The Road Dance E-Book

John Mackay

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

This edition is releasing to celebrate the release of the award winning film adaptation, starring Hermione Corfield, Will Fletcher and Mark Gatiss and directed by Richie Adams. Cinematic release set for May 2022 in UK and Irish cinemas. Winner of the Edinburgh International Film Festival Audience Award 2021. Kirsty MacLeod is a beautiful young woman, coveted by all the young men of her island village. She dreams of America, of following the setting sun west to a better life. She meets the man who dreams her dreams and promises to make them come true. But then the Great War breaks out and the men must leave for battle. In their honour, the islanders organise a grand Road Dance. That night she is raped. She is left with a secret that will bring shame upon her and her family and ultimately on the child she is carrying. On a night of storms and sorrow, she has to make her choice and it is no choice at all.

Leseprobe

JOHN MACKAY’s Hebridean roots stretch back beyond written records. His four bestselling novels, The Road Dance, Heartland, Last of the Line and Home, all draw on that heritage. He has made appearances at the Edinburgh Fringe, Aye Write and Celtic Connections, and his writing has featured on national television, radio and press. He is the co-anchor of STV’s News at Six and Scotland Tonight, the country’s most popular news and current affairs programmes. His experiences at the forefront of coverage of most of the major stories in Scotland in recent times are detailed in his book Notes of a Newsman, also published by Luath Press. A movie adaptation of The Road Dance filmed on the Western Isles and directed by Richie Adams was launched at the 2021 Edinburgh International Film Festival and won the Audience Award, voted for by viewers.

By the same author:

Fiction

Heartland, Luath Press, 2004

Last of the Line, Luath Press, 2006

Home, Luath Press, 2021

Non-Fiction

Notes of a Newsman, Luath Press, 2015

First published 2002

Reprinted 2008, 2010

New edition 2015

Reprinted 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021

This edition 2022

ISBN: 978-1-80425-038-9

The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

Typeset in 10.5 point Sabon by

Main Point Books, Edinburgh

© John MacKay 2002

With love to

Joyce, Scott and Ross

and

In loving memory of my mother, Cathie.

Gus am bris an làtha.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

10

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my faither Alex for the resource of his memory, the MacRitchie sisters for being who they are, Comunn Eachdraidh Chàrlabhaigh, Ken and Marion, Lindsey Macdonald for planting the seed all those years ago, Gavin MacDougall for his belief, all at Luath, Paul McKinney and Shereen Nanjiani and Meg Henderson for her time and advice.

Prologue

THERE WAS NOTHING BETWEEN here and North America but a heaving, ceaseless ocean. Two thousand miles of emptiness. This small, desolate bay had been caressed and battered by the unfettered seas since the beginning of time. Sometimes the waves could even claw at the cliff tops. Boulders lay at their base, the debris of an endless struggle between raw sea and rock. Today, though, there was a truce. Today the water gently lapped the shore. But even on the best of days the wind still tugged the hair and murmured in the ear.

The old woman moved hesitantly across the stones. The smooth, round rocks rolled against each other unsettling her step. She had not been here in more than half a century and yet she lived so close that the sounds of the shore were with her every morning when she woke and every night when she slipped to sleep.

The rocks sloped up in a dune behind her before being lost in the reeds and ferns, which in turn were overwhelmed by the grass and heather of the moorland. From the cliffs above, the stones were a smear of off-white between the dark of the sea and the green of the land. Standing on them on the shore they were every shade of white and grey, with speckles of pink, blue and ochre glinting even in an overcast light. The prehistoric history of the island was ingrained in these rocks.

Rain clouds smirred the horizon, but for now the grey mists above were content to drift on. A froth floated on the tide, a remnant of the most recent storm. The white of the foam was stark against the slate of the sea as it swelled against the cliffs and stroked the shore.

