The Lewis Man

But he just clung on to me all the more tightly, sobbing and shaking, and I let my head fall back against the rock and closed my eyes.

When I opened them again, the first grey light of dawn was angling into the crevice from above. Peter was curled up beside me on the shingle, and he wasn’t moving. I panicked and started shouting for help. Crazy! Who was going to hear me?

I was hoarse and had all but given up, when a shadow leaned over the opening fifteen feet above us, and a familiar voice called down. ‘Holy Mary Mother of God, what are you doing down there, boys?’ It was our neighbour, Roderick MacIntyre. I discovered later that he had found sheep missing first thing after the storm, and had come down along the cliffs looking for them. Had it not been for that serendipitous piece of good luck, we might both have died down there. As it was, I still feared for Peter’s life. He hadn’t moved since I regained consciousness.

The men who weren’t away with the fishing fleet assembled on the clifftop and one of them was lowered down on a rope to pull us up. The storm had abated by now, but there was still a strong wind, and I’ll never forget the look on Donald Seamus’s face in that yellow-grey dawn light as they brought me up. He never said a word, but lifted me into his arms and carried me down to the jetty where a boat was waiting to take us over to Ludagh. Peter was still unconscious, and in the crowd of men huddled around us at the boat I heard someone say he was suffering from exposure. ‘Hypothermia,’ someone else said. ‘He’ll be lucky if he survives.’ And I felt a terrible pang of guilt. None of this would have happened if it hadn’t been for me sneaking out to meet Ceit. How could I ever face my mother in the next life if I let anything happen to Peter? I had promised her!

I don’t remember much about the next day or so. I know that they put us in the back of Donald Seamus’s van at Ludagh, and we were driven to the cottage hospital at Daliburgh. The Sacred Heart. I must have been suffering from exposure, too, because I don’t even remember them putting the plaster on my arm. A big, heavy white stookie from my wrist to my elbow, with just my fingers and thumb sticking out the end of it. I remember nuns leaning over my bed. Scary they were, in their black robes and white coifs, like harbingers of death. And I remember sweating a lot, a bit delirious, burning up one minute, then shivering with cold the next.

It was dark outside when I finally recovered my senses. I couldn’t have told you whether one day had passed, or two. There was a light burning at my bedside, and it seemed shocking to have electric light again, as if I had been transported back to my former life.

I was in a ward with six beds in it. A couple of them were occupied, but Peter was in neither of them, and I began to get a bad feeling. Where was he? I slipped out of the bed, bare feet on cold linoleum, trembling legs that would hardly hold me up, and padded to the door. On the other side of it was a short corridor. Light spilled out from an open doorway. I could hear the hushed voices of the nuns, and a man’s voice. The doctor maybe. ‘Tonight will be critical,’ he said. ‘If he makes it through, then he should be okay. But it’ll be touch and go. At least he has youth on his side.’

I walked in something like a trance along that corridor and found myself standing at the open door. Three heads turned towards me, and one of the nuns was on her feet immediately, coming to grab me by the shoulders. ‘What on earth are you doing out of bed, young man?’

‘Where’s Peter?’ was all I could say, and I saw them all exchanging looks.

The doctor was an older man, in his fifties. Wearing a dark suit. He said, ‘Your brother has pneumonia.’ Which meant nothing to me then. But I knew from his grave demeanour that it was serious.

‘Where is he?’

‘He’s in a special room down the hall,’ one of the nurses said. ‘You can see him tomorrow.’

But I’d already heard them say that there might be no tomorrow. I felt sick to my stomach.

‘Come on, now, let’s get you back into bed.’ The nun who had me by the shoulders guided me back up the hall and into the ward. When I was safely tucked up in bed, she told me not to worry and to try to get some sleep. She turned out the light and slipped back out into the hall in a whisper of skirts.

In the darkness I heard a man’s voice coming from one of the other beds. ‘Pneumonia’s a killer, son. Better pray for your wee brother.’

