“You’ve no idea what it’s like.”
“I don’t care what it’s like, you don’t stop answering people’s calls. Now stop being such a girlie and let’s get moving.”
“It’s half-past eleven at night,” I point out.
His face lights with mischief.
“I know, exciting, isn’t it? It’s a full moon as well.” Then he howls like a werewolf as he fills the kettle. I head for the bedroom to pack.
We drove north, or rather he drove north, fast, treating most of the road marking as bourgeois suggestions. It took an hour or two to escape the outer tentacles of the suburbs, and then we travelled along dark motorways, following a river of red brake lights, as a river of white lights flowed towards us. I tried to stay awake, tried to keep chatting, to help him stay lively, but my heart wasn’t in it. I didn’t have enough to say, or the will to make small talk. So, eventually, I drifted off into a sleep of sorts.
When I woke up it was light. Mac turned down my offer to take over the driving – he said I wasn’t in a fit state to operate heavy machinery – so we hurtled on at full throttle until we decided we needed a pee and some food.
The roadside café was empty and basic, to put it at its kindest. Every surface was protected by plastic that was tacky to the touch. I had a light breakfast; Mac had almost every item on the sun-faded menu. We were somewhere near Berwick, but Mac refused to tell me our destination because he was enjoying being an arsehole. I kept asking and he kept cackling with amusement.
As the morning wore on, we continued through the borders, skimming Edinburgh, then north-west through the glens, where gleaming quilts of snow still lay in any dents near the peaks. I was quite enjoying being driven, watching the landscape unfold itself around us. I became a bundle of matter being transported to God-knows-where. Mac didn’t seem to mind that I was in no mood to talk.
Eventually, we arrived, in light, misty rain, at Ullapool, where Mac followed the signs to the ferry port.
“Wait a second, you’ve brought me to the back of beyond…and now that turns out to be phase one?”
“Well you said you didn’t want to see people so—”
“Bloo-dy hell, Mac.”
“And you’ve often said you’d like to visit the Outer Hebrides.”
“I’ve never said that.”
“You have.”
“Yeh, but it’s fucking freezing.”
“It’s a little brisk.”
“It’s freezing.”
“To a wee southern fairy-boy.”
“Look at the temperature, there, on the display.”
“You’re going to love it, nae sweat.”
“Look! Four degrees!”
“What are you? An orchid?”
“Four degrees.”
A man in a high-vis tabard (and an overcoat and gloves) taps on the window. Mac presents a pair of tickets. The cold air starts filling the car.
“We’ll load in a few minutes,” says the high-vis tabard. “Don’t go wandering off anywhere.”
Once he is gone, Mac starts giving me the hard sell on how good the food is in the ro-ro ferries.
“Also, they’re really stable. I’ve sailed through a force seven and not spilt a drop.”
“So will you tell me now?”
“We’re going to Harris. It’s stunning.”
“Harris?”
“Yeh…joins on with Lewis. Lewis is bleak. Moonscape. No trees. I think the Wee Free chopped them all down because they were green.” He chuckles at having stumbled on a joke. “Yeh, fucking bastard decadent trees…always rustling their leaves on the Sabbath. But Harris is beautiful and magnificent.”
The car in front of us starts its engine and the queue edges forward. Mac turns the key in the ignition.
“Wagons roll,” he cries, before humming the theme from Lonesome Dove.
“And what about your new love – ‘the one’ – how come you’ve abandoned her?”
“I made it clear at the outset that our relationship might involve unexplained absences. Besides, she’s in Munich on a course.”
The high-vis tabard motions for us to proceed up the ramp. There is an unsettling clunk as we lurch forward into the gaping maw of the car-deck. Another high-vis figure points to the lane nearest the side of the ship.
“What’s the weather forecast?” I ask.
Mac brings the car to a halt.
“Mixed,” he says.
“I don’t want to be recognised, Mac.”
“Well, you’re not allowed to stay in the car.”
