Entry Island (9 page)

He turned on the TV and lay on the bed in the dark. Although he was desperate to sleep he had no expectation of it, and didn’t bother to undress.

He listened to the rain hammering against the sliding doors. It almost drowned out the frenetic commentary on an otherwise dull ice hockey match. He wondered how it must be for Kirsty Cowell alone out there in that clifftop house, fully exposed to the fury of the storm. While just fifty yards away the home she had shared with her obsessive husband stood empty. Except for the cop who kept guard over the scene of his murder. Sime wondered how many unhappy memories of the couple’s ill-fated marriage had been subsumed by that house, become a part of its fabric, like the grain in wood.

He supposed that the house would be hers now. A house in which she couldn’t bring herself to stay alone when Cowell was gone. And it occurred to him that she stood to inherit not just the house, but all of his wealth. The fifteen million a year in lobster income. The processing plant here on Cap aux Meules. As powerful a motive for murder, perhaps, as betrayal. There must surely be a will. Something else to check out tomorrow.

His aching eyes searched the ceiling for the cracks and stains that might occupy his mind in the long sleepless hours to come. He had developed an ability to make endless pictures out of shapeless blemishes on walls and ceilings. Exercising his imagination to fill in the time. Even the
flickering light sent around the room by the ever-changing images on the TV screen could conjure up its own shadow theatre.

But tonight his lids were just too heavy. They fell shut, and there, once more in the darkness, he found her. Watching him, holding him in her eyes. And for a moment he thought he saw her smile …

I hear voices. Strange accents. I am lost among a sea of faces that I can’t quite see. As if I am looking at the world through a veil of gauze. I see myself now. Younger. Seventeen perhaps, or eighteen. I can feel my confusion, and at the same time watch myself with a peculiar objectivity. Both spectator and player. I wear the oddest clothes. Breeches held up with braces, a stained white shirt without a collar, a three-quarter-length jacket, heavy leather boots that seem too big for my feet.

I feel cobbles underfoot, and blackened sandstone tenements rise around me. There is a river, and I see a paddle-steamer ploughing its way past the quay towards a low, arched stone bridge that spans the leaden flow. Somewhere beyond the tenements on the far bank I see a church steeple prick the sky, and clouds of smoke and steam rise into the blue from a railway station almost immediately opposite. I can hear the trains spitting and coughing as they idle against their buffers.

It feels like summer. The air is warm, and I am aware of the heat of the sun on my skin. The gauze dissolves now,
bringing sharper focus, and my objectivity slips away. I become conscious of tall-masted sailing ships moored along the quayside. The sea of faces around me shifting and undulating as this current of humanity ebbs and flows, carrying me along like a piece of flotsam.

But I am not alone. I feel a hand in mine, small and soft and warm, and I look back to see Kirsty Cowell, apprehensive, unsettled by the lack of control we seem to have of our destiny in this crowd. She is younger, too. A teenager. I call to her above the voices that fill the air. ‘Don’t let go, Ciorstaidh, stay close to me.’ And from somewhere, far away, in my unconscious world, I realise I am calling her by her Gaelic name.

A space opens up around us, and I see a boy with a cloth cap and ragged shorts. A pile of newspapers is draped over one arm, a folded copy raised in his other hand. He is chanting some incomprehensible refrain. Over and over. Someone snatches a paper and slips coins into his hand. Kirsty takes one too, letting go of my hand to unfold it. I see its banner. The
Glasgow Herald
. And before she opens it up, the date: July 16th, 1847.

‘It’s Fair Friday,’ she says. ‘No wonder it’s so busy.’ But for some reason this means nothing to me. I am gripped, I realise, by a sense of urgency. Of time running out. Somewhere I can hear a clock chiming the hour.

‘We’re late. We can’t afford to miss the boat.’

She slips the newspaper under her arm and takes my hand
again, our free hands occupied by the carrying of small cardboard suitcases containing God knows what. Her face is shining, excited. She wears a tunic buttoned up over a long dress that flares and falls to the cobbles, but her black hair tumbles free across her shoulders, swept back from her face by a soft breeze.

‘We’re looking for the
Eliza
, Simon. A three-master. We’ve time enough. They said she wouldn’t be leaving the Broom-ielaw till a quarter past the hour.’

