I'll Keep You Safe

Chapter Twenty-Seven

I turned fifteen not long before it happened.

They say that your teens are a difficult time, and that your mid-teens are the worst. But for the most part I enjoyed my teenage years. That transition from childhood to womanhood was so full of discovery and pleasure that I revelled in it — apart from its one obvious downside. I embraced the changes that were moulding me, growing into the young woman I was to become. Secondary school gave way to further education and then to real life beyond. But right then, it was the Nicolson that was stretching my mind and my imagination. I was enjoying the challenge. The world seemed full of possibilities. The sun shone endlessly that summer, at least in my recollection, and the freedom I enjoyed in finding myself was simply delicious.

The cares of the world had not yet descended on my young shoulders, my independence unfettered by adult prohibition, and if I could have lived the rest of my life in that state of uncomplicated serenity I would have made that choice without a second thought. But as summer inevitably fades to autumn and then winter, such happiness could not be sustained, and I could never have foreseen the tragedy that brought it to an end.

Every other summer my uncle Hector would arrive from his home in the south of England with his exotic English wife, Rita. At least, exotic is how she seemed to us. She spoke with a creamy posh accent, a large-bosomed, bountiful lady whose perfume smelled of flowers. She wore glamorous clothes that looked as if they were just off the peg, and extravagant hats that she always had trouble keeping on her head in the wind.

My uncle, who was my father’s brother, was a doctor, and to us seemed fabulously wealthy. He and Rita lived in a big house in a picturesque village somewhere in the county of Hampshire. We had never been, mainly I think because my father could not afford the cost of travel for the whole family. But we had seen plenty of photographs, and to me it was like another world. A place you might read about in books.

Although my uncle was just an islander like us, he seemed different somehow. Better. He had ironed out his island accent, the blas he had acquired from speaking Gaelic as he grew up, and had made a success of his life in a bigger pond. It is a character trait of islanders to believe that they have to go away to better themselves, and perhaps the mainland offers more opportunity. But, in truth, I think that we are who we will be regardless of where we might end up. And most islanders, in the final event, come back. Or, at least, want to.

Visitors to our house slept in the caravan that we kept in the garden. But Uncle Hector and Aunt Rita always got my room. Not that they thought they were above sleeping in the caravan. It was my mother who thought that.

I was always delighted when they came to stay, because I was the one who got to be in the caravan. I loved it. My own little world, quite separate from the house and the rest of the family. As if I was all grown up and on holiday by myself.

It was usually August that they came to stay, when my uncle could get a locum to look after his surgery. They took three or four days to motor up, normally via Skye, taking the car ferry from Uig over to Tarbert in Harris, and driving up through Lochs. Uncle Hector liked his cars, and they always arrived in something big and shiny and expensive that made our wee Ford Fiesta seem dowdy and old. This particular year they turned up in a car the likes of which none of us had ever seen before. And not just us. It turned heads everywhere it went on the island, and I’m sure on the mainland, too.

It was what my uncle called a vintage car. A Humber Hawk. A big black sleek American-looking thing with a green-leather bench seat in the front and a column gear change. My uncle was so proud of it. ‘They stopped making these in sixty-seven,’ he told us, more than once. He frequently related the story of how Rita’s father had bought one of the last models off the production line, about the same time The Beatles were releasing Sgt. Pepper’s, but never registered it. He had kept it in his garage, wrapped almost literally in cotton wool. It was another thirteen years before he finally declared it to the authorities, registering it in 1980, and making it unique and very nearly priceless. He had gifted it to Hector and Rita as a wedding present.

The couple had treasured it ever since, keeping it mostly in the garage and taking it out on only rare occasions. It was the first time they had brought it up to the Hebrides.

Me and Anndra and Uilleam crowded into the back seat and rode like royalty around the island when my aunt and uncle took us shopping in Stornoway, or out for the day to Uig, or Luskentyre in Harris. It made you want to wave from the window, like the Queen, when people would turn their heads to watch us going by. Other motorists would slow almost to a stop in passing places so they could get a better look.

From time to time Anndra got to sit up front. He must have been nearly seventeen by then, and desperate to learn to drive. But lessons cost money, and it was likely he couldn’t afford it until he was out working himself. Which would be some way off. Because he was anxious to go to university in Glasgow to study Gaelic.

