The Chessmen

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

It’s strange that history should have affected us the way it did. But the discovery that our antecedents had survived the Iolaire together, one because of the other, formed a bond between me and Whistler that no one else could really understand. We were very different animals, he and I. I was quite a self-contained boy as a teenager, I think. I didn’t make friends easily. And perhaps that’s the only thing that Whistler and I really had in common. I was a cool, even-tempered lad, not much prone to depression, although there was plenty I could have got depressed about when I think back on it. Whistler, on the other hand, could fall into a black funk in the blink of an eye if things didn’t go just the way he planned. Other times he would be irresistibly funny, the life and soul of any party.

He never appeared to know, though, when he had crossed the line between what was funny and what was offensive. I saw him get away with murder. Putting his hands on a girl’s breasts and somehow managing to make a joke of it. And then another time getting his face slapped for making some wildly inappropriate remark. Which would send him off into one of his moods. He had meant no offence. Why hadn’t anyone seen the funny side?

He was brilliant and mercurial, talented and unpredictable. To be his friend you had to work at it. But you also had to be accepted by him. And I had been granted exclusive access to that club, a club with a membership of one.

I didn’t often stay over at Whistler’s house. His father was seldom sober, and when he was drunk he was unpredictable, liked to throw things around the place and bellow at the top of his voice. He never did us any physical harm, but I was scared of him, and so was Whistler.

Although already growing into the giant of a man he would become, Whistler was still no match for his dad, who was two sizes bigger. Derek Macaskill had spent half his life at sea, first in the merchant navy and later on the trawlers. But he was a man hopelessly addicted to the drink, and had become not only unemployed but unemployable. He was a liability aboard a boat. He had lost an eye in an accident on a trawler and was still, apparently, on some kind of disability benefit all these years later.

The glass eye they had replaced it with never moved, and no matter where you were in the room, or where his other eye was pointing, it always appeared to be looking at you. Occasionally he would take it out and polish it in some filthy handkerchief, with a big malicious grin on his face. He only did it because he knew it gave us the willies.

I’ve never seen such big hands on a man, fists you wouldn’t want to be on the wrong end of. His hair was cropped close to his scalp, dark once but rapidly turning grey. A long scar ran through it from his forehead to a point behind his left ear. Whether he had acquired it in the same accident that lost him his eye I never knew.

Following the death of his mother, when he was just nine, Whistler had spent a couple of years living with relatives of hers at Miabhaig, until big Derek Macaskill, fresh from being banned from the boats, came one day to claim him and take him back to live with him at Ardroil.

I’d always wondered where he got the money to buy his drink. He was, after all, an unemployed man on benefit. But I would find out soon enough.

Solas were really beginning to make their name then, playing gigs all over the island, at ceilidhs and school dances, in pubs and village halls. It was how I spent most of my Friday and Saturday nights, and sometimes week nights, too. Humphing gear. Me and Big Kenny. Kenny had turned seventeen before me, and was the first to get his driving licence. So it was only natural that he would become the roadie.

None of us knew it then, but Whistler had already taken his decision not to go to Glasgow, and his interest in the band had begun to wane. There were nights when he simply didn’t turn up. He never told anyone, not even me, and the band would frequently find themselves having to perform without their flute player.

Not that it made a radical difference to the quality of their performance. They were always great. At least, I thought so. But the haunting wail of that Celtic flute, particularly in tandem with Mairead’s violin, was the grace note that made them better than great. It made them magical. And it made Roddy mad when Whistler didn’t show up.

It all came to a head one night after a gig at the Cross Inn at Ness. After three straight gigs without showing, Whistler turned up as if nothing were amiss. He was in one of his manic good moods, and oblivious to the ill will festering towards him among the other members of the band. There had clearly been meetings to discuss his absences, discussions to which I had not been privy. But I knew that something was brewing.

Kenny and I had gone into the bar behind the hotel for a pint while the band was playing. When we came out at the end of the show, night was leaching the last light out of the sky. We went to take the van around to the front. Kenny had parked it beside the big tree that grew in the car park then, the only real tree on the whole of the west coast. A giant of a tree. God knows how it had survived the winds that drove in off the Atlantic all these years, but it must have seen a few generations come and go.

Roddy and Whistler were standing in its shadow almost screaming at each other. We heard them before we saw them. The crowds streaming out of the lounge bar in the hotel, to cars and minibuses, turned heads in their direction.

‘For Christ’s sake keep it down, boys.’ Kenny was self-conscious. But neither of them took any notice.

‘It’s just not fair on the rest of us,’ Roddy shouted. ‘All our arrangements, all our rehearsals, are based around us being a six-piece band. A lot of it built around your fucking flute. There’s a big bloody hole in our sound when you’re not there. It’s embarrassing.’

