by Tobias Hill
Are you running? Are you hunting? Are you running are you hunting? Are you?
At Glasgow Central a guard wakes her, his breath smelling of cough linctus. She gets out groggily and stands on the cold platform while the sleeper pulls away. The terminus is empty, the shops shut. Frost shines on the macadam. It is an hour until her connection, from a smaller station across town, and there is no one except her so foolish as to wait or walk at this time of night. She is unpacking her winter coat and gloves when the guard comes shyly back, ushering her into his office for directions and linctus-scented tea. The heat of the fire exhausting and gorgeous, her head aching, the smell of him waking her when it is time to go again.
The local train heads out unlit. Glasgow falls behind her, and with it her last hope of rest, whether she likes it or not: the sky is lightening, and she has never been a heavy sleeper. The tenements give way to hills, the hills in turn falling to lochs. Or not falling, she thinks, falling is wrong. It is not as if the land goes down to the water, but as if the water has risen up the flanks of the hillsides, leaving small towns beached at their summits. And the hills are still utterly black, as if something has torn ragged lengths out of the bottom of the sky.
She is thirty-eight, and she has never been so far north. She has never – she tries to contradict herself – she has never seen Scotland. Only one trip to Edinburgh, six hours in a conference room that might as well have been London. She glances around, as if someone might notice her ignorance, but the only other passenger is an old man sunk deep in sleep. It is her job which has always kept her in London, though the work, she thinks, is not to blame. It is not the work which chose her. But it has been a narrow life.
Oban is the end of the line. She makes her way across platforms, down past the seafront to the quays. The ferries loom overhead. A dozen children loiter by the water, in from the islands for schooling, pallid in the early light, sullenly pointing out the Tiree–Coll service when she asks.
The ferry smells of diesel and tar, salt, fried toast and cigarettes. The odours turn her stomach and leave her famished at the same time. She walks through the lounges and halls until she finds the passengers’ mess, unsteady with the expectation of motion. The menu offers tea and toast, bacon and mushrooms, farls and poached eggs, and she orders it all and carries it through the fixed tables to a window seat. Only when her plate is wiped clean does she look up to find that the ship is moving. Already she has left the mainland behind. Nothing is visible except the barren humpbacks of islets, the bright sky and the sea.
The Gulf felt closer, she thinks. It is a long way to come with so little to hope for or believe in. From her bag she takes Martha’s Eliot, Anneli’s letter, the photograph of John, and two pages printed out in a King’s Cross Internet café. There are few other passengers to disturb her. A family come in to eat, the four of them all dressed in black, as if for a funeral. She listens to them as she reads.
‘Did you remember the cheese and biscuits?’
©Ansel Libera, CNN, 03/10/18, All Rights Reserved.
Mother of the World’s Richest Man?
For years it has been the talking point for every hack and rumourmonger with an interest in money and high society (and that makes all of us): where is the family of John Law? Now the cat would appear to be out of the bagpipe. The family – all one of her – is alive and well on the remote Scottish isle of Coll.
‘Of course I remembered.’
‘Open them, then.’
Throughout his rise and rise, Law has retained an imperious silence on personal issues. What we did know already made good copy. Born in 1984 in a blue-collar sub-city of Glasgow, Law was the only child of a single-parent family, an early school-leaver who spent 18 months in the charge of the Scottish social services.
‘They’re not for you. Get off! And you, you keep your hands where I can see them.’
Well, we know what happened to the only child. But what about the single parent? Where did she go from such humble beginnings?
Meet Crionna Law, factory worker, sole resident of Cornaig Beag, an isolated homestead on the little-known island of Coll.
Her head aches from the too-small print and the smell of frying food. She puts the papers aside, opens the book. Little by little she reads the fine, cold lines.
It is hard for those who live near a Bank
To doubt the security of their money …
They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is will shadow
The man that pretends to be.