Had it been like this on that awful morning when The Skipper scanned the shoreline? Had he sat where she was now? What was it that had made him look? A movement maybe, a stirring that disturbed the rhythm of the tide? Had it been the dying spasm of her baby before the old man lifted his tiny body from the sea?

1

LIFE ON THIS ISLAND was a constant struggle against the raw power of nature. It lay on the very western edge of Europe and was first to bear the brunt of the uninterrupted Atlantic storms and last to feel the warmth of the continental air streams from the south. It was the outpost of the continent, and it had about it the wildness and harshness of the frontier.

Boils of rock betrayed the thinness of the soil; like eruptions on a pale face, they were evidence that this was not a healthy land. The people survived the poor earth and stood against the driving rain and constant wind. With the yield from their crofts, their beasts and the sea, the people survived, and they thanked God for His goodness and sang His praise. The seeds of faith sown in a foreign land in a different millennium had no deeper, stronger root than here, here where the soil was thin but the soul was fertile.

For six days of the week they toiled in the harshness of the land He bequeathed them, and on the seventh day they thanked Him for it. Eternal peace and salvation brought joy to those who believed, although their faces when in church to hear His word showed little exaltation.

This was the only world Kirsty MacLeod knew, but she dreamed of more. There had always been restlessness within her; it was the very essence of her. She read in her Bible of peoples and of lands so different from anything she knew. Her father would enthral her with his tales from the ports he docked at down the west coast and further over to the east. For a girl who’d never left her own district, there was an excitement about all that was beyond her.

Ten years before, a ship had arrived on the sea loch. It had come to take some émigrés away to the Americas. The sight of the ship thrilled her.

‘Did God make that, Father?’ she had asked in wonder.

‘No, my darling, that was made by men.’

‘How could men make something so big, Father?’

‘It takes hundreds of men to build big ships like that. And they go all over the world. They bring tea back from India, silk from China, tobacco from America. And they take things from here back to these countries. Sadly they take our people away too.’

‘A boat like that has been to America, Father?’

‘Many times. A boat like that will have crossed the ocean many’s a time. That boat you see there has probably been to places like New York and more.’

‘But no one ever comes back from New York, Father. Mam told me so.’

Her father chuckled.

‘Your Mam might well be right, m’dear. No person might come back from New York, but the ships,’ he said with admiration, ‘ships like that can come and go to New York as often as the wind.’

‘But why do the people not come back?’

‘Oh there are many reasons. Money more than anything. It is a lack of money that makes them go and the same that stops them coming back. And a lot of them don’t ever want to come back. It’s a grand life some of them have over there, better than they could ever have here. There is nothing for them to come back to.’

‘But this is home.’

‘It comes to us all. We all leave home sometime, it’s just that some travel further than others. Home is where you make it. And in America, from what I hear, it’s a better place to have a home.’

‘Would you like to have your home in America Father?’

Her father was silent for a moment as he looked to the ship before he stooped and swept her up in his strong arms.

‘How could I have my home in America while I have my own big girl right here on the island? You’re here, your Mam is here and Neil and Annie. This is my home.’

Years on she remembered the bubbling emotions of that day. Young men struggling to contain their tears as their mothers, faces crushed in sorrow, hugged them for the last time. The bewilderment of children too young to understand what was happening, the only certainty amidst the rabble being the instruction they had to hold tight to their tiny bit of luggage. One boy, maybe three years younger than herself, sat on top of a trunk with both hands wound round the handle of a black kettle. She had felt strangely envious of him, knowing the adventure that lay ahead of him. It had been the source of much guilt for her. How did Annie, her twin, love being at home so much, helping her mother, while Kirsty dreamt of being far away? Perhaps she loved her mother and father less, though she knew she loved them plenty.

Rowing boats had taken the travellers from the pier to the boat, and Kirsty had stayed for much of the afternoon watching the embarkation while her father had helped row the boats out. Some would sit waving repeatedly at those they had just left until they climbed onto the ship. Even then, they quickly returned to the decks to look back at the world they were leaving and would continue to do so until it fell away behind the horizon.

