The Lewis Man

TWENTY-FIVE

‘Who’s this?’

‘It’s your grandson, Mr Macdonald. Fionnlagh.’

He doesn’t seem at all familiar to me. I see some of the other inmates sitting in their armchairs like Lord and Lady Muck, eyeing up this young boy with his odd, spiky hair who’s come to see me. They seem curious. How does he make it stand up like that? And why?

The nurse pulls up a chair and the boy sits down beside me. He looks uncomfortable. I can’t help it if I don’t know who the hell he is. ‘I don’t know you,’ I tell him. How could I have a grandson? I’m hardly old enough to be a father. ‘What do you want?’

‘I’m Marsaili’s boy,’ he says, and I feel my heart skip a beat.

‘Marsaili? Is she here?’

‘She’s gone to Glasgow, Grampa, to sit some exams. She’ll be back in a day or so.’

This news comes to me like a slap in the face. ‘She promised to take me home. I’m sick of this hotel.’ All I do all day is sit in some damned chair and look out the window. I see the children across the street leave for school in the morning, and I see them come home at night. And I can’t remember anything that’s happened in between. I suppose I must have had lunch, because I’m not hungry. But I don’t remember that either.

‘Do you remember, Grampa, how I used to help with the gathering? When we brought the sheep in for the shearing.’

‘Oh, God, aye! The shearing. Back-breaking that was.’

‘I used to help out from when I was just four or five.’

‘Aye, you were a bonny wee laddie, Fin. Marsaili thought the world of you, you know.’

‘No, I’m Fionnlagh, Grampa. Fin’s my dad.’

He gives me one of those smiles I see people give me all the time these days. Sort of embarrassed, as if they think I’m daft.

‘I’ve been helping out Murdo Morrison for a bit of extra pocket money. Gave him a hand with the lambing too, this year.’

I remember the lambing well. That first year on the island. You never got snow, but it could be bloody cold, and the wind on a wet March night would cut you in two. I’d never seen a lamb born before, and was very nearly sick the first time. All that blood and afterbirth. But what an amazing thing it was to see that skinny wee thing, like a drowned rat, breathing its first breath, and taking its first wobbling steps. Life in the raw.

I learned a lot of things that winter. I learned that however hard I thought my existence had been at The Dean, there were much worse things in life. Not that anyone treated us badly. Not really. But survival was brutal work, and you weren’t spared it because you were a kid.

There were daily chores. Up in the pitch-black, long before we left for school, to climb the hill and fill our buckets from the spring. There was cutting the seaweed from the shore. So much a ton Donald Seamus got for it from Alginate Industries at the seaweed factory over at Orasaigh. Killer work it was, slipping and sliding over the black rocks at low tide, bent double with a blunt sickle hacking away at the kelp, crusted shells, like razors, shredding your fingers. I think they burned the seaweed and used the ashes for fertilizer. Someone once told me they made explosives and toothpaste and ice cream from it too. But I never believed that. They must have thought I was as simple as Peter.

After the lambing there was the peat-cutting, up over the other side of Beinn Sciathan, lifting the peats as Donald Seamus cut them with the tarasgeir, stacking them in groups of three. We would turn them around from time to time till they were dried hard in the wind, then fetch them in big wicker baskets. We shared our pony with a neighbour, so it wasn’t always available, and then we had to carry those baskets on our own backs.

After that there would be the hay, hand-cut with a scythe into long swathes. You took out the rough shaws and laid it out to dry, praying that it wouldn’t rain. It had to be turned, shaken and dried again, or it would rot in the stack. So you needed fine weather. Back at the stackyard it would be made into bales, and it wasn’t until the stackyard was full that Donald Seamus would be satisfied that there was enough to feed the beasts through the winter.

You wouldn’t think there was much time for school, but Peter and me were sent over with the other kids every morning on the boat to be picked up by the bus and taken to the corrugated-iron building by Daliburgh crossroads that was the secondary school. There was another building, the technical school, about a quarter of a mile down the road. But I only went until the incident at New Year. After that Donald Seamus refused to send me back, and Peter had to go on his own.

They weren’t bad folks, Donald Seamus and Mary-Anne, but there was no love in them. I knew some homers that got terrible abuse. That wasn’t us.

Mary-Anne hardly ever spoke. Barely acknowledged our existence, except to feed us and wash the few clothes we had. Most of her time was spent spinning, dyeing and weaving wool, and joining with the other women in the waulking of the cloth, all sitting around a long wooden table out front and turning and beating the weave until it was thickened and fully waterproof. As they waulked they sang to the rhythm of it. Endless songs to make bearable the mindless repetition. I’ve never heard women sing so much as I did during my time on the island.

Donald Seamus was hard but fair. If he took his belt to me it was usually because I deserved it. But I never let him lay a hand on Peter. Whatever wrong the boy might have done, it wasn’t his fault, and it took a confrontation between me and Donald Seamus to establish that.

