by Bella Pollen
‘Almost everyone else in East Berlin is one,’ he said. ‘I, however, am a nuclear physicist.’
31
Ballanish
Hunger made him leaner and fitter with every passing day. He swam for miles, island-hopping from one stretch of coast to another. The water was icy but the pain of it cleared his head and as he rolled through the chilled waters of the Atlantic he fantasized about bumping into his Kodiak brothers or comparing notes with those pale-faces, the polars. There were others he wanted to meet too. The walrus, for example, that wise old grandfather of the sea. All those rusted hulls of shipwrecks he’d explored, the whispered prayers of drowning seamen he’d heard. A walrus could follow the journey of a broken-off iceberg or play chicken in the fast lanes of the shipping highways.
So he swam on through shoals of bioluminescent shrimp and schools of minnows, their backs tattooed with silver. Twice he passed an orca, moving in graceful slow motion against the current. Another time he came across a basking shark, resting in deep water. He’d blown bubbles at it and splashed around with his paws, but the shark remained stationary, disinterested, like a submarine out of petrol.
The island was at its most beautiful just before dawn. A constant shifting of navy to grey. Once in a while the moon slid out from behind the clouds and shone a silver searchlight across the bay – a beacon signalling home. But when he returned to the cave it was not the thought of home or even the big wrestler that soothed him. It was the map. He would stare at the army of red arrows, at the misspelt words and badly drawn letters. These markings of language which looked so foreign, yet at the same time so achingly familiar.
32
How safe were memories? Letty tried to ward off paranoia but doubt was a tenacious emotion and she found it increasingly hard to judge what was real and what was not. After the row with Tom she found herself questioning even the most solid foundations of her life until the very ground beneath her feet began to shift and move.
There were good days, there were bad days and then there were the hopeless days, which outnumbered them both. On good days, she held on to what she believed. That there had been nothing underhand about this man she had loved, he was no liar, never a traitor. Instead, she focused her rage on Tom. Men are turned by disillusion or jealousy, Porter had said. If the British government were looking for a mole, then why not Tom? Why couldn’t it be Tom? On good days she functioned on automatic, held her grief in check, but on bad days the weight of it simply rolled over her. Then she would smoke ten, sometimes fifteen cigarettes in a single sitting, grinding the butts into the sandy ground one after the other. At night, to help her sleep, she drank whisky from a bottle she kept under her bed. She had no appetite, barely spoke to the children. You could call it living, but only just. Her memories were prickly and uncomfortable. Suspicions about Nicky loomed, plausible, unanswerable. He was never the man you thought he was, Tom had said, and on bad days she believed him. Because if Tom was capable of turning his back on his oldest friend, then what had Nicky been capable of?
The rest of the time were hopeless days and a single question consumed her. Had it been a man or a woman for whom Nicky had risked everything?
‘Marry me, and we’ll travel the world,’ Nicky had said, and she had imagined washing their clothes in the muddy water of the Ganges or nursing isolated Chinese villages through a cholera epidemic. She saw herself working tirelessly by Nicky’s side, building dams, administering vaccines. At night, they would sink, exhausted, into a bed shrouded by mosquito netting and she had fallen for the idea of a love binding them together through passion and adversity. Had it been her and Nicky against the world, she could have borne anything diplomatic life threw at her. Liberia, their first posting – unofficially dubbed by the Foreign Office as the ‘armpit’ posting of the world – had embodied all the romance she’d attributed to the job. Liberia, for all its overpowering heat and unreliable plumbing, for all its dreadful poverty and the madness of its Third World bureaucracy, had been the place she’d been happiest.
