by Molly Flatt
‘To being extraordinary,’ Alex toasted under her breath. ‘To brain realignment. To a brilliant career and a brilliant marriage.’ She stayed outside until the plastic cup was empty and the air grew chilly. Then she headed back in for a cheeky top-up.
She had only started drinking the day after her miraculous transition began, the day she’d gone to meet Lenni for lunch and quit her job at Minos. That evening, suddenly finding herself unable to remember why she’d insisted on remaining teetotal her entire adult life, she’d asked Harry to mix her a celebratory G&T. Unfortunately, this meant it still only took one to get her really quite drunk.
Now she had four.
The rest of the voyage was a blur of strip-lit corridors, impossibly tiny toilets and groups of people curled up in refugee camps built from sweatshirts, sweets and magazines. She vaguely remembered a man in a paper pork-pie hat depositing a steaming wedge of red-brown stuff onto a plate. Then she was alone, curled in a reclining chair in a dim, mutter-filled room – rocking up and down, down and up, up and down.
Alex pressed her hot cheek to the reinforced glass and fell through the dark.
MacBrian’s colleague was waiting for her at the dock, standing beside the front bumper of a hire car. He clocked her as soon as she walked through the sliding doors, one of the last to leave, then watched her approach, without moving or offering to take her bag.
‘Miss Moore?’ He was as broad and square as a wrestler, his heavily lined face inscrutable from beneath a thatch of short, dark hair. He was dressed in all black and his accent, like that of the Director’s on the phone, was indefinably Celtic. He possessed more than a touch of Gladiator-era Russell Crowe.
‘Hi,’ Alex whispered.
There was a silence. The man was still watching her as if he was waiting for her to spring a surprise chokeslam. After several long minutes Alex whispered, ‘Sorry. Where are my manners. You’re—?’
‘I’m Iain MacHoras.’ He finally tore his eyes away from her, performed a three-sixty scan of the emptying car park, then looked down at her bag.
Alex handed it to him. ‘Thanks.’ He hefted it, then without a word tugged open the zip and began to rifle through the belongings inside. ‘I, er, I—’ Alex stammered, but before she could formulate an appropriate expression of outrage, he had handed it back.
‘Get in,’ he said.
Too exhausted to quibble, Alex climbed into the passenger seat while he got in beside her and slammed the door. He started the engine, stalled, put it in gear, revved ferociously, stalled, revved, moved off. The radio was playing rousing fiddle folk, and the window let in a draught of air as cold and sweet as a Glacier Mint. The headlights, jerking as he repeatedly braked and accelerated, panned across the ferry, lumbering away from the harbour like a yellow-eyed sea beast.
‘Excuse me,’ Alex said faintly.
Iain MacHoras braked sharply and turned to look at her with implacable grey eyes.
‘I think I might—’ Alex gulped. ‘I think—’ She gulped again, then vomited a fountain of bile, gin and microwave lasagne into the footwell.
6
‘Stoornway puddin’?’
The proprietor of Hrossey B&B waved a pile of steaming black offal under Alex’s nose. Alex smiled weakly and shook her head, holding her breath.
‘Do you have any coffee? Proper coffee, I mean?’
‘Coorse.’ The woman disappeared back into the kitchen with her dish, bellowing ‘Rob! Git yin Nescaffy!’
Alex turned back to the text message from Harry.
Have you arrived? x
On main island, she tapped. Off to institute shortly. Stayed overnight here with bloke called Iain. Bit of a silent muscly tough-guy type. Already had a good poke thru my stuff – think looking for city spores that might harm native ecology or sthing. Dorothy’s not in Hackney any more! This is going to be fun! x
Be careful. I’m still here for you, A. Stay in touch. x
She placed her phone face down beside her empty plate, already feeling better. Overenthusiastic celebrating, unexpected spore-hunting and cheeky Harry-baiting aside, wasn’t this already genuinely fun? Waking up in a chintzy little room, opening the window to the sea air, sitting amongst fellow wayfarers sharing a wholesome repast? Chloe was right – when you practised noticing the positive, the positive bloomed everywhere. Alex sat back and smiled, with real warmth this time, at the two old boys tucking into fry-ups at the next table. Hrossey B&B’s breakfast room evidently did double duty as a popular local hangout. Nearly all of the tables were full of sturdy-looking Orcadians chomping their way through greasy hummocks of food.
