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Authors: Candia McWilliam
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sustained by the outraged blue sky. This poster was sold wherever anything was sold in these islands. It had become a good photograph, a labelled image in place of rage, a picture marketed before the word ‘controlled’ had lost any of its shocking cynicism and still marketed by people almost familiar with this habitual outrage done by the French on land and sea and air and water.
Insecure wooden crates of Sprite and Lilt were stacked up in the back, with baskets of the rolled-up posters among them. A collection of feather dusters stuck soft and lush from one roll of posters, a polythene petrol-syphoning tube slumbered among others. Through the blue corrugated plastic roof in which tinselly fibres flickered, came the striped light of day. The rich aromas of drains, roasting fish and beer came from the garage at the side of the shop.
Alec found six hard green oranges in a net and bought some mandarin segments in syrup and a pot of Dundee marmalade to enhance them. By the counter he was amazed to find jars of sweeties he’d not seen for years, among the Chiclets and taffy and Lifesavers; there were nougat prawns, jelly penknives and drunk men’s eyeballs, even Berwick cockles, though here they were labelled Killer Snails in the English and Super Escargots in the French, in deference from one colonising power to another.
As a small boy, Alec took to visiting the poorer parts of the New Town where people better off and less respectable than his own family lived. They were maybe university people or young doctor couples renting. A fair number of them went without hats. In their rooms at the front you might see a violin or an easel. Cars were infrequent, cats innumerable. A lot of the women in this part of town had their hair down and wore trousers.
He enjoyed his visits to these parts because they were so different from his own district, because the visits were secret, and, he saw now, because he was attracted by the way of life. Then he just wanted to carry on in his own way without too much attention and these people in their voluntary oddness seemed unlikely to observe him. Alec was averse to confrontation to a degree that kept him continually mildly compromised; he disliked telling the whole truth in case its edge should, no matter how paperily, cut someone. Least of all did he wish to harm – or tell the truth to – his mother.
Her legs by now had eely varicose veins up behind her knees. Her black hair had a wing of white. The shadows round her eyes had always been dark but they were no longer matched by her high colour. She had much disliked a year spent cleaning clams on the gutting floor, the clattering shells and pluggy, featureless creatures.
‘At least fish have an expression. A clam has no features. There is nothing to get to know,’ she said to Alec, a remark he only now, as he thought of her under this shady heated afternoon’s remembering mood, recognised as either dangerous or sad. She would have been horrified had he suggested to her that she was implying a wish to gut only creatures familiar to her.
It was rather that she was casting about for something to meet her eye. She was lonely in a way that is part of the sort of marriage she and his father made. Alec was no companion for her. In her idea of him, her ambition for his future, she had, with considerable sacrifice, resigned herself to his life’s betterment, as she saw it, at the expense of their closeness. She wanted him to become the sort of young man who did not know women like herself, although she also wished him to retain in himself her backbone and steely standards.
She was not, either, a demonstrative woman. Tears she retained by working in her house until their time had passed over.
Alec took pennies from his father and mother, from small stores hidden in places unknown to the other but known to him. He could smell out pennies anywhere with their copper and verdigris tang.
Mairi collected pennies from the time of the young
Insecure wooden crates of Sprite and Lilt were stacked up in the back, with baskets of the rolled-up posters among them. A collection of feather dusters stuck soft and lush from one roll of posters, a polythene petrol-syphoning tube slumbered among others. Through the blue corrugated plastic roof in which tinselly fibres flickered, came the striped light of day. The rich aromas of drains, roasting fish and beer came from the garage at the side of the shop.
Alec found six hard green oranges in a net and bought some mandarin segments in syrup and a pot of Dundee marmalade to enhance them. By the counter he was amazed to find jars of sweeties he’d not seen for years, among the Chiclets and taffy and Lifesavers; there were nougat prawns, jelly penknives and drunk men’s eyeballs, even Berwick cockles, though here they were labelled Killer Snails in the English and Super Escargots in the French, in deference from one colonising power to another.
As a small boy, Alec took to visiting the poorer parts of the New Town where people better off and less respectable than his own family lived. They were maybe university people or young doctor couples renting. A fair number of them went without hats. In their rooms at the front you might see a violin or an easel. Cars were infrequent, cats innumerable. A lot of the women in this part of town had their hair down and wore trousers.
He enjoyed his visits to these parts because they were so different from his own district, because the visits were secret, and, he saw now, because he was attracted by the way of life. Then he just wanted to carry on in his own way without too much attention and these people in their voluntary oddness seemed unlikely to observe him. Alec was averse to confrontation to a degree that kept him continually mildly compromised; he disliked telling the whole truth in case its edge should, no matter how paperily, cut someone. Least of all did he wish to harm – or tell the truth to – his mother.
Her legs by now had eely varicose veins up behind her knees. Her black hair had a wing of white. The shadows round her eyes had always been dark but they were no longer matched by her high colour. She had much disliked a year spent cleaning clams on the gutting floor, the clattering shells and pluggy, featureless creatures.
‘At least fish have an expression. A clam has no features. There is nothing to get to know,’ she said to Alec, a remark he only now, as he thought of her under this shady heated afternoon’s remembering mood, recognised as either dangerous or sad. She would have been horrified had he suggested to her that she was implying a wish to gut only creatures familiar to her.
It was rather that she was casting about for something to meet her eye. She was lonely in a way that is part of the sort of marriage she and his father made. Alec was no companion for her. In her idea of him, her ambition for his future, she had, with considerable sacrifice, resigned herself to his life’s betterment, as she saw it, at the expense of their closeness. She wanted him to become the sort of young man who did not know women like herself, although she also wished him to retain in himself her backbone and steely standards.
She was not, either, a demonstrative woman. Tears she retained by working in her house until their time had passed over.
Alec took pennies from his father and mother, from small stores hidden in places unknown to the other but known to him. He could smell out pennies anywhere with their copper and verdigris tang.
Mairi collected pennies from the time of the young
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