I can’t remember what it was now that Peter had done. Dropped the eggs on the way from the henhouse and broken the lot, maybe. I remember he did that several times before they stopped asking him.

But whatever it was he’d done, Donald Seamus was in a fury. He grabbed Peter by the scruff of the neck and dragged him into the shed where we kept the animals. It was always warm in there and smelled of shit.

By the time I got there my brother’s trousers were already down around his ankles. Donald Seamus had him bent over a trestle and was in the process of slipping his belt out of its loops, ready to give him a leathering. He looked around as I came in and told me in no uncertain terms to get the hell out. But I stood my ground and looked around me. There were two brand-new axe handles leaning up against the wall in the corner of the shed, and I lifted one, feeling the cool, smooth wood in my palm as I wrapped my fingers tightly around it and tested its weight.

Donald Seamus paused, and I met his eye, unblinking, the axe handle dangling at my side. He was a big man was Donald Seamus, and I have no doubt that in a fight he could have given me a good hiding. But I was a sturdy kid by then, almost a young man, and with a stout axe haft in my hand, there was no doubt in either of our minds that I could do him a lot of damage.

Neither of us said a word, but a line was drawn. If he laid a hand on my brother he would answer to me. He buckled up his belt and told Peter to clear off, and I laid the axe handle back in the corner.

I never resisted when it came my turn to feel his belt on my arse, and I think maybe that he belted me twice as much as he might otherwise have done. Like I was taking the punishment for both of us. But I didn’t mind. A sore arse passed, and I kept my word to my mother.

It was during our second lambing that I rescued one of them from certain death. It was a feeble wee thing, barely able to stand, and for some reason its mother took against it, refusing it the teat. Donald Seamus gave me a bottle with a rubber teat and told me to feed it.

I spent nearly two weeks feeding that wee beast, and there was no doubt she thought I was her mother. Morag I called her, and she followed me everywhere, like a dog. She would come down to the shore with me when I went to cut the kelp, and when I sat among the rocks at midday eating the rough sandwiches Mary-Ann had wrapped up for me in an oiled paper parcel, she would coorie in beside me, sharing her warmth and soaking up mine. I could stroke her head, and she would look up at me with adoring big eyes. I loved that wee lamb. First loving relationship I’d had with any other living creature since my mother died. Except, perhaps, for Peter. But that was different.

Funny thing is, I think it was the lamb that brought about my first sexual experience with Ceit. Or, at least, her jealousy of it. Seems daft to think of someone being jealous of a lamb, but it’s hard to overestimate my emotional attachment to that wee thing.

I’d never had sex of any kind, and some part of me figured that it was probably just for other people, and that I would likely spend the rest of my life beating the meat below the sheets.

Until Ceit took me in hand. So to speak.

She’d complained on several occasions about the amount of time I was spending with the lamb. I had always been at the jetty to meet her and Peter off the boat after school, and we’d go skimming pebbles in the bay, or cross the hill and make our way down to what she always called Charlie’s beach on the west side of the island. There was never anyone there, and we aye had great fun playing hide-and-seek among the grasses and the ruined crofts, or racing each other along the compacted sand at low tide. But since Morag came along, I’d been a bit preoccupied.

‘You and that bloody lamb,’ Ceit said to me one day. ‘I’m sick of it. Nobody has a pet lamb! A dog, maybe, but a lamb?’ It was well past the point where it needed me to feed it, but I was reluctant to let it go. We walked in silence up the track that led past Nicholson’s store. It was a fine spring day, a soft breeze blowing out of the south-west, the sky streaked with high cloud, like wisps of teased wool. The sun was warm on our skin, and winter seemed at last to have retreated to crouch in the dark, quietly awaiting the autumn equinox, when it would send word of its imminent return on the edge of savage equinoctial gales. But all that seemed a long way away during those optimistic days of late spring and early summer.

Most of the women were out on their doorsteps spinning and weaving. Most of the men were away at sea. The sound of voices raised in song drifted across the hills on the breeze, strangely affecting. It raised goose pimples all across my shoulders every time I heard it.

Ceit lowered her voice as if someone might overhear us. ‘Meet me tonight,’ she said. ‘I’ve got something I want to give you.’

‘Tonight?’ I was surprised. ‘When? After dinner?’

‘No. When it’s dark. When everyone else is sleeping. You can sneak out of your window at the back, can’t you?’

I was nonplussed. ‘Well, I could, I suppose. But why? Whatever it is, why can’t you just give me it now?’

‘Because I can’t, stupid!’

We stopped at the brow of the hill, looking down over the little bay, and out across the Sound, back towards Ludagh.

‘Meet me down at the quayside at eleven. The Gillies will be in bed by that time, won’t they?’

‘Of course.’

‘Good. No problem, then.’

‘I’m not sure that Peter’ll be up for it,’ I said.

