by Bella Pollen
One of the mackerel had swallowed its bait so completely that Alisdair had been forced to cut through its mouth to retrieve the hook. Alba could barely watch. The fish hadn’t been dead at the beginning of the operation and the noise the scissors made as they snipped through the cartilage was almost more than she could bear. And still they went on fishing. She’d been staring out to sea, her hand mechanically rising and falling, when she spotted them. Dark shadows rising up through the water like torpedoes. Two fins, a dorsal and a tail, twenty feet apart, circling the boat. Then, in frighteningly quick succession, four, five, six! Eight!
Alisdair froze. ‘Basking sharks,’ he hissed. ‘They’ll have us over.’ Alba, too, had been in awe of their size, longer than the boat itself and so close she could have dropped her hand and touched their muscled backs. A tail splashed. The boat rocked. Alba lost her footing.
‘Pull up the line!’ Alisdair shouted, but it was too late. The sharks were already tangled. There was a tug so powerful on Alba’s wooden handle that it wrenched her towards the boat edge. Alisdair, alarm written across his usually impassive face, snatched it from her and tossed it overboard.
‘Quick!’ He heaved a plastic container off the bottom of the boat. ‘Pour this out! This will keep them away.’ He grabbed a second container of paraffin and emptied it into the water. There was a frenzied thrashing. Alba caught a glimpse of a gargantuan mouth, then, as suddenly as they had appeared, the sharks submerged and were gone. ‘The devil’s messengers,’ Alisdair breathed, white and trembling. ‘Aye, sent by the devil hisself.’
‘I’ve never had such a miserable day my whole life,’ Alba later said. Even her mother’s admission that she’d stayed awake all night, racked with fear and guilt, had not appeased her. Before that moment she’d had no idea that death was so close. Now she knew. Death shadowed everyone. Death was driving the bus when you stepped off the pavement. Death waited in the cold gloom of the sea when a monster rocked your boat. And when you tripped and fell off a roof, it was death who caught you.
‘So you didn’t drown, then?’ Jamie said.
‘No, village idiot, as you can see, I didn’t drown.’
‘Did you cry?’
‘Yes.’
‘Would you cry if it happened now?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I don’t cry any more.’ Alba shrugged. ‘I can’t imagine anything that would make me cry’ She looked away and Jamie, sensing the abrupt change of mood, leapt to his feet.
‘Come on, let’s play it now.’
‘Play what?’
‘The cliff game.’
‘It’s not windy enough,’ Georgie said quickly.
‘One go.’
‘No.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we say so,’ Alba said. ‘Now shut up and sit down.’
But Jamie was already spreading his arms. ‘Tell me when.’ He took a step backwards. Alba seized his arm and yanked him down to the ground. ‘Stoppit.’ He struggled. She whacked him on the side of the head. ‘You do as you’re told, Jamie Fleming,’ she said, gritting her teeth in sudden fury. ‘Do you understand? You do as you’re bloody well told!’
35
There were three of them. Way above him. Silhouetted against the sky. They were worryingly near to the edge and he risked a closer look.
Two were girls. One wearing a blue anorak, the other red. Their long hair blew around their faces and caught across their mouths. But it was the third child, the boy, that made his heart skip a beat.
There’s no point asking how he knew. He just did.
‘Hello, boy,’ he said, and waited for a reply to come to him on the breath of the east wind. ‘Hello, bear,’ the boy whispered.
36
Sometimes she hunted for memories of him. A postcard he’d received and used as a bookmark, a note he’d written and kept for no reason. She hoarded these fragments, stockpiling them for the future. It haunted her that she couldn’t remember their last kiss or the last time he’d made love to her.
She’d found the canvas sorting through a builder’s packing crate. It had been full of long-forgotten rubbish – boxes of old fishing flies, dried-up paint tubes, kites with knotted strings, a single rowlock for the little rowing boat they had kept on the church loch for a while. She took out each item in turn, intending to throw it away, but finding instead some spurious reason to keep it. The painting had been at the bottom, wrapped inside a plastic bag. It was one of Nicky’s canvases, stretched over a wooden frame and neatly finished at the back with brown paper. The subject matter, the soaring white statue of Our Lady of the Isles set against the backdrop of radar domes, she had no trouble in recognizing as the missile firing-range at Gebraith. Given, though, that the strangely bright colours of the picture bore no relation to the weather on the day she and Nicky had climbed it, arguing all the way, it was obvious that Nicky must have returned at a later date.
