Orkney Twilight

by Clare Carson

  She chased Jim and her short legs failed to match his adult strides even though he was running backwards and shouting profanities that passed over her head and echoed round the tiles. Halfway across he stopped, abruptly, and walked over to the side of the tunnel and, as she caught up with him, she saw he had pushed one of the white tiles with his finger and lifted it away from the wall.

  ‘Stop it.’ Horrified. ‘You’ll let the water in.’

  ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to let the water in. I’m the one who makes sure there aren’t any leaks. I’m the bloody plumber.’ He laughed. And she laughed too. For some reason. She watched him curiously as he peered into the dark space in the white wall, stuck his hand in quickly, retracted it, pushed the tile back into place. In the strange silence of the tunnel she thought she could hear the river water rushing past above her head. She felt a wave of panic engulfing her.

  ‘The walls are caving in.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Hold my hand and we’ll run back together. You’re safe underground with me.’

  She wouldn’t be there in the first place, she thought, if it wasn’t for him. But she did what she was told and held his hand and felt the strength of his grip. Together they paced through London’s red clay while Jim marvelled at the magic of the Victorian’s underground engineering. Charlie was waiting for them when they reached the south side and he whistled his mournful tune all the way back to the surface. Let’s face the music. Later, when she tried to recall that evening, it took on the hazy quality of a haunting dream and she could no longer be certain whether Jim really had taken something out from a drop-box behind the tile and slipped it into his pocket or whether she had just imagined it. All she had to hold on to with any certainty was the feeling of sickness in her stomach, the tightness in her chest, the rising panic. And even then, she wasn’t sure whether the fear was reaching out to her or she was clinging on to it.

  She wiped an unexpected tear from her eye with the back of her hand, took a deep breath as she steamed against the wind, towards the memorial. More oxygen plus red blood cells equals stamina, she chanted and felt the power surging around her body. As she caught up with Jim, she veered to the right to overtake but he barged her, hard, making her stumble and he ran on to reach Kitchener’s brick memorial first.

  ‘I won,’ he shouted.

  She yelled, breathlessly, ‘You cheated.’

  ‘I still won.’

  ‘You’re past it, Dad.’

  He winced and she regretted her words.

  She slumped down with her back anchored against the tower, watching the skerry-strewn coastline beyond the sheer drop of the sandstone cliff, and ran through the Beaufort scale in her mind, the roaring wind paining her ears. High waves, breaking crests, white foam: force eight. Tom strode nonchalantly up the hill to join them, anorak pulling against his frame. He read the memorial plaque.

  ‘So this marks the spot where Kitchener and his crew went down with the HMS Hampshire,’ he said.

  They were respectfully silent for a moment as the breakers pounded the cliff way down below. A furiously flapping puffin cut across the headland and set a course for the open sea.

  Tom sat down on the grass next to her. ‘I wonder how many men drowned here.’

  ‘Hundreds.’

  ‘How long do you think anybody could survive in that water?’

  ‘About two minutes I should think. Your country needs you,’ she said, pointing at Tom, ‘to waste your life for a completely unnecessary cause.’

  ‘What do you know?’ Jim said scornfully.

  ‘The First World War was a total waste of life,’ she retorted. ‘Everyone knows that.’

  ‘Hindsight always gives you easy answers. The certainty of the armchair perspective. Right and wrong are not so clear when you’re in the middle of it, out there patrolling in the dark. Then it’s harder to make judgements. Then there’s no time for riding moral high-horses. Sometimes you don’t even know where you are. You might think you’re fighting for one side, put your head down and get on with it, and when you finally have a chance to breathe, you stand up and realize you’re in a completely different battlefield. Somewhere else entirely.’

  Tom looked as if he was about to say something, but he kept his mouth shut. She couldn’t quite bear the reverence, the brotherhood, the respect for all things macho and bloody. Take the toys from the boys.

  ‘Anyway, wasn’t Kitchener on his way to fix up a dodgy deal with the Russians when his ship went down?’ she said. ‘Wasn’t there some story about a Russian agent being involved? Somebody wanted Kitchener out of the way for some reason or another.’

  She felt the heat of Jim’s glare.

