by Adam Thorpe
‘Layers,’ said Mrs MacLean mysteriously. ‘Well, you canna have too many.’
‘Five seasons in a day,’ added Mr MacLean, with a grunt of amusement. He had the creased-up eyes of a fisherman.
They hardly ever had straight northerly gales here, they went on: the rascal who built yer hoose knew what he was doing – the blank back of it faced the south-easterlies. He may have been a smuggler and an alcoholic, but he was an islesman, having the local intelligence. According to Mrs MacLean’s long-dead grandmother, he had a long scraggly beard, bendy legs and a knotty cane.
‘Oh,’ Bob said, ‘I’ve got a bit of a way to go yet.’
Carol MacLean cleaned for local second-homers and for the pub, which had three plain rooms. Angus was a scallop diver, bony and tough, joggled daily by the ocean: since he’d started with his own boat twenty-five years ago, two of his fellow divers had drowned. They talked the Gaelic between themselves. Their two teenage children were busy being educated on the mainland. Bob told them he’d been to boarding school, too. Five of them.
‘Were you now?’ said Mrs MacLean gently, like a hypnotist. ‘They can be very fine.’
He said nothing. He shouldn’t even have told them about his schools. He ought to be giving his CV an entire makeover: new registration, new decals. Christopher Webb, amateur birder. Ex-teacher. Nature studies. Various tricky schools. No, a discreet prep school in the country. The depths of Suffolk. You wouldn’t have heard of it. It’s not even got a website.
They gave him some hand-plucked scallops, the biggest Bob had ever seen, destined for top-class tables in ungrateful places like Dubai. He admitted water wasn’t his favourite element. His socks were wet again.
‘Having said that,’ he went on, ‘neither are heights. Surprisingly.’
He stopped himself, mumbled something about going up ladders. They were surprised he was living where he was, given the state of it, the problems of access. Angus MacLean noted Bob’s ‘rugby shoulders’.
‘They’ll come in handy for carrying,’ Mrs MacLean pointed out.
‘That’s it,’ chuckled Angus. His skin was as brown as the earthenware teapot, but his eyes, like hers, were an arctic blue.
The evenings dragged; Bob realised his personal space was mostly confined to two minimal spots, either in front of the Raeburn or in front of the fireplace. He’d open the front door and step out into a windy dark: the paraffin lamp hung in the hall would swing wildly, making shadows leap from odd places. He’d made a colossal mistake. He missed Leila, the pools, the clubs, his friends. The sun. He dreamed of Dubai’s heat, even in its worst seasonal manifestation. He missed the cockpit, its luminous spread of instruments like a night city far below: Madrid, for instance, edging a blackness that was not the sea or a lake but its huge park; New York, even its approaching glitter more stylish than anywhere else. He missed the twins, although he’d phoned them from the call box several times. He even missed Olivia: she’d laugh to see him now.
Marcie’s café was closed for a fortnight – a winter break. Bored to gloominess, he ventured down to the Tinker’s Arms in Ardcorry. There were only three customers – two old boys and a younger man up at the bar, all weather-singed and with fiercely blue eyes, like the MacLeans. The one tape was clearly Johnny Cash.
Bob nodded politely, waited. The younger man eventually went round behind the bar and served him his pint and chaser (‘Murray’s oot the back’). Bob sat at the furthest table possible and pretended to read the Scotsman. With his scraggy beard and woollen cap, he hardly looked the typical tourist: he fancied the news had already spread from Bargrennan that some English idiot had taken the old croft-house near Ardcorry, the one without electricity out on Carnan Tuath that gets all the winds, and this was he. Or maybe their stares were simply born from winter tedium.
The older of the two veterans caught his eye and asked how was the fishing. Bob said he wasn’t fishing, or not yet. The man seemed surprised, told him that there were some fine fat trout in that wee loch (he gave it a Gaelic name).
‘Are you renting, now?’
‘That’s right. Just a few months.’
‘No electrics for years.’
‘I know. They didn’t tell me that.’
‘They wouldn’t,’ said the other old boy.
The younger man said, looking at the others with a straight face, ‘The summer can be quite pleasant, I hear.’
‘They do say that, aye,’ said the first man, into his beer.
‘So the rumour goes,’ sighed his friend, winking a watery eye.
