The Hanging Shed

TWENTY-ONE

I took the bus back to Brodick and caught the late-afternoon ferry to the mainland. I was in luck. The Glen Sannox was laid up for few days with engine problems. The sleek paddle steamer Jeanie Deans had been diverted from its usual runs up Loch Long to Arrochar. It would dock at Craigendoran instead of Ardrossan but the rail link along the north bank of the Clyde into Glasgow was quicker. Its twin red, white and black banded funnels belched long trails of steam as we set off for the mainland. I stood on the deck hanging over the rail, watching the white water churn past. The sea was as calm as it got out here between the island and the mainland; waves rolling past rather than flinging themselves at the bow. The big paddle wheel slapped rhythmically round and round; my brain seemed to be connected to it. It made no sense. Why in – literally – God’s name was Patrick Cassidy, man of the cloth, hiding this information? And why had he arranged for me to uncover it?

I was so lost in my reveries that I didn’t notice the two men who joined me at the rail, one on either side. They weren’t just taking the air. Their shoulders were touching mine. Their hats were pulled down over their faces. The one on my left turned to me.

‘A’ right there, Brodie?’

I made to stand back and found they had pinioned my arms. For a moment I thought they were police, until the one who’d spoken nodded to his pal. They bent swiftly and expertly and grabbed me behind the knees. Suddenly I was in the air, my hips rammed against the wooden railing. My hat went first. I watched it sail away and tried frantically to cling to the rail. But they’d got right under me and my weight was now beyond the point of return. A further heave and I went over the rail in a very bad piece of gymnastics.

My body sailed right over, but my hands still clung desperately to the wood. I crashed against the side, winding myself. In sheer desperation, I flung myself round and grabbed the bar below the rail with my right hand. I now clung with my face against the railing and my legs flailing on the side of the boat. I looked up into two grinning faces. One of them I recognised from my barney in the gents the other day.

‘Nice day for a swim, ya fucker!’ cried Fergie, pulling out a bike chain which he’d kept tucked up over his shoulder under his jacket. He lashed down at me and caught me on my head and shoulders with the sharpened links. Then he and his pal chose a hand each and stamped on it. I tried to hang on but it was useless. Before the next swing of the chain ripped my face open I pulled myself up, got one foot on the edge of the deck and swung a punch at Fergie. He stepped back and swept the chain at my head. It caught me on my left cheek, wrapped itself around my head and tore the skin off my jaw. As I jerked away I glimpsed his pal pull out a bayonet and plunge it towards my chest.

I did the only thing I could. I jumped.

I was a long time in the air, and I could see their grinning faces watching me every foot of the way. I hit the water and went under. Deep, deep into the green. The cold stopped my heart. The salt tore at my open wounds. I was blind in the mill race of the churning wake. My one piece of luck had been to stand downstream from the paddles. Otherwise I would have been fish bait by now. As it was, I was only drowning.

I kicked and struggled upwards and blasted into the air spewing salt water like a sounding whale. I lay flapping and coughing in the chopped furrows of the ferry. White spume kept slapping my face and forcing water down my every orifice. I felt my coat dragging me back under and struggled out of it. The shoes went next and then my jacket. Already my energy was fast dissolving as the adrenalin levels dropped. With a final push I struck away at right angles from the wake and splashed and swam till I found myself in calmer waters.

I rolled on to my back and lay gasping and spluttering like a harpooned seal. I concentrated on calming down and conserving my energy. When my body had relaxed a little and I could float without too much kicking, I turned and looked round for the boat. It was a fast disappearing hulk on my horizon. No one except my deadly pals had seen me fall. No sign of a crewman calling ‘man overboard’ and a nice red lifebelt floating my way. There were still waves rolling me up and down but it was the normal swell that ran down the Clyde all the way to America.

‘You bastards!’ I screamed, and slapped the waves in impotent fury. The thought of dying at the hands of these scum was too much to bear. I vowed to wring their dirty necks next time we met. If…

The cold water began to cool my ire. I took stock. Fergie had timed it nicely. The distance between Brodick and the mainland was about fourteen miles. I was roughly halfway between. There was no sign of any other boat and I was aware of being pulled along by a steady current towards the next bit of mainland: either Northern Ireland or Newfoundland. Such information was only going to be relevant to my bloated corpse.

