said that couldn’t possibly be true.
To the right of the house, several yards behind it and directly by the burn as it oozed out of the peat bogs on the hill, stood a tarred wooden hut with a rusting corrugated iron roof secured with ropes salvaged from fishing gear and weighted at the ends with large boulders; the word TOYLET was painted boldly on the black door in peeling white paint. This housed the hens, in a perfunctory kind of way, as well as a fully-functional (some of the time) flushing lavatory. A neighbour from over the way called Donald the Shore had installed the lavatory in 1966, plumbing it in via the burn, being the sort who liked doing helpful things for a pound or two, and indeed it was just the very dab according to most people hereabouts; they enjoyed trying out the flush and admiring the privacy of it all, although Granny Mack still couldn’t for the life of her see the point in it.
‘Before we got this fancy flushing thing we did our business in the burn and our muck went over the cliff. Now we do it in the hut and it still ends up in the burn and over the cliff. I cannot for the life of me see the point in it.’
‘You do it in the TOYLET. The hut is a toilet now,’ said Donald, ‘Not just a henhouse. You have PRIVACY what with the locking door and that.’
‘Ach away and dirt,’ replied Granny Mack, spitting out a shred of tobacco as she rolled herself a cigarette.
Donald the Shore went back to fixing up wrecked cars in his byre after that, and kept himself to himself for a long time.
Behind the TOYLET, high on a hill about a mile or so away, was a vast pile of crumbling sandstone, which had originally been a baronial-style castle built by an eccentric Victorian tobacco millionaire. All sorts of seedy goings-on had happened there, back in the day. Nobody knew for sure exactly what they were, but everyone knew they were seedy. Now it was just a crumbling, lichen-covered shell, overgrown with moss and returning to nature like Granny Mack’s concrete coal bunker and the black houses that could be found broken and scattered elsewhere on the island. In spring, the cracks in its walls were filled with an abundance of primroses and bluebells, in summer, it was a jungle of vast green ferns and purple foxgloves, and in winter, when the snow came, it seemed to vanish entirely, as if it had never been.
All that was all very well, but I realised, as I headed out the door, that Granny Mack had pretty much out-foxed me regarding the important matter originally in hand.
‘Wait a minute! Never mind me getting marmalade on the toilet paper. What about you and the lavvy door?’
‘Oh, what about it?’
‘Well, you were seen. Like I said.’
‘Who would see me?’
‘Dave Stark would. And he did. So they say anyway.’
‘Oh they do do they. What else do they say?’
‘They say that he’s got a trail cam set up by the burn so he can film otters and that, and post it on the internet.’ I gulped. ‘He’s got his own Youtube channel.’
‘The dirty scunner!’
Dave Stark and his partner Val ran the community café-cum-shop up on the hill, just along from the ruins. They were modern, go-getting types, with up-to-the-minute ideas, according to the rumour that went around when they first arrived. And for once, rumour had been within an otter’s whisker of being accurate. Dave was a wildlife enthusiast and offered ‘nature safaris’ to visitors who came to stay in their eco-friendly yurt. Not that there were many visitors.
‘Not yet!’ said Dave, ‘Early days!’
Early days. They’d been there for fifteen years.
Val was a red-faced, silent woman who baked a range of whole-meal breads, pies and cakes, and made hedge-row jellies and jams from locally-foraged fruit. All these things were for sale in the shop, and mini-versions were neatly boxed-up on the dusty old tobacco shelf at the back of the counter in baskets woven from nettle fibres; Welcome Packs for visitors that never came.
Once, and only once, not long after they arrived on the island, Dave asked Granny Mack if she might sell them some of her free range eggs.
‘… or perhaps barter them for some of Val’s jams?’ he smiled as he leaned against the door jamb with Val’s hand-knitted bobble hat pushed to the back of his balding head, stroking his wispy ginger beard and swinging his binoculars. ‘We’re vegan, but we’re prepared to be flexible and have eggs as an option for visitors, as long as the eggs are genuinely free range and we know yours are. They’re not one hundred percent organic okay, but that’s fine, we can live with that. We all need to co-operate, don't we, if we want this community to work.’
‘Ach away and dirt,’ said Granny Mack, frying Tulip bacon from the Co-op van on the propane gas stove. The fat sizzled and spat as she flipped the bacon over with her hook, and cracked a pair of double-yokers into the pan with her good hand.
