Marram

by Leonie Charlton

  ‘Is there another way out?’ Shuna asked hopefully.

  ‘We really don’t want to go back the way we came in,’ I added, picturing those collapsing riverbanks.

  ‘You’re in the wettest part of Harris here.’ Then he abruptly turned to the others saying, ‘Come on, we need to get all this stuff moved before the tide changes.’

  ‘Do you want a hand?’ we asked.

  ‘No, don’t worry.’ There was a long silence. ‘But thank you.’ It was in that moment that I felt the change in the mood. That I realised help wouldn’t be forthcoming, although still I hoped that after they’d got their work done they’d look at the map with us. I’d been holding it all the time, tightly. I wonder, had they noticed our tear-stained faces, wet boots, peat-clagged coats and hands, the blood on Shuna’s arms?

  The men were suddenly busying around us. Half a dozen of them. Carrying rolls of insulation, plastic-wrapped mattresses. We were invisible. It struck me then, how strange, if these were hillmen, that they weren’t more interested in the ponies, in what we were doing. A tight-lippedness descended amongst them and my confidence evaporated.

  ‘Shuna, I need to walk,’ I said, knowing she’d understand. ‘I’ll go along the coast here, check how far the field goes, and see what the ground looks like further on. Maybe there’ll be a route out along the coast to the west there. I won’t be long, then hopefully we can ask these guys to look at the map with us.’

  I walked off, focusing on where I was putting my feet, trying to breathe out the fear locked in my muscles. I passed Ross and Chief, both happily grazing. I walked through the field, giving thanks again for the good fence, the good grass, the comforting sound of calling sheep. All too soon the grass slipped into peat. On foot it was easy to walk across, but I knew that heading this way with the ponies wasn’t an option, not if the ground was like this all the way. A memory came back of Ruari saying they’d started to build a path out here from another village further west, but it had been abandoned. At the end of the field was a gateway but no gate in sight. I doubted the ponies would come down this far, they wouldn’t want to leave the grass, but just in case I thought I’d better sort something. On the rocky shore I found a length of fishing net and hung it across the gateway. The sight of my hands shocked me, the skin had dried out in the peat, was grained like rhinoceros skin, a thousand wrinkles deep. I walked back, hurrying my steps, I didn’t want to miss the men.

  Shuna came to meet me and we walked back together, saying very little. We stood near the crew who were finishing up. Nobody was looking our way. Nobody was talking to us. It was as if, in our absence, something had been further decided. We looked at each other in silent recognition of something strange in the air. ‘There’s the friendly one,’ Shuna said quietly, ‘coming back from the house. Why don’t we try to show him the map before he gets back to the others?’

  ‘Can you just have a quick look at the map with us, please?’ we asked. He looked towards the boat uncomfortably.

  ‘Okay, but like they said, there’s no easy way out of here. You’ll need to go back the way you came, but there’s maybe an easier bit I can show you. Here, there’s possibly a better way if you follow a different river. Look, the river starts there.’ He pointed beyond the white house. ‘There’s a fisherman’s path up the side, you’ll get the ponies up fairly easily. Then at this bend in the river,’ he pointed at the map, ‘cross here, you’ll see a shallow gravel bed where the deer cross.’

  There was a shout from the barge, he was being called back. ‘Look, this is tricky this ground, all of this, but if you pick a route between these knolls you’ll get to the hillside, onto harder ground.’ We both thanked him. A shrill whistle split the air, like a dog whistle, and he left, with a quiet ‘good luck’.

  The boat disappeared out of sight at the head of the bay, the sound of its engine fading, and then silence. ‘Thank God they’ve gone,’ said Shuna. ‘That was so weird.’ We could hear Oystercatchers calling, and the sun came out, spilling the afternoon into early evening.

  ‘There was something so strange about them,’ I said, ‘apart from the friendly guy, but even he went a bit odd.’

  ‘It could be that thing that sometimes happens in groups,’ said Shuna. ‘Individually they might be lovely, but in a group, you know, if there’s one total dickhead, the whole group changes. No offer of us using the house then,’ she said with a wry smile. ‘Let’s go over to the other house and take the stones away from the door. It’s not padlocked. Might as well make ourselves as comfortable as possible, we need to get a decent rest tonight. We’ll be better off inside if rain is on its way.’

