Fergus comes and stands behind me, bracing himself in the doorframe.
“Are you OK there?” he asks. I give the best smile I can manage in the circumstances.
“This is the choppiest bit. Well, apart from the bit around the island.”
“Right…so what is this, force four?”
He studies the churning of the waves for a second, grimacing as he peers beyond the stern.
“Maybe a five, possibly a six.”
Then a ve-ry big wave slaps us side-on and the boat rolls, and rolls, and keeps rolling, I am thrown on to the next seat, still we’re rolling, shit, are we going over?
A glance at Fergus’s impassive face tells me that we’re not. The boat rocks back towards an even keel and I feel ashamed of my fear. Did he see it? If he did, he has probably seen the same panic on the faces of countless tourists. Get over yourself, Kevin.
“How far is it to St. Kilda?”
Fergus puffs his pale cheeks. “From port? Ooh, about fifty-ish miles.”
“How long to go?” “We’ve done about, er…just under half of it.”
Great.
He glances over his shoulder deeper into the cabin, drawn by a straining, mechanical, ratcheting grunt that I know is the sound of Mac being sick.
During the next hour and a half St. Kilda gradually took shape in front of us. It began as a ghostly, thrusting outline and then hardened into a grey-green tooth of a rock, with more teeth to either side. Then a second mass appeared from behind it. As we got closer, it started to look a little less relentlessly sheer and vertical. Shoulders of rock, long ledges and ragged promontories fell into focus. Vertical, brutal stacks stood guard, with foam boiling at their base. And, in the middle, a pyramid of rock, larger than the rest, rising out of the sea like a lost world of myth and monsters. St. Kilda.
Calum had given a tattered tourist guide to Mac, who kept trying to shout statistics and facts over the din of the wind, the sea and the seabirds thickening in the air around the rocks. A hundred miles from the mainland, he shouted. Tallest sea-cliffs in the British Isles! Thousand feet! Humans have lived here for three thousand years! Evacuated in 1930! The colour had returned to his face, now that he had got rid of his breakfast.
The closer we drew to St. Kilda the more intimidating it became. At least, that was how I felt, but Mac seemed enchanted, standing at the back of the boat with his jaw hanging open in wonder. Fergus suggested he close his mouth, with so many seabirds flying over our heads. The sea was becoming calmer as we rounded a jutting outthrust of rock and entered a small bay. Mac read more text out of the guidebook. We were looking at the remains of a volcano. The bowl-shaped bay in front of us – Village Bay – was part of a semi-submerged caldera. A little disappointingly, the first structure you noticed on the shore was a small, very functional-looking, squat, square power-generator. But to the right of that, at the foot of a steep slope, you could see the ghosts of settlement, small, ruined, roofless cottages, lined up in a short street, with a couple of restored ones in the middle.
Peppered randomly over the hills were hundreds of round stone storehouses – which Mac announced were called cleits – and which, at a glance, could pass for natural features of rock.
Calum slowly edged the boat into the bay and anchored about forty yards offshore. Then a small rib was lowered to ferry us to the stone pier. Apparently, the boat was not allowed to moor alongside the pier in case there were rats aboard, who might escape and decimate the seabird colonies. Gingerly, Mac and I clambered down to the bouncing rib, followed by Fergus, then Calum, who steered us steadily towards the stone pier. As we approached it, I noticed an exchange of apprehensive looks between the two crewmen. Rather solemnly, like some Presbyterian preacher, Calum announced that the swell was higher than had been forecast and we would have to do exactly as he instructed. Watching the waves, with intense concentration, he manoeuvred the rib till we were alongside the ledge of the pier. But then the swell would billow beneath us and carry us ten, fifteen yards too far.
There was another exchange of looks and Fergus was no longer so slow-pulsed, his movements quick, sharpened by adrenalin. Mac and I sat, poised, nervously waiting for our orders. After a few attempts, Fergus managed to hook a rope through a rusty, metal ring and tug us closer to the jetty. Now it was getting to be a question of timing. Calum looked over his shoulder at the surges of water rolling in, as he waited for a pause. He told me to get ready. When he said “jump” I was to jump.