The ‘trip’ to the statue had been years ago, on a washed-out monotone afternoon. Alba had been small enough to still be carried on her father’s shoulders and that summer, for whatever reason, they’d decided to catch the ferry from Oban to Loch Baghasdail, driving up to the north island from the toe of the south.
When the white statue had unexpectedly come into view, Nicky had pulled the car into a passing place. ‘That’s it, isn’t it?’ he asked. ‘Our Lady of the Isles. That’s where the missile range is.’
‘Yes,’ she said shortly.
He switched off the engine. ‘Let’s walk up there. I’ve never seen it close up.’
Letty had been unwilling. The fact that it existed at all was bad enough. That Nicky should acknowledge its right to be there with a visit incensed her. In the late 1940s, the MoD announced its intention to build an army training base and rocket range at Gebraith. Initially the proposal was greeted with enthusiasm – jobs were scarce on the island – but everything changed once the islanders got wind of the sheer scale of the MoD plans, which extended from the middle of the southern island all the way to the north and required the ‘relocating’ of every islander in its way. The most impassioned critic of this scheme had been the local minister, who realized that not only would his parish be destroyed, but a way of life along with it. He had stirred up enough support to commission the building of a twenty-five-foot statue on a hill directly overlooking the intended military site. If the Free Church could admit to such things, then the statue was a godly act of defiance, a divine ‘fuck you’ to the MoD. The literature on Our Lady of the Isles described it as protector of the Gael. In times of trouble or threat they turned for help to Mary, Mother of God and ‘miraculously’, eight months after its completion, the Ministry of Defence announced a massive scale-down of their original plans. Even still, the range was an aberration. Giant twin golf balls perched on the hill, dwarfed by a radio mast. The very sight of it made Letty feel ill.
‘First they appropriate St Kilda,’ she fumed, struggling to pull Georgie up the hill behind Nicky and Alba, ‘the biggest gannetry in the world, next they go ahead and build this . . . and do you know what they promised the locals? That during tupping and lambing season, the “use of the rocket firing-range will be kept to a minimum”. Thank you very much. It’s so bloody arrogant! I can’t stand the way the MoD treats the Highlands and Islands like their own personal playground – look at this thing, it’s a monstrosity and they only got away with it because they think the islanders are an easy touch.’
‘A little simplistic, surely,’ Nicky said mildly. ‘Besides, you can’t object to progress just because it doesn’t suit your romanticized idea of how this island should be preserved. If it were up to you, no one up here would ever be allowed to join the twentieth century. People have to live and work and the range provides much-needed jobs for the locals.’
Letty bit her tongue. It was the very insularity of the island, its lack of ambition and blanket rejection of outsiders that had allowed it to remain a strange half-world, a
closed world – but she knew that she too was an outsider, just as her father had been, and the unintended consequence that came with their class and money meant, by definition, they were themselves destroying the island by being part of it.
‘If you think that a missile firing-range is suitable employment for the islanders then it shows you have no understanding of the kind of people who live here,’ she said tightly.
‘Or maybe you’re as guilty of underestimating their intelligence as the MoD,’ Nicky retorted.
‘It’s no use arguing with you,’ she’d said resentfully. ‘You won’t hear anything negative about your precious government.’
‘It’s your precious government too, Letty,’ he said gently. ‘Don’t forget that. You seem to have an innate distrust of your own country.’
‘And you don’t? With everything you know about their methods?’
‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t. I couldn’t very well do my job if I did.’
And they had not spoken again until they’d arrived at Ballanish.
‘Try to understand,’ she’d told him later, ‘this island is my sanctuary. It’s where I belong, it’s where I feel the possibility of hope and faith and every morning when I look out of the window I fall in love with it all over again.’
