The Blackhouse l-1

by Peter May

  Seonaidh was there, and Iain, and some other boys I knew from school. I was seriously depressed by now, and intent only on getting drunk. I began pouring beer down my throat like there was no tomorrow. Of course, they had heard that Artair and I were going out to the rock. Word, in Ness, spreads like fire on a dry peat moor, fanned by the winds of speculation and rumour.

  ‘You lucky bastard,’ Seonaidh said. ‘My dad was trying to get me on the trip this year.’

  ‘I’ll swap you.’

  Seonaidh pulled a face. ‘Aye, right.’ Naturally, he thought I was joking. I could have made a necklace from the eye teeth everyone there that night would have given to take my place on the team. The irony was, they could have had it for nothing. Any one of them. Of course, I couldn’t tell them that. They would never have taken me seriously or, if they had, they’d have thought I was insane. As it was, my lack of enthusiasm seemed to signal to them that I was merely playing it cool. Their jealousy was hard to take. And so I just drank. And drank.

  I didn’t hear Angel coming in. He was older than us, and he’d been drinking in the bothan most of the night. He’d brought out some beers in return for a joint. ‘Well, well, if it isn’t orphan boy,’ he said when he saw me. His face was round and yellow in the light of the tilley lamp and floated through the dark of the shed like some luminous balloon. ‘You’d better get as much drink down you as you can, son, ’cos you’ll get none out on An Sgeir. Gigs is unre-fucking-lenting about that. No alcohol on the rock. Smuggle out so much as a dram and he’ll throw you off the fucking cliff.’ Someone handed him a rolled-up joint and he lit it, pulling the smoke deep into his lungs and holding it there. When, finally, he blew it out he said, ‘You know I’m the cook this year?’ I didn’t. I knew he’d been out before, and that his father, Murdo Dubh, had been the cook for years. But I also knew that his father had been killed in an accident on a trawler during a stormy February that year. I suppose, if I’d thought about it, it would have been logical for Angel to follow in his father’s footsteps. It’s what men in Ness had done for generations. ‘Don’t worry,’ Angel said, ‘I’ll make sure you get your fair share of earywigs in your bread.’

  After he’d gone, another joint was lit and handed around. By now, I was feeling sick, and after a couple of drags, the suffocating claustrophobia of the shed began spinning my world around and around. ‘I’ve got to go.’ I pushed out of the door into the cold night air and immediately threw up in the yard. I leaned against the wall, pressing my face against the cool stone, wondering how on earth I was going to get myself home.

  The world seemed to pass me by in a blur. I have no idea how I even managed to get as far as the Crobost road. The lights of a large vehicle caught me full-beam, and I froze like a rabbit, wobbling on the verge until it passed with a whump of air that knocked me over into the ditch. It might not have rained in weeks, but the residual water held by the peat still drained in a thick, brown sludge into the bottom of the ditch. It covered me like slurry, clinging to my clothes, running down my face. I gasped and cursed and pulled myself out to roll over on to the spiny verge. I lay there for what seemed like hours, although it was probably only minutes. But it was long enough for that cold edge on the fresh north wind to chill me through. I struggled on to my hands and knees, teeth chattering now, and looked up as another vehicle came down the road towards me, illuminating my misery in the glare of its lights. As it approached, I turned my head away and shut my eyes. The car stopped, and I heard a door opening, and then a voice. ‘In the name of God, son, what are you doing there?’ Big hands lifted me almost bodily to my feet, and I found myself looking up into Gigs MacAulay’s frowning countenance. He took his forearm across my face to wipe the mud off on the sleeve of his overalls. ‘Fin Macleod,’ he said, recognizing me finally. He sniffed the alcohol on my breath. ‘For Heaven’s sake, son, you can’t go home in this state!’

  It took me some time to warm up again, huddled on a chair by the peat fire, a blanket over my shoulders, a mug of hot tea cupped in my hands. There was still a tremor ran through me each time I took a sip from it. The mud had dried now and was caked and cracking like shite on my skin and my clothes. God knows what I must have looked like. Gigs had made me leave my trainers at the door, but there was still a trail of dried mud between it and the fire. Gigs sat in his chair on the other side of the hearth and watched me carefully. He smoked an old, blackened pipe, and blue smoke curled from it into the light of the oil lamp on the table. It smelled sweet as a nut, a pitch higher than the toasty scent of the peat. His wife had taken a damp towel to my face and hands before brewing the tea and then, on some unspoken signal, retired to bed.