Whistler stood his ground, unfazed apparently by their embarrassment. ‘Maybe you should have thought of that before you started trying to ease me out.’

Which came with the unexpected force of a slap in the face to Roddy. ‘Ease you out? What are you talking about, man? No one’s trying to ease you out.’

‘You blew into Uig with your mainland money in your pocket and just took over. Everything. The band, the girls, the limelight. A real fucking star.’

Roddy shook his head in exasperation. ‘There was no band!’

‘Aye there was. Me and Strings and Mairead were playing together long before you showed up.’

Roddy was scathing now. ‘That wasn’t a band. That was just kids playing about in someone’s front room.’

Whistler took a dangerous step towards him. ‘What would you know? You were an incomer. You knew nothing about us, or the way we were. You just took over. Took it all. Mairead, too.’

Which was the first time I became aware of any tension between them over Mairead.

‘Mairead?’ Roddy gasped. ‘Don’t make me laugh. Mairead wouldn’t be seen dead with a loser like you.’

And that tipped Whistler over the edge. He leapt at Roddy, big hands grabbing handfuls of shirt and face, and the two of them went tumbling backwards to roll over several times in the dusty gravel of the car park, feet and fists flying. Roddy was an altogether more delicately built boy, and stood no chance against the monster that Whistler was becoming. I heard him cry out in pain, and saw blood on his face, and Kenny and I were on to them in a flash, dragging the flailing Whistler off him, ducking and diving ourselves to avoid the flying fists.

The crowd which had gathered around scattered backwards like displaced water. I heard girls screaming and some of the boys shouting encouragement. Kenny and I pushed Whistler up against the tree and pinned him there, the three of us breathing hard, almost growling, like animals. Roddy scrambled to his feet, bloodied about the lips. But his biggest injury was the one inflicted on his pride.

‘You fucking idiot!’ he screamed. ‘This is the end. You’re finished. You’re fucking finished!’ Strings and Skins and Rambo pushed through the group of fascinated spectators, and pulled him away, casting hostile backward glances at Whistler. And the crowd, sensing that it was over, started to dissipate.

Me and Kenny let Whistler go then, and he snarled, ‘I’ll kill him.’

‘No you won’t.’ The solitary voice came out of the dark, a lone figure left standing as the crowd melted away. It was Mairead. She was looking at him with an extraordinary intensity. ‘We’ve worked too bloody hard to get this far, Whistler. We’re not going to throw it all away now. Not because of you.’

To my amazement he was almost cowed by her. He looked at the ground, unable to meet her eye.

‘We’ve got rehearsal Wednesday night. You’ll be there, right?’ And when he didn’t respond, ‘Right?’ More forcefully this time.

He nodded. Still without looking at her.

‘I’ll speak to Roddy. We’ll just put this behind us and move on, okay?’ There was such authority in her tone, such complete confidence in her ability to manage these boys who brawled over her. It was something to see, the power that she possessed. And I think, too, it was the first time I saw in her that naked ambition. We’re not going to throw it all away now. Mairead was going places. She knew it even then. And nothing was going to get in her way. Certainly not Whistler.

Someone with a car gave the rest of the group a lift back to Uig, and Whistler wandered off in the dark, to sit brooding on a wall at the south end of the car park. Kenny and I packed up and carried everything to the van in silence. It wasn’t until we had finished that I said, ‘So what’s the story with Whistler, Roddy and Mairead, then?’

Big Kenny just shrugged. ‘You knew that Whistler and Mairead were an item before Roddy showed up?’

Of course, I’d heard about Whistler and Mairead being childhood sweethearts, but not about how it ended. I nodded.

‘Ever since primary three. Inseparable, they were.’

‘So what happened?’

‘Roddy happened.’

‘I didn’t know he wasn’t from Uig originally.’

Kenny lit up a cigarette and offered me one, and we leaned against the van and smoked them. ‘His grandparents were. But his folks were born on the mainland somewhere. His dad made a fortune in something or other, I’ve never been quite sure what. And they came back and built that beautiful big house on the road up to Baile na Cille that looks out over the sands. He still goes back to the mainland from time to time, doing whatever it is he does, and Roddy’s never been short of a bob or two. That’s how he could afford the synth, and the Marshall stack. And who do you think’s paying up the PA, and coughed up for the deposit on the van?’

I have to confess, I had never really thought too much about where the money came from. The band was paid, of course, for the gigs, but when I thought about it then, I realized their earnings would never have been enough to cover the costs.

Kenny said, ‘Whistler was right. Roddy was like a star that fell from the sky. Exotic, rich, talented. And Mairead was attracted to him like a moth to the light.’ He flicked his cigarette into the night sending a shower of sparks skittering across the car park. ‘End of Mairead and Whistler.’

