The premature ending of Annie MacLeod

I was gutting mackerel when they came for me, my fingers dipping in and out of rainbow'd bellies, trailing pink as I cried for dad, and island life carried on.  My mother, proper in mourning black, stuffed me under a pile of nets when she heard them riding along the shingle shore to our home.  The sun trickled through in tiny diamonds.  I lay there, listening to her lie over the shhh of the surf, smelling fresh fish and old twine, as a sneeze built in my head and the sorrow rose angry in her voice.

 

“What are you lot after now?”

 

“Your daughter hasn't attended school despite the warnings.  You've had the letters, we've explained the procedures.  It's time for her to go.”

 

One of the horses was unsettled by something, perhaps my quiet struggles with the mounting pressure in my nose.  It backed up and nearly stood on my leg beneath the nets.  The rider clicked his tongue, urging it forward, annoyance in his voice.

 

“I've just lost Annie and her father — check your paperwork, you heartless toe-rags.  Besides, we home-schooled.  So you can just sod off back to the mainland.  Now, if you please.”

 

There was some murmuring, and I'm sure I heard the nearest of them say something about “nut-jobs”.  I held my breath and hoped either the sneeze would go or they would.

 

“We'll need to see the records and take copies before we can close this off, as I'm sure even you can appreciate.  It's in your interest to show us them so we can go back to the boat.  Like you want us to.  We've no wish to intrude here.  And, er… we're sorry for your loss.”

 

He didn't sound it.  Just impatient.

 

“Fine, if that's what it takes to get you off our island, so be it.” 

 

I heard the door of our croft scrape shut across the summer warmed flagstones, then one of the men offer my mother a ride on his mount.  She spat on the path in answer, and a deep voice muttered something about “the bleeding dark ages”.  They clattered off slowly, along the beach path that wound behind our home, up through the blue hats of harebells and pink tufts of thrift dotting the coarse green of the island's west face.  Our church hides within a ring of outbuildings, small and growing smaller with every winter wind and stone's fall.

 

My father kept it carefully, repairing what he could, securing the records and sacred silver in a great black trunk in its cellar.  Away from my mother, when he dared.  We rarely used them, instead worshiping with our deeds and purity, but it was nice just knowing they were there.  He stored a secret box in the darkness, too, away from my mother and her friends, but we were close, he and I.  So I knew of the wireless.

 

Then I worried-

 

What if they took it?  What if they saw?

 

The sneeze fizzed through my nose and out with a sprinkling of spittle, but there was nothing to hear it now save the gulls whipping white through the sky, diving for the sunlit shore.

 

Though I knew it was forbidden, I followed the Mainlanders till I could see…

 

And there past the crosses, fresh and new, were the tethered horses.  Lent by Bill at the jetty, for the day.  Crawling through the yellow buds and dark prickles of gorse, their coconut smell sweet in the air, I snuck ever closer till at last I saw.

 

“Annie and John died a month ago, a fall from the cliffs.  I'm no a numpty. The paperwork's all filled out, correct, witnessed by the Reverend himself, so you can take yourselves back to the boat now.”

 

After the horses had cantered off to Bill and their hay-nets, the Mainlanders only having to hold on to return, I saw my mother walk not back to our home but over the field to her friends.

 

Sneaking into the cellar, I looked for the box, and wondered about dad falling like that.  And mum's midnight walks.  And that night on the beach.

 

But the wireless was gone.

 

And so was he.

 

I wondered…