One day, on the road down to Uig, Uncle Hector turned off on to a disused stretch of single-track and got out of the car. He waved Anndra into the driver’s seat. ‘On you go, son,’ he said. ‘Just a few hundred yards, mind. But it’ll be enough to give you a feel for it.’ And my uncle slipped into the passenger seat beside him and gave him instructions. It was quite a sacrifice for Uncle Hector to take a risk like that, and I can remember him wincing as Anndra crunched into first gear. But once my brother got her running, it was a smooth drive in a straight line, and he actually managed to get into top gear before finally running out of road and slowing to a stop. We all clapped, and Anndra glowed with pleasure. Uncle Hector said, ‘One day maybe, Anndra, I’ll leave her to you in my will.’ Me and Uilleam were dead jealous.

That summer we had been enjoying one of the finest spells of weather that I could remember. The wind was soft from the south-west, bringing warm air with it, but for once no rain, and we had day after day of clear blue skies and baking hot sunshine. Even the midges got burned off in the heat, and we spent days on end on this beach or that, getting tans like none of us had ever had before.

The day it happened, Dad and Uncle Hector were going fishing together. I don’t know where, and it probably wasn’t legal. They weren’t saying, and no one was asking. But they went off at first light with their sacks on their backs and their rods over the shoulders.

Aunt Rita had decided that we should go to Dalmore Beach for the day, and she and Mum spent half the morning preparing a sumptuous pack lunch that we could take with us. In the end, Mum decided that she would stay home and cook, and that we would have a big family dinner that night, since my aunt and uncle were scheduled to leave the next day.

We set off late in the morning, after Seonag’s mum had dropped her off, and we all squeezed into the car. Me and Seonag in the back with Uilleam, and Anndra up front with Aunt Rita.

I’ll never forget driving down that road to the beach. The colour of the sea simmering between headlands, the painfully clear blue of the sky. And the hills rising on either side of us burned brown by all the weeks of sunshine. I have never driven down that same road since with anything other than lead in my heart.

When we arrived at the metalled parking there were no other cars there, but I noticed half a dozen bikes leaning against the cemetery fence, and when we got out of the car the whoops and cries of their owners carried to us on the wind from the beach. Which was disappointing. Nine times out of ten we would have had the beach to ourselves.

Seonag and I ran on ahead, carrying fold-up canvas chairs and travelling rugs, and Aunt Rita followed with the boys, carrying two big hampers. A veritable feast!

When we got down to the beach, and picked our way over the stones to the sand, we saw that the bikers were in fact half a dozen lads from Balanish. And my heart skipped a beat when I saw that one of them was Ruairidh. They were playing football, stripped to the waist and wearing only shorts, kicking their ball about on the firm sand left by the receding tide. I heard Seonag beside me issuing a grunt of disapproval. ‘Bloody typical,’ she said. ‘Why do boys have to go and ruin everything?’

The boys saw us arriving, and probably had very similar thoughts. But I noticed that Ruairidh had clocked who we were, and his eyes lingered just a little longer in our direction than the others’. This was after the incident at the village disco, and before Ruairidh and I finally connected during my first summer break at Linshader, so I was playing it cool and chose to ignore them entirely.

I heard Uilleam cursing in Gaelic as he and Anndra and Aunt Rita appeared on the beach behind us. Rita would have lived with Hector long enough to recognize a few Gaelic oaths, and she shushed Uilleam and suggested we set up camp on the far side of the beach, just about as far away as we could get from the noisy, football-playing youths.

She was wearing a beautiful blue print dress with flaring skirts that billowed in the wind as she strode off through the soft warm sand to pick a spot. Her wide-brimmed straw hat fibrillated in the breeze and stayed on her head thanks only to the ribbons tied in a bow beneath her chin.

Uilleam growled at the footballers as we passed them. He had never liked Ruairidh, and I had always thought that maybe he was jealous that it was Ruairidh who’d had the initiative and courage to rescue me from the bog, when Uilleam was the older boy, and my brother to boot. As if Ruairidh had somehow done it just to show him up. By now Uilleam was already away from the island at university, and was only home for a couple of weeks following a summer job working at a hotel in Pitlochry.

