Peter May - Coffin Road

I click to drop down a menu and check my preferences. I have set everything to private, although since I have entered no personal information and made no posts, that hardly seems necessary.

Three icons along from the settings menu, there is a red dot next to a couple of square, overlapping speech bubbles. Someone has messaged Michael. I click on the icon to open a window that has a single message for Michael Fleming from Karen Fleming. It is dated just three days ago and reads, Uncle Michael, I think dad might still be alive. Please get in touch .

I sit back, stunned. So is that who I am? Michael Fleming? Karen’s uncle? If that is the case, why am I not suddenly remembering everything? Why is recollection and all that detail of my life not flooding back into memory? My sense of disappointment is almost crippling.

After several long minutes just staring at the screen, I force myself to click on Karen’s photos. There are a few dozen of them. I open up the first and then start scrolling through the others. Most of them are pictures of Karen with friends. Selfies. Stupid faces pulled for the camera. There are photographs of freshly acquired tattoos, and I am shocked by the extent to which this girl has vandalised her skin.

Then suddenly I am frozen in time and space, like an insect trapped in amber. A photograph posted of a much younger Karen. She is sitting on a wall beside a man, both of them smiling at the camera, his arm around her shoulder. Her post reads, Happier days. Me and my dad when I was twelve .

And the man is me.

It never seemed to occur to the police that I might have two keys for my car. I keep the spare in the glove compartment, and since the car is not locked I have no trouble retrieving it.

I take all the beekeeping equipment from the shed and throw it into the boot. Which is when I notice the large rucksack in the back. And I wonder now, as I pack everything into it — hat, gloves, smoker, kindling, hive tool — if this is how I carried all my stuff up the coffin road during my visits to the hives.

Bran jumps into the back seat, fed and happy, and stretches out as I start the car, reversing into the turning area, then accelerating hard over the cattle grid.

It takes me little more than ten minutes to get from the cottage to the parking area beyond the Seilebost causeway, turning off to where the tarmac ends and the mud track that is the old coffin road begins. The wind and the sun have mostly dried the mud, and the track is rutted and tricky underfoot, rainwater lying only in occasional pools, in holes and hollows.

Bran races ahead of me, pleased to be out and running free, stopping frequently to shove his nose at familiar smells, then galloping off in search of the next. It is hot in the afternoon sun, and only the wind cooling my sweat keeps me from overheating as I stride determinedly up the hill. I am not sure why, but I feel somehow as if the bees are the key. Not just to my memory, but to everything.

My name is Fleming. My daughter is Karen. Though nothing else has come back to me yet, memory seems only a breath away. Somewhere just beyond the most flimsy of membranes. I can almost see it, colours and shapes, blurred and refusing to come into focus. But somewhere in those hives, hidden among the rock spoil of ice-age explosions, I am convinced now that my memory is waiting for me.

It is what drives me on, refusing to stop for a breath, the rucksack weighing heavy on my back, legs aching from the relentless climb. Only once do I stop, to look back, and see dark storm clouds gathering along the distant horizon, incongruous in the sunshine that spills down here from the bluest of skies. But I know how fast the weather can change, and that it won’t be long before equinoctial winds, whipping up their anger in the south-west, will blow in the storm.

The breeze is already freshening and gaining in strength, and I turn to push on towards the summit. The wind ridges the surface of the loch as we pass it, and I force myself up through the final 200 yards of gruelling ascent, past ancient cairns, to the spot where I recognise the two stones that sit, unnaturally, one on top of the other.

The giant rocks away to our right, standing guard over my concealed hives, cut deep shadows into the incline. And the cracks and crevices in the face of the cliff above them are thrown into sharp relief by the sunlight.

Bran has already covered half of the distance between the rocks and the road as I set off across the peat bog in pursuit of him, black glaur sucking at my feet with every step. My legs are shaking from the effort by the time I reach the lip of the hollow and gaze down at what I know to be my hives gathered among the rocks below me.

I scramble down, swinging the rucksack from my back, and start lifting off lids and crown boards, stopping only to pull on my hat with its protective net and light my kindling, smothering it in the smoker with damp newsprint to produce clouds of white smoke that I puff into the hives to calm the bees.

Even though I have no recollection of it, I know I have done this many times. It comes to me as second nature.

There is a considerable traffic of bees, seduced to leave their hives by the good weather with its promise of pollen and nectar among the late-season heather.

All of the hives have sugar bags below the crown boards and I know, without even thinking, that the season is over and I have prepared them for winter. I know, too, that in the spring my bees will have flown down on to the machair, where they will have feasted upon the abundance of wild flowers there, and that it is during the summer lull, when the flowers have passed and before the heather is in bloom, that I will have fed them their first sugar syrup.

I can almost taste the sweetly perfumed heather honey that my bees produce, but then that moment of elation is followed by the shadow of depression descending suddenly upon me, like sunshine slipping behind a cloud. Something is wrong. The bees are dying. Not just here. Everywhere. I realise with shock, like a sudden slap on the face, how disastrous this is. Not just for me.

Bran’s barking brings me back to the present, and I turn, startled, to see him dancing around the legs of a man standing at the top of the hollow. He is silhouetted against the sky and it is not until he climbs down among the hives that I realise it is the man with the binoculars from the caravan across the bay.

His hair, like lengths of frayed rope, blows out behind him in the wind. His face is deeply tanned and unshaven, and he examines me carefully with dark-ringed eyes. When he speaks, his voice seems familiar. ‘Local gossip has it that you’ve lost your memory, Tom.’ I return his gaze with an odd sense of apprehension. ‘Maybe it’s about time that someone told you who you are.’

But a moment of revelation causes me to shake my head, and I stare at him with new eyes. ‘No,’ I say. ‘No. There’s no need, Alex.’

Bran is running around the cottage like a daftie, chasing imaginary rabbits, or something else unseen. He seems infected by my excitement. Although, in truth, excitement does not do justice to how I feel. I am both elated and devastated. I know who I am, and I know what happened on Eilean Mòr. And I remember only too vividly what occurred that same night when the storm finally capsized my damaged boat. Although nothing of what followed, until I was washed up on Luskentyre beach. I know that I am extraordinarily fortunate to be alive.

But it is all, simply, too much. I cannot process everything at once. My brain is suffering from information overload and telling me, ‘Enough!’ Like too much light, returning memory is blinding me. I can see the big picture in silhouette, but most of the detail is still burned out.