There had been nothing romantic about Bonn’s suburban spires and provincial formality. Her most immediate problem had been one of communication. Nicky absorbed languages like a plant taking in oxygen but Letty’s ear tuned in to chords and scales. Had they been stationed in France, or Italy perhaps, she might have fared better but German was a noisy, industrial hardware of a language. Even with three lessons a week, the words that came out of her mouth still sounded like cutlery dropping onto a stone floor. And then there was the vernacular of diplomacy. It had come so easily to Nicky but Letty was constantly having to watch what she said, work on her formalities. Diplomatic life in Bonn was about entertaining at every level. There were endless dinners to attend, back-to-back functions to grace. The narrow requirements of dress code frustrated her. Always a brooch to be pinned onto a jacket. Always shoes to be matched to a dress. Even her hair required taming into diplomatic sobriety. She found the number of engagements exhausting and the adherence to rules a torture.
In the beginning she tried pleading childcare. ‘I’m afraid it’s just not done,’ the Ambassadress informed her quietly.
‘Heartless old ogress,’ she said to Nicky. ‘I think the children might actually be dying before she gives me the right to refuse.’
‘Go on strike,’ Nicky said. ‘Everyone else does these days.’
But much as she was taken with the idea, she knew there was no place for a conscientious objector in embassy life. As the wife of the First Secretary, and then Counsellor, she had signed up for certain representational duties and some, of course, were worthwhile. If a train derailed or a plane crashed, it fell to the wives to comfort the survivors, but it seemed somewhat un-Christian of her to pray for constant national accidents for the sole purpose of keeping her from her chief duty – saving the Ambassadress from bores. At functions Letty soon learned she was required to draw the fire of the lesser guests, to laugh at their least amusing anecdotes, to free the Ambassadress for those who actually had something relevant to say. ‘My role is to be the filter through which the uninteresting and the unimportant must not be allowed to pass,’ she said to Nicky one evening.
‘You’re far too clever and beautiful to be allowed near anyone interesting. Gillian feels threatened by you – all the wives do, for that matter.’
‘I don’t know about that, but I swear to God, there isn’t anyone less suited to the job,’ she said ruefully. ‘Conversationally, I have the knack of making a sow’s ear out of a silk purse.’
‘Rubbish, you charm everyone, and what’s more, you know it.’
‘No.’ She kissed him. ‘But as long as I charm you, who cares?’
‘Anyway, you’re an inspired listener, and that’s all that most people want.’
She sighed. ‘I miss Liberia.’
‘I know you do.’ He took her in his arms. ‘The problem with Bonn is that its two principal industries are spying and Gummibär. There isn’t much in between.’
The rest of the wives were a Stasi of well turned-out women who operated in a strict hierarchy according to the seniority of their husbands. They kept each other under constant surveillance and were never short of advice, whether solicited or not. Letty found their pettiness irritating. Her natural distaste for gossip prevented her indulging in the fruits of the intelligence grapevine, however juicy. From time to time there would be ‘big’ news. A divorce, someone who had cracked under the pressure. So-and-so’s wife might be described as ‘a bit unsafe’. ‘She wasn’t discreet,’ the whispers went, ‘she wasn’t one of us. She wasn’t . . . well . . . diplomatic.’ These sorts of utterances, however, were too close to the bone for Letty and so she kept her own counsel.
The problem was, though, that if you weren’t inside the circle you were outside, and so Letty had no way of knowing that the other women quickly began to whisper about her, and the softest whisper of all was that Nicky Fleming might never make Ambassador because of his wife.
33
The thought came to him violently. His time was finite and he was wasting it. The sea was a seductive distraction and what he was looking for was not to be found there.
So now he left the cave for land, and only at night, when visibility was grainy and uncertain. Barely a hop, kick and a splash away was a grand curve of a beach overlooked by high dunes that led to a machair, an immense sanded prairie blanketed in a mosaic of wildflowers, and from this starting point he explored the island, taking each arrow of the compass in turn. To the north were the shadowy hills of Lewis and Harris, the promise of a colder wind and harsher light. On the far side of treacherous bogs and salt flats covered in pink thrift were the stone causeways to the southern islands. Then there was the east with its hopscotch of fresh-water lochs and heather-covered hills pimpled with rocks, but the east he found faintly oppressive, as though it were somehow tainted by its proximity to the mainland. So it was the west he kept returning to, the west with its seductive loneliness, the iridescent turquoise and emeralds of its bays and those startling bleached-bone sands.