I moved to the side of the rib. A wave grew beneath us, then faded, the rib settled for a beat, Fergus pulled the rope harder, the gap closed and I heard “jump”, so I put one foot on the rib’s edge and propelled myself on to the jetty.
I felt so pleased with myself. Why? It was hardly commando training. Now Mac was poised to jump. Calum told him to wait, and wait, and wait, and jump. With a tiny stumble, Mac scrambled on to the pier, clutching the backpack containing the sandwiches.
Then Calum gave us clear instructions that we should all meet back here at four and we set off, along the pier toward the corpse of the village.
We spent about two hours exploring the ruins. The only people we spoke to were a couple of academics – indomitable ladies in their fifties, the kind who built the empire – who were there studying rare plants. If they recognised me they didn’t let on. We saw a couple of uniformed figures, briefly, down by the little power station, but otherwise it felt like we had the place to ourselves. We strolled around the stone skeletons of dykes and pens behind the village and then we explored the ruined houses, with occasional commentary from Mac and the guidebook, trying to work out what the living arrangements would have been.
One of the tiny, restored cottages turned out to be a museum with displays describing how the St. Kildans survived for centuries against what, to modern eyes, seem like impossible odds.
When we come out of the gloom of the museum we are met by brilliant sunshine, so we sit and eat our sandwiches.
Mac’s empty stomach means he is bolting down his food like a prisoner-of-war. I can’t bear to watch.
“Did you read the display about the missionaries?” he asks, his cheeks bulging.
“Yup.”
“What bastards, eh? The poor fuckers survive perfectly well for centuries, eating puffins and playing their fiddles through the long, dark winters and along come some puritan fuckwits who say no dancing, you spend all your free time on your knees, in churches, crippled with fear, guilt and self-loathing.”
He starts to demolish a ham bap.
“Tell me, is there any culture in the entire world that has not eventually been fucked up by religious wankers?”
“And that was ‘Thought for the Day’.”
“Even out here, on the edge of nowhere.”
He exhales with annoyance. I feel a pang of envy at how fired up he can get.
“After this, we go up,” he says, offering me a Kit-Kat.
So, once lunch is devoured, we climb the curving ever-steepening slope behind the village. It is not a problem to start with, but the last hundred yards or so turns into a real struggle and I have to keep stopping to get my breath back. Have I really got so badly out of condition? Or is it anxiety? To my relief, Mac is also struggling.
“Je-sus, this is deceptive!”
He stops, with his hands on his knees. We both look like old men, which makes us laugh wheezy old-man laughs.
“One last push,,” he gasps.
As we slog to the top, we slowly realise that this cliff has been eaten in half by the elements. It has no back; and instead of a cliff-top ledge there is a nothingness, just an astonishing drop to the crawling waves. In fact, the razor’s edge is so intimidating that our bodies instinctively tell us to lie flat on our bellies so that we can look over the edge in safety. A thousand feet below us, gannets and fulmars float like tiny scraps of white paper. At least, Mac says they’re gannets and fulmars; they could be anything.
“Jesus, look at that,” he says, with
a whistle.
“Imagine this place in winter.” I look to my right, to another towering crag. “People have lived here for thousands of years, you say?”
“The book says there are Neolithic remains all over it.”
“Who in their right mind would opt to live here? Why did they come here?”
“I think it was attached to the mainland at one point.”
“Yeh but once it was an island.”
“Pretty in summer, I expect.”
“But a hell-hole most of the year, why would primitive human beings sail across miles of terrifying sea, in boats with no engines, to settle here?”
Mac gives it some thought.
“Fear. It has to be fear.”
“Fear?”