“I don’t want to be gawped at.”
“There’s hardly anyone here. Come on, we’ll find a nice quiet corner.”
As we climb out of the car, I put on my woolly hat and pull my coat up around my ears. Mac tells me that my attempt to look inconspicuous just comes across as attention-seeking. I tell him to shut up.
As I squeeze my way between the parked cars a small yapping white dog throws itself against a window.
“Juno! Be quiet!” screams its owner. As she struggles to clamber out of the driver’s door, she apologises for the dog’s behaviour, but I ignore her and keep on walking.
We found a quiet corner, by the toilets – a seated area where I could sit with my back to everyone without it looking odd. I slept most of the way, not because I felt especially tired, more because I couldn’t be bothered to be awake. Mac went up on deck, briefly, to see if he could spot some whales, but the cold drove him back inside.
After three hours or so, an announcement asked us to please return to our cars. There was a momentary confusion when we went to the wrong vehicle deck, but then we managed to spot Mac’s car and were weaving between the bumpers when the small white dog threw himself against the glass again, barking at me as if I was Satan himself. It was startling enough to make me jump. Once more, the woman made her flustered apologies and, again, I ignored her. This time, Mac told her not to worry. Why did he feel the need to do that? Was it some kind of criticism of me?
We climb inside the car.
A klaxon sounds.
Some grey sky starts to appear, as the ferry’s visor slowly lifts, revealing the low stone frontages of Stornoway. Gulls surf the wind. A tattered Saltire flaps, lonely, on a flagpole next to a portakabin.
“Welcome to the Hebrides,” I mumble sourly.
Mac starts the engine and we follow a travelling home out of the ship’s belly on to the quayside.
“I’d forgotten just how miserable a fucker you can be,” he chirps. “You’ll see, this place is like Paradise, only windy.”
We join a one-way system as I adjust the settings on the heater.
“And where exactly are we staying?”
“My cousin’s got a place at the southern end of the island. Not far. An hour at most.”
“Your cousin? Is—”
“Don’t worry, he’s away, it’s empty. And it’s nice and secluded. There’s no mobile signal. No TV. Nothing. It’s perfect. Like stepping back in time.”
“Are you all right to drive? You’ve had no sleep.”
“Ach, I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”
I ease back in my seat and close my eyes. The dog thing? Was that criticism? For a moment, I consider asking him, but then I decide it doesn’t matter enough. You’re a passenger, Kevin. Just sit back and let it happen.
Getting to his cousin’s place took longer than Mac had predicted because we got stuck behind a herd of sheep. He seemed to regard it as quaint and rustic, but I was hungry, tired and pissed off, regally pissed off. Why had I been so passive? Now look where I was. Stuck in a car, looking out on a land shrouded in rain, being dictated to by sheep. I told him, several times, to honk on the horn, but he just laughed and said I had to get off “city-boy time”.
Eventually, we find ourselves bouncing up a steep, rutted track towards an off-white bungalow, with black clouds gathering behind it.
Mac gets out of the car with his face illuminated. I try to get out, but because
I am on the windward side, I have to wait for a gap between the gusts before I can open my door. When I step out, the wind knifes me.
“They call this ‘a lazy wind’,” shouts Mac.
“‘Lazy’?”
“Yeh, ’cos it can’t be bothered to go round you.”
He heads for the doorstep where he finds the key beneath a flower pot. As we enter, Mac feels for a light switch.
“Ta-ra!”
The light comes on, watery and insipid.
“Home sweet home for the next few days.”
I look around me. It feels like I’ve stepped into the 1950s. There are swirling nylon carpets, straight-backed plastic chairs, a pouffe of indeterminate colour.
“You’re not impressed.”
“How long do you imagine us staying here?”
“I have to be back by the end of the week.”
“A week? Are you mad?”
But I’m talking to myself; he’s set off to fetch the suitcases out of the boot. There is a radio – a museum piece. I half-expect to hear the Goons coming out of it. Mac re-enters with the suitcases.