And wherever he went, he searched.
He saw Jackson, who worked at the lobster factory, hiding bottles of whisky in the sleeves of his Sunday suit. He witnessed Archie the gamekeeper, who sang at weddings in a soulful baritone voice, nearly cut off his thumb splitting driftwood. He was crouched in the byre when Hughie, the fisherman, who lived in unimaginable squalor in a croft with an upside-down pram on the roof, made love to his wife while she cried.
There were many times he could have been caught. Many times he would have welcomed it. Unlike other bears in captivity he hadn’t had his teeth taken out. Unlike other bears, he was not trapped in a cycle of pain with his nose forcibly crushed and his sense of smell destroyed. He understood what it meant to be loved, to feel safe. Show a creature enough love and it will never harm you. This had been the wrestler’s mantra and it was a brave one. Believe this and you have to believe that the instinct for love is stronger than the instinct to eat. You have to believe that the desire for love is stronger than the instinct to kill, stronger even than the instinct to survive.
34
The Kettle was a nickname for a deep ravine in the Scolpaig cliffs, a couple of hundred feet inland from the sea. Some topographical quirk made this enormous gash in the earth invisible from a distance and a person not paying attention to where they were going, a birdwatcher, say, scanning the seas for a guillemot, might easily find himself dropping into the abyss before realizing that land and luck had unexpectedly run out. In recent years this had indeed been the fate of two people: the first, a stranger to the islands, caught in a rolling mist off the sea; the second, a vet from Skye, a man who really should have known better than to choose the Kettle as a suitable place to remove a thistle from his sock, a decision that cost him his left gumboot, his balance and shortly thereafter his life.
The sides of the Kettle were sheer but there was a way down. Bisecting the crater was a narrow slope, on wet days as lethal as the Cresta Run, but in dry weather . . . The children, of course, were forbidden to attempt it, but Nicky had once made the descent using clumps of tough grass as hand-holds. At the bottom, he had discovered both a cave and a tunnel, and it was through this tunnel, during a storm or spring tide, that the sea ‘boiled’, churning around the walls with such centrifugal force that it shot a frothy spray one hundred feet up through the Kettle’s ‘spout’, covering those lying at the top in thick yellowing foam.
It was dead low tide by the time the children reached Scolpaig and the Kettle bottom was dry, save for the odd rock pool filled with green slime. Georgie and Jamie lay on their stomachs, the big Ordnance Survey map spread between them.
‘You know what they should build here?’ Alba rested her chin in her hands and gazed out to sea. ‘A high-security prison. It’s the perfect place. We’re on an island in the middle of the Atlantic with no way off.’
‘Except a ferry and a causeway and a plane once a week to Glasgow,’ Georgie commented.
‘The causeway leads to another island, so that’s a dead end, and convicts aren’t allowed to catch ferries or planes. Then the Minch is lethal to swimmers. It’s like the Bermuda Triangle of the British Isles.’
‘So?’
‘So, there’s no escape. We’re stuck here for life with no parole and no visiting hours.’
‘Perfect place for you, then,’ Georgie said. ‘Hey, look how clear St Kilda is.’
‘Which is St Kilda?’ Jamie asked.
‘The one shaped like a witch’s hat.’ Georgie pointed at a shadow of land out to sea. ‘Where the cliff game came from.’
Jamie squinted at the horizon. The cliff game was a form of Russian roulette Alba had devised for playing when a gale blew at force eight or higher. They would all stand around the top of the Kettle, backs to the wind, then on a countdown from three, lean back and allow the wind to support their weight. If it did, they would step a few inches closer to the edge and try again until someone chickened out. The game filled Jamie with equal measures of excitement and dread. To be allowed to join in was an honour, a chance to earn Alba’s respect, but he could never help wondering – what of those split seconds between gusts? What would it feel like to fall?
‘If you wanted to get married on St Kilda,’ Alba said, ‘they made you stand on the edge of a cliff on one leg to prove you could support a wife.’
