I looked then at my little brother, clinging on to the rail and staring back, the salt-filled wind dragging at his clothes and raking through his hair, and I almost envied him his innocence, his lack of awareness. There was a look in his face almost like exhilaration. He had nothing to fear, because he knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that his big brother would look after him. For the first time I felt almost crushed by the weight of that responsibility.
Maybe Catherine saw it, too. I caught her looking at me, and a little half-smile stretched her lips before her hand slipped into mine, and I cannot begin to describe the comfort and warmth of that little hand in mine.
The nuns had given us a box of sandwiches which we ate quite quickly, and within an hour had thrown up again. As all trace of land vanished, so the wind had whipped itself into a fury, and the sea with it. The big black- and-white painted tub that was the
And so we took it in turns to throw up in the toilet off the non-smoking lounge where we had managed to bag ourselves some seats by a rain-streaked window, and where people smoked anyway, and drank beer, and in a language we didn’t understand shouted to be heard above the thud of the motors.
Sometimes in the distance we would see the blurry outline of some island come briefly into focus before vanishing again beyond the waves. Each time wondering if that was where we were headed. Hoping beyond hope that this nightmare was coming to an end. But it never did. Or so it seemed. Hour after hour we endured it. Wind and rain and sea, stomachs retching, with nothing more to give up but green bile. I am not sure that I have ever felt quite so miserable in my life.
We had left early that morning. And by now, late afternoon, it was starting to get dark. Mercifully the sea had calmed a little, and the approach of night offered the promise of smoother passage. Which was when I heard someone shouting, in English this time, that they could see Ben Kenneth, and everyone rushed on to the deck amid great excitement.
We went too, expecting to see someone called Kenneth, but if he was there among the crowd it was impossible to tell. It was only much later that I learned that Kenneth, or Coinneach in the Gaelic, was the name of the mountain that sheltered the harbour whose twinkling lights we saw for the first time emerging from the dusk.
The land rose darkly all around the town, and along the horizon lay a single line of bright silver light. The last of the day. Wherever we were, it was where we were going, and there was a great sense of anticipation among the other passengers.
A voice came over the Tannoy. ‘Will those passengers who are disembarking and have not yet purchased a ticket please make their way to the purser’s office.’ There was a clanging of bells, and the deep, sonorous moan of the ship’s horn, as she came in to dock at the pier. Deckhands with mops and buckets were sloshing water over salt-caked planking as families gathered with suitcases to watch as a gangplank was manoeuvred into place.
It was a mix of hunger, relief and trepidation that made my legs tremble as I made my way down the steep incline, Peter ahead of me, Catherine at my back, to find unaccustomed solid ground beneath my feet. My body was still moving to the rhythm of the boat.
As the crowd thinned, heading for buses and cars, and darkness fell across the hills, we took out our little rectangles of cardboard and hung them around our necks, just as the nuns had instructed. And we waited. And waited. The lights started to go out on the ferry behind us, and the long shadows we had cast across the pier vanished. One or two people threw curious glances in our direction but hurried on. Now there was almost no one left on the pier, and all we could hear were the voices of the sailors on the ferry as they prepared her to spend the night at dock.
A feeling of such despondency fell over me as we stood there alone in the dark, the black waters inside the protective arms of the harbour slopping against the stanchions of the pier. The lights of a hotel beyond the harbour wall looked warm and welcoming, but not for us.
I could see Catherine’s pale face peering up at me out of the darkness. ‘What do you think we should do?’
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Like the nuns said. Someone will come.’
I don’t know where I found the faith to believe in that. But it was all there was to hold on to. Why would they have sent us all this way across the sea, and told us there would be someone there to meet us, if it wasn’t true?
Then out of the darkness a figure emerged, hurrying along the pier towards us, and I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or afraid. It was a woman, and as she got closer I could see that she was in her late forties or early fifties. Her hair was piled up beneath a dark-green hat pinned to her head, and her long woollen coat was buttoned up tight to the neck. She wore dark gloves and wellington boots, and carried a shiny handbag.
