by Peter May
We ran, splashing, back on to the beach, and up the sand to the old cottage where we rolled in the grass to dry ourselves off and slip quickly back into our clothes. Now the cold gave way to burning skin as we lay wrapped up in each other’s arms, lying there and looking up at the stars, breathless, enthralled, as if we had somehow discovered sex for the first time in human history.
Neither of us spoke for a long time, till I said, finally, ‘What was it you wanted to give me?’
And she laughed so long and hard.
I lifted myself up on my elbow and looked at her, perplexed. ‘What’s so funny?’
Still laughing, she said, ‘One day you’ll work it out, big boy.’
I lay back down beside her, and the sense of being on the wrong side of a joke quickly passed, overcome, nearly overwhelmed, by feelings of love, and the desire to hold and protect her, to keep her safe and secure. She wrapped herself around me, her face nuzzled into my neck, an arm across my chest, a leg thrown over mine, and I just gazed at the stars, filled with a new sense of joy in being alive. I kissed the top of her head. ‘Why do you call this Charlie’s beach?’ I asked.
‘Cos this is where Bonnie Prince Charlie first landed when he came to raise an army to march against the English in the Jacobite uprising of 1745,’ she said. ‘They taught us that at school.’
We met several times in the weeks that followed, to find our way to that old ruined cottage and make love. The fine spring weather continued, and you could feel how the ocean was warming, the conveyor belt of the Gulf Stream invading the cold winter waters of the North Atlantic. Until the night of the storm, when it all went wrong.
I had arranged to meet Ceit as usual that night. But some time during the late afternoon the wind changed, and great dark clouds bubbled up on the horizon, sweeping in as darkness fell. The wind rose, and must have been Force 8 or 9, driving the rain that came with the cloud almost horizontally across the island. Blow-backs from the chimney filled our living room with smoke that night, in the end driving us early to our beds, even although it wasn’t yet dark.
I lay for a long time staring at the ceiling wondering what to do. I had made the arrangement with Ceit, and there had been no chance to call it off. Although it would have been impossible for us to make love that night, there was no way I could not go, just in case she did. I couldn’t leave her to brave the weather on her own, standing exposed down at the jetty waiting for me to show up.
So I bided my time, checking frequently with my watch, its luminous hands glowing in the dark, until it was time to go. I slipped out from between the sheets and got dressed, and pulled out my oilskins from where I had concealed them earlier beneath the bed. I was just sliding the window up when Peter’s voice came out of the dark, raised a little to be heard above the howl of the wind outside.
‘Where are you going?’
My heart stopped, and I turned, an unreasonable anger welling up in my chest. ‘Never bloody mind where I’m going! Go back to sleep.’
‘But Johnny, you never go anywhere without me.’
‘Keep your voice down, for Christ’s sake. Just turn over and pretend I’m still in bed. I’ll be back before you know it.’
I pushed the window all the way up and swung my legs out to jump down into the rain. As I turned to draw the window down again, I saw Peter’s bloodless face as he sat up in bed watching me go, a look of both fear and incomprehension etched all over it. I pulled the window shut and turned my hood up against the rain.
There was no racing down the hill tonight. It was pitch-black, and I had to pick my way carefully through the rock and long grass, bracing myself against the wind and the rain that it drove into my face. Finally I reached the track that led down to the jetty, and was able to move a little faster.
When I reached it, there was no sign of Ceit. It looked as if the tide was in, and neither the quay nor the lie of the land afforded much protection against the sea. It drove in, wave after wave breaking on the rocks all around the shore. The roar of it was deafening. The spray thrown up by the sea thrashing against the stone of the jetty combined with the rain to soak me through. I could feel my clothes wet beneath my oilskins. I peered around me in the dark, wondering how long I should stay. It was madness to have come out at all. I should have known that Ceit would not have expected me on a night like tonight.
And then I saw a tiny figure darting from the shadow of the hill. Ceit, in floppy green wellies, sizes too big for her, and wrapped in a coat that must have belonged to Mrs O’Henley. I took her into my arms and crushed her against me. ‘I didn’t want to not come in case you did,’ I shouted above the roar of the night.