  ‘Conspiracy theory,’ he said dismissively. He clenched his jaw as he shifted his sight to the far horizon, the vanishing point, the place where the Hampshire was swallowed up by the sea. She tried to see what he could see, stared at the chopping waves and the dark spaces, let them fall into a pattern. Seals. Submarines. Shadows. And then she spotted the anomaly, the hard grey outline: the pointed prow of a boat. The Inquisitor.

  ‘Let’s move it,’ said Jim.

  Southbound along the narrow path that clung to the cliff edge, the fulmars bobbing along beside their feet, inches away from being blasted against the hard rock, skuas making them duck and shield their heads with their arms. Kitchener’s Memorial shrank behind them, nothing but a chess piece now. The cliff face eased out marginally into a more forgiving angle, scars of sheep tracks zigzagging the slopes.

  ‘Now this is the place,’ said Jim, ‘where I used to pick mushrooms. Look.’ He pointed toward a narrow gulley running off into oblivion. ‘I can see some down there. Who’s coming with me to pick them?’

  ‘Not me,’ she said. ‘I’ll wait here.’

  ‘Afraid of heights, are you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll go with you,’ said Tom.

  ‘That’s your funeral,’ she said. ‘It’s that way.’ She nodded her head towards the cliff edge.

  She flumped on the springy grass mattress. A stream trying to find its course along a small gully nearby caught her attention; the wind was so strong now it was blowing the water vertically into the air as it hit the edge of the cliff. She considered the meandering creek denying gravity and thought of Liz watching her husband and daughters disappearing over the edge at the same spot ten years earlier. For a moment, she was eight again, laughing at the wind with her sisters. And in her head the wind was tugging at Jim, pulling his fingers back from the rocks, flinging him to feed the waves below. She sat up, tipped on to her hands and knees and crawled towards the brink, lichen-starred stone rasping her palms. Jim and Tom were nowhere. But beyond the lines of curling waves, she spotted the dark shape of The Inquisitor again, visible for a few seconds in the spindrift before vanishing down a trough and reappearing further along the horizon, pursuing a dogged course parallel to the coast, shadowing their path. She pictured Jim and Tom, two dark dots moving across the pale cliff face like nits crawling across a forehead. They would be clearly visible even from a distance. What was Jim doing? Signalling his presence? Creating a diversion?

  The black crescent moon of Jim’s head emerged above the cliff’s edge, followed by his triumphant smirk. Tom straggled behind and collapsed on the ground beside her, his face taut and wan. Jim opened his cupped hands to reveal a pile of white fungus.

  ‘Mushrooms,’ he said.

  ‘Puffballs,’ she replied, giving the stuff a dirty look.

  ‘Mushrooms. Anyway, puffballs are edible.’

  ‘Well you’d probably eat babies’ brains if somebody offered them to you with a nice bit of bread to mop up the juice. I’m certainly not going to have any.’

  ‘I wasn’t offering you any.’

  He retrieved his Swiss Army Knife from his windcheater pocket, wiped the malingering slivers off the blade with his hanky, folded it lovingly, slipped it into his haversack. And she wondered whether he had brought the Walther with h
im, whether it was in there too, nestling at the bottom of his bag.

  ‘Okay then,’ he said abruptly. ‘I’ve had enough of you lot. I’m off. If you’re hungry, turn left out of the car park and there’s a café just down the road. Proper coffee. None of your gnat’s piss. See you back at the house.’

  He hoofed away inland, diagonally across the slope in the direction of the car park.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she shouted after him. ‘I need to know in case you don’t come back and I have to send the old bill out to search for your body. Are you going to see a man about a dog?’

  He turned, shouted back, the wind trying to snatch away his words. ‘Not a dog. I’m going bird-watching.’ He waved the back of his hand dismissively and headed off over the fields at a cracking speed.

  ‘He’s given us the slip again,’ said Tom. His face had reverted to its normal shade of pale now. ‘He’s led us on a merry song and dance up and down the cliffs and tired us out with his mushrooms and now he’s disappeared. Anyway, do you think that was a sort of confession?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Bird-watching. A bad joke. He was telling you he’s going to meet a woman.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Men sometimes ask to be found out,’ he said undeterred. ‘Usually when they get fed up with the other woman because she wants more commitment. That’s when they need a get-out, so they start dropping huge hints, hoping to be found out by their wives. And possibly daughters.’