‘That’s silly.’
‘They had no food out there, so they had to climb down cliffs to catch young fulmars and gannets.’
‘But what happened if they fell?’
‘Bad luck on them,’ Alba said, chewing her hair.
‘What happens if they didn’t fall?’
‘Then it was wedding bells and gannet pie for the rest of their life.’
‘But why didn’t they have any food?’
‘Because they lived on a giant cliff shaped like a witch’s hat,’ Georgie said patiently.
‘But why didn’t they live somewhere else?’
‘For God’s sake,’ Alba groaned. ‘They lived where they lived.’
‘But they can’t only have eaten gannet pie.’
Alba lined up a row of sheep pellets and flicked them off the edge one by one. ‘Of course not. For breakfast they had porridge with boiled puffin in it. For lunch they scrambled a few baby fulmars and they tore the feet off gannets and made jam out of them for tea.’
‘That’s horrid.’ Jamie’s brain flashed him an image of the head and shoulders of a puffin staring accusingly at him from the bowl. ‘Why don’t we send them some food?’
‘Nobody lives there any more. They were evacuated.’
‘I see,’ Jamie said in his gravest voice.
‘They asked the government to help them leave the island, although they didn’t all want to go,’ Georgie explained.
‘It’s pathetic,’ Alba said. ‘I would have refused.’
‘But then you would have been there all by yourself,’ Jamie said. ‘You’d be lonely.’
‘It’s a question of principle, Jamie. I would have stayed, however lonely, just to show I couldn’t be pushed around.’
‘Well, you’re the only one of us brave enough to,’ Georgie said generously. ‘Alba’s been to St Kilda, Jamie; don’t you remember?’
‘And bloody awful it was, too,’ Alba said.
It had been the summer of her eleventh birthday. There had been a surplus of crabs that year and Alisdair the fisherman took to bringing up tray containers of claws to the house. On hearing that Alba loved boats he offered to take her with him and Alba had been so excited that Letty had agreed without thinking through the implications. St Kilda was forty miles out to sea and boats had to leave at night in order to get a worthwhile fishing quota. As the day of departure drew closer, as the weather turned progressively nastier, she’d been plagued by doubts. Nicky had been delayed in Bonn and Alba, having shown off relentlessly about the trip, had been too stubborn to back down.
It was bitterly cold on the evenin
g in question and Alba had felt sick just looking at the lines of white surf breaking out at sea. Perched on the boat’s wooden bench, she watched her family growing smaller and smaller as they waved at her from the dock. Alisdair was typical of the island fishermen in that he was short of money and not entirely vigilant about the maintenance of his equipment, which meant his small boat wasn’t quite as seaworthy as it might have been. By midnight a warm front had arrived bringing rain and three-foot-high waves. Nevertheless, the little boat toiled on against the prevailing wind and currents until eventually Alba found herself beneath the witchy brim of St Kilda’s cliffs.
‘So what was it like?’ Jamie said.
Alba shrugged. ‘The island is one massive rock. You beach the boat in the bay and walk up to these little stone huts where they dry the fulmars. Then you climb up and there’s this patch of green that looks like a nice lawn, except it isn’t a nice lawn at all, it’s the other side of a really steep cliff and underneath the cliff there are about a billion gannets nesting. We only stayed a minute because we had to go fishing, although honestly, I wish we had stayed, as the fishing was awful.’
Alisdair had negotiated the treacherous narrows of St Kilda while Alba, lulled by the put-put of the outboard motor, watched the gannets above her head folding in their wings and plummeting one by one into the dense black sea. Finally Alisdair dropped anchor. The fishing rods were square biscuits of wood around which thirty feet of nylon line fixed with hooks was wrapped. Alba unravelled hers and waited.
By mid-morning the thrill of fishing had long gone. Alba’s breakfast of bread and butter had been an early casualty of the choppy waters. Her hands were raw from pulling at the line. She was dotted in tiny metallic scales and her eyes stung from the salt water. A carpet of stiff and bloodied fish lay beneath her feet.