It didn’t take much to persuade Whistler to stay over at Crobost that night. I knew that he was hurting inside, in his own self-destructive way, and I couldn’t bear the thought of him going back to the blackhouse in Uig, with his drunken father sitting polishing his eye in front of the fire. It was a Friday night and the band wasn’t playing on the Saturday, so we had the whole weekend ahead of us. I knew my aunt wouldn’t mind. There was a spare room at the end of the upstairs hall. No one ever came to stay, but there was always a bed made up in it.

Kenny dropped us off, and we went into the house to find my aunt sitting on her own in the front room, in her favourite armchair by the fire. She seemed a million miles away. The room was a nod to the sixties. Orange and turquoise curtains, boldly patterned wallpaper, big brightly coloured china pots that she bought from Eachan the potter at the bottom of the hill. She was listening to what I recognized as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on her old stereo system. Vinyl! It was so dated now. Everyone had cassette players in those days, or CD players, the new big thing if you could afford it. And she was smoking. She appeared to be pleased by the thought that we would have a visitor for the weekend and told Whistler he could use our phone to let his folks know that he wouldn’t be home.

Whistler was embarrassed. ‘It’s just my dad. He won’t notice.’ She gave him an odd look.

Afterwards, when we left the house to wander down the track to the shore for a smoke in the dark, he said to me, ‘She smokes dope, your aunt.’

I looked at him in amazement. ‘What makes you think that?’

‘Don’t you smell it?’

‘That’s incense,’ I said.

He laughed. ‘That’s what she burns to cover the smell of the dope, you idiot. Maybe she thinks you’d disapprove.’

I was stunned. Kids my age smoked dope. Adults didn’t. Or so I thought. And my aunt seemed ancient to me. Later, I realized that Whistler was probably right, and that she almost certainly acquired her marijuana from Eachan, who sold her his pottery and was a well-known dopehead. It wasn’t until much later, when I found out that she was suffering from terminal cancer, that I wondered if perhaps she had been taking it for the pain. But then I figured that more likely she’d been smoking it since the sixties, or earlier. Those heady days of youth and optimism when she must have felt that her whole life stretched endlessly ahead of her. A habit she never kicked, until those endless days finally came to the close that none of us ever quite believes in.

It was not April yet, and so it was not warm. We sat down among the rocks, huddled in our coats, and smoked a couple of cigarettes, watching periodic moonlight flit across the swell in the bay. It was more sheltered here, facing northeast, and protected from the prevailing wind. The collar of orange crustaceans on the rocks along the high-tide mark glowed in the dark.

At length I said to him, ‘Is this all about Mairead? You not turning up for gigs, getting into fights with Roddy?’

He gave me one of his looks.

‘It is, isn’t it? She’s got you and Roddy and every other boy in the school running around after her. Fighting over her now.’

‘That’s not what we were fighting about.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘No!’ He almost bared his teeth. ‘Anyway, it’s none of your business.’ He flicked his cigarette end out over the water and stood up, signalling the end of our conversation. He walked away into the dark, and I sat there for a while wondering why I bothered. There didn’t seem to be much reward in a one-way friendship.

I thought about Mairead, and those dark-blue flashing eyes, and the effect she had on every male around her. And I wondered if she realized the heartache she caused, and if she did, whether she did it on purpose, maybe even enjoyed it. I decided there and then that I didn’t really like her very much, even though I knew that she could reduce me to incoherence with just a look.

Which is when I heard Whistler’s shout in the dark, and the sound of splashing, even above the wind and the wash of the incoming tide. I was on my feet in an instant, and running over the rocks towards the sound of his cry. I clambered up over razor-sharp shells crusted around the giant boulders supporting the harbour wall, and up on to the slipway that ran down to the jetty. Even in the dark, I could see white water frothing in the still of the sheltered pool where they kept the crabs. I ran down to the quay, and saw Whistler thrashing about, treading water and gasping from the cold.

‘Jesus!’ he shouted. ‘Some idiot left a bloody boobytrap on the quayside. I could have killed myself!’

I knelt down and flipped a big rusted metal boat ring over on its axis. It had been cemented into the stone long before either of us was born. And I couldn’t help laughing.

‘It’s not funny!’

‘It’s bloody hilarious, Whistler. You want to watch where you’re putting your big feet.’ I uncoiled a length of rope lying among the creels and threw him an end. He grabbed it and pulled himself up on to the ramp. Some of the cages had burst open, and there were crabs clinging to his coat. He stood chittering in the cold and cursing as I pulled them off him and threw them back into the water, laughing the whole time. Which only made him worse. ‘Come on,’ I said, pushing him up the slipway ahead of me. ‘Let’s get you out of these clothes before you catch your death.’

