by Adam Thorpe
The house looked smaller than in the photos. There was not a single tree in sight; the building crouched in long, shaggy grass behind a couple of thorn bushes. Plastic tubs, milk crates and other bric-a-brac lay about, along with a fallen chicken-wire fence and a reassuring washing line with a single yellow clothes peg. The mist gave hints of a sea view, but there might equally well have been a nuclear power station out there.
The place was clearly a cement-coloured liability. The shape was peculiar because a single-storey croft house had been stretched to one side by an extension featuring a picture window. The older part had a gleaming slate roof with a skylight each side; mossed sheets of corrugated iron covered the newer section – about a third of the whole – so that it looked as if it could be pushed back in like a telescope.
The front door was on one side of a breeze-block porch, and had to be yanked open, scraping on the sill. Bob expressed concern.
‘It’s fairly wet in these parts,’ Ken pointed out.
‘Wet’s good,’ Bob replied; ‘you get more engine power.’
Ken covered his puzzlement with a joke. ‘You’d have been better off in the Maldives.’
Bob had expected the interior to be flagged floors and stony walls, with a rocking chair before a great peat-brick fireplace and a huge wooden bed in the corner, straw palliasse and all. This was how he remembered a croft interior on Mull when he’d bicycled up as a youth to escape family life; peat smells, hubby puffing on a pipe before the blaze, dim light from a paraffin lamp. Here it was all wood. The floors were natural pine boarding, but the walls showed a 1970s taste for dark-stained plywood sheeting. The bedrooms had cream wallpaper patterned with orange asterisks, crinkled in places from damp. The kitchen was all white paint or tiles, to go with the white Raeburn stove, whose doors the agent opened and then slammed shut, presumably checking for leftovers or flight logs. Two metal-and-foam chairs sat at a rocky table as if waiting for supper. The remaining furniture looked either home-made (plywood again) or from some indeterminate date before the war.
The lad annoyed Bob by saying ‘Take care’ as they climbed the boarded-in ladder to the attic bedroom, which was pine-clad. It felt ship-like. Bob could only stand up in the middle, slightly crouched, and was watched in sardonic silence from the stairs. I’ll sleep up here, Bob decided: he liked the ship feel, the marginally drier air.
It was gloomy: naturally, because there was no artificial light.
Ken had tried the mains switch a few times, looking at the instructions in his folder, ignoring comments from Bob. The general mouldiness reminded him of central Africa, the rainy season, with cold thrown in.
‘There goes my nice hot shower,’ he said.
‘You’ll be lucky to find anywhere else like this,’ Ken retorted, ‘if your mind’s set on the isles.’
‘I don’t plan to. Your lot can call an electrician.’
‘It’s beyond that,’ the agent sighed. ‘It needs rewiring. We’ll sort it, but you’ll have to sign new papers in the interim.’
That would be a pain. Al had dealt with all the papers, acting on behalf of his incapacitated cousin: Bob was effectively subletting. Now Al was out of the loop.
They were in the sitting room, whose picture window that day was like a TV without the aerial. The black sofas were fake leather. The cold had increased to something viscous in which they were trapped like flies.
‘Maybe I’m OK with no electrics,’ Bob said. ‘More romantic. The good life.’
Ken, thinking Bob was being sardonic, claimed innocence by saying he’d come out from the mainland and had only been working there a year, and the house had been on the market for three. ‘It’s all a mess,’ he sighed, staring at his hands, already world-weary. Fifty years ago, Bob reflected, he’d have been out in all weathers, carting seaweed or hauling blocks of peat, bringing the flock home. The light was fading already.
‘How far are the shops?’
‘Now there’s a man up with the times. There was a shop, but the causeway made it redundant. You have to go back over the causeway to Bargrennan, on the previous island. Twenty minutes.’
‘Tell them I’ll take it as is. Seriously. I don’t want to be bothering with more papers. The rent’s not high anyway.’
‘They’ll not be rewiring it tomorrow.’
‘I don’t want it rewired. I’ve worked out in Africa. Birds,’ he added, hastily. ‘Conservation.’
