Hi folks.
I have decided, as a gift to my followers, to serialise my novella,
Song for an Eagle. I will post one chapter at a time, weekly.
Song
for an Eagle
Prologue
When
Beth was five years old, her mother walked out and never returned. The child
had a memory of terror, terror of being left alone. She stood and watched as
her mother dragged a suitcase from under the bed and opened it. She yanked at
the drawers in her dresser and began to throw her clothes, make-up, a bundle of
papers and her jewellery into the case.
'Mammy, please don't go,' said Beth,
her voice so small it hardly made any sound at all.
Her mother bent down and kissed
her cheek. 'As soon as I find a place to stay, I'll come back for you.' A horn
sounded outside. Her mother stood up and looked around the room. 'This place is
sucking the life from me.' She paused and gazed at her child. A single tear
trickled down her pale cheek and then she turned and was gone. The door slammed
behind her, caught in the wind that howled up the strath like a living thing.
It was already dark and rain
ran sideways across the window glass. A skeletal tree dipped and swayed
outside, its branches clattering against the panes, a monster's arms reaching
out, trying to break in, trying to reach the child.
Her father had not come home
for hours and, when he did, she was huddled in a corner with her arms wrapped
around her knees, her body racked from crying. He started to go to her, then
saw the note his wife left. He read it, cursed and without speaking to his
daughter, opened a bottle of whisky. Beth's memory of that evening was
indelible, locked inside, echoing down the years.
She waited for her mother,
night after night, week after week, year after year and, somewhere deep in her
heart, she was still waiting.
Chapter One
2014
Beth stepped off the bus at the top of Berriedale Braes under a sky
piled grey upon grey. The first thing she noticed was the word, YES, painted in
white on a towering rock on the hillside, a distance away yet plainly visible
from the road. Someone else with their dreams in tatters, she
thought. How long would it take for the letters to fade and be washed away by
the force of time and elements?
Longer, she though, than the dream of independence would fade from many Scottish minds. Personally she didn't care, hadn't even voted in the referendum. Andy had told her she had to vote an emphatic no, so abstaning had been a minor act of rebellion. She had little time for politics.
The bus driver set Beth’s case beside her, closed the door to the
compartment and nodded at her feet. 'You won't get far up that road in those
shoes, me girl.'
His accent was central London, startling her for a second, briefly
reminding her of a time best forgotten. With a smile at being called 'me girl' by a man who was at least a
decade younger than she was, she considered the rutted track before her and
murmured, 'You're right. I should have remembered.' She opened her suitcase,
removed a pair of flats and exchanged them for her high heels.
When she was five years old she would climb down from the school bus at
this same spot and set out alone under an immense sky. The only sounds were the
birds and the sea and the distant bleat of sheep. The same sounds that filled
the air around her today.
Now, all those years later, a memory slammed into her mind with
remarkable clarity. With the memory came a rush of fear. She swallowed and took
several deep breaths. At fifty-nine years old, a successful businesswoman with
a career behind her, or so she appeared to the world, she thought herself
finally past the terrors of her youth.
Strands of hair blew around her face, the
hair she hated once, but now the hair for which she struggled to find the same
shade of red in a bottle. She lifted her guitar case, eased the strap over her
shoulder and thanked the driver.
While he removed the rest of her luggage from
the baggage section, she looked around. Wind turbines dotted the hills and the
bay, where, further out, the faded shapes of oil rigs were hardly discernible
in a gathering sea mist. Modern bungalows replaced many of the small, sturdy
cottages which once clung to the hillside like limpets to a rock. More than one
had a 'For Sale' sign in the front garden.
As the bus drove off, she stood for a moment, staring at the mountains
to the south.
'Okay. Here goes,' she said to no one and, avoiding the branches of
gorse that reached towards her stockinged legs, she set off along the side road
to her father's cottage. Her case, balanced on its two wheels, jolted behind
her, her steps in time with the beat of her heart. After so many years in the
city, the mountains to the south, the burn coursing through the glen dashing
its spray upwards as it met the resistance of stone, the snaking road winding
up the opposite hill, were almost foreign to her, yet startlingly familiar.
Memories leaked from the cupboard at the back of her mind, drifting in like the
ribbons of haar that twisted up the strath in the world of her childhood.
The cottage where she grew up sat about one and a half miles from the
bus route, along a neglected track which led through heather and bracken. By
the time she reached it, she was out of breath and the sky began to miserably
spit rain.
The key lay heavy in her hand and chattered against the lock like cold
teeth. Only then did she realise how badly she was shaking. At last the door
creaked open, filling the silence with a scream of dry hinges. The odour of
decay came out to meet her. Nothing appeared to have changed since the day she
left. The old range with a one-bar electric fire set in front; the gas cooker,
splatterings of grease on top and down the sides; lino on the floor, the
pattern missing in places, but still bright in the corners where no feet had
trod; a moquette suite, one chair grimier than the others, the arms worn bare.
