The Chessmen

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I suppose the band’s real rise to fame began with a bet.

Roddy and Strings had written most of the original material that Solas was playing at its gigs during fifth year at school. Like Lennon and McCartney, they were a formidable creative duo. But like the visionary force behind the Beatles, they didn’t much like one another.

There was an artistic jealousy, a constant competition to prove who was the more creative. And, of course, there was Mairead. Somehow she was at the centre of every conflict in the band, if not the cause of it. In this case she had engaged in a three-month fling with Strings during a period of fall-out with Roddy. The atmosphere both on and off stage had been horrendous.

But by June of that final year at the Nicolson the brief liaison with Strings was over, and Mairead was back with Roddy. Everything in the universe was in its proper place again. Except that Roddy and Strings could barely speak to one another without breaking into an argument.

The bet came about because although everyone agreed that the band needed a change of name before going to Glasgow, it was impossible to reach unanimity on what it should be.

Solas was too comfortable, too soft. They wanted something more edgy, that would reflect the unique blend of Celtic folk and rock that was their hallmark.

In the end there were two front-runners. One Roddy’s, the other Strings’s. But no one was going to choose between them because it would have been like taking sides.

Roddy’s preference was Amran, old Irish for song. He felt it would take the band out of what he called the Gaelic ghetto and into the wider Celtic world. Strings hated it. His choice was Caoran, the Gaelic for those little pieces of peat that are the hardest and blackest, and burn the hottest. Roddy ridiculed it by saying its pronunciation — kuuran — made it sound like Koran.

The solution to the impasse came during the first week in June. We had all sat our Highers by then and were just treading water till the end of the school term, so nobody was bothered about going to classes.

Since the revelations about the Iolaire, the motorbike group had stopped meeting at Holm Point, and gathered instead at the Bridge to Nowhere, an old concrete bridge above Garry beach beyond the village of Tolastadh on the east coast, about twenty-five minutes north of Stornoway. It was the beginning, and the end, of the Road to Nowhere — both so-called, unsurprisingly, because they went nowhere. The bridge was built and the road begun in 1920. They were the brainchild of the then owner of Lewis and Harris, the entrepreneur and visionary Lord Leverhulme. He had wanted to build a road that would lead all the way up the east coast linking Tolastadh to Sgiogarstaigh in Ness. But Leverhulme died before his grand plans for the islands could be realized, and the Road to Nowhere petered out very quickly into a rough track traversed ever since only by walkers.

It was one of those rare, delicious, early summer days when the wind was soft out of the south-west and the sky was broken by high white clouds that only occasionally masked the sun. Spring flowers shimmered yellow and purple and white across the moor, and the midges were kept at bay by the breeze. Of course, there was always something to spoil a perfect day, and in this case it was the cleggs. The little biting bastards were out in force among the long grasses. Horseflies the English call them, and they give you a real dirty bite, even through clothes if they’re tight-fitting.

We were all gathered on the bridge. About a dozen of us, drinking beer, scraping our names in the concrete, or just lying along the parapet sunning ourselves, fearless of the drop into the gorge below. The sun washed across the golden sands of Garry beach and out over the Minch, and I remember thinking there was something almost idyllic about it. The exams were by us, and a new, exciting future lay ahead. Escape from the island, the first chance any of us had had to spread our wings and fly. At that moment, anything seemed possible.

I lay with my eyes closed, my head resting on my folded blazer, drifting away into an imagined future. Which was when angry voices crashed into my idyll.

‘Okay! Okay!’ I heard Strings’ voice raised to an almost hysterical pitch. ‘You’re on. We’ll do it. Tomorrow.’

I opened my eyes, annoyed by the interruption, and swung my legs down on to the bridge. The others were all gathered at the far end where the Road to Nowhere snaked off towards the cliffs. I sighed and jumped down to make my way towards the group.

‘What’s going on?’

A grinning Whistler turned in my direction. ‘We’ve figured out a way to choose the new name.’

I frowned, surprised. ‘How?’

Mairead said, ‘Roddy and Strings are going to have a race on their bikes. To the blasted rock, and back.’

I wasn’t impressed. ‘That’s not very far.’

Rambo said, ‘It’s about two miles. It’s enough.’

And Skins added, ‘Whoever wins gets to choose the name.’

I found all their faces turned towards me, as if somehow seeking my approval. ‘Bloody stupid if you ask me,’ I said. ‘And dangerous.’

There were a lot of groans and faces turned away again. And Roddy said, ‘Who the fuck’s asking you anyway?’

Whistler and I walked the proposed course the following morning. It was another glorious day, and with the wind dropping away to almost nothing the midges were out in force. For the first part of the walk, as the road wound across the moor towards the cliffs, rising all the way, we were slapping our faces and necks and waving our hands around our heads like demented puppets.

The surface of the road here was rough. Tightly packed small stones, with moss and grass growing in between. Rocks rose away to our left, and to the right the land dropped by increments towards the shore, in turn smothered by bracken peppered by tormentil and scarred by peat banks. We rounded a bend and startled a clutch of grazing sheep, coats brightly slashed by green and purple markings, and they skittered away ahead of us.

‘I’m not going to uni,’ Whistler said suddenly, and I was startled.

‘Jesus! Why not?’

He shrugged. ‘Can’t be bothered.’

I stared at him in disbelief. ‘Christ, man, it wouldn’t be any bother at all to you. I sweat blood trying to pass my exams. You sail through them without even opening a book.’

‘So where’s the challenge in that?’

I was open-mouthed. ‘But what would you do?’

‘Stay here.’ He gazed off impassively across the sands.

‘Are you mad? I don’t know anyone that doesn’t want to get off the island. And there’s not a kid at the Nicolson who wouldn’t give their right arm for half your brains and the chance to get into uni.’

He shrugged again. ‘Fair enough. But none of them are me. And I want to stay.’

