I'll Keep You Safe

by Peter May

  From the main thoroughfare transecting the cemetery from east to west, they had a spectacular view out across the west side of Paris, towards the Seine and the Eiffel Tower. A view to die for.

  Niamh and Donald had not spoken much since his arrival at the hotel. He had waited for her downstairs, booking their flights back to the island on his phone, while she showered and changed. And then in the taxi neither of them had felt inclined to talk. Her phone call to him in the middle of the night two days before had been traumatic enough. And Donald was typical of the post-war Scottish male. He would never show his emotions. Whatever he felt would be held inside him like a clenched fist, and prised free only with acute embarrassment.

  Now he said, “How are you holding up?”

  She shrugged. “As you see.”

  He nodded. “Mum and Dad are pretty devastated.” She turned to look at him. There was an odd anger, somehow, behind his words. Then he said, “I’m so sorry, Niamh, that you’re having to go through all this. It doesn’t seem fair.”

  “Nothing fair about death,” she said. “Not much fair in life, either. We live it in the certainty that it will end. Just not how or where.” She paused. “Ruairidh certainly never expected it to be here. Or now.”

  They walked down the hill in silence for several minutes, before he said, “I keep thinking about that poor girl in the car with him.”

  Niamh turned, surprised. “Really? Maybe it’s bad of me. I haven’t given her a single thought.”

  Donald said, “Do you really think he was having an affair with her?”

  “I don’t know what to think, Donald. I wouldn’t have believed it of him. But the evidence is pretty damning. I’m just wondering if I’m ever going to be able to forgive him.”

  He nodded gravely. “I can understand that.” They were almost at the big stone-pillared gates when he said, “For what it’s worth, I don’t believe it for a minute.”

  As they passed from the place of the dead, back to the city of the living, Niamh glanced up at the inscription engraved on the stone pillar. She read it aloud, as she thought it pronounced. “Spes illorum immortalitate plena est.” And turned to Donald. “You studied Latin, didn’t you? What does it mean?”

  “Their hope is full of immortality,” he said.

  And Niamh thought how all her hopes had died along with Ruairidh. Immortality was an illusion.

  Lacroux Frères, Marbriers Funéraires, stood opposite the walls of the cemetery, in the Boulevard de Ménilmontant. A classical stone façade with a modern glass frontage. Green neon lettering above the door read Assistance Décès, which Donald translated for Niamh as Help with Death.

  “It’s not death I need help with, it’s life,” she said.

  The funeral director was a small, wizened man whose bald pate was fringed with dyed black hair. His black moustache might well have been dyed, too. He wore a dark suit and an air of indifference. Death was his business. The currency of his daily life. And Niamh supposed you would have to build some kind of wall between the two, if only to protect yourself.

  He examined her paperwork closely and nodded. “Mmmm, yes,” he said in English. “You have been expected.” He led them through a showroom of headstones and wreaths, of plastic flowers and urns, to an office in the back. He had yet more paperwork. This time for her to sign. She barely paused to glance at it all before committing her signature and date to the foot of the final page. Whatever it meant was of no consequence to her.

  An assistant came in with a small box of polished wood and set it on the director’s desk. It was about two feet long, twelve inches wide, and perhaps twelve deep. Niamh looked at it, perplexed, then at the funereal face of the director. He said, “In cases like yours, we usually use this kind of box. It is favoured by parents who wish to bury a stillborn child. What remained of your husband after the explosion has been vacuum-packed in heat-sealed plastic pouches. The box itself is sealed and leakproof.” He lifted it to place inside a brown cardboard box, which his assistant closed and bound with plastic shipping straps.

  Niamh’s mouth was dry, unable to form words, even had she been able to compose them. She stared at the box on the table in front of her. This was the reality. All that was left of Ruairidh after the explosion. She’d had no idea what to expect, but it had not been this.