The youth gave a supercilious laugh. ‘When folk see the postcards of this island, they say it’s like the Caribbean without the tourists. White sand beaches, turquoise waters, all that jazz. But there’s one big difference. Guess what that is, Mr Webb.’
‘No drugs?’
‘You’ve got to be joking.’
They walked back to the car in the gathering gloom. ‘Best of British,’ said the agent, like an insult. ‘If you get lonely, you’ve got a good choice of bars in Ardcorry. But they’re aye in the Tinker’s Arms, with the same piped music. One tape. You can walk there and back, though.’
Bob shook a limp, chilly hand and off its owner went, headlights already on at three o’clock. Now all Bob could hear was the gusts singing in the wires and a dim shushing noise which he assumed was the sea. Then he noticed a tussock near his feet, its long whitish stems agitated by the wind. Here he was. Here the tussock was. Both alive in this same moment. He must, he thought, remember to buy a torch, the type you strap onto your head like a miner’s lamp.
The shop in Bargrennan may have been a concrete shed with a roof of corrugated iron, but it reminded him of a cargo bay stocked with everything bar the shouting. The houses round about looked sullen, as if what they really wanted to do was get back to the mainland estate from which they’d been plucked. A few along the street towards the harbour were in stone and quite attractive, while others gained points from being painted a Kansas-style dark red.
He bought candles and matches and firelighters; the stores’ complete stock of kerosene lamps with a coil of wick; a bag of slow-burning coal bricks; some pots and pans for the stove, including one big enough to stand in as a bathtub; and food –tins and pulses, mainly, as the vegetable rack’s contents looked as if they’d circled the world a few times. He ordered bags of lump coal.
He also bought, in a moment of inspiration, a butane camping stove and several cylinders to back up the Raeburn; he was wise to the latter’s demands from earlier years in Worcestershire. In all this wild spree, he nearly forgot the torch – a halogen headlamp type for infant potholers, supplemented by a heavy-duty hand-held. And a heap of batteries. This miraculous place (like an old-time African general stores without the hawkers) even had a battery charger that ran off a car’s cigarette lighter. He went back again for paper and pens. And rope, and string. Oh, sorry, and a hot-water bottle.
‘Aye, you’ll be needing that,’ said the woman behind the counter: round and friendly, perpetually between thirty-five and fifty-five, with large glasses and a winning smile. Her accent was soft, almost dreamy. His coming and going amused her. When he told her the croft had no electricity, she fished out some solar-powered garden lights, the type you stick in the earth.
‘You’ll maybe find these useful.’
‘Is there enough sun?’
‘Well, I doubt that in the winter,’ she laughed. ‘But as my father used to say, Ye can live in sun, but ye cannae live on it.’
He was already attracting attention to himself, just by being here. What had he said to Al in Cookham? There’s safety in crowds. He had rushed into this, he realised. He might have been better off in Kuala Lumpur.
On the picturesque curve down to the harbour, in one of the older stone houses, there was a cosy-looking café called the Seaward Side. He popped in, thirsting for tea. It was empty, but a moon-faced woman in her thirties emerged from the gloom at the back, sweeping up to him in a zigzaggy yellow skirt, her leather waist-belt dangling a long tassel.
She brought him his tea in a mug that told him, in big red letters, to S
KIRL AND WHIRL.
‘Are you staying in Bargrennan, then?’
‘Not exactly. I’m over the causeway. The land beyond. Scourlay.’
‘It’s Scoorlay,’ she smiled, ‘as in moorland.’ She was ample but sexy, as Olivia would put it. He’d already noticed the two computers on tables at the rear, before the unlit picture gallery. A Wi-Fi sign in the window.
‘I haven’t got electricity,’ he said, ‘so you might see more of me. With laptop.’
‘Reception’s mostly guaranteed,’ she said with a drowsy smile. ‘I’m Marcie, by the way. This is Astra,’ she added, as a little boy around three years old sauntered in through the door marked PRIVATE. He was dressed as Batman.
‘Hello, Astra. I’m Kit.’
