Malcolm

08/07/2024

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            1   

I was speaking to my mother recently, several months after my step-father, Malcolm, passed away, and she told me an anecdote that revealed her first husband, my father, wasn’t so unobservant as she would have thought. It was at my sister’s 25th birthday and my father noticed a bruise on her arm and asked how it had come about. She said that she was surprised he noticed; Malcolm, who was at the time her boyfriend of nine months, hadn’t seemed to see anything at all. While I was intrigued to hear her speak about my father with a rare respect, I also wondered who had bruised her if it wasn’t her boyfriend (who hadn’t noticed it). The only person who could have done it was me, since I was the one living in the house at the time and, as my mother spoke, I recalled moments of rage on my part that could have been more violent than I was willing to remember. 

    My mother offered the remark to me I assumed as a way of illustrating Malcolm’s poor sense of observation, but she must have known that in recalling this detail she was implicating me in a violence I could hardly conjure up. It was these moments of Malcolm’s apparent indifference she would try to remember when feeling vulnerable, tearful and alone. She said she often felt lonely when Malcolm was alive and admitted she never felt like that when she was with my father. But that was your father’s problem, she said, or the problem for everybody else. He made people feel special in his company and of no consequence when they weren’t in his presence. I asked her why she stayed with Malcolm for so long — over twenty years — and she supposed he was there. Malcolm had three of four friends he had known since he was at school, had never lived anywhere other than Inverness, and always involved my mother in any socialising that took place — latterly, this was mainly card games, board games and trips to local villages for lunch. It was a small circle of Malcolm and my mother, his friends and their wives, and she would sometimes think if it weren’t for Malcolm she would have had no social life at all. He was so important to her life, she admitted. What I would never have thought was that he was important to mine.

   As she commented on the threat of social isolation she looked across at me and said that hadn’t quite proved to be true; that I knew she was now still very much part of the circle even though Malcolm had passed away, and had expanded it in his absence by incorporating a couple of men and another woman from a bereavement group to which she belonged. There must have been more to him than that and she said she supposed so or she wouldn’t be missing him so much. He was company, she added, as I wondered what my father was to her, and what I happened to be when I wouldn’t stay on at school, wouldn’t get a job, and lost contact with friends when I was seventeen and eighteen.

   My parents divorced when I was ten. My sister was seven years older than me and left home when they split up, moving in with a boyfriend five years older than she was and that my parents took as a symptom of their parting rather than my sister, at so young an age, finding a man she could love and trust. It was a dubious age gap since she had yet to turn eighteen but they remained together for ten years and only parted on the question of children. He wanted them; she didn’t. At ten I had nowhere to go, and there was no suggestion I should move in with my father, who left the town and settled in Glasgow. So I lived with my mother for most of the next decade, and only near the end of it did we find ourselves unable to communicate. While in the first two years after I left school she left me free to sign on as unemployed, when she started seeing Malcolm she became more insistent that I get a job. I said I didn’t wish to be part of society; my mother claimed I was already part of one living in her house. I said I would move out soon enough but needed an address. I’d have lived in a field or a forest if I didn’t need my fortnightly unemployment check for survival. And she knew I wasn’t only saying this; I had been accumulating equipment to do exactly that if necessary. During that spring when she started seeing Malcolm, I bought a bike, panniers, a rucksack, a tent, a sleeping bag, a camping stove, and other necessities for staying in the wilderness. 

                                        2

   That fortnightly cheque was all I needed to be free, but it was also money the state gave me in return for belonging to society. It was a small sum but enough for someone who wished to live in a tent. All I needed to do was adjust myself to increasingly cold temperatures and then only be in or around town for about three days a fortnight: to sign on and wait for the check two days later. I needn’t stay at my mother’s at all, and then would only have to worry about finding a good excuse to convince the people at the benefits office I was looking for work. That was easier than it perhaps ought to have been, with the officers willing to ask me a couple of questions when I visited and then leaving me to pursue my own interests. They wanted an easy life and were willing to offer me an even easier one if it didn’t make their job any harder.    

  Around the time of the initial arguments with my mother, I  bought a tent and the other items for a camping life; the bike I already owned. Between sixteen and eighteen I rarely went out, and even exiting my room was only an occasional occurrence; to use the bathroom, to make up some food, which my mother would always buy. She told me I should keep my benefit money, that I needed it more than she did and I wasn’t eating much anyway. I saved almost all of it so that when we started to fall out that spring, just after my eighteenth birthday, I had plenty of money to buy all the camping equipment I required. But between that spring and summer, I remember arguing with my mother almost every day, yelling at her to leave me alone when she offered the slightest suggestion, feeling I suppose that now she had another man in her life she didn’t need a son who refused to grow up. 

      By the end of May, I had all the items I needed, and when my mother next asked if I was going to get a job, I said I was going first to get my own place — as I took out of my room the various accoutrements needed for my camping trip. It may have been during this argument that we physically fought, and that I must have pushed her against the door and either the strength of my grip or the collision with the door would have bruised her. I went away for a few days, taking the bike along the road from Inverness to Beauly, finding a spot to camp next to a stream several miles outside the village. I wanted to be around fresh water and that meant also being around midges, but they never bit me as badly as they would others, and I had bought some citronella candles and also a bottle of it in liquid form. During this first trip, I stayed for only three nights, promising my sister I would get back for her 25th birthday. I turned up at the hotel along the River Ness, a couple of hundred metres past the castle and facing out onto Eden Court, arriving with my bike and my camping gear, dressed inappropriately for an occasion where my sister and her friends, my mother, Malcolm and, it seemed, everyone but my father, had made an effort. It was a phrase my mother offered when she said I could have tried to look presentable and I replied it didn’t look as though most of the others had made much of an effort either. They had dressed up because that was what they had wanted to do, and I hadn’t because that was what I had wanted to do. I was making as much of an effort as they were, I said: it just meant we were dressed differently. 

    I expected a further argument but when my sister came over and said she was so happy I was there, that mum had told her I’d been away camping and that she shouldn’t expect my presence, she gave me an enthusiastic hug. My sister was wearing a cream-coloured dress, high on the thigh and sleeveless, while my mother’s was puff blue, worn just above the knee and with her shoulder and upper arms covered, presumably partly chosen to hide the bruise. I was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of shorts, I had washed in the river that morning. They had dried in the strong noonday sun, while I sat sunbathing in a pair of pants that I’d also washed by dipping into the shallow stream. I was clean; I just probably didn’t look it, and the trainers I wore were spattered with dried mud. I thought I’d dodged all photographs but when looking at a photo album recently from that day I noticed I was in the background of a couple of them, and it appeared like I had strayed into the wrong venue. My father may not have been well-dressed either but he looked more crumpled than scruffy — his beige suit, his white shirt and his brown tie all looking as though they needed an iron that he no doubt didn’t own. I remember him telling me once that the best thing was to come half-wet out of the shower and get dressed. The clothes will dry on you and remove most of the creases. I wasn’t convinced then and looking at the photos I am no more convinced now.

       I stayed for a couple of evenings at my mother’s after it and, if we didn’t argue, it may have been chiefly because she was hardly there — she stayed over at Malcolm’s place and I supposed he stayed over at hers sometimes now that I was disappearing for days at a time. I noticed on that first return a couple of items in the bathroom that were male and not mine, and I knew I wanted to find another place to live. After several more expeditions into the countryside, and trips back home where my mother and I argued, I found what I was looking for. I had discovered a disused shelter that looked dilapidated but was structurally sound. It was half-covered in moss, shrouded by trees and had two windows on one side; none on the other, and the door was at the front of the rectangular building rather than in the middle, as was common amongst cottages in the area. It gave the space a cavernous quality and against the back wall there was a fireplace which could also double up as a primitive stove. The house had no inside sink but had a cold water tap outside the building. It appeared as if nobody had occupied it for many years and I knew I wanted to make it my home, though didn’t want to make a clear decision until I knew it could withstand rain. I camped next to it for several nights until there was a downpour and the next morning looked to see if any water had leaked through the roof. There was no leakage and yet there had been a major downfall.

