Bird of Passage (34 page)

She hated him being up in Finn ’s room although there was nothing of Finn left in there except the memory of him, and even that seemed to be fading. She had packed his few remaining possessions, his books, his overalls and working boots, into a suitcase and left it up there in a cupboard under the eaves, where she supposed it still was, although perhaps the mice had got to it by now, shredding his books, gnawing holes in the overalls, nesting in the boots. 

Once or twice, she had spoken to Billy about his drinking, but she didn’t dare tell Nicolas. Nicolas would have dismissed him, but then who would help Alasdair? She had the uneasy feeling that if Billy went, Nicolas wouldn’t replace him, but would use the crisis to institute some change, moving Alasdair down to the village. She had a deep sense of foreboding about the future of Dunshee.   

On the ninth anniversary of her mother’s death, she went up to the old kirkyard with a posy from the gardens: late roses and a few Michaelmas daisies. There was a stone on her mother’s grave now, a granite headstone, engraved with birds and flowers. ‘
Isabel Galbreath, a dear mum, and daughter
,’ it read. ‘
Be thou my vision, oh lord of my heart
.’ It had been Isabel’s favourite hymn and Kirsty loved it too. There was something comforting about the ancient words, ‘
Be thou my high tower,’
with their suggestion of round towers and hill-top strongholds.
Alasdair had asked the stonemason to carve the word ‘
daughter
’ because that was how he had always thought of Isabel.

There was a vase on her mother’s grave, slotted neatly into a hole in the base of the headstone. When she lifted it out, there were worms and centipedes and earwigs scuttling about beneath. The lid of the vase was hard to get off and there were always a few dead flower stalks left inside. She took a plastic bottle to the tap in the corner of the cemetery and fetched water to rinse out the vase and refill it. By the time she was ready to replace it, the denizens of the hole had disappeared. She arranged her posy carefully.

 ‘Oh, mum!’ she thought, and although it was so many years since her mother had died, she felt a lump in her throat and tears in her eyes. She felt tired to the point of exhaustion. She would have liked to lie down on the short turf and go to sleep, but somebody might come and see her. So she gathered together her plastic bottle and her plastic bag, with the stalks of the flowers and the few dead blooms from her last arrangement, and took them to the litter bin.

Before going home, she scrambled down into the older part of the kirkyard where she and Finn had once tried to summon the dead MacDonald from his grave. She hadn’t been here for years.  The place was full of clear, slanting light as the sun sank behind the island.  There were brambles growing over the more unkempt graves, and she picked the ripe berries and ate a few of them. They bruised her fingers with their juice, and she knew that her tongue would be the same colour.

She found the MacDonald grave, stumbling upon it almost by chance, and  began to walk around it with the brambles tugging at her jeans. Shrubs and long grasses barred her way, but she pushed them aside. Once, twice, three times.

‘Come forth!’ she whispered. ‘Come forth!’ She saw movement among the brambles but it was only a wren, hopping about among the stalks on his impossibly spindly legs, searching out insects with the needle of his beak.

She stood up straight and looked towards the mainland, scanning the darkening stretch of water. The last ferry of the day was returning to the island. She could see from here that the deck was empty. No cars. No passengers either. It was returning to its berth for the night and wouldn’t leave again until morning. For no reason that she could see, she felt an irrational stab of fear. There was a nervous fluttering in her stomach. Her heart raced and the sky wheeled above her. She steadied herself on a tombstone, feeling the gritty texture of granite and lichen beneath her fingers. She breathed deeply and, after a moment or two, the sensation of panic passed. What was that, she thought? What happened then?

The children would be wondering where she had got to. She wiped her mouth with her hand, leaving a red smear of  berry juice on her cheek, and headed down the hill towards Ealachan. Nothing, she thought. I am waiting for nothing.

