The Blackhouse

mug of hot tea cupped in my hands. There was still a tremor ran through me each time I took a sip from it. The mud had dried now and was caked and cracking like shite on my skin and my clothes. God knows what I must have looked like. Gigs had made me leave my trainers at the door, but there was still a trail of dried mud between it and the fire. Gigs sat in his chair on the other side of the hearth and watched me carefully. He smoked an old, blackened pipe, and blue smoke curled from it into the light of the oil lamp on the table. It smelled sweet as a nut, a pitch higher than the toasty scent of the peat. His wife had taken a damp towel to my face and hands before brewing the tea and then, on some unspoken signal, retired to bed.

‘Well, Fin,’ Gigs said at last, ‘I hope this is you getting it out of your system before you go out to the rock.’

‘I’m not going,’ I said in a voice so small it was little more than a whisper. I was still drunk, I suppose, but the shock of falling in the ditch had sobered me up a little, and the tea was helping, too.

Gigs did not react. He puffed gently on the stem of his pipe and watched me speculatively. ‘Why not?’

I have no recollection now of what I said to him that night, how it was that I expressed those feelings of deep, dark dread that the very thought of going out to the rock had aroused in me. I suppose, like everyone else, he must have assumed that it was fear, pure and simple. But while others might have displayed contempt for my cowardice, Gigs appeared to understand in a way that seemed to lift that enormous weight which had been bearing down on me from the moment Artair’s dad had given me the news. He leaned towards me across the fire, holding me steady in the gaze of those Celtic blue eyes of his, his pipe smoking gently in his hand. ‘We are not twelve individuals out there, Fin. We are twelve together. We are a team. Each one of us is reliant on the other and supports the other. It’s hard, aye. It’s fucking hard, boy. And it’s dangerous. I don’t pretend otherwise. And the Lord will test us to the very edge of our endurance. But you’ll be richer for it, and you’ll be truer to yourself. Because you’ll know yourself in a way that you never have before, and maybe never will again. And you’ll feel that connection that we all feel with every one of those men who’ve been out there before us, reaching back through the centuries, joining hands with our ancestors, sleeping in the places they have slept, building cairns by the cairns they have left.’ He took a long pause, sucking on his pipe, allowing the smoke to eddy around his lips and nostrils, rising into the stillness in blue wreaths around his head. ‘Whatever your blackest fear, Fin. Whatever your greatest weakness. These are things you must face up to. Things you must confront, or you’ll spend the rest of your life regretting it.’

And so with a heart full of dread I went on the trip to An Sgeir that year, although I wish, today, with every fibre of my being that I had not.

In the days before we left, I kept myself to myself. The wind had swung further round, to the north-east, and a storm that seemed to mark the end of summer hammered the island for two days. Force-ten winds blew the rain in horizontally off the Minch, and the land drank it thirstily. I had not made up with Marsaili after our last exchange in the barn, and I avoided going to Mealanais. I stayed indoors, reading in my room, listening to the rain battering against the windows and the wind lifting tiles on the roof. On the Tuesday night Artair came to the door to say that we were leaving for the rock the next day.

I couldn’t believe it. ‘But the weather’s coming from the northeast. They always say you can’t land on the rock if there’s any kind of easterly.’

Artair said, ‘There’s a new front coming in. A north-westerly. Gigs thinks we’ve got a twenty-four-hour window for getting on to the rock. So we go tomorrow night. We’ve to load the trawler at the Port tomorrow afternoon.’ He didn’t seem any happier about it than I was. He sat on the edge of my bed in silence for a long time. Then he said, ‘So you’re going?’

I couldn’t even bring myself to speak. I acknowledged with a tiny nod of my head.

‘Thanks,’ he said. As if somehow I was doing it for him.