They all three glanced at Bob, expectant and suspicious at the same time.
‘I don’t mind the weather,’ he said. ‘As long as I can see the birds. Research,’ he added, conveying its apparent dullness.
‘Oh,’ said the first man, ‘you’re a twitcher. I’m partial to birds myself,’ he added, rubbing his thigh as the others chortled. ‘So what’s your speciality? Sea eagles? We have a few of them, these days. Reinserted.’
‘Reintroduced,’ corrected the younger man.
‘The black-headed gull,’ Bob said, ignoring Sophie’s advice. ‘Feeding habits. With particular reference to its cliff habitat.’
There was a brief silence. They glanced at one another. The younger man said, ‘So you’ll not be very occupied now.’
‘What?’
‘At this time o’ the year.’
Bob looked at him, somewhat puzzled. ‘Oh, they’re out and about.’
‘Are they now?’
‘Well, I’m used to rough weather, and they’re pretty easy to spot with their dark hoods,’ he said. ‘I saw three only yesterday.’
‘Three, was it? Are you sure you hadn’t been at the hooch?’
Thankfully, the barman emerged with an item of local gossip in the newspaper. During this distraction, Bob slipped out. Something was awry.
In Stornoway he had bought a stack of literature dealing with local natural history, including a bird dictionary the width of a flight-crew training manual: it was better to know a little in depth than a lot shallowly. As Doug used to tell him, ‘You’re a pilot once you don’t expect the instruments to do what you expect them to do.’ He sounded Zen sometimes, would Doug Rydale. ‘Never trust your instinct: you’re dealing with a machine.’
Bob turned again to the black-headed gull in the illustrated book on Hebridean birdlife. Larus ridibundus. The commonest of gulls. ‘Its huge colonies abandon their island nests and go south to farmland or city, returning to the Hebrides only in March.’ It was now the last week of January. The news got worse: the spoilsports lost the hooded look in winter, replacing it with white plumage and a chocolate smudge behind the eyes, which gradually grew in stripes and patches as the breeding season approached. This began around May.
Bob’s diet revolved around oats. He missed trees. Locals stood in the middle of the road, looming dangerously out of the horizontal rain, as did sheep. The damp made his joints ache, irritated his scar tissue. He was sick of tinned artichoke hearts and the lack of a hot shower and not lifting winged metal into the tropopause. He would leave at the end of the following month and join an ashram. Somewhere hot and hidden. This decision cheered him. The end of February was a destination. He hiked, he muddied the polo’s livery up and down the island chain. He phoned Al on the special number.
‘Bob! How’s the weather?’
‘Hear that banging? It’s trying to get in.’
‘Oh for fuck’s sake, you’re making me come over all nostalgic. Seriously, are you surviving, skipper?’
Bob was about to tell him that he was throwing in the towel, but something in Al’s tone – a cockiness, perhaps – prevented him. ‘Al, it’s fine. Nice beaches, beautiful girls, no midgies.’
A chuckle over the wire hum. ‘But that’s another story, eh?’
‘And no typhoons and no millionaires.’
‘People are very nice here, too. I like millionaires.’
‘Are you one, Al?’
&n
bsp; Wire hum again, but no chuckle.
‘I feel like it. I’m swinging in a hammock between two palm trees, and the sun is setting into the Caribbean and the beach is deserted, and there are some incredible yachts out there, and I’m drinking a Painkiller.’
‘I assume that’s not liquid valium.’
‘The effect’s the same. Pusser’s rum, pineapple juice, cream of coconut and squeezed orange, splashed onto the ice, not poured, fresh ground nutmeg on top. We never got that in our council estate in fucking Fife.’
‘Yo ho ho. You sound just like Blackbeard.’
‘So I should. This was his old stamping ground. Pirates, Bob, pirates.’
‘How’s your peeling nose?’
‘I protect it these days. How’s yours, skipper?’
‘Al, there are fewer people on this island than would fill business class in a 727, but they’re all spies and informers. I’d have been better off in a metropolis.’
Another chuckle, with partying sounds behind: bass notes and high-pitched laughter. The yacht scene, no doubt. Al was irritatingly on top. Or just full of rum cocktails. He asked Bob if his neighbours were still the MacDuffys.
‘The nearest house is the MacLeans.’
