Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [9]
I squint through the heavy rain and imagine that young woman, bleeding and in terror, running through the fog, across the heather to Dunvegan castle. Upon hearing her calls for help, the MacLeods seized their sacred banner—“The Fairy Flag,” Mum says, enjoying this part of the story. “We’re very mystical, very savage people you know”—and descended on the scorched remains of Trumpan Church, where they cornered and slaughtered the Macdonalds before they could flee. “Wonderfully tribal,” Mum concludes approvingly.
I walked around to the small window of the ruined church. The window looked like something you might hope to shoot a skinny arrow through, but not anything you’d consider as a means of escape, even in dire circumstances. In any case, churches are supposed to be recognized as places you run into for refuge, not places you flee in terror. They are supposed to be universally recognized sanctuaries. But here my ancestors join all the worst villains in history—they are among those who have killed people in churches. I went back out to the view of the sea and kicked the spoiled dyke. A little black cloud scudded in from the Outer Hebrides and unloaded another small flood on me.
COLD AND WET—waterproofing goes only so far when rain begins to rise up as well as fall down—I repaired to the nearest pub. Steaming in front of a large pint of bitter, surrounded by American tourists swapping ancestral anecdotes and swatches of tartan, I reflected that Mum would hate to live on the Isle of Skye now. The incessant battles over land, the blood feuds between clan and family—those are all over. The best she could hope for would be a bar brawl and even that—judging by the determinedly cheerful nature of the people in the pub—would be over before you could get yourself nicely settled into a ringside seat.
It is true that in Mum’s opinion land is good, blood-soaked land is better and land soaked in the blood of one’s ancestors is best. And by those criteria, the Isle of Skye is premium earth. But I am sure the American tourists would irritate her with their attempts to connect to a violence for which they no longer have any stomach. And the sheep would bore her silly. Because even painted up as camels, Cape buffalo and elephants, sheep are still just sheep.
Nicola Fuller and the Fancy Dress Parties
Mum and Auntie Glug as Alice and the White Rabbit. Kenya, circa 1950.
When she was six, Mum’s parents went on leave from Kenya to Britain, taking their two children with them. Of that three-week journey by ship from Mombasa to Southampton and back again, Mum remembers only three things: “They performed this ghastly ceremony when the ship crossed the equator. The passengers were dunked in buckets of water and beaten up with dead fish.” Then Mum remembers the ship stopping at Gibraltar, where she was dragged by her parents to see the Barbary apes. “It was stinking hot and we had to haul up to see the Rock, which was plastered in ravens and these ferocious, scary monkeys.” And finally Mum recalls, “The other thing—the most gruesome thing—was the Fancy Dress Party. It was awful, being paraded around the deck dressed up in some silly costume. I hated the whole ordeal.”
“Then why did you participate, if it was so gruesome?”
“You had to,” Mum says. “You were beaten into it.”
“With dead fish?” I ask.
Mum gives me a look. “No. Not unless you also happened to be crossing the equator at that exact same moment.”
SO HERE WE ARE: Mum, now in her early thirties, having apparently learned nothing from her experience as a child, dressing Vanessa and me up for the Davises’ annual Fancy Dress, an event I might not have dreaded at all if Mum hadn’t chosen costumes of such agonizing inventiveness that it’s a wonder they didn’t kill us.
“Why can’t I be like Vanessa?” I asked.
“Because,” Mum said.
“But I’m itchy,” I complained.
Olivia was only four months