I'll Keep You Safe

Chapter Twenty-Six

Niamh had arrived in Stornoway far too early for the ferry, and spent her time wandering aimlessly around the town, remembering places she had been with Ruairidh, things they had done together. A drunken meal at Digby Chick that had left neither of them in a fit state to drive home. The night subsequently spent at the Royal, making love noisily and keeping the people in the next room awake until they banged on the wall. The day that Ruairidh dropped his iPhone into the inner harbour, trying to photograph curious seals which had swum right up to the pontoons. A first night spent in a room at the luxuriously refurbished Lews Castle that sat up on the hill overlooking the town and harbour below. A new perspective on a familiar place.

The times they had attended HebCelt, drifting from tent to tent in the castle grounds, listening to some of the best Celtic music to be heard anywhere. Or Rock Night in the theatre at the An Lanntair arts centre, a tribute by local musicians to a long line of rock classics.

Moments spent together. Lost now for ever. For while they remained still strong in her recollection, what were memories if not to be shared?

Finally, it was at An Lanntair that she ended up, nursing a coffee at a table with a view over the outer harbour where she could see the ferry as it rounded the point and ploughed its passage across the bay to the pier. The angled silver roof of the terminal building caught moments of fleeting sunshine and more resembled a flying saucer than a ferry terminal.

She could see the Jeep from here, too, where she had left it in the car park, its white roof, like that of the terminal building, flashing intermittently in the sporadic sunlight.

As the time passed so her dread grew. She could not remember now the last time that she had seen Uilleam. Probably at some family funeral, or wedding, where they would not have spoken or even caught each other’s eye. She would have loved him to be the happy-go-lucky protective big brother she remembered from childhood, awkward with girls, taking delight in tormenting his wee sister, along with Anndra. But those memories were tainted now by animus, and the innocents they had once been were long lost.

When the MV Loch Seaforth finally powered her way around the headland Niamh’s heart pushed up into her throat. The Loch Seaforth was a big, luxurious ferry compared with her predecessors, the Isle of Lewis and the Suilven. It was the Suilven that had ferried Niamh back and forth to the mainland in her early student days, sailing right up until the mid-Nineties, when the boat was sold into service between the North and South Islands of New Zealand, only to capsize and sink in Fiji twenty years later.

This new ferry seemed huge, with her three levels of passenger deck above a vast hull that carried the cars of the tourists and the trucks that supplied the islands with most of their provisions. Niamh waited until the very last minute, when she could see passengers streaming off the boat, before abandoning the remains of her coffee and crossing the road to the car park.

She was shocked by how much Uilleam had aged since the last time she had seen him. His once black hair brushed through with steel and thinning a little. He had developed the stoop that so many taller people adopt as they grow older, as if bowed by years of leaning down to hear the chatter of all those smaller people around them.

He was wheeling a suitcase and she stood waiting by the car as he approached her across the tarmac. To her astonishment, when he reached her, he released the suitcase and folded his arms around her, with all the protective big brother love she remembered from when they were children. She buried her face in his chest and wished away all the miserable years between then and now. Remembering how it had been, and what it was that had caused the rift.