I got off that boat before it made me feel any colder in my bones, though the night was mild for the time of year. The mooring knot didn’t come loose with the single jerk I had planned for it, and I took longer than I was happy with sorting out the mess I’d made, and then I was floating free, and with relief powering my arms I paddled to dry land—which was actually wet and slippy with treacherous bladderwrack and strands of kelp covering the rocks below. Solid ground came as a huge relief, even though I now had to stalk Brand in the dark, with no clear plan as to how to confront him or—better—steal Jess back before he noticed.
I pulled the kayak into the grass above the tideline. Looking around, I wasn’t able to see where Brand had put his dinghy, but there were so many humps and hummocks in the darkness that I could have wasted a lot of time looking, so I dismissed a half-formed plan to cut it loose and headed for the church.
Moving quietly was easy as the grass was soft under my feet. But even if I had been louder, I still would have heard the noise that stopped me in my tracks.
I knew it was music, but it was not the kind of music we made when we sang around the fire, and it was not the kind of music that Bar made when she played the tin whistle she had found still wrapped to the instruction book it had come with in the old art centre shop on Uist. It didn’t sound like Ferg’s strumming on any of the guitars he’d salvaged.
It sounded like angels crying.
I know angels don’t exist any more than ghosts do, but if they did and they were mourning something big—like the passing of the world perhaps—that’s what it would sound like. Because angels are meant to be pure, and this noise, this music was lots of things I had never heard before but most of all it was pure. The tune was high and sharp and it rose and swooped back and forth above everything, and then all the bright notes that had been gathered up so high to dance with each other tumbled down with a kind of desperate and inevitable sadness that made a hole high in my chest, a void like a lump I couldn’t swallow no matter how hard I tried. It made my eyes wet. And as I blinked I thought of Joy. I had felt that heavy hole in my chest once before and that was after she fell out of our world. Hearing the clean, terrible grief echoing in the stone cavern of the church didn’t just bring her back to me. It made me feel treacherous because I had let time dull the sharpness of her loss. Forgetting is a kind of betrayal, even if it’s what happens to all grief. Time wears everything smoother as it grinds past, I suppose.
I was too short to look in the high window and see what was making the beautiful sound, so I snuck round the corner to the door, which was cracked open, letting a lance of light spill across the grass beyond. I kept close to the wall, feeling the old stonework as I edged round and looked in.
The noise was, of course, Brand. He had a lantern at his feet and he’d lit a small fire on the paving stones at the centre of the cavernous space. I’d never seen a ceiling as high. It was so high, it kept disappearing as the firelight below flickered and threw shadows across it.
Brand was wearing my father’s coat and had a violin tucked under the long flame-coloured spade of his beard, and he was half turned away from me as he played it with a long bow, sawing slowly back and forth across the strings. His eyes were closed and he swayed as he played, his long hair falling forwards and backwards as his head moved in its own separate dance. It was like the music was a dream he was both making and getting lost within.
Because his eyes were closed, I let myself watch him longer than I meant. Because the music was so beautiful, so unexpected, so something I had never heard before, I stopped—for a moment—thinking about Jess and getting her back.
Lost in music. That’s what they used to call it. On Eriskay there was a house with a shelf that was not full of books, but these thin brightly printed cardboard envelopes with big black plastic discs inside them. Dad said they were records with music trapped on them, but the playing machine stood on a table by a broken window on the weatherward side of the house. It was cracked and the mechanism had rusted out, so we could never free the music on those discs. Instead I spent a day pulling them out and looking at all the covers. One was called Lost in Music and I remember it because there were four people on the front and they looked like me, or at least I thought they did. I mean, not like me exactly, but they had normal-coloured skin like us. Not pale and cold like Brand, whose skin and sea-coloured eyes always seemed at odds with the warmth of his hair.
Music—even that wonderstruck violin music—is just as bad a place to be lost in as anywhere as it turns out, because if I had kept my bearings I might have heard the thing that crept up behind me before it snarled and barked and hit me between the shoulder blades, knocking me forwards into the immoveable end of the open church door, sledgehammering me into darkness before I could do more than grunt in surprise.
Chapter 9
I own her
The world came back, and it was on its side and it hurt. There was a great weight pressing my hip and my knee to the stone floor, and it was this pain as much as anything else that hooked me back out of the dark and laid me sideways, staring into the firelight, my cheek flat on the paving stones. I had a throbbing tightness in my forehead where it had hit the edge of the door, in just the same place that the boom had smacked it earlier. It felt as if my skull had cracked.
When I tried to feel it and see if there was any blood, I discovered my hands were stuck behind my back and I couldn’t move them. That’s when I did panic, and I thrashed around trying to get up and free them, and then the great weight—which was of course Brand—finished tying my wrists to each other and stood up.
The relief to the side of my knee and my hip was good, but the look he gave me as he stepped sideways wasn’t, not a bit. It was cold and fierce and as dangerous as the knife he picked up off the chair by the fire. I knew it was razor-sharp because it was mine and I sharpened it every time I used it.
Where are they? he said.