It must have been midnight before we got him out of his wet things and into a bath. My aunt fussed and faffed in a way she never did over me, making sure he had big soft clean towels, and taking his clothes away to put through the wash.

He was still in the bath, and I was in my pyjamas and ready for bed, when my aunt came to my bedroom door. She had a strange expression on her face.

‘I want you to come downstairs, Finlay.’

I knew immediately that something was wrong. ‘What is it?’

‘There’s something I want you to look at.’

I followed her down the steep narrow staircase, on uneven stairs that creaked like wet snow, and into the little hall at the front door. She turned into the laundry room. It was little more than a scullery, with a washing machine and a tumble dryer. A short pulley, usually laden with drying clothes, hung from the ceiling. Whistler’s wet clothes were spread out over the worktop above the machines.

She turned to me. ‘Look at this.’

I glanced at them, full of incomprehension. ‘What about them?’

‘Look!’ She lifted his socks. ‘They’re full of holes.’ And as she held them up I saw that they were. Worn to holes at the heel and the ball of the foot, and wafer-thin along the line of the toes, almost at the point of disintegration. ‘And these.’ She held up his underpants, stretched out between fastidious thumbs and forefingers. It took a great effort of will for her even to touch them, and there was a look of extreme disgust on her face. ‘The elastic’s perished.’ She dropped them. ‘And his trousers. Look how he keeps them up.’ She showed me the safety pin at the waistband where a button had once been. The zipper was broken. ‘And here.’ She turned them over and I saw where the seam between the legs had burst open, the stitching rotted and broken.

Then she held up his coat and turned it inside out. ‘And this isn’t much better. The lining’s all torn and worn thin. And look at his trainers for God’s sake.’ She stooped to lift them on to the counter. ‘You can’t see it at a glance, but the soles have come away from the uppers, and it looks like he’s used duct tape to stick them back together.’ She glared at me with accusation in her eyes. ‘How could you not notice?’

‘Notice what?’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Finlay. This!’ And she waved her hand over the assembled garments. ‘They’re only fit for the bin.’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I thought it was just his look.’

‘Holes in your socks aren’t a look, Finlay.’ She took me by the arm and steered me through to the living room and lowered her voice. ‘He lives with his father, he said. Where’s his mother?’

‘She’s dead.’

‘You’ve met his father?’ I nodded. ‘And been to the house?’

‘Yes.’

She closed the door and said, ‘Sit down. I want you to tell me everything.’

I said nothing to Whistler when he came out of the bathroom. I gave him a pair of baggy old pyjama bottoms that just about fitted him, and an XXL T-shirt that he stretched over his chest. He wrapped my old dressing gown gratefully around himself and went off to the spare room at the end of the hall muttering about bloody idiots who left dangerous objects lying about on jetties. We slept until almost twelve the next day.

It was the sound of my aunt’s car pulling up at the front door that woke me. I screwed up my eyes against the midday sunshine and from my window saw her take several carrier bags from the back seat. There was a fresh blustery wind chasing random clouds across a broken sky, sunlight spilling from it in occasional pools and splashes. But it was dry and my spirits lifted.

By the time Whistler and I got ourselves downstairs, she had a late breakfast sizzling for us in the kitchen. Porridge, followed by bacon, egg, sausage, black pudding and fried bread, all washed down with big tumblers of fresh orange juice. Whistler wolfed into it, and barely looked up until he had finished. Then the three of us sat around the table drinking tea, and Whistler told a tall story about two men trying to take a bull on a raft across to an island in Uig. He swore it was true. They were very nervous, he said, that the raft would tip over and the bull would drown. Then the thing did capsize, halfway across, and tipped all three into the sea. The men thought they were going to drown because neither of them could swim. But then it turned out that the bull could, and so they clung on to him, and he swam to the island and got them ashore. The way he told it, Whistler had us all in stitches.

I watched my aunt as he spoke. There was more life in her eyes, I think, than I had ever seen in them before. And she laughed in a way I’d never heard her laugh. A laugh like running water, that flowed from smiling lips. I don’t know what it was about Whistler that attracted her. It was certainly more than feeling sorry for him. But I’ve often thought that she’d probably rather have had Whistler to raise than me. And although I had never loved her, I felt a disconcerting pang of jealousy.

When we had finished eating, Whistler said, ‘I’d better get dressed.’ And he looked around for his clothes. My aunt flicked me a look.

‘I’ve put them in the bin, John Angus,’ she said.

