Coffin Road

Chapter four

It is raining when I waken. A driving rain, blown in on the leading edge of a strong south-westerly. I can see it slashing across the beach, almost horizontally. The cloud is low, nearly black at its most dense. As I stand at the French windows, looking out across the Sound towards Taransay, I can see the rain falling from it in dark streaks that shift between smudges of grey-blue light and occasional flashes of watery sunshine that burn in brief patches of polished silver on the surface of the sea.

I have slept the sleep of the dead, untroubled by dreams, good or bad. The greatest nightmare was waking to face the dawn of a new day with memories that stretch back no further than yesterday. I feel hollowed out, empty, devoid of optimism and consumed by depression. The only light in my darkness is Sally.

I remember how it had been making love to her the night before. All the mystery and excitement of sex with a stranger. How driven we had been, both of us, by some uncontrollable inner urge. And then my revelation of memory loss bringing distance between us, and a cooling of our warmth. I had felt her slipping away, the only thing of substance that I’d had to hold on to. And then her offer to walk the coffin road with me, like a lifeline. I was no longer alone.

While Bran polishes off the food in his bowl, I slip waterproof leggings over my jeans and push my feet into well-worn walking boots. My green waterproof jacket is fleece-lined and warm. I zip it up and select a hiking stick from the rack, before opening the door to face the rain.

Bran dashes out ahead of me, running for the beach until he sees that I have turned the other way, then comes scampering after me. In the window of the house that sits up on the other side of the road, I catch sight of the woman I met yesterday on the road. The one with the yappy little dog. She waves, and I wave back before turning east and tilting a little into the rain that drives in from the beach side, stinging my cheek.

The single-track winds between leaning fenceposts, past the cemetery and a collection of houses on the other side of the road, a barn with its sloping expanse of rust-red roof. Ahead, along the rise, a handful of solitary trees that might be Scotch pines stand in silhouette against the luminous grey of the sky. Trees whose branches have been stripped and sculpted by the wind into strange, horizontal skeletons that reach to the east, like old television aerials seeking a signal.

Beyond the cemetery, the road bends and dips down to where a cattle grid sits between two red-topped white gateposts. Beyond it, a metalled path descends to the cottage on the beach that I saw yesterday. I turn in there to stand and wait, my back to the rain, out of sight of Jon and Sally’s house, and Bran looks at me as if I am mad.

It is almost five minutes before Sally’s car appears. A Volvo estate. She pulls up beside me and, as I climb in, she jumps out and runs around to lift the tailgate. Bran leaps in, unbidden. Evidently we have done this before.

The car steams up quickly and she puts the blower on full as she accelerates up the hill, past gnarled, stunted shrubs clinging stubbornly to sandy soil. More skeleton trees punctuate the bleak September landscape, late-season heather bringing the only colour to otherwise stone-grey hills. I am aware of Sally glancing at me.

‘I guess you didn’t wake up suddenly remembering everything?’

My laugh is without humour. ‘I wish.’ And it occurs to me that I am being shaped now only by the memories I am making, and have made since yesterday. Who I am, or rather who I was, is lost. A new me is being forged out of the moment, and I wonder how different that new me is from the old one.

We drive in silence on a road that twists and turns and undulates around and over the contours of the land, glimpses of the beach opening up at almost every turn, vast and dominating. Even on this greyest of mornings the water is the most extraordinary blue, somehow generating its own light. Then, as we follow the line of the shore, the hills rise up around us, the summer green of the grass already fading towards winter brown.

It is a long way to the head of the bay, and I am glad not to have been walking it on my own in this rain. We encounter no other vehicles, and at the road end we hit the main A859, which turns north towards Tarbert and south to Leverburgh. On our left, a rain-streaked perspex bus-shelter harbours a single miserable soul waiting for a bus into town, a phone box next to it placed there, perhaps, so that passengers might call someone to pick them up when the bus drops them off. On the hill to the north, we see lines of lorries and road-rollers laying a ribbon of thick black tar on a new, wider stretch of road. We turn south, and the road here is still single-track, with passing places. Half a mile on, we pass, coming in the opposite direction, the bus that will lift the spirits of the solitary passenger waiting at the Luskentyre turn-off. Then the long, straight stretch of causeway that arrows through choppy sea until it curves to the right, and on our left a huge expanse of salt marsh stretches away to the north, a startling green, shot through with snaking ribbons of still water reflecting grey sky.