  ‘They must think we’re total idiots,’ I said.

  Shuna looked at me, her blue eyes ice bright. ‘Beady, we’re out in the middle of nowhere, we’re in deep shit. I really don’t give a fuck what those guys might think. I can’t believe you’re even having that thought. We’ve got far more important things to worry about.’ I gave her a steady look back, and burst out laughing.

  ‘You’re right. I can’t believe I just said that!’ All my life I’d worried far too much about what other people thought. Maybe it was time for a change. ‘Ross and Chief are fine. All our gear’s back at the house, that’s handy. I’d really like to walk the route he just showed us on the map. Get a feel for it before we try it with the ponies.’

  Shuna nodded. ‘Let’s go then.’

  We walked towards the river, past the house with the new mattresses stashed away inside, past the tap and the empty iron gateposts. I thought of that other gate yesterday. Had it been an omen, that locked gate at the end of the track? Mum’s friend Moira told me a story after Mum died. In 1997 they’d both gone to Morocco, ‘quite an experience travelling with your mother’, she’d said. ‘She drove through an armed checkpoint, just put her foot down and said, fuck it, let’s go, I’m not giving them any money. She was a nightmare, your mum, and wonderful, and totally impossible.’ Yes, fuck it, let’s go, I thought as I stepped in beside Shuna.

  We found the fishermen’s path and started to follow it. Imagining I had Ross with me, I pictured each and every step we’d make the next morning in my mind’s eye. Yes, Shuna’s right. Time to stop worrying about what other people think. I’m in my mid-forties. Time to drive through a few armed checkpoints. Poach a few fish. Break a few rules. Meeting the boat, and those men, had been a watershed moment for me. We trod that riverbank imagining ourselves to be half a ton of pony weight, but knowing it would look altogether different in the morning when we had them with us. I looked for fish in the gold-lit water, I saw none: no evening rise, no gash of silver, no belly swaying beneath peaty overhangs. Perhaps they were down in the bay, nosing into the tickle of fresh water, waiting for rain to push them upriver on the next leg of their journey.

  ‘It won’t be easy,’ I said, ‘but he was right, the deer stalker, this is a better route.’ Feeling reassured we retraced our steps. In reverse order I engraved every yard of the route we’d take the next day on my mind, each landmark of Deer track, Primrose patch, river rock. I was good at that, remembering a route, footfall by footfall, one area where Shuna could hand over to me. That and my sense of direction. A Red Grouse startled up by our feet, its wingbeats stirring our blood.

  ‘Our welfare is more important than any barred doors,’ said Shuna, as we lifted away the stones from the doorway. Inside the house was cold and dark. The windows at the back of the house were completely blacked out by stones. There were candles, a kitchen worktop, plates washed and left to dry, equipment stored in Tupperware boxes. There were camp beds too, and a stove and cut peats. There was wood and an axe. We felt very thankful. Shuna split some kindling, lit the fire, I grappled with the camp beds. The fire was lit – flames, hurrah. We took off our sodden trousers and socks, hung them on a string over the fire. There were even pegs, bright blue ones. I lit a candle that was half burned down in an empty wine bottle.

  ‘There’s no heat in the fire,’ said Shuna, ‘but maybe it
’ll come.’ We got out our sleeping bags and made ready for the night. We ate a can of butter beans with sardines and Tabasco and drank the last of the whisky in our tea. We were happy.

  We lay down expecting to sleep, knowing we needed to, knowing the next day would be long and hard. In the silence the house began to feel hostile. I looked up at the wood-lined ceiling in the firelight, it had cornicing and the thought this was never a home came to me. A damp cold gusted from the broken upstairs, down through the hole that the ladder disappeared into. I imagined other things coming down that ladder and turned towards the fire for warmth, but the peats burned a slow orange and put out no heat. My back was chilled and exposed to whatever was coming down from upstairs. Rolling back over, eyes wide and dry, I looked into the metal bulge of a 25kg gas bottle. I didn’t pray, but I called on spirits, all those that had dwelt or passed through this place in the past centuries, millennia even, back to before the peat was deep. And other, more recent times when Cattle were milked up the river from here, and were walked north across the moor towards Uig. Were they very small, or was the ground not so wet back then? Did they have a secret route, passed down through the generations? Had ponies ever been in this place?

