Trap

by Neil Gordon

People were becoming crueller, Michael was convinced. Sure only last week hadn’t there been that break-in over in Letterfearn? Then there was that business with the shotgun over the back of the Bealach. He’d seen the police helicopters circling, tour buses forced off the roads by the ambulances. It was enough to make you a shut-in. He grumbled and took a nip of whisky. He wouldn’t be driven to drink, he knew better than that, but it helped steady his hands. He fumbled across the dark shelf overhead for the tin.

Upstairs he heard Sheila stirring. The old bed creaking. She wasn’t speaking to him at the moment. They lived in different strata: she upstairs, him beneath. What was he to do?

He poured the nails out of the biscuit tin onto the countertop and raked through them until he found some good sharp ones. An inch or two in length, at least. More like shrapnel than builders’ nails. Mean looking nails, these.

The phone rang, then a distant mumbling told him Sheila had picked up. It’d be her cousin, or that nosy hag McNab from up the road. When had he last spoken on the phone? Nobody had anything of interest to tell him. And wouldn’t she be complaining about him anyway? Even Roddy barely called these days, and when he did, she would intercept it.

He transferred some thirty or so good nails into the lid of the biscuit tin and carried it outside. The air was still over the loch, and the tide was being pulled steadily out past the headland. The garden had become wild and thickened the already humid air with pollen. It was startling how quickly it spread when it knew Sheila wasn’t looking. The chickens picked through dishevelled shrubs, where insurgent weeds had sprouted beneath, obscuring the corn he tossed out for them each morning after they’d picked fallen kernels from his slippers. If Sheila didn’t return from her bed soon, he worried the garden might be a cornfield by next spring.

In the stifling shed, he got to work, pushing the nails at irregular intervals and all angles through a length of hosepipe some fifteen feet in length. He kept pricking his fingers, but the nerves had shrunk back from the surface, and he felt barely a dull impression. A few thin streaks bloodied his shirt cuffs when he was done.

He laid the hosepipe across the top of the driveway, in a shallow channel at the boundary where the track met the tarmac. The sun pressed through the thick clouds, and he leaned on the fencepost, mopping his brow with his handkerchief, as he caught his breath. It was a start. A bit of security. He’d do the same around the top of the fence, but he’d need more nails and hosepipe to finish it. See if that Paterson fellow down the road would stand him some. Michael had lent the man his strimmer for the verges last spring, so he was owed something.

He traipsed back, overgrowth grasping at his trousers. He didn’t like seeing the garden that way. Everyone always said Sheila had a “magic touch” with the flowers. Healing hands. Still the old crofters came to her, not the vet, when a lamb was sick or poisoned. And wouldn’t she always bring it back? She’d done it enough times on the farm, brought back enough lambs that he’d later send on their way. She’d never name them. She wasn’t sentimental like that.

Back inside he heard her calling.

“Michael?”

“Yes?”

“Michael!”

He went to the bottom of the stairs.

“Yes, Sheila?”

“Where’ve you been?”

“Fixing the fence.”

“The what?”  

“THE FENCE. FIXING THE FENCE.”

“You’re mumbling. I can’t hear you.”

He waited.

“Roddy called. He’s going to bring the girls over to see me.”

“Oh. Good.”

Michael went back to the counter for his whisky and took another nip. It was a damned nuisance. He’d have to go and take the trap in again before Roddy came by, and hadn’t he only just put it out? He knew what the boy would say. That’s dangerous, he’d say. You’re going to hurt yourself, Dad. The boy thought he knew everything.

Michael washed his hands, squeezing the little cuts open again to get the soap in. He thought about his son. After his hip got bad, Roddy had taken over running the farm, he and Sheila punted to the old cottage down the way that used to be her aunt’s. Roddy made a good go of it, but the boy was impatient. He was so focused on diversification. He’d opened a farm shop and a couple of fancy holiday lets, and sure wasn’t he just talking about getting a still for making gin? It was too much. He neglected the livestock, and the livestock wouldn’t sort themselves. His dogs were lazy, more interested in the smell of the damned pizza oven than seeing to the sheep. Roddy’d hired staff to run the shop and turn over the cottages. Not local folk, southern or foreign ones. He’d even chucked the gun. The boy was leaving himself wide open. Might as well stick up a welcome sign for the vagrants, the foxes, the crows. Michael knew.

Sheila used to poke fun at him, about the gun. He’d take any excuse to crack it out, she’d say. It was true; he liked the heft of it. It made his arms work, like fixing the fences or shearing, but the satisfaction was more immediate. He’d only had cause to point it at a person once. What a thrill that had been.

Outside, there was a commotion. Something clattered, and there was a fluttering at the window as the chickens scattered. A shrill noise like a braying animal.

“Michael?”

“I’ll see to it.”

“What was that?”

“I’LL SEE TO IT, SHEILA.”

He took his cane from behind the door and went out, squeezing it in both hands to get the feeling back. This might be it already. His turn.