He and Anndra hammered stakes into the sand to stretch out a windbreak while Aunt Rita spread the travelling rugs and arranged the hampers and chairs. Seonag and I stripped off to the bathing costumes beneath our clothes and went splashing and shrieking into the water. Despite the heat of the summer, the sea was still ice-cold and a shock to the system.

‘Don’t go in too far,’ Aunt Rita called after us. ‘You know how deep it gets.’

I knew only too well from past experience. When the tide goes out it leaves a stretch of gently sloping wet sand, before suddenly shelving steeply away into deeper, darker water. You could tell from the way the waves broke as they came in and were quickly sucked out again by a powerful undertow. Sometimes you saw surfers out in the bay, but they would be strong swimmers, often with life vests. The waves weren’t big enough today to attract the surfers, but forceful enough to knock you over and drag you back out if you weren’t careful and strayed too far in.

It’s true there was a time when most islanders couldn’t swim. In fact, fear of the water was almost instilled into us. If you had a healthy fear of it and couldn’t swim, then you wouldn’t be tempted to go into the sea. But a drowning tragedy at Uig had persuaded my parents that we should learn. Anndra and I were sent off to Stornoway for lessons, but Uilleam refused to go. I think his fear of the water was already too deeply ingrained.

Anndra came and joined us splashing about in the sea for a while before Aunt Rita called us back to eat, and we all sat around the travelling rugs, Uilleam still fully dressed, and tucked into the grub that was laid out on plates. There was cheese and pickle, and bread and cold meats. Egg sandwiches, cucumber sandwiches. Flasks of tea and coffee, and bottles of lemonade in a cold bag.

The ball came out of the blue, from somewhere on the other side of the windbreak. It landed smack in the middle of our lunch, upsetting plates of food and tipping over an open flask to spill still piping hot coffee all over the rug.

Seonag and I screamed, startled, and Uilleam roared with anger, jumping immediately to his feet to hurl Gaelic abuse over the windbreak at the culprits. Aunt Rita remained remarkably unperturbed. ‘Alright, keep calm, it’s not the end of the world,’ she said. Nothing if not practical, she handed the ball to Anndra and began rearranging the plates and food, taking napkins from the hamper to mop up the spillage.

But Uilleam was not so easily mollified. He snatched the ball from Anndra as Ruairidh came running up, panting, from beyond the windbreak. He regarded the chaos of food and plates with dismay. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘The wind caught the ball, and...’

‘You fucking idiot!’ Uilleam shouted at him.

‘Uilleam, please, it was an accident,’ Aunt Rita said, retaining her accustomed calm. But Uilleam wasn’t about to let it go, and he knew that Rita wouldn’t understand him if he stuck to Gaelic.

‘You stupid fucking boys just don’t care, do you?’ He stabbed a finger into Ruairidh’s chest. ‘And you, you wee fucker, you’ve been nothing but trouble your whole life.’

‘Oh don’t be such an arse,’ I told my big brother, but he wasn’t listening.

Ruairidh was bristling with anger. He had apologized for what was obviously an accident, but he wasn’t about to stand down when it came to taking abuse from Uilleam. He looked at my aunt. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Murray. It was an accident. Is there any chance we could get our ball back?’ His friends were gathered watching from a discreet distance.

‘No fucking way,’ Uilleam shouted in his face, and I saw Ruairidh clench his teeth, and his fists.

‘Aw grow up, Uilleam,’ Anndra said. ‘Give them their ball.’ He and Ruairidh were around the same age and had long been friends.

‘I’ll give them their fucking ball,’ Uilleam hissed, and he stuck it firmly under his arm and went marching off towards the water.

Aunt Rita called after him, ‘Uilleam, don’t be silly. Let it pass now.’ She had no idea just how strong the language was, but the tone of it was a powerful clue. Me and Seonag and Anndra jumped to our feet and went chasing after him. Ruairidh stood seething for a moment, before turning and running past us to try to wrestle the ball away from Uilleam. But Uilleam put a hand in his face, for all the world as if fending off a tackle on the rugby field, and ran on right up to the water’s edge. There he released the ball from his hands and kicked it with all his might. Caught by the wind, it went sailing over the incoming waves to land with a splash in the bay, a good thirty yards out.

