Cal by Bernard Maclaverty

Author:Bernard Maclaverty [Bernard MacLaverty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1998-05-07T04:00:00+00:00

Four

Cal continued to live in the cottage, appearing early in the mornings before Dunlop and hanging around at night, as if for his lift, until Dunlop went. On Wednesday Dunlop drove into town for some tractor spares and Cal went to the cottage. He sorted among the piles of furniture and found three square seat cushions on a battered sofa. These he lined up in the corner of his own room for a bed. He covered them with two thin, grey blankets which draped a pair of better-looking dining-room chairs set aside from the main pile. He borrowed a small hand-brush from the tool shed and swept the glass and dirt off the floor into the hallway. He thought of borrowing the torch that sat on the shelf but realized that if he could see the house anyone in the house could see him. Instead he began to know his way in the dark.

After a week he had to accept that he was growing a black beard, not because he wanted one, but because he could think of no way of shaving. There was a jaw-box in the tiny kitchen but no taps. Several nights he walked to the Stray Inn to get cigarettes. The place also sold pub grub and Cal would eat because he knew that if he did not, eventually he would become ill. The clientele was not local but the sheepskin-coat brigade who drove out from various towns for somewhere different to go. He thought it unlikely that any of them would know him.

He got the feeling that the house was the earth and the cottage the moon orbiting it. At night sometimes when the wind was in the right direction he could hear the distant rattle of dishes. He would keep a kind of vigil and see the lights come on in different rooms and wonder whether it was Marcella or not. Although she was light years away from him he felt the enormous pull of her. And yet, like the moon and the earth, he knew that, because of what he had done, they could never come together. His sin kept them apart as surely as cold space. All that was left to him was to watch her. He had heard Father Brolley say once that sin was outlawing yourself from God. After death God did not point the finger and say. ‘Depart from me, ye accursed’. You realized your sinfulness and remained outside. A man damned himself.

One night Cal saw Marcella come to her window and, with a sweep of her arms, draw the curtains. Then a light came on at the side of the house above the kitchen extension. If he had barred himself by his action the least he could do was look. He slipped out of the cottage and walked across the farmyard. The window where the light had come on was bubbled glass and he could see the vaguest movement of her through it, rippling backwards and forwards. The

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