‘Is that a local speciality?’ she said, leaning towards the nearest old man and pointing at his huge lumpy scone. He looked up at her, glanced over at his friend, made a tiny movement with his shoulders, and went on eating.
‘Are you from Mainland?’ she asked.
The man grunted.
‘It must be so wonderful to live here. The air! It’s so pure. And the food must be so nutritious. Do they have rules about what you can spread on the fields?’
The man gave her another brief appraisal, then returned to his food. ‘Thoo’ll need mair maet lass, thoor turnin’ tae a rookle o’ bones,’ he said.
‘Mmm!’ Alex said enthusiastically. ‘And were you born in Mainland?’
The man sighed and put down his fork. ‘Yoor a ferry-louper?’
‘I’m a – oh, yes, exactly. Just off the ferry, ha-ha.’
‘A peedie break i’Kirkwall, is it?’
‘Ah, no, sadly I’m only passing through,’ Alex scraped her chair closer. ‘I’m actually off to Iskeull later this morning, to do some work at GCAS. European Chapter. Well, I hope I am.’ She peered over his shoulder, relieved to spot the hire car on the gravel outside the window. ‘I got stupidly drunk on the ferry, you see, and—’
Alex realized that both her friend and his companion had stopped eating and were staring at her. Damn. Misstep. Hadn’t she read that most of them were Calvinists?
‘Yi din wan’ t’ waste time wi Iskeull folk,’ the companion said slowly. ‘Thir’s nowt tae see o’er there.’
Ah. Of course. She should have known. She had read about the Orcadians’ fierce sense of independence, as well as their aversion to self-importance. Or, as one travel blogger had put it, with the bitter ring of reported speech, their dislike of ‘fancy airs’. She could only imagine the sort of hostility that the private ownership and grandiose global vision of GCAS might stir up.
‘But surely you support their environmental work?’ Alex suggested gently. ‘Don’t they help preserve the native landscape? Keep the ancient ecology alive?’
The man gave a laugh of such dark astringency that she wondered, for an uncharitable moment, whether he was one of those rural people who moaned about the destruction of the old ways while secretly wishing Tesco’s would offer him half a million to bulldoze his patch of Neolithic burial site.
‘Aye, thee could say yin,’ he said. Then he stopped laughing and leaned across the table, the brown skin of his forehead ploughed into two deep furrows. Alex leaned closer in turn, getting the impression that her new friend was about to impart some urgently important folkloric truth.
‘Miss Moore?’
Iain was watching them from the doorway, the hire-car keychain dangling from his fist. Alex’s confidant flung up his head in something like panic, curled in on himself like a snail and returned with great concentration to his plate.
‘Oh, hello, Iain, yes!’ Alex’s voice rang loud in the small space. The other customers had become suddenly and silently intent on their kippers.
‘The plane is ready,’ Iain said.
‘Oh, great. Brilliant.’ Alex grabbed her valise from the floor. ‘See? I’m all set. And I promise: no comestibles! No mad cow! No spores!’
Iain didn’t react.
She jumped to her feet, then stood still for a moment, regretting it. ‘It was lovely to meet you,’ she told her neighbours. They i
gnored her, still staring down at their food. But she got the feeling, as she followed Iain out of the door, that they were watching her back.
In the car, Alex made an apologetic comment about city slickers and sea legs, which Iain ignored. He maintained his silence on the ten-minute drive to Kirkwall airport and, secretly relieved, Alex wound down the window. She let the breeze clear her head as they lurched past wide, glassy lakes and long, low hills that were the almost too-green green of a spirulina shake. In the car park, Iain tucked the keys under the front wheel, then set off without a word across the tarmac.