Later on that night, she was alone in the small parlour, dozing in front of the television. Nicolas had been in his study all evening, working on some estate correspondence, but an hour ago he had gone to bed. The children were fast asleep. Kirsty had been attempting to knit a pullover for Flora who had become very interested in her own clothes. She wanted one in pink, with a teddy bear on the front, but Kirsty had never been good at such things, and she noticed that she had dropped a stitch, four or five rows back. She couldn’t bear the thought of unpicking it all just now, so she bundled it  into her knitting bag and pushed it down the side of the sofa. To console herself, she poured a large sherry, which was all there was in the room, besides Nicolas’s whisky. She would have liked a gin and tonic but she couldn’t be bothered trekking down to the kitchen through the silent and faintly spooky house.  She decided to watch the television news and go to bed.

Annabel was coming tomorrow. The girls were delighted at the prospect of a visit from their aunt. Somewhat to Kirsty’s surprise, she was very patient with the girls and would sit for hours, playing board games, threading beads, colouring in pictures, making unlikely and madly collapsible structures out of Lego.

Kirsty has just taken a large gulp of her sherry when the newsreader, with suddenly assumed gravity, began to speak about a tragedy which was unfolding somewhere out on the North Sea. There had been explosions on an oil platform. A fire was raging. She saw smoke billowing. Twisted metal. She watched rescue vessels, and helicopters hovering, unable to get closer because of the smoke and the flames. She saw water funnelling up into the air, a desperate attempt to combat the fire. She wished that Nicolas was awake because this was too sad to watch alone.

She drank again, and the alcohol steadied her. They were attempting to assess the number of dead and injured, but nobody was sure. It could be dozens. It could be more than a hundred. There was a shot of ambulances; many of the  survivors were badly burned. They were interviewing the few who were relatively unscathed, who had been picked up by boats and helicopters: haggard men with grimy faces, men wrapped in blankets, men on their way to hospital to be treated for smoke inhalation and hypothermia. What was it like? How do you feel? Stupid, unanswerable questions.

The camera focused in on a pale face. It was a face on which the full horror of the evening’s events were painted, as one might paint them on a canvas, the black hair damp with sea water or sweat or both, the cheeks bruised and dirty. It was a gift for any artist, this coldly beautiful face, shaded and hollowed by terror.  

‘How did you get off?’ the young reporter was asking.

‘I don’t know. I must have jumped. Somebody pulled me out of the water. It shouldn’t have happened. I know that. It should not have happened.’ The man turned away, shaking his head, putting out a hand to shield himself from the camera’s intrusive eye. ‘No’ he said. ‘No. That’s enough.’

Long after they had moved on to the next item on the schedule, she sat staring at the screen.

Had she imagined the whole thing?

Or could it be true that she had just seen Finn O’Malley turning away from his interrogator, shaking his head, pushing the empty air aside?

At last she got up, poured another large sherry, drained the glass in one gulp, and then went over to her desk where she kept her sketchbooks, newspaper clippings, catalogues. She rummaged about frantically, looking for the current Writers’ and Artists’ Year Book.  Leafing through it, she found what she was looking for: contact details for the BBC. She phoned the switchboard and was passed on to whatever duty officer was manning the television news desk at this late hour.

‘Can I help you?’ asked the young woman at the other end. She sounded tired, as if she was at the end of a long shift and couldn’t wait to get home.

‘I hope so’ said Kirsty and then hesitated. This was preposterous. 

There was a silence at the other end. The girl was waiting.

‘I was watching the news, the news about the accident, in the North Sea.’

‘Yes, Madam.’

‘Your reporter was interviewing one of the survivors.’

She sensed the girl gathering herself together to deal with the situation.

‘There are believed to be survivors,’ she intoned, professionally. ‘The police have issued a telephone number, madam. I think it’s an Aberdeen number. Can I give it to you?’

‘I just need to know. The man you were interviewing. The point is, I know him. How can I contact him? Do you have any contact details?’

There was another pregnant pause. She could almost see the girl at the other end mouthing ‘We’ve got one here!’ to an unseen companion.

‘Was this a relative? Did you have a relative working aboard the rig, madam?’

‘No. Not a relative. But as good as. An old friend. Missing. I need to know where he is.’