She slowed as she reached us, a look of consternation on her face, and she bent to peer at the cards around our necks. Her frown vanished as she read the name O’Henley on Catherine’s, and she gave her a good looking over. A hand came up to grip her jaw and turn her face one way, then the other. And then she examined both her hands. She gave us barely a glance. ‘Aye, you’ll do,’ she said, and took Catherine’s hand to lead her away.
Catherine didn’t want to go, pulling back against her.
‘Come on,’ the O’Henley woman barked. ‘You’re mine now. And you’ll do what you’re told or suffer the consequences.’ She yanked hard on Catherine’s arm, and I’ll never forget the desperate look on wee Cathy’s face as she glanced back at Peter and me. I really thought, then, that I would never seen her again, and I suppose that was the first time I realized that I was in love with her.
‘Where’s Catherine going?’ Peter said. But I just shook my head, not trusting myself to speak.
I don’t know how long we stood there then, waiting, growing colder, till I couldn’t stop my jaw from chittering. I could see figures moving around inside the lounge bar of the hotel, shadows in the light, people in another world. One that we didn’t inhabit. And then, suddenly, the lights of a vehicle raked across the pier, and a van drove right on to it, stopping just yards away, trapping us in the beam of its headlights like rabbits.
A door slammed and a man moved into the light, casting a giant shadow towards us. I could barely see him with the light behind him. But I could tell that he was a big man. He wore blue overalls and boots, and a cloth cap pulled down on his forehead. He took two steps towards us and peered down at the cards around our necks and grunted. I could smell alcohol and stale tobacco on his breath.
‘In the van,’ was all he said, and we followed him around to the side of the van where he slid open a door to let us in. ‘Hurry up, I’m late enough as it is.’ Inside were ropes and fishing nets and orange buoys, old wooden crates stinking of rotten fish, creels and a toolkit, and the carcass of a dead sheep. It took me a moment to realize what it was, before recoiling in horror. For some reason it didn’t seem to trouble Peter.
‘It’s dead,’ he said, and put a hand on its belly. ‘And still warm.’
So we sat on the floor in the back of that van with the dead sheep and the fishing stuff, and had our bones shaken, breathing exhaust fumes, while he drove us over dark, singletrack roads, flat bogland silvered by the moon shimmering away into a black distance.
Until we saw and smelled the sea again, almost dazzling in the glow of the moon, occasional lights rising up the hillside, burning in the windows of unseen cottages.
The long finger of a stone jetty reached out into still waters, and a small boat rose gently on the swell. A man we would come to know later as Neil Campbell sat smoking in the wheelhouse, and came out to greet us while the big man with the cap parked his van. When he’d done, he told us to get out.
The two men spoke and there was an exchange of laughter. But I had no idea what it was they said. We were ushered, then, down into the boat which chugged across the moonlit strait towards the ragged shape of an island rising up out of the sea, odd lights dotted around its looming hillsides. It took only ten minutes or so to reach it, and we climbed up on to a crumbling stone jetty at one side of a narrow neck of water leading into a small bay. I could see houses on both sides of it. Strange, squat, stone dwellings with grass for roofs that I later learned was called thatch. The tide was out, and the bay was ringed with black and gold seaweed.
The boat headed off, back across the strait. ‘Follow me,’ the big man said, and we trotted after him along a beaten track that circled the bay, and then up the hill on a stony, rutted path to one of those thatched cottages we had seen from the harbour. There I encountered my first-ever smell of peat smoke as the wooden door squeaked open into a dingy inner room, half filled with the stuff. A faint yellow light spilled from a Tilley lamp hanging low from the rafters, and a bank of peats glowed red in the open door of a black, cast-iron stove set against the end wall. An earthen floor was strewn with sand. This was the kitchen, living room and dining room all in one, a large table sitting in the middle of it, a dresser against the back wall, two small deep windows set on either side of the