  ‘Well, Fin,’ Gigs said at last, ‘I hope this is you getting it out of your system before you go out to the rock.’

  ‘I’m not going,’ I said in a voice so small it was little more than a whisper. I was still drunk, I suppose, but the shock of falling in the ditch had sobered me up a little, and the tea was helping, too.

  Gigs did not react. He puffed gently on the stem of his pipe and watched me speculatively. ‘Why not?’

  I have no recollection now of what I said to him that night, how it was that I expressed those feelings of deep, dark dread that the very thought of going out to the rock had aroused in me. I suppose, like everyone else, he must have assumed that it was fear, pure and simple. But while others might have displayed contempt for my cowardice, Gigs appeared to understand in a way that seemed to lift that enormous weight which had been bearing down on me from the moment Artair’s dad had given me the news. He leaned towards me across the fire, holding me steady in the gaze of those Celtic blue eyes of his, his pipe smoking gently in his hand. ‘We are not twelve individuals out there, Fin. We are twelve together. We are a team. Each one of us is reliant on the other and supports the other. It’s hard, aye. It’s fucking hard, boy. And it’s dangerous. I don’t pretend otherwise. And the Lord will test us to the very edge of our endurance. But you’ll be richer for it, and you’ll be truer to yourself. Because you’ll know yourself in a way that you never have before, and maybe never will again. And you’ll feel that connection that we all feel with every one of those men who’ve been out there before us, reaching back through the centuries, joining hands with our ancestors, sleeping in the places they have slept, building cairns by the cairns they have left.’ He took a long pause, sucking on his pipe, allowing the smoke to eddy around his lips and nostrils, rising into the stillness in blue wreaths around his head. ‘Whatever your blackest fear, Fin. Whatever your greatest weakness. These are things you must face up to. Things you must confront, or you’ll spend the rest of your life regretting it.’

  And so with a heart full of dread I went on the trip to An Sgeir that year, although I wish, today, with every fibre of my being that I had not.

  In the days before we left, I kept myself to myself. The wind had swung further round, to the north-east, and a storm that seemed to mark the end of summer hammered the island for two days. Force-ten winds blew the rain in horizontally off the Minch, and the land drank it thirstily. I had not made up with Marsaili after our last exchange in the barn, and I avoided going to Mealanais. I stayed indoors, reading in my room, listening to the rain battering against the windows and the wind lifting tiles on the roof. On the Tuesday night Artair came to the door to say that we were leaving for the rock the next day.

  I couldn’t believe it. ‘But the weather’s coming from the northeast. They always say you can’t land on the rock if there’s any kind of easterly.’

  Artair said, ‘There’s a new front coming in. A north-westerly. Gigs thinks we’ve got a twenty-four-hour window for getting on to the rock. So we go tomorrow night. We’ve to load the trawler at the Port tomorrow afternoon.’ He didn’t seem any happier about it than I was. He sat on the edge of my bed in silence for a long time. Then he said, ‘So you’re going?’

  I couldn’t even bring myself to speak. I acknowledged with a tiny nod of my head.

  ‘
Thanks,’ he said. As if somehow I was doing it for him.

  It took several hours the next day to load the Purple Isle berthed at the breakwater quay at Port of Ness. All the supplies required to maintain twelve men on a rock in the middle of the ocean for a fortnight. There was no natural spring on An Sgeir, so all of our water was taken in old beer casks. We had boxes and boxes of food, two tons of pickling salt in sacks, tools, waterproofs, mattresses to sleep on, a fifteen-foot aerial lashed together to pick up a signal for the radio. And, of course, the peat for the fires that would warm us and feed us. The hard graft involved in passing everything from the quay to the trawler and stowing it in the hold took my mind off our imminent departure. Although the storm had abated, there was still a heavy swell, and the trawler rose and fell against the harbour wall, making the transfer of supplies a difficult and sometimes perilous task. We got soaked, too, as the sea broke again and again over the wall, sending spray cascading down upon us as we worked. The previous day waves had been smashing into the breakwater and exploding fifty feet into the air, sending their spume arcing over the harbour to obliterate it from view at each pulse of the ocean.

