Pig Island (12 page)

I flexed the fingers on my left hand feebly. You can probably still move, old mate, I told myself. I clenched my mouth a few times, trying to get my jaw to click. You probably can. I swallowed the blood that trickled down the back of my throat. If I rolled my eyes back I could just see the beam of the torch. The wire-cutters were right next to it. On top of me, Dove stiffened.

“Whad?” My voice came out of me thick and loud, like I had a heavy cold. “Whad you doing?”

“Your peace of mind,” he whispered. “Remember your peace of mind, Joe Finn? Well, now I’m fucking with it. I’m fucking with your peace of mind, Joe.”

He pushed himself off me and I rolled sideways, lungs sucking up air, arms coming up convulsively. He grabbed the axe, and before I could even begin to sit up he was swinging it down, blunt side first. I made a weak grab for it, blindly, my left wristbone colliding with the head and getting a slippery grip for a second before he hefted it away and I dropped back, my hands bleeding, the world rocking and bucking all around me.

And that was it.
Bang bang
! Maxwell’s silver hammer came down on my head. And, bang, bang, down went old Oakesy. Not dead, of course. But pretty fucking close.

Chapter 11

It was three weeks before I got back on to Cuagach. I never stopped thinking about it, not once. All the time I was lying in bed, too weak to get up, half asleep, half dreaming about Dove’s Beelzebub, I never once stopped thinking about how to get revenge on the gobshite. Turned out he’d given it to me good. He’d split a big chunk of my scalp away and fractured my skull. Not an open fracture, no bits of bone forced into the brain tissue, but bad enough—a three-inch-long hairline fault in the ‘parietal bone’, whatever the fuck that is. And, bad fracture or good fracture, he took out a large chunk of my memory too. What I remember about the first forty-eight hours is almost nothing.

Christ knows how I got back to the community. Probably Blake raised the alarm, came over and found me lying on my back in the heather where Dove had left me, flies circling above my face like planes in a stacking pattern over Heathrow. I’ve got flashes of being carried through trees, and of being so cold my bones were shaking: I remember the taste of blood too, and every five minutes puking all over myself (try getting the human stomach to tolerate uncooked blood: it just won’t do it). I know that at one point I was taken somewhere freezing and dark and laid out like the dead on a stone floor for what seemed like fucking-ever while Blake and Benjamin argued nearby, their voices echoey, like we were in a tomb: Blake wanting to call the police on Dove—saying this was attempted murder—and Benjamin screaming like a girl that he wanted nothing to do with it: ‘
We should never have had a journalist on Cuagach in the first place
!“ Eventually someone—I imagine it was Blake—must have put me in the boat and got me to the mainland (he didn’t take the card out of my camera—you never really know who’s on your side, do you?), because the trusty lobsterman found me at six o’clock the next morning, lying under a blanket on a jetty outside Croabh Haven.

Later Lexie said, when she opened the door to find me standing supported by the lobsterman in the doorway, my left hand cupping the right like a dead animal, my head caked with blood, puke all over my T-shirt, the first words out of my mouth were ‘Bolt-cutters, Lex. Insulated handles. I need you to get me some.“

She thought I’d had a stroke, seeing my face, and I’ve still got a memory of the Hallowe’en mask I saw when she held up a mirror to me: the right side of my face had slackened, like melted candlewax, and my right eye was hanging so loose I could see the red bottom of my eyeball. Sometimes that face comes to me still, mixed in with all the other nightmares. But I refused point-blank to go to the police or the hospital—I wasn’t having the police coming along and arsing it all up before I’d had a chance to get back to the island—and over the next few days, whenever I had the strength to speak, me and Lex argued about it. They all ended as class arguments, just like we always had, her raging around the room throwing her arms in the air and mourning the upper-class husband she should have married: ‘I don’t believe this! You’ve never trusted the police because you and Finn grew up little criminals and you think we’re all living in some Orwellian bloody dictatorship where you can’t trust the authorities—and because of this
perfectly reasonable
thinking, you’re not going to report an attempted murder.“

“Lex—‘

‘
I
for one was brought up to
respect
authority. It’ll come back to haunt you, Oakesy, not reporting this. Listen to what I’m saying.
It will come back to haunt you
…’

She was far,
far
more pissed off with me than she was with Dove. The only time she stopped shouting was when she brought me food, or changed the sheets, or wiped the caked blood out of my hair and tried to tape together the two sides of my scalp. It was weird the mixture of affection and fury she lavished on me. On the second day—2 September—she crawled naked under the sheets, her feet cold against my calf, and slid her hand on to my knob. I lay there in silence, my eyes closed, knowing I’d never get a hard-on in that state, and after ten minutes of lying there, neither of us speaking, she burst into tears and jumped out of bed, running out of the room and slamming doors. For the rest of the night I heard her in the living room, sobbing loudly—loud enough for me to hear it. Which, of course, I was supposed to do.