It took several hours the next day to load the Purple Isle berthed at the breakwater quay at Port of Ness. All the supplies required to maintain twelve men on a rock in the middle of the ocean for a fortnight. There was no natural spring on An Sgeir, so all of our water was taken in old beer casks. We had boxes and boxes of food, two tons of pickling salt in sacks, tools, waterproofs, mattresses to sleep on, a fifteen-foot aerial lashed together to pick up a signal for the radio. And, of course, the peat for the fires that would warm us and feed us. The hard graft involved in passing everything from the quay to the trawler and stowing it in the hold took my mind off our imminent departure. Although the storm had abated, there was still a heavy swell, and the trawler rose and fell against the harbour wall, making the transfer of supplies a difficult and sometimes perilous task. We got soaked, too, as the sea broke again and again over the wall, sending spray cascading down upon us as we worked. The previous day waves had been smashing into the breakwater and exploding fifty feet into the air, sending their spume arcing over the harbour to obliterate it from view at each pulse of the ocean.

We left on the midnight tide, diesel engines thudding as we slipped out into the bay from the relative shelter of the harbour, facing into the huge swell, waves breaking over the bow to pour in foaming rivers across the deck. It seemed no time at all until the lights of Ness were swallowed by the night as we yawed and pitched into open seas beyond the Butt of Lewis. The last thing to vanish was the comforting flash of the lighthouse on the clifftop at the Butt, and when that was gone there was only the ocean. Untold stormy miles of it. If we missed the rock the next stop would be the Arctic. I gazed out into the blackness in what I can only describe as abject terror. Whatever my greatest fear, I figured I was facing it right now. Gigs tugged on my oilskins and told me to go below. There was a berth reserved for Artair and me and we should get some sleep. The first day and the last on the rock, he said, were always the hardest.

I don’t know how I slept, squeezed into that narrow berth right up on the port side of the bow, shivering and wet and miserable. But I did. We had crashed through eight hours of mountainous seas to cover fifty miles across some of the most notorious waters in the world, and I had slept through it all. I think it was the change in the pitch of the engines that wakened me. Artair was already scrambling up the ladder to the galley. I wiped the sleep from my eyes and climbed out to drag on my boots and my oilskins, and then follow him up on deck. It was broad daylight, the sky above us torn and shredded by the wind, periodically obscured by the squally showers of fine rain that blew in our faces.

‘Jesus,’ I said, ‘what’s that stink?’ It was a high-pitched acrid stench, a porridge of shite and ammonia.

‘That’s the guano, orphan boy.’ Angel grinned at me. He actually seemed to be enjoying this. ‘Ten thousand years of accumulated bird shite. Get used to it. You’re going to be living with it for the next two weeks.’

That was how we knew we were close to the rock. The stink of bird shit. We couldn’t see it yet, but we knew it was there. The Purple Isle had slowed to only a few knots. The swell of the ocean had dropped dramatically, and we were going with it now rather than fighting it.

‘There she is!’ someone shouted, and I peered through the mist and rain to catch my first sight of this legendary place. And there she was. Three hundred feet of sheer black cliff streaked with white, rising straight out of the ocean in front of us. Almost in that same moment, as the mist cleared, splinters of sunlight fell through fissures in the cloud, and the glistening rock was thrown into an instant projection of sharply contrasting light and shade. I saw what looked like snow blowing in a steady stream from the peak before I realized that the snowflakes were birds. Fabulous white birds with blue-black wingtips and yellow heads, a wingspan of nearly two metres. Gannets. Thousands of them, filling the sky, turning in the light, riding turbulent currents of air. This was one of the world’s most important surviving gannet colonies, and these extraordinary birds returned in ever-increasing numbers year after year to lay their eggs and raise their chicks in this forbidding place. And that in spite of the annual harvest by the men of Crobost, and the two thousand chicks we were about to take from their nests this year again.

An Sgeir lay along a line that ran approximately south-east to north-west. The towering spine of the rock dropped from its highest point in the south to a bleached curve of two-hundred-foot cliffs at the north end, like a shoulder set against the prevailing weather of lashing gales and monstrous seas that rose out of the south-west to smash upon its stubborn gneiss. Three promontories on its west side jutted into the ocean, water breaking white and foaming furiously in rings all around them as they dipped down into undersea ravines.

The nearest rib of rock was called Lighthouse Promontory, because of the automatic lighthouse built at its conjunction with the rest of the island — the highest point of which loomed over us as we approached. Beyond it, the second and longest of the promontories formed an inlet that cut deep into the heart of the island, open to the east, but providing shelter from the west and the north. It was the only place on An Sgeir where it was possible to land our supplies. Here, time and the relentless assault of the elements had carved out caves in the rock so deep