“Aye, fear and greed are the two great impelling forces and it is not going to be greed, there’s nothing here and it’s tiny…so it has to be fear. Look at Venice, right, that was malarial marshland, right, no one wanted to live there, but the tribes were running away from…the Lombards, was it? They thought, fuck it, we’ll go live out there, in Nature’s arsehole, they won’t follow us there.”
On a very clear day, I suppose, you probably can see St. Kilda from Harris, so he might be right. Frightened people might have thought – that weird little island, right out there, maybe there we’ll get to live in peace.
“Let’s face it, if it wasn’t for fear of our fellow human beings, we’d probably all still be living in Mesopotamia.” Mac ends his observation by spitting over the cliff like a schoolboy, but the wind whisks it sideways. “Fear…can drive us to great deeds, Kev…or it can make us curl up in a fucking ball.”
The journey back was memorable. The wind had dropped slightly so Calum headed out from the island and pottered around the base of the sea stacks, which loomed over us like dark skyscrapers. As we rocked in the troughs, seabirds swirled around us, some strafing the surf, others floating directly above our heads as if suspended on wires. Gannet after gannet moved in for a close-up, posing at head-height alongside us, catching the intermittent bursts of sunlight. When they glowed we could see the elegance of their lines, the perfect design of their long beaks, the tapered, black-tipped wings, the subtlety of their colouring as the white of their bodies shaded into a honeyed yellow around the head. On several occasions, they started feeding around us and torpedoed down into the water at startling speeds. Fulmars escorted us as well. Smaller, prim, almost ladylike. Less streamlined than the gannets, almost chubby in comparison, but still perfect and effortless in flight. It is hard to describe how exhilarated I felt, how thrilled I was to be bobbing around engulfed by wildness and ignored by Nature.
From time to time, Fergus pointed out features of the geology, or wave-lashed platforms of rock where the St. Kildans would land when they came to climb the stacks, hunting for birds. All the rock faces looked unclimbable to my eyes, but I suppose if you grow up climbing cliffs then you see every available hand-hold. All Mac and I saw was precipices and certain death.
The last rock is called Stac an Armin. It soars above us, as the boat edges closer.
Fergus shuffles across the deck to point something out. Disconcertingly, I notice that, in several places, the water seems to be bulging higher than we are.
“See right at the top there? That little dark patch?”
Mac squints and shakes his head.
“I see it. Is it a cave?” I ask.
“Sort of. It’s a shelter the fowlers hollowed out. A bothy. That’s where they’d sleep every night for a fortnight while they were catching birds.” A gannet spears into the water a few feet in front of us.
“In the early 1700s,” continues Fergus, “the boat dropped off twelve men. For two weeks, they caught birds…only the boat never came back. Virtually everyone on St. Kilda had died of smallpox inside a fortnight, so there was no one who could row the boat out to fetch them.”
Mac grimaces. “So they died?”
“No, they survived, nine months, I think, all through the winter, twelve of them in that wee cave. Until the rent collector from McLeod of McLeod came to fetch the rent, was told about the stranded men, and organised a rescue party.”
We both peer at the small, dark patch that looks like no more than a crack.
“Fuck me,” says Mac. “They must have been tough wee bastards.”
“What did they eat?” I ask.
“Birds. But they couldn’t drink the water off the rocks ’cos it would have been polluted with bird-shit, so they drank puffin-blood.”
“Jesus, I’ve drunk some horrible stuff in my time but…”
“We’re heading back now,” calls Calum.
The boat is turned towards Harris and the engine is freed to full throttle.
The trip back to Harris was much more comfortable. The wind was still high, but it was mostly behind us so we ploughed a clean furrow through the waves and the rolls were slow and steady. It sent me into a kind of trance.
I watched the grey peaks of St. Kilda fading slowly away into the ocean for over an hour. Somehow it seemed more beautiful than on our approach. Was that the light? Or was it me? Maybe something becomes more beautiful once you know it.