My mind was racing, trying to come up with arguments that would persuade him of the folly of this decision. ‘What about the band?’

‘What about it?’

‘Well, everyone else in Solas is going to go to Glasgow.’

‘So?’

‘So you can’t still be in the band if they’re there and you’re here.’

‘So?’

‘You’re not serious?’

He turned his head slowly and fixed me with his big dark eyes. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

‘Because you’re a brilliant flute player. Because it’s your life.’

He shook his head. ‘Nah. I can blow a whistle okay, but what use is it? And it’s not my life. Never has been. It’s Roddy’s band. Him and Strings. It’s their lives, not mine.’

I knew he was not to be argued with when he’d made up his mind about something, and so we walked on in silence to the first big bend in the road. The breeze stiffened, blowing away the midges and carrying a smell of fish and dampness to us on its leading edge. Fulmars dipped and shrieked above our heads, and we saw shags down on the water. Looking back you could see Garry, and beyond it the curve of Traigh Mhor, literally the big beach. Tolastadh Head and the village itself stretched out on the rise, treeless and stark in the sunlight.

The road dipped, then, before rising to the second bend. It was sharper and closer to the sea, which seemed a long way below us now, and we saw the coastline stretch away to the north, rising sheer from the deceptively tranquil azure of the Minch. The sky was streaked with high cloud, almost luminous in the morning sun, as if brushed across it by some impatient watercolour artist.

Not much further on, a short stretch of grass at the left poured straight over the edge of the cliffs into an almost vertical chasm, or geodha in Gaelic, that slashed down sharply into the rock. Peering over from the top of it, you couldn’t see the bottom.

I leaned over as far as I dared to look down. ‘Bloody dangerous this is,’ I said. ‘We should post somebody here, just so the boys are aware of it.’

The plan was to station us in pairs at the bends, and at the turning point at the end, just to make sure there was no cheating.

Whistler left the road, and started making his way down the south side of the geodha to try to get a better view of it.

‘Careful,’ I shouted after him. It was steep. I could see sheep on a narrow grassy ledge about halfway down, but nothing beyond that.

He waved his arm. ‘Come and see this.’

I picked my way cautiously over the grassy banks and rock until I could see what he saw. Household rubbish. Tons of it dumped over the edge, no doubt by the good folk of Tolastadh over many years. A skein of rusted metal, prams, bicycle frames, fish boxes, old nets, fencing wire. The sea had clawed out the bottom of the pile, but much of it was stranded halfway down, caught by clusters of jagged rock.

The sea was abnormally calm where it washed into the fissure, emerald green and clear as day. You could see the rocks beneath the surface, magnified, and simmering in the current. And even this high above it, you could hear the sea sucking and sighing, its breathing amplified by the acoustic effect of the geodha, almost as if it were alive.

We scrambled back up to the road. Whistler nodded then. ‘Aye, we definitely need to mark this as a danger spot.’

The road beyond followed the line of the cliffs to where its builders had been forced to blast through a giant rock that blocked the way ahead. Part of it, twelve or fifteen feet high, had been left standing on the cliff side, all of its strata exposed, seams of red running through its broken surfaces, like a geological diary going back to the very beginnings of time.

This gateway to nowhere was to be the turning point. We stood in the gap blown through the stone more than ninety years before and saw how the spoil from it lay all across the hillside, a jumble of shattered rock nestling still where it had first settled after the explosion. And looking back, as the road curved away, we could see straight across to the distant peaks of mainland mountains so hazily familiar to generations of islanders.

‘You know what?’ I said. ‘This is crazy. Why don’t you guys just have a secret ballot? Majority vote wins.’

Whistler shook his head. ‘Roddy would never agree. He’d be scared of losing.’

Word had got around, and apart from the dozen or so regular members of the bike group another twelve or fifteen kids turned up that afternoon to watch the race. Everyone was gathered at the bridge. Someone had brought a can of spray paint, and some of the kids were decorating the concrete parapets with their names. Roddy and Strings were hyped up and silently tense, focused on the race. There would be no problem distinguishing one from the other. Roddy with his bright-blue Vespa scooter, and the violent yellow of Strings’ machine.

Whistler and I were stationed at the second bend. Skins was on duty at the blasted gateway, and Rambo was standing guard at the geodha. Mairead and another girl were at the first bend. Curiously she had expressed no opinion whatsoever on either of the proposed names, which I took to mean that she probably favoured Caoran, but didn’t dare say so.

We heard the shout go up from the bridge, and the roar of revving engines, but we had no sight of the bikes until they rounded the bend. Strings appeared first, crouched low over his handlebars, totally focused on the road ahead of him. Roddy was just a few feet behind, swerving to avoid the dust and stones being kicked up by Strings’ rear wheel.

They passed me and Whistler and picked up speed on the straight stretch, engines screaming as they flew past Rambo. Then they vanished from sight. When they reappeared, on the return, it was Roddy who was marginally ahead, tyres skidding and spinning as they both changed gear on the bend. We retrieved our own bikes from the bracken and set off after them, Skins and Rambo not far behind us. Even before we got back to the bridge we could hear a loud cheer going up. Mairead had got back ahead of us, and everyone was gathered around the blue and yellow bikes, voices raised in excitement.

‘What happened?’ Whistler said as we drew up beside them.

‘Dead heat,’ someone shouted.

And one of the other kids said, ‘They were neck and neck when they hit the bridge. No way to separate them.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Honour satisfied. Now why don’t we toss a coin?’

Strings wiped the sweat from a dust-stained face as he swung his leg over the saddle and tipped his bike on to its stand. ‘I suppose we might as well.’

‘No!’ Roddy was adamant, and still sitting astride his Vespa. The voices around him fell away to a hush. ‘There’s another way to settle this. We do it again. Only this time we time it. One after the other. It’s the only way to separate us.’

A girl called Dolina went delving into a pink knitted bag slung over her shoulder. ‘I’ve got a stopwatch. We use it for sprint training at the athletics club.’