She dozes again despite herself, the warmth and motion lulling her into a fitful kind of sleep. Only the shudder of the ferry wakes her. The family has disappeared. Her breakfast is gone too, the formica in front of her wiped down. When she looks out the ferry is already docked, a man in jeans and a red fleece mooring the gangway to bollards. ‘Coll,’ the ship’s tannoy is repeating wearily, as if it has said the same thing too many times before. ‘Last call for Coll,’ and she jumps up too fast, knocking her knee on the table’s edge, crumpling the papers into her bag, running to be gone.
Only the mourners follow her down to the jetty. A battered hearse waits for them, and they get in, still softly arguing, and drive slowly away. There is no harbour, only a single pier at the mouth of a sea loch. The man in the fleece unropes the gangway and stands well back as it is hoisted up, lighting a cigarette. The ferry creaks and groans, the sound of it like some sea creature amplified to colossal volume.
She turns away from the spectacle of departure. Inland the hearse crawls up the one road, past the two outbuildings, the hangar of a factory, its sign broadside, COLL SEA PRODUCT PROCESSING. It is low tide, and the loch is exposed, rocky and treacherous. Goats graze along the water’s edge. Otherwise the island is featureless, the wind eroding it down to nothing, the cold so keen and the light so bright they hurt.
She closes her eyes against them. The image of John is with her, but she remembers him only as she last saw him, and she pushes the memory away.
‘Can I help you?’
She opens her eyes. The man in the fleece is beside her, hatchet-faced, cigarette cupped in one hand, the other thrust into his pocket. ‘Can I help you?’ he says again, decorous as a shopkeeper.
‘Thanks. I was – wait –’ She unzips the bag. The papers flutter madly as she searches through them.
‘If you’re here for the MacKinnons you’ll need to hurry.’ He looks her over tentatively. ‘You’ll want to change, no doubt. If you walk you’ll be there –’
‘I’m not here for the funeral.’
‘No,’ he says, as if coming to an agreement.
‘I was looking for a place called Cornaig Beag.’ As she says it the wind tears at the papers. She catches at the photograph. Anneli’s letter wheels out of her grasp, across the kelpy rocks to the open sea. The ferryman watches it go.
‘You won’t be needing that, I hope.’
She shades her eyes. The letter is still visible, gull-white, riding the waves. ‘Probably not,’ she says, and it is true, though when she laughs it is unsteadily, her head going light with hilarity.
‘The tide’s turned, you might be lucky. I’ll keep an eye out for it. Where are you – ?’
‘No,’ she says; too quickly, so that he turns back to her. She folds the photograph over in her hands. ‘I really don’t need it. Thanks anyway.’
‘Cornaig Beag,’ he says, and looks down thoughtfully at the cigarette in his hand. The wind has whittled it away to ash, and he raises one foot, putting it out on his boot, placing the dead end in his jacket pocket, as carefully as if it were money.
‘Is it far?’
He shrugs. ‘Not by car. But you’ll be on foot?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘A fair walk, then.’
‘Which way – ?’
‘Go on through Arinagour. Take the right roa
d out of town. Half a mile and right again. Keep going and you’ll come to it.’
‘Thanks.’ She picks up the bag, folds the remaining papers in. She has already started down the jetty when he calls her back.
‘You’re not the first.’
‘Not the first what?’
‘Not the first,’ he says, ‘coming asking for Cornaig Beag.’
She knows it before he finishes, her heart sinking with the understanding, as if it has been pulled under. He puts his head down, walks up beside her. ‘Come on. I’ll drive you.’
‘No, there’s no need –’ she begins, and then stops herself. She is tired, her leg aches where she knocked it against the mess-room table. He makes a sound in his throat, ah, and looks back at the ship as it rounds the headland. She wonders if the questions he asks will be worth the answers he gives.