 ‘Madam,’ said the girl, and she sounded quite friendly. Humouring her. ‘I’m afraid we couldn’t possibly issue such details, even if we had them. Our reporter was on the scene, but we have no way of knowing the identities of the people he was talking to. Can I give you the police number? They may be able to tell you more.’

Kirsty heard the scepticism in her voice. Not a cat in hell’s chance, she was thinking.

She took the number anyway and dialled it, at intervals, for an hour, but it was always engaged.

When at last she got through, they again asked her if she was a relative. She should have lied. She should have said yes, he’s my husband, my cousin, my long lost brother who left home years ago. But when she said  ‘he’s an old friend’, they told her politely but firmly that they could give out no information.

Finn,’ she said.  ‘His name’s Finn O’Malley. I saw him on the television. He’s been gone so long. Years. I have to know if it was him.’

‘And your name?’ asked the policeman.

‘Kirsty Galbreath.’ Why did she say that name, she wondered? Why not Kirsty Laurence?

‘Well Ms Galbreath, we will be issuing a list of survivors in due course. Can I suggest that you wait until this is published at the proper time?’

‘I can’t wait. I have to know.’

‘Then I’m sorry, but I really can’t help you. May I suggest that you contact this Mr O’Malley’s family.’

‘You don’t understand. He doesn’t have a family. We’re the only family he has.’

‘With all due respect Ms Galbreath, if you haven’t seen him for years, how do you know?’

She hung up. He was right of course. Finn may have a wife and children by now. They may have been watching the news with the same sick sense of trepidation. They may, even now, be weeping with relief, phoning the police, speeding to the hospital with all the right in the world to embrace Finn, to give thanks that he was alive.

It was very late. The fire had gone out and she was cold. Even the dogs had gone to bed. When she went upstairs, she found the cat asleep on Nicolas’s feet.  New Cat they called him, even though he was not new at all, but five years old, brought home by India from a friend’s house as a gift for her mother. Poor Fish Face had long gone to rest under the fuchsia hedge at Dunshee. She undressed and crept into bed, but she couldn’t sleep. When she closed her eyes, a thousand images of Finn leapt from the darkness.  She tried to warm her cold feet on him, but he only sighed and turned away from her.

A few days after the disaster, the newspapers published a list of survivors. Over one hundred and thirty men had died, and only sixty odd had survived. Among the list of survivors, there was the name of Finn O’Malley.

Kirsty showed it to Nicolas but he seemed indifferent.

‘So?’  he said. ‘Now you know where he went. He’s probably a rigger. Making himself a bit of cash. He was one of the lucky ones.’

‘I think you’d rather Finn was at the bottom of the North Sea.’

‘That’s not fair. I don’t wish any ill to the man. In fact I don’t really think about him at all. Besides, I’ve got too much else to worry about right now.’

‘What are you worried about?’

‘Are you really so self absorbed that you don’t know? Our company – we supplied some of the equipment on the rig. Have you no bloody idea of the implications of all this?’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t think.’

‘And I’m sorry too. But there could be all kinds of ramifications – mostly financial.’

‘It always comes down to money, doesn’t it, Nicolas?’

But once again, he wouldn’t argue with her. He took himself out of the room and left her alone with her cooling coffee. 

The local newspaper had reported the accident and its survivors extensively. Finn wasn’t a rigger. To her surprise, she read that he was an engineer. He had just been coming off duty, which was why he wasn’t in the accommodation block. Which was why he had survived. But that was as much as she could find out. Nobody would tell her anything. The persistent thought that he might be married gave her an unreasonable pang of jealousy.  

She would lie awake in the early hours of the morning with a dozen scenarios playing themselves out in her head: Finn with his wife, Finn back in Ireland. But would he ever go back to Ireland? She supposed not. Although he had once confessed to her that he missed Dublin, had loved Dublin, and wished that the rest of his memories were as happy. She saw him with his children, playing in some imagined garden. She saw him in Glasgow, in Edinburgh, in London. She did not see him at all.