by Ru Pringle
What the …?
Some kind of battle is taking place on the bridge.
Breathing very fast, she strains for details. Even in moonlight, it’s too dim for her night vision to make out much. There’s a scrum of movement, and a growing roar of voices. And clanging – lots of clanging. Also thumps, like haunches of meat being dropped on a floor. She sees a flash of something bright and metallic. There are screams.
Something falls noisily off the bridge right in front of her, barely three kayak-lengths away.
She fights the urge to back-paddle. Whatever hit the water is now thrashing about in it, swearing incoherently. It splashes towards the shore as she drifts closer, staggers obliviously up the bank to the road waving what might be a stick, and rejoins the chaos.
She daren’t move. Not this close. The best she can do is let the current take her, hoping no one sees. The bridge looms. She sees fists, what look like clubs improvised from shinty sticks and wooden posts, and swords – actual swords! – raised against the moonlit clouds.
Holy fuck.
Then she’s under the arch, and floating out the other side.
The channel is mercifully quiet after that, though she’s now so thoroughly freaked out that she half-expects every shadow to conceal some fornicating maniac with a sword or spear. Is this my country now? It feels like she’s floating through a delirium. She can’t remember when it all stopped making sense – at what point the nightmare became something that she couldn’t wake from. A reality in which the young had so little hope they fought and fucked as a sort of nihilistic experiment; in which decorated police superintendents became fugitives, and oil-tongued politicians sanctioned mass murder with baying public support. It’s only looking back that she realises how far she and the world have drifted from the kind of path even her parents might have imagined.
She floats towards the aurora’s shimmering smudge, feeling utterly, bewilderingly empty and alone. Then out of nowhere, the hacking sobs begin. She’s not aware of them being a response to anything specific. They just sort of rise up from a place so deep that she can’t find any connection to it at all, and yet slowly they possess her until she is bawling, and howling and shaking; snot and tears flooding down her face, and she can’t see the image of Karen and the bullet-raked boat, but she knows it’s there, as a kind of shadow in her soul. She can’t stop. It’s like she’s trying to vomit something impossible and huge up into the universe until she feels she will shake into dried-up, empty pieces with it; pieces that will blow away into the sky and evaporate.
The slackening current spits her into the silver-dappled waters of the bay.
CHAPTER 25
______________
Kerrera
TALLER THAN IT IS WIDE, the castle rears against a sky that looks too heavy and metallic to hang unsupported. Infected with shiny fossil boulders, the puddingstone crags beneath it could have been painted by Kurt Geiger. Completing the impression, corbies wheel around the ruined tower, their caws reverberating darkly.
Coira appreciates why her forebears feared the birds. From trips here in her youth, many times by home-made raft, she remembers this as a place of laughter, green grass and blue skies. Days spent trawling the shore for crabs, sea-anemones and small fish whose names she no longer even remembers, and evenings cooking mussels and less palatable things in the salt-smoke of driftwood fires.
Now …
It’s not just her that’s changed. Everything has. It’s like she can sense it in the ground, and she thinks she knows something of how the MacDougalls felt as they watched General Leslie’s Covenanter army besiege the castle they eventually sacked, four hundred years ago.
J. M. W. Turner might have enjoyed the island of Kerrera today, she thinks, wondering why the famous Georgian had chosen only to sketch the castle, and not render it in one of his great, wild paintings. She suspects his journey here from southern England would have made her own screwed-up little odyssey seem trifling.
CROSSING THE BAY – a distance of around four kilometres – had proved more eventful than she’d hoped. Waiting for a favourable tide on one of the small islands north of Seil, she’d huddled out of the breeze as best she could behind the kayak, snatching fragments of sleep as the moon arced overhead. The sky seemed alive with drones and other aircraft, flying north and south every few minutes. Sometimes she could make out what might have been distant thunder, although there were no signs of thunderstorms.