‘For fuck’s sake, Johnny, can you not do something without Peter for once!’ Her face was flushed, and she had the strangest look in her eyes.

I was taken aback by her sudden passion. We always did things together, me and Ceit and Peter. ‘Of course I can.’ I was a bit defensive.

‘Good, just you and me, then. Eleven o’clock at the jetty.’ And she stomped off across the hill towards the O’Henley croft.

I don’t know why, but I was strangely excited by the idea of sneaking out at night in the dark to meet Ceit. And as evening fell, and the wind dropped, I could barely contain my impatience. Peter and I completed our evening chores and then ate with Mary-Anne and Donald Seamus in the silence that always followed grace. It wasn’t that they didn’t talk to us on purpose. They never had a word for each other either. In truth, none of us had anything to say to one another. What was there to talk about? The cycle of life hardly changed from day to day. From season to season, yes. But one thing followed another quite naturally and never required discussion. It wasn’t from Donald Seamus Gillies or his sister that we learned the Gaelic. Peter picked it up from the other kids at school. In the playground, of course, not in the classroom where only English was spoken. I picked it up from the other crofters, some of whom hardly spoke any English at all. Or if they did, they weren’t going to speak it to me.

Donald Seamus smoked his pipe for a while by the stove, reading the paper while Mary-Anne washed the dishes and I helped Peter do his homework. Then at ten on the dot it was off to bed. The fire was tamped down for the night, lamps extinguished, and we went to our rooms with the smell of peat smoke, tobacco and oilwick in our nostrils.

Peter and I shared a double bed in the back room. There was a wardrobe and a dresser, and hardly enough room to get the door open. Peter was asleep in minutes, as he always was, and I had no fears about disturbing him by getting dressed again and climbing out of the window. But I had no idea how well or badly Donald Seamus or Mary-Anne slept. And so just before the clock struck eleven and I had committed myself, I opened the door a crack and listened carefully in the dark of the hallway. Someone was snoring fit to register on the Richter Scale. Whether it was brother or sister I didn’t know, but after a while I became aware of another, higher-pitched, intermittent snoring that came from the throat rather than the nose. So, both were asleep.

I closed the door again and crossed to the window, drawing the curtain aside to unsnib the sash and slide it up as quietly as I could. Peter grunted and turned over, but didn’t wake. I saw his lips moving as if he were talking to himself, perhaps using up the words that were never required of him at mealtimes. I sat on the ledge, swinging my legs over to the other side, and dropped down into the grass.

It was still surprisingly light out, a faint glow dying in the west, the moon already spilling its colourless light across the hills. The sky was a dark blue rather than black. In full summer it would still be light at midnight and later, but we had some weeks to go before then. I reached back in to pull the curtains shut, and slid the window closed.

And then I was off down the hillside like a greyhound out of the trap, sprinting through the long grass, feet squelching in the bog, exhilarated by an extraordinary sense of freedom. I was out, and the night was mine. And Ceit’s.

She was waiting for me down at the jetty, nervous I thought, and a bit impatient. ‘What took you so long?’ Her whisper seemed excessively loud, and I realized that there was no wind, just the slow, steady breathing of the sea.

‘It must be all of five past,’ I said. But she just tutted and took my arm and led me up the track towards Rubha Ban. There wasn’t a single light burning in any of the crofts across the hillside, an entire island asleep, or so it appeared.

Visibility was no problem in the wash of moonlight, but it made us feel vulnerable, too. If anyone should venture out we would be clearly visible.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked her.

‘Charlie’s beach.’

‘Why?’

‘You’ll see.’

There was only one moment when it might all have gone wrong. Ceit yanked suddenly on my sleeve, and we flattened ourselves into the long grass at the side of the track as a light flared in an open doorway, and we saw an old man stepping out into the moonlight with a shovel and a newspaper in his hand. Most folk used a chanty during the night, which got emptied in the morning. But old Mr MacGinty must have thought it was a fine night to relieve himself out on the moor. And so we had to lie there, giggling in the grass, while he dug himself a shallow hole and crouched over it, with his nightgown up around his neck, grunting and groaning.

Ceit put a hand over my mouth to shut me up, but she could barely contain her own mirth, air escaping through tightly pressed lips in tiny explosions. So I put my hand over hers, and we lay like that, pressed together, for nearly ten minutes while Mr MacGinty did his business.

I suppose that must have been the first time I became aware of her body in a sexual way. Her warmth, the softness of her breasts pressed against my chest, one leg crooked over mine. And I felt the first stirrings of arousal, both surprising and scary. She was wearing a sort of pale print dress with a V-neck that showed her cleavage. And I remember she was barefoot that night. There was something sensuous and tempting in those bare legs exposed in the moonlight.

She wore her hair a lot longer now than she had at The Dean, and it fell in soft, chestnut curls over her shoulders, a too-long fringe constantly in her eyes.

