Coffin Road

Chapter twenty-eight

There is sunlight streaming into the bedroom through the side window I left on the latch. I feel the heat of it on my legs as it falls across the bed, and I am sure that is what has wakened me.

I glance at the bedside clock and realise with a sense of shock that it is almost midday. I must have slept for well over twelve hours. No doubt I needed it, but if anything I feel worse. My head is thick, my nasal tubes stuffed up so that I have to breathe through my mouth. My eyes are gritty and clogged with sleep. My body is stiff and aching, and feels as if I have left it behind in the land of Nod, even though my brain has woken to the new day.

I swing my legs out of bed and stagger into the bathroom to lean against the wall and listen, eyes closed, to the stream of my urine as it splashes into the pan. Then plunge my face into the sink to splash it repeatedly with cold water, before rubbing it briskly dry with a fresh, soft towel.

I pull on jeans and a T-shirt and pad through to the kitchen to make coffee. Both kitchen and sitting room are flooded with the softest September light, and I look from the window at the incoming tide in all its shades of blue, reflecting sunshine in pools and eddies all across the bay. Bran is stretched out at the kitchen door and scrambles hopefully to his feet as I come through. I go into the boot room and open the front door to let him out. He goes haring away across the dunes and I return to the kitchen to sit at the table, sipping strong black coffee. I try to remember the idea that excited me sometime in those brain-fogged moments before sleep took me last night. It had seemed inspirational then. But now, as it comes back to me, it appears to have little merit. It had occurred to me that I hadn’t checked the laptop in the shed.

I look at the other laptop sitting on the table in front of me, and wonder why I thought the computer in the shed might cast any more light on my situation than this one has done.

Still, I am a man who pays attention to detail. I know that now, and so I am aware that I must check the laptop out there, even if the rational part of my brain tells me I will be wasting my time.

In the boot room I slip bare feet into my wellington boots, and take my mug of coffee with me as I go out to the shed. The breeze is fresh and strong in my face as I step outside. I can smell the sea and the heather, and, somewhere on the edge of the wind, the faintest whiff of peat smoke. And I wonder who has lit a fire on a day like this.

The laptop takes some minutes to boot up, so I stand gazing around the shed as I wait for it. When my eyes alight, finally, on the beekeeper’s mask, the gloves that I know make my hands too clumsy to wear, the tools, the smoker, I have a moment when I am so close to remembering everything, I feel that if only I reached out I could almost touch my forgotten past. I lift the beekeeper’s hat and face-net down from its peg, feeling it soft in my hand, like memory itself. But frustratingly, it is all still just beyond recollection.

I realise that the laptop has finished loading its operating system and I turn to examine it, laying my mug to one side. Apart from the software that came by default with the OS, there is nothing on it at all. No applications, no files. Nothing. How is it possible, I wonder, to work with a computer for a year and a half and leave no traces? Which is when I spot the black firewire cable trailing away from the input sockets on the left side of the computer. It is about six inches long, a naked, shiny plug on the other end of it. And it dawns on me that I must have been using an external drive. Something loaded with software, where I stored all my files, leaving no trace of my activities on the computer itself.

But where is it?

I search the shed from top to bottom. Methodically, meticulously. It is not here. And I know it is not in the house. In a drawer, I find a cardboard box containing nearly a dozen USB thumb drives. One by one, I plug them into the laptop, but they contain no data, and never have, as far as I can see. Unused, virgin thumb drives, each with a capacity of 32 gigabytes.

In my frustration, I strike out and punch the wall, only to graze and bruise my knuckles and wave my hand in the air, cursing at the pain and my stupidity.

I grab my coffee and storm back to the cottage, aware, as I stride across the few yards between hut and house, of Mrs Macdonald watching me from her window across the road. Bran has been waiting outside and runs into the house ahead of me. I slam the door shut, kick off my wellies and slump into my chair at the table again. I get absolutely no satisfaction from ticking off another thought from my list.