Even if I could’ve got out of bed I wouldn’t have known what to say to her. I couldn’t tell what I’d fallen in love with any more: Lexie or a particular black mini-skirt she was wearing the night I first met her. The mini-skirt, and the kind of distant look Finn got on his face when he saw her in it. I married her two months later—the bride and the Neanderthal are just coming up the aisle, the bride looks stunning in organdie, the Neanderthal has got his hand up her dress.
Now
my friends tell me they never liked her—
now
, not from the get-go. Cheers for the caveat, so-called mates. That night in the bungalow I lay there, staring at the ceiling, while she cried and cried. From time to time I heard her push open the living-room door. Probably poking her head out to check I was listening.

We had a couple of silent days after that. I watched a lot of TV. The owner of the bungalow came over and I negotiated two more weeks’ rental. After ten days the paralysis and swelling had gone and I let Lexie take me to the hospital for X-rays, making up a load of old toss about a biking accident. Turns out Lex was a good nurse. All that time she spent at the clinic, I guess. The fracture was healing fine: I didn’t need treatment or stitches. So, I ruffled my hair over the scar and began making plans to get back to Cuagach. I went to Lochgilphead and bought a pair of insulated heavy-duty bolt-cutters. Course, could I find
one
fisherman or boat-owner prepared to drop me on the south of the island and wait? Could I fuck. Eventually, after four days of searching, I found someone in Ardfern who was prepared to rent me a small outboard for a massive deposit. But just as I was all set to go the weather turned. Autumn had already descended on Scotland—the day I was carried off the island it seemed to pounce in an hour: one moment there was balmy Indian summer, the very next the temperatures dropped and there was even snowfall in the Highlands. Now it got worse. The winds picked up and howled round the coast; the sea threw itself at the beaches day after day. If I didn’t want a battering on the rocks off Luing, I’d have to sit it out.

And what a wait it turned out to be. It was a week before I woke up to see chilly sunrays sparkling off the waves of the firth.

It’s weird, but the clearest memory I have of Lexie during the whole sorry episode isn’t what you’d think: it isn’t any of the nightmare stuff, it’s actually something kind of benign in comparison. It’s from the morning she came down to the jetty to see me off. Even now it’s as clear as anything. She was furious I was going back to Pig Island; she almost couldn’t speak she was so angry, and I’ve got a perfect mental snapshot of her standing with one hand on her hip, pushing her sunglasses up her nose and staring out at the island because she couldn’t bring herself to look at me. She’d had her hair cut in London before we left—and still a bit of suntan across her nose from the summer—and all in all she didn’t look exactly like my wife that day, I thought, glancing at her sideways.

“Why don’t you go back to London?” I said. “Get a taxi and take the train.” She didn’t answer. She shrugged and crossed her arms, keeping her attention on the island. I watched her for a moment, then got into the boat and started up the engine. “There’s cash in my computer case if you need it,” I called, as I slipped the bow line and the boat began to edge away. “In the front pocket.”

She didn’t bother waiting. When I got the boat out of the moorings and looked back at her, wondering briefly whether to make a romantic-guy display—take the boat back, leap ashore and kiss her without a word—she’d already turned away and was heading up the sea steps, and the moment was gone.
C’est la vie
, folks. I tapped out an irritated rhythm on the tiller arm as I watched her go. It goes to show you never can tell.

The tide was with me. I was washed straight out of Craignish loch into the firth, where whirlpools bounced tennis-ball-sized knots of foam on the surface and goats watched me from deserted islands. Spanish Armada goats: they’d been stranded on these islands for centuries, poor fuckers—and Sovereign thought she had it bad. It was rough for a while, and I had images of being sucked into the mighty Corryvreckan whirlpool, chewed up and spat out. But then I caught a drift of something and before I knew it the water was calm and the sea almost rolled me, like the gentle hands on a prayer book, around to the deserted side of Pig Island.