  The funeral director slipped the paperwork into a clear plastic pouch which he taped to the outside of the box. “Everything you will need for customs and airline security,” he said. His tone was flat, his face expressionless. And Niamh wanted to shout at him. To scream at him, “This is my husband we’re talking about! My Ruairidh. A living, loving sentient human being.” But all that would come were the tears that filled her eyes, and she wondered when they would ever stop.

  She felt Donald take her hand and give it the gentlest squeeze.

  The box sat between them in the back seat of the taxi, like the ghost of her dead husband. The remains of the biggest part of her life lay inside it, all that there was to take home with her to put in the ground. Donald stared silently from the window, and it was impossible to know what he was thinking, or feeling. Niamh turned her head to gaze sightlessly out of the other side of the car as the city spooled past in a grey blur.

  All she wanted to do was curl up and die.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The sense of returning home had never been so bittersweet. As the 58-seater Saab 2000 banked beneath the cloud that lay low across the island, Niamh saw the old peat cuttings that scarred the moor, and the settlements that clung to the north side of Broad Bay—Tong and Back. Then as it banked again, the view south across the causeway at Sandwick to the Beasts of Holm. After twenty-four sleepless hours since collecting the box from the undertaker at Père Lachaise, the relief at being back was very nearly overwhelming. But only a part of her had returned from Paris, and she knew she would never feel complete again.

  Donald had accompanied her on the journey, but apart from transactional exchanges had kept his own counsel. He sat beside her now in morose silence, his big hands folded together in his lap. She glanced at him and wondered what he was thinking. What he really felt. If he blamed her. As she was sure his parents would. And yet, since his arrival in Paris, he had offered her nothing but comfort. In his own quiet way. Someone less like Ruairidh would be hard to imagine, but she had been grateful for his company.

  The airport was less busy on a Sunday. Not too long ago there had been no Sunday flights. Or ferries. She would have had to wait to bring Ruairidh home on the Monday morning, along with the Sunday papers.

  The familiar blast of soft Hebridean air greeted her as she stepped down on to the runway, the smell of the sea never too far away. A glance across the airfield revealed a windsock at full stretch, inflated by the strong breeze that blew straight in off the moor from the west. Beyond reflections on tall windows that overlooked the apron, she saw pale anxious faces peering out from inside the terminal.

  In the arrivals hall, curious eyes watched from a respectful distance as Niamh’s mother held her in a tearful embrace. There would not be, she knew, a single soul on the island who was not aware of what had happened in Paris. She knew, too, that her mother’s tears were for her, and not for Ruairidh. Oddly, her own eyes remained stubbornly dry.

  Donald and her father shook hands awkwardly. Then as Niamh and her mother drew apart Donald said, “Do you need a hand with . . .” His voice tailed off, and he found himself unable to finish the sentence.

  Niamh shook her head vigorously. “No, it’s okay, Donald. Thank you so much for everything. I don’t know how I’d have got through this without you.” He blushed with embarrassment and shuffled uneasily. “I’ll come and see your folks tomorrow to discuss . . .” It was Niamh’s turn to find it hard to finish. She searched for a concluding word. “Everything.”

  He nodded, leaning past them to retrieve his overnight bag from the carousel. “Mrs. Murray. Mr. Murray.” He presented them an uncomfortable smile, then headed off towards the
exit where a friend was waiting to take him to Balanish.

  Niamh’s mother said, “What’s happened about the . . .” Another sentence that was less than easy to finish. She composed herself. “About Ruairidh.”

  Right on cue the brown cardboard box with its shipping straps slipped through the plastic flaps from the loading bay beyond, and Mrs. Murray followed her daughter’s eyes. Her gasp was involuntary, and her hand flew to her mouth. Whatever she felt about Ruairidh, nothing had prepared her for the sight of that box. And Niamh remembered the first time that Ruairidh had come into her life.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I was just seven years old when I had my first encounter with death, and Ruairidh Macfarlane saved my life.

  I was born three years before Margaret Thatcher became prime minister, and most of my growing up was done during the Eighties when she ruled our country with an iron fist in a velvet glove. I didn’t know much about politics then. I was too young. But I learned to associate the name of Thatcher with economic depression and unemployment, growing up as I did in a community where barely a single soul had voted for her and unemployment was rife.

