I’ve ended up renting a shepherd’s hut in Kilchoan. If I don’t get to live in a saturation chamber for the next three weeks, then this narrow space will do. It’s freezing, though. How long have I been asleep?
I haul my feet over the side of the bed. My phone is on a table near the bed. I squint at the screen. It’s 4:30 a.m. on Saturday, which means I’ve been asleep for nearly two days. God. The decompression always knocks me out, but this is a new record.
Thankfully, there’s a socket in here so my phone is fully charged. “Solar power,” the woman who owns the hut boasted as she showed me around. I didn’t tell her I work in the oil industry.
I use the light of my phone to check out the wood-burning stove. Took me ages to get this going when I first arrived, so I hope I can manage it now. I screw up a few sheets of newspaper from the basket next to the stove. My fingers are so cold they’re not working properly. I open the stove, throw in the paper, and sprinkle on a handful of kindling. After two failed attempts, I light a match.
“Please,” I say under my breath, as I close the stove door.
Next, I light tea lights in a couple of lanterns, pleased I haven’t had to use the electric lamp. The candlelight makes me feel as though I’m in some in-between place, where it’s neither night nor day.
I take a look around the hut. It’s got wood panelling on the walls, an embroidered quilt on the bed, and mismatching furniture. I like it. The woman who runs the place, Lizzie, lives in a farmhouse up the hill. She told me she’d left a few bits and bobs to get me started. There’s a tin of beans, some bread rolls, and a bowl of eggs. I take an egg and press my fingertip against a small white feather stuck to the shell. I put it back in the bowl.
I get the beans going on the gas hob, noting happily that even in a place like this, there is a need for the oil industry. I sit on the wicker chair.
Well. Here I am.
I found the hut online. When I knocked on the farmhouse door, it was nine in the morning. I could see into the kitchen: a man and woman were sitting on wooden rocking chairs in front of a bottle-green range. Two girls were playing with a toy train at their feet. The man was smoking a pipe, and the woman was reading the paper. Something about that Dickensian scene made such sense to me. Fate had brought me out of the water and all the way to this farmhouse. I could have been on the seabed at that moment, turning screws and melting metal, but instead, here I was, peering at a family tableau.
The woman, Lizzie, patted the girls’ heads before she came to answer the door. “How long will you be staying, dearie?” she asked.
As long as it takes, I felt like answering. I told her I’d start with three nights and take it from there.
“You’re here during our quiet period,” she told me. “No one’s booked in for a wee while, so just let me know what’s good for you.”
What’s good for me. How do I figure that one out?
I stir the beans and think about babies. I think about diving and my dad and long-distance running and looking at the stars and vodka and my dog. It’s like that four burners theory everyone was going on about a few years ago. Your life is a cooker with four burners—or hobs or rings or whatever you want to call them—representing work, health, friends, and family. The theory is that if you want to be successful, you have to turn off at least one burner. If you want to be extremely successful, you have to turn off two. How many burners does it take to make a baby? It takes one to make beans.
I take the saucepan off the stove and pour the contents over a bread roll. I balance the plate on my knees and eat. This meal reminds me of a camping trip James and I went on when we first got together. Our Trangia broke on the first night (so, no burners at all), and we had to eat sachets of mushroom stroganoff and freeze-dried Moroccan chicken prepared with cold water. We were hiking around the Lake District at the time, and I was determined to finish the trip without having to stop off at Millets for supplies. James argued that going to Millets wasn’t cheating, but it felt like it to me.
That trip was one of our first dates. We’d met only a fortnight or so earlier, in a snooker hall in Huddersfield. I’d been at a friend’s thirtieth, getting pampered at a spa hotel. Not my thing. At the end of it, full of lavender and soapsuds, I was desperate to go somewhere grimy again. I happened upon this snooker hall and thought, Why not? It reminded me of the many hours I’d spent at the Eastville Social Club with my dad when I was a girl.
James was there on a stag do, and he had escaped to the bar while his mates were finishing a game. That’s where we got talking. Before long, we were flirting so much that we’d swapped numbers, French-kissed, and arranged a week-long hiking trip to the Lake District. It was out of character for me, but then so was James. I think I always went for jerks in the past because I knew they wouldn’t