There was an odd silence in the kitchen as his jaw dropped and he stared at her in disbelief. I felt like someone watching a movie. Involved in the action, but with no influence over the way it was unravelling.

‘I’ve been to Stornoway to buy you some new. Nothing fancy mind. I went to the Crofters. They’ll do you for now.’ And she lifted the carrier bags she had brought from the car on to the table.

Whistler still hadn’t spoken. He looked in the bags, one after the other. There was a sturdy pair of leather boots. Jeans. A chequered shirt. A waterproof jacket with a hood. And seven pairs of socks and underpants.

‘I wasn’t sure about sizes, so I just got the biggest I could.’

Whistler’s mouth was still hanging open. He looked at her and shook his head. ‘I can’t afford this.’

‘I can,’ is all she said, and in a way that brooked no argument. ‘Now go and get dressed. I’d like to be on the road in fifteen.’

‘Where are we going?’ I asked her.

‘To Uig.’

I glanced at Whistler. His face had flushed pink, his big dark eyes filled with confusion. I could see an objection playing around his lips, but it never quite found voice. My aunt was not someone to be argued with.

We drove down to Uig in silence. Me in the front with my aunt, Whistler filling most of the back seat and unusually subdued. It was a typical day in late March, the wind blowing in strongly off the Atlantic all the way down the west coast, rain never far from its leading edge. But we could see the sky almost clear to the east, and sunshine falling in shifting patches somewhere across the dead, deserted interior. Far to the south we could see where the rain fell intermittently, rainbows fleetingly crayon-colouring the sky then vanishing again as the sunlight was swallowed by more cloud. And as we left Garynahine behind us, and followed the tortuous route down to the south-west, storm clouds gathered ominously among the mountains that rose up beyond Uig, a portent of coming conflict.

A sense of dread was already growing in me. God knows what Whistler was feeling. I glanced in the mirror and saw him sitting uncomfortably in his new clothes, but his face gave nothing away.

To my enormous relief, there was no sign of Whistler’s dad when we arrived at the croft. My aunt banged her car door shut and confidently pushed open the door of the blackhouse.

‘Hello?’ she called out, to be greeted by silence.

Whistler and I followed her in and stood wordlessly watching as she cast an appraising eye about the place. Her nose wrinkled with disgust.

‘Show me where you sleep,’ she said, and Whistler led her into the tiny room at the back that was his bedroom. It smelled rank in here, his bed unmade, sheets sweat-stained and dirty. She went through the wardrobe, and a chest of drawers, finding little more than a pair of jeans with the knees out of them, and a couple of ragged old jumpers. There was a pair of mud-caked wellies, and a drawer with two or three pairs of threadbare socks and some underpants. Like the ones she had thrown away, the elastic was rotten. ‘Where are the rest of your clothes?’ she demanded.

He shrugged. ‘In the laundry.’

‘And who does your laundry?’

‘I take it with me to Stornoway during the week.’ It was the first time I had realized the importance of the student lodgings to Whistler. It was the one place he could keep himself clean, where he could shower and do his laundry. I glanced at my aunt and saw a look that I knew well. A contained rage. She turned and marched back out to the living room. There was an old refrigerator next to a sink filled with unwashed dishes. She threw it open and stood looking inside. The interior bulb was long gone. ‘Turn on the lights,’ she instructed, and Whistler obeyed without a word. She peered into the dark interior of the fridge. ‘There’s nothing but beer in here. Where’s the food?’

Whistler shrugged and opened a wall cupboard on the other side of the sink. There was some chipped and broken crockery, a half-empty bag of sugar gone solid from the damp. Teabags. A jar of instant coffee. A jar of jam which she opened to find mould growing inside. On a worktop below it, there was a bread tin with half a loaf of stale bread inside it. I could see the horror on my aunt’s face.

‘What do you eat?’

Whistler blew air through loosely pursed lips. ‘Fish, mostly. At the weekends. Whatever I can catch.’ He glanced at me, and I felt his embarrassment for him. ‘But I do most of my eating during the week.’ And I remembered how he had devoured my aunt’s late breakfast that morning as if he hadn’t eaten in a week, and maybe he hadn’t. It had never occurred to me that the only place he got a square meal was at school. It was a miracle he was growing at the rate he was.

‘What the fuck’s going on here?’

We all turned at the roar of Whistler’s dad’s voice. Mr Macaskill’s big frame seemed to fill the room, casting its shadow across us.

‘You will not use language like that in the presence of the children!’ My aunt’s voice scythed through the fetid air of the Macaskill blackhouse and reduced the big man by several inches. He looked confused. It was the first time in a long time that either of us had been called children, and I doubted if any woman had ever spoken to Mr Macaskill like that in his life.

‘Who the hell are you?’