‘We’re on, then.’ Roddy grinned his satisfaction, and looked to Strings for agreement.

Strings shrugged. ‘Sure.’

‘We’ll toss for who goes first, then.’ Roddy dug out a tenpence piece and spun it into the air. ‘Heads,’ he shouted, and everyone gathered around to see how it landed when it came down. Heads it was. Roddy grinned. ‘Me first.’

Rambo set off on his bike to the turning point to scrape a line in the track that each bike must cross, and to make sure that it did. Dolina stood with her stopwatch at the end of the parapet, and Roddy manoeuvred his front wheel on to the line that marked the end of the bridge and the beginning of the road. We waited to give Rambo sufficient time to get to the blasted rock, and then there was a countdown from three that everyone joined in. Roddy revved and was off as Dolina pressed the start button.

You could see from the way he held his body, how tense and determined he was, back wheel skidding from side to side as he accelerated to the maximum, up the slope towards the first bend. And then he vanished, and the sound of his motor faded into the distance, masked by the rise of the hill.

Strings sat on the parapet, hands clasped in front of him as if in prayer, and never said a word. The rest of us milled about, speculating about the outcome of the race in hushed tones, almost as if we were afraid of breaking Strings’ concentration. I glanced at him and saw how some powerful inner tension was writing itself all over his face. For some reason this meant much more to him than it should. After all, what the hell was in a name? And, in the end, what did it really matter?

We heard Roddy’s bike before we saw it. He was back very quickly. I glanced at my watch. Just over three and a half minutes. And then he appeared, leaning over at a dangerous angle as he came careening around the bend. It took him fewer than thirty seconds to reach the bridge. We all dived to either side as he accelerated hard over the finish line, then jammed on his brakes and pulled the front wheel around to skid to a stop by the far end.

His face was flushed, eyes shining. He knew he’d made a good time. ‘Well?’

‘Three minutes, fifty-seven,’ Dolina called out, and Roddy cast triumphant eyes towards Strings.

But if Strings harboured any self-doubt he wasn’t showing it. He stood up, cool as you like, and threw a leg over his bike to kick away its stand and start the motor. Everyone clamoured around the start line, and I stood up on the parapet to get a better view.

The countdown began.

Strings revved and released his clutch, back wheel spinning, screaming like a distressed gannet, until it gripped, and he was off in a spray of chippings. I watched Roddy watching him, and saw how doubt crept slowly but surely into his mind. And then Strings disappeared as he rounded the bend. Several of us checked our watches as the sound of his engine faded into the afternoon. Tension moved among us like a ghost.

Three and a half minutes passed and still there was no reprise of that shrieking 125cc motor. No yellow blur on the bend. Four minutes, and still nothing.

‘Something’s wrong,’ I said, and for the first time that ghost among us morphed from tension, to apprehension, to fear.

‘Ach, he’s just fallen off,’ Roddy said. ‘Trying to go too bloody fast.’

But I wasn’t waiting to find out. I jumped on my moped and accelerated over the stony Road to Nowhere, bumping away up the track towards the bend. I heard another bike on my shoulder and flicked a backward glance to see Whistler there. And beyond him, others setting off in pursuit.

There was no sign of Strings, and it wasn’t until I passed the second bend that I saw a distressed Rambo at the side of the road above the geodha. Strings’ yellow bike lay twisted in the grass, its front wheel upturned and still spinning, a large swathe of peat churned up where the bike had slewed off-track. Three sheep were scampering away up the road beyond it. Whistler and I reached Rambo before the others. He was in a panic, eyes wide.

‘I was getting my bike when I heard the crash. Must have been those bloody sheep running on to the road. Looks like he went straight over.’

‘Fuck.’ The word escaped my mouth in a breath.

Whistler was already clambering down the slope on the south side. Recklessly. Arms windmilling, before he jumped down on to the lowest of the rock ledges visible from above, and steadied himself. I went chasing after him. When I reached the ledge I spotted the detritus we had seen that morning, trapped by the rocks halfway down the drop. The bottom wasn’t visible from here, and there was no sign of Strings.

I glanced back up the hill and saw everyone crowded along the roadside. Roddy came running pell-mell down the slope towards us. He reached us gasping, eyes wide and filled with fear. ‘Where is he?’

‘No sign of him,’ Whistler said.

‘Oh, Jesus.’ Roddy immediately began lowering himself over the drop.

Whistler tried to grab him but couldn’t hold on. ‘For Christ’s sake, man, don’t be a fool. There’s no way down there. And if there is, there’s no way back up.’

But nothing was going to stop Roddy. I saw his desperation as he climbed down, face towards the cliff, arms and legs stretching to either side, searching for hand and footholds. He had made it as far as the limit of our ability to see into the geodha when his face turned up towards us. ‘I can’t see him!’ His voice echoed around the cliffs. And then he fell from sight with barely time for a muffled cry.

‘Shit!’ Whistler immediately started to go down after him, but I grabbed his arm.

‘We should get help.’ I glanced hopelessly up the slope to where the others were gathered along the track, and to my amazement saw a dishevelled Strings push through them to the edge of the geodha. He was covered in peat-black mud, and there was blood trickling from his forehead. I have never seen a face so bleached of colour. The others parted to make way for him, staring at him in silent astonishment. He glanced towards Whistler, then back at me.

‘Where the hell did you come from?’ I shouted.

He shook his head and his confusion was clear. ‘Dunno what happened. Damn sheep came running on to the road. Next thing, I’m coming to in the ditch on the far side, and you lot are all gathered around the geodha.’

‘We thought you went over!’ I called back.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ he said. ‘Did no one think to look in the bloody ditch!’ He lifted his arms then dropped them to his side again. ‘Where’s Roddy?’

‘Fell in going after you!’ Whistler bellowed. It was obvious that he had little sympathy for Strings. He turned to me. ‘See if anyone up there’s got a rope in their saddlebag.’ And he swung himself over the edge, searching for Roddy’s foot-and handholds.