     The cottage was a few miles south of Beauly and about 12 miles from the town, and was both isolated enough for me to feel that nobody was likely to come and move me on, nor so far away from civilisation that I couldn’t sign on every fortnight in Inverness, buying necessities only five miles away in Beauly. I didn’t know if I could survive through the winter but the idea of living in the cottage indefinitely, turning it into a home and feeling under no obligation to speak to anyone, except to answer a couple of obligatory questions about my job search, gave me a sense of odd hope. I would have nothing to look forward to in some ways but also nothing to feel anxious over. The only problems were those seeking solutions and while this might sound obvious — aren’t all problems about resolving them? — I knew that those arguments with my mother had also been arguments with myself. What was I going to do with my life, my mother would ask, and I didn’t have an answer for her because up until I went out into the wilderness I hadn’t found an answer that satisfied me. I was getting angry with her because she was asking the same questions I was asking but somehow her articulation of the query left me in a rage. When I thought about living in the cottage, cycling back and forth every couple of weeks to Inverness, I was filled with a hope that may not have been the sort of answer she had been looking for but was a good enough answer for me. 

                              3

   During that first summer, it wasn’t difficult living in the cottage and I sometimes didn’t stay there anyway. I often cycled around the region even going as far as the west coast, staying inland enough to avoid the tourists and setting up camp in spots I felt no other human had ever walked upon. I supposed I was wrong but the isolation felt complete. It wasn’t just that I didn’t meet anyone as I parked my bike a few hundred yards off the road, half camouflaged and locked to a tree, as I walked for another couple of miles by foot, it was that I felt this was all part of an adventure that could last as long as my life did. That was the important thing: to follow my path, which was modestly exploratory but personally necessary.  

   By the end of the summer I had taken a dozen trips elsewhere and still found time to make the cottage inhabitable I hoped for the autumn and the winter. I bought a trailer for the bike and in Beauly managed to get a bed base and a mattress. The bed base was a split divan that fitted in the trailer with one part on top of the other, and I took the wrapped up mattress on a second trip. I picked up less bulky items like pots and pans from Inverness and also some books and a radio. I wondered if I wanted to keep a connection with the social world, yet since I was part of that world as an unemployed person obliged to sign on every fortnight, it seemed I might as well accept I was still a citizen with a stake in the society I was mainly trying to escape. 

    I thought a lot that summer of my unemployed status. I didn’t feel it especially as a moral concern, that I was taking money from the state without looking for work. There was high unemployment, and the little I knew of economic theory appeared to propose that unemployment was necessary to keep inflation down. If it was an excuse good enough for the economists, it was an excuse good enough for me, and if the government needed people to be unemployed I would happily be one of them. I don’t remember exactly how much the benefits were then but it left me with enough to save at least ten pounds a week, which I added to some money from a savings account my father had set up that became available when I turned eighteen. I knew there was more than enough money to see me through the winter, but I also didn’t want the anxiety of knowing I would run out of money after a year. The benefit cash was the safety net it was always designed to be, even if I was using it in what some might have deemed an immoral manner since I had no desire to find employment. 

    During those cycles over to the West Coast, while working on the cottage and sometimes catching fish from the river, and picking berries off trees, I was far more active than I was sitting in my bedroom waiting for a job, and probably more so than in many a job I would have been expected to take. When people speak of being an active member of society, of taking work, I often think they mean a contributor less to society than to the surplus profit made by employers. Now many people in low-paid jobs aren’t earning enough to pay tax but they are working enough to allow corporations to make enormous profits from their labour. It suggests the moral argument for work is difficult to make, and perhaps it was true then as well. All I knew was that I believed I was costing the state as little as I could while living as freely as I wished. I saw the minimum money as society’s acceptance that nobody should starve; not as a condition of trying to find work. 

     During that summer when I would go and sign on I stayed the night before at my mother’s, and she seemed as happy to see me, and pleased that I was staying, as she had previously been happy that I had gone and that she could have the house to herself. I think she was pleased to have her son out (and sometimes her new partner in) but what had worried her most was that I was angry and insular; that my bedroom was like a hermitage. Now that I had found one beyond the four walls of the house, she could see I was no longer angry and found it easier to meet her eye. As we talked one evening late that summer, she said she didn’t care if I got a job, even if I had friends or a girlfriend; what mattered to her was that I was a person out in the world making of it whatever I wished. She didn’t say anything about our last serious altercation; nor did I — though I must have remembered it at that time since it had happened so recently.

    For the next two years, I remained unemployed even though I always seemed so busy as I turned the run-down dwelling into a cottage that could be lived in all year round, and where I also managed to grow winter vegetables while relying on the summer fruits that were naturally nearby: raspberries, blackcurrants, strawberries, apples. I often fished in the earliest hours of the morning and sometimes in the dark, and during those two years managed to catch many a dinner without myself getting caught. Each fortnight I cycled back into Inverness even in the most atrocious of weather and after one soaking a few months after I had moved to the cottage, I bought waterproofs. Sometimes when listening on the radio I would hear of the feckless unemployed and it was a phrase used so often by certain politicians and commentators that a person new to the language might have assumed it was one word. Perhaps it could appear so when some lives were viewed from a particular angle. But I knew it didn't apply to me - and knew too that my adventure during those years could have been ruined by a conscience. 

                              4

  I have no memory of feeling lonely during this period but that could have been due to those fortnightly visits to my mother’s and where I would also see my sister. Perhaps since I saw her less often than I would see my mother (every two or three months) she was more inclined to comment on the changes she saw during that period: she commented on the length of my hair and on a couple of occasions the thickness of my beard. I never did cut my hair during that first years,and shaved with a cut-throat razor I managed to purchase from a traditional barber’s shop in Inverness. My sister’s partner knew the owner and said to go along and explain that I was living in the wilderness and would occasionally need a shave. The barber seemed more amused than bemused and gave it to me for a token sum, and each week thereafter I scraped away with the blade, removing excess facial hair in a metal basin of hot water I had warmed on the fire. I would dab my face afterwards with surgical spirit from the first aid box. The next time I saw my sister, she noticed I’d missed a bit, and we stole one of the disposal blades Malcolm would have left behind when staying over with my mother — which never coincided with my own visits. My sister shaved me carefully removing, stray, longer hairs around my lip and my neck. She also gave my hair the first wash it had seen in months and said with a decent hairdresser my hair would be described as luxuriant. I laughed and said it would be a sad reflection on my life choices if, after it alI, I was good only for a shampoo advert.  

    During these years I ate no meat and didn’t buy any fish from the supermarkets. I had no qualms about catching fish and gutting them, but I couldn’t imagine killing a sheep or a cow. I suppose this was partly because they belonged to farmers and it would be an act of theft. But I didn’t try and catch and kill rabbits or birds either. They seemed too fleshy, I suppose, too close to my own body mass to kill, though not in the past to eat: I wasn’t a pescatarian before; I suppose now I would think that the question for many isn’t what they are willing to eat but what they are willing to kill. There might not seem like too much of a difference between a chicken breast and a slice of salmon when both are wrapped in cellophane, yet the brief slap on the slab of a stone, removing the salmon’s life, was easy enough for me; plunging a knife to eat some lamb would have been a wrestle with more than my conscience. 

     How did I spend my days? Initially, a lot of time was spent getting the cottage organised, setting up vegetable patches, and travelling within a several-mile radius picking berries. I would have picked far more if I had anywhere to store them but without electricity I had no freezer, and could eat only so many, a limitation I turned to my advantage during my second summer, selling them at a fortnightly farmer’s market in Dingwall. Along with the trips to Inverness, they were usually the only occasions that I would meet people. To describe time in such isolation is perhaps harder to do than when describing societal time, with its mornings and afternoons, its lunch breaks and its dinners, its work demands and leisure time activities. It was in the countryside I began to think of our typical expectation of time as tyrannical, with anything falling under such a term that felt inevitable but didn’t need to be. Gravity was necessary and offered no alternative and thus couldn’t be a tyranny. But clock time could have been otherwise and hence proved to be oppressive. When people have told me they fear death, I’ve often wondered if they have fretted over it because they have given their life over to the calculation of time and worked out how much of it they are likely to have left. If they have lived till sixty, are they likely to live till a hundred and twenty? They are surely more than halfway through their life, and when they look back they are looking at more time than when they are looking forward. Some might answer that it is best not to think about it, but this is couched in denial rather than in a different type of acceptance. Better perhaps to think about time as encompassing us within nature and that just as the dead birds and foxes I would sometimes pass were in various stages of putrefaction, as they moved from a moving organic entity to a still, decomposing figure, so we too will become potentially part of the compost — giving birth not only or necessarily to children but to the flowers and plants that can grow on top of our buried bodies. We ourselves have become part of recycling. Even our bones eventually perish as the soft collagen deteriorates. 