‘Me too.’ She grinned up at me, and I kissed her. ‘But I’m glad you did. Even if it was just to tell me that you couldn’t come.’
I grinned back at her. ‘No pun intended, I guess.’
She laughed. ‘One-track mind, you have.’
We kissed again, and I held her tight against the battering of the wind and the rain, the storm crashing all around us. Then she broke away.
‘I’d better go. God knows how I’m going to explain all this wet stuff.’
She gave me one last quick kiss, and then she was off, swallowed up by the storm and disappearing into the night. I stood for a moment catching my breath, then found my way back on to the track, to head up the hill towards the Gillies croft. I hadn’t gone more than ten yards when a figure emerged out of the dark. I got one hell of a fright, and nearly cried out, before I realized it was Peter. He was wearing no waterproofs, just his dungarees and his worn old tweed jacket, a hand-me-down from Donald Seamus. He was soaked through already, his hair smeared over his face, his expression of abject misery visible to me even in the darkness. He must have got up and dressed himself and come after me as soon as I had gone.
‘For God’s sake, Peter, what are you doing?’
‘You were with Ceit,’ he said.
I couldn’t deny it. He had obviously seen us.
‘Yes.’ ‘Behind my back.’
‘No, Peter.’
‘Yes, Johnny. It’s always you, me and Ceit. Always. The three of us, ever since The Dean.’ His eyes burned with a strange intensity. ‘I saw you kissing her.’
I took his arm. ‘Come on, Peter, let’s just go home.’
But he pulled himself free. ‘No!’ He stared at me out of the storm. ‘You’ve been lying to me.’
‘No, I haven’t.’ I was starting to get angry now. ‘For fuck’s sake, Peter, Ceit and I are in love, okay? It’s got nothing to do with you.’
He stood for a moment staring at me, and I’ll never forget the look of complete betrayal in his eyes. Then he was off, into the night at a run. I was so surprised it took me several seconds to react, in which time he had already vanished from sight.
‘Peter!’ I shouted after him. He had run off in the opposite direction from the croft, towards the shore. I gasped in frustration and ran after him.
Mountainous seas were breaking all along the jagged northern coastline, where giant rocks lay in blocks and shards all along the foot of the low-rise cliffs. I could see Peter now, the merest shadow of a dark figure, scrambling over them. It was insanity. Any moment the sea could reach in and take him, dragging him out into the Sound and certain death. I cursed the day he’d ever been born, and started off over the rocks in pursuit.
I shouted after him several times, but my voice was drowned by the sound of the sea and whipped away by the angry bellow of the wind. All I could do was try to keep him in my sights and endeavour to catch him up. I got to within fifteen or twenty feet of him when he started to climb. In normal circumstances not a difficult climb, but tonight in these impossible conditions it was nothing short of madness. The machair dipped down to within twenty feet or so of the shore before dropping sheer to the rocks below, and a deep crack ran back from it, for all the world as if someone had taken a giant wedge and a big mell and split it open.
Peter was almost at the top when he fell. I
f he called out, I never heard it. He just vanished into the black chasm of that crack in the earth. I abandoned all caution and climbed up the rock in a panic to where I had last seen him. The darkness below me, as I peered into the chasm, was absolute.
‘Peter!’ I screamed his name and heard it echoing back at me out of the ground. And to my relief I heard a faint call in return.
‘Johnny! Johnny, help me!’
It was lunacy what I did. If I had stopped to think, I would have run back to the croft and roused Donald Seamus. No matter how much trouble we would have been in, I should have gone for help. But I didn’t stop, and I didn’t think, and within moments I was as much in need of help as Peter.
I started to climb down into the crack, attempting to brace myself between the two walls of it, when the rock simply crumbled away beneath my left foot, and I fell into the blackness.
At some point during my fall I struck my head, and I lost consciousness even before I reached the bottom. I have no idea how long I was out, but the first thing I became aware of was Peter’s voice, very close to my ear, repeating my name again and again, like some mindless mantra.