As I scrambled back up to the road, I wondered at Roddy’s desperation. Only fifteen minutes before he had been determined to beat and humiliate Strings in this foolish competition to decide the band’s new name. And now he had gone and risked his life, maybe even lost it, trying to save him.

Three of the boys had tow ropes. But none of them was long enough. To everyone’s surprise it was Mairead who knew how to tie the knots that would make them into one serviceable length. We shouldn’t have been, since her dad was a fisherman, but the speed and dexterity with which she knotted those lengths of rope together took us all aback. Strings just stood watching helplessly. No one was interested right then in how badly hurt or otherwise he might be. The focus was all on Roddy.

I ran down the slope with the rope and several other boys and inched carefully towards the edge of the drop to see if I could spot Whistler. There was no sign of him. I bellowed his name as loud as I could, and to my intense relief heard his voice echo back up at me.

‘Did you get a rope?’

‘We did.’

‘Chuck it down, then, and make sure it’s well anchored at the top.’

The only way to secure it was to wrap it around my waist and use me as the anchor, while ahead of me the other boys gripped it, hand over hand, like members of a tug-of-war team. I lay back, almost sitting, my heels dug hard and deep into the peat, and we threw the other end down into the geodha.

After a few minutes we felt a tug on it, and then what seemed like the full weight of two Whistlers testing our strength to hold it firm. It was touch and go whether we could. I shouted towards the road for more help, hoping that Mairead’s knots were going to hold. Several of the others came running down, girls too, everyone set to lend a hand, until finally we saw the giant form of Whistler pulling himself up over the edge, the apparently lifeless figure of Roddy slung over his shoulder.

As soon as he reached the grass he let go of the rope and dropped Roddy on to the turf. Roddy let out a yell of sheer bloody agony, his right leg twisted at a horribly unnatural angle. Whistler was pink-faced and sweating from his exertions. ‘Busted leg,’ he said unnecessarily.

Roddy was breathing stertorously and unscrewed his eyes for a moment to open them and look up. Strings leaned over him, his bloodied face a mask of concern. Roddy’s lips contorted into a sort of grimace, and he said, ‘So. Amran it is, then.’

I didn’t see Roddy again until after the start of the summer holidays. He had been rushed to hospital and undergone several hours of surgery on a shattered femur. Metal plates and screws inserted. The band’s summer gigs were cancelled, and it wasn’t until a meeting called to discuss their future that all the members of the band were reunited for the first time since the accident. I never knew what had passed between Strings and Roddy on the subject of the race, but the incident at the geodha was never referred to, not in my presence anyway. And in his own obdurate way, Roddy simply seemed happy that he had won the bet. His leg was plastered and in a brace, and he turned up in a wheelchair pushed by a private nurse paid for by his parents.

The meeting was held in the public bar at Scaliscro Lodge, which sat up on the west bank overlooking Little Loch Rog. Roddy looked terrible. But he had been determined to convene the meeting, to map out the future of the group once they went to Glasgow.

However, it was Mairead who provided the shock. To everyone’s astonishment she had cropped her hair to something not much longer than a crew-cut. Gone was the long, dark wavy hair that tumbled over angular shoulders. She looked stark and gaunt with this most macho of male cuts, although still strangely feminine. There were not many women who could wear their hair like that. But she had strong, striking features, and even the shape of her head, now fully revealed, was classically beautiful. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

Roddy was oddly animated, as if he were on something. And maybe he was. A cocktail, perhaps, of painkillers and beer. Or maybe it was just that restless, relentless ambition that so drove him. But his face was flushed and there was a strange glow in his eyes.

‘Amran,’ he said, and he threw a little triumphant glance in Strings’ direction. ‘It’s got a good ring to it.’ Nobody was going to argue with him. ‘As soon as I’m back on my feet, Strings and I will go down to Glasgow to try to line up some gigs, and we’re probably going to need a management company.’

I caught a glimpse of Whistler out of the corner of my eye as he laid his pint glass down on the bar with an odd sense of finality. I knew what was coming. ‘I won’t be going to Glasgow,’ he said.

The thumping of the music playing over the stereo system only further emphasized the silence that followed.

Rambo said, ‘What. . you mean you’ve applied for Strathclyde, or Edinburgh, or somewhere?’ You could hear the disbelief in his voice.

‘I mean I won’t be going to any university. Glasgow, Edinburgh or anywhere else. I’m staying on the island.’

I almost held my breath.

‘What are you talking about?’ Roddy said. All the light had gone out of his eyes. ‘You can’t stay here and still be in the band.’

‘Congratulations. You just won a set of steak knives and a holiday for two in Torremolinos. You’d better look for another flute player when you’re down in Glasgow.’

Roddy looked as if the world had just fallen in on him.

Mairead said quietly, ‘When did you decide this?’

Whistler shrugged. ‘A while ago.’

‘And you never told us?’ Roddy was angry now.

The sound of Mairead’s open hand hitting the side of Whistler’s face was like the crack of a rifle. She hit him so hard that he had to put a hand on the bar to steady himself. She stared at him for a long, hard moment with something akin to loathing in her gaze, before turning to walk out of the bar.

Ironically Amran, as they became, achieved their greatest success post-Whistler, and the accident on the Road to Nowhere seemed, perversely, to have brought Strings and Roddy closer together.

But prime mover in their transition from island Celtic rock band to mainstream supergroup was Donald Murray. Big Kenny had gone to agricultural college in Inverness, leaving the band without a roadie. And it was after my final break-up with Marsaili that I got a call one day from Donald.