  I’d assumed, because there were stalkers’ paths on the map, and runrigs and houses, that there must have been ponies too. But maybe not, or perhaps they’d been brought in by boat, like the sheep we’d been told about. If all went wrong tomorrow, maybe we could take the ponies out by boat. I shuddered then, knowing I never wanted to see that grey boat again. It had grown monstrous in my mind, monstrous as the each-uisge (water horses) that lured women to their deaths. I was also aware of the irony that in this situation it was ourselves, and nobody else, who could be held responsible for any luring.

  In the daylight Kinloch Rèasort had felt remote and isolated. In the peat-light, I felt the presence of past people. The last child born here was in 1907. Imagine going into labour out here, how terrifying it would have been if things went wrong. Remembering the three beads in the beehive south of here, I wanted to see my children. Badly. Fleas bit across my stomach, the camp beds were full of them. I scratched at my body, feeling the changes in texture where each stretch mark crossed my stomach. I scratched harder, tearing at my skin with peaty nails. I didn’t sleep. There hadn’t been any heat coming from the fire but when it finally died an even more intense cold descended.

  I couldn’t lie any longer so hopped to the window in my sleeping bag. An orange moon scudded behind frayed clouds. I had never felt so frightened in my life. There were occasional stars, bright specks between stealths of cloud. In his book When Breath Becomes Air Paul Kalanithi writes that ‘the root of disaster means a star coming apart, and no image expresses better the look in a patient’s eyes when hearing a neurosurgeon’s diagnosis’. I looked at the moon and thought of Mum. I called on her quietly. Even though I’d promised I wouldn’t, that I’d let her be, I called on her anyway, and acknowledged the fear she must have felt faced with death, such fear that even she, outspoken on all taboos, had chosen in the end not to speak of.

  Lying on the canvas camp bed and looking out of the window, I got colder and colder. My mind started to disarticulate as the moon ratcheted across the window. On the border between Harris and Lewis, I was on a threshold between safe and unsafe, between the spirit world and the non-spirit world, between being stuck or unstuck. The Gaelic translation for the saying ‘being stuck between a rock and a hard place’ is eadar dà theine Bealltainn. Literally meaning between two Beltane fires. I had my fires, the gas and the peat, and now I was frozen. Would I be able to change? Could I be braver? Sheep bleated outside. I didn’t feel it that night but in the months that followed I would see changes: I’d begin to say small ‘no’s to people and learn that the world didn’t end; I’d let go of a friendship that had run its course. Yes, I’d learn to stop sitting on the fence, trying to cover all bases, to keep everybody happy. But that was all later. Now, in the watchers’ house I was rigid and sleepless with fear. Haunted by the sight of Ross floundering in the bog and the call of the Greenshank. And all the while cold was burrowing into me. I must have fallen asleep, because I woke with my heart juddering.

  The darkness was complete, the moon gone from the window. I sat up stiffly and hopped across again to press my nose flat against the pane. When I saw the moon a current jolted through me and, in that moment, I knew that everything was going to be all right. The feeling was as real and as fierce as the flea bites which would itch and bleed and scab for months to come.

  DAY TWENTY

  Loch Rèasort to Aird Asaig

  ‘Peanut delight or cocoa orange?’ asked Shuna. The oats were finished so breakfast was an energy bar. I was holding on to the moment in the night when I’d felt that wave of ‘it will all be all right’, but now, in the cold grey early morning, I just felt frightened.

  ‘Cocoa orange.’ I took a bite and forced it down. Coffee might help, some caffeine-induced can-do. All it did was twist my guts even tighter. With heavy arms I packed away the camp beds, stuffed my sleeping bag into its gossamer-thin cover and thought about leaving a thank-you note for the candles, now burned an inch lower, for the peats, for the beds. But that would be evidence we’d been there, uninvited, and right now I just wanted to get out of there, to forget about this place.