She took several steps towards him, and Whistler and I moved aside to let her past. The difference between them was almost comical. This tiny lady confronting a giant of almost biblical proportions. David and Goliath. But there was no question of who was the more dominant. ‘You filthy brute of a man!’ Her voice was shrill and intense and filled with fury. ‘You send your child out into the world hungry and dressed in rags, while you drink your life away. Maybe it’s a worthless life anyway. And maybe you don’t care about it.’ She flung out a clenched fist, finger pointed at Whistler. ‘But here’s a young life that’s worth something. A young life that needs nurtured and fed. Not neglected and abused.’

She spun around and returned to the fridge, throwing open the door and reaching inside to scoop all those cans of beer into the crook of her arm and sweep them out and on to the floor. The noise of it was startling, and we all three of us looked at her in amazement.

‘Next time I come, I want to see this fridge filled with food, not alcohol. And I want to see clothes in the drawers of that boy’s room, and clean sheets on his bed. And if you are not capable of doing that, Mr Macaskill, then I will make it my personal crusade to have this young man removed from your care, and whatever benefits you scrounge from the state taken from you as well.’ Her face was flushed now, and she was breathing hard. ‘Is that clear?’ And when the dumbstruck Mr Macaskill failed to respond she raised her voice in pitch. ‘Is that clear?’

The big man blinked, cowed and subdued, in just the way I had seen Mairead dominate Whistler. ‘Aye.’

‘Call yourself a father? You should be ashamed of yourself.’

Whistler’s dad glanced at his son, and I was astonished to see that there was, in fact, shame in his face, as if perhaps he had always known what a lousy father he was. But it had taken my aunt to make him see it.

‘Come on,’ she said suddenly. ‘Coats off, all of you.’ and she took off her own. ‘We’re going to make this place habitable.’

We spent the rest of that Saturday afternoon cleaning the house from top to bottom. There was no washing machine, but once the big Belfast sink had been cleaned, my aunt stripped the beds and hand-washed the sheets. They dried in no time on the line she got Mr Macaskill to put up outside.

Mountains of rubbish accumulated against the exterior wall as she went ruthlessly around the house selecting stuff for the bin. Boxes of full and empty cans of beer, piles of bottles. Filthy clothes and sheets. Broken and cracked crockery. The detritus of lives neglected and in decline. And as Mr Macaskill washed the floorboards with an old brush, like scrubbing the deck of a boat, Whistler and I set about cleaning years of grime from the windows. My aunt sat at the table and wrote out a shopping list.

When she had finished she thrust it at Whistler’s dad. ‘Priority stuff,’ she said. ‘Food, clothes, bed linen. You don’t look after that lad of yours, trust me, your life won’t be worth the living of. And I’ll be back to make sure of it.’

He took it from her and nodded.

When we left that day, I was full of trepidation for my friend, and I could see, too, that he was afraid of being alone with his father. He never talked in detail to me about what happened when we’d gone, except to say that they had sat for a long time in silence that night, his father sober for the first time he could remember. And that finally, unbidden, Mr Macaskill had looked at his boy and said, ‘I’m sorry, son.’

After that weekend my aunt encouraged me to spend as much time there as possible. I don’t think she needed me to be her eyes and ears, because I am almost certain she made frequent trips down to Uig herself during the week when we were at school, but I guess she wanted me to be around as a constant reminder to Mr Macaskill that an eye was being kept on him. And that is how I came to be there the weekend we decided to go fishing up at Loch Tathabhal.

It was early in April that year, and there had been an uncommon amount of rain, even for the west coast of Lewis. A slow-moving front which had been picking up moisture over three thousand miles of Atlantic Ocean had settled itself over the island and was shedding its accumulated cargo in copious amounts. It was mild, though, with soft warm winds blowing up from the south-west. Excellent early-season fishing weather. There were lots of young brown trout up in the lochs, that would be delicious slow-roasted in tinfoil over the glowing embers of a peat fire, and Whistler and I were determined to bag a few.

Of course, we’d have been in trouble if the water-bailiff had caught us, though they weren’t so bothered in those days. Poaching wasn’t the problem it became, and the rivers and lochs were teeming with trout. The worst that might have happened would have been a kick up the backside and getting our fish confiscated. But if they’d caught us with salmon that would have been another story. So we contented ourselves with the trout, and kept our eyes skinned for the water-bailiff or the gamekeeper.

It had taken us nearly two hours to walk up to the loch. The peaks of Mealaisbhal and Cracabhal and Tathabhal above us were lost in the clouds. Water was cascading down the track in gushing rivulets, exposing the bed of big sea pebbles that were its foundation, swirling in frantic eddies and churning up potholes that could break an axle. Deep drainage channels dug in the peat were overflowing with the thousands of gallons of brown rainwater running off the mountains.