‘Ah, what a pity. Carol MacDuffy was a dish. Gorgeous at seventeen. The belle of the isle. And very bright. Quite a one, too. Not that there was much competition.’
‘Maybe that’s Carol MacLean. Married to Angus MacLean, scallop diver. They speak the Gaelic.’
‘That’ll be her. The parents must have passed on. Nice folk. Is she still gorgeous?’
Bob suddenly saw her in a new light: no longer quite so homely behind her flowery kitchen apron.
‘She’s coming up to fifty, Al. Filled out a bit, I imagine. But holding her own. I go there for the odd hot shower and cup of tea. She lets me use her twin-tub.’
‘Does she now? Diving for her scallops, eh?’
‘I don’t reckon she’s quite a one, these days.’
Bob didn’t think he’d call Al again unless there was some emergency, and he was careful now to visit the MacLeans only when Angus was present.
One time, nevertheless, the man was out. Bob emerged from the bathroom, feeling much better in clean clothes, to find Carol wielding a pair of long-pronged scissors in the kitchen.
‘How about it, Samson?’
‘How about what?’
‘A wee trim. I’m Scourlay’s unofficial men’s hairdresser. I think you’re maybe a bit superannuated for the hippy look.’
Her breasts settled comfortably against his shoulder as she snipped, her breathing warm on his ear. Today she was wearing jeans that were too small for her in all the right places, as Olivia would put it, and a fetching furry top. Bob tried to think of rest homes, his father in his last weeks, but this neurological cold bath failed to work. He rested his hands casually over his crotch, wisps of his hair falling on them like autumn leaves. They were chatting about the export of scallops, how the middlemen got the largest cut, how Angus risked his life for peanuts. Bob said he wasn’t a great sailor, but he’d quite like to go out in a boat and see porpoises. The front door opened and Bob’s heart appeared to stop. Angus, with a .22 rifle in his hand. The muddy terrier panted at his feet. The scissors went on ticking.
Bob raised his hand to wave at him. ‘Hello, Angus. Your wife said I looked like a hippy.’
‘I never did,’ Carol laughed.
‘I had the long hair one time,’ said Angus, dumping a dead rabbit on the table, blood congealed in its nose. ‘I was quite a mover in my youth.’
The gales stopped after three weeks, leaving a ringing silence and a lovely mountainous landscape of bright reflectors under a blue sky that made Bob feel vaguely stoned. It was a fitful sun by the afternoon, but the day was dry and he walked the peninsula’s blacklands, stumbling into ditches and drains like the lad had warned, and reached a bay to the north.
He strode the shore, elated. The sea turned turquoise whenever the sun appeared, breaking on a broad white-sand beach populated only by gulls. He didn’t think he had ever seen any nicer beach anywhere: the only sunbathers were seals, spread on rocks in glossy mounds. Long streaks of cirrus down to the sea’s horizon. Take that, Al my friend. You and your buried treasure.
He walked for the rest of the day without seeing a soul. In among the skerries, where it was calm, he watched a sea otter play for an entire hour. A huge bird of prey circled a sea-stack. The blue sky looked permanent.
The next day it poured – horizontally. It was amazing that the ground was wet at all, but it was.
The café reopened the following morning and he took his laptop and picked up David’s emails with the scanned post. There wasn’t much. Bills were all on direct debit, he could do most things online if needs be. A chilly, belligerent letter from Olivia’s solicitor, quite unnecessary, concerning the Swiss account. Maybe he didn’t miss Olivia. A steamy postcard from Leila, along with a photo of herself in a micro-bikini by a pool: David commented that it was now pinned up on his wall. Bob wrote back asking him not to tell Mum. Sophie had sent a chatty, loving email, and he replied in due measure. He hoped nobody sinister was hacking in.
Which pool was it? Arab tiles, palms, lots of fancy bushes. Maybe the oasis hotel they’d driven out to last year, all adobe walls and camels. Leila’s collarbones were prominent above the packed contents of her bikini top. Heat, dryness and let’s-get-into-the-shade. The sun had barely showed itself again, here: a one-day wonder. When Marcie suddenly appeared with his coffee, he pressed Exit. The screen returned to the twins, aged sixteen, grinning in front of a big oak near the house.
Huge dangly blue earrings, a woolly bee-striped top and a crimson skirt.
‘Your kids?’
