The Last of Us

Back Bay

To the edge of the dunes, God. Layers of the world.

Sometimes bones stick out: of sheep, rabbits.

Don MacPhail put cars in the sand dunes to stop the island from blowing away.

‘Come see my traffic jam,’ he said to me once, when I met him with Mum on the beach.

He surprised us with steering wheels, engines, seats in sand. His collie dog ran ahead, tail circling the wind.

The island – always moving, he said. Like a giant that hasn’t decided yet where it wants to be.

And now, from up here, I can see most of it.

The hill gets me sweating. The grass gone-yellow, tough so it scratches my legs. Bits of bog-cotton wafting. Then, keeping away, small birds, not seagulls, with wings so thin they might be made of paper.

I look away out to sea. No boats. Just islands, black with shadows on one side, gold the other.

There’s the tanker, or trawler. It’s too square-long to be an island, too brown. I don’t like to look at it for very long in case there’s ghosts on deck.

Then I think I see something that’s not an island.

My arms know it first. My arms are moving, even before my heart or my head catch up. It’s a boat. Not an island, or a wreck, it’s too white. Surely it’s a boat with the sun on it, with the shine of sun coming and going?

I shout, shout until my voice gives up. The paper-wing birds go up, circle me high in the sky.

Then the shine tells me something different.

It’s only a buoy. Guarding the entrance to the bay. And worse: I’ve seen it before. It did the same thing to me before.

Mum, back to this memory: You keep me in the van. You don’t go to the doors as you do your round. There’s other stuff for delivery, but not as many letters as usual. You’re smoking, which you said you’d stopped for ever. It makes the van stink. When I tell you not to you don’t even notice I said anything.

‘Why’d he go?’ I ask.

You don’t hear until I shout, then I have to tell who I’m meaning: Mike, the stand-in postman. He never even made a single delivery. Plus he left all of your laminate cards on the floor of the van, just to keep reminding us about his going away and leaving us.

‘Had family,’ you say.

Then you turn up the radio. As we go around the side of the island to the north end it loses signal. You switch around stations until you get it back.

‘Hush – trying to hear.’

But I wasn’t saying anything, not for ages.

On the ribbon road there’s two lorries from the fish factory. You flash your lights and roll down the window at the passing place, to indicate you want to talk.

‘The tankers get in?’

The driver in the red overalls shakes his head. He talks about diesel, something else I don’t understand. Then you talk about the bank, the ferry, most of it in whispers. When I turn down the radio to hear a bit better you turn it up again and get out of the car.

Some other cars come; you wave them past.

It starts to rain when we’re driving again. You keep turning the radio to get any kind of signal.

‘Will Dad come?’

You light another cigarette with the car’s red glow button. Then say, ‘He’ll be looking after himself.’

‘Why are the ferries cancelled?’

‘It’s temporary.’

‘But there isn’t a storm. Or even any fog.’

‘I know.’

‘Did the ferry engine break like it did last summer?’

‘No.’

‘So why, then?’

You pull the car into a passing place, then turn around to speak to me. Sometimes when it’s raining your face gets dirty from the ink on the letters. Like today.

‘To stop people coming in.’

The shadow of Beinn Tangabhal gets long. It grows like the tongue of a giant over our village.

I climbed over the counter at the post office. In a dusty cupboard I found cartridges of ink.

I cracked a black one open, then used the ink to make my cheeks smudged, like Mum’s.

But with only halfway light in the mirror at home it looked stupid. Like a girl with scars had decided to draw all over her face, pretending she had a beard.

‘Like you’re facing your worst enemy,’ I say to the girl.

She only just beat me to it this time.