Orkney Twilight

by Clare Carson

  ‘Good morning, Dad,’ she shouted after him. He ignored her, heading along the platform. The Cortina had already been offloaded from the trailer and was in the car park, its decrepit state exaggerated by the two gleaming metallic saloons parked on either side. Jim strolled off to collect the keys from the guard.

  ‘We’ve got about six hours to reach Scrabster and catch the ferry,’ he said on his return, glancing at his watch, ‘which should be plenty of time, but we’ve got to cross Caithness, so I don’t want to bugger about. No shilly-shallying.’

  She clambered into the passenger seat. He dumped the haversack at her feet, underneath the glove department. She retracted her legs, didn’t want her feet to touch the bag, wasn’t taking any chances with lethal weapons. She fumbled with the seat belt.

  ‘Look sharpish,’ Jim snapped. ‘No fannying around.’

  Tom clambered clumsily into the back seat. Sam wound down the window a smidgen to let in some fresh air, smiled to herself, enjoying the sense of escape under a vast sky, rolling clouds. Leaving the south far behind.

  ‘Viking country,’ said Jim as they set off, heading into the streets of Inverness. It felt like a pre-emptive attack, a challenge to anyone who might be thinking about trying to swing a punch at his cover story.

  ‘Is that what you’re going to do your history degree in then – the Dark Ages?’

  She caught Tom’s eye in the mirror and tried unsuccessfully not to snigger.

  Jim said, ‘If you are going to take the piss, you really should try and do it without giggling like a three-year-old. What’s so funny about the idea of me doing a degree anyway?’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘Why shouldn’t I try something different? I’ve had enough of this malarkey. Policing. I’ve been at it for too long. It grinds you down after a while: all the criticism, the snarky comments. Nobody has a good word to say about coppers. Whatever you do, it’s wrong. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Pisses me off. They’ve got some early retirement deal going at the moment and I’m eligible. I’ve done a lot of years; put a lot of dosh into the pension pot, so I’d be a bit of an idiot not to consider it. But then, if I retire now, I’m going to have to find something else to occupy myself.’

  ‘How about golf?’ she suggested.

  He ignored her. ‘I’d like to avoid the private security company trap. I’ve seen too many of my mates fall into that one. It’s not a dignified way to go. I don’t want to end up being a private dick.’

  ‘Is being a private dick any worse than being a public dick?’

  Tom snorted in the back. Jim scowled and for a moment she thought he was going to lose it, but then his frown softened at the edges. Holiday mood perhaps.

  ‘Yes. I would say it is worse than being a public dick. When you’re a private dick, you have to do what the money tells you to do. At least if you’re a public dick you have some sense that you’re there to do the right thing, whatever the profit margin.’

  She squinted at him as he watched the road and noticed his hands feeding the steering wheel round corners. Advanced driving course for policemen. Tics, habits; the signs were there if you knew where to look. Some things were impossible to disguise.

  ‘Bastards,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ said Jim.

  ‘Vikings. They were bastards. All that raping and pillaging.’

  Jim shook his head. ‘Everyone thinks they were mindless thugs, but there was more to them than that.’

  ‘What good did they do then?’

  ‘They were explorers, entrepreneurs. They did a lot to open up important trade routes, establish new markets. Early capitalists.’

  Sam pulled a dismissive face. ‘Yes, but you can’t use the economic ends to justify all the violence.’

  ‘I’m not trying to justify it. I’m explaining it, saying the violence wasn’t totally gratuitous. They didn’t just kick a few heads in. They produced. Traded. Farmed the land. Norsemen settled all over this part of Scotland. Caithness,’ he added. ‘Orkney too, of course.’

  ‘So when did they arrive in Orkney?’

  ‘The first raids on northern England were in the late eighth century. But the archaeologists reckon they were settling in Orkney before that.’

  Tom joined in the conversation from the back. ‘Was anybody already living there when they arrived?’

  ‘The Picts. Small-scale farmers. Christians. The Neolithic people who built Skara Brae and the stone circles were long gone. They come from a much earlier time. Nearly four thousand years earlier than the Vikings in fact.’