5

      Let’s not pretend all these thoughts came to me during my time at the cottage, but whatever feelings of well-being I had were probably quite closely associated with such thinking. It is difficult to describe a day when it doesn’t have the components of what many regard as a day, and there would be hours when I sat looking at a loch, looking up at the sky or watching birds hop from tree to tree. In clock terms, I could lose hours but it was as though I was instead finding a way to die, as if life needed to be encompassed within a notion greater than the clock. Immortality wasn’t a desire for more clock time but a disintegration of oneself into the world that would eventually include one’s body decomposing in the earth. 

    And yet the clock was there as every two weeks I knew I needed to sign on. I couldn’t completely forget time and kept a calendar marking off each day and then cycling off into Inverness the day before my appointment. Even in so small a city as Inverness, I felt the hubbub, with people rushing around, trying to catch buses and cabs, going to meetings and queuing in stores. Occasionally too I would feel the pressure at the job centre, with the odd zealous employee determined to find me work and insisting it was important for one’s self-worth, that it would force me to do something. I would look at these staff members and see that they didn’t especially believe in what they were saying. One was wearing a crumpled shirt as though reflecting a crumpled demeanour, and it looked like it hadn’t been ironed but taken out of a stuffed drawer. Another person who tried to push me into employment had drink on his breath. A possible quick and sociable pint during a lunch break with a friend, or part of a wider drink problem? I supposed they were unhappy and wished I be no less unhappily contributing to the system rather than leaching from it. But ours was also a co-dependent relationship; they needed me unemployed to justify their salary, and I needed them to accept that I had signed on and thus to get my cheques. 

     I would go into the office on Wednesday and the cheque would arrive at my mother’s on Friday, but since I only ever stayed over for one evening I cashed it on the day I would go in and sign on. My outgoings were minimal and I always had more than enough for there to be no urgency to cash the cheque, yet while I could survive for more than a fortnight without it I still needed the money over a long period to remain in the wilderness. As I fished, picked berries, grew my own vegetables, I still belonged to the society I retreated from. I provided about twenty, at most thirty, percent of my food needs, a higher percentage in the summer; a lower one in the winter. I still bought tea, pasta, eggs, cheese, soya milk and oatcakes, for example, and needed to pay for tyres, breaks and other parts for the bike. I had no rent to pay on the cottage, and the wood I collected kept me warm and heated the water. I may have had few needs but I still had too many to survive independently. I thought a lot during those first two years about how I could be entirely self-reliant. The dole money I received was perhaps about £30 a week, and I needed around £1,000 a year to live off, which meant that I saved £1000 during those two years. I knew that were I pushed off the dole, I could survive for about three years longer if I used up my other savings as well.

      This is precisely what happened after three years in the cottage. I went into the unemployment office and they said that there was no evidence I’d been looking for work in recent years; they would have no choice but to send me off on a training course. It would be five mornings a week for a month, and I asked what would happen if I said no. They said they might assume I already had a job, that this was why I was reluctant to attend the course; an investigation might be forthcoming and court proceedings could follow. I said I didn’t have a job but couldn’t attend the training as I explained for the first time that I was trying to live as self-sufficiently as I could in a cottage I’d renovated outside Inverness. They then asked me a few questions that had nothing to do with my job search; it was as though they too wished to find a way of escaping their predicament. It was the man with the crumpled shirt, his shirt still looking un-ironed and his face looking more rucked than before. After we chatted for ten minutes he asked me what he should do. He was obliged to say I would attend the course or that my benefit money would be stopped. He said usually when this happened, the assumption was the person was employed and signing on — it was an unwritten agreement he supposed. The state wouldn’t prosecute and the client would lose their benefits. The state no longer gave out money; the client avoided prosecution. The state lost money it had given out in the past; the client was going to lose money they were expecting in the future. It made sense I said. But your case doesn’t, he replied. I supposed not, I added. I said I accepted he had no choice, and that from now on I would have to find an alternative means of income. 

     It was an odd feeling as I exited the building next to the River Ness and cycled along the river before turning off for Clachnaharry Rd and then on towards Beauly. It was a road I knew well but one I needn’t travel again for many months if I didn’t wish to do so. I had well over three thousand pounds in savings and I sensed enormous freedom and a no less evident limitation to it. I was like a prisoner in reverse, someone whose liberty could be numbered in years as I had around three of them to remain my own man. During the following two I didn’t go into Inverness at all, and only around once a month to Beauly. But I wasn’t entirely alone: my mother would occasionally visit, and my sister too. They would usually arrive with bags and boxes of food, tins that could keep me fed for months, and perishables that they knew I couldn’t grow or that would quickly go out of date. They brought soya or UHT milk, and which left fresh milk a luxury that was also a treat, and which I would buy occasionally off a farmer whose eggs I also bought. I was eating well and realised too that those fortnightly visits to Inverness where I had to acknowledge the power of the state in return for a living allowance had been more anxiety-inducing than I thought. It made me too aware of time, and if my project had a meaning it rested on escaping from the clock — finding a temporal autonomy that was tantamount to escape.  

6   

This may have been hard to explain and usually I had no reason to do so, but I found myself trying when my father was in the Highlands again for the first time since my sister’s 25th. As I had no access to mail or a telephone, I usually knew of people’s future visits based of their previous one. My mother or my sister would say they would come again in two or three weeks, and on one of my sister’s visits she told me our father would be around in a fortnight. Would it be ok if he came to see me? It was when she said this I became aware that my retreat from society had so little to do with reclusiveness. I wasn’t trying to hide from anyone and never minded the occasional trip out from my family, and wouldn’t have minded, I suppose, visits from friends, if I had any. At school I had been part of a circle, about six of us who would always hang out at lunchtimes, often after school and then again in the evenings, usually just congregating near Bught Park. It was a routine, and part of all the others with school as the most constraining one. When I left at sixteen I didn’t know why I wanted to leave: the grades were good and I was expected to stay on for fifth year and get the advanced qualifications to take me to university. Retrospectively, I would say that I sensed even then that time as everyone around me was defining it was my enemy, and so it was increasingly an enemy I hid from and I stopped seeing friends and rarely exited the house. It was then my mother understandably became concerned, and yet since I couldn’t articulate this need to escape the standard demands of the temporal I must have literally lashed out, and this is what she alluded to when we talked after Malcolm’s death.   

     So visitors didn’t bother me at all and my father’s was as pleasant as any and so it was to him that I explained the reasoning I offer above. I was never seeking the hermit’s life, though I was almost always content with my own company. My day possessed little boredom perhaps because I had so few expectations. When the weather was dry I usually wandered the region, sometimes so unsure for how long I would be away that I took the tent, a sleeping bag and enough food for an overnight stay. Sometimes I even ventured out knowing it would probably rain and mastered the rudiments of protecting the tent and keeping a fire going during a downpour. Often even in moderately heavy rain it became light enough under a tree to protect the fire and to reduce the downpour to a pitter patter on the tent’s canvas. I would sometimes sit by the tent’s entrance, feel the warmth of the fire on my face and read one of the books I requested on an earlier visit from my mother or my sister. I am not sure whether I had grown into literature or whether solitude had created the space for it, but at school it was a chore trying to turn those flat letters on the page into vivid images in my mind. During my time in the woods, it was as if turning water into wine: the letters immediately becoming images with little effort on my part. It was as though I needed company and the writer’s request met with my wish to be part of worlds that could be imaginative rather than actual. Before, living amongst people and all those time constraints and demands, the imagination seemed to have little place. I suspect that if someone had said to me during my time in the cottage that, when starting a book, I would have to finish it by the end of the week, the book’s imaginative capacity would have disintegrated. 

       It was during my years in the cottage that I came to understand that my needs were those of time more than space; that I didn’t need to live reclusively; I needed to live without too insistent a sense of the clock. This was an important thought; it allowed me to see options before my money ran out, even if an act of good fortune intervened and allowed me to stay for another five years at the cottage. My nan died and left a decent sum for her two children and a modest sum for her four grandchildren. I received ten thousand pounds and I couldn’t pretend the financial gain was greater than the emotional loss. I had only seen her twice since my parents had divorced and she was ninety when she passed away. I deposited it into my account knowing I’d bought more time and that I could continue occupying my space.