Now a layer of dust and evidence of mice coated everything, and the
chill in the air, colder than outside, made her shiver. She wondered about her
father living out his life in this cold box.
She should have come back sooner, should have come to see him when he
was still well, not the emaciated figure she sat beside this morning in
Raigmore Hospital in Inverness. The man she'd not seen for forty-two years
before that.
Soon the house would be hers, the house, the ground, the memories she
could no longer contain. She flicked a switch and the bare light bulb dangling
from the ceiling threw its low wattage into the gloom. She went into the
kitchen and gagged. Something had been left to rot. A half-empty tin of cat
food sat on the draining board, mould growing on the surface. Opening the
window to dispel the fetid air, she looked outside. The cat had probably found
a home elsewhere by now, that or been eaten by foxes. Under the sink, she found
half a bottle of bleach and set to work.
Some time later, satisfied the kitchen was now as fresh as it could be,
given the state and age of the building, she closed the window. The whole house
could do with a good seeing to, but her muscles were already beginning to ache
and she’d broken two nails.
Her energy depleted, she ate the pot noodle she brought with her and
drank a cup of instant coffee with powdered milk and no sugar. To someone used
to eating meals cooked by a chef, it tasted vile. Then she went to the bedroom which
was once hers. Inside, an onslaught of memories drifted within the shadows. Her
single iron bed with the pink candlewick cover, her soft rabbit with the chewed
ear sitting on top; the rose-flecked wallpaper, now yellowed at the corners and
curling away from the plastered walls; the square of pink and grey carpet; her
pine dressing table with the drawers that were difficult to open; the posters
of Elvis, the Beatles, the Jackson Five, still tacked to the wall. Everything
as she left it. But now, the room reeked of damp.
She stared at the bed. Probably a thousand crawling creatures had made
their home there over the years. Beth crossed the landing to her father's
bedroom and stopped, knuckling her eyes and filling her lungs with the sour
air. Her father's bed was unmade, the indent of his head and a few stray hairs
still on the pillow. She crossed to the cupboard and found clean sheets and
blankets on the shelf where they always were. Somewhere in this house, she
would find a hot water bottle, something to take the chill off.
On the second shelf sat a couple of tin biscuit boxes, slightly rusty
at the edges. She lifted the first one and, taking it with her, sat on the bed
and eased the lid off.
Surprised, she lifted a newspaper clipping, a grainy photo of herself
at twenty-four, with the caption, Hammond
Signs New Hopeful. Beneath that, she found every report of her life, her
rise to dubious fame, her fall. She quickly set them to one side and picked up
a note, the note she’d penned on a page torn from her jotter on the day she
left.
Dear Dad,
I'm going to London. I want to
be a singer, and I know I'm just a nuisance to you anyway. I'll write when I
get settled.
Beth
She smoothed the paper. Why had he kept this?
He hadn't come after her as far as she knew. She hadn't expected him to.
Underneath was the first letter she sent him, Edinburgh postmark,
telling him she was well and she would never come home again. She had not added
an address. Twenty years later she wrote another, one her therapist encouraged
her to send.
'Build bridges with your
father,' the therapist said.
'He can give you the answers you need to
know.'
That time she had added an
address.
He hadn't replied, but kept the letter. It was here, still in the
envelope, the top edge jagged where it was torn open. She tried not to think of
her disappointment as she’d checked the mail day after day. Perhaps she should
have returned then, tried to put right the wrongs of the past, but she'd been
vulnerable, scarred. Her career as a singer was over and nothing else mattered.
Then there were her school reports, the father's day cards she made,
the drawings she did at school, black and heavy. He'd kept them all.
At the bottom of the box was a photograph of her mother sitting on the
dyke outside, head thrown back, mouth open in a laugh, her dark hair loose and
tumbling down her back. And another, herself as a baby in her mother's arms.
Her mother was gazing down at her with an expression of adoration. She studied
the image, trying to recall the face, the dark hair, the red lips.
'Why did you
leave me?' she asked. 'I needed you so much.' She thought her parents didn't
love her, yet there was no mistaking the love in that photo. And her father, if
she really was the burden she'd imagined herself to be, would he have followed
her career so resolutely, kept every little memoir of her existence?
She removed the lid of the second box. The first thing she saw was a
wedding photo of her parents, both in army uniform. Beneath that lay several
snapshots, and a vision of a Box Brownie camera in her mother's hands flew
through her mind. She picked up the picture of a baby in a gown assuming it was
herself and turned it over. The name Michael was printed on the back. Michael?