  We left on the midnight tide, diesel engines thudding as we slipped out into the bay from the relative shelter of the harbour, facing into the huge swell, waves breaking over the bow to pour in foaming rivers across the deck. It seemed no time at all until the lights of Ness were swallowed by the night as we yawed and pitched into open seas beyond the Butt of Lewis. The last thing to vanish was the comforting flash of the lighthouse on the clifftop at the Butt, and when that was gone there was only the ocean. Untold stormy miles of it. If we missed the rock the next stop would be the Arctic. I gazed out into the blackness in what I can only describe as abject terror. Whatever my greatest fear, I figured I was facing it right now. Gigs tugged on my oilskins and told me to go below. There was a berth reserved for Artair and me and we should get some sleep. The first day and the last on the rock, he said, were always the hardest.

  I don’t know how I slept, squeezed into that narrow berth right up on the port side of the bow, shivering and wet and miserable. But I did. We had crashed through eight hours of mountainous seas to cover fifty miles across some of the most notorious waters in the world, and I had slept through it all. I think it was the change in the pitch of the engines that wakened me. Artair was already scrambling up the ladder to the galley. I wiped the sleep from my eyes and climbed out to drag on my boots and my oilskins, and then follow him up on deck. It was broad daylight, the sky above us torn and shredded by the wind, periodically obscured by the squally showers of fine rain that blew in our faces.

  ‘Jesus,’ I said, ‘what’s that stink?’ It was a high-pitched acrid stench, a porridge of shite and ammonia.

  ‘That’s the guano, orphan boy.’ Angel grinned at me. He actually seemed to be enjoying this. ‘Ten thousand years of accumulated bird shite. Get used to it. You’re going to be living with it for the next two weeks.’

  That was how we knew we were close to the rock. The stink of bird shit. We couldn’t see it yet, but we knew it was there. The Purple Isle had slowed to only a few knots. The swell of the ocean had dropped dramatically, and we were going with it now rather than fighting it.

  ‘There she is!’ someone shouted, and I peered through the mist and rain to catch my first sight of this legendary place. And there she was. Three hundred feet of sheer black cliff streaked with white, rising straight out of the ocean in front of us. Almost in that same moment, as the mist cleared, splinters of sunlight fell through fissures in the cloud, and the glistening rock was thrown into an instant projection of sharply contrasting light and shade. I saw what looked like snow blowing in a steady stream from the peak before I realized that the snowflakes were birds. Fabulous white birds with blue-black wingtips and yellow heads, a wingspan of nearly two metres. Gannets. Thousands of them, filling the sky, turning in the light, riding turbulent currents of air. This was one of the world’s most important surviving gannet colonies, and these extraordinary birds returned in ever-increasing numbers year after year to lay their eggs and raise their chicks in this forbidding place. And that in spite of the annual harvest by the men of Crobost, and the two thousand chicks we were about to take from their nests this year again.

  An Sgeir lay along a line that ran approximately south-east to north-west. The towering spine of the rock dropped from its highest point in the south to a bleached curve of two-hundred-foot cliffs at the north end, like a shoulder set against the prevailing weather of lashing gales and monstrous seas that rose out of the south-west to smash upon its stubborn gneiss. Three promontories on its west side jutted into the ocean, water breaking white and foaming furiously in rings all around them as they dipped down into undersea ravines.

  The nearest rib of rock was called Lighthouse Promontory, because of the automatic lighthouse built at its conjunction with the rest of the island — the highest point of which loomed over us as we approached. Beyond it, the second and longest of the promontories formed an inlet that cut deep into the heart of the island, open to the east, but providing shelter from the west and the north. It was the only place on An Sgeir where it was possible to land our supplies. Here, time and the relentless assault of the elements had carved out caves in the rock so deep that finally they had cut clean through to the sheer cliffs at the far side. It was possible, Gigs said, to paddle through them in a punt, or a rubber dinghy, great natural cathedrals rising forty and fifty feet into blackness, before emerging on the other side of the island. But only ever when the sea was flat calm, which was almost never.

