There’s something terribly strange about sitting in a distantly familiar house surrounded by people that transport you back to the past. The Murdoch clan are a sight to behold, their mountainous shoulders awkwardly tussling for space on the tiny couch in front of me. Two of the brothers had given up and sat either side of my shoulders, the heat coming off them toasting me to the point of discomfort.
Innis grins a ferociously friendly way that would unsettle the unacquainted but, it’s familiar to me. I hadn’t thought, for a second, that I’d miss the damp, greyed streets of Lochbar but, the pain twanged at my heart steadily, and loudly, until I booked a flight home. The landscape had looked up at me through the tiny window of the plane with its marshy fields and concrete-slabbed buildings eating into the plant life. The lone strawberry picking farm that had human-shaped ants scavenging it’s produce. The tired, misshapen runway that led into Lochbar airport. It looked up at me and said, “now, where the bloody hell have you been?” Funnily enough, that’s the first thing Innis had asked me, chortling away with his grizzly bear frame, big meat paws rattling my shoulders. Innis Murdoch isn’t a difficult man to understand. He likes his rugby, loves his boys, and misses his wife. That’s all you need to know about the man, not one for complications or complexities. Each of Innis’ boys are a carbon coby of each other, with slightly differing haircuts. Andrew, the youngest, pushes his brother into the arm of the chair they’re sitting in, rattling around his father in the process. His hair curls round the backs of his ears, tickling his eyebrow in bounced black spirals. Ian, the second youngest, swats at his brother, causing the mop of hair atop his head to flounce around. He’d decided he was going to grow it out after Mairi from the local sweet shop said she fancied that long-haired bloke on BBC Scotland.
“You know the one that does all those history documentaries?” She’d said, and Ian answered by vowing off scissors from the day forward. The father of these bear cubs endures the disagreement for a wee while before he implodes and roars at both of them to, ‘wheesht it before he’s annoyed to death.’ He’s not an unkind man, Innis Murdoch, but every person has their breaking point and Andrew Murdoch seemed to have been born to push his Dad’s buttons.
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Dougie, the eldest, is laughing up a storm next to me. The musical sound of it wrapping round the room like a blanket. He has embraced the full mountain-man design, sporting a scruffy beard and a long matt of black hair that Ian swears he’ll have someday. “You cannae let him get to you,” he grumbles.
“Tell him to stop annoying me, then.” Ian spits back before their father tells them all to shut it, once again. It was a last-minute decision, phoning Dougie up at the airport, as I was too scared to face his da. Maybe it was the fact that I wasn’t in my right mind in the airport. The plane had argued with the concrete on its landing and my stomach contents had been thoroughly mixed around. It was as I was waiting for my suitcase, aw’ peely-wally and trying not to vomit, that I realised I had no one to stay with, with the only hotel being run by the two biggest gab-mouthed shites there are. I braved my pride and rung Dougie’s number, hoping he hadn’t changed it. Who was I kidding? It’s Dougie. He’s had the same phone since 2012.
“Eilidh, is everything awrite?” His voice tumbled out the speaker like a bag of rocks being clanked together.
“I’m in Scotland.” I mumble.
“Holy shit.” He whispers to himself. Well, as much as a voice like his can whisper. “I didn’t know if you’d be coming back, I heard the news. Where you stayin?” And that’s when I started to cry in the middle of Lochbar airport. I cried as worried families teetered around me at a safe distance. I cried as a dog peeled out from under a chair with perked ears. I cried and sobbed and whimpered by the luggage lane until Dougie enclosed me in a hug, picked me up, and ferried me away.