I remember groaning at the stupidity of it. ‘Uilleam. Jesus, what an idiot!’

One of the other boys detached himself from the group and came running up to the rest of us. ‘That’s my ball!’

Uilleam turned on him, and I remember thinking he was old enough to know better than this. ‘Go and get it, then.’

‘I can’t swim!’

‘Awww, that’s a shame. Looks like the game’s a bogey.’ This in English. Pure Glasgow slang that he must have picked up at university.

I glanced towards the ball. It was riding the incoming swell, and seemed to be drifting even further out, drawn by the currents.

Aunt Rita joined us at the water’s edge, then, hands on hips. ‘Well, that’s just the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen.’ She turned to the group of village boys. ‘Whose ball is it?’

The boy put his hand up.

‘I’ll buy you another one,’ Aunt Rita said.

Uilleam snorted his disapproval. ‘It’s not that far out. Any decent swimmer could go and get it.’

‘Aye, like you?’ Ruairidh said. He knew perfectly well that Uilleam couldn’t swim.

Uilleam bridled. ‘Why don’t you go and get it, then, big-mouth? You won the swimming championship at the Nicolson, didn’t you? Or maybe you’re a chicken.’

Ruairidh glared at him, and I saw his eyes flicker just for a fraction of a second in my direction, before he turned and without another word went plunging out into the water.

‘For God’s sake, lad, what are you doing?’ Aunt Rita shouted after him, and was almost drowned out by a chorus of voices imploring Ruairidh not to do it.

‘Stop it!’ I screamed after him. ‘Stop it!’

But by now he was already out of his depth and windmilling his arms in strong steady strokes to break through the incoming swell and set a course for the ever-diminishing ball.

We all watched, then, in silence, barely daring to breathe, as he got further and further away. It took an interminable time for him, finally, to reach the ball. I don’t think any of us had realized just how far out it really was.

Even from where we stood on the edge of the water we could hear him fighting for breath. Big, deep, barking gasps. Having reached the ball, he clung on to it now to keep himself afloat as he tried to control his breathing, but we could see that all the time the current was drawing them both further out.

Real fear stalked among us then, and I could see from his face that even Uilleam was starting to panic.

For two or maybe three very long minutes Ruairidh clutched the ball to his chest, floating on his back as he slowly regained his breath. Then, without letting it go, he started kicking with his legs and setting a course back towards the beach. But even as we watched, he seemed to make no progress at all. The pull of the current was stronger than the kick of his legs. If anything, it seemed to me, the swell was growing, the waves breaking a good twenty yards out where the seabed fell away and the undertow dragged everything down.

Ruairidh’s friends were screaming encouragement at him, but not one of them could swim, or at least weren’t admitting to it.

‘You idiot! You stupid idiot!’ Aunt Rita shouted at Uilleam. I had never seen her so angry. She hoisted up her skirts and went wading off into the water, waist-deep, as if by somehow getting closer to him she could reel him in. But she must have realized the futility of it and stopped, her dress floating on the surface of the sea, and spreading out all around her like ink from a squid.

Suddenly, Anndra went sprinting past me, legs pumping as he pulled them up out of the water to plunge forward, and then launch himself past Aunt Rita and into the sea. Everyone, almost in unison, called him back. But Anndra had made up his mind and nothing was going to change it. He was a strong boy, my brother, with muscular shoulders and a ripped chest and stomach. A good swimmer, too, and the courage of a lion.

Our protests tailed off as we watched him power his way through the incoming waves, fear nearly choking us. For a moment he vanished, and no one dared breathe until we saw him again breaking the surface of the water beyond the swell. Long, elegant strokes of his arms took him quickly out towards Ruairidh, and he reached him much more quickly, it seemed, than it had taken Ruairidh to get out there himself.

Now we could hear him gasping for breath, too, and both boys clung to the ball, dipping beneath the surface then emerging again with water streaming down their faces. Anndra was shouting something to Ruairidh, but it was impossible to make out what. Then, of a sudden, they both struck out for home. Ruairidh was still on his back, one arm crooked around the ball for buoyancy, the other arcing through the water as he kicked frantically with his feet. Anndra remained on his belly, his left arm making arcs through the water in sync with Ruairidh’s, the other hooked around the arm that held the ball.