  ‘Although in some ways,’ Sam said, ‘the Vikings had more in common with the Neolithic people than with the Christian Picts. They probably had similar beliefs to the stone circle builders – ancestor worship, fertility rites. Magic. Do you think the invading Vikings converted the Picts back to paganism and Odin worship?’

  ‘Some people argue that the Vikings took over Orkney’s Neolithic monuments, the stone circles and the burial chambers, and used them for their own religious rituals. They say that’s why you find Norse runes all over the ancient stones. But nobody really knows what happened to the Picts when the Vikings arrived. It’s one of the great mysteries of Orkney’s history. There isn’t much evidence to go on. No battle corpses. No signs of fighting. But then there’s no mention anywhere of surviving natives either. No written record of cohabitation. Only a few pre-Norse place names to serve as a reminder of the times before the Norsemen arrived. So it’s all speculation. Annihilation or assimilation.’

  ‘And which do you think is the most likely theory, war or peace?’ Tom asked.

  ‘Well, I don’t think the Vikings would have wiped the original inhabitants out because they needed people to work the land for them.’ Jim checked Tom in the mirror. ‘And maybe they were slightly in awe of the Picts if they thought they were the descendants of the monument builders. So I’m inclined to think—’

  His hypothesis was cut short as he jammed his foot on the brake in order to avoid ramming the boot of the car ahead.

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ His irascibility surfaced rapidly. ‘It can’t be a traffic jam. We’re in the middle of bloody nowhere.’

  ‘We’re not,’ Sam said. ‘We’re in the middle of Inverness.’

  He wound his window down and leaned out to find out what was happening. Nothing. The Cortina inched forward. Jim swore under his breath. Someone was taking the mickey. It was a total bloody shambles. She was afraid of catching Tom’s eye in the mirror in case it set her off.

  Ten minutes of crawling and cursing brought them to a crossroads. An out-of-order set of traffic lights. Two traffic cops, young and female, were mismanaging the junction, ineffectually waving their white-gloved hands in the air and miserably failing to keep the cars moving.

  ‘Fucking amateurs,’ Jim muttered.

  The Cortina stuttered up to the lights and stopped in front of an outstretched hand attached to the arm of a frazzled looking WPC. Jim ferreted in the glove compartment, found what he was looking for, thrust his police identity card out of the window. She’d never seen him do that before. She watched him waving the card around; it almost seemed as if he were trying to act the part of a cop.

  Jim jabbed a finger menacingly at the WPCs. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re playing at?’

  Passing pedestrians turned and stared. Sam attempted to disappear, hunched her shoulders and buried herself in the front seat. She could sense Tom behind, observing the scene with detached interest. The WPCs froze, unable to speak, caught on the barbed wire of Jim’s temper, faces reddened with humiliation, glassy eyes. Sam willed them not to cry.

  Jim yelled. ‘You’ve got as much intelligence as two piles of shit.’ He gripped the wheel angrily, put his foot on the accelerator, spun the wheels and sped across the junction. Tom was silent in the rear.

  ‘Do two piles of shit have more or less intelligence than one pile of shit?’ she asked.

  ‘Will you do something useful
instead of making smart-arse comments? Have a look for the sodding road map; see if you can give me some directions to Scrabster.’

  She rummaged under the seat, pulled out a battered AA guide to Britain. ‘How did the Vikings navigate the seas? They couldn’t have used the sun because half the time it’s too cloudy up here.’

  Nobody answered. She gazed wearily out of the window; a shaft of light illuminated a road sign to Thurso along the A9, the route across Caithness.

  She absorbed the passing scenery and found a strange comfort in the desolate landscape of the Flow Country. It was less dramatic than the mountains and glens of the Highlands, but the endless brown moors and the vast leaden skies had an alluring bleakness. The Cortina, though, was struggling with the plateau, buffeted by the crosswinds, growling in response to Jim’s angry foot on the accelerator. Jim was oblivious to the car’s protestations. A never-ending stretch of fast, straight road was punctuated by a clank of metal on tarmac. Tom enquired politely from the back, ‘Did something just drop off the car?’