There were others, though, having said their goodbyes, who were now looking ahead to their future. Kirsty was captivated by one young woman who had climbed onto her father’s boat with only a trunk and a bag. She was travelling alone and no one had come to say farewell. Kirsty had fantasised about who she might be and why she was alone. The woman had sat quietly in the rowing boat and had not looked back once. She had graciously accepted assistance to get onto the ship and then she was gone from view.

Kirsty was only a young girl, but the images and feelings of that day had never left her. Even now she wanted to be like that mysterious woman. She knew that so many who had been forced to sail away longed to return. The songs of the émigrés yearned for home. They may be prosperous in the New World, but home was the island they knew they would never see again, and how they wept for it. Kirsty could not understand why they cried. They may have had to leave to find work, to make a life for themselves, but that they had surely done. Not for them the back-wrenching labour of cutting the peat, lifting the potatoes, scything the hay and gutting the herring; the constant work, from the setting of the fire and milking the cow in the morning to the covering of the embers late at night. Those gone wrote of factories, huge buildings where hundreds, even thousands worked. And when the day was done they were free. She wanted to join the generations who had gone before, to go to the big cities where the letters said the buildings scraped the sky, and jobs and land were to be had by all. It sounded like the land of dreams, a New World for a new life. And whenever she looked to the west Kirsty so longed for that.

She lived near the end of the village road, a few hundred yards from the shore. Like most others in the settlement, the house was a Black House; a single-level dwelling which seemed almost to cling to the earth from which it had been torn. Solid chunks of stone arranged closely, with a thatched roof. It was so perfectly suited to its environment that it looked almost as natural as the moorland itself. In a place where the wind never rested it found the house of rocks a doughty barrier, with the moist earth between the wall cavities forming a final line of defence. Cattle were sheltered at one end of the house and the family lived in the other, separated by a small entrance lobby. Five of them shared two rooms: Kirsty’s parents slept in the living area, Kirsty, her twin sister Annie and brother Neil in the only bedroom. The house smelled of peat smoke and strong tea.

Kirsty was a handsome girl and she knew it. She knew that her shy smiles and cheerful laughs kept the boys looking at her for that second longer. Sometimes, when she passed, a group of them would share a confidence, a laugh and a snigger. There was something of the beast about them at times. They would tease her and banter with her. They would boast of the bull they had calmed, the storm they had endured at sea or the haul of fish they had landed. She would listen and she would laugh, but she would never believe.

Her mother told her how lovely she was, how bright her eyes were; ‘You have such beautiful red hair,’ she would say, as she brushed it at night. Ordinarily it was tied up close to her head beneath a scarf, but at the dances it would shake free and tumble around her shoulders bringing warmth, light and colour to her face, like the sun setting over the sea. And she would laugh and the boys would whoop as they spun her ever faster. And Kirsty would always be spinning and reeling, be it during the winter ceilidhs in the village hall, or in the road dances during the midsummer when darkness barely cast its cloak. And when the boys danced with her, they would hold her as close as they dared in their rough way, and as they sent her spinning onto her next partner their fingers would slip down her arm relishing the touch of her for as long as they could. And although their fingers may leave her, their eyes never did.

Old Peggy thought Kirsty a little too flighty for her own good. Something about the way she carried herself and the way she giggled. But then Old Peggy thought anyone who didn’t clad themselves in joyless colours was frivolous. Old Peggy would tell anyone who listened, and because she was an elderly widow and the village matriarch, people did listen. She would even tell Kirsty herself. ‘You watch yourself, girl,’ she would say.

Kirsty knew what the old harridan meant – closeness to the boys led to trouble. She’d heard the story of a girl in the village who had had a child. It had happened many years before, but the story was still told and retold. Like the flowers of the machair, it flourished in the right conditions. Like as not that would be a wet and wild night with a gathering at a house. The songs would have been sung and the poems and legends spun. The village gossip would be passed around like a communal quaich, often lighthearted, sometimes with a hint of scandal. Then there might be an oblique reference, a question of detail, and the legend of Mary Horseshoe’s daughter would blossom in all its tragedy.

