The clouds drift away, revealing the last of the stars, their signs and warnings unread by those islanders hiding in the blackout or sleeping in their beds. This is the time of salt laced outside doors to warn off sea spirits. The land, pockmarked by dropped bombs and groaning under skeins of wire, smells of doused fires and explosives from the quarry. Had we knocked on any of those darkened doors tonight, we’d have found it barred.
We wait.
‘How long, do you think?’
We draw a shuddering breath. It doesn’t matter now: the unseen days and weeks and years unravel blankly ahead of us. Light will bleed out over this water nightly; day will settle in again and again. We won’t know.
The first glimmer of sunrise brightens the sea, picking out the skeletal shadows of the wrecks from the last war. We used to swim down to them: ships full of dormant bombs and bleached bones. When the tide shifts, the jaws on some of the skulls clack open and shut, as if there is something they still want to say.
A figure finally walks along the barrier – Mr Cameron, with his rope-tied trousers, his grey skin, his hacking cough.
He is ten paces away before he sees the body.
‘Christ! What have you . . .? Christ!’
His face pales and he stumbles back along the barrier, not towards the houses of Kirkwall, just across the water, but up towards the camp, with its spiked fences and metal huts.
Now would be our chance to escape.
We don’t move. The cold from the ground seeps up into our bones, rooting us.
This is where we belong.
We squeeze our hands together as if we could become a single being. As if we could return to the time before the war. Before we knew about love and death and envy.
We count two hundred shared breaths before they come for us – not the police, but one of the guards from the camp, black-booted and in a pressed uniform of dark green: a practical colour to hide mud and bloodstains.
We stand and turn, face him and hold up our hands – the blue-white skin on our wrists identical, indistinguishable, even to our own eyes.
And with one voice, we say, ‘She didn’t do it. I did it. It was me.’
Part One
Friday I held a seaman’s skull,
Sand spilling from it
The way time is told on kirkyard stones
From ‘Beachcomber’, George Mackay Brown
October 1941
Midnight. The sky is clear, star-stamped and silvered by the waxing gibbous moon. No planes have flown over the islands tonight; no bombs have fallen for over a year. The snub noses of anti-aircraft guns gleam, pointing skywards. The cliffs loom like paper cutouts, hulking shadows above the natural harbour of the bay. Everything is flattened by the darkness, as if the sea around Orkney is a stage set, waiting for an entrance.
The German U-boat glides between the rocks that lead to Scapa Flow. It is alone, on a mission that cannot be accomplished.
People have told Commander Pasch that he is mad, that he is risking his crew, his vessel, his own life. His men snap commands to each other in broken sentences. They touch the pictures of wives, children, lovers.
One of the men whispers, ‘Vater unser in Himmel . . .’ Our Father in Heaven.
Around the boat, the water shifts and sighs: so close to winter, the sea temperature would shock the air from the men’s lungs. Inside is safety. This boat has carried them through enemy waters, past icebergs and monsters of the deep. Their living home, snug, bullet-shaped, fuggy with their breath, thick with their laughter.
The submarine slides past the clean-picked bones of ships long-sunk. A maze of broken-ribbed vessels, stretching steel to snag them. Beyond, the navigator can make out a dark mass of ancient rock. Beneath the waves, one land looks much like any other; friend and enemy soil are the same in the darkness. But the man has studied this land, this route, these remote islands.
Orkney.
And above their heads, floating like ghosts in the moonlight, are the massed ships of the British Royal Navy. They will be full of men at ease: sleeping, dreaming of home. Their portholes will be open. No one will expect an attack.
But it is best not to think of the men. Best to focus on the instruments, on loading the torpedoes, on setting the sights on the largest boat at dock. HMS Royal Elm. It hangs, suspended in the water above them, bobbing like a bloated corpse.
The Orcadians sleep in their beds with half an ear open for bombers, which might still whine overhead for all it’s just past midnight. It’s rumoured that the Germans are developing a new plane, which can fly entirely silently, and they’ll be testing it on Orkney first. It’s been said that the Germans will overrun them.
‘Hush, you,’ the mammies whisper, when their children repeat the horrors they’ve heard in the schoolyard.
‘The Germans will peel off our skins, Mammy!’
‘We’ll no have Germans here.’ But their brows are creased as they smooth covers flat and kiss foreheads and press the blankets more closely around the windows to block out any light that might call to a passing plane.
There are many different islands, some clustered closely enough that you could swim from one to another, or shout insults across the water. The only safe secrets are concealed under the ground or beneath the sea.
They are a cold, closed people here. Hard-faced and with a single lonely beating heart. They survive as one. They weather storms and winds and bad harvests together. They know each other’s middle names, whose baby is teething, or whose children are in need of a sharp slap and some manners. They know when a couple has fallen out, or when someone has taken ill, and they deal with both problems the same way: a loaf of bread on the doorstep, like a promise, and an expectation that the