I push up on to my tiptoes to see across the heads on the quayside. There are three boats tied up to giant iron capstans. And I see the name I am looking for painted in black and gold across the stern of the furthest.
ELIZA
. She seems huge to me, a confusion of masts and rigging and furled canvas sails.

‘I see her. Come on.’

And, pulling Kirsty behind me, I push off through the bodies of men, women and children scrambling anxiously to secure their places on these wind-driven time capsules, to be carried off to new lives in other places.

But then I hear voices raised in anger, lifting above the others. Cursing and blaspheming and brimming with violence. A large group is gathered around a stand of trolleys laden with bags. An argument has led to a fight, and I can see fists flying. Top hats skiting away across the cobbles. The crowd ahead of us surges back, like displaced water, and my grasp of Kirsty’s hand is broken.

‘Simon!’ I hear her scream, panic in her voice. I heave against the bodies that have separated us, only to see her carried away by a current stronger than both of us, fear in her eyes, a hand hopelessly grasping at the air above her head before she is lost from sight. ‘Get to the boat.’ Her call is barely discernible above the roar. ‘I’ll meet you there.’

The shrill sounds of whistles pierce the air, and I see uniformed constables ploughing through bodies, batons swinging. Another surge sweeps me away, and I realise that my only hope of finding her again is at the
Eliza
.

I am determined now, driven by anger and fear. I am young and strong and fight my way through the panicked hordes, head down, using my shoulders to clear the way ahead. And when next I look up the
Eliza
is towering over me, and I realise it must be high tide. The crowd is funnelling like water on to the narrow gangplank that leads up to the deck, marshalled by sheriff’s officers.

Hands grasp my arms and my shoulders, propelling me forward, and I go helplessly with the flow, craning my neck and turning to look left and right above their heads to catch a glimpse of Kirsty.

We spill out on to the deck, hundreds of us it seems, and I elbow my way to the side of the boat from where I have a view of the gangplank and the crowded quay. I have seen sheep herded this way before, but never people. And never so many in one place and at one time.

I scan the faces that fill my field of vision, apprehension
rising like bile as I fail to find her. I have been pushed further and further along the deck, and away from the rail. Voices rise above the melee, and I am aware of the gangplank being pulled aboard.

Total panic fuels my fight through protesting voices back to the embarkation point, and I see dockers loosing ropes as thick as a man’s arm from the loops that secure them to their capstans. More voices raised from above turn my head upwards in time to see vast sheets of canvas unfurling to catch the breeze, and I feel the ship lurch for the first time beneath my feet.

‘Ciorstaidh!’ My voice tears itself from my lungs and I hear her call my name in reply, so far away I fear I am just imagining it. I reach the rail in time to see that the
Eliza
has slipped her berth and is pulling out now into the main channel of the river where the water is deeper and the current runs fast.

And there, among the faces of the crowd on the quay, the pale upturned face of the girl I love. My sense of disbelief and dismay is almost overwhelming.

‘Ciorstaidh!’ I scream again. And for a fleeting moment I consider jumping overboard. But like most islanders, fear of water has always robbed me of the ability to swim, and I know I would be leaping to certain death. ‘Wait for me!’

I can see the fear and consternation in her face as she pushes through the crowds, trying to keep up with the
Eliza
as she drifts away. ‘Where?’

I have no idea. I search desperately in my confusion to find a single rational thought to hang on to. And fail. ‘Wherever
you are,’ I shout through my hopelessness, ‘I’ll find you. I promise!’

And I watch helplessly as her face recedes from view, blurred and lost among my tears, as I realise it is a promise I can never keep.

Sime awoke calling her name. Hearing it rip from his throat. He sat bolt upright on the bed, and felt the sweat trickle down his face. And yet he was shivering with cold. His breath came in short rasping bursts, and his heart felt like someone hammering at his ribs from the inside, trying to break their way out.

It was just a dream, but so vivid that the same hopeless impotence felt by Simon when his lover faded from view lingered in his own consciousness like a black cloud of depression.