  I did wonder after my nan’s death whether my indifference to her demise was part of a wider lack of feeling; that I’d become detached from others. But I believed it was more that she was a woman whom I never knew and never felt close to and that it was only the demands of blood rather than an element of affection that left me with a small inheritance. Sometimes we have to be honest with our feelings, to understand that a loss of a life can be a gain for ourselves and I suppose while many a novel will insist that the decent characters grieve while the villainous covet, I neither grieved nor coveted. I was surprised and perhaps even saw it as fate: that another’s death at ninety allowed me to live freely for another few years.

    During this time I often thought of what I would do; that before the age of thirty I would be back in society with no degree, no job history and no contacts. Yet this caused me almost no anxiety; I hadn’t perceived my life with momentum but instead through stillness, as though I was occupying a centre that it was my purpose to protect. I reached the age of twenty-seven and after almost ten years living in the cottage, and with five thousand pounds in savings, I decided to leave and find work. But what work? In those last two or three years there I had thought about various possible posts for a young man without quantifiable skills. I knew the most likely option that would suit my temperament, and my temporal needs, would be a night porter. Yet most of the jobs required a uniform and there was something in the wording of the post that hinted at servility. 

     I had still plenty savings, had no rent to pay and about a third of my food I caught, grew or picked myself. I didn’t go looking for work and almost never went into Inverness, but would ask my sister and my mother to look out for any positions they might think suitable, and for which the employer would imagine me capable. On a visit, my sister, who worked in hospitality during those years, said she had heard the youth hostel in the town was looking for a part-time night porter. It would be two days a week, and they would pay time and a half for the inconvenience of working nights. I said that seemed very convenient for me and hoped they wouldn’t pay me less since I wanted to work evenings over days. Just keep it to yourself, she said, as though she suspected that my years in the country had robbed me of facetiousness and left me only with naivety. I promised, I said.

    I got the job and earned more than twice as much as I needed while leaving my remaining savings untouched. I worked two nine-hour shifts a week, starting at 10 and finishing at 7, and while there were occasions when I was exhausted as I insisted on cycling the 15 miles each way, I could usually sleep between about 2 and 6. I was once again returned to the demands of a temporality that wasn’t my own. But it didn’t bother me, and around this time what was more bothersome were rumours that the land I was occupying was soon to be sold. I always supposed whoever owned the land had so much of it they didn’t care I was occupying a derelict cottage I’d made inhabitable. But someone had recently died and it was after working for a year at the hostel a person came to the cottage and said that I had a choice to vacate the land or buy it. The price was £20,000. I didn’t have the money, but a couple of months later, after I’d not so much resigned myself to losing the place but lost some sleep over wondering where I would stay in Inverness, and how many more hours I would need to work to pay for rent in the town, I received another visit. The person told me that I didn’t need to move. Someone who would prefer to remain anonymous had bought the piece of land I was occupying. 

   Over the years I would wonder who this person was, and assumed that it was probably the new owners who accepted that as I had lived there for years without causing any problems, better to cover a very minor loss and avoid the inconvenience of moving me on. I wasn’t likely to have gone to the press, but I knew that a lot of landowners in Scotland liked their anonymity, buying up chunks of the country that they purchased because of its remote locale and tranquil aspect. A few pieces in the local paper that could have been picked up by the national and even international press would have defied the point of the purchase. Best to leave me alone, I assumed, and still have many acres to themselves.  I lived on the land, worked in the hostel and never really thought too much about my good fortune, or whose fortune it was that allowed me to stay. 

7

   When I talked to my mother recently about my teen years, to the incidents that seemed to have led me to retreating into the country, as she talked about Malcolm not always perceiving things and was surprised on one particular occasion when my father did, shesaid, after I realised it was me who had bruised her arm, that there were moments when she was frightened. I still had almost no memory of the incidents she went on to describe but as she detailed three or four that led to the moment of violence, she said she had viewed me as an animal caged. It was an obvious image but I suppose apt. I would be in my room almost as though in solitary confinement; I would only come out to eat or use the bathroom. She could see there was so much energy in need of release and on those occasions when it was unleashed, she felt scared, and at the same time didn’t say anything to Malcolm. The relationship was new and she believed that talking to him was a betrayal, perhaps aware that was how I was seeing her affair with a stranger. That is the thing, for her, he quickly became familiar, but there was no reason why he should have become so for me, and she was caught between promptly knowing him well, and sensing how strange this familiarity would have seemed to a son who just saw a man beginning to spend time around the house. It wasn’t that I disliked Malcolm, she thought, but that I couldn’t have accepted anybody appearing to move in. 

   I asked her more about this aggression towards her, as though I were enquiring about the deeds of a stranger, as though it were Malcolm who had been aggressive with her. Yet I knew that, as she talked, she wouldn’t be making me aware of incidents of which I was ignorant but making me privy to those that as she talked would become clearer in my own mind and not only through the words she offered. As she told me about one where I slammed a door so hard that a framed photograph of my sister fell off the wall and smashed on the ground, and another when I pierced the tyre on Malcolm’s car, so each act of force became clearer in my head. After telling me about how violent I could become, I asked more specifically about the bruise on her arm at my sister’s party. She said I arrived back after being out all day. I went straight to my room and she knocked on the door asking if I wanted anything to eat I yanked it open and grabbed her arm, insisting she leave me alone. It wasn’t the subsequent bruise that was such a cause of concern; it was the look in my eyes that stayed with her for months. As I gripped her arm I added that I hated Malcolm; that he wasn’t my father and had no right to be inside our house. 

    When offering me this image, she quoted what I’d said, I didn’t doubt the veracity of the telling as I found myself half recalling those words and remembering that grip. It was terrible what I said about Malcolm, she said. He liked me, she added. He wouldn’t have ever pretended to have replaced my father but he might have hoped he could have perceived me as the son he never had, as an offspring he might have wished a little to project upon. He had nobody else with whom he could do so, she said, once again becoming tearful. He had friends she supposed, but it was as though they were friends out of longevity and familiarity rather than meaningfulness. It occurred to me then that it was Malcolm who bought the land allowing me to remain in the cottage, and perhaps my mother in time would have told me if I hadn’t asked. She said that this was true but she hadn’t known until he passed away. In his will was indeed a modest piece of land a couple of miles from Beauly. The land was now in her name and she would be happy to put it into mine if I wished. She just hadn’t known how to discuss it with me; she always had in her mind that remark I made about hating Malcolm, and how would I feel about a man I hated being responsible for me continuing the life I was leading? She offered it aware I would of course say I didn’t hate Malcolm and it was true; obviously I didn’t. But what she didn’t expect was that I would be moved by the gesture, by realising that this man whom I barely I knew, whom I initially claimed to hate, and never for one moment saw as a father-figure, had become nothing less than a guardian angel. If he had told me at the time that he was buying the land I might have resisted and certainly not been moved; may not even have been so if I knew he had told my mother that he had bought it for me. 

    Yet I also found myself thinking about time, that all those years I had lived somehow outside of it or at least tried to find in time an escape from the expectations of space. That might be more complicated than necessary; what I couldn’t deny, though, was there was something in the pressure of time, in all those years passing, with Malcolm remaining a stranger to me, and yet keeping to himself this immense gesture of kindness that moved me. As I’ve made clear, I have never been an especially solitary person, except in that period between school and going to live in the cottage. Whenever people would visit I was pleased to see them. During my years at the hostel, many people have passed through those doors and into my life however briefly. There have been occasions where I and others have become close, even if nobody else need ever know of these brief encounters. They could have been dreamt of rather than lived. Perhaps in some way they were. But what I am left with, alongside a small piece of land, is thinking of Malcolm’s solitude, one that he lived in I believe despite his friendships that my mother has continued, and a relationship with my mother for a couple of decades. My solitude is well-known, my family, the friends I have made in the hostel, and even the newspapers that on a couple of occasions wanted to interview me about my apparent reclusiveness, and whose requests I declined, were aware of the solitary life I had chosen. But nobody perhaps knew of Malcolm’s isolation, as it occurred to me that he would have noticed that bruise on my mother’s arm, but never commented on it to her; that it wasn’t my father’s acuteness that led to his remark, but something else, a confidence that he was very much in the world, a confidence I realised I simultaneously shared and that perhaps Malcolm didn’t.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Malcolm

            1   

I was speaking to my mother recently, several months after my step-father, Malcolm, passed away, and she told me an anecdote that revealed her first husband, my father, wasn’t so unobservant as she would have thought. It was at my sister’s 25th birthday and my father noticed a bruise on her arm and asked how it had come about. She said that she was surprised he noticed; Malcolm, who was at the time her boyfriend of nine months, hadn’t seemed to see anything at all. While I was intrigued to hear her speak about my father with a rare respect, I also wondered who had bruised her if it wasn’t her boyfriend (who hadn’t noticed it). The only person who could have done it was me, since I was the one living in the house at the time and, as my mother spoke, I recalled moments of rage on my part that could have been more violent than I was willing to remember. 