His name is Michael Gilchrist. His truck is unnaturally clean, as if he spends too much time on it. He talks as he drives, quietly, saying next to nothing. The funeral is the second this year. There hasn’t been snow for a week. The ferries call more often now, with the causeway over to Tiree. He sounds, Anna thinks, like a man who talks to himself often, and is not overly concerned by the fact. He reminds her of the waitress on Dauphin Island. The same voice, mild and keen, though less jovial. The eyes cautious and curious. The same islandness.
The landscape outside has changed. Where the east side of Coll was bare, the hillsides little more than rock, here there are tended fields under pocked snow, rising to the west. Sand settled by centuries of grass, the sheep carving the higher dunes into tortuous pyramids.
It reminds her of something too, not a place but a time. The days just after the end of Soft Gold. There is the same sense that money means less, that it has lifted, like weather.
‘How long will you be staying?’
‘I’m not sure yet. Can I ask you something?’
He cracks a smile. ‘You can always ask.’
‘How many people are there on the island?’
‘Two hundred. More down on Tiree. One priest, no bank, no doctor, and no police.’
‘You must know everyone.’
‘Some better than others. Ask me another.’
‘Do you ever see the Northern Lights?’
‘Here?’ He glances warily across at her. ‘Why?’
‘I’m just interested.’
He looks back at the road. Three cows lumber across the single lane. Michael slows, accelerates around them. ‘If that’s what you’re looking for, you’ve come to the wrong place.’
‘Why?’
‘Fir Chlis,’ he says, as if to himself, and then to her, ‘The Nimble Men. The Merry Dancers, people used to call them, Cnoc-na-piobaireached. If it’s them you’re after you should’ve gone further north.’
‘Are you telling me …’ she says, ‘hold on. Are you saying you never get them here?’
‘No.’ He changes up a gear, quiet for a moment, as if his mind is somewhere else. ‘No, I didn’t say that. This time of year, on a clear night, you might see something. But you’d have to be lucky. You might have a cold wait. It’s only once in years we get the real thing. The whole song and dance.’
For a while they drive in silence again. Outside the dunes and marram grass give way to stern outcrops of rock. The few houses they pass are less often whitewashed than those in Arinagour; more ramshackle, easier to miss. The homes of people, Anna thinks, who wish to keep themselves to themselves.
She sits back, his voice running over in her mind. The conversation nags at her, as if she has missed the essence of it. ‘So I’m not the first.’
‘Not the first,’ he nods. ‘Not the second either. We had the constable over from Oban, and a week after that two suits from the government. Asking questions. None of them stayed for long.’
‘Did they find what they were looking for?’
‘I wouldn’t have said so.’
‘What were they looking for?’ she asks, and Michael Gilchrist laughs shortly and pulls off the road. Cuts the engine, sets the brake.
‘I’ll tell you one thing, they weren’t here for the Northern Lights. We’re here,’ he says, before she can ask, and she turns and looks out at Cornaig Beag.
It is not so much a house as a well-kept accretion of spare parts. Two trailer homes sit up on pilings, boarded together, the wheels planked off, an extension of clapboard and field-stone adjoining the main structure at an angle. Smoke rises from a red stovepipe. A low-lying privet hedge separates the front yard from the road. Rose stumps, bound in straw, show dark through the hard snow. To one side a hearse is parked, paint peeling from its rusted fixtures, to the other a geodesic greenhouse, the panels fogged, out of place in its modernity. Beyond the house a stand of trees, a slope of land.
‘Were you hoping for more?’
‘Not really.’ She looks back to find him watching her.
‘You should’ve brushed up on your Gaelic. You would’ve known that Beag is small.’
Why would I have expected more, she almost asks; and stops herself. Something clicks inside her, a fractional mental adjustment. Ask me another. She almost missed it. She looks back at the house, the hearse beside it, the trees beyond.
‘Your funerals don’t take long.’
‘Oh, they do. That’s Ian’s old number. He’ll be out in the new one for a few hours yet.’
‘I thought she lived alone.’
‘Not for a while now. Looks like she’s in. After you?’
