These Demented Lands (7 page)

‘I wish you could prove it to Brotherhood. He's a man who will not allow himself a single illusion.'

‘I can't imagine your calling impresses him much then.'

He chuckled, ‘He's no fan of me. You think I work with illusions? Think what happened after they put your man up on that cross?'

‘He's never helped me once,' I goes, then went beetroot as I suddenly realised the soup was finished and I'd already stolen from this man. He took back and handed me the opened peaches.

‘Watch you don't cut your tongue.'

‘I've never tasted anything so sweet,' I smiled at him. He nodded and carried on smoking his cigar.

‘What
are
you? Some kind of a drifter?' he goes.

‘I been travelling here and there,' I says. ‘You're no going to tell me I should be settled.'

‘That's a matter for your . . .' he blew out a splut of smoky laugh.

I gulped and nodded, trying to swallow the peaches down. I says, ‘Tell us another Brotherhood story then I'm off to kiss the shite's arse.'

‘Look. I don't know your game down there but you don't strike me as the typical treasure hunter.'

‘What do you mean, sunken treasure like yon Argonaut's hunting?'

‘Mmm. No . . .'

‘What then?'

‘What's your business down there?'

‘Personal.'

‘You could step into crossfire.'

‘There's no need to go the all-dramatic on me.'

‘Brotherhood'll chew you up: a girl looks like you,' he laughed; shook his head, ‘I'm crazy to even consider letting you go down that hill.'

I stood quick, picked up the kit-bag, holding it up to my chest, the side with the patch on it facing away from me. The Devil's Advocate stayed put as I started to stroll away from the fire.

‘On you go. I can't help it, I just thought you were more than another who wanders these demented lands in days of the end.'

‘Aye, but its always the days of the end for yous bible-bashers; thats all we've ever heard from you.'

‘If you think about it, girl, every day is the end for someone and will be here soon enough for you.'

‘Lighten up, man,' I says as I crested 96-Metre Hill. ‘Thanks for the food.'

I kept on down that wide slope in the failing light; only later I would see that the one known as The Devil's Advocate had turned back to his tent, checked under the pillow and saw what he'd suspected; let out his wholesome laugh. He could easy have shouted, started running down the hill and caught me before I'd crossed the first of the barbed-wire fences, but I was believing myself off, striding into the duskness, the kit-bag pushed out before me like a pregnancy, knowing all the time how

I WAS IN
the Observation Lounge above the grass runway and I saw her figure hugging a kitbag on 96-Metre Hill to the south of the hotel and airstrip. She appeared beside the stunted larch: the larch on which, reposing, but ruined by hoody crows and hostile weather, the pilot's corpse had been found ten years before.

That evening on which she appeared was clear and bitter cold. The convoy (some cars with headlights already on) from the vehicle ferry had already moved along the big road on the shoreline towards The Outer Rim.

I had an unobstructed view of her distant figure moving downhill off the slopes, striding through the gloaming of dying sun that lit the tangled spreads of fallen bracken alternately rust then scarlet in colour; the inverted stalks washed and battered to an earth that would be a hard grid of frost under the coming dark.

For an instant, above the shoreline, the newcomer's figure was silhouetted along with the farthest larch-outcrops that are scattered on the bare hills above the hotel and airstrip. The silver-grey light on the water of the so-called bay stopped
sparkling. The sun moved down behind the snow-capped mountains that form the far shores of the Mainland along the fjord-like Sound.

She came down onto the shoreline close to the chapel ruins and graveyard where the remains of the pilot lay buried. The light was failing badly when she next materialised on the hotel side of the pine plantation that obscured the far end of the runway and its southern threshold, above which the aluminium folded together ten years ago in the darkness. She must have traversed the machair which, in the coming flush we dared call Spring, would blot with pure white daisies: an expanse that would turn pink as a cold cloud passed over and the sensitive under-petals, that looked as if they'd had a little burgundy spilled on them, turned up in resignation. She used the roadbridge to cross the river which was in spate, pulling down tonnes of freezing water from the Interior and spilling them out in the hazed whorls of the sandy seaweed delta below the graveyard. Then I saw something.