I lay for a long time, listening to the beat of my own heart, the blood pulsing in my ears, until I heard the gentle purring of my fellow patients as they finally succumbed to sleep. But I knew there was no way that I was going to sleep that night. I waited, and waited, until finally the light in the hall outside was doused and a blanket of silence descended on the little cottage hospital.

At length I summoned the courage to slip from the bed and cross once more to the door. I opened it a crack and peered down the hall. There was a line of light beneath the closed door to the nun’s station, and a little further down, light seeped out from beneath another door, also closed. I squeezed out into the corridor and drifted past the nun’s station till I reached the second door and very slowly turned the handle to ease it open.

The light in here was subdued. It had a strange yellow-orange quality. Warm, almost seductive. The air was suffocatingly hot. There was a single bed with electrical equipment along one side, cables and tubes trailing across the covers to the prone figure of Peter lying beneath the sheets. I closed the door behind me and hurried over to his bedside.

He was a terrible colour. Paler than white, with penumbrous shadows beneath his eyes, his face glistening with sweat. His mouth hung open, and I could see that the sheets that covered him were soaked through. I touched his forehead with the backs of my fingers and almost recoiled from the heat. He was burning up, unnaturally hot. His eyes were moving beneath his eyelids, and his breathing was shallow and rapid.

My sense of guilt very nearly overwhelmed me then. I pulled up a chair to his bedside and perched myself on the edge of it, taking his hand in mine and holding on to it for dear life. If I could have given my life for his I would.

I don’t know how long I sat there. Some hours, I think. But at some point I fell asleep, and the next thing I knew I was being wakened by one of the nuns who took me by the arm and led me back to the ward, without a single word of admonition. Back in my own bed I dozed fitfully, never far from the surface, troubled by strange dreams of storms and sex, until the light of the dawn began creeping in around the edges of the curtains. And then sudden sunlight laid itself down across the linoleum in narrow burned-out strips.

The door opened, and the nuns wheeled in a trolley with breakfast. One of them helped me to sit up and said, ‘Your brother’s fine. His fever broke during the night. He’s going to be all right. You can go along and see him after breakfast.’

I could hardly get my porridge and toast and tea down me fast enough.

Peter was still prone in his bed when I went in. But there was colour in his face now, his eyes a little less shadowed. He turned his head to look at me as I pulled up the chair beside his bed. His smile was pale, but he seemed genuinely happy to see me. I had feared that I would never be forgiven. He said, ‘I’m sorry, Johnny.’

I felt tears prick my eyes. ‘What for? You’ve nothing to be sorry about, Peter.’

‘It’s all my fault.’

I shook my head. ‘Nothing’s your fault, Peter. If anyone’s to blame it’s me.’

He smiled. ‘There was a woman who came and sat with me all night.’

I laughed. ‘No. That was me, Peter.’

He shook his head. ‘No, Johnny. It was a woman. She sat right there in that chair.’

‘One of the nuns then.’

‘No. It wasn’t a nun. I couldn’t really see her face, but she was wearing a sort of short green jacket, and a black skirt. She held my hand all night.’

I knew enough, even then, to know that a fever can make you delirious. That you can see things which aren’t there. It had been me holding his hand, and no doubt the nuns had been in and out. It had all merged together in his mind.

‘She had beautiful hands, Johnny. Such long white fingers. Married, too. So it couldn’t have been a nun.’

‘How do you know she was married?’

‘She was wearing a ring on her wedding finger. Not like any ring I’ve ever seen before. Sort of twisted silver, like snakes wrapped around each other.’

I think, then, every hair on my body stood on end. He had never known about our mother giving me her ring. Never knew how I hid it in a sock in the sack at the end of my bed. Never knew how it had gone into the furnace along with everything else that Mr Anderson had thrown into the flames that day.

I suppose it is always possible that some childhood memory of it had remained in his mind, of seeing it on my mother’s hand. But I believe that what he saw that night had nothing to do with lost memories or delirium. I believe