The next morning, while the other two still slept and with his bed stripped and his backpack already in the car, Taylor brewed up his dreadful coffee one last time and took a mug of it outside. It was cloudy today, it had rained overnight but the flowers in the pots by the door were bright and cheerful. His toes were still sore but they felt okay in socks and Converse today so he took his coffee and walked out and over to the crest of the dunes. His feet were soon soaking. He remembered that first morning, how the same thing had happened. He thought how the island’s lessons were still to be learned.
And then he phoned his mom.
She was a night owl. He liked the fact that with the time difference she’d still be in yesterday while he was in today. It felt important to be one step ahead of her.
‘Taylor? Is that you?’
‘No it’s someone who’s stolen my phone.’
‘Huh?’
‘Of course it’s me. I just thought I’d phone.’ He paused. ‘Tell you how I’m doing.’ He paused again. ‘See how you are.’
She asked so many questions about Paris and about London and about what they had planned for Edinburgh. She wanted all the facts and figures of the two marathons and she wanted to hear news of JB and Drew. But she didn’t mention Harris by name. She just said, how is it out there? And when Taylor answered with various superlatives she just said uh-huh, uh-huh.
‘So Mom,’ he said before he realised he was going to say it. ‘I have to ask why you wove some bullshit about those pieces of tweed?’ He listened hard at the silence reverberating between midnight in California where she was now, and morning on the west coast of the island where she’d been raised.
‘I don’t understand?’ she said.
‘All these years – my whole life – you’ve said my grandfather wove them.’
‘I did not, Taylor.’
‘You did so, Mom! I know so little about your side of the family – just what you’ve chosen to tell me – but you’ve always gone on and on about coming from this family of weavers.’
‘That is true.’
‘Well I took those tweeds – because you were throwing them out. And I brought them here and guess what Ma – they are not real.’ Though Taylor felt smug about this, it was not a nice feeling.
‘Yes they are.’
‘I callbullshit,’ Taylor said. ‘I took them to this old guy – Duncan MacDonald – and he knew my grandfather and he was adamant my grandfather didnotweave them.’
This silence of his mother’s was really pissing him off.
‘Mom? Why would you say my grandfather wove them when he did not?’
‘He did not weave them.’
‘I know! They’re just random scraps of old tweed.’
‘My father did not weave them.’
‘I know – chrissakes – Iknow– but you told me he did.’
‘I never did, Taylor. I told you I am from a long line of weavers. I told you that my father was a weaver, my grandparents too – and their parents before them. But I never said that he wove those tweeds.’
Taylor started to furl back through conversations and memories. There was a squeeze across his forehead and his eyeballs ached a little.
‘I wouldn’t lie to you, my honey,’ she was saying.
‘Why have you kept them, then? Why were they with the crotal spoon and the pieces of Gneiss and the shells and the photos and the old book? Why keep them in your special box all this time if they’re just random? What’s the point?’
‘Because they are mine. I wove them. They were woven by me.’
Far below, over the sea, a huge eagle glided.
‘Taylor?’