Now, Letty shook her head at the canvas, perplexed at the almost luridly bright blues and purples. Why had Nicky painted it and when? Had he gone down to Gebraith without her knowledge? CO-60, NI-60, MG-137. She squinted at his colour-codings, half-heartedly trying to match them to the tubes of old paint in the crate. Then, with a stubborn determination to find an answer to something, anything, she tried to match them to every other tube of paint she could find in the house, but none of the references came close. I paint things to study them, she could almost hear Nicky saying as she took the canvas to the kitchen table and set it down. To understand how they work.
And that had been her point, really. How Gebraith was going to work.
The range had been originally built to launch the Corporal missile, Britain’s first nuclear weapon and a weapon, they’d argued, that was to be at the forefront of the Cold War defence. For the management and security of such a thing to be in the hands of islanders, whose inherent disposition allowed them to leave valuable machinery to rust outdoors and tolerate rubbish piling up all over their island, made her profoundly uneasy. What of human error? What if there was an accident? And suddenly, out of nowhere, the word appeared in her mind.
Schyndell.
The power-plant in East Germany. She sat down abruptly. There was no reason to make a connection, and yet . . .
Schyndell, Porter had said. A little coincidental. A little convenient, don’t you think?
She tried to think back. Had Nicky applied to be part of the delegation, or had it been the other way round?
It was when she turned the canvas over again that she heard it – an almost imperceptible shift of material, the noise of paper sliding against paper. The sound of suspicion. Nicky’s paintings were crudely framed affairs with the raw edges of the canvas stapled straight to the wood. She stared at the double thickness of the brown backing paper, hoping for something, praying for nothing, hovering on the threshold of the before and after – it was so much easier to stay in the past where the knowledge of the present didn’t exist, but it was too late now and she knew it. She punctured the corner of the canvas and ripped the paper away. A white envelope fell out. On the front was a single sentence written in Nicky’s tidy script. Everything and every event is pervaded by the Grace of God.
She read the line twice, uncomprehendingly, then she turned the bulky envelope over and slit the flap.
37
An eight-hundred-pound grizzly with the run of a Hebridean island was a rare occurrence, and teatime most days found Donald John’s small kitchen bulging with visitors all engaged in the island’s most popular pastime: gossip. Weeks had passed since the flight of the bear and the excitement was beginning to die down. Nevertheless, when Jamie walked in, he found Peggy from the shop, Roddy and Mrs Matheson, who was married to the island stick-maker, all deep in speculation about the animal’s fate.
‘If it isn’t wee Jamie,’ the old lady broke off. ‘Why, many’s the long day since we’ve seen you!’ She grasped Jamie’s thin hands in her own complicated, knotted ones. Dolly Matheson was hopelessly crippled by arthritis and whenever the Flemings paid her a visit they had to steel themselves for an interminable wait at the door, accompanied by the sound of agonizing groans coming from within. After much dragging of feet the door would be opened with one final gut-wrenching cry by Mrs Matheson, who would then limp back to the front room where her husband, who enjoyed the rudest of health, was slouching in his favourite easy chair. ‘Why, hello! Hello!’ He would leap up to greet them in a sprightly manner before ordering his poor, creaking wife to fetch the tea as though she were a tin servant in need of oil. ‘Aye, everyone’s after that thousand pound reward,’ she resumed as Jamie ran the gauntlet of head pats before squeezing himself next to Roddy on the bench. ‘The army have got aerial photographs, helicopters and the whatnot, why, they’ve even got the coastguards in Skye looking for him on account of someone saying they saw him there.’
‘Tse, so much fuss about that beast still.’ Donald John produced a bottle of Cherry Coke for Jamie. ‘He’ll have gone over a cliff long before now.’