Although most had heard it, few were capable of telling it. Those who could had refined their narrative over many years and recitals; each pause had its place, every look and glance laden with meaning, each sigh drawing out the drama. And as the years passed, the storytellers capable of reliving the events of nearly four decades before had diminished in number. Old Peggy remembered. Old Peggy had been there and Old Peggy would never forget, nor let succeeding generations forget.

Kirsty had never known the girl, although her mother lived in a house below the road as it curled back on itself round a rocky outcrop. The Horseshoe, it was called, and the old lady was known as Mary Horseshoe. Kirsty knew her as a quiet, timid woman who would avoid your gaze even as she spoke to you, for all the speaking that she ever did. She was stooped and frail and the story had it that she had been stooped ever since the night her daughter’s screams had heralded the birth of a child, a child that no one expected. The girl herself had barely understood what was happening, they said. Only as the months passed had the awful realisation dawned on her as she saw her stomach swell and felt the flutterings inside, and even then she did not know for sure, but guessed from what she had seen of other women. The long tweed skirts and woollen cardigans and shawls had kept her secret until it could be kept no more. She could not even seek help from her mother and the other older women of the village because they did not know and they could not know. It was only when the waters broke and the blood seeped and the pain pushed the girl to hysteria that anyone knew.

In time-honoured tradition, older women from the village came to help. There were no medical textbooks to follow, but there was the experience of generations of women who had nothing to support them but the sisterhood of other women who knew what needed to be done because they had been through the same themselves so often before.

The community helped bring the child into the world, was a part of it as it passed through its life, and stood over it as it was laid to rest in the burial ground.

It had been so different for this child, a boy with a thatch of black hair and lungs that had forced the sound of his cry along the village road. By the following evening there was no more crying to shatter the night. The bastard child was gone, huddled away to the other side of the island. No one knew where he had gone from there, but Old Peggy said he had been taken to the mainland. Instead of watching a child grow to manhood the village saw a legend mature.

As for the girl who had mothered the child, she too disappeared. There were stories of her moving to a family on another island, of her following the child to the mainland, but those who nursed her that night recalled that she had never returned from the wild frenzy of her childbirth. She had been taken away in a cart, huddled in a shawl with her mother’s protective arm around her. She had been trembling like a puppy. Her father had not even been able to wave farewell, his love for his daughter soured by disgust. Her disgrace was his shame. He had failed in his guidance of her.

Mary Horseshoe returned the following day, walking up the road from the bridge, her shawl pulled tight around her head to keep out the wind and the questions. She never again spoke of her daughter in public. And even at night in the privacy of the darkness and her home, her husband never asked. Now the only one who really knew where she had gone was Mary Horseshoe and she never said and she never travelled.

No one knew who the father of the child had been. There were stories of the girl’s friendships with this boy or that. The pier on the sea loch was a landing place for fishermen from other parts of the country, sometimes even from different countries. And some of the girls would have gathered to work with the fish and sometimes just to watch these exotic strangers with their strange accents and unusual ways. There were those who said that she misunderstood the rituals and had been drawn too far by one of those men from far away. Even darker allegations were hinted at, never uttered, but insinuated by a look or a mumbled mutter. Wasn’t her brother a strange one? Whoever he was, wherever he was, the father of her baby was away from her now, abandoning her to her fate.

At the church the minister softly asked for compassion for the girl and prayed for health for the child and said that in time God would reveal why He had allowed such pain. It was not for man to know such things, but to accept that the Lord worked in mysterious ways. For a few moments he had rested his hands on the pulpit, his head sunk below his shoulders as if he was weighed down by the sorrow of it all.