I noticed, too, as we lay in the grass a faint smell of flowers about her, aromatic, with a low, musky note, different from the smell she’d had at The Dean. When Mr MacGinty had finally gone back to his bed and we took our hands from each other’s mouths, I sniffed and asked her what the scent was.

She giggled. ‘It’s Mrs O’Henley’s eau de cologne,’ she said.

‘What’s that?’

‘Perfume, silly. I sprayed a couple of puffs of it on my neck. Do you like it?’

I did. I don’t know what it was about it, but it set butterflies free in my stomach. Her eyes seemed very dark as we lay there in the moonlight. Her lips full, with an almost irresistible allure. I found myself so much wanting to kiss them. But before I could succumb to the temptation, she was on her feet, holding out her hand and urging me to get up quick.

I scrambled to my feet and she took my hand, and we ran then up over the hill, past the primary school and along the road above the beach. We stopped, breathless, to take in the view. The sea simmered in a shimmering silence around the curve of the bay below us, rolling gently in to break in soft silver foam along the sand. The reflection of moon on water stretched away into a never-ending distance, the horizon broken only by a handful of dark islets and the brooding shadow of Barra.

I had never seen the island like this. Benign, seductive, almost as if it were colluding in Ceit’s grand plan.

‘Come on,’ she said, and led me down a narrow path through the heather to where the remains of an old ruined cottage looked out across the sands, and we picked our way through the stones to its grassy interior. She promptly sat herself down in the grass and patted a place beside her. I sat down, immediately aware of the warmth of her body, the soft sighing of the sea, the vast firmament overhead, the sky black now and crusted with stars. I was full of breathless anticipation as she turned those dark eyes on me, and I felt her fingertips on my face like tiny electric shocks.

I have no idea where we learn how to do these things, but before I knew it I had my arms around her and we were kissing. Lips soft and warm, parting to let our tongues meet. Shocking, thrilling. I felt her hand between my legs, where I was already straining at my trousers, and mine slid beneath the cotton of her dress to find it filled by a soft, pendulous breast, a nipple as hard as a nut grazing my palm.

I felt intoxicated. Drunk. Swept away on a sea of hormones. Completely out of control. We undressed in a kind of frenzy, clothes discarded in haste, and then we were skin to skin. Soft, warm, hot, wet. I had no idea what I was doing. Boys never do. They just follow some crude instinct. Ceit was much more controlled. Taking me in her hand, guiding me gently inside her. Gasping, almost crying out. I wasn’t sure if it was from pain or pleasure. Then all my primal instincts took over, and I performed as I suppose I was programmed to do. Her cries only aroused me more, driving me on towards the inevitable, which of course came far too soon.

But Ceit was ready for it, forcing me away so that my seed spilled itself silver in the moonlight across the soft curve of her belly. ‘Don’t want me getting pregnant now, do we,’ she said, and she put my hand down between her legs. ‘Finish me off.’

I had no idea what she meant, but with her guidance my clumsy fingers quickly learned how to elicit a response from between the wet softness of her lips, and I was filled with such a desire to please as her body arched and arched beneath me before she cried out to the night and lay panting in the grass, her face flushed and smiling.

She reached up, taking my head between her hands, and pulled me down to kiss me. A long, lingering kiss, her tongue turning slowly around mine, again and again. And then she was on her feet, grabbing my hand. ‘Come on, Johnny.’ And we ran naked among the stones and down on to the beach, helter-skelter across the sand and into the sea.

The shock of it very nearly took my breath away completely. Freezing cold water on hot skin. Both of us called out involuntarily, and it was a good thing that there were no inhabited crofts close to the beach or we would certainly have been heard. As it is, I am amazed we weren’t. Our cries must have carried right across the island.

‘Fuck me!’ Ceit shouted out in the dark

And I grinned and said, ‘I think I just did.’

We ran, splashing, back on to the beach, and up the sand to the old cottage where we rolled in the grass to dry ourselves off and slip quickly back into our clothes. Now the cold gave way to burning skin as we lay wrapped up in each other’s arms, lying there and looking up at the stars, breathless, enthralled, as if we had somehow discovered sex for the first time in human history.

Neither of us spoke for a long time, till I said, finally, ‘What was it you wanted to give me?’

And she laughed so long and hard.

I lifted myself up on my elbow and looked at her, perplexed. ‘What’s so funny?’

Still laughing, she said, ‘One day you’ll work it out, big boy.’

I lay back down beside her, and the sense of being on the wrong side of a joke quickly passed, overcome, nearly overwhelmed, by feelings of love, and the desire to hold and protect her, to keep her safe and secure. She wrapped herself around me, her face nuzzled into my neck, an arm across my chest, a leg thrown over mine, and I just gazed at the stars, filled with a new sense of joy in being alive. I kissed the top of her head. ‘Why do you call this Charlie’s beach?’ I asked.