‘I love that.’ Alex rushed to catch up in with him. ‘That level of trust. I suppose everyone knows everyone out here, right? Although it seems like you might be caught up in a bit of local politics? With GCAS? I mean, you certainly look and sound like you grew up in these parts yourself, but those two characters in the B&B—’
‘We keep to ourselves,’ Iain said.
‘Right. I’m sure. But there must be quite a few people like me coming in and out? Collaborators, and so on?’
‘Fewer than you’d think.’
‘And what’s your position here, Iain?’ She had to jog for a few strides to keep pace. ‘I mean, what’s your specialism?’
He turned to look at her then. ‘Security,’ he said.
Alex laughed. She’d read about the dry sense of humour. ‘Well, I promise not to cause any trouble. I’m a pacifist.’
If she hadn’t already primed herself to make concessions for northern dourness, she might have interpreted his expression as positively hostile.
Iain came to a halt on a patch of runway in front of a very small blue-and-white plane that looked like something a 1940s schoolboy might glue together from a kit. He opened the door of the plane and let down a set of flimsy fold-down steps.
‘Get in,’ he said.
Alex looked across the tarmac to the series of hangar-like buildings that she had assumed to be the terminal. ‘Don’t we have to check in or something?’
‘We have a special arrangement.’
‘Oh! Okay. Wow. How glamorous.’ Alex climbed the steps and buckled herself into one of eight tiny seats. ‘Where’s the pilot?’
Iain stooped to the front of the plane. He crammed himself into the pilot’s seat and reached for a headset.
‘You’re the pilot?’ Alex called. ‘How—’ She was saved from having to complete her sentence by the roar of the engines. Frankly, she thought, how terrifying, considering your performance with a Ford Fiesta. But then she stopped thinking and concentrated on keeping the plane in the air with sheer willpower.
If the weather on their flight had passed the ‘permitted’ test, Alex couldn’t imagine what it would have taken to ground them. It wasn’t too bad at first, once she grew used to every tiny buffet of wind flip-flopping her guts. As the wing dropped to give her a panorama of the islands, she felt a burst of genuine happiness that had nothing to do with Eudo or getting her life back in balance, or anything other than vast quantities of light and air. She started formulating a metaphor for her first ‘Postcard from’ Eudo blog, involving emerald velvet patchwork and swathes of cerulean silk.
And then the sky turned black.
At one point, as their scrap of airborne foil shuddered and dropped and banked and baulked through a churning maelstrom of doom-laden grey, Alex started to yell. Yelling seemed necessary, although she was unclear exactly what she was begging Iain to do. Stop? Pull in? Turn around? Eventually she closed her eyes and hummed as loudly as she could, a vigorous military march that she later realized was the Dam Busters theme. Then a phrase she’d heard from a speaker at an entrepreneurship unconference – ‘you have to jump off the cliff and assemble your aeroplane on the way down’ – started, rather unhelpfully, circulating in her head. Next she had a premonitory vision of her mother, weeping in black Boden, at her funeral. By the time they landed, she felt as exhausted as if she had swum to the sodding place. It hurt to straighten out her fingers, which had curled into bloodless claws around the armrest.
Expressionless, Iain stooped his way to the door, wrenched it open and unfolded the steps. Wet wind swooped into the cabin. Determined to salvage the shreds of her pride, Alex took her time wriggling into her new yellow anorak, squeezed past Iain’s solid bulk and climbed, shakily, out.
Iskeull airfield consisted of a strip of scrub that ran from a low stone hut to the edge of a perpendicular cliff. On the grass below the steps was a solitary figure in a waxed cape, silhouetted against the rolling grey muscle of the sea.
Alex wobbled down the steps, took a moment to make sure she wasn’t going to fall over, then stepped forward and offered her hand. ‘Director MacBrian? Great to meet you.’
A plain, sallow face excavated with black moles shone out from beneath the hood. Iain walked past, bent his face close to MacBrian’s ear and muttered. When he had finished, MacBrian gave a single nod, then finally gripped Alex’s hand, a little too hard.
‘Miss Moore,’ she said. ‘Welcome to Iskeull.’ Her accent was strong, and her English a little slow and over-precise, as if she didn’t use it much.