    My mother offered the remark to me I assumed as a way of illustrating Malcolm’s poor sense of observation, but she must have known that in recalling this detail she was implicating me in a violence I could hardly conjure up. It was these moments of Malcolm’s apparent indifference she would try to remember when feeling vulnerable, tearful and alone. She said she often felt lonely when Malcolm was alive and admitted she never felt like that when she was with my father. But that was your father’s problem, she said, or the problem for everybody else. He made people feel special in his company and of no consequence when they weren’t in his presence. I asked her why she stayed with Malcolm for so long — over twenty years — and she supposed he was there. Malcolm had three of four friends he had known since he was at school, had never lived anywhere other than Inverness, and always involved my mother in any socialising that took place — latterly, this was mainly card games, board games and trips to local villages for lunch. It was a small circle of Malcolm and my mother, his friends and their wives, and she would sometimes think if it weren’t for Malcolm she would have had no social life at all. He was so important to her life, she admitted. What I would never have thought was that he was important to mine.

   As she commented on the threat of social isolation she looked across at me and said that hadn’t quite proved to be true; that I knew she was now still very much part of the circle even though Malcolm had passed away, and had expanded it in his absence by incorporating a couple of men and another woman from a bereavement group to which she belonged. There must have been more to him than that and she said she supposed so or she wouldn’t be missing him so much. He was company, she added, as I wondered what my father was to her, and what I happened to be when I wouldn’t stay on at school, wouldn’t get a job, and lost contact with friends when I was seventeen and eighteen.

   My parents divorced when I was ten. My sister was seven years older than me and left home when they split up, moving in with a boyfriend five years older than she was and that my parents took as a symptom of their parting rather than my sister, at so young an age, finding a man she could love and trust. It was a dubious age gap since she had yet to turn eighteen but they remained together for ten years and only parted on the question of children. He wanted them; she didn’t. At ten I had nowhere to go, and there was no suggestion I should move in with my father, who left the town and settled in Glasgow. So I lived with my mother for most of the next decade, and only near the end of it did we find ourselves unable to communicate. While in the first two years after I left school she left me free to sign on as unemployed, when she started seeing Malcolm she became more insistent that I get a job. I said I didn’t wish to be part of society; my mother claimed I was already part of one living in her house. I said I would move out soon enough but needed an address. I’d have lived in a field or a forest if I didn’t need my fortnightly unemployment check for survival. And she knew I wasn’t only saying this; I had been accumulating equipment to do exactly that if necessary. During that spring when she started seeing Malcolm, I bought a bike, panniers, a rucksack, a tent, a sleeping bag, a camping stove, and other necessities for staying in the wilderness. 

                                        2

   That fortnightly cheque was all I needed to be free, but it was also money the state gave me in return for belonging to society. It was a small sum but enough for someone who wished to live in a tent. All I needed to do was adjust myself to increasingly cold temperatures and then only be in or around town for about three days a fortnight: to sign on and wait for the check two days later. I needn’t stay at my mother’s at all, and then would only have to worry about finding a good excuse to convince the people at the benefits office I was looking for work. That was easier than it perhaps ought to have been, with the officers willing to ask me a couple of questions when I visited and then leaving me to pursue my own interests. They wanted an easy life and were willing to offer me an even easier one if it didn’t make their job any harder.    

  Around the time of the initial arguments with my mother, I  bought a tent and the other items for a camping life; the bike I already owned. Between sixteen and eighteen I rarely went out, and even exiting my room was only an occasional occurrence; to use the bathroom, to make up some food, which my mother would always buy. She told me I should keep my benefit money, that I needed it more than she did and I wasn’t eating much anyway. I saved almost all of it so that when we started to fall out that spring, just after my eighteenth birthday, I had plenty of money to buy all the camping equipment I required. But between that spring and summer, I remember arguing with my mother almost every day, yelling at her to leave me alone when she offered the slightest suggestion, feeling I suppose that now she had another man in her life she didn’t need a son who refused to grow up. 

      By the end of May, I had all the items I needed, and when my mother next asked if I was going to get a job, I said I was going first to get my own place — as I took out of my room the various accoutrements needed for my camping trip. It may have been during this argument that we physically fought, and that I must have pushed her against the door and either the strength of my grip or the collision with the door would have bruised her. I went away for a few days, taking the bike along the road from Inverness to Beauly, finding a spot to camp next to a stream several miles outside the village. I wanted to be around fresh water and that meant also being around midges, but they never bit me as badly as they would others, and I had bought some citronella candles and also a bottle of it in liquid form. During this first trip, I stayed for only three nights, promising my sister I would get back for her 25th birthday. I turned up at the hotel along the River Ness, a couple of hundred metres past the castle and facing out onto Eden Court, arriving with my bike and my camping gear, dressed inappropriately for an occasion where my sister and her friends, my mother, Malcolm and, it seemed, everyone but my father, had made an effort. It was a phrase my mother offered when she said I could have tried to look presentable and I replied it didn’t look as though most of the others had made much of an effort either. They had dressed up because that was what they had wanted to do, and I hadn’t because that was what I had wanted to do. I was making as much of an effort as they were, I said: it just meant we were dressed differently. 

    I expected a further argument but when my sister came over and said she was so happy I was there, that mum had told her I’d been away camping and that she shouldn’t expect my presence, she gave me an enthusiastic hug. My sister was wearing a cream-coloured dress, high on the thigh and sleeveless, while my mother’s was puff blue, worn just above the knee and with her shoulder and upper arms covered, presumably partly chosen to hide the bruise. I was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of shorts, I had washed in the river that morning. They had dried in the strong noonday sun, while I sat sunbathing in a pair of pants that I’d also washed by dipping into the shallow stream. I was clean; I just probably didn’t look it, and the trainers I wore were spattered with dried mud. I thought I’d dodged all photographs but when looking at a photo album recently from that day I noticed I was in the background of a couple of them, and it appeared like I had strayed into the wrong venue. My father may not have been well-dressed either but he looked more crumpled than scruffy — his beige suit, his white shirt and his brown tie all looking as though they needed an iron that he no doubt didn’t own. I remember him telling me once that the best thing was to come half-wet out of the shower and get dressed. The clothes will dry on you and remove most of the creases. I wasn’t convinced then and looking at the photos I am no more convinced now.

       I stayed for a couple of evenings at my mother’s after it and, if we didn’t argue, it may have been chiefly because she was hardly there — she stayed over at Malcolm’s place and I supposed he stayed over at hers sometimes now that I was disappearing for days at a time. I noticed on that first return a couple of items in the bathroom that were male and not mine, and I knew I wanted to find another place to live. After several more expeditions into the countryside, and trips back home where my mother and I argued, I found what I was looking for. I had discovered a disused shelter that looked dilapidated but was structurally sound. It was half-covered in moss, shrouded by trees and had two windows on one side; none on the other, and the door was at the front of the rectangular building rather than in the middle, as was common amongst cottages in the area. It gave the space a cavernous quality and against the back wall there was a fireplace which could also double up as a primitive stove. The house had no inside sink but had a cold water tap outside the building. It appeared as if nobody had occupied it for many years and I knew I wanted to make it my home, though didn’t want to make a clear decision until I knew it could withstand rain. I camped next to it for several nights until there was a downpour and the next morning looked to see if any water had leaked through the roof. There was no leakage and yet there had been a major downfall.