  Jim grunted dismissively. The car’s rear emitted an alarming wet farting sound. Sam glanced over her shoulder, pulled a face at Tom. Jim ignored them, ignored the noise, pushed his foot down harder. The futtering became more insistent. Bemused sheep lifted their heads from their incessant nibbling and bleated as the Cortina passed.

  ‘Shit.’ Jim swerved the car towards the heather lapping the roadside, squealed to an emergency stop, threw off his seat belt, grabbed his haversack, leaped out of the car, slammed the door, stomped off at speed over the peaty soil into the damp emptiness. Sam and Tom peered through the car windows out over the moorland and watched the small dot of Jim, disappearing into nowhere.

  ‘What was that all about?’ Tom asked.

  ‘He’s always bad in the mornings. I suppose he’s annoyed because there’s something wrong with the car and he doesn’t know what to do about it.’

  ‘He’s not going to solve the problem by storming off like that.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Where do you think he’s going?’ Tom asked.

  ‘Maybe he’s gone to look for a Viking burial site.’

  ‘He was certainly putting up a good show on the old early Middle Ages. I thought he was quite convincing back there with his theories about the Vikings.’

  ‘Did you? I thought he was overdoing it a bit with his revisionist history lecturer act.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘What are we going to do, then?’

  ‘Well, the car is still moving even if it is making an embarrassing noise. So, if Jim doesn’t come back soon, I can drive us back down to Inverness.’

  She clocked the ignition. ‘You can’t. He’s taken the keys with him.’

  ‘Bastard.’

  They tumbled out of the car on to the heather. The wind tugged at Sam’s coat. She stretched out her arms, leaned into the gusts, a kestrel soaring over the moor, searching the hollows for shadows and movements, waiting to dive. She felt Tom staring at her quizzically. She put her arms back down at her sides, returned to earth.

  She said, ‘Have you ever been hanging around in a pub and had some dodgy-looking bloke sidle up and tell you he’s an ex-member of the SAS?’

  Tom nodded.

  ‘And he says he’s done that thing where they drop you in the middle of nowhere without any food or equipment and then they come back three days later to see if you’re still alive?’

  Tom nodded again.

  ‘Well, Jim once told me his lot trained with the SAS and he passed the three-day survival test.’

  ‘So is he a dodgy-looking bloke who hangs around in bars making up stories or do you think he was telling the truth?’

  She poked the heather with her toe. ‘Possibly both. But if he was telling the truth, we could be here for a long time.’

  ‘We could test our own survival skills. Head off into the wilderness and see if we can make it back to civilization before we die from lack of caffeine. He who dares wins. Or she,’ he added quickly. ‘They who dare win. We’d make it. We’ve got a map.’

  ‘We’ve got your emergency rations as well. We could crack open the Hobnobs.’

  ‘I’ve eaten them all already.’

  ‘What? The whole packet? When?’

  ‘In Inverness, when we were in the traffic jam. I was hungry. I wasn’t sure we’d make it out alive and I thought it was a pity to waste them.’

  She had noticed he was being suspiciously quiet in the back seat.

  ‘In that case, we’re stuffed.’ She gave him a reproachful glare. ‘Whatever happened to comradeship? Solidarity?’

  ‘It’s all about survival of the fittest. You’ve got to be tough to make it. You’ve got to be able to compete if you want to win the prizes.’

  She tutted disparagingly.

  ‘That’s the trouble with us lefties,’ he said. ‘We’re not competitive enough. Not ambitious enough. We wouldn’t last a day in the city.’ He fixed his sight on the horizon. ‘Jim would be okay in the survival stakes. He’s obviously pretty fit, judging by the speed he managed to keep up when he stormed off. Was he ever in the army?’

  ‘Yes. But I’ve never been quite sure what he did. He’s a bit fuzzy about the details. All I know is he signed up when he was sixteen and was sent off somewhere hot, Africa I think, where he learned how to make do with little more than a couple of sheets of hard toilet paper and some dry biscuits. And his toes were blown off when he trod on a landmine.’

  ‘His toes? Wouldn’t he have lost his whole leg in a landmine explosion?’

  ‘Landmine,’ she repeated. ‘That’s what he’s always said anyway. Landmine.’

  ‘That’s an unlikely story.’