A man sat on the black tarmac at the top of the driveway clutching one foot from which the hosepipe trailed, pulled loose from its little trench in the dirt. The man’s face resolved as Michael approached. His hair was thin and barely crept forward beyond the summit of his head, though it was rich chestnut in colour, and his face was smooth with a youthful putty sheen. His eyes were sheep-like: wild and globular and far out to the sides of his head. He made little gurning noises, puffed up his white cheeks, and blew foolishly over the injured foot.

“What’re you after?” Michael demanded. The man looked up.

“I’m sorry, I… I’ve stepped on something.”

“I said, what’re you after? What’s your business here?”

“It really hurts.“ He screwed up his big jelly eyes and groaned. Michael took a step closer. The hosepipe was stuck fast along the length of the man’s cheap, canvas trainer. There must have been a good two or three nails in there. One poked clean through, glinting cruelly in the sun, and the pale canvas top was staining red.

“This is my property,” said Michael, “and I’ve a right to know your business.”

The man gritted his teeth. Flies had begun to percolate about him in the heavy air. He lay back on his elbows, screwing his eyes shut to keep out the pale sky. “I’m lost,” he groaned after a moment. His leg still hung in the air, the hosepipe trailing limp.

Michael peered along the road. No car. No rucksack to the lad. No walking boots. Only the fields extending up the hill behind him until they were lost in gorse and heather. They were secluded here: the hill at the back, the loch at the front. And what was that accent? Not local.

The man opened little slits to his eyes. “Please,” he said, then his jaw hardened, and a shadow came over his face, an impertinence solidifying suddenly within him. “What the fuck is this anyway?”

Michael didn’t like that kind of language. He twisted the cane in his hands as if wrenching apart a book of foul words. His hip had begun to ache where the metal met the bone. Lately, he had begun to imagine it rusting, the edges grinding away at him. He shifted to his good leg and broadened his shoulders to show the man he still possessed his heft. That hadn’t been stripped of him, at least. Over the stranger’s head, the road disappeared into the verges down the way, and a heat haze had begun to fuzz the air. What if Roddy were to appear round the bend now with the girls? He wouldn’t understand. One day he might, but not yet. The boy would need to get burned himself first. Then he’d understand.

“Please!” cried the man. “I’m not after anything.” He looked at his foot again, gestured to the trailing rubber pipe with the ragged nails as his voice rose to a wail. “Why’s this here? Are you crazy? I should call the police.”

Michael snorted. “I’ve dealt with worse than you.”

Yes, he’d dealt with worse. Roddy had been only a boy, Sheila young and fit. He’d come off the hillside to the farmhouse with a dead lamb on the back of his quad. The foxes had been getting bolder. He thought he’d clipped one, arrived at the farmhouse with the gunshot still vibrating through his muscles, blood rushing unhindered through his veins. He’d approached through Sheila’s garden, the last of the sun slanting over the Cuillins giving an orange glow to the heads of the hydrangea, the snapdragons, the purple heathers that dotted the rocks, the dozens of other blooms he couldn’t name. Inside, a clattering; Sheila’s voice raised; something breaking on the flagstones. He burst in. There was his brother Colin, drunk on something crude, harassing Sheila in the house. He’d always been on at her.

“Leave her be, Colin,” he’d said. A gun in his hands, pointed at his brother’s chest. God but he’d felt terrific. A power in him. Sheila had come over to him, then laid a firm hand on his forearm. Her eyes burning from whatever Colin had done.

“Do it, Michael,” she’d said, quiet like.

He’d wanted to. How could he not? Seeing Sheila like that, her face flushed, a hatred in her like he’d never known. But he didn’t. He watched Colin leave one way, Sheila another. He swept up the broken plates with his hands, the little cuts and pinpricks scouring them clean. Colin died anyway not long after, his body eating itself from the inside, but it couldn’t happen soon enough for Sheila. She wouldn’t go to the funeral.

“Will you help me or not?” cried the man. “I’m not after anything, I swear! Help me up and I’ll leave.”

Michael looked toward the house. Sheila’s window looked back, blurry in the thick air over the mouldering garden. He felt the blood quickening in him. He tightened his grip on his cane, lifted it with both hands, and pointed it at the lad’s chest.

“You’ll get no help here, son.”

“Michael?”

He scrubbed his hands again in the kitchen sink. The chickens had ventured back in. He could see their red and white flashes through the undergrowth, examining the shed, inspecting the tarpaulin round the back.

“What was that?”

The chrome plating on the taps had crumbled off at the edges, and they were tinged red with rust. The countertop veneer, too. Some things needed to be fixed: the rotten windowsill on the porch, the rickety lean-to where the firewood dried for the winter. The garden. Other things they would live with for a time. But Sheila would have to get better.

“Michael!”

He thought he’d better clean up the mess and take the trap in. Roddy would be by soon with the girls.

BIO: Neil is a writer and PhD physicist from the Scottish Highlands. His work has been published in East of the Web, and he has performed readings at literary events organised by Glasgow publisher Thi Wurd, also featuring on their podcast. He can be found on Twitter at @NeilGordon16 for as long as he can bear it.