Coffin Road

Chapter three

I am awakened for the second time by a noise I don’t hear, but which is somehow transmitted from my subconscious to send me spiralling up from the deepest of sleeps to break the surface of consciousness, blood pulsing in my head. I blink in the dark, pupils shrinking to bring focus to the light that falls in a skewed rectangle across the floor and far wall of the hall. And I see a shadow step through it.

‘Who’s there?’ I know it is my voice, but it seems disconnected. I feel I should be scared, and yet I am not. I hear Bran issue a strange throaty sound and turn to see him lift his head into the darkness, sniffing furiously. But he has not been moved to rouse himself from the bed.

A silhouette steps into the hall from the sitting room, and I know immediately that it is Sally.

‘Jesus!’ I am not sure why I am whispering. ‘You scared the hell out of me.’

‘Why? Did you think I wouldn’t come?’

‘I didn’t know I was expecting you.’

‘Idiot!’ I can hear the smile in her voice, and roll on to my side as she starts to undress, clothes falling to the floor, until I can see the smooth curve of her hips and the darker circles of her areolae around hard nipples.

‘What about Jon?’

‘What about him? You weren’t expecting him to join us, were you?’ And she slips, grinning, into the bed beside me.

‘Won’t he wonder where you are?’

‘He’s still on that medication. Knocks him out. He won’t surface for another eight hours.’ I realise I am supposed to know what the medication is for, so I don’t ask.

I don’t know whether to be alarmed or excited. The proximity of her naked body to my own is immediately arousing. The scent of her perfume, the warmth that emanates from smooth skin that suddenly slides over mine. Thigh on thigh as she moves between my legs, insinuating her body on top of mine. Hard breasts pressing into my chest, her breath in my face. I feel cool palms on each cheek as she holds my head and brings her lips to mine. I can only imagine we have done this many times before, but for me it is like the first time, and it feels as if she has lit a fire inside me. It rages and burns and fuels an unquenchable desire simply to consume her.

I grab her arms and flip her suddenly over on to her back and hear her tiny gasp of surprise. Almost subconsciously, I am aware of Bran jumping down from the bed and sloping huffily away along the hall. My mouth finds hers again and our hunger for each other is limitless. She writhes below me as I move my mouth across every part of her. Breasts, nipples, belly and the soft fuzz of her pubis. To breathe her in is intoxicating. I feel myself losing control, driven, possessed and wanting to possess her.

But she fights back, an equal battle for possession, and we go to war with our mouths and our hands, all intelligent thought sacrificed on the altar of physical desire, bringing us ultimately to a frantic, breathless conclusion that leaves us gasping and shiny with sweat, staring up at the shadows on the ceiling with wide eyes, awaiting the return of some semblance of sanity.

Finally she says, as if only now catching her breath, ‘That was amazing.’

I nod, at a loss really for words. Then I realise she can’t see me and say, ‘It was.’

She hoists herself up to lean on one elbow and stare into my face in the semi-darkness, lightly tracing fingers across my chest. ‘Better than the first time. Better than the last. What’s got into you, Neal? You seem... I don’t know, different.’

A dozen responses flit through my head, each one flippant or evasive, and all failing to address the truth. I feel nerves like butterflies fluttering in my belly. It is the moment to share, because I am certain I cannot keep this in much longer. And yet still I am afraid to address what it is I can’t even remember. In the end, all I say is, ‘I am.’

I turn my head to see her half-frowning, half-smiling. ‘Are you? In what way?’

I draw a deep, tremulous breath. ‘They say that all any of us are is the sum total of our memories. They are what make us who we are. Take them away and all you are left with is a blank. Like a computer without software.’

She seems to think about that for a moment. ‘I’m trying to imagine what that might be like,’ she says. ‘Weird. I suppose memories are just experience. We learn from our experiences. So without them...’ She laughs. ‘We’d be just like children again.’

‘Not if all you took away were the memories of yourself. Who you are, what you are. Everything you have learned in life remains. It’s only you who’s been taken out of the equation.’ I suppose I am trying to find a way of explaining it to myself. But it’s not easy, and I am not sure I am anywhere close, but now her half-smile has gone and only the frown remains.