They get out together. There is no gate, the hedge so low and broken that Michael simply steps over it. Anna hangs back as he rings at the doorbell and waits. After a while a light comes on and the door opens.
‘Michael. What are you doing here?’
‘I’ve brought you a visitor.’
They both turn to look at her. The woman is a head taller than the ferryman. She wears an apron over sweater and slacks. In one hand she holds the door, in the other a short, dull knife. The light falls clear into her face. ‘Who are you?’
‘Anna Moore.’
‘Who’s Anna Moore, when she’s at home?’
Kennedy eyes. She looks away, back at the car, the road beyond. All this way, she thinks, to find another person angry, dishonest, terrified.
‘What’s that?’
‘I used to work for the Revenue.’
‘What’s that to do with me? I pay my taxes.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m not here for you.’
‘What did you say?’
She looks back. ‘I’m not here for you. I’ve come for John,’ she says. Her voice low so it will not break. She says, ‘I’ve come to see your son.’
A fire burns behind the stove-glass. The room is all velvet and oak. A mantel clock of ormolu, a driftwood carving of a man singing or calling, arms outstretched. In one corner an easel sits, a canvas cloth hung over it. There is a smell of peat and turpentine, sweet and comforting, and no clue to the scene outside except the motion of the wind as it butts at the thin walls.
Sit, Crionna says, sit, and they do while she works around them, carrying the easel through into the next room, putting a kettle on in the galley kitchen. Michael shifts uneasily, less comfortable, now they are here, than Anna feels herself. The heat has made her drowsy, and when Crionna sets the tea down she has to blink herself awake.
‘How are the children, Michael?’
‘Fine. We put them on the boat this morning. Off to Oban for the week.’
‘You must miss them.’
‘Oh well, we do. Laurie misses them.’
‘And work?’
‘The same.’
‘Busy, I should think,’ Crionna says, and pours. Two cups of fine china. ‘Shouldn’t you be getting back?’
‘I should.’ He stands with reluctant relief, turning to Anna, formal again. ‘I hope you’ll have a good stay on Coll. Goodbye, then. Goodbye, Crionna.’
He closes the door carefully behind him, as if not to wake someone. In the quiet she listens t
o the sound of his car turning, the voices of sheep, the tick of the clock on the mantelpiece.
‘Milk?’ Crionna says, and Anna looks back into the Cryptographer’s eyes.
‘A little, thanks.’
‘So, you’ve met Michael.’
‘He seems nice. He drove me up from the ferry.’
‘A man with too much time on his hands.’
‘He knows John, doesn’t he?’
‘Yes, they’ve been friends for years. You look tired.’ She settles back into the empty seat. ‘Did you come far?’
‘Just from London.’
‘London.’ She drinks, holding the small cup in both hands. To Anna she looks old, though her movements are those of a younger woman. Clean and sure. ‘I went there once. I didn’t like it very much.’
‘It’s where I’ve always lived.’
‘Well, I’ve tried both. I grew up in Glasgow, where John was born. My grandfather left me land here twenty-seven years ago. I haven’t been back since.’
‘He is your son, then,’ she says, and Crionna lets out her breath, Tts.
‘I never said he wasn’t. You know him, what do you think? I wouldn’t deny the fact. What I tell them now is what I’ve always told them, that it’s no one’s business but mine and his. They come up here in their shiny government cars and ask me and I say yes and goodbye, and off they go again. Not quite as shiny and not much the wiser.’
‘Michael said they were up here recently.’
‘Oh, they were. Asking all kinds of people all kinds of questions. Getting no kind of answers at all.’ She cracks a smile. ‘People here aren’t too fond of questions.’
She gets out the photograph. It is seamed now, John’s face crumpled in transit. His mother takes it and tuts again. ‘I took this. Did you know that?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘No, well, you wouldn’t. I used to do photography, but the developing took up too much space. These days I paint instead. I don’t know how they got hold of this one. I’d complain if I didn’t think it was too late.’