‘Cos this is where Bonnie Prince Charlie first landed when he came to raise an army to march against the English in the Jacobite uprising of 1745,’ she said. ‘They taught us that at school.’

We met several times in the weeks that followed, to find our way to that old ruined cottage and make love. The fine spring weather continued, and you could feel how the ocean was warming, the conveyor belt of the Gulf Stream invading the cold winter waters of the North Atlantic. Until the night of the storm, when it all went wrong.

I had arranged to meet Ceit as usual that night. But some time during the late afternoon the wind changed, and great dark clouds bubbled up on the horizon, sweeping in as darkness fell. The wind rose, and must have been Force 8 or 9, driving the rain that came with the cloud almost horizontally across the island. Blow-backs from the chimney filled our living room with smoke that night, in the end driving us early to our beds, even although it wasn’t yet dark.

I lay for a long time staring at the ceiling wondering what to do. I had made the arrangement with Ceit, and there had been no chance to call it off. Although it would have been impossible for us to make love that night, there was no way I could not go, just in case she did. I couldn’t leave her to brave the weather on her own, standing exposed down at the jetty waiting for me to show up.

So I bided my time, checking frequently with my watch, its luminous hands glowing in the dark, until it was time to go. I slipped out from between the sheets and got dressed, and pulled out my oilskins from where I had concealed them earlier beneath the bed. I was just sliding the window up when Peter’s voice came out of the dark, raised a little to be heard above the howl of the wind outside.

‘Where are you going?’

My heart stopped, and I turned, an unreasonable anger welling up in my chest. ‘Never bloody mind where I’m going! Go back to sleep.’

‘But Johnny, you never go anywhere without me.’

‘Keep your voice down, for Christ’s sake. Just turn over and pretend I’m still in bed. I’ll be back before you know it.’

I pushed the window all the way up and swung my legs out to jump down into the rain. As I turned to draw the window down again, I saw Peter’s bloodless face as he sat up in bed watching me go, a look of both fear and incomprehension etched all over it. I pulled the window shut and turned my hood up against the rain.

There was no racing down the hill tonight. It was pitch-black, and I had to pick my way carefully through the rock and long grass, bracing myself against the wind and the rain that it drove into my face. Finally I reached the track that led down to the jetty, and was able to move a little faster.

When I reached it, there was no sign of Ceit. It looked as if the tide was in, and neither the quay nor the lie of the land afforded much protection against the sea. It drove in, wave after wave breaking on the rocks all around the shore. The roar of it was deafening. The spray thrown up by the sea thrashing against the stone of the jetty combined with the rain to soak me through. I could feel my clothes wet beneath my oilskins. I peered around me in the dark, wondering how long I should stay. It was madness to have come out at all. I should have known that Ceit would not have expected me on a night like tonight.

And then I saw a tiny figure darting from the shadow of the hill. Ceit, in floppy green wellies, sizes too big for her, and wrapped in a coat that must have belonged to Mrs O’Henley. I took her into my arms and crushed her against me. ‘I didn’t want to not come in case you did,’ I shouted above the roar of the night.

‘Me too.’ She grinned up at me, and I kissed her. ‘But I’m glad you did. Even if it was just to tell me that you couldn’t come.’

I grinned back at her. ‘No pun intended, I guess.’

She laughed. ‘One-track mind, you have.’

We kissed again, and I held her tight against the battering of the wind and the rain, the storm crashing all around us. Then she broke away.

‘I’d better go. God knows how I’m going to explain all this wet stuff.’

She gave me one last quick kiss, and then she was off, swallowed up by the storm and disappearing into the night. I stood for a moment catching my breath, then found my way back on to the track, to head up the hill towards the Gillies croft. I hadn’t gone more than ten yards when a figure emerged out of the dark. I got one hell of a fright, and nearly cried out, before I realized it was Peter. He was wearing no waterproofs, just his dungarees and his worn old tweed jacket, a hand-me-down from Donald Seamus. He was soaked through already, his hair smeared over his face, his expression of abject misery visible to me even in the darkness. He must have got up and dressed himself and come after me as soon as I had gone.

‘For God’s sake, Peter, what are you doing?’

‘You were with Ceit,’ he said.

I couldn’t deny it. He had obviously seen us.

‘Yes.’ ‘Behind my back.’

‘No, Peter.’

‘Yes, Johnny. It’s always you, me and Ceit. Always. The three of us, ever since The Dean.’ His eyes burned with a strange intensity. ‘I saw you kissing her.’

I took his arm. ‘Come on, Peter, let’s just go home.’

But he pulled himself free. ‘No!’ He stared at me out of the storm. ‘You’ve been lying to me.’

‘No, I haven’t.’ I was starting to get angry now. ‘For fuck’s sake, Peter, Ceit and I are in love, okay? It’s got nothing to do with you.’

