‘Darkness,’ Drew said, a little too darkly.
‘Ass-wipe!’ JB threw a balled up sock at him. Drew caught it and took the insult with a shrug of his shoulders and didn’t parry back, so JB tried again with jerk and cocksucker and dick until Taylor stood and stretched and suggested a drive.
‘Let’s take the Golden Road,’ he said.
‘What – are we in the Wizard of Frikkin Oz?’ said JB.
‘You can’t beinthe Wizard,’ said Drew. ‘But, as Taylor will say, we areinHarris – so let’s get out there.’
‘You canbeinthe Wizard if that’s your thing Drewdog,’ JB said and he laughed at himself and called himself such a dick before he, too, stood and stretched.
‘Just looks like a regular road to me,’ JB said, as they turned into the Golden Road. This island was one big disappointment.
‘So-called because it cost a bunch to build it,’ Taylor said lightly. He’d been enjoying quite a lot of research, quietly on his phone and from his guidebook while the other two slept. All around, the land stretched and rolled, pocked by rock and loch; it was intense and stern like an elderly man of few words.Taylor, though, thought it was magnificent in its grandeur and melancholy. Every hour he was here, Harris injected itself deeper. This place, for whatever reason, was significant. He sensed that it ran deeper than just the marathon, that it was more intricately woven than four scraps of fabric. Why would that be?
‘They filmed2001: A Space Odysseyhere,’ Drew piped up from the back. You could forget Drew was in your company sometimes. ‘I read that. I read that Kubrick used Harris for Jupiter.’
Taylor loved Drew just then.
‘It’s godforsaken,’ JB said with a shudder. ‘I thought we were going to some tiny, cute island, like we could skip around it. But it feels so big, lonely too. And also – could somebody tell me – where are the trees? Why’s there not a single tree?’ He looked out at the window, at the miles of rock and squelch. He felt smaller here than ever he had in the presence of great mountains or forests and he wasn’t sure how that could be. Maybe it was because of his ankle, perhaps he felt vulnerable. Fuck that. He was in pain. Fuck that too! Pain is all in the mind, he told himself because it had been drummed into him. God, his Dad had told him a bunch of crap when he’d been young. The awful thing was, he still believed it, lived his life accordingly.
‘Well I think it’s cool,’ Taylor said. ‘It’s good to feel small.’
‘Do you know where your family’s home was?’ Drew asked.
‘I never really asked my mom that,’ Taylor said. ‘She always saidHarris, nothing more, so I imagined it was going to be a small place with one tiny town and everyone knowing each other.’
‘You can see why she left here when she did,’ JB said. ‘Imagine growing up here with all this nothing, too much water and no trees.’
‘Look!’ said Drew. They were in a place called Drinishader and there was a tweed shop with a small museum attached. ‘Do you have your pieces of tweed?’
Taylor did not. He turned to JB. ‘You okay if we make a stop, buddy?’
‘Yeah, I’m done with the landscape – and they have coffee.’
They were the only people there. It was a compact, brightly lit space cleverly designed and informative. JB hobbled around from display to display, reading, feeling and smelling; learning about the history of the cloth. He soon forgave the island its lack of trees in return for its tweed.
‘I like that what started as a functional cloth became high fashion,’ said Drew.
‘It’s like jeans,’ said JB.
‘Huh?’ Taylor was only half listening.
‘Yeah, in America denim was used not for clothing but for bags and stuff for farm hands. And then this farmer dude’s wife called Jean runs up work coveralls for the labourers from denim. And so,jeanswere born.’
Taylor and Drew stared at JB.
‘Yep,’ he said. ‘I’m not just a pretty face.’
‘Denim is, in fact, French,’ Drew said. ‘De Nîmes– fabric from Nîmes.’
‘You and your brain,’ JB shook his head and rolled his eyes and although his voice was generous, still he gave Drew a shove though it caused him to wobble.
They came across the old spiked hand paddles, learnt about blending and carding wool, about dyeing and spinning and how every thread has a precise twist to create an even, resilient yarn. They looked at the sheep bones used as the shuttles on the early wooden looms, passed through by hand.
‘So you say your grandfather knew how to do this? He’d’ve had a loom like that one?’
But Taylor wasn’t listening. There was a spoon, just like the one in the pocket of his backpack back at Flora’s House. A simple spoon with part of it shorn off at an angle.