Stiff and sore as she raised herself at low tide, she had washed down the last crumbs of Barnhill bread with the remaining quarter-bottle of water, then followed the trackless coast north for half an hour. The shore here was a raised beach, thick with young woodland and frowned on by low cliffs. Ahead, as dawn sent dim fingers through thickening cloud, she could see up the Sound of Kerrera to where Oban lay. A few lights still twinkled along what was probably Corran Esplanade, north-west of the town. Northwards, Kerrera was a dark shield floating in mercury.
She found herself central to another pod of dolphins, but the wonder of her previous encounter was gone. As she watched them receding ahead, she noticed a strange “poc” noise. It sounded nearby, and was followed seconds later by a kind of whistling scream, which grew in volume as it seemed to descend at her from all sides at once.
There was a concussive thump and a tremendous hissing roar.
Before her popping eyes, hardly any distance away, the sea swelled upwards in a turquoise dome, out of which burst something like a giant fist of seawater. She remembers yelling, eyes screwed shut as a deluge hammered down around her like a waterfall and heavy somethings slapped and thudded on to the kayak’s hull, shaking the whole boat. She’d snapped her eyes open as a wave of foam engulfed the kayak.
Somehow, when things had calmed down, she was still upright. At first she couldn’t work out what she was seeing. Something had to be wrong with her eyes. The sea, and her hands, were crimson. And then there was that smell. A cloying smell of wet iron …
That’s when she saw the pieces of flesh floating beside the kayak. Oh God no, no …
She inspected herself in horror. She’d clearly been blown up: the blood and meat had to have come from somewhere. A pathologist had once told her of heads remaining conscious minutes after being severed. Her brain just hadn’t got the message.
And yet, she couldn’t find anything missing. Arms and torso seemed fine; toes could be felt and wiggled. The kayak wasn’t sinking.
She was so busy screaming that she didn’t notice the other boat until it was almost on top of her. Someone at the bow was waving. She vaguely considered paddling away, but the truth was she was still too stunned to move. If her heart beat any harder, she thought it might actually burst, like a shot tomato.
‘Watch whaur ye’re gaun!’ the man at the bow yelled over, gesticulating wildly from a few metres away. Skeletally thin, he wore a straggly red beard, a purple birthmark round one eye, and a startled expression. The boat was an aluminium tub with a huge dent in the bow and an oversized outboard. ‘Ye completely mad, eh? Naebody taks a kayak oot here ony mair – no hou things is noo! Tryin tae mak yersel deid, lass?’
The lank-haired man holding the tiller looked on, shaking his head, flinty eyes locked on hers.
‘What,’ she managed through chattering teeth, ‘the fuck are you doing?’ Her ears were still ringing and she was shivering – through shock, not cold. She could see the barrel of an olive-green mortar above the gunwales of the boat. It was smoking.
Red Beard seemed affronted. ‘Awbody haes tae eat,’ he told her, pulling a pole with a wicked hook on the end from the boat as it glided past the kayak, engine in neutral. His pale brows came down. ‘Didnae meant tae scare ye or naethin, but yon kayak’s near-on invisible, so it is! Got yersel a daith wish or somethin?’
Expertly, he began hooking chunks of meat from the sea. The long-haired man grabbed another hook and joined in. Between them they began hauling the largely intact corpse of a dolph
in into the boat. She watched, mind spinning.
They’ve seen me. Now anyone who asks will know where I am.
Then again, they didn’t exactly seem establishment types. The dolphin slid aboard with a wet clang.
‘You boys from Oban?’
Snorting, Red Beard shook his head. ‘Woudnae gang onywhaur near Oban the noo, like. We’re camped juist roon the corner frae here – Barrnacarry. There’s a wee ruined fairm we teuk ower.’ The man exchanged a glance with his companion. ‘Come back wi us, an ye like. Bin a while syne we seen a freenly face.’ A glint enters his eye. ‘We’ve got oorsels a wee still on the go.’
‘Fine hooch,’ observed Lank Hair, his gaunt features conspiratorial as he mimed swigging. It was as unexpected as his accent: English and very middle-class. His smile was more gaps than teeth.