     The cottage was a few miles south of Beauly and about 12 miles from the town, and was both isolated enough for me to feel that nobody was likely to come and move me on, nor so far away from civilisation that I couldn’t sign on every fortnight in Inverness, buying necessities only five miles away in Beauly. I didn’t know if I could survive through the winter but the idea of living in the cottage indefinitely, turning it into a home and feeling under no obligation to speak to anyone, except to answer a couple of obligatory questions about my job search, gave me a sense of odd hope. I would have nothing to look forward to in some ways but also nothing to feel anxious over. The only problems were those seeking solutions and while this might sound obvious — aren’t all problems about resolving them? — I knew that those arguments with my mother had also been arguments with myself. What was I going to do with my life, my mother would ask, and I didn’t have an answer for her because up until I went out into the wilderness I hadn’t found an answer that satisfied me. I was getting angry with her because she was asking the same questions I was asking but somehow her articulation of the query left me in a rage. When I thought about living in the cottage, cycling back and forth every couple of weeks to Inverness, I was filled with a hope that may not have been the sort of answer she had been looking for but was a good enough answer for me. 

                              3

   During that first summer, it wasn’t difficult living in the cottage and I sometimes didn’t stay there anyway. I often cycled around the region even going as far as the west coast, staying inland enough to avoid the tourists and setting up camp in spots I felt no other human had ever walked upon. I supposed I was wrong but the isolation felt complete. It wasn’t just that I didn’t meet anyone as I parked my bike a few hundred yards off the road, half camouflaged and locked to a tree, as I walked for another couple of miles by foot, it was that I felt this was all part of an adventure that could last as long as my life did. That was the important thing: to follow my path, which was modestly exploratory but personally necessary.  

   By the end of the summer I had taken a dozen trips elsewhere and still found time to make the cottage inhabitable I hoped for the autumn and the winter. I bought a trailer for the bike and in Beauly managed to get a bed base and a mattress. The bed base was a split divan that fitted in the trailer with one part on top of the other, and I took the wrapped up mattress on a second trip. I picked up less bulky items like pots and pans from Inverness and also some books and a radio. I wondered if I wanted to keep a connection with the social world, yet since I was part of that world as an unemployed person obliged to sign on every fortnight, it seemed I might as well accept I was still a citizen with a stake in the society I was mainly trying to escape. 

    I thought a lot that summer of my unemployed status. I didn’t feel it especially as a moral concern, that I was taking money from the state without looking for work. There was high unemployment, and the little I knew of economic theory appeared to propose that unemployment was necessary to keep inflation down. If it was an excuse good enough for the economists, it was an excuse good enough for me, and if the government needed people to be unemployed I would happily be one of them. I don’t remember exactly how much the benefits were then but it left me with enough to save at least ten pounds a week, which I added to some money from a savings account my father had set up that became available when I turned eighteen. I knew there was more than enough money to see me through the winter, but I also didn’t want the anxiety of knowing I would run out of money after a year. The benefit cash was the safety net it was always designed to be, even if I was using it in what some might have deemed an immoral manner since I had no desire to find employment. 

    During those cycles over to the West Coast, while working on the cottage and sometimes catching fish from the river, and picking berries off trees, I was far more active than I was sitting in my bedroom waiting for a job, and probably more so than in many a job I would have been expected to take. When people speak of being an active member of society, of taking work, I often think they mean a contributor less to society than to the surplus profit made by employers. Now many people in low-paid jobs aren’t earning enough to pay tax but they are working enough to allow corporations to make enormous profits from their labour. It suggests the moral argument for work is difficult to make, and perhaps it was true then as well. All I knew was that I believed I was costing the state as little as I could while living as freely as I wished. I saw the minimum money as society’s acceptance that nobody should starve; not as a condition of trying to find work. 

     During that summer when I would go and sign on I stayed the night before at my mother’s, and she seemed as happy to see me, and pleased that I was staying, as she had previously been happy that I had gone and that she could have the house to herself. I think she was pleased to have her son out (and sometimes her new partner in) but what had worried her most was that I was angry and insular; that my bedroom was like a hermitage. Now that I had found one beyond the four walls of the house, she could see I was no longer angry and found it easier to meet her eye. As we talked one evening late that summer, she said she didn’t care if I got a job, even if I had friends or a girlfriend; what mattered to her was that I was a person out in the world making of it whatever I wished. She didn’t say anything about our last serious altercation; nor did I — though I must have remembered it at that time since it had happened so recently.

    For the next two years, I remained unemployed even though I always seemed so busy as I turned the run-down dwelling into a cottage that could be lived in all year round, and where I also managed to grow winter vegetables while relying on the summer fruits that were naturally nearby: raspberries, blackcurrants, strawberries, apples. I often fished in the earliest hours of the morning and sometimes in the dark, and during those two years managed to catch many a dinner without myself getting caught. Each fortnight I cycled back into Inverness even in the most atrocious of weather and after one soaking a few months after I had moved to the cottage, I bought waterproofs. Sometimes when listening on the radio I would hear of the feckless unemployed and it was a phrase used so often by certain politicians and commentators that a person new to the language might have assumed it was one word. Perhaps it could appear so when some lives were viewed from a particular angle. But I knew it didn't apply to me - and knew too that my adventure during those years could have been ruined by a conscience. 

                              4

  I have no memory of feeling lonely during this period but that could have been due to those fortnightly visits to my mother’s and where I would also see my sister. Perhaps since I saw her less often than I would see my mother (every two or three months) she was more inclined to comment on the changes she saw during that period: she commented on the length of my hair and on a couple of occasions the thickness of my beard. I never did cut my hair during that first years,and shaved with a cut-throat razor I managed to purchase from a traditional barber’s shop in Inverness. My sister’s partner knew the owner and said to go along and explain that I was living in the wilderness and would occasionally need a shave. The barber seemed more amused than bemused and gave it to me for a token sum, and each week thereafter I scraped away with the blade, removing excess facial hair in a metal basin of hot water I had warmed on the fire. I would dab my face afterwards with surgical spirit from the first aid box. The next time I saw my sister, she noticed I’d missed a bit, and we stole one of the disposal blades Malcolm would have left behind when staying over with my mother — which never coincided with my own visits. My sister shaved me carefully removing, stray, longer hairs around my lip and my neck. She also gave my hair the first wash it had seen in months and said with a decent hairdresser my hair would be described as luxuriant. I laughed and said it would be a sad reflection on my life choices if, after it alI, I was good only for a shampoo advert.  

    During these years I ate no meat and didn’t buy any fish from the supermarkets. I had no qualms about catching fish and gutting them, but I couldn’t imagine killing a sheep or a cow. I suppose this was partly because they belonged to farmers and it would be an act of theft. But I didn’t try and catch and kill rabbits or birds either. They seemed too fleshy, I suppose, too close to my own body mass to kill, though not in the past to eat: I wasn’t a pescatarian before; I suppose now I would think that the question for many isn’t what they are willing to eat but what they are willing to kill. There might not seem like too much of a difference between a chicken breast and a slice of salmon when both are wrapped in cellophane, yet the brief slap on the slab of a stone, removing the salmon’s life, was easy enough for me; plunging a knife to eat some lamb would have been a wrestle with more than my conscience. 

     How did I spend my days? Initially, a lot of time was spent getting the cottage organised, setting up vegetable patches, and travelling within a several-mile radius picking berries. I would have picked far more if I had anywhere to store them but without electricity I had no freezer, and could eat only so many, a limitation I turned to my advantage during my second summer, selling them at a fortnightly farmer’s market in Dingwall. Along with the trips to Inverness, they were usually the only occasions that I would meet people. To describe time in such isolation is perhaps harder to do than when describing societal time, with its mornings and afternoons, its lunch breaks and its dinners, its work demands and leisure time activities. It was in the countryside I began to think of our typical expectation of time as tyrannical, with anything falling under such a term that felt inevitable but didn’t need to be. Gravity was necessary and offered no alternative and thus couldn’t be a tyranny. But clock time could have been otherwise and hence proved to be oppressive. When people have told me they fear death, I’ve often wondered if they have fretted over it because they have given their life over to the calculation of time and worked out how much of it they are likely to have left. If they have lived till sixty, are they likely to live till a hundred and twenty? They are surely more than halfway through their life, and when they look back they are looking at more time than when they are looking forward. Some might answer that it is best not to think about it, but this is couched in denial rather than in a different type of acceptance. Better perhaps to think about time as encompassing us within nature and that just as the dead birds and foxes I would sometimes pass were in various stages of putrefaction, as they moved from a moving organic entity to a still, decomposing figure, so we too will become potentially part of the compost — giving birth not only or necessarily to children but to the flowers and plants that can grow on top of our buried bodies. We ourselves have become part of recycling. Even our bones eventually perish as the soft collagen deteriorates. 

