Peter May: Coffin Road

‘You didn’t think it was strange that I never told you more about myself?’

I see her shrug her shoulders. ‘In the circumstances, I suppose I didn’t really want to know. I sensed your reluctance and I never pushed you. Sometimes people can know too much about each other. Remove the mystery and you take away the excitement.’

‘What about you and Jon?’

‘Jon and I have been married eight years. We came to Harris a little less than a year ago, from Manchester. A sabbatical of sorts, too. Only ours was to try and patch up a failing marriage.’ There is no amusement in the tiny laugh that breaks from her lips.

I break the silence that follows. ‘Should I feel guilty, then?’

‘About what?’

‘Us.’

‘No.’ Her voice is flat, without emotion. ‘It became apparent to Jon and I, very quickly, that the marriage was beyond repair. In the beginning it had all been so intense. But they say the light that burns twice as bright burns half as long.’ She pauses. ‘And we were all burned out.’ Then a sigh. ‘But we’d taken on the let for a year, so decided to stick it out.’ She half-turns again. ‘Then I met you.’ She swivels fully around so that she can meet my eye. ‘And that’s what saved my sanity.’

I search her face and find intensity there. In the line of her mouth, the darkness of her eyes. ‘And Jon has no idea?’

Her shrug this time is philosophical. ‘I don’t think so. But, who knows? If he does, he’s not letting on. And, anyway, he goes back to Manchester a lot, to take care of business, he says. Maybe he’s seeing someone there.’ Her smile is wan. ‘At least it makes it easier for us.’ Pause. ‘Or did.’

The look she gives me is so piercing and invasive that I almost cannot hold her gaze.

She says, ‘I can’t even imagine what it must be like not to know who you are. You must have something in the house. Personal stuff. Things that would at least let you start filling in the gaps.’

I shake my head. ‘That’s what’s so bizarre. There’s nothing. No photographs, no passport, no chequebooks. Not even any credit cards.’

‘Well, then, how do you live?’

My gasp is born of utter exasperation. ‘I don’t know. I have money in my wallet. But beyond that...’

Her frown deepens. ‘This is surreal, Neal, you know that? You couldn’t make this up.’

‘I know. I know.’ Then I remember the map. ‘The only thing I’ve found...’ And I slide past her and off the bed to go through to the sitting room. I hear her right behind me, and I lift the Ordnance Survey Explorer Map from the coffee table. ‘Is this.’ She peers at it over my shoulder. ‘It’s just a map.’

I trace the line of the orange marker pen with my finger. ‘But I’ve drawn this on it. Following some kind of track that goes up into the hills.’

She looks more closely. ‘Oh, yeah. Bealach Eòrabhat .’ And somehow I know she gets the pronunciation of the Gaelic all wrong. ‘The coffin road. Jon and I walked the whole circuit last spring.’

I look at her, filled with incomprehension. ‘Coffin road?’

‘Apparently, right up till not that long ago, people on the east coast of Harris used to carry their dead across the hills to bury them here on the west side.’

‘Why?’

‘The soil on the east side is so thin you can’t dig down deep enough to make a grave. So they used to carry the coffins across what they called the Bealach Eòrabhat to bury the bodies in the west-coast machair.’ She smiles. ‘Though I’m not sure they actually used coffins. You could count the trees on this island on one hand, so there wouldn’t have been much wood around. Maybe they only had one that they used again and again for carrying the bodies, and just buried them in a shroud or something.’

‘Why would I have marked out the coffin road in orange?’

Her smile is pale, and not exactly sympathetic. ‘You tell me, Neal.’ She turns back to the map. ‘But it stops about a third of the way up, so maybe there’s something there.’

‘Like what?’

‘How would I know? Jon and I didn’t see anything in the spring. Well, I mean, apart from boulders and lochs and a bunch of cairns. I read somewhere that sometimes, when the weather was really bad, the coffin bearers would stop on the road and dump the bodies in a loch, or bury them anywhere they could find, and just mark the spot with a cairn.’

I drop the map back on the table and sit heavily on the settee. ‘Only one way to find out. I’ll walk the coffin road tomorrow.’

She looks down at me, and for the first time since I have confessed my memory loss, I see her expression soften. ‘It’s quite a trek just to get to the point where the coffin road begins, Neal. Right around the head of the bay and across the Seilebost causeway. How will you get there without a car?’

‘I’ll walk.’

She purses her lips. ‘I could give you a lift. And walk with you over the coffin road.’

‘What would Jon say?’

‘I’ll tell him I’m going into Tarbert, and I’ll pick you up at the far side of the cemetery. You can’t see that far along from our house.’

And I am suffused with a sense of gratitude.

It is raining when I waken. A driving rain, blown in on the leading edge of a strong south-westerly. I can see it slashing across the beach, almost horizontally. The cloud is low, nearly black at its most dense. As I stand at the French windows, looking out across the Sound towards Taransay, I can see the rain falling from it in dark streaks that shift between smudges of grey-blue light and occasional flashes of watery sunshine that burn in brief patches of polished silver on the surface of the sea.

I have slept the sleep of the dead, untroubled by dreams, good or bad. The greatest nightmare was waking to face the dawn of a new day with memories that stretch back no further than yesterday. I feel hollowed out, empty, devoid of optimism and consumed by depression. The only light in my darkness is Sally.

I remember how it had been making love to her the night before. All the mystery and excitement of sex with a stranger. How driven we had been, both of us, by some uncontrollable inner urge. And then my revelation of memory loss bringing distance between us, and a cooling of our warmth. I had felt her slipping away, the only thing of substance that I’d had to hold on to. And then her offer to walk the coffin road with me, like a lifeline. I was no longer alone.

While Bran polishes off the food in his bowl, I slip waterproof leggings over my jeans and push my feet into well-worn walking boots. My green waterproof jacket is fleece-lined and warm. I zip it up and select a hiking stick from the rack, before opening the door to face the rain.

Bran dashes out ahead of me, running for the beach until he sees that I have turned the other way, then comes scampering after me. In the window of the house that sits up on the other side of the road, I catch sight of the woman I met yesterday on the road. The one with the yappy little dog. She waves, and I wave back before turning east and tilting a little into the rain that drives in from the beach side, stinging my cheek.

The single-track winds between leaning fenceposts, past the cemetery and a collection of houses on the other side of the road, a barn with its sloping expanse of rust-red roof. Ahead, along the rise, a handful of solitary trees that might be Scotch pines stand in silhouette against the luminous grey of the sky. Trees whose branches have been stripped and sculpted by the wind into strange, horizontal skeletons that reach to the east, like old television aerials seeking a signal.

Beyond the cemetery, the road bends and dips down to where a cattle grid sits between two red-topped white gateposts. Beyond it, a metalled path descends to the cottage on the beach that I saw yesterday. I turn in there to stand and wait, my back to the rain, out of sight of Jon and Sally’s house, and Bran looks at me as if I am mad.