‘Please, call me Alex. And I must say, I’m relieved to have made it. That was quite a trip!’
‘We’re glad you could join us. We’ve been most impatient to meet you. Most’ – eyes the colour of the sea swept Alex from head to toe – ‘most intrigued.’ MacBrian said something unintelligible to Iain, who nodded and headed back towards the plane. ‘It’s only a short walk to the main facility.’ She gestured beyond Alex’s left shoulder to an ugly stone building perched on the cliff to the north of the airfield. Beyond it could be seen the outskirts of what looked like an old town, half-concealed by the drizzle. ‘Please, follow me.’
Alex tramped beside her across the turf, grappling with the hood of her anorak as the mud squelched over the tops of her trainers. The rain had an ominously persistent feel. ‘I’m a little unprepared for the weather, I’m afraid,’ she laughed. ‘We’re having a heatwave in London, you see.’
‘Indeed,’ MacBrian said, after a pause. ‘Here we are experiencing quite unseasonal storms.’
‘Climate change, right? At least we have people like you looking out for the planet.’
MacBrian flashed her a sideways look.
‘I’m serious,’ Alex said. ‘It’s so impressive. I can’t wait to see what you’re up to, conservation-wise. I’m convinced most of my recycling goes straight into landfill.’
‘I’m afraid,’ MacBrian said, ‘that the reserve on the peninsula at the north of the island is out of bounds to all but staff. I must ask you in the strongest terms to respect our boundaries, Miss Moore. Some of the species we protect on the peninsula are extremely rare, and even the best-intentioned intrusion might upset the ecology. However, our agricultural governor may be able to arrange for you to have a look at some of our working farms here.’ She indicated over her shoulder and Alex swivelled to look at the land beyond the airfield.
Oh. She stopped, and drew in a sudden, rain-laced breath.
Before her spread perhaps fifty unbroken, treeless miles, illuminated with oyster-coloured shafts of light. There were pennants of shivering golden-green barley; valleys bathed in purple-grey mist; ridges crowned with jagged standing stones. Hundreds of weathered settlements covered the slopes, from single houses with sheep-studded paddocks to big barns clustered around ant-busy yards. In the middle of them she saw the gaping mouth of a quarry and, beside the glassy inlay of a loch, the giant wheel of a mill. Yet unlike the monocrops and apocalyptic pig farms of her childhood, Iskeull had clearly nailed the art of keeping agriculture in harmony with its environment. Even through the driving rain she could see the riot of wildflowers stippling the grass in a nearby field and the birds of prey circling the distant, yellow-dusted coastal heath. Beyond the heath she could just about make out a thin rind of white sand and, beyond that, the faint, scalloped hem where the sky met the sea.
‘Shit,’ Alex murmured. The panorama
was spine-tingling, bordering on surreal. Blindly she fished her phone out of her pocket, and it was only when she swiped to unlock the camera that she realized the screen was a sunburst of lines.
‘Shit!’ Fuck – that damn plane. ‘Ah well, not to worry,’ she said brightly, rooting around in her bag for her iPad. But when she pulled out the tablet she found that not only had its screen also fractured, but the casing at the back had warped, as if its circuitry had melted. ‘This is ridiculous!’ She turned to MacBrian, waving her useless devices. MacBrian recommenced her march up the slope.
‘Ah well,’ Alex panted as she tried to keep pace. ‘As my mother says, don’t trust anything that doesn’t have a smell. And I’m sure you’ll have a few bits of old hardware up at the campus that I can borrow?’
‘I may have failed to mention,’ MacBrian said. ‘We have no electricity.’
Alex tried to decipher what she meant. ‘Oh. Okay. So just broadband?’
‘No. No telecommunications, no wires, no satellites. I’m afraid that Iskeull isn’t on the grid at all. It’s necessary, for the conservation. Other than Iain’s plane, the only transport we have on the island is by horse. We have some powerful energetic leylines here and, as you can see, they have a tendency to interact rather badly with man-made technology.’
By this time even MacBrian seemed to be getting an inkling of the impact her words were having. She stopped walking and peered round her hood.