  An Sgeir was barely half a mile long, its vertebral column little more than a hundred yards across. There was no soil here, no grassy banks or level land, no beaches. Just shit-covered rock rising straight out of the sea. I could hardly have imagined anything more inhospitable.

  The skipper steered the Purple Isle gently into the inlet they called Gleann an Uisge Dubh, Black Water Creek, and dropped anchor in the bay, a great rattling of rusted chain as it left its locker. With the cutting of the engines, I became aware for the first time of the noise of the birds, a deafening cacophony of screeching, calling, chattering creatures that filled the air along with the stink of guano. Everywhere you looked, on every ledge and stack and crack in the rock, birds sat in nests or huddled in groups. Gannets and guillemots and kittiwakes and fulmar petrels. The bay around us was alive with young shags, their long, snakelike necks dipping in and out of the water in search of fish. It was extraordinary to think that a place so hostile and exposed could play host to so much life. Gigs slapped my back. ‘Come on, son, we’ve got work to do.’

  A punt was lowered on to the gentle swell, and we began the process of transferring our supplies from boat to rock. I went out with the first load, Gigs gunning the outboard and motoring us in to the landing place, cutting the motor at the last moment and turning broadside to allow the swell to lift us gently up against the rock. It was my job to jump out with the rope on to a ledge no more than two feet wide and secure it to a large metal ring set into the stone. I nearly went on my arse as my feet slithered under me on a slimy skin of sulphur lichens. But I kept my balance and slipped the rope through the ring. The punt was secured and we began unloading. We balanced boxes and kegs and sacks precariously on ledges and outcrops until it looked as if everything we had brought with us had been dropped from a great height on to the lower reaches of the cliffs. With each return of the boat, more of the team arrived and leapt ashore. Just beyond our landing point, the rock folded away into one of its cathedral caves. It was dark and creepy, with the eerie sound of water sucking on rock echoing from somewhere deep within its blackness like the rasping breath of some living creature. It was easy to imagine how legends of sea monsters and dragons had grown out of such places.

  After four hours the last of the supplies was brought ashore, and the rain began again, misty wet sheets of it, soaking everything, making every algae-covered surface of every rock treac
herous underfoot. The last thing we took on to the island was a small rubber dinghy, which four of the team dragged up the slope to secure about fifty feet above the bay. It was to be used for emergencies, although I could not think what kind of emergency would make me want to put to sea in it. To my astonishment, I saw that Angel had crouched down in a shallow cleft in the cliff, and using his body as shelter had built a small fire of peats. He had a kettle close to boiling on it. The Purple Isle blew her foghorn out in the bay, and I turned to watch her pull anchor and head towards the open sea. It was a dreadful feeling watching her slip away like that, the skipper’s mate waving from the stern as she went. She was our only link with home, our only way back. And she was gone, and we were left here on our own on this barren lump of rock fifty miles from the nearest landfall. For better or worse, I was here, and all that remained now was to get on with it.

  Miraculously, Angel was now passing around mugs of hot tea. Tins of sandwiches were opened, and we crouched there on the rock, the smell of peat smoke in our nostrils, the sea snapping at our feet, and drank to warm ourselves, and ate to restore our energy. For now, all these boxes and barrels and sacks had to be manhandled two hundred and fifty feet to the top of the island.

  What I had not expected was the ingenuity of the guga hunters. On some previous expedition, they had brought out wooden planking and constructed a chute, two feet wide and nearly two hundred feet long. It was built in ten-foot sections, which they wrapped in tarpaulin and stored on the rock for each successive year. Piece by piece the sections were retrieved and slotted together, braced against the rock by stout legs and stays. It looked like one of the old wooden flumes you would see in black and white photographs from the goldrush days of the Klondike. A dolly on castors came thundering down from the top at the end of a length of rope, and the process of hauling up kegs and sacks and rolled-up mattresses began. Smaller boxes were passed hand to hand in a chain of men all the way up to the top of the rise. Artair and I passed boxes between us in silence, and then up the chain to Mr Macinnes, who kept up a constant commentary, explaining how the chute would be kept in place for the two weeks we were on the rock, and used at the end of it to slide the gugas — plucked, singed, gutted and cured — one by one to the boat below. All two thousand of them. I could not begin to imagine how we could kill and process so many birds in just fourteen days.