Coira was immediately wary. ‘How many of you are there?’ Red Beard explored a nostril with a gory finger as he pondered the question.
‘Twelve. Maist o the time. Whiles less, whiles mair.’
This was tricky. She needed information, but couldn’t push hard enough to arouse suspicion. And while she no longer felt they meant harm, the longer they talked, the more a topic of conversation she was likely to be.
‘Any news of – you know? The troubles? Where the fighting is now?’
Both men shook their heads. ‘ Aw naw, we keep richt oot o aw that,’ Red Beard told her. ‘We’ve no even got a radio. Fightin finds us, it finds us. There’s no ower muckle we can dae aboot it, aither wye.’
‘Well,’ she called over her shoulder as she paddled away. ‘Happy fishing.’
Red Beard had shrugged, turning his attention to the next corpse.
Feeling very exposed after the encounter, she had headed straight for the south of Kerrera. An early trickle of vessels in the Firth of Lorn to the west was becoming a stream. Against the dark volcanic cliffs of the south-east corner of the island of Mull, every silhouette she saw was heading north, either up Loch Linnhe towards the town of Fort William, or through the relatively sheltered Sound of Mull towards the Sea of the Hebrides and the wild coasts and mountains west of the Great Glen.
Separatist country.
At least her camouflage seemed to be working. Even so, now daylight had at least nominally arrived, she decided to hide herself in the bay west of Kerrera’s southernmost tip to think. And, if she could, sleep.
NOW SHE’S SITTING with her back to a rock below Gylen Castle, gazing down the Firth of Lorne: a funnel of quicksilver widening towards the horizon somewhere out in the Atlantic. She still needs that intel, but the dolphin hunters have at least given her one piece of useful information.
She will need to be very, very careful.
Which means going at night.
For some reason, lying back in the grass, she starts thinking of the farm at Glenmachrie. Of her sister, running along the stream in her wellies. Of her parents, at the big old kitchen table that for so long seemed the centre of the world. Dad, smiling. Fiddling with his glasses in that way he did when he was amused. Mum molesting him, shamelessly. A habit that made anyone else in the room squirm. The smell of home-made pies or roast potatoes in the Rayburn. Bramble jam stewing on the hotplate.
Then, as night follows day, it’s Mum’s eyes she sees, staring up from the metal drawer. Weirdly opaque, like opals. She’d identified her father by his appendectomy scar, the shape of his toes, and a mole on his arm. He didn’t have a face, apparently. They’d covered whatever had replaced it with a cloth. She still feels the fracturing she experienced then. A knock so hard it had torn something inside her loose, and set it spinning. Her sister had spun on the outside as well: a top that lurched and flailed into everything, setting people who tried to love her spinning too. Her passage was the trail of a tornado. One which inevitably blew itself out so that one day Coira found herself looking into eyes as opaque as her mother’s had been in an equally cold, anonymous metal drawer.
She knows it’s wrong, that it will end in disaster, but suddenly she burns to go to Glenmachrie. Needs its dark soil under her feet and its pines and hay-meadows in her nostrils. Just a few kilometres away. She can feel the place. Like it’s magnetic.
She calls out, the feeling moving in her like a metal spike.
She knows the place she remembers is long gone. That she will never return there, and that it would be folly to try to even if she could.
She wrenches her attention towards her plan. She has no idea what she will encounter in Oban, but in the best scenario there will be armed troops. Roadblocks are near-certain, she thinks, and some kind of harbour patrol is likely. Assuming the authorities are searching for her openly, her description will have been circulated to the public and on the news. There will be surveillance cameras, at least along the main streets. Perhaps surveillance drones too. Particularly if warships are docked. All of which makes her priority finding somewhere to alter her appearance.
She’ll have to mull that over for a while.
Once suitably altered and in the town, then what? Finding internet would be good. However, short of breaking into an unoccupied house it seems unlikely she’d get a safe chance to ’netlink – and anyway, what she needs is local knowledge, not whatever propaganda the government’s mouthpieces have cooked up.