It was the first time he had dreamed it, but this was a story he knew. He pulled his knees up to his chest, leaning his elbows on them and closing his eyes. And for a moment he was transported in his mind back to childhood. To his grandmother’s house on the banks of the Salmon River in Scotstown. An old timber house built in the early twentieth century and made gloomy by three tall trees that loomed darkly over it.

He could almost smell it. That perfume of old age and dampness, of dust and history that permeated every corner. And he could hear her voice. Low, almost monotone, and always with an underlying sense of melancholy as she read to him and his sister from the diaries.

He had not thought once about those memoirs in all the years since, and yet he seemed to recall them now with great clarity. Not in every detail, but with a striking sense of place and story. The story of his ancestor’s life, begun on his voyage across the ocean. The man after whom Sime had been named, whose story had ended in a tragedy that his grandmother had always refused to read them.

Why had this moment suddenly forced its way into his consciousness? The tragic separation of Simon and Ciorstaidh on the quay at Glasgow. And why had his subconscious mind cast himself and Kirsty Cowell in their respective roles? He shook his head. A head that ached. He had no answers and felt almost feverish. Then it occurred to him that if he had dreamt, then he had slept. Although it hardly felt like it. He glanced at the bedside clock. It was just after 1.30 a.m. The television still sent shadows dancing around the room. The ice hockey match was over, but the channel had now surrendered its night-time hours to telesales of a machine for sculpting abdominal perfection. He could have slept for no longer than the real-time passage of his dream.

He slipped off the bed and went through to the bathroom to splash his face with cold water. When he looked up he was
almost startled by the pale, haggard young man staring back at him from the mirror. Under the harsh electric light every crease and shadow on his face seemed darker and more deeply etched. His soft brown eyes were weary and pained, the whites shot through with red. Even his curls seemed to have lost their lustre, and although his hair was fair, almost Scandinavian blonde, he could see the grey starting to grow in at the temples. Shaved short at the sides and back, but allowed longer growth on top, it gave him a boyish appearance, which seemed incongruous now with the tired blanched face whose reflection he could hardly bear to look at.

He turned away to bury his face in a soft towel and went back through to the bedroom, dropping his clothes on the floor behind him as he went. He found a fresh pair of boxers in his bag and slid between cold sheets, turning on to his side and drawing his knees into the foetal position. He had slept once already tonight, albeit for less than an hour, and he so much wanted to return to his dream, to manipulate it as is sometimes possible when you are consciously dreaming. To achieve what his ancestor had been unable to do in life. To change its outcome. To hear her voice and find her on the boat, and release himself from that unkeepable promise.

For a long time he lay, eyes closed, with kaleidoscope colours appearing like inkblots behind his lids before vanishing again into darkness. He turned over and focused on his breathing. Slow, steady. Letting his mind and his thoughts wander. Trying to relax his body, let the weight of it sink into the bed.

And then he was on his back. Eyes open and staring at the ceiling. And although every part of him cried out for sleep he was wide awake.

*

It was possible that he had drifted off into periods of semi-consciousness, but it didn’t feel that way. Unable to prevent himself, he had followed the painful passage of time through the digital figures that counted away his life during the small hours, the wind and rain raging without cease outside the glass doors of his room. Four, five, six o’clock. Six-thirty now, and he felt more tired than when he had lain down the night before. The headache was there, as it always was, and he finally rose to drop an effervescent painkiller into his plastic cup and listen to it fizz. It seemed impossible now to face the day without it.

Back in the bedroom he picked his clothes off the floor and slowly got dressed. His cotton hoodie, which he had hung over the bath the night before, was still damp. But he had brought nothing else, and so pulled it on anyway. He slid open the glass doors and slipped out into the car park. The first grey light of dawn was seeping through clouds so low they were scraping the surface of the island, propelled by a wind that was not yet spent. The tarmac was littered with the debris of the storm. Upturned garbage cans, their contents carried off into the night. Roof tiles. The branches of pine trees from the plantation that grew all around this island conurbation. A child’s trampoline, all buckled out of shape,
had been plucked from a garden somewhere and come to rest lodged between a pickup truck and a saloon car. The cross above the steeple of the ugly modern church building across the street had snapped at its base and hung precariously from the roof, attached only by its lightning conductor.