Who? I said. Before I could think better of it.
The others, he said. Your father. Your brother. The rest of you. You wouldn’t have come alone.
The fire crackled. My blood thumped in my ears. My head felt like it was going to split open.
They’re outside, I said, now having had that time to think better.
He looked at me.
You stole my dog, I said.
How many came? he said. And don’t lie and don’t call out or I’ll cut out your tongue.
Given that choice, it seemed like a good idea to do neither of those things. So that’s what I did.
How many? he said.
You shouldn’t have taken my dog, I said.
He looked at me some more, but his head was cocked and I could tell he was listening for something outside.
About then was when my head cleared enough for me to remember what had happened on the other side of the blackness I’d just been hooked out of and I began to wonder about who exactly had hit me from behind while I was watching Brand play all the sad magic into the night air. The Brand in front of me now seemed like a completely different person from the self-contained musician lost in the dream of his own creation. This Brand was on edge, all his nerves raw on the outside of himself, listening with more than his ears.
He suddenly put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. Loud. Shrill. Twice.
There was an answering noise from out of the darkness beyond the doors. A bark. But not Jess or Jip. Not a bark like a terrier barks, sharp and hoarse at the same time. A deep bark, as much rumble as woof. The noise a big thing makes.
Something big enough to hit a person in the back and knock them hard into the edge of a door.
Brand looked at me.
You stay. You don’t move. You don’t shout. Do that? Maybe you keep your tongue, he said. And then he slipped out of the church in a low ducking kind of run and left me staring up at the fire shadows dancing across the great vaulted ceiling overhead.
Liar, I thought. Thief and liar.
His dog was
not dead at all. But where was Jess?
It didn’t make sense. He’d stolen her. But she wasn’t on the boat. And she wasn’t here. She’d have barked if she smelled me. I wondered if they’d done something terrible to her. Or had she jumped overboard and tried to swim home and drowned? Had I been so set on following the distant red sails all day that I’d missed a small and loyal dog’s head in the waves as I passed it? Had she barked in relief as I got closer to her and then watched the Sweethope sail past, leaving her alone and bewildered on the wave waste as the cold took her?
All of those thoughts kept repeating in my head, images that got worse and more detailed every time they came around. And the more I tried not to think of her last moments, the closer I seemed to get to them. I could easily have missed a dog’s barking in the sound of the wind. Jip could have missed her scent. As my head whirled round and round on it, I became more and more convinced. We had betrayed her. But me most of all.
It hurt like losing Joy all those years ago, worse really because that loss had not been my fault, and by the time Brand came back after what felt an hour or more I had persuaded myself that she was dead and had died in the terrible way I had imagined.
He walked in taller than he had left somehow. Slower, calmer—not ducking any more. A big dog padded in at his heels, a dog with thick grey and black fur and a white face and the least doglike eyes I have ever seen. They were blue as Brand’s own eyes, but not then nor ever after did I see them go warm in the way his could; they were always cold, and would never look away from you. Dogs don’t like holding your gaze. Saga was different. Saga could outstare a rock.
Good dog, Saga, Brand said. Sit.
The dog sat in front of me and watched. Brand had made his fire out of chairs. He had a good supply of this firewood. There were lots of them in rows behind him, waiting for a crowd of believers who would never come again. He picked the nearest one up, stomped it to kindling and used it to feed the fire that had gone to embers and ash in his absence. There were lots of matching red books stacked on a shelf on the wall and he tore the pages out of one and fed the coals with them, using the empty cover to fan the fire back into crackling life. Then he kicked another chair to bits and added that to the new flames.
He took a chair and brought it close to the fire so he could sit over it and warm his hands and watch me at the same time.
You came alone, he said. Didn’t expect that.
I kept quiet.
Don’t need you to tell me I’m right, he said, nodding at the dog. Saga and I criss-crossed the island. It’s not big. And she’d have smelled them if they were there. The others.
I don’t know if you ever had your wrists tied together when you were alive. It’s a horrible feeling, especially when they’re trapped behind you. You’ve lost your hands and everything about you is open and exposed. It makes it hard to breathe normally. Brand looked at me and did the unnerving thing he could sometimes do, which was seem to hear what your head was saying to you. He smiled. Not a nasty smile, one of his good ones.
You can talk, he said. He took my knife from his belt and stabbed it into the seat of the chair beside the one he was sitting on so that it stood there, stuck in the wood, reflecting the firelight at me.
Not going to cut your tongue out, he said. That’d be a horrible thing to do to a person. Just said it to get your attention. Needed you to keep quiet.
I stayed that way. Like I said, hands tied behind you makes you feel powerless and the only thing I did have control of was my words, so I looked away and clenched my teeth to stop them getting out.
Was just a threat, he said. Don’t take it bad. It’s like when you tell a lie, it’s always better to put a grain of truth in it to make it stick, eh? Thing with a threat is you have to put a little picture in it, something specific so that it catches in the head. You add that little picture, the person you’re threatening has more to chew on in their imagination, and chewing makes them digest the threat properly and then before they know it it’s a part of them and they believe it much more than if it’s just words outside them, you see?