Brotherhood heard my quiet laugh as he stood behind the Observation Lounge bar, drying a glass. He had on his dinner suit and bow-tie. The couple from number 6, sitting by the log fire, looked over in unison. It was so dark in the lounge by then I could only make out the man's eye sockets and was sure he was wearing a jet-black boilersuit below his neck.

Brotherhood sauntered to the wide panorama windows and lifted the binoculars from the peeling varnish of the sill to his face. In the middle distance the small, black aircraft-shape silently ascended again above the dark pines then swooped with a wobbling, dreamy, stilted manner, like a hallucination:
unnatural, not moving like a Real Thing, it came worrying down towards the walking figure until, this time, she chickened out and threw herself forward onto the sheer black of the cold ground. It was Chef Macbeth at the top of the airstrip, hiding at the fringes of the plantation, flying his radio-controlled model before dinners started. Brotherhood and I both laughed as the lithe figure stood up from the spoor of dark ground and moved towards us. The radio-controlled aircraft was over the spruces and gone.

Out on the Oyster Skerries the shipping lane auto-beacon began its eleven-second semaphore. Polaris, the North Star, flickered weakly above the waters of the Sound, sliding past, silently and ever-wide as some lugubrious Mississippi.

When the young woman's boots crunched on the buff gravel chips below, two things happened: weak, buttermilky moon reflected on the shoulder and arm of her black leather jacket and all the televisions suddenly switched back on as the signal came alive from up in the mountains where the aerial is. Brotherhood silenced them, his arm held out like a fascist salute.

As the girl moved round to the outside lamp by the corner of the building, I leaned back in the best armchair, away from my reflection on the black glass. I drained my whisky, letting the ice cubes rest against my lip, then I set the glass down.

‘Well, well,
well,
real guest!' Brotherhood tossed the dish towel on the bar-top and moved down the spiral staircase to the reception area below.

I heard the front door open to admit the newcomer, then it opened a second time: Chef Macbeth with his aircraft under
an arm, heading for the kitchens. I listened: no confrontation to help pass the evening.

I walked behind the bar and poured myself a large Linkwood fifteen-year-old, while there was still ice in my glass; I slopped in water from the decanter. Ignoring the stares from the number 6s I took up position on a bar-stool so we would be out of earshot when Brotherhood returned.

I heard the firedoors swing, then a few minutes later the different squeaking of them opening into the lobby. Brotherhood circled up the staircase, winked, swung behind the bar and carelessly tipped the neck of the Linkwood into his tumbler, gloshing a fair splurt over the edges which he ignored as he bit down the raw whisky, leaned over past the single beer pump, ‘Fucking gorgeous, she could shove my toothbrush up her arse as far as it would go and I'd brush after breakfast and last thing at night. About twenty-four or five, seems to have come a long way over rough country. Where on earth's she wandered from to this place?' He paused then, concentrating; whispered, ‘The wet lower material of her trousers was dappled with the burned golds of dead bracken. The arm of her leather jacket was streaked with mud and she was out of breath; she had a kitbag, held in a weird way . . .'

‘What room did you put her in?'

‘As I was SAYING,' (the number 6s gaped over), ‘She held it out in front of her . . .'

‘Maybe the straps bust?'

‘So she had to look over it, the top of the kit-bag, and with her hair pinned up like that she seems even taller; she put down the kit-bag carefully, she said, “Do you have any vacancies?” I paused, surveyed her, then made a right show
of removing the register and flicking through it,' Brotherhood grabbed the bar menu and acted out the mocking turning of pages. He paused at desserts, looked at me from behind the menu. He stared at the sleeve of the cheap, functional outdoor jacket I bought in that Chandlers on the jetty at Ferry Slipway, one of two identical, even the same colour,
the cleanness, the purity of first days, my chunky new clothes, the incredible spirit of hotel rooms – monastic, assaulted daily by Chef Macbeth's fateful cauliflower and perpetual potatoes.