With both sets of legs kicking against the current, it was with relief that I saw they were actually making progress towards the shore. Until they arrived at that point where the incoming swell reached its peak and broke in furious white foaming spume. Both boys vanished from view, and with a shock, like a punch to my chest, I saw the ball shoot up into the air and go skidding back across the surface of the water in the bay.

Still no sign of either Ruairidh or Anndra.

And now it was Aunt Rita who went plunging off into the ocean, still fully dressed, her hat whipped from her head to bob momentarily on the crest of a wave before being washed, spinning, back up on to the sand.

I remember feeling immersed in the strangest silence. Even though the sound of the sea breaking all around us and the howl of the wind was very nearly deafening. It was as if time had stood still, or at least slowed to the merest crawl. Almost exactly as I would experience so many years later in the Place de la République.

Aunt Rita had vanished now into white water, and I saw only a flailing arm, before she re-emerged, pulling one of the boys behind her, fighting to keep her head above water as she sought to find some kind of foothold below it. And then, when she touched down, emerging head and shoulders from the water, dragging Ruairidh in her wake. I heard him coughing and choking, gasping desperately for a breath that wouldn’t carry more water into his lungs. He was alive, and I almost collapsed with relief.

All of the boys went wading then into the water to grab him from my aunt and pull him up on to the beach where he lay retching and vomiting seawater. But there was no sign of Anndra.

In the moment before she turned to go back for him, I saw the fear in Aunt Rita’s eyes, but also the courage that it took to risk your life for a loved one. Or maybe it takes no courage at all when you love a person. You just do what your heart demands, even though your head is calling you a fool.

By this time I was in tears, howling uncontrollably as Seonag stood staring out to sea, her face whiter than I have ever seen it. Uilleam was rooted to the spot, his feet sunk in the soft wet sand, rabbit eyes scanning the waves as panic filled and emptied his chest in a series of rapid shallow breaths.

Aunt Rita had vanished again from sight, and the horrible thought began to worm its way into my brain that neither she nor Anndra would ever be seen again. Not alive, anyway.

And then there she was, on her back, arms around Anndra’s chest, kicking for shore, before turning to push her legs down in search of traction, finding it and pulling Anndra behind her.

This time we all ran into the water to help her. Everyone except Uilleam, whose abject fear of the stuff wouldn’t permit him to set so much as one foot in it. Anndra was a dead weight. Unlike Ruairidh before him, there was no coughing or gasping for breath.

Panic propelled us up on to the firm sand left by the receding tide, and Anndra lay on his back, head tipped towards the water. His eyes were wide open, just like Grampa’s that time by the caravan. Except that water foamed backwards out of his mouth, washing over his open eyes as if trying to flush all the life out of them. But with a terrible constriction of my chest I knew that he was already gone.

Aunt Rita, though, hadn’t given up hope just yet. Her sodden dress clung to every contour of her body, and I could see her underwear beneath it. Her usually coiffured hair hung down in rat’s tails over her face as she knelt down by the prone form of my brother and began pumping at his chest with both hands. Gouts of water spurted from his mouth, before she leaned over him to pinch his nostrils and breathe into his mouth. Then more pumping. I remembered that Rita had been a nurse before she married my uncle, which was how they had met, and I willed her to breathe life back into Anndra.

She carried on long beyond the point where all of us knew there was no longer any hope. A desperate reluctance to accept that he was dead. Maybe because she was the only adult there, she felt in some way responsible for what had happened.

Ruairidh, meantime, had struggled to his knees, still retching, tears streaming from his eyes, watching with horror as Rita pumped and pumped with despairing hands on Anndra’s chest.

I understood even then that Ruairidh was going to get the blame. The fact that it was Uilleam who had kicked the ball into the water and goaded Ruairidh into going after it would get lost in the telling. All that anyone was going to remember was Ruairidh’s stupidity in going into the sea to get it, causing Anndra to risk and lose his life in the process of trying to rescue him.