‘What are you saying, Neal?’

I sigh. There is no turning back. ‘Sally, the only reason I know that I am Neal Maclean is because I saw the name on a utility bill. The only reason I know your name is Sally is because that’s what Jon called you.’

She laughs. ‘Is that supposed to be funny?’ Then, ‘I don’t know why I’m laughing, because it’s not.’ And that thought banishes her laughter, and the smile. ‘Neal, you’re scaring me.’

‘I’m only telling you how it is, Sally. Eight hours ago, ten, maybe, I don’t know how long it was, I found myself washed up on the beach out there. I was soaked through, freezing cold, and only still alive because I was wearing a life jacket. I don’t know where I’d been, or how I got there.’ I sit up, knees drawn to my chest, cupping my face in my hands and breathing into them. Then I turn to look at her with an intensity that I see reflected in her alarm. ‘I had no memory of who I was, or what happened. And I still don’t.’

Her frown of consternation cuts deep shadows in her face. ‘How’s that possible?’

‘I don’t know, but it is. I’m the blank that’s left when you take away the memories. It’s not just my life that I can’t remember, my whole history, it’s who I am. What I’m like. What I’m capable of.’ I hesitate, almost too frightened to shape the thought with words. ‘I feel as if I have done something...’ I search for the right word. ‘Awful. I don’t know. Shocking. Every time I try to force memories from my subconscious, I find myself lost in some black fog of dread. Beyond it, I know, there’s clarity. But I just can’t reach it. And I’m not sure now that I want to.’

There is a long silence. ‘You were acting really strange this afternoon.’

I nod.

‘You didn’t prang your car, did you?’

‘No.’

‘So where is it?’

‘I don’t know.’

She takes some moments to digest this. ‘You must have gone out to the Flannans after all.’

I shrug. ‘I don’t know why I would.’

‘You go out there all the time, Neal. Research for your book.’

‘I’m not writing a bloody book!’ My raised voice startles her. ‘What do you mean?’

‘It was you and Jon who told me that. That I was writing a book. About the Flannan Isles mystery.’

‘Only because that’s what you told us.’

I shake my head. ‘After you’d gone I checked my computer. I found twenty chapter templates and not a single word in any of them. If that’s really what I told you, Sally, then I was lying. I’m not writing any book.’

‘Then what have you been doing here all this time?’

‘You tell me, because I haven’t the first idea.’ My frustration is bubbling out of me, and I hear my voice rising in pitch and volume. I force myself to calm down. ‘I’m sorry. It’s not your fault. It’s just... well, you must know so much more about me than I do.’

Her voice is quiet, and I can sense that she has retreated into herself. ‘What do you want to know?’ There is a lack of warmth now in her tone. ‘After all, I can only tell you what you told us.’

‘Well, let’s start with that.’

She rolls away to slip out of bed and start dressing. The intimacy between us is long gone. When she finishes, she sits on the edge of the bed, her back towards me, and I cannot see her face as she speaks. ‘You’ve been on the island for about eighteen months. Taken this place on an open-ended long-term let. A sort of sabbatical, you said, from an academic career in Edinburgh. Time you were using to write your book on the disappearance of the lighthouse men.’ She half-turns her head towards me. ‘At least, that’s what you said.’ Then, ‘You were always a little bit mysterious about yourself. What exactly it was you did for a living. Whether or not you were married. You don’t wear a ring, but I could see from the paler band of skin on your ring finger that you had until recently.’

‘You didn’t think it was strange that I never told you more about myself?’

I see her shrug her shoulders. ‘In the circumstances, I suppose I didn’t really want to know. I sensed your reluctance and I never pushed you. Sometimes people can know too much about each other. Remove the mystery and you take away the excitement.’

‘What about you and Jon?’

‘Jon and I have been married eight years. We came to Harris a little less than a year ago, from Manchester. A sabbatical of sorts, too. Only ours was to try and patch up a failing marriage.’ There is no amusement in the tiny laugh that breaks from her lips.