‘Hey man,’ he drawled. He was affecting a mid-Atlantic accent in those days, somewhere between Ness and New York. One of the brightest boys of his year at the Nicolson, he had come down to Glasgow University, carrying with him all the despairing hopes of his parents. His father, Coinneach Murray, was one of the most feared and respected men in Ness. Minister of the Crobost Free Church, a man of fire and brimstone, a relentless advocate of a harsh and unforgiving Christianity. A Christianity that his son had rejected from an early age, becoming the archetypal rebel without a cause, and defying his father at every turn. He drank, swore, slept with more girls than you could count, and seemed hell-bent on a road to self-destruction.

He dropped out of first year at university before Christmas, and I had lost track of him until that phone call at my student lodgings.

‘Donald?’ He sounded different to me.

‘It’s me, bro.’

‘Where the hell are you? I mean, what are you doing?’

I heard him chuckling on the other end of the line. ‘I’m in the music business, bro.’

‘Donald, I’m not your bro!’

‘Hey, Fin boy, keep the heid. It’s just a figure of speech.’

‘What music business?’ I said.

‘Got a job in a music agency. We represent bands, singers, organize tours, negotiate deals with record labels.’ He paused, and I heard the pride in his voice. ‘I’m personal assistant to Joey Cuthbertson, impresario extraordinaire. Amazing guy, Fin. What he doesn’t know about the music business isn’t worth knowing. And I’m going to pick his brains until there ain’t a cell left I don’t possess.’

‘Good for you.’

He laughed. ‘Never could impress you, could I?’

‘Not when you were trying to, Donald. The thing you’ve never understood is that you don’t have to try.’

More laughter down the line. ‘Fin, Joey Cuthbertson’s signed Amran.’ He paused. ‘On my recommendation. They’re going places, boy. Mark my words. I figure we’ll have a record deal before Easter.’

‘Good for them. What’s any of this got to do with me, Donald?’

‘We need a roadie, Fin. Big Kenny’s gone to Inverness, and your name came up. The guys are comfortable with you.’

‘Some of us are still trying to get a degree, Donald.’

‘Nights and weekends, Fin. Good money in it. And, hey, you’ll sail through your degree, bro, without even breaking sweat.’

Donald was wrong about a lot of things. But he was right about Amran. I roadied for them for the rest of that academic year, and we gigged all over Scotland and the north of England. The record deal that Donald predicted came in June. The band spent the summer in the studio recording their first album, which they called Caoran, as a sop to Strings. They were mostly songs on which Roddy and Strings had collaborated, but they were given a real professional gloss by a producer who came up from London. They never did replace Whistler. When their first single was released in September it went straight into the charts at No. 5.

Mairead was turning into a minor celebrity, her face appearing regularly in the Scottish red-tops and on the covers of several nationally distributed magazines. She had her own fashion guru now, at least that’s what Mairead called her. A kind of dusty-looking lesbian art school dropout who advised her on clothes and make-up. I had to pinch myself at times to remember that Mairead was just a wee lass that I’d known and fancied at school.

Roddy’s dad had bought him a second-hand, single-engined aeroplane. A red-and-white Piper Comanche. And the band had started earning enough for Roddy to pay for flying lessons out of Glasgow airport. But Roddy was flying high in more ways than one. He was destined for stardom and recognition of his very special talents. That’s how he saw it, anyway. And it was that overweening ambition that brought him, finally, into conflict with Donald.

By the time I went into second year at university, Roddy and the rest of Amran had dropped out to concentrate on their careers in the band. Joey Cuthbertson had been reduced by a heart attack to little more than an invalid, and Donald had stepped into his shoes as No. 1 at the agency. It seems he had indeed sucked the old man dry.

But although Donald’s dramatic rise to prominence in the Scottish music business had led to a resurgence of interest in mainly Glasgow-based bands like Amran, it also coincided with his spiralling descent into drink and drugs. He had always been, I suppose, a classic contender for that uniquely island condition known as the curam, when childhood indoctrination in unrelenting Presbyterian beliefs resurfaces like a virus after years of dissolute living to reshape its victims in the image of their fathers. In this case, the Reverend Coinneach Murray. But it would be a few years before Donald would find himself following in his own father’s footsteps. For the moment he was having too much fun in denial.

What he had done was taken his eye off the ball, and Amran’s career was starting to stall, even before they had recorded their second album. Success can come in the blink of an eye, but vanish just as quickly, like an evaporating tear. The gigs were routine and repetitive and not serving in any way to advance the band’s career. Donald was never there, never at the end of a telephone, never around to discuss the things that Roddy and Strings and the rest thought important to their future. He had already embarked on that long and treacherous slide into addiction.

For my own part, I didn’t much care. I drove the van, and the money I made meant I didn’t have to think too much about my own future. In truth, I didn’t really want to think about it. I had no interest in my degree course, no ambition, no idea what to do with my life. The news which had greeted me on my return to the island for my aunt’s funeral had robbed me of any interest in it. Artair and Marsaili were married. I had lost my oldest friend, and the only girl I had ever really loved.

The friction between Roddy and Donald finally came to a head one weekend in early November.

It was a Friday night, and Amran were giving a concert in one of those end-of-pier pavilions, a survivor from the days of seaside music hall, rescued from demolition and lovingly restored. It was somewhere on the west coast of England. I don’t remember where, exactly. One of those Victorian coastal resorts that had somehow survived the town hall vandals of the fifties and sixties and retained a kind of faded charm. The original promenade which ran a mile or so along the seafront was still there, and the pier was an elaborate structure of iron struts and girders nearly five hundred feet long. The pavilion itself was a shambles of curved roofs on the T at the end of it, and housed an auditorium with a seating capacity of between four and five hundred. In the summer it hosted those seaside variety shows that still somehow attracted large audiences. But events in November were few and far between.

It was typical of the gigs that Donald had been booking for the band, and Roddy was in a mood even before we set off, determined to have it out with Donald, who had agreed to meet us there.

It was a filthy night, wet and blustery, light fading as we drove into a little town en route, tucked away among the unfamiliar folds of rolling green English countryside. I was peering through my rain-smeared windscreen searching for signposts when Rambo, who always travelled in the van with me, suddenly shouted at me to stop. I jammed on the brakes.

