Virgin Mary and baby Jesus, and winged angels bowed in prayer, cast long shadows across narrow wooden pews. Stars shone in a blue firmament painted in the dome above the altar, and the white-draped table itself was supported on the bows of a small boat.
Every hair on his arms, and the back of his neck, stood on end. For here was the church with the boat in it that Tormod had spoken of. He turned back towards the entrance.
‘Excuse me.’
The old lady straightened up from her bucket. ‘Yes?’
‘What’s the story of the boat beneath the altar? Do you know?’
She placed both hands behind her hips and arched herself backwards. ‘Aye, she said. ‘It’s a wonderful tale. The church was built by the people themselves, you see. Quarried and dressed the stone, and carried the sand and all the materials up here on their backs. Devout souls they were. Every last one of them with a place in Heaven. No doubt of that.’ She thrust her mop back into the bucket and leaned on its handle. ‘But it was the fishermen who paid for it. Offered to give the proceeds of one night’s catch towards the building of the church. Everyone prayed that night, and they came back with a record catch.?200, it was. A lot of money away back then. So the boat’s a kind of homage to those brave souls who risked the wrath of the sea for the Lord.’
Outside, Fin followed the gravel path around to the west side of the church and saw how the land fell away to the shore. Past the houses on the rise, and the headstones on the machair below, to a strip of beach glowing silver against the shallow turquoise waters of the bay. Just as Tormod had said.
Fin remembered a paragraph from the post-mortem report, which he had read only the night before in the flickering fluorescent light of his tent.
The pathologist had found fine silver sand in all the abrasions and contusions of the lower body. Not golden sand, as found on the beaches of Harris. But silver sand, as found here, down there, on what Tormod had called Charlie’s beach.
Fin focused on the crescent of silver that led the eye around the bay to a new breakwater at the south end, and wondered why he had called it
TWENTY-FIVE
‘Who’s this?’
‘It’s your grandson, Mr Macdonald. Fionnlagh.’
He doesn’t seem at all familiar to me. I see some of the other inmates sitting in their armchairs like Lord and Lady Muck, eyeing up this young boy with his odd, spiky hair who’s come to see me. They seem curious. How does he make it stand up like that? And why?
The nurse pulls up a chair and the boy sits down beside me. He looks uncomfortable. I can’t help it if I don’t know who the hell he is. ‘I don’t know you,’ I tell him. How could I have a grandson? I’m hardly old enough to be a father. ‘What do you want?’
‘I’m Marsaili’s boy,’ he says, and I feel my heart skip a beat.
‘Marsaili? Is she here?’
‘She’s gone to Glasgow, Grampa, to sit some exams. She’ll be back in a day or so.’
This news comes to me like a slap in the face. ‘She promised to take me home. I’m sick of this hotel.’ All I do all day is sit in some damned chair and look out the window. I see the children across the street leave for school in the morning, and I see them come home at night. And I can’t remember anything that’s happened in between. I suppose I must have had lunch, because I’m not hungry. But I don’t remember that either.
‘Do you remember, Grampa, how I used to help with the gathering? When we brought the sheep in for the shearing.’
‘Oh, God, aye! The shearing. Back-breaking that was.’
‘I used to help out from when I was just four or five.’
‘Aye, you were a bonny wee laddie, Fin. Marsaili thought the world of you, you know.’
‘No, I’m Fionnlagh, Grampa. Fin’s my dad.’
He gives me one of those smiles I see people give me all the time these days. Sort of embarrassed, as if they think I’m daft.
‘I’ve been helping out Murdo Morrison for a bit of extra pocket money. Gave him a hand with the lambing too, this year.’
I remember the lambing well. That first year on the island. You never got snow, but it could be bloody cold, and the wind on a wet March night would cut you in two. I’d never seen a lamb born before, and was very nearly sick the first time. All that blood and afterbirth. But what an amazing thing it was to see that skinny wee thing, like a drowned rat, breathing its first breath, and taking its first wobbling steps. Life in the raw.
I learned a lot of things that winter. I learned that however hard I thought my existence had been at The Dean, there were much worse things in life. Not that anyone treated us badly. Not really. But survival was brutal work, and you weren’t spared it because you were a kid.
There were daily chores. Up in the pitch-black, long before we left for school, to climb the hill and fill our buckets from the spring. There was cutting the seaweed from the shore. So much a ton Donald Seamus got for it from Alginate Industries at the seaweed factory over at Orasaigh. Killer work it was, slipping and sliding over the black rocks at low tide, bent double with a blunt sickle hacking away at the kelp, crusted shells, like razors, shredding your fingers. I think they burned the seaweed and used the ashes for fertilizer. Someone once told me they made explosives and toothpaste and ice cream from it too. But I never believed that. They must have thought I was as simple as Peter.
After the lambing there was the peat-cutting, up over the other side of Beinn Sciathan, lifting the peats as Donald Seamus cut them with the
After that there would be the hay, hand-cut with a scythe into long swathes. You took out the rough shaws and laid it out to dry, praying that it wouldn’t rain. It had to be turned, shaken and dried again, or it would rot in the stack. So you needed fine weather. Back at the stackyard it would be made into bales, and it wasn’t until the stackyard was full that Donald Seamus would be satisfied that there was enough to feed the beasts through the winter.
You wouldn’t think there was much time for school, but Peter and me were sent over with the other kids every morning on the boat to be picked up by the bus and taken to the corrugated-iron building by Daliburgh crossroads that was the secondary school. There was another building, the technical school, about a quarter of a mile down the road. But I only went until the incident at New Year. After that Donald Seamus refused to send me back, and Peter had to go on his own.
They weren’t bad folks, Donald Seamus and Mary-Anne, but there was no love in them. I knew some homers that got terrible abuse. That wasn’t us.
Mary-Anne hardly ever spoke. Barely acknowledged our existence, except to feed us and wash the few clothes we had. Most of her time was spent spinning, dyeing and weaving wool, and joining with the other women in the waulking of the cloth, all sitting around a long wooden table out front and turning and beating the weave until it was thickened and fully waterproof. As they waulked they sang to the rhythm of it. Endless songs to make bearable the mindless repetition. I’ve never heard women sing so much as I did during my time on the island.
Donald Seamus was hard but fair. If he took his belt to me it was usually because I deserved it. But I never let him lay a hand on Peter. Whatever wrong the boy might have done, it wasn’t his fault, and it took a confrontation between me and Donald Seamus to establish that.
I can’t remember what it was now that Peter had done. Dropped the eggs on the way from the henhouse and broken the lot, maybe. I remember he did that several times before they stopped asking him.