‘Yup. A few years back. Twins.’
‘Lovely, they look. I guess one day Astra will look like that.’
Bob doubted it, but made the right noises.
‘Feels a long way away, doesn’t it, Kit? The mainland? Assuming your base is there.’
‘It is. Kind of. Where’s yours?’
‘Oh, wherever Astra is,’ she said, needlessly fetching him sugar. ‘The isles for now. There’s nowhere like them.’
‘Certainly isn’t.’
The gallery took up the back area of the café beyond a bead curtain: out of season she didn’t bother to light it. It was full of mostly bird photos and slapped-on paintings of cliffs, and Astra’s sit-on plastic lorry parked in the corner, its bonnet partly melted and the back end chewed. The café was cosy enough, with quality striped curtains, Mexican tiles and framed posters of wise sayings.
The adventure that the hero is ready for is the one that he gets.
‘I like that one,’ he said, as Marcie passed.
‘What date’s your birthday?’
‘December the twelfth.’
‘I knew it. You’re a fire sign. Sagittarius. Likes adventures.’
‘Fire. Not air?’
‘Air and earth are your seasonal qualities. Not water, though. Water’s out.’
‘That figures.’
The ocean rushing up, mid-Pacific. An uncontrollable dive. Flat descent and at night, so no shrieks from behind. The impact of the belly in a fantastic crest of foam. Only in his thoughts and dreams, thankfully.
The twins smiled at him from an English summer afternoon. The only other customers were a group of harbour workers in hi-vis jackets over oilskins (playing cards), and a white-faced couple fresh off the morning ferry, which was hours late due to a rolling swell.
He searched on the Web for ashrams. Inner engineering, early-morning Vedic chanting, active ‘jumping and screaming’ meditations: these were not really his thing; besides, ashrams were not only expensive but internationally busy. Folk questing for life’s meaning would ask questions, probe, want him to join in. Hit men probably used them to increase their inner calm. Canadian therapeutic masseurs, too. Life had moved on from the 1970s. He could hear a vague and prolonged screaming thro
ugh the PRIVATE door: Astra was already into the active meditations, it seemed.
He glanced out of the window: the harbour street was seriously empty, the heaving sea audible, the sleek tarmac lashed again by what they called a shower. The return mainland ferry had been cancelled. No planes, either. Certified personal safety, at no cost. The paraffin stove hummed.
He ordered another coffee, with cake, shut his laptop and had a look at Marcie’s books. She was a minor rival of the book-cum-gift shop near the harbour, which sold tweed scarves, teacloths, plastic haggises from China. Marcie’s dusty stock filled a small recess and had a New Age angle, but there were quite a few of Bob’s sort of title, generally second hand. He pulled out a scruffy copy of The Guns of Navarone. He hadn’t read that since he was a teenager; he wasn’t even sure that he had ever finished it.
‘At least you’ll have the headwind behind you, going back,’ Marcie joked. ‘They say it’ll clear tonight. I like your hair, by the way. Who cut it?’
They were right: clearance was total. He jogged to the headland’s 300-foot cliffs which dominated the end of his favourite beach. Past the machair, at the peak’s base, the white sand dazzled and the water was back to turquoise in long streaks, with far-off peaks stuck flat and pale onto the horizon. The cliffs were covered in birds stuck like tiny barnacles or swooping about the rock-face amazingly fast. He didn’t know how birders coped.
Seals were sunning themselves again on a flat reef fifty yards out and not minding when a bigger surge swept them off in a slither of dark blubber. Big glistening eyes, mournful expressions. Running the length of the beach were dunes, with glutinous hollows he had learnt were called slacks, backed by machair. Rabbits swarmed over the grassier parts: they vanished into their burrows as he passed. Sensible creatures.
He sat in the dry section of the dunes in his fleece-lined waterproof, between harsh salt-grass and prickly creeping plants like miniature thistles. It was cold and blustery, the gusts sporadically cuffing his hood and blowing sand off the beach into his eyes in gritty clouds. Sophie would have called this place awesome. Although restful enough immediately in front, with its huge sheen of backwash, the sea, having made great play with the stacks standing offshore like bits of cathedrals, rolled against the sheer side of the headland, streaming down it in temporary waterfalls, emerging in spontaneous geysers. He missed his kids.