“We’d best decide who has which bedroom.”
“Mac…what the fuck are we going to do here?”
He plonks the suitcases on the ground.
“You are such a snob.”
“It’s…depressing.”
“Well, I’m sorry, Lady Penelope, but Balmoral was fully booked.”
“Seriously, Mac, what are we going to do?”
“We can go for nice walks.”
“If we can get out of the door.”
“There’s lots around here. And there’s a very good chance of seeing an otter.” He knows what I am about to say. “Once the weather eases off.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“We put our feet up, read some books, get nice and cosy. Look, see, there’s a chess set. And we can chat, spend some time together, when did we last do that, eh? Just the two of us. It’ll be like old times, only without the moments of degeneracy.”
His shoulders droop slightly.
“Come on, Kevin. It’s a change of scenery. It’ll do you good. You were…” His voice fades away beneath the frustration.
“What was that with the dog-lady?” I ask.
“Eh?”
“You were all nice to her when her stupid dog barked at me.”
“I was just being polite.”
“What, and I wasn’t?”
“No, you were fucking rude if you must know. But you’re having a bad time of it, so…”
“Don’t apologise for me, OK?
I can hear a tremble in my voice. Mac stands very still.
“I have to say, Kevin, that if you’re thinking of starting a fist-fight, I don’t think that you’re in very good shape.”
He’s right. I’m being moody and absurd and the realisation makes me laugh.
“Let’s go see the bedrooms, wee man!”
Both bedrooms turn out to be extremely small, as are the beds.
“Well,” pronounces Mac, “if we pull any women, they’ll have to be midgets. This one’s slightly bigger, you can have it. You’ll need more room for your head.”
He laughs at his own joke as he bustles into the other room with his suitcase. Then he charges down the hall shouting that he’s going to buy some provisions. The front door slams and he’s gone.
I turn up the tiny radiator in my room. Thank fuck there’s central heating, a small concession to the march of progress. The wind starts to whistle through a weakness it has found. I head for the tiny lounge, get out the chess set and start laying out the pieces.
Come the next morning, the world could not look more different. The clouds have given way to a blaze of colour and as we sit in the tiny kitchen, eating a fried breakfast, we take in a panorama of blue sky, gleaming sands, lush green dunes and distant purple mountains.
“What’s this bay called?” I ask.
“Scarista. How did you sleep?”
“Surprisingly well. I had to curl up like a hedgehog, but…”
“Yeh, me too. I slept like a baby…woke with my pyjamas full of shit.” He laughs like a drain. “Sorry, that just came to me…maybe it’s funnier with ‘pyjamas soaked in piss’.”
“No,” I tell him, “it isn’t.”
Mac starts crunching through his toast. I had forgotten what a noisy eater he is.
“I’m sorry about yesterday, Mac…I was a bit wound up.”
“Forget about it.”
We eat on in silence – not awkward silence, but the silence where you know each other well enough not to have to speak. Down below us in the bay, breakers are rolling up the beach with steady grandeur. He was right. It is very beautiful here.
“That headland jutting out on the left there?” he says, sawing at some bacon. “That’s called Toe Head. We can walk to the end of that.”
“You know the area well then?”
“Been here a couple of times. Mostly when I was younger. Didn’t appreciate it then. You’re not easily impressed when you’re a kid, are you. Nature’s just something people drag you round. But now…well, you’ve got to admit, that’s a world-class view. Not seen much better than that. In New Zealand, maybe. Have you been to New Zealand?”
“No.”
“It’s like Scotland on steroids. Magnificent vistas in every direction. So magnificent, in fact, that it gets a bit boring. Perfection dulls the mind.”
“Is that a quote?”
“No, that’s me being poncy. The New Zealanders have this funny accent. Instead of ‘six’ they say ‘sex’.”
“Right.”
“Yeh…it can cause confusion when you’re trying to buy eggs.”
