Tormod was an unmade man in a world of daoine dèante – when others spoke at the opening of some new school, or put on their best Wee Free gloom of a face to talk about the decline, the death, the Deathly Hallows gone Gael, he spent his days minding his own business.
The blue of his eyes had long ago told others to leave him alone, the comharradh-cluais carved into the ears of his lone sheep an interrobang of do not try to save me or i’ll save you to hell.
As a child he’d been a dreamer, sure, but after years of ignoring the depression buried in an eternal line of slings tied to the ground, like tongues under the burden of a sheep’s head chanting donotspeakthatfilthytongue, he’d finally burst open, like a broken melon, and cried.
‘bu’r chinnteach gur Gàidhlig a chainnt’
Not in Back of course, but hidden by the rain, and the years that followed, when his heart had wanted him to travel shrug off Lewis and build the island anew in the theatre of his mind, he’d instead trapped himself in a croft, overlooking the arrival of the Guga and the sea.
Stone by stone had been added to the old house, electricity came and left when no money travelled from his fingers to the bank in Stornoway and when the piseag died he’d buried it, put together his pipes and played a pìobrochd never heard before.
A lament for a cat, and he didn’t even attend church, the rumours built themselves up faster here than skyscrapers in the Middle East.
He’d had a wife once and a daughter, Sìle, who occasionally phoned him on a stone of a phone she’d forced him to buy when her mum had drowned herself and he’d been more than willing to follow her to that seal-infested place she’d entered like a disillusioned mermaid from long ago
oh double seachd nine four is trì fhìchead, five a dhà còig is five eile she’d written on a piece of paper she’d glued on to the back of it. He still didn’t know if it was his or her number, and thus left the smoke signals of modern times to be made by his daughter.
Now and then he took his bike across the island from the western sea breeze to a Minch full of tourists. If they ever came to his part of the post card, they stopped at the broch, ohd and ahd, went on to Calanais, ohd a bit more and made out with the biggest stone for a selfie.
Then they’d seen the unsandiness of his beach, and the Gaelic curse masquerading as a greeting that he’d painted on the sign leading up to his croft and left. He preferred it like that.
Wading through a town built anew, he thought of it as the Eagle, ready to cause another disaster buried in the hearts of Gaels.
Later, when the mix of his own people complaining about the loss and the incomers fairy tales had driven him close enough to his wife’s grave, he’d enter the closest pub, and hours later he would leave, whiskied up and hihoroing ironically with his bike on his back homewards.
The day his daughter came back to the island, she brought BBC Alba with her, and a man looking like an academic, Tom, but all too busy with his act of drowning in the eyes of Sìle to see that Tormod was in the process of resisting to die.
His blue had turned white, and the pipes were out once again, but nothing was ever said – people did not discuss these things, they just knew.
One day Sìle had to go to Stornoway to get Tormod a new bottle of cough syrup, and left in the croft was her father and a shiny new lap-top. Tormod, the dreamer, emerged from the old man’s chest and hours later, when Sìle returned, the dying man was gone, and nowhere to be found.
The browsing history on her computer took her to the Boston Times, and then a youtube video of someone snorkling, the rest had been deleted, even her journal article on the Gael - did she really need it anyway - written with Tormod singing puirt-a-beuls in her mind, was gone.
Two months later, a letter arrived, stamped in Auckland. Tormod had filled it with red sand from the Kalahari, a dried leaf from a tree in India, and a hei tiki of jade.
Tricks and decoys, of course, she knew her father, but a letter nonetheless.
The letter was short, ‘a Shìle bheag, a luaidh, don’t let the island become a prison, don’t become them, don’t let them tell us we’re dying: Auckland is bigger than I thought, these islands also drowned in false myths, and dying, a ghràidh, I am as young as I was yesterday.’
Fuck his false poetry.
When Tormod returned, one year and a day later as legend has it, the bodach walked up to his house, told his daughter that he loved her, and then set off in his tiny boat to die.
That summer, the son of Sìle and Tom was named a Thormoid beag, and once again young feet of resistance and caol ri caol on his lips danced over the machair, the island reborn.
