'She Got That From You...'
It was not a sentimental portrait. Alasdair wanted to avoid that at all costs. He didn’t know if Janey shared his love of apples, if she was visited by the Black Dog, or if she sparkled enough to keep it away. He did not feel audacious enough to add any of his own fond introspection, to show how she may be now, six years on. And so, on this day, he painted his daughter simply and with precision, from a crumpled old photo he occasionally used as a bookmark. Here was Janey as she had been: smiling beatifically, recent tears glistening, forgotten, on her cheeks. A sting had been acquired on a sunny day in the garden. Janey was inconsolable, not for her sore foot, but for the bee in question…
‘But he’ll DIE NOW!’ she had screamed repeatedly. Jean crouched beside
her, pale and wired as she sought to solve the puzzle.
‘Who will die, darling?’ and, under her breath, ‘Christ, Alasdair, you
don’t think she’s seen a car crash?’
‘Bumble,’ was Janey’s eventual, tear-sodden explanation. She pointed at
her foot, a hint of pink just visible beneath the grass stains and mud. ‘Daddy
said.’
Alasdair had smiled, and gathered his daughter in his arms, remembering
the previous week when he had read to her from the National Geographic about the tragic Bee and his self-destructive
sting.
‘Oh now, don’t worry about that. What can we sing? What about… what about…
Ally Bally, Ally Bally Bee…’
As Janey’s face crumpled all over again, her mother’s grew stony, and she
murmured in Alasdair’s ear as she went to fetch the ammonia.
‘Your Tale of Mr. Noble Bumblebee could have waited a couple of years,
don’t you think?’
But Alasdair had managed, somehow, to tame his daughter. Jean returned to
see her gurgling happily on his lap, allowing him to sing Ally Bally as his own father had done with him, as she unfurled
long curls of green wool from his jumper. Jean crept upstairs quietly to find
her old film camera, something telling her she’d better capture the moment.
‘I’m sorry, I have to take this. But I’m still very annoyed, Alasdair.’
That was back when he did watercolours, teal-hued and thoughtful, and the
three of them lived in a robust tenement flat filled with Edinburgh light. A postcard deal with IKEA,
which had failed spectacularly to impress his father, instead succeeded in
paying for them to live comfortably, and the surprise at their sudden good fire
fortune had lingered on Alasdair’s face until
it gently gave way to fear. Janey had been an auburn-haired thing with bright,
determined eyes. Alasdair always thought of bonfires when he thought of his
daughter; a torrent of flames and beauty, always at risk of taking off or
fading out.
‘Yes. She got that from you,’ Jean had said, that last day. Jean was a
different kind of fire.
Alasdair’s job now was to collect things for the Architectural Salvage in
Falkland. The site was a sonorous timber
warehouse behind a poppy field, and it was quiet there; he could get on with
it, and ignore things. Alasdair had a haphazard, all-inclusive selection
process, so that conventional home ware items were complimented with broken
sinks, soldiers’ jackets and empty Brasso
cans from the 50s. Many of his more eccentric acquirements went un-purchased by
the locals; they would peruse them with wry smiles before getting down to the
serious business of bulk-buying pine chests and brass lamps. Once or twice,
over the six years that Alasdair had run the place, the warehouse had entered
what Doug privately called ‘wasteland mode’, when sold furniture went
un-replaced, leaving behind only the eclectic clutter and huge expanses of
dusty grey floor, as Alasdair flitted about, clichéd and red-eyed, oozing
Glenfiddich. The last time had been six months ago, and it had all gone
unmentioned for five.
Doug was a quiet Fifer, and accompanied Alasdair on long van drives
across Scotland
to collect pews and prayer-books from churches, or oak cabinets and tarnished
crockery from elderly couples, shaking and brimming with the unlikely histories
of their loot.
‘Och aye,’ Doug would say to the ferns shooting past the window. Alasdair
liked this. It tinged the trips with a certain noble melancholy which validated
him. Alasdair thought Doug probably had a family history of salmon fishing,
stone-laying, and stoicism in the face of injustice. His crinkled eyes reminded
him of the ones that had sparkled from the cover of Jean’s David Essex tape,
and he was impressively strong for his age. Alasdair, in muted, cryptic terms,
sought Doug’s approval for the more implicative
decisions of his life. He took from the ponderous silences and
intermittent drags on his pipe that Doug agreed: a roaming temperament and a
penchant for spirits were not conducive to domestic city living.
‘Och aye… The bairn’s better aff wae her mammy, right enough…’
This was the kind of thing Alasdair thought Doug would probably have said,
had he spoken much. They bobbed along together thus, until the floors again
turned grey with dust, and Doug announced that Alasdair should have stuck with
his watercolours, and his wee daughter in Edinburgh.
The nights had begun to draw in since then, the year fading gently into
winter.
Alasdair surveyed the empty warehouse over the top of his easel. The Brasso cans and helmets had come to the
attention of disapproving bodies, and were wanted rid of. Alasdair had
surprised himself with the violence of his own refusal.
A splodge on the canvas where it wasn’t supposed to be, and he staggered
slightly as he stood back to survey the damage. Loading his brush with the pale
grey of the wasteland dust, he allowed it to fly in motes and clouds around
Janey’s dress. The rogue splodge would become a golden delicious, sticking to
her little hands.
Still, though. It was not a sentimental portrait.