  She didn’t respond.

  ‘So what do you think he’s going to do?’ Tom needled.

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Have a guess.’

  She stuck her hands in her pockets, put her head on one side, glanced at Tom; he wasn’t what you would call good-looking, but he was quite attractive in an unconventional sort of way, now that he was more angular.

  ‘Well, he probably was telling the truth in a funny kind of way,’ she said. ‘Because he does sometimes, tell the truth. Just not all of the truth. So maybe he is heading to a bird-watching place, a reserve or something like that. Although God only knows what he is going to do when he gets there.’

  ‘Maybe we should try and follow him and find out?’

  She hesitated. ‘Why?’

  ‘Why not? It could be fun. Come on. Let’s find out what he’s really up to.’

  She glanced over Tom’s shoulder to the ocean, saw the distant predatory form of The Inquisitor chasing through the waves and felt a twinge of fear for Jim.

  ‘Okay, but we’ll have to move quickly; otherwise we’ll lose track of him.’

  They raced down the hill, a tailwind harrying them along now. She pushed her arms down straight and held her hands out horizontally to the ground, gliding effortlessly, feet hardly touching the ground, floating over red clover, white clover, ragged robin, heart’s ease. ‘The prevailing winds,’ she shouted, ‘are carrying me away. I’m flying.’

  ‘What makes you so sure that you won’t turn out like your dad?’

  ‘Half of my DNA may come from him, but I reckon all his genes are recessive. That’s why I don’t look anything like him.’

  She tried without success to barge Tom and knock him over. He stuck his foot out to trip her up. She jumped over his trainer, escaped, running down the hill laughing, just in time to catch sight of the roof of the Renault as it slid along the hedgerow and sped down the road.

  ‘He’s travelling south,’ she shouted.

  ‘We’ll have to see if we can work out where he’s heading,’ said Tom.

  They sat in the car with the map spread out between them.

  ‘I wouldn’t know where to start,’ said Tom. ‘You’ll have to make an educated guess.’

  She pondered for a second, pictured The Inquisitor drawn away by Jim’s mushroom-picking escapade to the northwest of the island.

  ‘This is the way I see it. Jim’s going to a bird reserve. Probably somewhere to the southeast, and I would imagine it’s a place I will recognize, somewhere we went to together when I was young, because he seems to be revisiting old haunts. So we have to look for one of those bird symbols somewhere on the other side of the island in a place that sounds familiar to me.’

  ‘Good deduction.’

  ‘Elementary, my dear Watson.’

  She studied the map through the shimmer of her eyelashes and felt light-headed: contour lines, roads and grid marks twirled, kaleidoscope patterns formed in front of her face and dropped like dust on the paper, the day trips of childhood summers danced across the map’s creases. And suddenly she realized everything was a bluff for Jim, nothing was what it appeared to be, even their bloody summer holidays. She felt a fermenting anger in her stomach, swallowed it down and told herself to concentrate; she searched the map coldly this time, a geomancer reading the landscape, ruling out various places because they were too close or because they didn’t ring any bells. Something clicked.

  ‘I know that beach.’ She prodded the map. ‘Waulkmill Bay. There’s a bird reserve there. That’s the one, I’m sure. Jim used to take us there to look for mussels. I still have a scar on my knee from tripping on the rocks because we had to scramble back when Liz pointed out the tide was coming in.’

  The corners of Tom’s mouth sagged. ‘God, I nearly got more than a scarred knee out there on the cliff face just now. I thought at one point the wind was trying to rip me away from the rock. Jim is a bit…’ he started to say.

  ‘I did warn you,’ she shouted. ‘Anyway you’re eighteen. You are an adult. You didn’t have to follow him over the edge of a cliff in a force nine gale. It was your stupid choice.’ She reached for the car door, about to flounce away and tramp off over the cliffs, when she caught sight of herself in the wing mirror, realized she was on the verge of acting like a nutter. Like her dad. She fastened her seat belt.

  ‘Why are you getting angry with me?’ Tom asked.