An unexplained frisson of fear worked its way up her spine. She shrugged it
off. Who the hell was Michael?
Then another snapshot. This time of a boy of around five at her
mother's side holding her hand. Quickly she leafed through the photos, photos
she'd never seen before, and the boy featured in a lot. Michael aged one,
Michael first day at school, Michael aged ten and Beth aged one. Michael
sitting on an old-fashioned basket chair, a fat baby on his knee. Did she once have
a brother? If so, why did she have no memory of him? Why had her parents never
spoken of him? Why had her father kept these photos from her?
After that, the only images she found were a couple of her school
portraits. Michael was gone. And her mother was gone, and there were no more
Box Brownie snapshots.
She found her parents' marriage certificate, her grandparents' death certificates.
Nothing for Michael or herself.
'Who are you, Michael?' she said, but the silent face with the frozen
smile mocked her from the photograph. A stranger, telling her nothing. A creak
came from somewhere. Her fingers tightened on the image, her spine tingled. She
imagined another's eyes upon her. She spun around. The room was empty as she
knew it would be. An old house, settling and creaking. She forced a laugh at
her own nervousness. Nevertheless, she thrust Michael's photos to the bottom of
the pile, rose and left the room, gently closing the bedroom door, trapping the
past and her memories behind it.
Later, sitting beside a blazing stove, glass
of wine in hand, she tried to relax. The gale was a lost soul crying in the
chimney. The house itself seemed to take a breath and release it with a
tremble. The wind sighed and whistled. A cloud of smoke billowed into the room.
Loose branches slapped against the windowpanes making her jump. It was just
like that other night, that long-ago night. The night her mother left. And once
again, she was in this house, alone.
For a moment she imagined the face of an eagle through the glass. She
blinked, shook her head, rose and pulled the curtains blotting out whatever was
out there.
For years she'd clung to the therapist's words explaining her
nightmares.
You have come to see the eagle
as a symbol of bad luck. You saw one that day, and that night your mother left.
There was no eagle, she told herself. There never had been. It was no
more than an imaginary entity conjured up by a lonely and unhappy little girl,
an imaginary entity which grew and became something more, a vehicle for all the
hurts of her young life. She set him free many years ago, released him, watched
the imaginary eagle fly into an imaginary sky and take with him all her
feelings of worthlessness. Why then, the constant sense there was more?
Leaning against the wall she counted each breath until her heart
stopped racing. Perhaps she should not have come back, should have left the
past where it was. Done what Andy told her to do. There was reasonable
accommodation in Inverness for the family of patients, yet she'd been drawn
here by the same invisible bonds from which she once fought to escape. That,
and the need to face the demons of the past, to finally convince herself that
she stayed with Andy out of choice, not because of the deep-rooted fear of
being alone.
She poured herself another glass of wine and drank it quickly, waiting
as the welcome warmth spread through her body. From the corner came a
scratching sound. Mice, she told herself, or worse still, rats, and she
wondered again where the cat had gone. Apart from keeping the vermin down, she
would have welcomed its company. Folded on the sofa was a tartan rug. She
pulled it across her knees.
After the sounds of the city, the cottage felt dreadfully isolated. She
had grown used to passing traffic, human voices in the street outside; music
from the bar room; shouts of drunken merriment. All at once she wanted to hear
Andy's voice, wished she had, after all, asked him to come with her. She picked
up her phone and, realising there was no signal, set it down again. Her father
was ninety-three years old and lived all his life without a landline. The rug
was thick and soft, and she guessed fairly new, and she snuggled within its
folds and allowed herself to be lulled by the song of the wind.
She awoke, still on the couch, her head at a
painful angle. The light outside was bright amber, the sounds were of the early
morning; a seagull's cry, a bleating sheep, distant intermittent traffic. The
empty wine bottle lay on the linoleum. She stretched, easing the cricks in her
back, almost laughing at her fears of the night before. She glanced at her
watch. Seven thirty. The cinders in the range still glowed, filling the room
with a meagre warmth. Longing for a shower she went through to the bathroom to
clean the bath. Brown water gushed from the hot tap, took minutes to clear, but
remained cold. She had not thought to turn on the immersion heater. A wash-down
was the best she could expect. In the kitchen, she switched on the kettle,
mentally berating her father for not having the foresight to connect the water
supply to the stove.
It occurred to her that if she was going to stay here for any length of
time she would need a car. She'd left the Audi in Edinburgh with Andy. Two cars
were a waste of money, he said, since he was on hand to drive her wherever she
needed to be. For now, she would catch the early bus and spend some time by her
father's bedside in the hope he would recognise her, if for only a minute. She
wanted him to see her, know she was there, forgive her.