Although we wore waxed jackets with hoods, and wellies, and waterproof leggings, we were both soaked by the time we got there. I could see Whistler’s big plump cheeks, pink and shining with the rain, grinning at me through the circle of hood that left his face exposed, black hair smeared across his forehead. But I also saw caution in his eyes, and he nodded towards the gate at the foot of the track leading up to Loch Tathabhal.

There was a Land Rover parked there. We scanned every horizon, then, but saw no one, and approached the vehicle in silence. Whistler put his hand on the bonnet. ‘Cold. It’s been here a while.’ I wiped the rain away from the side window and peered inside. The keys were dangling in the ignition. On the passenger seat there was a copy of that day’s newspaper, and a fisherman’s woollen cap with homemade flies pinned all along its skip. Useless as protection in these conditions. But I recognized it immediately.

‘It’s big Jock Macrae’s,’ I said. The water-bailiff.

Whistler nodded. ‘Better be careful, then.’

We made our way up the track towards the loch, following the line of a stream that in summer was not much more than a trickle. Now, though, it was a thunderous flow of water, breaking and splashing over the rocks and boulders that tumbled down the slope in a series of dramatic drops towards Loch Raonasgail below. The stream had burst its banks where the land levelled out towards Loch Tathabhal, swelling to a width of ten or twelve feet where it left the loch, sweeping in full spate towards the falls.

By the time we reached the loch itself, we saw that the level had risen to the point where the water was passing just inches below the old wooden bridge. Normally it had a clearance of four or five feet. If it got any higher, it would sweep the flimsy structure away, leaving just the drystone stanchions at either side. But even those were in danger, water flowing around them with a power that filled the air with its fury. Whistler raised his voice to shout above it. ‘Let’s cast from the bridge. Loch side. The currents are bound to draw the fish this way.’ We were rank amateurs in those days.

I nodded, and we clambered up over the stones and on to the bridge itself. There was a wooden rail that ran along the loch side of it that we could lean on and cast. We dropped our bags and assembled our rods, the water rushing beneath our feet in a torrent. Scary in its power and proximity. I didn’t dare look at it, or it made me giddy.

Whistler grinned. ‘This is the life, eh?’

I grinned back, and for some extraordinary reason took a step backwards before casting. I was gone in a second. A momentary sense of flying through thin air, before hitting the water and feeling the power of it sweep me away. The cold took my breath with it and I couldn’t even cry out. And then I was under, and knew with absolute certainty that I was going to die.

I have heard people say that in the seconds before a crash, or a life-threatening accident, time seems to stand still and you have all that you need of it to rewind your life, spooling back through those moments that exist only in your memory and are about to be lost for ever. I didn’t experience it like that.

The first thing I felt was pain as I was dashed against a rock dividing the flow of water. The force of the impact and the current of the water itself lifted me out of it for a few vital seconds. I could see how the stream dropped away below me, white water breaking over boulders and cascading in spumes and spray through the rain that continued to fall. And I found myself almost beached on the slab of rock which had broken my downward momentum, sliding over its slippery black surface, face down, feet first, knowing that unless I could hold on to it I would certainly be smashed and broken by the succession of drops that lay ahead.

As I slid inexorably across the angle of its face, water breaking all around me, I tried desperately to find a handhold, fingers seeking anything they could grab. I felt myself going, and the conviction of death returned before, at the very last, my fingertips found a seam that broke across its smooth surface, and they locked into the two inches of ledge it provided.

For those few vital seconds, I felt my body washing about below me in the flow, as if hands were trying to grab me and pull me down. But my tenuous grasp on the rock stopped that downward drag. At least long enough for me to swing my right arm across the rock and find a crack in the gneiss that gave me something more substantial to hold on to.

It seemed somehow incredible to me, that only seconds before I had been about to cast a line to fish for trout, without a care in the world. And here I was now, fighting for my life, against what felt like impossible odds.

In the speed with which it had all happened, I hadn’t given Whistler a single thought. Now, above the roar of the water, I heard him shouting. ‘Hang on, Fin! For Christ’s sake, hang on!’ I inclined my head to my right, water breaking over it and almost obscuring my vision. I saw him on the bank, no more than six or eight feet away. He had one foot forward in the flow of the water, an arm outstretched. But it was a long way from reaching me, and I knew that if he tried to wade into it, the force of the water would sweep him away. I could see the desperation in his face. It would be suicide to try to reach me, but there was a limit to how long I could hold on, a limit that was not far away now.

His thought processes were almost visible in his eyes. There had to be something he could do.