I glanced up at Uilleam. He was gazing in disbelief on his younger brother lying dead in the sand, and whatever guilt he was busy tucking away somewhere deep inside him, I knew he would never admit it to the world. His eyes flickered towards Ruairidh, and I saw hatred there. He sensed my eyes on him, and when he turned to look at me, I knew in that moment that I had lost not one brother, but two.

Of course, there were no mobile phones in those days. No one to call for help, and no help to be given anyway. And so the boys carried Anndra up past the cemetery, where just a few days later we would put him in the ground. When I looked back I could still see the football being washed remorselessly out to sea. I was sobbing uncontrollably, Seonag with an arm around my shoulders, Aunt Rita following behind us, stooped with grief and crying silent tears. When we got to the car park, the boys laid Anndra out on the back seat of the Humber Hawk, while Seonag and I squeezed into the front with my aunt.

There was no room in the car for Uilleam and he returned to the village with the other boys, one of them giving him a backie. But not before, I heard later, he had taken out his wrath on Ruairidh. Punching him into the long beach grass and kicking him until the others pulled him off. From all accounts Ruairidh didn’t lift a finger to defend himself, and in all the years that followed, not a word ever passed between him and me on the events of that day.

I can’t even begin to describe how awful things were in our house over the next few days. I don’t think I have ever witnessed grief like it. Or anger. As I suspected, no blame was ever apportioned to Uilleam. Teflon Uilleam. All the shit stuck to Ruairidh.

Anndra’s coffin was laid out in the front porch, just as our grandfather’s had been before him. Everyone in the village, and from a good way beyond, came to pay their respects. But when the Macfarlanes turned up, my mother wouldn’t even let them past the gate. She must have had her hate radar set, because somehow she sensed them coming before any of the rest of us.

The first I knew about it was when I heard her screaming at them in Gaelic from the doorstep. They and their son would never be welcome in our house again. Not that they had ever been regular visitors anyway. She hoped that their God would forgive them, because she never would. That, in spite of the fact that while she blamed their son for the death of hers, it was Ruairidh who had saved my life all these years before. Which is when I first began to suspect that maybe my mother valued Anndra’s life above mine. The preference for a son over a daughter.

The funeral was held on the Saturday. A long procession that followed the hearse down that single-track road to Dalmore Beach and the cemetery that overlooked it. Still the good weather had not broken, and the sea in its innocent blue lay calm and still in the bay, breaking in only the gentlest of waves upon the sand.

Things had changed somewhat since my grandfather’s funeral and the women came right down now to the car park, but remained on that side of the fence as the men carried Anndra across the machair, between the headstones of all the dead who had gone before him, to a freshly dug grave in a plot that commanded a view of the very spot in the bay where he had drowned.

I stood by my mother’s side, Seonag holding my hand tightly, and let silent tears roll down my face as we said goodbye. Goodbye to the brother who had taunted and tormented me all through my childhood. What I wouldn’t have given in that moment to find one of his spiders in my pocket, and hear him stifling laughter from some hidden place as I screamed in panic.

Which was when I noticed the lone figure silhouetted on the clifftops away to our right. Ruairidh, too, had come to pay his last respects. I’m sure he was riddled with all the guilt that everyone felt was justified. For he certainly knew that but for Anndra it would have been his funeral here today. And I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him, blamed and excluded, a pariah among his peers.

At the far end of the cemetery the minister had delivered his final words, and the mourners were picking up spades to shovel the sandy soil over the coffin and fill the grave. The headstone was not raised for another six months, and although I am not sure if my mother ever visited his grave, I went to see Anndra often over the years, just to sit with him and pray that he would forgive me for marrying the man who everyone blamed for his death.

Uncle Hector and Aunt Rita made their delayed departure on the Monday morning. A solemn affair, in which there were few words spoken and more tears spilled. Just before they left I noticed my aunt covering the back seat of the Humber with a tartan travelling rug. The leather had been ruined by the salt water from Anndra’s body, which had left its pale imprint in the green. A permanent reminder of the tragedy of that summer’s day on Dalmore Beach.

They never came to stay with us again, and I heard much later that my uncle had put his beloved car up for sale as soon as they got home.