  The population of Balanish was, and is, only a few hundred. When I was still a child most of our neighbours were crofters. They kept sheep on land divided into narrow strips, and grew mostly potatoes and root vegetables. There were a few fishermen, but even then there was no serious fishing being done from the west coast. A few folk worked in the mill at Carloway, and others had jobs with the council, like my dad, and travelled to and from Stornoway on a daily basis. Others were unemployed, and only the money from the buroo and subsistence crofting kept them going until better times.

  I had, when I look back on it now, the best childhood I could have hoped for. Idyllic in many ways. I had two older brothers, Anndra and Uilleam. Anndra was the middle child. And maybe because the first child gets all the attention, and the girl gets all the adoration, he developed a mischievous streak. He knew I hated spiders, and I would find them everywhere. In my school bag, in my pockets, even in my bed. It gave him endless amusement.

  But he and Uilleam were also ultra-protective. The merest hint of a threat to me, no matter who from, and they would rally round to stand resolute in my defence. Family came first. Tormenting Niamh second.

  Sometimes, to escape their mischief, I would hide in the peat stack. My father was meticulous in the building of our stack. Long and beautifully rounded, a perfect herringbone construction to maximise drainage. But once it was built, it was the boys who were sent out to bring in the peats for the fire. And when I became old enough the peat-fetching was delegated to me. At an early age, I learned how to hollow out one end of it, hiding the peats I removed in the old blackhouse, and making myself a wee den inside that I could conceal by stuffing peats in the hole to block it. It was my secret place, though it had always disappeared by the end of the winter.

  We had perfect freedom in those days to wander wherever the mood took us. As long as we were home in time for meals. Looking back, it seems the world was a safer place then. I used to cycle three miles or more to the next village along the coast to play with Seonag. I went part of the way on the main road, and then over a rough dirt track that wound its way around the hills beyond the Doune Braes Hotel. And I went in all weathers.

  It’s a funny thing. Most folk on the mainland are obsessed by the weather. Because they get a fair amount of the good stuff, they don’t take it well when it turns bad. On the island, the weather’s almost always bad, and changes so fast that you don’t really notice it. It just is.

  I met Seonag on our first day at primary school and we sort of clicked. Her folks had a croft that ran right down to the shore, with a stunning view across East Loch Roag to Great Bernera. Her father owned a mobile shop, and he used to travel up and down all the villages on the west coast selling processed meats and root vegetables, fruit in season, and tinned goods and bread and sweeties for the kids. He also did some weaving, and we used to hear his old Hattersley clacking away in the shed at the top of the croft.

  When Seonag came to our place we played in a small stone outbuilding, or bothag as we called it in Gaelic. Houses was the name of the game we indulged in there, furnishing it like a big doll’s house that we could crawl in and out of, dragging our dollies with us, teaching them how to sit up straight and eat nicely.

  It was where my father kept his tools, and we had to drag them all out to make space for our domestic fantasy. He would get mad at us and tell us to go amuse ourselves elsewhere. Which is when we’d head off to play down by the shore. I couldn’t count the hours we spent down there trying to catch crabs in the pools left by the outgoing tide, or just sitting on the rocks with the stink of the kelp in our nostrils, watching the boats coming in and out of the harbour across the bay.

  There was an old walled cemetery on the shore, by the foot of our croft, that hadn’t been used for a hundred years or more. But it always reduced us to silence when we would pass by it, knowing that the spirits of the dead were kept somewhere inside it, behind its moss-smothered walls. I remember Seonag saying to me once in a hushed voice, “Will they bury us in there when it’s our turn to die?” I particularly remember that phrase—our turn to die. Somehow I’d never thought of it like that before, and maybe it was the first time I had ever fully understood that one day I, too, would die.

  “Don’t be silly,” I told her, a little shocked and trying to recover myself. “They don’t bury folk in there any more.” I remembered my grampa telling me that it was an accidental cemetery. In the old days they took the bodies by boat across the water to a burial ground on Little Bernera. But when the weather was too bad, they buried them right there, a stone’s throw from the slipway.