As I drew close to the shore I could see a small, derelict jetty, a white, salt-dried fishing-net tangled round it and pebble beaches stretching out as far as the eye could see. About a foot outside the tree-line stood a wire fence that must have been a continuation of the one in the gorge. Maybe it was there to stop the PHM landing by boat. Or maybe it was a cage to stop something getting out.

I tied the boat to the jetty, hefted the bolt-cutters on to my shoulder and stood for a moment, staring inland, past the fence, half expecting Dove to materialize out of the trees. There was silence, just the creak and yaw of the boat moving against the sun-bleached timbers of the jetty. After a while I picked up my kit and set off along the beach, trying to find somewhere secluded to make the break. A breeze had picked up: a cold, unnatural breeze with a fishy scent to it, which made the trees come alive, a lazy flex and sigh travelling the length of the fence. By the time I’d reached the rocks at the end of the beach it had turned into a strong wind that flattened my hair sideways and made my head ache in a way it would never have done before I got that tap on the head from Dove’s axe. In the daylight it was nothing like the gloom of the last time I’d been up here, but it felt like the twigs and scraps of heather pirouetting in the wind were just the outriders of something more powerful coming out of the enclosure. I was glad of the weight of the bolt-cutters on my shoulder.

I approached the fence, stopping only inches away and holding up my hand, waiting for the crawling sensation of the electric field lifting the hairs in their beds. But this time they remained flat, not responding, only moved by the occasional blast of wind. There was none of the faint buzzing I remembered from last month and now it occurred to me that although I couldn’t have broken the circuit I could have caused Dove to close down the supply so he could repair the damage.

I positioned my hands carefully on the insulated handles of the cutters, checking the way my thumbs lay along them. There was a chance the fence was dead, but that didn’t stop my heart thudding like a pile-driver. I lowered the bolts, bringing them closer and closer and closer to the wire. I let them touch, ready to have them jolted out of my hands. But they didn’t. They lay inertly, occasionally moving sideways in the wind, the sun winking white off the jaws. I shook my head and gave an ironic smile, half laughing at the sinking feeling in my chest.
No excuse now, old mate
… I ran the cutters down the fence in one movement to check for a rogue current, and when they landed with a bang on the floor, no sparks or jolts, I crouched and began to sever the wire.

Compared to Blake’s snippers, the cutters went through the fence like a hot knife through butter. In less than three minutes I’d made a hole from top to bottom. If someone was watching me from in there, hiding in the trees, they weren’t going to have any doubt about my intentions. I picked up the kit and stepped through, resting the cutters on my shoulder so I could either carry them comfortably or circle them down in one move, crack them out of the air like lightning.

The first thing that struck me about the forest was the pig dung. The pellets were everywhere, piles of them, some trampled, some perfectly oval and crusted like manufactured dog biscuits. I kept passing shallow grooves in the earth, wind-battered snarls of hog-hair caught on twigs and stones where the pigs had come to scratch themselves. Every time the wind changed direction I got a blast of a smell too—not the rotting pigs’ heads, but digested grass and leaves.

Deeper in the forest the wind couldn’t reach and for a while everything got weirdly still, the trees motionless, loaded with silence. I paused to get my bearings, ears roaring in the quiet. Ahead, between the trunks, I could see patches of sunlight, like there was a large clearing out there. I could make out shapes—a rusting old hopper, a blondin rope suspended high in the air with an old pulley dangling from it. The slate mine.

I poked my head out of the trees and checked the clearing for signs of life. Deserted. The pulley creaked back and forward in the breeze—the same eerie squeaking I’d heard from outside the fence. I picked my way across the mine, peering into shafts, giving the hopper a shove, making rust flake into the air. In the side of a rock face a shaft entrance was half concealed by a rusting water tank. It gave off a stink of decay, like a sewer—when I shone my torch into it I came face to face with a dead pig. I stared into its flat eyes for some time, thinking that it was a weird place for it to have crawled. It must have been pushed in. And it wasn’t as decomposed as it smelt—it looked kind of fresh. Maybe this was one of Malachi’s disposal places. I remembered what the Garricks had said, that he had access to hell through these shafts: I was thinking of crawling inside to dislodge it when something made me stop.