On the plus side, even at this time of year, the water wasn’t cold enough to kill me outright. The blessed Gulf Stream kept the waters lapping Ayrshire and the west coast at a temperature that was survivable. For a while. Not quite the Murmansk run. Or not immediately. I could last for, well, hours, until the cool Atlantic slowly sapped my strength and my body shut down bit by bit.

Though I could swim well enough, I’d never swum seven miles in my life, far less in the open sea. My trousers were tugging at me and I slipped them off as well as my shirt and socks. They weren’t keeping me warm and were only making me struggle against their sodden weight. I would look like I’d gone for a dip in my vest and pants, and got carried away by the currents. Apart from the chain marks across my face.

Big Bill, my old Geography teacher, was always telling me to pay more attention, that knowing how the natural world worked was essential knowledge in a man. I wish he’d told me it could be a matter of life or death. I had no idea what the tides and currents did in the Firth of Clyde. I didn’t know their direction or whether they changed depending on the phases of the moon. All I recall was that the currents were supposed to be treacherous.

At least the seas were calm, just a shallow swell and steady ripple of waves that lifted me up and down like a soggy cork. I turned on my face and, for want of a better idea, started swimming, a steady crawl towards the mainland. I gave it up after a couple minutes with no sense that I’d made any impact whatsoever on the distance. I tried backstroke, as it was more like floating, but that got me nowhere either as far as I could see. All I was doing was using up energy and therefore body heat.

I wasn’t entirely alone: the odd seagull squawked and hovered over me until it decided I wasn’t yet ripe for nibbling. It would keep coming back until I was. There was other debris in the water, junk from ships and from the mainland. A nice big log would do me fine, or a stray rowing boat. Flotsam and jetsam. I tried to recall the difference; I think I was technically jetsam.

I looked at my watch. It seemed to be living up to its claim of being waterproof up to a depth of twenty feet. Though if it hadn’t I wasn’t in much of a position to complain about it to the manufacturer. It was already five thirty and would be dark by eight. After that? Could I go on floating till morning? At what stage would I just say sod it, and let it all go? They say drowning is easy, just fill your lungs with water and relax. But I reasoned that if evolution had removed our gills in favour of nostrils, it wouldn’t be that comfortable to go into instant reverse.

Suddenly my already damaged head took another belt. I sank and spluttered around to see what had hit me. It was a crate, a packing crate, half submerged. It said ‘Tea’ on the side. Thank you, Lipton’s. I swam to it and clung on to it. The tea chest immediately sank. I let go and it bobbed up. I felt round it. It was open on one side. I turned it and emptied it as best I could and then upended it trying to capture as much air inside as possible. On my third try it bobbed with about-one third of its bulk out of the water. Gingerly I got my arms over it and my upper body part on it. It was precarious but it held me. Only my hips and legs dangled in the water. I’d seen an odd shark hanging bleeding at Ayr fishing harbour before but couldn’t recall if they were the type that had a penchant for hairy legs. But in such ignorance there is hope.

I’d been in the water an hour, and from my wobbly perch there was no doubt: I was being pulled parallel along the coast and towards the south. For a while, Holy Island off Lamlash had been my nearest chunk of dry land but I was being dragged away from it into the widening bay where the last Ice Age had taken a bite out of Ayrshire. For a time I felt I was being pushed towards the coast and my hopes rose. But then the capricious tide seemed to grip again and I lost way. Another hour later, as darkness softened the seascape, I was numb and frozen, and certain I couldn’t hang on till morning. It wasn’t how I expected to die. I’d been attacked by tanks in the desert and blown up in Italy, and shot at all across northern France to the Rhine. But here I was, about to drown a couple of miles off the beach I used to build sand castles on. It was almost as though I’d been living on borrowed time and the big guy who kept count had finally noticed. All those months after demob when I wished I was dead came sharply into focus. I suddenly realised I very much wanted to live. Too late. I should have spent the rest of my savings on drink and wild women.

The sun finally set way to the west but, funnily, it hadn’t gone completely dark. A northern light imbued the great plain of water with a sullen glow. A half-moon rose and added to the sheen on the wave tops. That’s when I saw the distant lights.