And then he condemned; this was a lesson to all the young, that looking away from the Lord was to look towards Hell itself. And although everlasting torment was the certain end for those who did not believe, there could be a living Hell for those on earth, when acts not worthy of the Lord could lead to heartbreak and suffering. Face away from the Lord and you face blackness even in sunlight. The shame brought upon a household in the village was the work of evil, and the Devil would stop at nothing to ensnare you. Every impure thought, every moment your mind strayed from His Glory, every temptation was Satan grasping to you, drawing you to him, enslaving you. The Lord worked in wondrous ways, but the Devil was never far behind.

For an hour and more he blistered the congregation before him, his eyes scorching from face to face, his chest heaving like bellows to the flame. The flushed red of his neck and face stark against the white dog collar told everyone that this was a Man of God. His voice rose and fell like the stormy sea. The people before him were at his mercy, tossed from peak to trough by the power of his rage against sin. And in their midst sat Mary Horseshoe, pressed against the pew by the force before her.

When he was done and had entreated that the grace and peace of the Lord be with them all now and forever more, they filed out, still trembling. The memory of it burned through the decades. Mary Horseshoe had walked home that Sabbath as so many before, but despite the people walking with her, she walked alone.

In the years that followed many a girl heard the story of Mary Horseshoe’s daughter. And if, like Kirsty, the girl was popular with the boys, the story carried a warning. Kirsty understood the message and it left its mark on her as it did the others. Paul had written to the Ephesians of the mystery of man and wife becoming one flesh. The intimacy between man and woman was for marriage alone and for now, for Kirsty, that must wait. She knew she could have her pick of the men, but she wanted none of them. That would bind her to the island.

Iain Ban told her, she couldn’t remember how often, of the croft he was to take over from his ailing father, his plans to build one of the new style of houses which were appearing on the island. White Houses they were called, two storeys high with slate roofs and a kitchen with a stove. Iain had his plans alright: more sheep, more cattle and a new loom for the weaving. Iain wanted to have money in his pocket. He made it clear he wanted to have Kirsty too. And Iain Ban was a real catch, a tall powerful man who had the look of the Vikings from whom he was descended. Iain Ban, they called him, White Iain. He was the prime of his generation in the district and the district thought that whoever Iain chose, Iain would have. Who could not wish to be his wife? He would speak to Kirsty after church, he would walk her home from the village store, all the while telling her of what he was doing to his land and the prospects for his beasts. The time would come soon when he would need someone to be there with him and what a life they would have. He didn’t say that it would be Kirsty, but his implication was clear; when the time was right he would come for her and the white flags would be out to celebrate their marriage.

Yet he never saw that not once did he make her heart surge. Kirsty knew there would be no marriage to Iain Ban. He was a good man, but he saw life before him stretching no further than the end of his croft. Kirsty’s dreams soared like the moorland eagle beyond that, swooping down beyond the croft and over the ocean.

She despaired of the future others saw for her. She was eighteen and it was a surprise to some that she was not already wed. Marriage, though, meant living with in-laws in an already overcrowded house until another home could be built. It meant having children, many children – some women had given birth to ten and more. Not all would survive and many’s the time she had seen a woman grieve over the death of a child. To have something so precious growing within you, to feel it move and come alive and then have it denied to you. It could only be like a part of yourself dying, having it torn from you. How did they go on? How could they begin again? And yet they did.

Infant mortality had become less common in the new century, but always there was the unasked question when a child was born, would it survive its infant years? And women died giving birth. Died in agony trying to give birth to a child that couldn’t be released from their body. Kirsty could not help but think that they did not live for themselves, that their life was not their own.

Kirsty wanted so much more, believed that there was more to be made of her life. She devoured letters home from family overseas and she knew that was where she wanted to be.