Which leaves the direct approach.
But who to ask? Where? Army personnel should be the most dependable source of intel, but approaching government employees of any kind seems like begging for trouble. Then again, what fugitive would brazenly ask a soldier for information?
It couldn’t be a checkpoint, though. She’d barely get a word out before being asked for ID. They’d need to be off-duty.
A bar?
Even if she avoids being recognised, she suspects she looks wild enough for someone in a bar to call the police. At least her land clothes are dry. Then she remembers how torn and stained they are. She’ll need to find a needle and thread and a laundry. Or steal replacements. Somewhere along the way she’s lost a roll of cash, but in her zipped trouser pocket she has eight hundred and fifty pounds and a few ten-pound coins, if she remembers correctly. Enough for a wash and a dry and a couple of meals. She considers washing her blouse and trousers in the sea or a stream, but the mud is so ingrained she suspects it would be futile. Then she has an idea.
It’s one that’s likely to compound the risks involved with going ashore, though less so than breaking and entering. This is all getting very chancy and complicated. However, she has another pressing reason for risking human contact, as a groan from her midriff reminds her.
She is ravenous.
Her thoughts are interrupted the sight of a navy cruiser heading up the firth. She ducks behind her rock. A long grey wedge with a pyramid on top, the cruiser’s moving at an impressive speed. She knows she’s probably being paranoid: even though the vessel can be only three or four kilometres away, the chances of personnel or systems on board spotting her, even if they had nothing better to do and knew where to look, seem slim.
Through her binoculars she watches it bear down on an apparent convoy of three smaller boats.
The boats look old. Two are vomiting impressive clouds of dark smoke. They don’t have the stubby, seaworthy outlines of local boats, and their decks are thick with silhouetted human figures.
Coira grips the binoculars harder as the warship closes the gap. At least two figures on the rearmost smaller boat are aiming elongated shapes in the direction of the approaching vessel. Their tips begin to sparkle. As she watches helplessly, tracer fire arcs, like streams of tiny sparks, silently over the sea towards the navy ship.
Stop it! Fuckwits – what the hell is that going to achieve?
The boat jinks away, surprisingly nimble, heading for the line of dark cliffs. She doesn’t understand why at first. Then she reasons it must be running for the hidden harbour of Loch Spelve. Thinking the warship has given up on it, she turns her attention to the two remaining boats, but
as the warship storms after them, she sees its single trapezoid gun turret turn to track the receding vessel. From this distance, the muzzle sticking out of the turret is like a matchstick. It’s hard to believe it could do harm.
The muzzle shortens. Puffs something.
Coira pulls at her hair. She can’t look away.
The migrant boat jolts downwards in the middle like a hinge, its centre eaten by a plume of grey debris. A doughnut of dark smoke and orange light rises against the cliffs, reflecting on the sea as the halves of the vessel separate and roll towards each other, sinking with shocking speed.
The report of the gun echoes off the crags.
Coira is screaming, eyepieces pressed in her eye sockets so hard they begin to hurt. She hurls the binoculars into the grass. Leaps up and stands, hands clawed, raging.
How dare they …?
Again, she feels murderous. For a crazed moment she burns to hear the cruiser’s crew of privileged fucks protesting they were “following orders” as she batons everything above their regulation shirt collars to bloated mush, beginning with the captain. Or seals them in their big steel coffin and watches them burn in it before they drown. That’s the death they just gave scores of human beings whose faces they’d never even see. People whose epic journeys to reach here, only to be snuffed out so casually on her doorstep – in her name – likely involved more courage than that insulated killing machine would know in its commission.
Teeth actually grinding, she retrieves her binoculars again, but the remaining boats have vanished behind the limb of the island, and the cruiser soon follows. A couple of swing-rotor helicopter gunships thunder up the sound, headed in the same direction. She has a strong urge to find high ground so she can watch what happens next.
Gradually, she comes to her senses. Doing that would make her highly visible. Besides, ultimately there’s nothing she can do.