  “Where will we be buried, then?”

  “Dalmore,” I said.

  “On the beach?” Seonag was amazed.

  “Don’t be daft! There’s a cemetery on the machair above the beach. That’s where everyone goes now.” Years later I always thought of Dalmore as being the valley of death. It was a place that took on a significance in my life that I could never have guessed at then.

  Sundays were my least favourite day of the week. None of us was allowed out to play. I had friends whose parents made them sit in and read the bible all day, and although my folks were never that religious, we still got dragged off to midday service at the Free Church of Scotland. It sat right next door to the Church of Scotland. I never knew the difference then, and still don’t today. Except that they present a shining example of how folk can never agree on anything. Even God.

  You might think that with two churches Balanish was a big place. It wasn’t. You could walk from one end of it to the other in a few minutes. Although folk who lived a mile or two out along the road in either direction would tell you that they were balaniseachs too. There was a primary school with two teachers, and when you completed your seventh year you went to Shawbost for the first two years of secondary. Then on to Stornoway. Either the Nicolson or Lews Castle. Right next door stood a community hall that was opened by Donnie “Dotaman” Macleod, who was a kind of Gaelic TV celebrity and singer. Runrig, the Celtic rock band, played there once. I can remember sitting in class hearing them practise on the Friday afternoon before the concert that night.

  There wasn’t much to do in the evenings. The older kids ran a youth club in the hall, and there were usually discos on the Friday night, but me and Seonag were too young for that then. Too young, too, for the pleasures of cigarettes and alcohol enjoyed by village teenagers on wet, windy, winter nights huddled under the bridge, or in the bus shelter, smoking and drinking vodka straight from the bottle. We were dead jealous, and wishing away our lives till we were old enough to join them. Such were the heights of our childhood ambitions.

  My favourite person when I was seven was my grampa. He was my dad’s dad, but I never knew my dad’s mother. She died before I was born. Grampa lived with us in the croft house. Or should I say, we lived with him. It was his ho
use. His croft. Anndra and Uilleam shared a bed, and I slept on the settee in the front room. Grampa had his own room at the back. He had something about him, that old man. He knew stuff. About the world. And about people. He’d spent years at sea and was hard as nails. Even in his seventies. No man in his right mind would pick a fight with him, and yet I never heard him utter a word in anger, or say a bad thing about anyone.

  I spent many a long hour sitting with him when he was weaving in the old blackhouse. I’d watch his hands, clasped together in front of him as if in prayer, as he worked the treadles with his feet. Big-knuckled hands spattered brown with age, and veins that stood out on them like ropes. And he would tell me tales of places I had never heard of, with exotic and sometimes daft-sounding names. Hong Kong. Shanghai. Abidjan. Dakar. “Never judge a man,” he used to say to me, “by the thickness of his wallet, but by the stoutness of his heart.” I had no idea what he meant then. But I do now.

  My mother doted on that man. More than her own father, and maybe even her own husband. I look back sometimes now and wonder, had she known Grampa as a young man would she rather have married him than my dad?

  When family came to stay, which they did quite often in the summer, they would sleep in an old caravan that we kept at the side of the house, lashed down to stop it from blowing away in the south-westerlies.

  It was by the side of the caravan that Anndra found Grampa lying on the path one day. The old man had just returned from his daily walk through the village, and his cloth bunnet and his walking stick were lying on the slabs beside him.

  Anndra came running into the house. “Something’s wrong with Grampa!” We were just gathering to sit down to dinner and so we all ran out on to the path. Immediately he saw his father, my dad turned and pushed me away. “Get back in the house, lassie.” But it was too late. I’d already caught sight of him. Lying in a strangely unnatural position on the path. It was the first time I had seen a dead person, and although I’m sure he was still warm, his blue eyes were wide and staring at the sky, and it was clear that life had left him. It was his body alright, but it wasn’t my grampa lying there. He was already somewhere else.