I hear my own voice reverberate around the kitchen before realising that I have shouted at the facing wall, an unadulterated expression of pent-up anguish. My mug goes flying, and coffee spills across the keyboard of the laptop on the table. I swear, and leap up to grab a cloth from the sink and mop it up before it does any damage. Bran is barking his consternation at the ceiling, wondering what I am shouting at and why I haven’t fed him.

The act of wiping the cloth across the keyboard wakens the laptop from its slumber, and its desktop throws grey light back in my face. I shout at Bran to shut up and am about to slam the lid shut when I notice for the first time, amongst all the software icons on the dock, a familiar white F on a blue background. I know immediately it is a Facebook application, and I wonder two things. Why did I not notice it before, and why would I have a Facebook app?

I find myself staring at it, a seed of excitement burgeoning somewhere deep inside me. Is it possible that I have a Facebook account? No matter how unlikely it seems, I feel a fresh flush of hope. I sit down to face the screen and, with trembling fingers, activate the application. Username and password are automatically entered from the computer’s keychain memory, and the home page fills the screen. It is blank, apart from an open Update Status window, in which there is the silhouette of a white head against a pale grey background. The status is empty, too. On the blue menu bar along the top of the screen, there is a miniature postage stamp of the white head beside the name Michael.

I pause before clicking on it. Michael? Is that me? I steel myself for whatever might come next and click on the name. It brings up the personal page of Michael Fleming. Both profile and cover pic windows are blank. There is not a single entry on the page, no personal details, no education or work history. And only one friend.

Karen Fleming.

I am aware now that my mouth is quite dry, with my tongue in danger of sticking to the roof of it. I reach for my coffee mug but it is empty, and I am not about to get up and make another.

There is a profile pic of Karen. She looks mid-teens, with strangely short hair, shaved at the sides and dyed green on top. There are steel studs in her eyebrows and rings in her lower lip, a tiny sparkling diamond in her nose. She has ice-blue eyes like mine and is staring straight into the camera with a kind of challenging insolence. Nothing about her is familiar to me, except perhaps for the eyes, but maybe then only because they are the same colour as mine. The cover photo on her personal page is of some heavy metal rock band with impossibly long hair and sneering faces. She has twenty-seven friends. Not many for a girl of her age. And her posts and shares are sparse and cryptic. Teenagers, I know, have a language that is all their own.

I click to drop down a menu and check my preferences. I have set everything to private, although since I have entered no personal information and made no posts, that hardly seems necessary.

Three icons along from the settings menu, there is a red dot next to a couple of square, overlapping speech bubbles. Someone has messaged Michael. I click on the icon to open a window that has a single message for Michael Fleming from Karen Fleming. It is dated just three days ago and reads, Uncle Michael, I think dad might still be alive. Please get in touch.

I sit back, stunned. So is that who I am? Michael Fleming? Karen’s uncle? If that is the case, why am I not suddenly remembering everything? Why is recollection and all that detail of my life not flooding back into memory? My sense of disappointment is almost crippling.

After several long minutes just staring at the screen, I force myself to click on Karen’s photos. There are a few dozen of them. I open up the first and then start scrolling through the others. Most of them are pictures of Karen with friends. Selfies. Stupid faces pulled for the camera. There are photographs of freshly acquired tattoos, and I am shocked by the extent to which this girl has vandalised her skin.

Then suddenly I am frozen in time and space, like an insect trapped in amber. A photograph posted of a much younger Karen. She is sitting on a wall beside a man, both of them smiling at the camera, his arm around her shoulder. Her post reads, Happier days. Me and my dad when I was twelve.

And the man is me.

It never seemed to occur to the police that I might have two keys for my car. I keep the spare in the glove compartment, and since the car is not locked I have no trouble retrieving it.

I take all the beekeeping equipment from the shed and throw it into the boot. Which is when I notice the large rucksack in the back. And I wonder now, as I pack everything into it — hat, gloves, smoker, kindling, hive tool — if this is how I carried all my stuff up the coffin road during my visits to the hives.

Bran jumps into the back seat, fed and happy, and stretches out as I start the car, reversing into the turning area, then accelerating hard over the cattle grid.