At the end of the causeway, at the Seilebost sign, we turn left on to a metalled track, past a tiny pitched roof over a circle of stones, an ersatz well with a crudely carved wooden plaque depicting a hiker and the legend Frith Rathad, the Harris Walkway. Opposite is a sign for a rural sewer project funded by the European Union, and I wonder how people would survive in a place like this without the European money that would never have come from Westminster.

The track curls up past a clutch of cottages, lifting gradually into the foothills, the salt marsh stretching away in the plain below, the sheer scale of Tràigh Losgaintir behind us becoming apparent as we rise above it. We abandon the car where the tarmac gives way to stone and grass and rivers of water running in the tracks left by farm vehicles. And we walk, then, up to a wooden gate where we have the choice to continue north, or turn east. We take the latter, following Bran, who makes the turn without thought. A familiar route. He bounds over a stile, and we follow him along the track, heading off into a sodden wilderness of grass and heather that cuts between barren, rocky hills pushing up all around.

There has been no let-up in the rain. We are more exposed here in the hills, wind rushing between the peaks, hurrying east, the same wind that must have blown rain into the faces of all those carriers of coffins across the centuries.

I notice for the first time that, although Sally’s parka is keeping her core dry, she is not wearing leggings and her jeans are already soaked through. A fair-weather hiker. I had dressed instinctively, donning those waterproofs I found in the boot room. Experienced in protecting myself from the elements. And Bran’s confidence in where we are going tells me we have been this way many times before.

It is disheartening to look ahead, because the track climbs endlessly into the distance, and so we both focus on our feet, avoiding potholes and boulders on which ankles might get turned. And when, from time to time, we look up, our hearts sink, for we appear to have travelled no distance at all. Until we look back, and are rewarded with the most spectacular view of the beach, far, far below, a luminous silver and turquoise.

‘Look!’ Sally’s voice makes me turn my head and I see where she is pointing, towards a small group of cairns gathered on the hillside. I see more of them ahead of us. Each one marking the place where someone has been laid to rest with the world at their feet. A view to die for.

Below us, on our right, a scrap of loch gathers in a hollow, reflecting the sky, its surface rippled by wind, and I check my map, folded into a clear plastic ziplock. Not too much further before my orange line comes to its end. We circumvent three large boulders strung across the track to prevent vehicles from trying to go any further, and the path starts to climb even more steeply.

The hills lift almost sheer now on either side, to peaks lost in cloud, the track winding away into obscurity, still rising to what might or might not be its summit. There have been many faux summits before now.

‘We must be nearly there,’ Sally says. She is breathless, her face pink from exertion and the sting of the rain. She glances away to our right. ‘Looks like they were quarrying here at some time.’ A cliff face is broken, seamed and jagged, with boulders lying in chaos below it, some of them as big as houses and canted at odd angles.

But I shake my head. ‘Explosions from a past ice age, Sally. Water freezing and expanding in the crevices until the rock shatters from the pressure.’ I find myself grinning. ‘Nature’s dynamite.’ And I wonder how I know this.

Sally grins back at me. ‘What, are you a geologist now?’

I shrug. ‘Who the hell knows? Maybe I am.’

I turn back to the track and stop. Two boulders, about the size of shoe boxes, but almost oval, sit balanced, one on top of the other. They are unusually shaped, and I can’t see how nature could possibly have arrived at this precarious arrangement.

‘What is it?’ Sally follows my gaze but sees nothing out of the ordinary.

‘Someone placed those stones like that.’

She frowns. ‘How do you know?’

I shake my head. It’s hard to explain. ‘It just doesn’t look natural. But I guess most folk would have walked right past without noticing.’

‘I wouldn’t have given them a second glance.’ Sally casts me a curious look. ‘So somebody put them there?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

A pause. ‘You?’

