Entry Island

CHAPTER NINE

I hear voices. Strange accents. I am lost among a sea of faces that I can’t quite see. As if I am looking at the world through a veil of gauze. I see myself now. Younger. Seventeen perhaps, or eighteen. I can feel my confusion, and at the same time watch myself with a peculiar objectivity. Both spectator and player. I wear the oddest clothes. Breeches held up with braces, a stained white shirt without a collar, a three-quarter-length jacket, heavy leather boots that seem too big for my feet.

I feel cobbles underfoot, and blackened sandstone tenements rise around me. There is a river, and I see a paddle-steamer ploughing its way past the quay towards a low, arched stone bridge that spans the leaden flow. Somewhere beyond the tenements on the far bank I see a church steeple prick the sky, and clouds of smoke and steam rise into the blue from a railway station almost immediately opposite. I can hear the trains spitting and coughing as they idle against their buffers.

It feels like summer. The air is warm, and I am aware of the heat of the sun on my skin. The gauze dissolves now, bringing sharper focus, and my objectivity slips away. I become conscious of tall-masted sailing ships moored along the quayside. The sea of faces around me shifting and undulating as this current of humanity ebbs and flows, carrying me along like a piece of flotsam.

But I am not alone. I feel a hand in mine, small and soft and warm, and I look back to see Kirsty Cowell, apprehensive, unsettled by the lack of control we seem to have of our destiny in this crowd. She is younger, too. A teenager. I call to her above the voices that fill the air. ‘Don’t let go, Ciorstaidh, stay close to me.’ And from somewhere, far away, in my unconscious world, I realise I am calling her by her Gaelic name.

A space opens up around us, and I see a boy with a cloth cap and ragged shorts. A pile of newspapers is draped over one arm, a folded copy raised in his other hand. He is chanting some incomprehensible refrain. Over and over. Someone snatches a paper and slips coins into his hand. Kirsty takes one too, letting go of my hand to unfold it. I see its banner. The Glasgow Herald. And before she opens it up, the date: July 16th, 1847.

‘It’s Fair Friday,’ she says. ‘No wonder it’s so busy.’ But for some reason this means nothing to me. I am gripped, I realise, by a sense of urgency. Of time running out. Somewhere I can hear a clock chiming the hour.

‘We’re late. We can’t afford to miss the boat.’

She slips the newspaper under her arm and takes my hand again, our free hands occupied by the carrying of small cardboard suitcases containing God knows what. Her face is shining, excited. She wears a tunic buttoned up over a long dress that flares and falls to the cobbles, but her black hair tumbles free across her shoulders, swept back from her face by a soft breeze.

‘We’re looking for the Eliza, Simon. A three-master. We’ve time enough. They said she wouldn’t be leaving the Broom-ielaw till a quarter past the hour.’

I push up on to my tiptoes to see across the heads on the quayside. There are three boats tied up to giant iron capstans. And I see the name I am looking for painted in black and gold across the stern of the furthest. ELIZA. She seems huge to me, a confusion of masts and rigging and furled canvas sails.

‘I see her. Come on.’

And, pulling Kirsty behind me, I push off through the bodies of men, women and children scrambling anxiously to secure their places on these wind-driven time capsules, to be carried off to new lives in other places.

But then I hear voices raised in anger, lifting above the others. Cursing and blaspheming and brimming with violence. A large group is gathered around a stand of trolleys laden with bags. An argument has led to a fight, and I can see fists flying. Top hats skiting away across the cobbles. The crowd ahead of us surges back, like displaced water, and my grasp of Kirsty’s hand is broken.

‘Simon!’ I hear her scream, panic in her voice. I heave against the bodies that have separated us, only to see her carried away by a current stronger than both of us, fear in her eyes, a hand hopelessly grasping at the air above her head before she is lost from sight. ‘Get to the boat.’ Her call is barely discernible above the roar. ‘I’ll meet you there.’

The shrill sounds of whistles pierce the air, and I see uniformed constables ploughing through bodies, batons swinging. Another surge sweeps me away, and I realise that my only hope of finding her again is at the Eliza.

I am determined now, driven by anger and fear. I am young and strong and fight my way through the panicked hordes, head down, using my shoulders to clear the way ahead. And when next I look up the Eliza is towering over me, and I realise it must be high tide. The crowd is funnelling like water on to the narrow gangplank that leads up to the deck, marshalled by sheriff’s officers.

Hands grasp my arms and my shoulders, propelling me forward, and I go helplessly with the flow, craning my neck and turning to look left and right above their heads to catch a glimpse of Kirsty.

We spill out on to the deck, hundreds of us it seems, and I elbow my way to the side of the boat from where I have a view of the gangplank and the crowded quay. I have seen sheep herded this way before, but never people. And never so many in one place and at one time.

I scan the faces that fill my field of vision, apprehension rising like bile as I fail to find her. I have been pushed further and further along the deck, and away from the rail. Voices rise above the melee, and I am aware of the gangplank being pulled aboard.

Total panic fuels my fight through protesting voices back to the embarkation point, and I see dockers loosing ropes as thick as a man’s arm from the loops that secure them to their capstans. More voices raised from above turn my head upwards in time to see vast sheets of canvas unfurling to catch the breeze, and I feel the ship lurch for the first time beneath my feet.

‘Ciorstaidh!’ My voice tears itself from my lungs and I hear her call my name in reply, so far away I fear I am just imagining it. I reach the rail in time to see that the Eliza has slipped her berth and is pulling out now into the main channel of the river where the water is deeper and the current runs fast.

And there, among the faces of the crowd on the quay, the pale upturned face of the girl I love. My sense of disbelief and dismay is almost overwhelming.

‘Ciorstaidh!’ I scream again. And for a fleeting moment I consider jumping overboard. But like most islanders, fear of water has always robbed me of the ability to swim, and I know I would be leaping to certain death. ‘Wait for me!’

I can see the fear and consternation in her face as she pushes through the crowds, trying to keep up with the Eliza as she drifts away. ‘Where?’

I have no idea. I search desperately in my confusion to find a single rational thought to hang on to. And fail. ‘Wherever you are,’ I shout through my hopelessness, ‘I’ll find you. I promise!’

And I watch helplessly as her face recedes from view, blurred and lost among my tears, as I realise it is a promise I can never keep.