The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 104

I drive as one in a dream.

I can’t decide: is this land beautiful, or is it bleak? Is bleak beautiful?

Grey stone juts from the thin green grass, poking into a grey sky.

A withered tree, bent sideways by the wind, sweeps clawed fingertips of black twig out towards a tuft of brown, scratching grass that grows on nothingness.

Pylons runs along the brow of a shallow hill.

The water from a pond, or pool, or from a nameless protuberance of water that changes so often with the seasons that no one has bothered to name it, spills onto the road, flooding it to half the depth of my tyres. I drive through slowly, listening to the sloshing around my wheels, and pick up speed again on the other side, heading towards the beacon of an abandoned croft.

Flatness, greyness, emptiness. Sometimes the land rises sharply, then sinks almost as fast. Most of the time it is washed smooth by water, flecked with salt that has thrown itself inland like Poseidon’s buckets.

Stones fallen from the hills, how did they get there? Sharp teeth of white, like a cathedral cracked by thunder, sitting growing yellow moss, from nowhere, of nowhere.

A cottage in the shape of a beehive, no road to its door, no power to it either, looking down towards a loch, the mouth of the bay where it hits the sea, brown with mud and sand.

Is this place beautiful?

Is it the end of the world?

As night falls, I take refuge in a farmhouse, the number given me by the woman who sold me a meat pie (what kind of meat? — no, forget I asked) from a van parked on the side of the road.

Do you get much custom? I asked.

People come to find me, she replied, as the radio blared behind her.

Do you know where I can stay tonight?

Try the MacKenzies, she replied. They’ve got a spare room.

The room was £10 for the night, and the lady of the farm gave me an extra blanket, “as you’re probably not used to the cold”.

A spider wove patiently in the corner of my room, so used to solitude that it couldn’t process the presence of a human in its den. I ducked under the door of the bathroom, sat on the toilet and stared at a sampler on the wall which declared:

AND THESE SHALL GO AWAY INTO EVERLASTING PUNISHMENT: BUT THE RIGHTEOUS INTO LIFE ETERNAL.

I had no mobile phone signal, but they let me use their landline.

I made one phone call, brief and to the point, thanked them for their hospitality, and went to bed.

I woke with the sun, because my hostess did, marching up and down beneath my window quacking furiously at her ducks.

The ducks quacked, and she quacked back, and they swarmed around her as she threw down feed, declaring quackquack! Quackquackquack, singing along with their clamour. I went up to her and said, “Hello, I’m new here. Can I buy some breakfast?”

A lazy cat sat next to the stove in the kitchen, folded in the solitary rocking chair, one eye open, daring anyone to even attempt to depose it from this, the warmest part of its domain. I steered clear, but the woman scowled and it leapt away, sensing a battle lost before it was begun.

“Eat, damn you, eat!” she exclaimed, seeing me hesitate, and I ate homemade bread with homemade honey, collected from the hives before the bees died back for winter, and she put on the radio loud and did the washing-up and we did not talk, and I didn’t see her husband.

At the end of this meal, as I headed towards the car, she asked, “Where are you heading?”

“To the bottom of the island.”

“Holiday, is it?”

“No. Seeing a friend.”

“Friend, is it?” she tutted. “Well, they do say.”

What they said, and whether it was good, I didn’t ask, but thanked her for the breakfast and turned the heater on inside my car, before getting in and driving away.

Grey sky becomes one.

Grass becomes one.

Abstract painting, colours melt together.

Motion with the paintbrush, they blur, right to left with travel, left to right with the wind off the sea.

Feet on pedals, hand on steering wheel, I never passed the test but I can drive, a survival skill, a discipline, my dad would be furious, breaking the law, a child of mine, but my mum would understand.

You do what you must, when you cross the desert, she says. The rituals you make, the devotions you perform, they are what binds you to yourself. If you do not have them, if you have not found them within you, you are nothing, and the desert is all.

I’m proud of you, says Mum from the passenger seat, smiling at the blurring sky. I’m proud of you, Hope Arden.

Thanks, Mum. Hey — Mum?

Yes, dear?

When you saw the edge of the desert, what did you feel?

Honestly? I felt sad to be leaving the desert behind. But I kept on walking anyway.

A cottage on the edge of the sea.

I parked at the top of a track, too thin to get a vehicle down. How did you get furniture into this house? I wondered, as I picked my way towards the sounds of the water breaking on a stony beach.

You carried it, I replied. You asked your friends down to help, and together you got it done.

Two storeys to a stone house, slate tiles on the roof, yellow-lichen rounded stones in the wall, tiny square window frames, eaten by salt, the glass within coming loose. A white front door. A ceramic cat was stuck to the wall above the knocker, ancient and malign. A few weeds grew between the bricks. Lace curtains hung in the windows. A light was on in a room upstairs. A manhole fifty yards away suggested that at some point recently, pipes and electricity had been run underground, away from the raging winter wind.

I knocked with an iron knocker that grinned beneath my fingers.

Knock knock.

Waited.

A light turned on in the hall, though it was daytime, morning, but the skies were thick enough to cast shadows that grew thicker indoors.

A shadow passed across the spilling glow around the wooden frame. A bolt was lifted, a chain slid back.

The door opened.

Byron peered at me from within a warm, wood-smoke glow and said, “Yes?” Her accent, Scottish, thickened by her time on the isle; her face, curious, open, unrecognising.

“Hello,” I said. “My name is Hope.”

A moment.

Memory.

She does not remember me, but she remembers perhaps

a mantra repeated: her name is Hope her name is Hope her name is Hope her name

remembering the act of trying to remember.

She looks at me, at my face, my bag, my travel-worn clothes, my overgrown hair that I haven’t had time to weave into something self-contained, my stolen car parked up the way, and though she can’t remember, she knows.

“Oh,” she said. Then, “You’d better come in.”

I stepped inside, and she closed the door behind me.