And then awareness brought pain. A searing pain in my left arm that took my breath away. I was lying spreadeagled on a bed of rock and shingle, my arm twisted under me in an unnatural way. I knew at once that it was broken. It cost me dear to turn myself over and haul myself into a sitting position against the rock, and I yelled my imprecations at the night, cursing God and the Holy Mother, and Peter and anyone else who came to mind. I couldn’t see a thing, but the roar of the ocean was quite deafening. The shingle beneath me was wet with seaweed and sand, and I realized that the only reason we were not under water was that the tide must have turned.
At high tide, in a storm like this, the sea would rush into this crack in the earth in a fury of boiling, foaming water, and we would both have been drowned. Peter was wailing, and I could hear his teeth chattering. He pressed himself up against me, and now I could feel his shivering.
‘You’ve got to go and get help,’ I shouted.
‘I’m not leaving you, Johnny.’ I felt his breath in my face.
‘Peter, if you’ve got nothing broken, you’ve got to climb out of here and go get Donald Seamus. My arm’s broken.’
But he just clung on to me all the more tightly, sobbing and shaking, and I let my head fall back against the rock and closed my eyes.
When I opened them again, the first grey light of dawn was angling into the crevice from above. Peter was curled up beside me on the shingle, and he wasn’t moving. I panicked and started shouting for help. Crazy! Who was going to hear me?
I was hoarse and had all but given up, when a shadow leaned over the opening fifteen feet above us, and a familiar voice called down. ‘Holy Mary Mother of God, what are you doing down there, boys?’ It was our neighbour, Roderick MacIntyre. I discovered later that he had found sheep missing first thing after the storm, and had come down along the cliffs looking for them. Had it not been for that serendipitous piece of good luck, we might both have died down there. As it was, I still feared for Peter’s life. He hadn’t moved since I regained consciousness.
The men who weren’t away with the fishing fleet assembled on the clifftop and one of them was lowered down on a rope to pull us up. The storm had abated by now, but there was still a strong wind, and I’ll never forget the look on Donald Seamus’s face in that yellow-grey dawn light as they brought me up. He never said a word, but lifted me into his arms and carried me down to the jetty where a boat was waiting to take us over to Ludagh. Peter was still unconscious, and in the crowd of men huddled around us at the boat I heard someone say he was suffering from exposure. ‘Hypothermia,’ someone else said. ‘He’ll be lucky if he survives.’ And I felt a terrible pang of guilt. None of this would have happened if it hadn’t been for me sneaking out to meet Ceit. How could I ever face my mother in the next life if I let anything happen to Peter? I had promised her!
I don’t remember much about the next day or so. I know that they put us in the back of Donald Seamus’s van at Ludagh, and we were driven to the cottage hospital at Daliburgh. The Sacred Heart. I must have been suffering from exposure, too, because I don’t even remember them putting the plaster on my arm. A big, heavy white stookie from my wrist to my elbow, with just my fingers and thumb sticking out the end of it. I remember nuns leaning over my bed. Scary they were, in their black robes and white coifs, like harbingers of death. And I remember sweating a lot, a bit delirious, burning up one minute, then shivering with cold the next.
It was dark outside when I finally recovered my senses. I couldn’t have told you whether one day had passed, or two. There was a light burning at my bedside, and it seemed shocking to have electric light again, as if I had been transported back to my former life.
I was in a ward with six beds in it. A couple of them were occupied, but Peter was in neither of them, and I began to get a bad feeling. Where was he? I slipped out of the bed, bare feet on cold linoleum, trembling legs that would hardly hold me up, and padded to the door. On the other side of it was a short corridor. Light spilled out from an open doorway. I could hear the hushed voices of the nuns, and a man’s voice. The doctor maybe. ‘Tonight will be critical,’ he said. ‘If he makes it through, then he should be okay. But it’ll be touch and go. At least he has youth on his side.’
I walked in something like a trance along that corridor and found myself standing at the open door. Three heads turned towards me, and one of the nuns was on her feet immediately, coming to grab me by the shoulders. ‘What on earth are you doing out of bed, young man?’