  She felt herself tumbling, hitting an unexpected dip, engulfed by greyness, uncertainty, the fear that there was nothing solid, no roots touching soil, nothing living, nothing genuine about her life. Nothing to hold to break the fall. They lapsed into silence, both of them staring across the moorland, lost in their own thoughts.

  Ten minutes. Twenty. Half an hour. It was beyond a joke. A small speck appeared on a ridge out on the edge of the world. Sam watched, hypnotized by the fuzzy form gliding over the boglands in a seemingly effortless forward movement, growing larger and larger.

  ‘Silencer,’ Jim announced as he climbed back into the car.

  ‘What?’ she demanded.

  ‘It’s the silencer,’ he repeated. Impatient. As if he’d just nipped round the rear of the car for a couple of minutes to have a look and hadn’t actually stormed off in the middle of nowhere without explanation.

  ‘Must have dropped off. But we’ll make it to Scrabster without it anyway.’

  He pulled away from the heather, pushed his foot down. She caught a faint whiff of whisky.

  ‘I’ll take it to a garage when we get to Orkney,’ Jim continued. ‘See if a mechanic can do anything about the noise. Can you drive, Tom?’ Jim made eye contact with Tom in the mirror. Tom smiled, clearly relieved to be addressed in a straightforward manner with no obvious sneer.

  ‘I passed my test when I was seventeen.’

  ‘Not as useless as Sam then.’

  ‘Well, maybe if you’d offered to help pay for the lessons,’ she said, ‘like everybody else’s dads, I might have learned by now.’

  Jim ignored her. He said to Tom, ‘Why don’t you use this car while we’re in Orkney? That’ll give you two a bit of independence. I can borrow another car from my mate in Stromness.’

  Jim and Tom started chatting about problems with cars as if they were both expert mechanics. She watched in the mirror and noticed that Tom appeared to be taking it at face value, this man-to-man chat. She glanced sideways at Jim and spotted the corner of Jim’s mouth forming a sly smile that made her wonder why he was so keen to offload the Cortina. Was he setting them up as a decoy? Allowing them to drive around in the hard-to-miss noisy old Cortina while he slipped off silently in a less conspicuous vehicle? She sighed. You couldn’t even take his kind offers at face value; he
really was a bastard.

  Jim slung the car around the hairpin bends, feeding the wheel furiously, zigzagging down to the coast. ‘Don’t want to miss the ferry,’ he said.

  She clung to the door handle, reluctant to upset the delicate balance of Jim’s fragile temper again, closed her eyes as they swerved around an acutely sharp loop in the road, barely hanging on to the corner. ‘Dad. Do you have a licence to kill?’

  He fed the wheel aggressively. ‘Yes. Do you have a licence to be totally bloody irritating?’

  ‘Actually I do.’

  ‘Well it’s been revoked. So you’d better watch it.’

  A ray of sun pierced the cloud blanket and lit up the Cortina as they advanced noisily over the final stretch of the headland and descended to Scrabster, its granite harbour walls like fingers clutching at the outflowing tide. A line of vehicles was already waiting to drive on to the ferry. The rickety old St Ola that had ferried them across the Pentland Firth every summer of her childhood had been replaced with a larger, roll-on roll-off of the same name. She felt a wave of nostalgia; it had always been a bit of a thrill watching the cars being hoisted on to the boat by crane, the exciting touch-and-go tension as the Cortina was lifted up in the air like a toy and swung over the quay into the hold.

  ‘Pity. I wouldn’t have minded if they’d dropped it in the water this time,’ Jim said, as he surveyed the new ferry. ‘At least I could have claimed the insurance. Still, the old banger might prove to be useful while we’re here.’ He smiled to no one in particular.

  Despite Jim’s disappearing act out on the moors, they still had more than an hour to spare. Jim announced he wanted to talk to a man about a dog so Tom and Sam headed to a café built up against the rocky headland, pounding across the flagstones, pushing against the strengthening wind that was whipping anything light and loose into horizontal lines, thrumming the cables of tightly moored lobster boats. They reached an oilskin-clad fisherman pulling the slack out of a wrack-covered rope, feeding it into a neat coil on the quayside.

  Tom stopped. ‘Is it rough out there today?’