Marcie sighed. ‘That’s a nice name.’
‘’Tisn’t,’ said Astra. ‘Yuk.’ And gave him a kick.
He drove back over the causeway feeling warmer inside, thanks to a few smiles from Marcie. It didn’t take much. She hadn’t sounded Scottish, but a drawly northern English: a fellow stranger.
He did feel, though, that he was coming back to ‘his’ island. He had been here about three hours. Scoorlay.
He unloaded the car boot by the gate in what was effectively darkness, the wind slapping at him playfully and apparently swinging an invisible watering can towards his face every few seconds. He failed to keep to the path. His head torch wavered feebly over an undifferentiated mass of grass, rock and shadow. He had forgotten what real night looked like under cloud, terrestrially: he could barely see the hill, let alone the house. Maybe I’ll hit a bottomless bog and vanish, he thought, never to be found again. Seconds later his left foot sank with a gurgle and he pulled it free, minus gumboot. This was not a good start.
He laid down his bags carefully and groped about for the boot, his wet toes starting to go numb. The water felt unnaturally cold: this was annoying. He began to regret Dubai. He was an idiot: he’d been lured into the wilderness, and without electricity, and it was freezing. Then his fingers closed on rubber and he rejoiced.
He tried walking on the dried heather bells, but these proved treacherous, as they sat on wet sponge. Using rocks as stepping stones was no good either, as slipping was worse than sinking. Apart from anything else, a burn white-watered its way down the hill and sprawled carelessly across the path. The stepping stones weren’t big enough for a goat.
He squelched to the door, splashed to the forehead. He had only freighted a portion of his purchases, leaving the rest for tomorrow. The house seemed colder than the vigorous outdoors, cold in thick slabs. How nice it would have been to switch on the light, radiators, an electric kettle, to stand under a steaming power-shower. Instead, he had just the jittery little halogen that threw evil shadows from corners as the wind whistled outside.
He tried to light a candle, but the matches were wet. Somewhere he’d packed his vintage Canadian Pacific cigarette lighter that he’d kept for the occasional cigarillo and as a good-luck charm. By the time he found it in one of his suitcases, he was jabbering aloud.
In the kitchen, in the light of two candles, he peeled off his clothes, shivering like bad actors do in films and cursing McAllister and Bensoussan in that order, and rubbed himself down, staining the towel with black mud. Within a couple of hours he had the kitchen dancing to the coal bricks – the Raeburn required dusting out, but was fully operative – sufficient to fry some eggs and heat some beans, and generally thaw him out. His socks steamed on the stove’s metal rail. The digital AA-powered trannie kept him company with Radio 4, albeit hissed at by the gusts.
He reckoned he was winning.
This is an adventure, he said to himself. Only Al knew precisely where he was. Any non-junk snail mail would get redirected to David, who would scan it and send it to him by email. ‘What a pain,’ was all his son had said, when called from the phone box, adding, ‘You can’t keep hiding for ever, Dad.’
‘Things change. These types fall out, get arrested, die, retire to a life of luxury. Only diamonds are for ever. I’m staying here nine months, until the September gales.’
‘Tim reckons you’re a rough one. Diamond, I mean.’
Bob laughed. ‘Tell him I have many facets.’
Supposing they put pressure on his nearest and dearest to reveal his whereabouts? This was not the modus operandi of any of the known dodgy operators, apart from the Mexican drugs cartels – who were Broadmoor-certifiable. Which was why he didn’t like the fact that Diez was Mexican.
The Raeburn roared behind its little window and the heat beat against his face; he felt pretty good as the food slipped down. Things are most definitely looking up, he thought, as he filled the hot-water bottle with water that his own vigorous efforts had boiled, taking it up to bed along with his pistol and the candle. Various noises kept him awake and he stared into the darkness, suddenly missing people. Live people of a non-murderous disposition, anyway.
The picture window had better reception the next morning – bleached grass in the foreground and a black plastic water barrel – but it might still have been the overshoot at Gatwick: the mist had thickened. To boil water meant a further lot of palaver with wood and coal and some extra waiting, but the tea in his own Fly Me mug (Sophie’s present) was better for it, despite its tang of peat.