He stood for a moment staring at me, and I’ll never forget the look of complete betrayal in his eyes. Then he was off, into the night at a run. I was so surprised it took me several seconds to react, in which time he had already vanished from sight.

‘Peter!’ I shouted after him. He had run off in the opposite direction from the croft, towards the shore. I gasped in frustration and ran after him.

Mountainous seas were breaking all along the jagged northern coastline, where giant rocks lay in blocks and shards all along the foot of the low-rise cliffs. I could see Peter now, the merest shadow of a dark figure, scrambling over them. It was insanity. Any moment the sea could reach in and take him, dragging him out into the Sound and certain death. I cursed the day he’d ever been born, and started off over the rocks in pursuit.

I shouted after him several times, but my voice was drowned by the sound of the sea and whipped away by the angry bellow of the wind. All I could do was try to keep him in my sights and endeavour to catch him up. I got to within fifteen or twenty feet of him when he started to climb. In normal circumstances not a difficult climb, but tonight in these impossible conditions it was nothing short of madness. The machair dipped down to within twenty feet or so of the shore before dropping sheer to the rocks below, and a deep crack ran back from it, for all the world as if someone had taken a giant wedge and a big mell and split it open.

Peter was almost at the top when he fell. If he called out, I never heard it. He just vanished into the black chasm of that crack in the earth. I abandoned all caution and climbed up the rock in a panic to where I had last seen him. The darkness below me, as I peered into the chasm, was absolute.

‘Peter!’ I screamed his name and heard it echoing back at me out of the ground. And to my relief I heard a faint call in return.

‘Johnny! Johnny, help me!’

It was lunacy what I did. If I had stopped to think, I would have run back to the croft and roused Donald Seamus. No matter how much trouble we would have been in, I should have gone for help. But I didn’t stop, and I didn’t think, and within moments I was as much in need of help as Peter.

I started to climb down into the crack, attempting to brace myself between the two walls of it, when the rock simply crumbled away beneath my left foot, and I fell into the blackness.

At some point during my fall I struck my head, and I lost consciousness even before I reached the bottom. I have no idea how long I was out, but the first thing I became aware of was Peter’s voice, very close to my ear, repeating my name again and again, like some mindless mantra.

And then awareness brought pain. A searing pain in my left arm that took my breath away. I was lying spreadeagled on a bed of rock and shingle, my arm twisted under me in an unnatural way. I knew at once that it was broken. It cost me dear to turn myself over and haul myself into a sitting position against the rock, and I yelled my imprecations at the night, cursing God and the Holy Mother, and Peter and anyone else who came to mind. I couldn’t see a thing, but the roar of the ocean was quite deafening. The shingle beneath me was wet with seaweed and sand, and I realized that the only reason we were not under water was that the tide must have turned.

At high tide, in a storm like this, the sea would rush into this crack in the earth in a fury of boiling, foaming water, and we would both have been drowned. Peter was wailing, and I could hear his teeth chattering. He pressed himself up against me, and now I could feel his shivering.

‘You’ve got to go and get help,’ I shouted.

‘I’m not leaving you, Johnny.’ I felt his breath in my face.

‘Peter, if you’ve got nothing broken, you’ve got to climb out of here and go get Donald Seamus. My arm’s broken.’

But he just clung on to me all the more tightly, sobbing and shaking, and I let my head fall back against the rock and closed my eyes.

When I opened them again, the first grey light of dawn was angling into the crevice from above. Peter was curled up beside me on the shingle, and he wasn’t moving. I panicked and started shouting for help. Crazy! Who was going to hear me?

I was hoarse and had all but given up, when a shadow leaned over the opening fifteen feet above us, and a familiar voice called down. ‘Holy Mary Mother of God, what are you doing down there, boys?’ It was our neighbour, Roderick MacIntyre. I discovered later that he had found sheep missing first thing after the storm, and had come down along the cliffs looking for them. Had it not been for that serendipitous piece of good luck, we might both have died down there. As it was, I still feared for Peter’s life. He hadn’t moved since I regained consciousness.

The men who weren’t away with the fishing fleet assembled on the clifftop and one of them was lowered down on a rope to pull us up. The storm had abated by now, but there was still a strong wind, and I’ll never forget the look on Donald Seamus’s face in that yellow-grey dawn light as they brought me up. He never said a word, but lifted me into his arms and carried me down to the jetty where a boat was waiting to take us over to Ludagh. Peter was still unconscious, and in the crowd of men huddled around us at the boat I heard someone say he was suffering from exposure. ‘Hypothermia,’ someone else said. ‘He’ll be lucky if he survives.’ And I felt a terrible pang of guilt. None of this would have happened if it hadn’t been for me sneaking out to meet Ceit. How could I ever face my mother in the next life if I let anything happen to Peter? I had promised her!