‘No, he won’t,’ Jamie said. It made him furious when people said the bear was dead. The bear was a huge creature. One of the largest of all land carnivores, his father had told him. Nothing on the island could threaten it. If one hundred sheep armed with cudgels rushed it all at once, if all the cows and bulls ganged up and headbutted it together, the bear would still be stronger. As for the idea that he’d fallen off a cliff - bears weren’t stupid! They didn’t just trip over their claws. Bears lived in Russia, in Canada. They were used to cliffs. He didn’t care if Georgie and Alba had given up. He had devised his own system for searching. The Kettle was his headquarters. He wasn’t sure why he was drawn back there again and again, but he was, and from the top of the cliffs he could see the flower-covered sweep of the machair, the headstones in the graveyard and the vast bog in front of it. He could see all the way to the road and up to the heathery tip of Clannach beyond. Way in the distance he could make out Donald John’s croft and even the yellow gate of Ballanish. If the bear crossed in any direction, he would see it. If his father walked down the road to Ballanish, well, he would see him too . . .
In the last couple of weeks all Jamie’s doubts had resurfaced. Despite his father’s promise, despite Tom Gordunson’s confirmation, despite all the prayers he’d uttered and the maps he’d folded into bottles and tossed off the rocks, his father had still not returned. While the family had remained in Bonn, Jamie had felt secure, but in England, in the unfathomable surroundings of a strange city, he had been assailed by new worries. In London, it had no longer been a question of his father finding him -the question was who, precisely, was looking for his father? In Bonn, the British Embassy had taken care of that. Everyone had been involved – the Ambassador, the two military policemen who checked passes, the BND, the third secretary – even the German Militärpolizei in their stiff leather coats. Jamie pictured them all, faces grave with concentration, listening for the tap of Morse code, waiting for the crackle of information, perhaps even interrogating suspects. In Bonn, he had held onto the idea that the entire city was secretly engaged in the effort to locate his missing father. He imagined the man behind the newspaper kiosk passing a stealthy note to the street cleaner standing outside Cafe Uhl, who in turn signalled the woman with the coiled bun sitting at her desk on the second floor of the office block, who immediately picked up a telephone to the embassy where every day, yes, every single day, new diplomatic channels were being opened to embassies in Paris, Istanbul, Madrid, Moscow. At night, when he had trouble sleeping, Jamie would spread out a map in his head and watch as red dots illuminated each capital until the who
le world was blinking back at him in eager cooperation. Yes, in Bonn there had been a common cause, a single directive, ‘Find Nicholas Fleming and bring him home,’ but in London no one seemed interested. People stepped off pavements and ate in restaurants as though they hadn’t a care in the world. Even his mother, who following his father’s disappearance had yo-yoed between the embassy, the police station and the Ambassador’s residence, seemed to become curiously inactive and, slowly, the dark truth came to him. No one was looking for his father any more.
And now people had given up looking for the bear. Angrily he took a slug of Cherry Coke and stared bale-fully round the room. Why was he the only person who believed in anything? Why was he always the only one not to succumb to the epidemic of hopelessness? Were faith and optimism things that disappeared when you grew up? His father was still lost, just as the bear was still lost and he, Jamie, would find them both.
‘The beast isn’t in Skye and he’s no’ dead either,’ Roddy said. ‘Why, only the other evening, I was listening to the wireless when I heard noises.’ Roddy rubbed at the bags of loose skin under his eyes. ‘It was a stormy night, right enough, but I went outside and there in front of me I saw the red eyes of the bear glowing in the dark. Ach, what a terrible sight! Why, if I’d only had a pitchfork to hand,’ Roddy sighed mightily, ‘indeed that reward would have been mine.’
‘Alick said he should have got the reward,’ Jamie said, ‘because he actually caught the bear a few weeks ago.’
‘Did he now, the scoundrel!’ Donald John bashed at his knees in amusement.
‘Yes, but it got away,’ Jamie said forlornly.
‘Alick is always concocting stories,’ Roddy scoffed. ‘Why, once he comes into my croft with blood in his hair and he says to me, “I’ve got a sore head,” and points to a dead sparrow lying there on the ground. “See that sparrow! It came flying straight at me just now and I got it right between the eyes.” So I look at the dead sparrow on the ground and I says to him, “Why, that sparrow has been rotting on the ground for days, you liar.”’