‘What the hell-?’

The car carrying the rest of band nearly ploughed into the back of us.

‘There’s a guy on the bridge.’ Rambo pointed across my line of vision towards the parapet of a bridge that spanned the brown waters of a river in spate. It was an old stone bridge, with lamp posts at intervals across its arch. A man stood up on the parapet wall, one hand clutching a lamp post. He was looking down at the water rushing past below. There was no mistaking his intent. A man steeling himself to jump.

Roddy, Mairead and the others leapt out of the following car and ran round to my door.

‘What’s wrong?’ Roddy shouted.

I pointed over the bridge. ‘Looks like that guy’s about to do away with himself.’

Everyone looked and there was a momentary hiatus. ‘Jesus,’ Roddy whispered. ‘What are we going to do?’

I glanced at my watch. ‘We’re running late already.’

Mairead threw me a look. ‘A man’s life is a little more important, don’t you think, than a gig on a pier?’

We all looked at her in surprise.

‘She’s right,’ Strings said. ‘Come on, let’s try and talk him down.’

But Mairead grabbed his arm. ‘No, you’ll scare him off. I’ll talk to him.’

We watched as Mairead made her way cautiously towards him, and heard her call out. ‘Hello, I wonder if you could help me? I think we’re lost.’

The man’s head snapped around, frightened rabbit’s eyes drinking her in. He was a man in his fifties I would say, losing his hair. Unshaven, and wearing a shabby raincoat over charcoal-grey trousers and a thread-worn cardigan. ‘Don’t come near me!’ He raised his voice above the roar of the water and glanced beyond her in our direction.

‘What are you doing up there?’ Mairead asked him.

‘What do you think?’

Mairead looked down at the river and shook her head. ‘Not a good idea. You’ll ruin your shoes.’

He looked at her with something like disbelief, and then she smiled, and there was something about Mairead’s smile that no man I ever knew could resist. He smiled back. A timid, uncertain smile. ‘They’re not new,’ he said. ‘So it won’t really matter.’

She looked at his feet. ‘You’re wearing odd socks.’

He seemed surprised, and took a look for himself. ‘Who cares?’

‘There must be someone who does.’

His lips tightened into a grim line and he shook his head. ‘No one.’

‘No one at all?’

‘The only one who ever did is gone.’

I saw her eyes fall upon the man’s left hand holding the lamp post and the band of gold on his third finger. ‘Your wife?’

He nodded.

‘She left you?’

‘She’s dead.’

‘Recently?’

Again he shook his head. ‘A year ago today. Cancer. It was a long time coming.’ He turned to look at the water flashing below, then back at Mairead. ‘I tried so very hard. But I just can’t do it any more.’

Mairead moved carefully, then, turning around to pull herself up into a sitting position on the parapet at his feet, hands flat on the wall on either side of her. ‘No children?’

Another shake of the head. Then, ‘Well, yes. But he’s in Australia. I told you, nobody cares.’

She tilted her head to look up at him. ‘I care.’

He almost laughed. ‘You don’t even know me.’

‘Yes, I do. I know you very well.’

‘No, you don’t!’ His tone was hostile now.

‘Yes I do.’ And I saw a shadow cross her face, a cloud of real emotion. ‘You’re every man who’s ever lost the woman he loves. You’re my dad. I wish I’d been there for him. But I never knew, you see. He never said. And I never found out till he was gone. The young are too busy with their own lives. And it’s easy to forget that your folks still have lives, too. Feelings. You never lose those, even when you get older.’ She turned moist eyes towards him. ‘Have you told him? Your son. Have you told him how you feel?’

‘I’m not going to bother him with stuff like that.’

‘And you don’t think he’ll be bothered when the police come knocking on his door to tell him his father killed himself? You don’t think he’ll wonder why you never spoke to him? Or the guilt he’ll probably live with for the rest of his life, thinking there’s something he could or should have done?’

The man’s face crumpled, then, and tears rolled down his cheeks with the rain. ‘I didn’t want to be a nuisance.’

Mairead eased herself off the wall and held out a hand towards him. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘You’re not a nuisance. Let’s go and call him. Right now.’

‘It’s the middle of the night there,’ he said.

Mairead smiled. ‘He won’t mind. Trust me.’

He looked at her for a long moment, and she held his eye, hand still outstretched, until finally he grasped it and jumped down on to the pavement beside her. Mairead put her arms around him and hugged him. The rain intensified then, as if crying with them, soaking them both as they stood in the middle of the bridge, darkness falling around them, the lights of cars raking past, drivers oblivious to the little life-and-death drama playing itself out by the parapet.

Then, still holding his hand, she walked him towards us.

‘Come on, mate,’ Roddy said, ushering him into the car. ‘Let’s get you home.’

The man lived in a semi-detached house in a short suburban street on the outskirts of the town. A drab, miserable place. Mairead switched on the lights and put on a kettle. A train rattled past the foot of a long, narrow garden with a dilapidated potting shed and an overgrown lawn.

Roddy went next door and came back with the neighbour, an elderly woman who fussed and flapped in the tiny kitchen where the rest of us were gathered, and said she knew a friend who would come and sit with him. And Mairead sat him down by the electric fire with the phone, and dialled the number of his son in Australia.

We left him then, with the neighbour keeping an eye till the friend arrived, the man talking hesitantly to his son ten thousand miles away. I could not really imagine what kind of a conversation it might be. But he was alive, and he was speaking about how he felt instead of bottling it up and driving himself to suicide. And that was all down to Mairead.

On the path, as we walked back to the vehicles parked in the road, I said to her, ‘I didn’t know your parents were dead.’

She shrugged. ‘They’re not.’ And then she laughed at my frown. ‘Oh, Fin, Fin, you’re such an innocent. The situation called for a story, so I gave him one. When I sing about a broken heart, or everlasting love, folk need to believe that it’s true. That my tears are real. I’m good at that.’

