‘It’s voluntary, though,’ Fin said.
Artair said, ‘Aye, but do you really think anyone’s not going to do it? I mean, it would look fucking suspicious, wouldn’t it?’
‘I’m not doing it,’ Fionnlagh said, and they all stopped and looked at him.
‘Why not?’ Artair demanded.
‘Because it’s the thin end of the wedge.’ Fionnlagh’s face flushed with a strange passion. ‘The beginnings of a police state. We’re all going to end up on a database somewhere, identified by a DNA barcode, and we’re not going to be able to do anything or go anywhere without someone knowing why, or where we’ve come from, or where we’re going to. You’ll end up getting turned down for a mortgage, or life insurance, because the insurance company thinks you’re a bad risk. It’ll all be there on the DNA database. Your grampa died of cancer, or maybe there’s a history of heart disease on your mother’s side. You’ll get knocked back for a job because your prospective employer’s discovered that your great grandmother spent time in a mental institution, and your barcode looks a hell of a lot like hers.’
Artair looked at the faces gathered around listening open-mouthed. The loading of the lorry had ground to a halt. ‘Will you hark at him. He sounds like one of these left-wing radicals. Karl fucking Marx. I don’t know where the hell he gets it from.’ His eyes darted momentarily towards Fin, then he turned to Fionnlagh. ‘You’ll take the test and lump it.’
Fionnlagh shook his head. ‘No,’ he said with a quiet resolution.
‘Look …’ Artair took a more conciliatory tone. ‘We’re all going to do it, right?’ He looked around for support. Everyone nodded and murmured their agreement. ‘So it’s going to look pretty fucking suspicious if you don’t. Is that what you want? Is it? You want them to think it was you?’
A look of sullen resignation fell across Fionnlagh’s face. ‘Well, whoever did it should get a medal.’ Fin did not miss the echo of Artair’s words. Fionnlagh took in all the faces turned in his direction. ‘The man was a brute and a bully, and I’ll bet there’s not a single one of you standing on this jetty who doesn’t think he got everything he deserved.’
No one said a word. And a few moments’ silence stretched into half a minute, tempered only by the sound of the wind rushing through the grasses on the cliff. Finally, as if just to break it, one of the men said, ‘So does it hurt? This DNA test.’
Fin smiled and shook his head. ‘No. They take a thing like a big cotton bud and scrape it down the inside of your cheek.’
‘Not your bum cheek, I hope,’ a thin man with ginger hair and a cloth cap said, and they all laughed, glad to be able to release the tension. ‘’Cos nobody’s sticking a big cotton bud up my arse!’
The laughter was a cue to begin loading again, and they restarted the passing of salt sacks along the chain to the lorry.
‘How long before they get the results of the DNA tests?’ Artair asked.
‘Don’t know,’ Fin said. ‘Two or three days, maybe. Depending on how many samples they take. When are you hoping to leave for the rock?’
‘Tomorrow,’ Gigs said. ‘Maybe even tonight. Depends on the weather.’
Fin blew air through clenched teeth as he took another sack, and felt the sweat breaking out across his forehead. He was going to have to shower and change when he got back to Stornoway. ‘You know, what I don’t understand is why you kept taking him.’
‘Angel?’ Gigs asked.
Fin nodded. ‘I mean, you all hated him, didn’t you? I haven’t come across a single person since I got here who’s had one good word to say for him.’
The comedian with the ginger hair said, ‘Angel was the cook. He was good at it.’ And there was a mumble of accord.
‘So who have you asked to stand in for him?’ Fin said.
‘Asterix.’ Gigs nodded towards a wee man with a big, whiskery moustache. ‘But we didn’t ask him. We never ask anyone, Fin. We let it be known that there’s a place available, and if someone wants to go, then they come and ask us.’ He paused, a sack of salt weighing heavily in his arms. But he didn’t seem to notice. ‘That way no one can lay the blame at our door if anything goes wrong.’
When they had finished loading the lorry, they took a break for a smoke, a quiet moment together before this unlikely assembly of weavers and crofters, electricians, joiners and builders, headed off to crofts and work places. Fin wandered away along the jetty, past rusting capstans and tangles of green fishing net. There was fresh concrete around the walkway and the wall where work had recently been carried out to repair the damage caused by ferocious seas. A great grassy rock rose from the water in the inner harbour. As a boy, Fin had gone out to it at low tide and climbed up to the top, sitting there to survey all around him. King of the harbour. Until the tide came in and trapped him there. He’d had to wait until the tide went out again before he could get off the rock. For like most island boys of his generation, he had never learned to swim. There had been hell to pay when eventually he got home.
‘You know, we’ve never spoken properly about what happened that year.’ Gigs’s voice close at his shoulder startled him. Fin turned and saw that the others were still gathered around the lorry at the far end of the jetty, smoking and talking. ‘When we got back, you were in no condition to talk. Didn’t remember much, anyway. And then you left for the university and never came back.’
‘I don’t know that there was anything much for us to say,’ Fin said.
Gigs leaned against the lifebelt hanging from the harbour wall and gazed across at the breakwater quay, smashed now by the sea, where the trawler used to berth to land the harvest from An Sgeir. ‘In the old days, hundreds of people gathered on the quay there, queuing up the road to the village, just to be sure of at least one guga.’ The wind whipped the smoke of his cigarette from his mouth.
‘I remember it,’ Fin said, ‘from when I was a boy.’
Gigs tilted his head and cast him a searching look. ‘What else do you remember, Fin — from the year you came with us?’
‘I remember that I nearly died. It’s not something I’m likely to forget.’ He felt Gigs’s eyes piercing him, like searchlights seeking illumination in some dark place deep inside, and he was discomfited by it.
‘A man did die.’
‘I’m hardly likely to forget that either.’ Emotion welled up in Fin like water in a spring. ‘There’s hardly a day goes by that I don’t think about it.’
Gigs held his eye for a moment then looked away again towards the shattered quay. ‘I’ve been out to the rock more than thirty times, Fin. And I remember every single trip. Like songs in a hymn book, they’re all different.’
‘I suppose they are.’
‘You’d think maybe one year would begin to seem like all the others after thirty-odd years, but I can recall every detail of every one like it was the last.’ His pause was laden. ‘I remember the year you came with us as if it was yesterday.’ He hesitated, seeming to consider his words carefully. ‘But outside of those of us who were there, it’s never been discussed.’
Fin shuffled uncomfortably. ‘It was hardly a secret, Gigs.’
Gigs’s head swivelled again in his direction, the same look in his eyes. Searching. And then he said, ‘Just so you know, Fin. It’s an unwritten rule. Whatever happens on the rock stays on the rock. Always did, always will.’
ELEVEN
The news that Artair and I were to join that year’s team going out to An Sgeir ruined my last summer on the island. It came out of the blue, literally, and sent me into a deep, black depression.
There were only six weeks left before I was due to leave for university in Glasgow, and I wanted to spend them as I had the last two. Marsaili and I had passed nearly every day together since our encounter on Eilean Beag. I had begun to lose count of the number of times we had made love. Sometimes with the ferocity and passion of