‘Where’s Peter?’ was all I could say, and I saw them all exchanging looks.
The doctor was an older man, in his fifties. Wearing a dark suit. He said, ‘Your brother has pneumonia.’ Which meant nothing to me then. But I knew from his grave demeanour that it was serious.
‘Where is he?’
‘He’s in a special room down the hall,’ one of the nurses said. ‘You can see him tomorrow.’
But I’d already heard them say that there might be no tomorrow. I felt sick to my stomach.
‘Come on, now, let’s get you back into bed.’ The nun who had me by the shoulders guided me back up the hall and into the ward. When I was safely tucked up in bed, she told me not to worry and to try to get some sleep. She turned out the light and slipped back out into the hall in a whisper of skirts.
In the darkness I heard a man’s voice coming from one of the other beds. ‘Pneumonia’s a killer, son. Better pray for your wee brother.’
I lay for a long time, listening to the beat of my own heart, the blood pulsing in my ears, until I heard the gentle purring of my fellow patients as they finally succumbed to sleep. But I knew there was no way that I was going to sleep that night. I waited, and waited, until finally the light in the hall outside was doused and a blanket of silence descended on the little cottage hospital.
At length I summoned the courage to slip from the bed and cross once more to the door. I opened it a crack and peered down the hall. There was a line of light beneath the closed door to the nun’s station, and a little further down, light seeped out from beneath another door, also closed. I squeezed out into the corridor and drifted past the nun’s station till I reached the second door and very slowly turned the handle to ease it open.
The light in here was subdued. It had a strange yellow-orange quality. Warm, almost seductive. The air was suffocatingly hot. There was a single bed with electrical equipment along one side, cables and tubes trailing across the covers to the prone figure of Peter lying beneath the sheets. I closed the door behind me and hurried over to his bedside.
He was a terrible colour. Paler than white, with penumbrous shadows beneath his eyes, his face glistening with sweat. His mouth hung open, and I could see that the sheets that covered him were soaked through. I touched his forehead with the backs of my fingers and almost recoiled from the heat. He was burning up, unnaturally
hot. His eyes were moving beneath his eyelids, and his breathing was shallow and rapid.
My sense of guilt very nearly overwhelmed me then. I pulled up a chair to his bedside and perched myself on the edge of it, taking his hand in mine and holding on to it for dear life. If I could have given my life for his I would.
I don’t know how long I sat there. Some hours, I think. But at some point I fell asleep, and the next thing I knew I was being wakened by one of the nuns who took me by the arm and led me back to the ward, without a single word of admonition. Back in my own bed I dozed fitfully, never far from the surface, troubled by strange dreams of storms and sex, until the light of the dawn began creeping in around the edges of the curtains. And then sudden sunlight laid itself down across the linoleum in narrow burned-out strips.
The door opened, and the nuns wheeled in a trolley with breakfast. One of them helped me to sit up and said, ‘Your brother’s fine. His fever broke during the night. He’s going to be all right. You can go along and see him after breakfast.’
I could hardly get my porridge and toast and tea down me fast enough.
Peter was still prone in his bed when I went in. But there was colour in his face now, his eyes a little less shadowed. He turned his head to look at me as I pulled up the chair beside his bed. His smile was pale, but he seemed genuinely happy to see me. I had feared that I would never be forgiven. He said, ‘I’m sorry, Johnny.’
I felt tears prick my eyes. ‘What for? You’ve nothing to be sorry about, Peter.’
‘It’s all my fault.’
I shook my head. ‘Nothing’s your fault, Peter. If anyone’s to blame it’s me.’
He smiled. ‘There was a woman who came and sat with me all night.’
I laughed. ‘No. That was me, Peter.’
He shook his head. ‘No, Johnny. It was a woman. She sat right there in that chair.’
‘One of the nuns then.’
‘No. It wasn’t a nun. I couldn’t really see her face, but she was wearing a sort of short green jacket, and a black skirt. She held my hand all night.’