I break the silence that follows. ‘Should I feel guilty, then?’

‘About what?’

‘Us.’

‘No.’ Her voice is flat, without emotion. ‘It became apparent to Jon and I, very quickly, that the marriage was beyond repair. In the beginning it had all been so intense. But they say the light that burns twice as bright burns half as long.’ She pauses. ‘And we were all burned out.’ Then a sigh. ‘But we’d taken on the let for a year, so decided to stick it out.’ She half-turns again. ‘Then I met you.’ She swivels fully around so that she can meet my eye. ‘And that’s what saved my sanity.’

I search her face and find intensity there. In the line of her mouth, the darkness of her eyes. ‘And Jon has no idea?’

Her shrug this time is philosophical. ‘I don’t think so. But, who knows? If he does, he’s not letting on. And, anyway, he goes back to Manchester a lot, to take care of business, he says. Maybe he’s seeing someone there.’ Her smile is wan. ‘At least it makes it easier for us.’ Pause. ‘Or did.’

The look she gives me is so piercing and invasive that I almost cannot hold her gaze.

She says, ‘I can’t even imagine what it must be like not to know who you are. You must have something in the house. Personal stuff. Things that would at least let you start filling in the gaps.’

I shake my head. ‘That’s what’s so bizarre. There’s nothing. No photographs, no passport, no chequebooks. Not even any credit cards.’

‘Well, then, how do you live?’

My gasp is born of utter exasperation. ‘I don’t know. I have money in my wallet. But beyond that...’

Her frown deepens. ‘This is surreal, Neal, you know that? You couldn’t make this up.’

‘I know. I know.’ Then I remember the map. ‘The only thing I’ve found...’ And I slide past her and off the bed to go through to the sitting room. I hear her right behind me, and I lift the Ordnance Survey Explorer Map from the coffee table. ‘Is this.’ She peers at it over my shoulder. ‘It’s just a map.’

I trace the line of the orange marker pen with my finger. ‘But I’ve drawn this on it. Following some kind of track that goes up into the hills.’

She looks more closely. ‘Oh, yeah. Bealach Eòrabhat.’ And somehow I know she gets the pronunciation of the Gaelic all wrong. ‘The coffin road. Jon and I walked the whole circuit last spring.’

I look at her, filled with incomprehension. ‘Coffin road?’

‘Apparently, right up till not that long ago, people on the east coast of Harris used to carry their dead across the hills to bury them here on the west side.’

‘Why?’

‘The soil on the east side is so thin you can’t dig down deep enough to make a grave. So they used to carry the coffins across what they called the Bealach Eòrabhat to bury the bodies in the west-coast machair.’ She smiles. ‘Though I’m not sure they actually used coffins. You could count the trees on this island on one hand, so there wouldn’t have been much wood around. Maybe they only had one that they used again and again for carrying the bodies, and just buried them in a shroud or something.’

‘Why would I have marked out the coffin road in orange?’

Her smile is pale, and not exactly sympathetic. ‘You tell me, Neal.’ She turns back to the map. ‘But it stops about a third of the way up, so maybe there’s something there.’

‘Like what?’

‘How would I know? Jon and I didn’t see anything in the spring. Well, I mean, apart from boulders and lochs and a bunch of cairns. I read somewhere that sometimes, when the weather was really bad, the coffin bearers would stop on the road and dump the bodies in a loch, or bury them anywhere they could find, and just mark the spot with a cairn.’

I drop the map back on the table and sit heavily on the settee. ‘Only one way to find out. I’ll walk the coffin road tomorrow.’

She looks down at me, and for the first time since I have confessed my memory loss, I see her expression soften. ‘It’s quite a trek just to get to the point where the coffin road begins, Neal. Right around the head of the bay and across the Seilebost causeway. How will you get there without a car?’

‘I’ll walk.’

She purses her lips. ‘I could give you a lift. And walk with you over the coffin road.’

‘What would Jon say?’

‘I’ll tell him I’m going into Tarbert, and I’ll pick you up at the far side of the cemetery. You can’t see that far along from our house.’

And I am suffused with a sense of gratitude.