It takes me little more than ten minutes to get from the cottage to the parking area beyond the Seilebost causeway, turning off to where the tarmac ends and the mud track that is the old coffin road begins. The wind and the sun have mostly dried the mud, and the track is rutted and tricky underfoot, rainwater lying only in occasional pools, in holes and hollows.

Bran races ahead of me, pleased to be out and running free, stopping frequently to shove his nose at familiar smells, then galloping off in search of the next. It is hot in the afternoon sun, and only the wind cooling my sweat keeps me from overheating as I stride determinedly up the hill. I am not sure why, but I feel somehow as if the bees are the key. Not just to my memory, but to everything.

My name is Fleming. My daughter is Karen. Though nothing else has come back to me yet, memory seems only a breath away. Somewhere just beyond the most flimsy of membranes. I can almost see it, colours and shapes, blurred and refusing to come into focus. But somewhere in those hives, hidden among the rock spoil of ice-age explosions, I am convinced now that my memory is waiting for me.

It is what drives me on, refusing to stop for a breath, the rucksack weighing heavy on my back, legs aching from the relentless climb. Only once do I stop, to look back, and see dark storm clouds gathering along the distant horizon, incongruous in the sunshine that spills down here from the bluest of skies. But I know how fast the weather can change, and that it won’t be long before equinoctial winds, whipping up their anger in the south-west, will blow in the storm.

The breeze is already freshening and gaining in strength, and I turn to push on towards the summit. The wind ridges the surface of the loch as we pass it, and I force myself up through the final 200 yards of gruelling ascent, past ancient cairns, to the spot where I recognise the two stones that sit, unnaturally, one on top of the other.

The giant rocks away to our right, standing guard over my concealed hives, cut deep shadows into the incline. And the cracks and crevices in the face of the cliff above them are thrown into sharp relief by the sunlight.

Bran has already covered half of the distance between the rocks and the road as I set off across the peat bog in pursuit of him, black glaur sucking at my feet with every step. My legs are shaking from the effort by the time I reach the lip of the hollow and gaze down at what I know to be my hives gathered among the rocks below me.

I scramble down, swinging the rucksack from my back, and start lifting off lids and crown boards, stopping only to pull on my hat with its protective net and light my kindling, smothering it in the smoker with damp newsprint to produce clouds of white smoke that I puff into the hives to calm the bees.

Even though I have no recollection of it, I know I have done this many times. It comes to me as second nature.

There is a considerable traffic of bees, seduced to leave their hives by the good weather with its promise of pollen and nectar among the late-season heather.

All of the hives have sugar bags below the crown boards and I know, without even thinking, that the season is over and I have prepared them for winter. I know, too, that in the spring my bees will have flown down on to the machair, where they will have feasted upon the abundance of wild flowers there, and that it is during the summer lull, when the flowers have passed and before the heather is in bloom, that I will have fed them their first sugar syrup.

I can almost taste the sweetly perfumed heather honey that my bees produce, but then that moment of elation is followed by the shadow of depression descending suddenly upon me, like sunshine slipping behind a cloud. Something is wrong. The bees are dying. Not just here. Everywhere. I realise with shock, like a sudden slap on the face, how disastrous this is. Not just for me.

Bran’s barking brings me back to the present, and I turn, startled, to see him dancing around the legs of a man standing at the top of the hollow. He is silhouetted against the sky and it is not until he climbs down among the hives that I realise it is the man with the binoculars from the caravan across the bay.

His hair, like lengths of frayed rope, blows out behind him in the wind. His face is deeply tanned and unshaven, and he examines me carefully with dark-ringed eyes. When he speaks, his voice seems familiar. ‘Local gossip has it that you’ve lost your memory, Tom.’ I return his gaze with an odd sense of apprehension. ‘Maybe it’s about time that someone told you who you are.’

But a moment of revelation causes me to shake my head, and I stare at him with new eyes. ‘No,’ I say. ‘No. There’s no need, Alex.’