5

      Let’s not pretend all these thoughts came to me during my time at the cottage, but whatever feelings of well-being I had were probably quite closely associated with such thinking. It is difficult to describe a day when it doesn’t have the components of what many regard as a day, and there would be hours when I sat looking at a loch, looking up at the sky or watching birds hop from tree to tree. In clock terms, I could lose hours but it was as though I was instead finding a way to die, as if life needed to be encompassed within a notion greater than the clock. Immortality wasn’t a desire for more clock time but a disintegration of oneself into the world that would eventually include one’s body decomposing in the earth. 

    And yet the clock was there as every two weeks I knew I needed to sign on. I couldn’t completely forget time and kept a calendar marking off each day and then cycling off into Inverness the day before my appointment. Even in so small a city as Inverness, I felt the hubbub, with people rushing around, trying to catch buses and cabs, going to meetings and queuing in stores. Occasionally too I would feel the pressure at the job centre, with the odd zealous employee determined to find me work and insisting it was important for one’s self-worth, that it would force me to do something. I would look at these staff members and see that they didn’t especially believe in what they were saying. One was wearing a crumpled shirt as though reflecting a crumpled demeanour, and it looked like it hadn’t been ironed but taken out of a stuffed drawer. Another person who tried to push me into employment had drink on his breath. A possible quick and sociable pint during a lunch break with a friend, or part of a wider drink problem? I supposed they were unhappy and wished I be no less unhappily contributing to the system rather than leaching from it. But ours was also a co-dependent relationship; they needed me unemployed to justify their salary, and I needed them to accept that I had signed on and thus to get my cheques. 

     I would go into the office on Wednesday and the cheque would arrive at my mother’s on Friday, but since I only ever stayed over for one evening I cashed it on the day I would go in and sign on. My outgoings were minimal and I always had more than enough for there to be no urgency to cash the cheque, yet while I could survive for more than a fortnight without it I still needed the money over a long period to remain in the wilderness. As I fished, picked berries, grew my own vegetables, I still belonged to the society I retreated from. I provided about twenty, at most thirty, percent of my food needs, a higher percentage in the summer; a lower one in the winter. I still bought tea, pasta, eggs, cheese, soya milk and oatcakes, for example, and needed to pay for tyres, breaks and other parts for the bike. I had no rent to pay on the cottage, and the wood I collected kept me warm and heated the water. I may have had few needs but I still had too many to survive independently. I thought a lot during those first two years about how I could be entirely self-reliant. The dole money I received was perhaps about £30 a week, and I needed around £1,000 a year to live off, which meant that I saved £1000 during those two years. I knew that were I pushed off the dole, I could survive for about three years longer if I used up my other savings as well.

      This is precisely what happened after three years in the cottage. I went into the unemployment office and they said that there was no evidence I’d been looking for work in recent years; they would have no choice but to send me off on a training course. It would be five mornings a week for a month, and I asked what would happen if I said no. They said they might assume I already had a job, that this was why I was reluctant to attend the course; an investigation might be forthcoming and court proceedings could follow. I said I didn’t have a job but couldn’t attend the training as I explained for the first time that I was trying to live as self-sufficiently as I could in a cottage I’d renovated outside Inverness. They then asked me a few questions that had nothing to do with my job search; it was as though they too wished to find a way of escaping their predicament. It was the man with the crumpled shirt, his shirt still looking un-ironed and his face looking more rucked than before. After we chatted for ten minutes he asked me what he should do. He was obliged to say I would attend the course or that my benefit money would be stopped. He said usually when this happened, the assumption was the person was employed and signing on — it was an unwritten agreement he supposed. The state wouldn’t prosecute and the client would lose their benefits. The state no longer gave out money; the client avoided prosecution. The state lost money it had given out in the past; the client was going to lose money they were expecting in the future. It made sense I said. But your case doesn’t, he replied. I supposed not, I added. I said I accepted he had no choice, and that from now on I would have to find an alternative means of income. 

     It was an odd feeling as I exited the building next to the River Ness and cycled along the river before turning off for Clachnaharry Rd and then on towards Beauly. It was a road I knew well but one I needn’t travel again for many months if I didn’t wish to do so. I had well over three thousand pounds in savings and I sensed enormous freedom and a no less evident limitation to it. I was like a prisoner in reverse, someone whose liberty could be numbered in years as I had around three of them to remain my own man. During the following two I didn’t go into Inverness at all, and only around once a month to Beauly. But I wasn’t entirely alone: my mother would occasionally visit, and my sister too. They would usually arrive with bags and boxes of food, tins that could keep me fed for months, and perishables that they knew I couldn’t grow or that would quickly go out of date. They brought soya or UHT milk, and which left fresh milk a luxury that was also a treat, and which I would buy occasionally off a farmer whose eggs I also bought. I was eating well and realised too that those fortnightly visits to Inverness where I had to acknowledge the power of the state in return for a living allowance had been more anxiety-inducing than I thought. It made me too aware of time, and if my project had a meaning it rested on escaping from the clock — finding a temporal autonomy that was tantamount to escape.  

6   

This may have been hard to explain and usually I had no reason to do so, but I found myself trying when my father was in the Highlands again for the first time since my sister’s 25th. As I had no access to mail or a telephone, I usually knew of people’s future visits based of their previous one. My mother or my sister would say they would come again in two or three weeks, and on one of my sister’s visits she told me our father would be around in a fortnight. Would it be ok if he came to see me? It was when she said this I became aware that my retreat from society had so little to do with reclusiveness. I wasn’t trying to hide from anyone and never minded the occasional trip out from my family, and wouldn’t have minded, I suppose, visits from friends, if I had any. At school I had been part of a circle, about six of us who would always hang out at lunchtimes, often after school and then again in the evenings, usually just congregating near Bught Park. It was a routine, and part of all the others with school as the most constraining one. When I left at sixteen I didn’t know why I wanted to leave: the grades were good and I was expected to stay on for fifth year and get the advanced qualifications to take me to university. Retrospectively, I would say that I sensed even then that time as everyone around me was defining it was my enemy, and so it was increasingly an enemy I hid from and I stopped seeing friends and rarely exited the house. It was then my mother understandably became concerned, and yet since I couldn’t articulate this need to escape the standard demands of the temporal I must have literally lashed out, and this is what she alluded to when we talked after Malcolm’s death.   

     So visitors didn’t bother me at all and my father’s was as pleasant as any and so it was to him that I explained the reasoning I offer above. I was never seeking the hermit’s life, though I was almost always content with my own company. My day possessed little boredom perhaps because I had so few expectations. When the weather was dry I usually wandered the region, sometimes so unsure for how long I would be away that I took the tent, a sleeping bag and enough food for an overnight stay. Sometimes I even ventured out knowing it would probably rain and mastered the rudiments of protecting the tent and keeping a fire going during a downpour. Often even in moderately heavy rain it became light enough under a tree to protect the fire and to reduce the downpour to a pitter patter on the tent’s canvas. I would sometimes sit by the tent’s entrance, feel the warmth of the fire on my face and read one of the books I requested on an earlier visit from my mother or my sister. I am not sure whether I had grown into literature or whether solitude had created the space for it, but at school it was a chore trying to turn those flat letters on the page into vivid images in my mind. During my time in the woods, it was as if turning water into wine: the letters immediately becoming images with little effort on my part. It was as though I needed company and the writer’s request met with my wish to be part of worlds that could be imaginative rather than actual. Before, living amongst people and all those time constraints and demands, the imagination seemed to have little place. I suspect that if someone had said to me during my time in the cottage that, when starting a book, I would have to finish it by the end of the week, the book’s imaginative capacity would have disintegrated. 

       It was during my years in the cottage that I came to understand that my needs were those of time more than space; that I didn’t need to live reclusively; I needed to live without too insistent a sense of the clock. This was an important thought; it allowed me to see options before my money ran out, even if an act of good fortune intervened and allowed me to stay for another five years at the cottage. My nan died and left a decent sum for her two children and a modest sum for her four grandchildren. I received ten thousand pounds and I couldn’t pretend the financial gain was greater than the emotional loss. I had only seen her twice since my parents had divorced and she was ninety when she passed away. I deposited it into my account knowing I’d bought more time and that I could continue occupying my space.