I didn’t. But I did wonder who in the whole wide empty world he had learned this from. Or done this to. Maybe it was something he read.
My silence unsettled him, I think.
Say something, he said. Are they coming after you?
Saga barked at me and the shock of the deep noise and her teeth so close to my face sort of jumped the words out of my mouth without me meaning to let it happen.
Where’s Jess? I said.
Who? he said.
My dog, I said. The dog you stole.
Jess, he said. And he leant back, smiling a little, scratching Saga’s ears, rewarding her for frightening the words out of me.
I didn’t know her old name, he said. I was going to call her Freya.
What have you done to her? I said.
She needed discipline, he said. She bit Saga.
Good, I thought. Good dog, Jess.
Locked her in a shed over there, he said, pointing into the dark. Small room, no food, hard floor. She’ll be better behaved come light, or she’ll stay hungry.
That was a relief. It flooded through me like warm water, washing away the images I’d made of her lonely death in the waves.
This was a holy place, he said looking around. That table up there was the altar. Where they made their sacrifices and such. There’s a metal board with writing on it out there by the shed. It explains it all. If you can read. Not just the church. The whole island.
I didn’t want to listen to him talk. Especially in the way he’d started to, all easy and friendly, like he hadn’t recently threatened to cut my tongue out.
Just give me my dog, I said.
I own her, he said.
No, I said. You stole her.
He looked at me oddly. And then he grinned and threw back his head and chopped out a short laugh.
No, he said. The name of the island.
And he grinned some more and spelled it out.
I-O-N-A, he said. Iona. Not I-own-her.
And then his eyes got cold and serious again.
Though I do that too, he said. That’s just a fact you need to get used to.
I want my dog, I said. You stole her.
You keep saying stole, he said.
I do, I said. You’re a thief.
It sounds like I was being brave, writing down what I said then, in that dark echoey place by the fire. That’s not true. I was angry and scared and felt very unprotected with my hands tied behind me. All I had for a shield was words.
A thief now, is it? he said. And he said it as if this was a word he had never heard before. A thief? Well now. That sounds bad.
Don’t mind what it sounds like, I said. Give me my dog. And the fish. And my dad’s coat.
He smiled then, looking down at the yellow oilskin.
It’s a good coat, he said. But it’s mine. I traded for it. Same as the dog that was yours and is now mine.
You did not, I said.
And how would you know? he said. Seeing as you were asleep at the time.
His eyes were level. Open, even. There was no real accusation in them. Maybe a bit of disappointment.
Ah, Griz, he said. I thought we were friends. Your father is a man who understands the nature of a proposition. There’s more to a trade than like for like. He really wanted that windmill part. And while you were sleeping, we came to an agreement.
Just for a moment I let the warm smile and the soft words make me doubt myself. Had I rushed off before anyone could tell me I had grabbed the wrong end of the stick? Had I missed the turbine offloaded and waiting on the shore? Had everyone been too sick to stop me with the truth?
And a liar, I said. Thief and liar.
Ah, Griz, he said again. Words like that can poison a friendship, you know?
I know you’re lying because if you had made a deal, you wouldn’t have run off so scared, asking if the others were there, I said. An honest man wo
uldn’t have done that.
To his credit, he didn’t drop the smile much.
Well, he said. Well. No one likes to be badly thought of.
They are coming, I said. They were right behind me. So you better let me go.
He shook his head.
Two liars now, he said. And us in a church. Double the poison, don’t you think?
I didn’t answer. None of the replies bubbling up in my throat made sense enough to be let out anyway. He stretched and then prodded a chair leg deeper into the fire.
They poisoned the dogs, you know? he said. At the end. They gave them something harsh and vicious to their wellbeing. That’s why there aren’t more of them. Why they’re rare.
I kept quiet. He didn’t like quiet. If he had a weakness—and I still don’t know if it was really a weakness—it was not liking quiet when there was company to be had. He liked to talk. He liked being the centre of any attention that was going. Maybe because he was on his own so much. I had lived with four—once five—others. I had no need to be heard. If I wanted to know what I sounded like, I had Dad and Ferg and Bar to listen to. They sounded just like me.
Brand carried on. The old bastards were frightened of dogs turning into dangerous packs, he said. So they dosed them.
I could have asked him how he knew that. Because of course it can only have been a story he had heard from long before either of us were alive. A traveller’s tale. A rumour. A lie. A story. I didn’t say anything.
Whatever they gave the dogs did for the bitches more than the males, he said. Way I see it, what bitches remain have litters with fewer females in them than they used to. So, fewer females, fewer dogs in the long run. Males on their own don’t breed. Males in a pack with no breeding to be done? Well, Griz, you can see how they’d get mean. You’re tall enough for a person to think your body’d be telling you what I’m talking about, but then you haven’t started with the hairs on your chin yet, so maybe it hasn’t come on you yet, the wanting and the not having. But when it comes on you, you remember what I say. Men with no breeding to be done are the meanest creatures in the world.
A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World Page 7