I thought about the emotion which had clouded her face as she lied to the man on the bridge, and how easily both he and I had been convinced. And I realized then that I could never trust her to tell me the truth about anything.

The upshot of it all was that we arrived an hour late for the gig on the pier. The manager was a skinny, uptight, bald little man called Tuckfield. He wore a blue suit with brown shoes. A combination I had never trusted. He was red-faced and close to apoplexy. And, of course, there was no sign of the smooth-talking Donald to pour salve on troubled waters.

‘I have three hundred paying customers in there baying for my blood or their money back,’ he spluttered at Roddy.

Me and the guys left Roddy to try and explain as we unloaded the van. I don’t know how we did it, but the band was on stage and opening the show within half an hour. Myself, and a Glasgow boy called Archie, who drove the car, lay down in sleeping bags in the back of the van to try to get some sleep, and the band played for almost three hours to make up for their late arrival.

The first I knew that there was any trouble was when the back doors of the van were flung open and Roddy stood out on the pier, his face grey with anger. ‘That bastard won’t pay us!’

‘What?’ I sat bolt upright. If the band didn’t get paid, I wouldn’t get paid.

‘We played nearly an hour longer than agreed to make up for being late, but he still says we were in breach of contract and won’t pay.’

I jumped out the back. ‘Let’s go talk to him.’

We found him in his office at the end of a corridor behind the stage. He was wary and defensive when Roddy and I came in, and took an instinctive step back from the door. He raised a hand. ‘I don’t want any trouble.’

‘There’ll be no trouble,’ I said. ‘Just pay us and we’re gone.’

He waggled a finger. ‘No, no, no. You people left me hung out to dry tonight. That wasn’t professional. You broke your contract. Get me your manager on the phone, and when we’ve agreed compensation, you’ll get your money.’

‘You’ve had your compensation,’ Roddy almost bellowed at him. ‘We played an extra fucking hour!’

‘I still had people asking for their money back. People who left before you even showed up.’

I thought Roddy was going to go for him, and stepped in quickly, hand raised. ‘Okay, let’s get Donald on his mobile.’ Not everyone had mobile phones in those days. Donald had the latest model, but there was no guarantee that he would be in any fit state to answer it. He should have been at the gig with us. But he wasn’t. God only knew what had become of him.

I borrowed Tuckfield’s phone and listened as the number rang unanswered at the other end, until Donald’s messaging service kicked in. There didn’t seem any point in leaving a message. When I hung up I saw murder in Roddy’s eyes.

I tried to be the voice of reason. ‘Now look, Mr Tuckfield, you know why we were late. We saved a man’s life tonight. And we gave you an extra hour of our time to make up for it. Now, we’re not unreasonable people. And I’m sure you’re not an unreasonable man. So we’ll just go and pack up the van, and wait out front. And when you decide you’re going to pay us, we’ll shake hands, and say no more, and be on our way.’ I paused. ‘And if you don’t. .’ I could feel Roddy’s eyes on me, wondering what was coming next. ‘Well, you can stay in here and rot. I’ve driven two hundred and fifty fucking miles to get here, and I’ve another two hundred and fifty fucking miles to get home, and I’m not fucking leaving till I get my fucking money.’

I wasn’t one to swear much, although Mr Tuckfield wasn’t to know that, but Roddy did. And as I strode back out to the van, with Roddy almost running to keep up, he said, ‘Maybe you should be our manager, Fin.’ I just gave him a look.

We were packed up and ready to go shortly after midnight. Mairead and the other members of the band who travelled in the car wanted to go, leaving me and Roddy to deal with Tuckfield.

But I was adamant. ‘No. We all stay, or we all go. And if I go without being paid, this is the last gig I drive for you people.’ And they knew I meant it.

So we stood around outside at the end of the pier, smoking, wrapped up in coats and scarves, listening to the sea washing up against the stanchions below us. The streetlights of the town, rising up across the hill beyond the promenade, twinkled in the dark. But the good people of this once popular holiday resort had long since gone to bed, and the houses that lined the hillside stood in darkness. The rain had stopped, but everything was still wet, reflecting street lamps and stars.

I didn’t know how long Tuckfield was prepared to stay in there, but I was ready to sit it out till the following morning, if necessary. By one o’clock the others were getting restless.

‘Come on,’ Strings said. ‘This is pointless. Let’s go.’

Roddy was shaking his head slowly, almost like a man in a trance. He muttered, very nearly inaudibly, ‘This is the end for Donald fucking Murray. He’s finished. Finished!’

All the lights around the pavilion went out, plunging the end of the pier into darkness. Everyone was suddenly alert. Almost at the same time, the distant wailing of a police siren drifted to us across the night, and I turned to see the blue light of a police patrol car heading down the hill towards the front. It was no surprise when it bumped across the promenade and headed straight up the pier towards us.

‘Jesus!’ Rambo said. ‘He’s called the cops.’

I felt indignation welling in my chest. ‘So? We haven’t done anything wrong.’

But as it turned out, the cops weren’t interested in us. The patrol car drove straight past, swerving into a sideways skid on a handbrake half-turn, and coming to a stop right outside the main door. A white-faced Tuckfield emerged, quickly locking the door behind him, and jumped into the back seat of the police car. The car revved and spun its back wheels, and sped off along the pier.

For a moment we all stood watching in disbelief.

Mairead sat in the front seat of the car, face pale and angry, like a full moon reflected on the windscreen. Roddy and Strings were in the back, Roddy sitting side-on, with his legs out of the open door. I don’t really know what possessed me, but anger rose in me like overheated milk and I jumped behind the wheel of the car and started the engine.

‘What are you doing?’ Roddy shouted.

‘Just shut the door!’