Dave and Val had their own eggs these days, having imported fancy-looking ‘silkies’ from the Mainland. By all accounts they were excellent layers. Dave’s latest idea was the ‘trail cam’; he thought it would be an investment.
‘It’s an investment Val,’ I heard him say, as I walked past the yurt during an evening stroll; I won’t say I was listening in, but sound travels easily through yurt walls, and despite her snarled protestations of ‘away and dirt’, I knew that it made Granny Mack’s night when I repeated any random, choice nuggets I happened to overhear, ’It’s great advertising. We want to stop people focusing on the ruins and the no roads and the midges and the lack of toilets and stuff. Let’s show everyone what kind of brilliant wildlife we’ve got round here and they’ll all want to come. It’s all very well posting photos online but what everyone looks for now is a vid, okay Val? Everyone likes a vid. And there’s bound to be all sorts round here. I can’t wait to see what we capture.’
He certainly got more than he bargained for when he captured Granny Mack.
‘What on earth possessed you to leave the door open? I mean it’s none of my business but let’s face it it isn’t the 1950s any more, you can’t be doing that kind of thing.‘
‘Oh don’t keep on at me. It is none of your business, you’re quite right, but here, I don’t mind telling you. I like to sit in there, it’s out of the wind and I like a read of the Daily Record while I’m at it. Look at this one now – this one interested me.’
She reached into the pocket of her pink flowered pinny and handed me part of a Daily Record. It was an inner page, neatly folded, and there was a round-ish, brown-rimmed hole in the top corner where it had, evidently, been hanging on the rusty nail in the TOYLET.
‘I was sitting on the TOYLET for a wee while, with nothing happening. You know when you sit down and nothing happens...well no, you won’t know what that’s like at your age of course. Nothing’ll put you up nor down… ‘
‘Go on.’
‘Well, I rolled myself a cigarette and started reading through the Daily Records in order to take my mind off things. Relax myself and that. I started reading that page there, that one you’re looking at, and it got me thinking.’
I peered at the newsprint. ‘This is quite a recent one.’
‘Yes. Have a read.’
Granny Mack sounded nervous, which was a new one on me. She was never nervous. She hadn’t even been nervous when the Great January Storm blew the TOYLET roof clean off in 1996; the racket as the wind ripped the nails out and the rusting sheet of corrugated iron flipped onto its side and crashed into the wall of the house had been enough to scare the dead, and me into going into her room and jumping into bed beside her.
Almost.
It felt like the storm had come right into the house that night. We’d bumped into each other on the landing, meeting somewhere in the middle as we groped our way through the dark. Pitch black as it was with the wind howling and the slates rattling, I could only see the faintly glowing end of Granny Mack’s roll-up cigarette reflected in the steely gleam of her hook, as she raised it to her wrinkly, thin-lipped mouth.
‘There’s no room in there for you,’ she’d said. She was one of those people who don’t have to shout to be heard over a storm. ‘Four hens, the cat, and the dog already under the eiderdown.’
‘You don’t have a dog,’ I replied, shuddering as I clutched my Kumfi Kwilt more closely round my shoulders.
But she didn’t hear me. I’m one of those people who do have to shout to be heard over a storm, and I hadn’t shouted. ‘I’m away out to thon TOYLET thing,’ continued Granny Mack, ‘the dirler’s full up.’
The ‘dirler’, so called because of the noise she made when using it, was the iron bucket that she kept in her room for night-time TOYLET purposes.
I had to admire her nerve.
At any rate, she survived the storm that night, just as she’d survived everything else.
I peered at the section of the Daily Record that she’d handed to me. It featured Coleen Nolan’s Problem Page.
‘Dear Coleen,
I’ve been single for over forty years since my husband took unwell through the rum and then vanished. I’m an old woman now, and I live at the back end of nowhere. There’s no chance of me meeting a man at my age, I know that, but I still have needs. I’m a big fan of the Daily Record and I like your style Coleen – you’re a modern go-getting kind of person with up-to-the-minute ideas so can you help me I wonder. Thanking you in advance.