  I did wonder after my nan’s death whether my indifference to her demise was part of a wider lack of feeling; that I’d become detached from others. But I believed it was more that she was a woman whom I never knew and never felt close to and that it was only the demands of blood rather than an element of affection that left me with a small inheritance. Sometimes we have to be honest with our feelings, to understand that a loss of a life can be a gain for ourselves and I suppose while many a novel will insist that the decent characters grieve while the villainous covet, I neither grieved nor coveted. I was surprised and perhaps even saw it as fate: that another’s death at ninety allowed me to live freely for another few years.

    During this time I often thought of what I would do; that before the age of thirty I would be back in society with no degree, no job history and no contacts. Yet this caused me almost no anxiety; I hadn’t perceived my life with momentum but instead through stillness, as though I was occupying a centre that it was my purpose to protect. I reached the age of twenty-seven and after almost ten years living in the cottage, and with five thousand pounds in savings, I decided to leave and find work. But what work? In those last two or three years there I had thought about various possible posts for a young man without quantifiable skills. I knew the most likely option that would suit my temperament, and my temporal needs, would be a night porter. Yet most of the jobs required a uniform and there was something in the wording of the post that hinted at servility. 

     I had still plenty savings, had no rent to pay and about a third of my food I caught, grew or picked myself. I didn’t go looking for work and almost never went into Inverness, but would ask my sister and my mother to look out for any positions they might think suitable, and for which the employer would imagine me capable. On a visit, my sister, who worked in hospitality during those years, said she had heard the youth hostel in the town was looking for a part-time night porter. It would be two days a week, and they would pay time and a half for the inconvenience of working nights. I said that seemed very convenient for me and hoped they wouldn’t pay me less since I wanted to work evenings over days. Just keep it to yourself, she said, as though she suspected that my years in the country had robbed me of facetiousness and left me only with naivety. I promised, I said.

    I got the job and earned more than twice as much as I needed while leaving my remaining savings untouched. I worked two nine-hour shifts a week, starting at 10 and finishing at 7, and while there were occasions when I was exhausted as I insisted on cycling the 15 miles each way, I could usually sleep between about 2 and 6. I was once again returned to the demands of a temporality that wasn’t my own. But it didn’t bother me, and around this time what was more bothersome were rumours that the land I was occupying was soon to be sold. I always supposed whoever owned the land had so much of it they didn’t care I was occupying a derelict cottage I’d made inhabitable. But someone had recently died and it was after working for a year at the hostel a person came to the cottage and said that I had a choice to vacate the land or buy it. The price was £20,000. I didn’t have the money, but a couple of months later, after I’d not so much resigned myself to losing the place but lost some sleep over wondering where I would stay in Inverness, and how many more hours I would need to work to pay for rent in the town, I received another visit. The person told me that I didn’t need to move. Someone who would prefer to remain anonymous had bought the piece of land I was occupying. 

   Over the years I would wonder who this person was, and assumed that it was probably the new owners who accepted that as I had lived there for years without causing any problems, better to cover a very minor loss and avoid the inconvenience of moving me on. I wasn’t likely to have gone to the press, but I knew that a lot of landowners in Scotland liked their anonymity, buying up chunks of the country that they purchased because of its remote locale and tranquil aspect. A few pieces in the local paper that could have been picked up by the national and even international press would have defied the point of the purchase. Best to leave me alone, I assumed, and still have many acres to themselves.  I lived on the land, worked in the hostel and never really thought too much about my good fortune, or whose fortune it was that allowed me to stay. 

7

   When I talked to my mother recently about my teen years, to the incidents that seemed to have led me to retreating into the country, as she talked about Malcolm not always perceiving things and was surprised on one particular occasion when my father did, shesaid, after I realised it was me who had bruised her arm, that there were moments when she was frightened. I still had almost no memory of the incidents she went on to describe but as she detailed three or four that led to the moment of violence, she said she had viewed me as an animal caged. It was an obvious image but I suppose apt. I would be in my room almost as though in solitary confinement; I would only come out to eat or use the bathroom. She could see there was so much energy in need of release and on those occasions when it was unleashed, she felt scared, and at the same time didn’t say anything to Malcolm. The relationship was new and she believed that talking to him was a betrayal, perhaps aware that was how I was seeing her affair with a stranger. That is the thing, for her, he quickly became familiar, but there was no reason why he should have become so for me, and she was caught between promptly knowing him well, and sensing how strange this familiarity would have seemed to a son who just saw a man beginning to spend time around the house. It wasn’t that I disliked Malcolm, she thought, but that I couldn’t have accepted anybody appearing to move in. 

   I asked her more about this aggression towards her, as though I were enquiring about the deeds of a stranger, as though it were Malcolm who had been aggressive with her. Yet I knew that, as she talked, she wouldn’t be making me aware of incidents of which I was ignorant but making me privy to those that as she talked would become clearer in my own mind and not only through the words she offered. As she told me about one where I slammed a door so hard that a framed photograph of my sister fell off the wall and smashed on the ground, and another when I pierced the tyre on Malcolm’s car, so each act of force became clearer in my head. After telling me about how violent I could become, I asked more specifically about the bruise on her arm at my sister’s party. She said I arrived back after being out all day. I went straight to my room and she knocked on the door asking if I wanted anything to eat I yanked it open and grabbed her arm, insisting she leave me alone. It wasn’t the subsequent bruise that was such a cause of concern; it was the look in my eyes that stayed with her for months. As I gripped her arm I added that I hated Malcolm; that he wasn’t my father and had no right to be inside our house. 

    When offering me this image, she quoted what I’d said, I didn’t doubt the veracity of the telling as I found myself half recalling those words and remembering that grip. It was terrible what I said about Malcolm, she said. He liked me, she added. He wouldn’t have ever pretended to have replaced my father but he might have hoped he could have perceived me as the son he never had, as an offspring he might have wished a little to project upon. He had nobody else with whom he could do so, she said, once again becoming tearful. He had friends she supposed, but it was as though they were friends out of longevity and familiarity rather than meaningfulness. It occurred to me then that it was Malcolm who bought the land allowing me to remain in the cottage, and perhaps my mother in time would have told me if I hadn’t asked. She said that this was true but she hadn’t known until he passed away. In his will was indeed a modest piece of land a couple of miles from Beauly. The land was now in her name and she would be happy to put it into mine if I wished. She just hadn’t known how to discuss it with me; she always had in her mind that remark I made about hating Malcolm, and how would I feel about a man I hated being responsible for me continuing the life I was leading? She offered it aware I would of course say I didn’t hate Malcolm and it was true; obviously I didn’t. But what she didn’t expect was that I would be moved by the gesture, by realising that this man whom I barely I knew, whom I initially claimed to hate, and never for one moment saw as a father-figure, had become nothing less than a guardian angel. If he had told me at the time that he was buying the land I might have resisted and certainly not been moved; may not even have been so if I knew he had told my mother that he had bought it for me. 

    Yet I also found myself thinking about time, that all those years I had lived somehow outside of it or at least tried to find in time an escape from the expectations of space. That might be more complicated than necessary; what I couldn’t deny, though, was there was something in the pressure of time, in all those years passing, with Malcolm remaining a stranger to me, and yet keeping to himself this immense gesture of kindness that moved me. As I’ve made clear, I have never been an especially solitary person, except in that period between school and going to live in the cottage. Whenever people would visit I was pleased to see them. During my years at the hostel, many people have passed through those doors and into my life however briefly. There have been occasions where I and others have become close, even if nobody else need ever know of these brief encounters. They could have been dreamt of rather than lived. Perhaps in some way they were. But what I am left with, alongside a small piece of land, is thinking of Malcolm’s solitude, one that he lived in I believe despite his friendships that my mother has continued, and a relationship with my mother for a couple of decades. My solitude is well-known, my family, the friends I have made in the hostel, and even the newspapers that on a couple of occasions wanted to interview me about my apparent reclusiveness, and whose requests I declined, were aware of the solitary life I had chosen. But nobody perhaps knew of Malcolm’s isolation, as it occurred to me that he would have noticed that bruise on my mother’s arm, but never commented on it to her; that it wasn’t my father’s acuteness that led to his remark, but something else, a confidence that he was very much in the world, a confidence I realised I simultaneously shared and that perhaps Malcolm didn’t.


© Tony McKibbin