Brotherhood said, ‘I deliberately stared at the mud on her jacket sleeve in the hope it would unnerve her, but . . . made of sterner stuff this one.' He snapped the menu shut. “How many would the room be
for
?” “One,” she said. “And for how many
nights
?” “I don't know. Three?” the little soul said.'

‘Three! What one have you put her in?'

‘“We. Are all. Fuuuullll. Up!”' Brotherhood leaned his chin on the bar-top then straightened up to full height. ‘She just stared at me. Fantastic, cause she knew I was lying and she would huff to go walking back out into that night; then, perfect timing, Chef Macbeth appeared, walking in backwards wearing that silly flying helmet, the big plane tipped up and held under his arm. Macbeth stared right over her shoulder at me, then laughed.' Brotherhood lowered his voice, ‘she did not
even
turn round to look at Macbeth, just giving me the vicious eye on this room item. Single-mindedness. That's my kind of lass.' (The word said in that false way of those who have lost the accent and try to reclaim it.) Brotherhood smiled, ‘So there's Chef Macbeth laughing out loud at the girl's shoulders. He's an illiterate runt but then
you just had to hand it to him – give him his due. Anyway he cleared off to the kitchen with his toy aeroplane. I leaned to her a bit, breathing in gentle through my nose but I couldn't get any smell, no BO, no perfumes, nothing. I said, “I could give you a double room,” sort of leered it. “That would be
good
,” she came back with, completely deadpan, trying to make it as insincere as she possibly could.'

‘You put her in 15.'

‘“Sign here,” I said to her.' Brotherhood took a card for registration from the pocket of his dinner jacket then slid it across the bar-top to me. I almost touched it with my fingers but held back and deliberately didn't glance down at what I knew was there: the fat, girly bubbles of writing on a card identical to the one Brotherhood had mockingly made me fill out on my day of arrival. Brotherhood stared at my face, hoping to catch my eyes trembling downwards: relishing the possibility of seeing me seek salvation in the pursuit of some pretty girl with healthy little stools who'd come rambling out of nowhere.

‘Don't you think it's a lovely name?' Brotherhood taunted.

I looked down and the edges of my mouth curled as eyes rested, not on the name but the numeral 15 in Brotherhood's writing. I looked back up; the usual blankness, hiding the hope I'd given up, without memory of when, was all my face showed.

‘I led her up the corridor.'

‘Were you looking at her?' I was feigning interest, trying to play our game, staking a claim in Brotherhood's universe the way I'd been able to a month earlier when I began my investigation.

He replied, instantly, ‘No. Obviously I was walking in front, striding into the darkness of the corridor before the sections lit up. When we got outside the room I was especially nasty because I stood talking without opening the door or handing her the keys that I'd kept, clutched in my hand all the time.'

‘What were you saying?'

‘The usual cack . . . “Perfectly respectable, my lovebirds, we fly them in; expecting a plane right now, explains the togs; I mean we're very informal here, up in our rather lovely lounge,” now, mark my words and report back Sam Spade, give some credit to me cause I said . . . Ooops, shush.'

The male honeymooner from number 6 had stood and was crossing the dark lounge towards us, wearily swaying between the armchairs and circular tables.

‘Yessss . . . sir.' Brotherhood showed his teeth.

‘Is it okay to order food now?'

I didn't grace the guy with the curiosity of turning to even glance at his brand-new-wife's cream-stockinged legs, the lycra reflecting orange flames from the log fire. I knew everything; all was pre-ordained. On tonight's stroll, arm in arm around the concrete slabs forming two figure 8s in the pine plantation, the backs of those stockings would be splattered from the calves to the back of the knees with precise little dots of wet mud – even although it is a frosty night the slabs are laid so badly, mud is squeezed out from beneath as a foot is placed on each – those dots of mud will dry in the darkness, as each stocking lays concertina'd all night beside the bed in number 6.

‘Here,' Brotherhood sliced the menu at him, ‘The soup's broth. No . . . it's leek.'

The honeymooner crossed through the shadows to the safety of fireside brightness beside his young wife. They hunched over the menu.