Kind regards
Bella MacAskill (Mrs)
I glanced up at Granny Mack. She was standing by the fireplace staring at her plimsolled feet. If I hadn’t known her so well I’d have sworn her weather-browned cheeks were turning slightly red. I didn’t like to see that. It unsettled me to think that Granny Mack might be anything other than unrelentingly hard. I didn’t want to have to deal with the possibility that she might have a breaking point – kind of like the nails Donald the Shore had used to hammer the corrugated iron roof onto the TOYLET.
I folded the paper where it had been folded before, and placed it carefully on the table.
I sensed that I had a very good chance of winning the next stare-me-down contest, but oddly enough I didn’t feel as pleased about that as one might expect. ‘Coleen suggests Bella might try internet dating.’
‘Ach she can away and dirt. What would I be doing with the internet?’
‘I don’t know. But you’ll be all over it if Dave Stark posts his latest video online. You’ll probably go viral. You might even attract some fresh blood to Dave and Val’s yurt business.’
‘He’s a dirty scunner. Thon long-haired nyaff and his new-fangled contraption.’ Granny Mack sat down in her favourite chair, the one with the scarred leatherette back, and rested her head in her good hand. ‘Do you know what I was thinking last night? I was thinking that if I wasn’t eighty two and didn’t know for sure that I was going to die before long, I would have to kill myself.’
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. I felt I should think of something positive and up-beat, like Coleen in the Daily Record, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
‘Things were never the same after Granda vanished. I’ll be honest with you. Part of me’s been looking for him ever since. Forty years! Can you believe that? It’s almost as long as you’ve been alive.’
I raised an eyebrow at that, but I didn’t interrupt. What did time mean, anyway, in a situation like this? What difference did it make in any situation, now I came to think of it?
Granny Mack continued. ‘Stormy nights, when the slates are rattling, I’m thinking is that him at the door. When I walk in the woods I’m thinking is he hiding out there in one of the abandoned black houses in the clearing in the middle. When I look out to sea, to that grey haze on the horizon, I wonder if he’s made his way there, and if he’ll ever come back.’
Me too, I thought, but again I stayed silent, afraid of getting too emotional. Emotional would knock Granny Mack right off her stride, at this juncture.
She rolled herself a cigarette, and speared it on the hook while she lit it via a spill taken from a bunch of others kept on the mantelpiece in a small blue china boot emblazoned ‘Kyle of Loch Alsh’ in white lettering.
‘I know I’m hard as nails. I know I’ve a temper dearie. I know he wanted away from me sometimes. That’s why he took to the rum. To escape from me. I used to shout at him something awful about it but I didn’t blame him really, I knew it was me and my terrible nature driving him to it. Maybe the rum wasn’t enough though. Maybe he wanted away altogether. Maybe…’
Again, I wanted to interject, to console, to contradict, but the words wouldn’t come.
‘Or maybe he found someone else along the way. Someone better. A nice fat nurse maybe. A good cook with a kind heart, a decent wage and a pension.’ Granny Mack took a deep drag on her cigarette and blew a long plume of smoke into the fire. ‘I’ll never know for sure. I’ll just have to carry on living with the pain and that’s the long and short of it.’
‘What does he intend to do with the thing anyway?’ she continued, after a moment, pushing at a cinder with a skinny plimsolled foot.
‘Who?’
‘Who? The long haired nyaff. Who else?’
‘Dave? Oh, I don’t know. The video’s probably very blurry, and what with the infra-red if it wasn’t for the hook and the staring eyes I bet nobody would know it’s you. And now I come to think of it, he might even pixellate your face.’
‘He might what?’
Obfuscation. We could all benefit from that from time to time.
‘Och he’s only interested in otters, Granny. He’s hardly going to post a grainy vid of an eighty two year old on the toilet.’
‘But I thought you said I would go viral.’
‘I know what I said. It was just talk. You don’t want to go viral, do you?’
Granny Mack peered at me, and I peered back, curious and, as usual, slightly fearful of meeting her gaze. Then for the first time it came to me, the reason for my fear. It wasn’t merely the obvious fear of bearing the brunt of one of her frequent rages, for that was nothing to me now, really. It was fear of loss; the inevitable breaking of a fragile golden thread that had always held me grounded, through her. Because the fading blue of her eyes held sea and sky and ancient rain-washed heaven.
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