I don’t remember much about the next day or so. I know that they put us in the back of Donald Seamus’s van at Ludagh, and we were driven to the cottage hospital at Daliburgh. The Sacred Heart. I must have been suffering from exposure, too, because I don’t even remember them putting the plaster on my arm. A big, heavy white stookie from my wrist to my elbow, with just my fingers and thumb sticking out the end of it. I remember nuns leaning over my bed. Scary they were, in their black robes and white coifs, like harbingers of death. And I remember sweating a lot, a bit delirious, burning up one minute, then shivering with cold the next.

It was dark outside when I finally recovered my senses. I couldn’t have told you whether one day had passed, or two. There was a light burning at my bedside, and it seemed shocking to have electric light again, as if I had been transported back to my former life.

I was in a ward with six beds in it. A couple of them were occupied, but Peter was in neither of them, and I began to get a bad feeling. Where was he? I slipped out of the bed, bare feet on cold linoleum, trembling legs that would hardly hold me up, and padded to the door. On the other side of it was a short corridor. Light spilled out from an open doorway. I could hear the hushed voices of the nuns, and a man’s voice. The doctor maybe. ‘Tonight will be critical,’ he said. ‘If he makes it through, then he should be okay. But it’ll be touch and go. At least he has youth on his side.’

I walked in something like a trance along that corridor and found myself standing at the open door. Three heads turned towards me, and one of the nuns was on her feet immediately, coming to grab me by the shoulders. ‘What on earth are you doing out of bed, young man?’

‘Where’s Peter?’ was all I could say, and I saw them all exchanging looks.

The doctor was an older man, in his fifties. Wearing a dark suit. He said, ‘Your brother has pneumonia.’ Which meant nothing to me then. But I knew from his grave demeanour that it was serious.

‘Where is he?’

‘He’s in a special room down the hall,’ one of the nurses said. ‘You can see him tomorrow.’

But I’d already heard them say that there might be no tomorrow. I felt sick to my stomach.

‘Come on, now, let’s get you back into bed.’ The nun who had me by the shoulders guided me back up the hall and into the ward. When I was safely tucked up in bed, she told me not to worry and to try to get some sleep. She turned out the light and slipped back out into the hall in a whisper of skirts.

In the darkness I heard a man’s voice coming from one of the other beds. ‘Pneumonia’s a killer, son. Better pray for your wee brother.’

I lay for a long time, listening to the beat of my own heart, the blood pulsing in my ears, until I heard the gentle purring of my fellow patients as they finally succumbed to sleep. But I knew there was no way that I was going to sleep that night. I waited, and waited, until finally the light in the hall outside was doused and a blanket of silence descended on the little cottage hospital.

At length I summoned the courage to slip from the bed and cross once more to the door. I opened it a crack and peered down the hall. There was a line of light beneath the closed door to the nun’s station, and a little further down, light seeped out from beneath another door, also closed. I squeezed out into the corridor and drifted past the nun’s station till I reached the second door and very slowly turned the handle to ease it open.

The light in here was subdued. It had a strange yellow-orange quality. Warm, almost seductive. The air was suffocatingly hot. There was a single bed with electrical equipment along one side, cables and tubes trailing across the covers to the prone figure of Peter lying beneath the sheets. I closed the door behind me and hurried over to his bedside.

He was a terrible colour. Paler than white, with penumbrous shadows beneath his eyes, his face glistening with sweat. His mouth hung open, and I could see that the sheets that covered him were soaked through. I touched his forehead with the backs of my fingers and almost recoiled from the heat. He was burning up, unnaturally hot. His eyes were moving beneath his eyelids, and his breathing was shallow and rapid.

My sense of guilt very nearly overwhelmed me then. I pulled up a chair to his bedside and perched myself on the edge of it, taking his hand in mine and holding on to it for dear life. If I could have given my life for his I would.

I don’t know how long I sat there. Some hours, I think. But at some point I fell asleep, and the next thing I knew I was being wakened by one of the nuns who took me by the arm and led me back to the ward, without a single word of admonition. Back in my own bed I dozed fitfully, never far from the surface, troubled by strange dreams of storms and sex, until the light of the dawn began creeping in around the edges of the curtains. And then sudden sunlight laid itself down across the linoleum in narrow burned-out strips.

The door opened, and the nuns wheeled in a trolley with breakfast. One of them helped me to sit up and said, ‘Your brother’s fine. His fever broke during the night. He’s going to be all right. You can go along and see him after breakfast.’

I could hardly get my porridge and toast and tea down me fast enough.

Peter was still prone in his bed when I went in. But there was colour in his face now, his eyes a little less shadowed. He turned his head to look at me as I pulled up the chair beside his bed. His smile was pale, but he seemed genuinely happy to see me. I had feared that I would never be forgiven. He said, ‘I’m sorry, Johnny.’

I felt tears prick my eyes. ‘What for? You’ve nothing to be sorry about, Peter.’

‘It’s all my fault.’

I shook my head. ‘Nothing’s your fault, Peter. If anyone’s to blame it’s me.’