And now, unexpectedly, there was Murdo. Murdo Book, he was known as. Books were his passion. This was a man who would often walk the twenty miles and more across the moor to town to get books from the public library. Murdo Book would read and read. His was a mind that craved to learn and though his formal education had ended long before, he wanted to know more. His dream of being a teacher had died with his father’s passing, but he could still learn. To what end he didn’t know, but there did not need to be a purpose to it. The acquisition of knowledge was a pleasure in itself.

Something set him apart from the other boys of the village. Not his looks, though he was handsome enough, but an air. It wasn’t sophistication exactly, more a sense of being a part of them but not one of them, something of a loner. He played the shinty, but he was not so inclined to gather at the bridge to yarn and joke the evening away or sup with them in the bothies. Instead he sought older company, talking with the bodachs of the district – the old men, many of them, even in their eighth or ninth decade, still with keen minds and hoards of deep experience of life and the world. They were the pages of his books brought to life; soldiers, sailors, adventurers, men who had seen the best and worst of mankind and the grandeur of God’s earth. And he would learn from them.

Kirsty had known Murdo Book all her life, but it took a chance conversation on a late summer’s evening for her to see him in a new light, to learn more of this rather distant man. She had been at the potatoes at an old lazybed her father had found on the moor near the cliff edges. She had lost herself as her eyes gazed at the sea and her mind sailed across it. People from the village, from the island, from the Highlands as a whole, had been crossing that ocean to the Americas for two centuries and more. It had been for adventure at first, young men following the sunset to find adventure and riches. Too soon, though, it had become necessity as clan chiefs, once paternal kin, had been seduced by the good living of the south. Blood, kinship and loyalty paled against a lifestyle of fine wine, good food and status in genteel society. In Edinburgh and London the ancient bonds of ancestry and loyalty were as nothing compared to the cosmopolitan sophistication of the lords and ladies. The chiefs had turned away from their people, without whom they would be nothing. And after turning away from them, they turned upon them. High living came at a price and land could provide a better return than people, particularly if that land was filled with sheep. Sheep could be sold, humans could not. The clan chiefs became landowners whose right to possess the land was lost somewhere in the mists of genealogy. The people were burned from their homes and cleared from the land. Thousands were forced across the ocean out of sight and out of conscience. Kirsty knew of these people, and of the bitterness that endured three and four generations on.

Even now the clearances continued, but in a different way; now it was an economic imperative. With limits on the good land available, younger sons saw emigration as their only chance of prosperity. Men who might have anticipated a life of working with the plough and the scythe and the fishing smack, crossed the Atlantic and became familiar with the drill and the grinder and the production line as they worked in the factories of Detroit and Chicago producing the new motor cars.

Murdo Book had seen the solitary figure looking out to sea. When he came closer to her he said her name.

‘Kirsty.’

She was so lost in her fantasy she didn’t hear him. He came within a few feet of her.

‘Kirsty. Hello.’

She whirled around in surprise.

‘Oh Murdo!’ she exclaimed.

He moved towards her, his right hand held out in apology.

‘I’m sorry if I made you jump.’

Her head bowed and she rubbed her hands distractedly down the sides of her legs, agitated that he had come upon her when she was dreaming her dreams. She had been so absorbed that she did not know how long she had been there. How long had he been watching her? Had she perhaps spoken aloud in her trance? She felt distressingly vulnerable and exposed.

Throngs of her hair hung heavily over her flushed face. He thought her the most beautiful vision he had ever seen, so alive, so vivid. He had always thought of her so. She brought colour and life to everything around her. But he had understood that she was beyond him and although his heart could still jump when they met, his pulsing arteries remained concealed.

He could not understand the intensity of her reaction. Why was she so overwhelmed? She had only been looking out to sea.

‘Were you digging for pirate’s treasure?’ he smiled, trying to put her at her ease.

‘No, I was…’ she paused in total confusion. ‘The potatoes.’

Murdo looked to the horizon.

‘It’s a lovely night, is it not?’

‘It is. It’s beautiful,’ she said, regaining her composure.

‘There’s not a cloud in the sky. You could believe there’s not a cloud between here and America.’