His gumboots had dried by the Raeburn in a smell of rubber; he stepped outside with warm toes. The air reminded him of the stuff coming through at 35,000 feet, and he could smell the sea on it, and sea wrack, and iodine, and his own chimney. He had enough cash – even after the divorce came through, even without the flat sold – to keep him going for the planned nine months. In that time he would plot the next instalment. Every man needs a pause. But he already felt lonely. At night it was almost scary. What he needed was a guitar, although he’d only mastered four chords some thirty years back.
He found some large flat stones for the awkward burn-flow zone, then clomped to and fro with the remaining clobber.
The house was on a peninsula. This was not saying much: cartographically, the island looked like a plate smashed on a hard floor, its bits kicked together. The coastline was jagged and parts came and went with the tide: skerries, reefs, washed-over boulders, clefts with sand that looked like pleasant coves until they vanished in spume.
Cliffs were more reliable. He’d approach a grassy edge, think of the 6,000 miles of water meeting their match far below, remember the balcony incident, and tread gingerly back. The breakers rolled on slowly and hypnotically towards their fate, even in a gale.
The first gale started on his third day. He was told it was a south-easterly. After a few hours of this, he hitched on his yellow sou’wester to investigate the sou’easter: once he’d left the lee of the house, the long grass flattened all around, he felt a rearrangement of priorities: weather first, tiny human last. It was all he could do to breathe. He staggered round to the back, tugging his hood to keep it on: he was instantly wet through, transformed into nothing but a pair of salty lips. The loch had white streaks all over its gloomy surface and was chopping against the rocks so hard he could see spray.
The front skylight began to leak directly above his pillow in the loft bedroom, so he moved the bed to the corner. The sound effects of wind and rain against the slates was a bother, but the downstairs bedrooms were small and smelt faintly of pyjamas: he’d started to use these rooms as storage spaces, gathering useful stuff like planks, crates, elastic straps, polystyrene buoys, a single undamaged oar. The loo was the size of a seven-oh’s, stained green and with a broken plastic seat. The tiny wash-basin was clogged with cigarette butts, rotted to a mush.
He expected the gale to blow itself out after a day or so, but a week later it was still going without a single toilet break. It was several south-easterlies, apparently, stacked and landing on the island with seamless precision.
The peninsula and its little loch were swept by every wind going. He’d hold up a wet finger and give up. But he felt safe, more or less. He had take
n Sophie’s advice and ditched the mobile, replacing it with a one-use prepaid type; the car was parked a couple of hundred yards down the road, tucked well off the asphalt on dry grass that curved behind a hummock; he’d check the vehicle over on departure and arrival, feeling around the hubs and tyres and the rim where the jack goes, taking a visual on everything else with a torch.
He wondered whether, when the season began, there’d be a lot more people to worry about. The shopkeeper, whose name was Kathleen, said they didn’t get many tourists outside the music festival in August. The weather. It could bucket down in the summer, or clear to a cloudless sky for a week. ‘There’s no knowing, you see.’
‘There never is,’ he agreed, paying for a week’s potatoes in straightforward, anonymous cash.
He bought a paper and read that every UK banknote was tainted with cocaine. There was no getting away from anything, these days.
2
HIS NEAREST NEIGHBOURS were Carol and Angus MacLean of the neat white house on the way to Ardcorry. The peninsula’s top portion was their grazing; their nephew looked after the sheep and doubled as the local DJ – with a taste for ‘industrial rock’, they added, laughing. The neat house sat next to what looked like a scrapyard but was in fact Angus MacLean’s workshop.
Bob had met Carol MacLean in the lane on the third day, and, eerily, she’d seemed to know who he was. She invited him over for tea, mainly to let him know that if he didn’t fence his land, their flock would be all over it. That was all right by me, he told them.
He walked up the lane and arrived with water streaming off his hood. They had two pigs, many hens, several cows, cats and a muddy terrier. He asked some trainee-islander questions, starting of course with the weather.