He barely had time to get his legs in and pull the door closed before I had spun the car around to accelerate hard along the pier in pursuit of the police car. ‘For Christ’s sake, Fin, you can’t go chasing the cops!’

I saw Strings’ frightened-rabbit face ballooning into my rearview mirror. ‘Jesus, Fin, you’ll get us all arrested.’

I said nothing, and as I pressed my foot to the floor in an attempt to close the gap on the blue flashing light ahead of us, I was aware of Mairead turning to look at me. But she never said a word.

The police car slewed across the promenade and turned south towards a collection of fairground attractions shuttered up for the night. The driver ran a red light, and turned up the hill. I could feel the tension in my own hands as I spun the wheel and followed. There were no other vehicles around this early in the morning.

At the top of the hill the police car turned right then dog-legged to the left, and I felt my tyres sliding on the wet surface of the road as I followed, losing control for just a moment before finding grip again and picking up speed. I was almost hypnotized by the blue flashing light dead ahead, without a single thought of what on earth it was I might do if and when I caught up with it. But we were gaining on it, and the tension being generated by the others in the car was almost tangible.

Suddenly the brake-lights of the car in front filled our windscreen, blurred and dragged across it by the wipers. I stood on my brakes, feeling the car drifting beneath me, swinging left, and then right as I pumped the brake for grip and swung the wheel one way then the other to right the skid. We stopped, I think, within six inches of the rear bumper of the police car.

There was an almost collective exhalation of relief from Roddy, Strings and Mairead, and I sat clutching the wheel, breathing hard. For what felt like an inordinate length of time nothing happened. Both cars sat there, one behind the other, engines idling.

I could see Tuckfield’s frightened face, half turned to peer back at us through the dark. Nobody moved. Nobody spoke.

Then the driver’s door of the police car swung slowly open. A goliath of a uniformed police sergeant stepped out on to the street, pulling on his cap and tugging its shiny peak down over his eyes. He stood for a moment glaring at us, then walked slowly towards my side of the car, one hand on his hip, the other touching the handle of the baton that hung from his belt.

I wound down the window as he leaned in to peer at me. His face was impassive, and his dark eyes flickered first towards Mairead, and then Roddy and Strings in the back, before returning to me. I could see a shaving of ginger hair around his head beneath his cap. ‘Are you in the band?’

‘I’m the roadie.’

He nodded and took a black notebook and pen from his breast pocket. He reached past me and handed it to Mairead. ‘My daughter’s got your CD. I figure she’d love to have your autograph.’

Mairead gave him one of her smiles. ‘Of course.’ She took his notebook, found a blank page and signed it. She glanced over her shoulder. ‘Do you want the others?’

‘Are they in the group?’

‘They are.’

He nodded, and Mairead handed his notebook back for Roddy and Strings to sign. Roddy reached over my shoulder to give it to me, and I handed it back. He returned it to his breast pocket, then focused his glare on me once more. To my surprise he thrust his big hand through my window.

‘I’ll shake your hand, son.’ For a moment I couldn’t bring my arm to move, before suddenly it reached up, almost involuntarily, for my hand to be gripped by his. A warm, firm handshake, that he held for what seemed like an eternity. When finally he returned it to me he said, ‘You’ve got some fucking nerve, boy, I’ll give you that.’ He paused to draw a long breath. ‘Your story had better be good.’

So I told him. He stood and listened in silence, his slow, stertorous breathing pulsing out clouds of misted breath to swirl around his head. When I had finished he nodded and drew in his lips. ‘Well, I’ll tell you, son. And here’s the thing.’ He nodded towards his car. ‘Mr Tuckfield there has friends in high places. And I’m just doing what I’m told, no questions asked. So whatever the rights or wrongs of what’s gone down here tonight, you’ll be going home without your money, and damned lucky not to be spending the night in a police cell.’ I could have sworn then that there was a smile in his eyes that he was doing his best to conceal. ‘In all my years in the force,’ he said, ‘I have never been chased in a police car. And I’m damned sure it’ll never happen again.’ He flicked his head back down the hill towards the seafront. ‘On your way.’ He leaned down, then, smiling past me at Mairead, and tapped his breast pocket. ‘Thanks for the autographs.’

We sat in silence and watched as he got back behind the wheel of his car and drove off into the night. I could see Tuckfield’s smug face grinning back at us. I wound up the window and Roddy said, ‘Donald’s fucking dead!’

I never was party to exactly what transpired between Roddy and Donald, but within the week the band had fired him and signed up with an established London agency. And while Donald’s career and life then went into free fall, Amran’s fortunes soared. They made several television appearances, and Roddy and Strings were commissioned to write a song for a Hollywood movie being shot in Scotland. The producers liked it so much they asked the band to write and record all the incidental music, which then became the basis of their next album. The subsequent success of the film led to even greater success for Amran. The song was released as a single and shot straight into the charts at No. 1, where it stayed for almost five weeks. By the time their next CD was in the music stores, they were riding high on what appeared to be an unstoppable track to the top.

Except that Roddy, for all his talent and all his ambition, never lived to see it.

I remember that it was the following summer, June or July, when I heard. I had got drunk the previous night, on the rebound from a relationship of several months, and ended up in the bed of a girl I’d met at a party. She was a student, living in a bedsit in Partick, on the downmarket edge of Glasgow’s west end. I didn’t wake up till ten or eleven, pretty hungover and with very little recollection of what had passed between us the previous night. She didn’t even seem familiar to me as she leaned over the bed and shook me gently awake.

‘You told me last night you roadied for Amran,’ she said.

I could hardly open my mouth, it was so dry. ‘So?’

‘Roddy Mackenzie’s the keyboard player, right?’

‘Jesus Christ, what about it?’ I screwed up my eyes against the light.

‘It’s all over the morning news. Apparently his plane went missing somewhere up the west coast yesterday evening. Search and rescue have been out all night. They’ve given up hope of finding him alive. They’re just looking for wreckage out at sea now.’