Suddenly he bellowed, ‘I’ll be right back. I promise. Just don’t let go.’ And he was gone. Out of my field of vision. And in that moment I felt as lonely as I have ever felt in my life. The sight and sound of the water filled my eyes, my ears, my mind, and I focused very hard on maintaining my hold on the rock. I trusted absolutely that Whistler would be back with some way of getting me out of this, but I doubted my ability to hold on for long enough. I could feel the cold numbing my body, the strength ebbing from my arms. I had almost no sensation in my hands now at all.

I let my head rest against the rock and closed my eyes, total concentration on not letting go. In a strange way, I could almost have slept and just released my hold, like drifting off in a dream from which there would be no waking. And there was something oddly comforting in that thought. Until I was startled to consciousness by the revving of a motor that felt very close.

A Land Rover was backing up to the very edge of the water, wheels spinning and sliding, and then locked suddenly in place with the ratcheting sound of a handbrake. I heard a door slam, and Whistler came running around to the back. He had a coil of rope in his hands. He quickly tied one end around his waist, and knelt down to loop the other around the tow bar to secure it. He stood up, then, and without a moment’s hesitation came wading through the water towards me. Almost immediately he was swept off his feet by the force of the flow. As he went down, I saw his outstretched arm, and the rope looped around his hand and wrist, preventing him from being carried off.

Amazingly he found footholds, something beneath him to anchor his feet, and his upper body lifted up out of the flow like Neptune rising out of the sea. And suddenly there he was, right next to me, the veins on his forehead standing out like ropes, a big lad straining every sinew, pitting himself against all the forces of nature to try to save his friend. The water crashed all around him in a fury, white and frothing, as he literally scooped me up in his arms. In an enormous leap of faith I relinquished my hold on the rock and grabbed the rope, feeling his arms lock themselves around my waist. And in the same moment he lost his foothold, and we were both carried off in the surging water. Lost for just a second to a power so much greater than we could ever have imagined. Until the rope held, and we swung crazily to the side, smashing up against the near bank. Whistler somehow found the strength to reel us in on the end of the rope until we reached the Land Rover and fell gasping and wordless in the reeds and rain-sodden peat beneath the rear wheels. The water passed just inches from our faces, hissing and spitting and cursing. Cheated somehow. And it occurred to me that Whistler’s great-grandfather must have used John Finlay Macleod’s line from the Iolaire in much the same way to save my grandfather’s life.

Whistler rolled over on to his back and started laughing at the sky. I fought to find my breath, and heard my trembling voice demand to know what was so damned funny. He turned his big grinning face towards me. ‘You, daft bastard. Biggest bloody fish I ever pulled out of the river, and totally inedible!’

On the drive back down the valley, pitching and bumping through the potholes that the rain had scoured out of the hard core, hot air belted out of the heater and slowly brought life back to my frozen bones. I sat shivering next to Whistler, who handled the Land Rover as if he’d been driving it all his life. But I wasn’t sure he even had a licence.

‘What the hell’s Jock Macrae going to say when he finds his Land Rover’s gone?’ I said.

Whistler just laughed again. ‘I’d love to know. I can see the air turning blue. And he’s going to have to walk back home.’

‘We’re going to be in trouble.’

‘Nah.’ Whistler shook his big head, like a dog shaking water from its fur. His grin was almost maniacal. ‘He’ll never know it was us. And who’s going to tell him? Not me, not you. Just be grateful the old bugger was up there, and keeps a tow rope in the back.’

At the house, we got out of our wet clothes, and Whistler set them drying on a clothes horse in front of a roaring peat fire and put the kettle on. He got dressed, and I recognized the shirt my aunt had bought him. ‘Back in a few,’ he said, and when he went outside I heard the Land Rover start up and drive off. In fact it was half an hour before he was back, on foot, to find me huddled at the fire, hands cupped around my second mug of hot tea. ‘I’ve got something that’ll warm you up better than that.’ He vanished into a back room and returned with a half-empty bottle of whisky and poured a good measure of it into my mug. He grinned. ‘Central heating. My old man thinks I don’t know where he hides it.’ He disappeared to return it to its place of concealment, and then sat down next to me.

I looked at him. ‘Are you not having any?’

But he just shook his head. ‘Who knows what’s in the genes. Don’t want to end up like him.’

I sat staring into my mug for a long time before taking a stiff draught and turning my head towards him. ‘You saved my life, Whistler.’

But he just shrugged. ‘That’s my job, Fin.’

I learned later that Jock Macrae had been apoplectic when he returned to find his Land Rover gone. At the end of a long walk back in the rain, he had gone into the first croft he came to and phoned the police to report it stolen. To his, and their, consternation, it was found a short time later parked outside his house. No one ever did find out who took it, or why.