He then launches into a rambling, tangled anecdote involving a misunderstanding with a female shop assistant in Auckland. Like a lot of his stories, it is a maze of tangents and detail, although it does end with the two of them having sex in a cupboard. I am not totally sure if I believe it, but it’s a story, and he is trying to raise my morale.
“OK then,” he announces, wiping egg from his chin with the back of his hand, “shall we go walkies?”
“Um…yeh…all right.”
“Good, good, good.” He starts clearing plates and dumping them in the sink.
“I haven’t got boots,” I tell him.
“Neither have I. Come on, let’s get cracking before the weather changes.”
The shoes and coats go on and we head out the door, down the steep, loose-stoned track towards the honey-gold curve of the beach.
The wind feels like it is blowing every thought out of my head, buffeting and slapping my face, drumming on my ears. The colours seem to intensify by the minute in the slanting northern light. The blue of the water blends towards green, then back to brilliant blue again, then a mottled silver as some clouds hurry past. About twenty yards out, a squad of gannets arrow into the waves, white darts, catching the sun. We stop and watch them for a while, watch them circling into the wind before folding their wings to become missiles, piercing the water.
“They go blind in the end,” Mac shouts above the wind. “They’ve got this membrane-thing that protects the eye from the impact. But eventually it wears away, so…”
“That’s them finished, I suppose.”
“Well you can’t give one a guide dog.”
A gannet hits the water, smack, right in front of us.
“Whoa!” exclaims Mac. “That looks like fun, doesn’t it? It feels like they should be calling ‘wheeee’ on the way down.”
Mac’s face is lit up as he watches them. I had no idea he loved birds as much. When did that happen? Now he is pointing out some smaller birds, swooping in shorter, stabbier flights, further out above a foaming reef.
“Arctic Terns. But those two brown things over there, the ones that are sort of half-buzzard, half-gull, they’re skuas. They just steal fish from other birds. They’re opportunists. If they can catch a gannet when it’s still on the water, they�
��ll try and murder it. I’ve seen them do it. It’s horrific.”
Then he starts laughing. “Just like people, eh? Two types. One lot who work really hard just to survive, and the other bastards who steal it.”
That’s more like the Mac I know, the man who can turn any topic into a socialist commentary.
We turn and walk along the beach with the wind at our backs. The head of a seal pops out of a heaving wave and it tracks us, disappearing occasionally, but always resurfacing nearby, curious and watchful.
After a while, I decide now is the time to broach something.
“Why have you never asked me, Mac?”
“Asked you what?”
“You know perfectly well…why have you never asked me whether I hit her.”
“Well, I kind of assumed…from your demeanour, that you didn’t.”
“But you’ve never specifically asked.”
He stops to poke his toe into a dried-out jellyfish.
“Would you like me to specifically ask?”
“Were you frightened you might get the wrong answer?”
He tips his head back and laughs.
“God, you always have to torture yourself, don’t you?”
A few steps brings his face right in front of mine.
“OK now, pay attention. I assumed…that you would assume…that I had assumed…that you didn’t hit her…I took it as read.”
“And…supposing I had hit her?”
“Then I would feel you’d behaved like a total shit, but you would still be my friend. I’m lumbered with you now. That’s what friends are, lumber.”
The seal bobs up in front of us.
“They’re like marine Labradors, aren’t they,” he chuckles. “Who are you staring at, pal?”
There is a volley of screeches as the gannets escort a loitering skua off the premises. I stand and watch the aerial dogfight as Mac walks on ahead, calling back over his shoulder, “You need to get over yourself. All this angsty crap…waste of time and energy.”
He scurries to his right, as a longer wave chases him up the beach.
“And I tell you something else. If you want people to accept that you’re an innocent man, you’d best start behaving like one.”
Of course, that is what friends are for – to give you patronising advice that you resent. So I let Mac walk well ahead of me, while I hang back to watch the seal. What the fuck did he mean by that?
The Star Witness Page 6