  She couldn’t answer. She had no idea. She saw herself momentarily through his eyes: Sam Coyle, a bar-brawler in a pub called Emotion, flinging random punches at no apparent target before making a dive for the saloon door and legging it off into the night. She let her temper subside and fizzle out. Smiled sheepishly.

  The wind dropped as they drove and was almost non-existent by the time they reached Waulkmill Bay. They crawled around the tyre-rutted car park of the bird reserve a couple of times, but there was no trace of the Renault or of Jim. She was beginning to think her instincts were wrong, she couldn’t read the signs after all. They agreed they had better give up the chase, call it a day, and head back to Nethergate. Driving along the main road, it was Tom who spotted the Renault parked outside an ugly breeze-block building, a tacky reproduction of a crofter’s cottage that had ended up looking like a public toilet. A salt-rusted board by the road clanked in the breeze: the Oyster Catcher Café.

  ‘That was where we used to go for tea after we’d collected the mussels.’ She yelled with the relief of being right after all. ‘Do you think he would have heard the Cortina go past?’

  ‘Doubt it. The café’s too far from the road. What shall we do then? Turn around and drive back to the café?’

  ‘No.’ She wrestled frantically with the folds of the map. ‘Turn up here. Left. Park there, behind that hedge.’

  They pulled in at the side of the road by a stile and a footpath, hidden from sight by a stubby hawthorn.

  Standing by the car, debating what to do next, she felt uneasy. She scanned the hill ridge behind, searching for the brief flare of a match, the warning cry of a crow. Nothing. It must have been the breeze. She was imagining things; Jim had lured the Watcher out on the seas beyond Marwick Head, shaken the shadows.

  ‘Perhaps we should run back to the café and look inside,’ Tom said. ‘We can peer in through the windows.’

  ‘What if he spots us?’

  ‘We’ll just say we were driving past, saw the Renault and thought we’d take a peek in to see if he was there because we fancied joining him for a cake
and a cuppa. Okay, let’s get moving,’ he said. Taking charge. Enjoying the chase. ‘Zero hour. We’re going over, men.’ He set off down the road at an officer-like clip before she had time to object.

  She caught up with him at the café car park, crouching behind a mud-splattered Land Rover.

  ‘Down,’ Tom hissed. ‘You might be seen. We have to rethink,’ he added as she squatted next to him. ‘The windows are too high to look in.’

  She stuck her head up above the bonnet of the Land Rover, took in the narrow windows pushed up against the eaves.

  ‘You could hold on to a windowsill and pull yourself up,’ she said. ‘If we go round the back, no one will be able to see us.’

  They trampled through the nettles, inspecting the windows.

  ‘See if you can lift your head above the ledge.’

  He stretched, clutched on to the windowsill, hauled himself up, pushing his feet against the wall for leverage, momentarily raising his chin above the sill before dropping back to the ground.

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘Jim. He’s with a woman.’ He sounded smug. ‘They are sitting alone at a table in the corner talking.’

  ‘What did she look like?’

  ‘Late twenties, I would guess. Long blonde hair. It’s hard to see clearly through the net curtains.’

  ‘You’re making it up.’

  ‘I’m not. It’s what I saw.’

  ‘I have to look.’

  ‘You’ll never reach up there.’

  She cast around for a solid object to stand on, an old milk crate perhaps, but couldn’t locate anything that would hold her weight.

  ‘You’ll have to lift me. I can sit on your shoulders.’

  Tom crouched down while she clambered on; he swayed and grunted with the effort as he stood up, staggered the few steps to the window. She steadied herself by holding on to the sill as she peeked through the mucky netting. The interior of the café was the same as it had been eight years before: flustered teenage girls in too-tight black skirts, three-tiered cake-stands, dour couples in drab hiking gear scouring the room irritably to see if their food was on its way. Jim was sitting in a corner, leaning in close to a woman with straggly dirty-blonde hair. She couldn’t quite make sense of it all. She blinked and the scene shimmered and danced, everything solid seemed to melt into air and just for that moment she doubted her own existence; her whole life was a cover. She was the shadow, a figment of Jim’s imagination, conjured up to provide a bit of depth to his fake backstory and the true reality, the solid Jim and the relationship that meant something to him were there in front of her eyes, on the other side of the window.