He smiled. ‘There was a woman who came and sat with me all night.’

I laughed. ‘No. That was me, Peter.’

He shook his head. ‘No, Johnny. It was a woman. She sat right there in that chair.’

‘One of the nuns then.’

‘No. It wasn’t a nun. I couldn’t really see her face, but she was wearing a sort of short green jacket, and a black skirt. She held my hand all night.’

I knew enough, even then, to know that a fever can make you delirious. That you can see things which aren’t there. It had been me holding his hand, and no doubt the nuns had been in and out. It had all merged together in his mind.

‘She had beautiful hands, Johnny. Such long white fingers. Married, too. So it couldn’t have been a nun.’

‘How do you know she was married?’

‘She was wearing a ring on her wedding finger. Not like any ring I’ve ever seen before. Sort of twisted silver, like snakes wrapped around each other.’

I think, then, every hair on my body stood on end. He had never known about our mother giving me her ring. Never knew how I hid it in a sock in the sack at the end of my bed. Never knew how it had gone into the furnace along with everything else that Mr Anderson had thrown into the flames that day.

I suppose it is always possible that some childhood memory of it had remained in his mind, of seeing it on my mother’s hand. But I believe that what he saw that night had nothing to do with lost memories or delirium. I believe that my mother sat with him through all the critical hours of his pneumonia, willing him to live from the other side of the grave. Stepping in to fill the vacuum left by my failed promise to always look out for him.

And I will carry the guilt of that with me to my grave.

It was some days before they let us go home, my arm still in plaster, of course. I was dreading it, afraid of the certain retribution that would be awaiting us at the hands of Donald Seamus. The look on his face when they pulled us out of the crevice was still vivid in my memory.

He turned up at the Sacred Heart in his old van and slid open the side door to let us climb in the back. We drove the twenty minutes down to Ludagh in silence. At the ferry, Neil Campbell asked after us both, and he and Donald Seamus passed a few words, but still he never spoke to us. When we climbed on to the jetty at Haunn, I could see Ceit watching from the door of the O’Henley croft, a tiny figure in blue on the hillside. She waved, but I didn’t dare wave back.

Donald Seamus marched us up the hill to the croft, where Mary-Anne was waiting for us inside, our dinner cooking on the stove, the room filled with the smell of good things to eat. She turned as we came in the door, and gave us a good looking over, but she too said nothing, turning instead back to the pots on her hotplate.

The first words spoken were the grace said in thanks to the Lord for the food on our plates, and then Mary-Anne served us up a meal fit for a king. I wasn’t big on the bible then, but I was minded of the story of the prodigal son, and how his father had welcomed him home as if nothing had happened. We gulped down thick, hot vegetable soup and cleaned our plates with hunks of soft bread torn from a fresh loaf. We had a meat stew and boiled tatties, and bread and butter pudding to finish. I am not sure if I have ever enjoyed a meal so much in my life.

Afterwards, I changed into my dungarees and my wellies and went out to feed the animals, the hens and the pony. Not so easy with your left forearm in plaster. But it felt good to be back. And maybe, for the first time in a year and a half of being there, it felt like home. I went down the croft then, looking for Morag. I was sure she must have missed me, though perhaps a part of me was half afraid that she had forgotten me in my absence. But I couldn’t find her anywhere, and after nearly half an hour of searching I went back up to the house.

Donald Seamus was in his chair by the stove, smoking his pipe. He turned around as the door opened.

‘Where’s Morag?’ I said.

There was an odd dull look in his eyes. ‘You just ate her, son.’

I never let him see how his cruelty affected me, or gave any hint of the tears I cried silently under the covers that night. But he wasn’t finished with me.

The next day he took me up to the shed where they kill the sheep. I’m not sure what it was about that old hut with its rusted tin roof, but you knew the minute you went into it that it was a place of death. I’d never seen a sheep slaughtered before, but Donald Seamus was determined that it was time that I did. ‘Animals are for eating,’ he said. ‘Not for affection.’

He pulled a young sheep into the shed and hauled it up on to its hind legs. He got me to hold it by the horns, struggling while he placed a bucket beneath it, and then he slid out a long, sharp knife that flashed as it caught the light from the tiny window. In one quick, short movement, he drew it across the major artery in the neck and blood spurted out of it into the bucket.

I thought the beast would struggle more, but it gave up on its life almost immediately, big hopeless eyes looking up at me till the blood had all been spilled and the light went out of them.

The same look I saw in Peter’s eyes that night on Charlie’s beach when his throat was cut, too.

The boy’s sitting staring at me now, as if he expects me to say something. In a strange way, I see me in his eyes, and I reach across to take his hand in mine. Damned tears! They blur everything. I feel him squeeze my hand and everything my life is, and has been, seems black with despair.

‘I’m sorry, Peter,’ I say. ‘I’m so sorry.’