‘It’s possible.’ I pull out the map again, wiping away the rain from the plastic with icy fingers. ‘This would be about the right place.’

‘Where’s Bran?’ There is a hint of alarm in Sally’s voice. I look up and cannot see him anywhere.

‘Bran!’ I shout at the top of my voice. And I hear him barking before I see him. Then he appears on the slope off to our right, emerging from behind one of those huge boulders deposited on the hill, part of the spoil from that ice explosion thousands of years ago. A great slab of rock, split along one of its seams. ‘Here, boy!’ But he stands his ground, barking at me as if I am an idiot, and it occurs to me that he expects me to follow, as if that’s the path we always take. I turn to Sally. ‘Come on.’

I help her over ground that rises and falls beneath our feet, peat bog sucking at our shoes, soaking them in a brown slurry. I use my stick for balance, climbing slightly as we reach the first of the boulders, and watch as Bran turns and runs down into a hollow ringed by rock spoil, like giant headstones randomly arranged around a level area of beaten grass beneath the cliff, completely protected from the wind. And as we reach the top of the rise to look down into it, we are stopped in our tracks.

‘Jesus Christ,’ I hear Sally say, the words whipped from her mouth as she speaks them. Below us, completely hidden from view, and as protected from the elements as might ever be possible in this brutal environment, stands a large collection of bee hives. Square, boxlike hives, two and three levels high, some painted orange, others simply weathered, silver wood. They appear to have been positioned arbitrarily, raised off the ground on wooden pallets, roped down and weighted with small boulders on top. I do a quick count. There are eighteen, and I’m not sure that I have ever seen anything quite so unexpectedly incongruous in my life.

It takes us just a few minutes to scramble down into the hollow, and we wander among the hives like warriors walking among the dead of some battle fought long before our arrival.

‘I don’t understand,’ Sally says. ‘Who put them here? Was it you?’

I feel a strange calm descend on me, and I stop by one of the hives. ‘They call this a National,’ I say. ‘Well, a Modified National, because it was modified from the original Langstroth hive, combs set on hanging frames. Pretty much universal in Britain.’ And with an expertise that seems to come from race memory rather than conscious recollection, I lift the stones from its roof and untie the hive, taking away the roof itself to reveal what I know to be called the crown board. But it is no normal crown board. Clear plastic allows us to peer into the hive.

I am aware of Sally at my side as we look in on a burst-open pack of white sugar sitting on top of the eleven honeycomb frames that hang from rebates along either side. Bees are gathered together here on the right, between two or three of the frames, crawling over each other. Small, brownish, faintly striped. ‘What are they doing?’ she asks.

‘Clustering for warmth. Apis mellifera. Honey bees. This is their brood chamber. There will be anything up to sixty thousand bees in here.’ I have no idea where any of this is coming from. ‘To collect honey, you would have another chamber on top, a super, with a queen excluder, to prevent her from laying eggs in it. But it’s the end of the season. The honey will have been harvested.’

‘What’s the sugar for?’

‘To feed the bees across the winter, since we’ve stolen most of the honey they would normally feed on.’ I replace the roof, carefully tying it down, then adding the weight of the stones. ‘There’s still pollen around in the heather, but they’ll not venture out on a day like this. The only real forage up here is the heather itself. But in the spring the machair will be covered with wild flowers. Not too far for the bees to fly, and a veritable feast of pollen and nectar.’

I stand back to find her staring at me. Curiosity and confusion, and more than a hint of distrust in her eyes. ‘You remember all this stuff,’ she says. ‘And yet you don’t remember who you are. Or me.’

I shrug. I can’t explain it.

‘These are yours, aren’t they? These hives.’

‘I’m guessing they must be.’

‘But you never told me about them. In all the time we’ve spent together, all those intimate moments, and you never once thought to say that you kept bees. You didn’t want me to know, did you?’ There is more than a hint of accusation in this.

I allow my eyes to wander over the hives, and then lift them to the boulders that stand around this tiny clearing, like so many silent witnesses. ‘It seems to me I didn’t want anyone to know. They are completely hidden here. God knows how many walkers trek across the coffin road during the summer months, but not one of them would have had the least idea that there were hives beyond these rocks.’