  We laid our packed saddlebags outside. The boys were resting side by side in their favourite spot above the blackhouses on the other side of the bay. I looked up at the weighty skies, rain was on its way. If we needed to climb onto the tops it would be so much harder in poor visibility. We went back inside and put on our waterlogged boots. I thought about the scene in the film Into the Wild where McCandless, having gone out into the Alaskan wilderness to be alone, finally decides he wants to be back in human company, but then can’t cross the rivers which are rising with meltwater. He dies.

  Obviously, we’re not in that predicament. Of course, we’ll get out and no one’s going to die. Anyway, as an absolutely last resort the ponies could get out on a boat, but my mind kept slipping. Welcome to the last resort. You will never leave.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about rising burns and mist coming down. About Ross half-lost to the peat yesterday, and how those two ponies were dependent on us to get them out of this mire we’d led them into. It felt like a completely different place to the one we’d walked into two days before, when we were drenched in evening sunshine and river water and sheer delight, and the Sea Eagle had fixed us with her bold eye. Now I was connected to a deep sense of sadness and fear. Was it all my own or was I also tuning in to the cianalas, the Gaelic word for what Alastair McIntosh describes as a ‘soul-felt wearisomeness’? He goes on to say, ‘that pretty much this whole western coastline of North Harris and South Lewis cries out, laconic in its emptiness’.

  We closed the door, building the stones carefully back up in front of it.

  ‘A spot of sunshine would be good,’ said Shuna brightly. I nodded. ‘What’s that?’ she said, pointing down to our right. A small boat was idling in towards the shore just to the north of us.

  ‘It’s not estate people again, is it?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Shuna flatly.

  My first thought was to hide. Then something firmed up inside me. ‘Let’s go and have a closer look, let’s be grown-up about it.’ We set off stumbling but together over the rocks.

  ‘I think it might be walkers,’ said Shuna. ‘There’s a woman and two men.’ As we approached, a waterproof-clad couple, now standing on the shore, waved to us. I felt delight at seeing that gesture and those friendly, and thankfully unfamiliar, faces. It turned out that the couple lived in Uig, up round the coast, and were being dropped off by their pal in the boat. They were planning to walk home around the coast to the north west, and were hoping to find a dozen beehive dwellings on the shore that were being eroded by the sea.

  ‘They’ll be gone soon,’ said the woman, ‘and we want to see them before they’re washed away f
orever.’

  We spilled out what had happened the day before: the bogs, the boat, the men. ‘We didn’t feel the love,’ I said.

  The man lifted an orange dry bag from the boat onto the rocks and put it down next to an empty rucksack, and other full dry bags. His face was serious. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t have been feeling the love. This is the playground of just a few, and those few don’t want anyone out here. I’m local and I can tell you the clearances are very close here. That lot,’ he tilted his head to the south west, ‘they’re obsessed with poachers.’ As he spoke I watched his hands methodically pack the dry bags into his rucksack. The woman was doing the same. They were businesslike, and you could tell they were eager to be on their way as a thin slanting rain began to fall.

  ‘Have you seen the forecast?’ Shuna asked.

  ‘It wasn’t looking great,’ said the woman. ‘Heavy rain’s coming in, but last year we waited for the good weather all summer and missed out, so this year we’re just getting on with it.’

  ‘We needed that,’ said Shuna as we walked away. ‘Some normal friendly people.’ As we crossed the bay to the ponies the little boat buzzed away out of sight, a lone man at the helm. By the time we got to the field the walkers were well up the hillside across the loch, the woman’s hi-vis waterproof pack cover was easy to spot. The man was ahead, harder to see against the darkening hillside. We would think of them on and off all day: wondering if they’d found their beehives yet; voicing our gladness for them when the weather brightened; remembering them when the rain blew in cold and sharp. We were not alone.

  At the far end of the sheep park I took the fishing net down from where I’d hung it across the gateway and, passing our camping spot, thanked the blackhouse for the comfortable camping spot, saw as if for the first time how the ground had grown up between the walls: four feet of earth and grass and moss since it had last been inhabited. We led the boys out of the sheep park, tied the gate shut behind them. My hands felt the roughness of the wiry yellow rope, for the last time, but part of me knew there was a chance we’d be back again that night.