“Wasn’t that amazing?” says Mac as he slides in alongside me. He hands me a mug of hot tea. “Fergus made it. I’ve been thinking about those fellas in that hole for nine months…not knowing why no one had come for them…not knowing if anyone would ever come for them…all through the darkness of the winter and the storms…”
“Yeh, it’s incredible.”
“Just goes to show how adaptable people are, doesn’t it. How they can survive anything…even when the future’s scary and uncertain…they just hang on in there and wait for things to turn their way.”
“OK, Mac.” I look him in the eye. “I get the message.”
He sips his tea. “There is no message.” Then he puts on an American accent, “Messages are for Western Union.” He’s crap at accents.
As we pulled into the harbour, I felt calmer than I had felt for months. I knew the realities that were waiting for me in London, and my stomach still turned a little if I thought about them, but Mac’s highland adventure had given me some emotional distance – a sense that all things pass. Most of life is chatter, so don’t panic. That was how I felt as I stepped on to the quay at Leverburgh. It would be all right. Just drink up your puffin-blood. I was renewed.
4
The Wait
The day after I returned to London, I was charged, and my sense of renewal disappeared in an instant. Inevitably, the photographers had prior warning of my appearance at the police station. One of them broke his ankle in the scrum. I was deemed not to be a “flight risk”; bail was set at a minimal two thousand pounds, and the trial date was set for August 21st. Four months. Four more months.
So, like a crab, I retreated back into my hole in the mud. I grew the beard even longer, and I sat for hours, unfeeling and unthinking, watching images flicker across the TV screen. I tried to read some books, but the mental focus was not there, so I found myself re-reading the same paragraph over and over. Looking back at that period, I find it very hard to separate out any real memories. Life defocused into a blur. One episode, though, does manage to poke through, like the outline of rocks in a fog.
My solicitor, Graham, came to my house for a meeting, stayed for a drink, and then another and another, and then started telling me things that I didn’t want to know. The first was the break-up of his marriage. All his fault, apparently. He had been too clingy, so she had left for Australia. Then he moves on to my case.
“The thing is, Kevin,” he says, tapping me affectionately on the knee, “the thing is – and don’t tell Nina I said this – but there is another option you should keep open for yourself…y’know…in the great scheme of options.”
“Another option?”
“Yuh…a very valid option.” He puts his whisky glass down on the table with exaggerated care and then looks me hard in the eyes. “You could cop a pl
ea. Plead guilty to assault. Accept the sentence, it’ll be short, might even be suspended, and then move on, and get on with the rest of your life.” He leans back in his chair. “I’m just throwing that out there.”
“Oh fuck off, Graham.”
“Fair enough.”
“I’m not pleading guilty to something I didn’t do. Why the fuck should I do that?”
“Just laying out the options.” He picks up his whisky again. “Just examining the realities.”
I know Graham is pissed so I shouldn’t take him too seriously, but the word “realities” buzzes in my mind.
“Realities? What realities?”
He leans forward conspiratorially. “The reality…that we have to work with…which is that juries no longer like celebrities. They used to. In the good old days, you used to go to court with a celebrity and the jury would go ‘oh that’s old so-and-so off that TV thing set in the hospital, we like him, he can’t be guilty. He swims things for charity!’ Always. Celebrities. People believed in them. Juries believed them. But then…” He pauses to burp. His voice gets louder: “But then…along comes Mister Jimmy-fucking-Savile and now if you’re a celebrity you’re guilty – guilty as sin – from day one. Juries think all showbiz people are kiddy-fiddling, tax-avoiding rapists or worse. So, one option open to you is not to risk getting in front of a jury…I’m just saying…don’t mention this to Nina. She hates defeatism.”
At this point, I decide to call Graham a taxi. But he hasn’t finished his observations.
“We’re living through a witch-hunt. And once someone points at you and shouts ‘witch’, that’s it…on the bonfire with him, whoosh! The justice system…out of the window.”
The Star Witness Page 8