‘But why?’ I see doubt in her eyes. Suspicion. Though there is nothing I can say to allay that.

I very nearly shout at her, ‘I don’t know!’ And she takes a half-step back. Bran barks, wondering why I have raised my voice.

The rain has stopped as we walk back down the hill, but the wind has stiffened and blows directly in our faces. I suppose I must have seen it many times, but the view from here is quite magnificent. It feels like we are up among the clouds, looking down on the world. The cloud formations coming in off the Atlantic are torn and shredded by the wind, sunlight breaking through them in beams of pure gold against black, criss-crossing the incoming wash and the silver of the sand like spotlights on a stage. Nature’s own theatrical production, dazzling and majestic.

Sally and I have not spoken for nearly fifteen minutes. Whatever is going through her mind, she is keeping her own counsel, while I am nursing an unreasonable guilt. In the end I cannot bear it any longer. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, without looking at her.

‘What for?’ Her voice is cold.

‘Everything. Shouting at you. Not telling you about the bees.’ And my frustration fizzes once more to the surface. ‘Jesus! Why the hell would I be so secretive about keeping bees?’

‘You tell me.’

‘I wish I could.’

It is easier going down than it was coming up, but the silence between us is still difficult.

I glance at her. ‘You said I went out to the Flannan Isles on a regular basis.’

She flicks me a look. ‘Yes.’

‘Did someone take me, or do I have a boat?’

‘You have a boat.’

‘Where?’

‘You berth it in the harbour at Rodel.’

‘And where’s that?’

She looks at me again to see if I am serious, then she very nearly laughs. But the laughter dies quickly, and the smile with it. ‘It’s right at the southern tip of Harris. Beyond Leverburgh. It looks out across the Sound to North Uist.’

‘Would you take me there?’

‘When?’

‘Now.’

It is a long time before she responds. ‘To be honest, Neal, I’m not sure why I should trust you any more. You’ve lied to me, concealed things from me.’

None of which I can deny. ‘But I must have had my reasons.’

‘Clearly.’

I suck in a deep breath. ‘In all those hours we spent together, you must have got some sense of the man I am. Trusted me, had feelings for me.’

‘Yes, I did. And still do.’ She stops, forcing me to stop too, and I turn to face her. ‘But I never really knew you, Neal. Like I told you last night. I just didn’t ask. And you weren’t telling.’

‘Then give me the benefit of the doubt, Sally. Please. I’m not sure I can deal with this on my own.’

She looks at me for a long time, before sighing in deep resignation. ‘Come here.’ And she opens her arms to wrap them around my waist and pull me to her. Holding me tightly, her head turned and pressed into my shoulder. I close my eyes and feel the wind whistling around us, yanking at our clothes and our hair. ‘Of course I’ll take you to Rodel.’

I’m not sure how long we have been standing like this, just holding each other, when I hear Bran barking somewhere on the track below us. We break apart and I see him a hundred or more yards away, barking at a man leaning against the gate at the foot of the hill. He has binoculars raised to his eyes, watching us. And, when he lowers them, I see, even from this distance, that it is the man who was watching me from the far shore yesterday. Buford, Jon had said his name was. A solitary traveller, with his caravan pegged down on the machair.

‘What the hell does he want?’ Sally says. ‘Do you think he was following us?’

‘I don’t know. Not up to the hives, anyway. Why don’t we ask him?’

But even as we look, he pushes his binoculars into the deep pockets of his waterproofs and turns to hurry away towards the road, long ropes of hair blowing out in the wind behind him.

‘Come on.’ I take Sally’s hand, and we increase the speed of our descent. But the surface is difficult, slippery with mud and awash with rainwater running off the hills, and by the time we get to the gate, Buford has reached the semicircle of tarmac, where his Land Rover is parked next to Sally’s Volvo. He backs up his vehicle and accelerates away down the track. When finally we get to the car, Buford has turned north on to the A859, and is picking up speed around the curve of the causeway.