Doug Johnstone: Smokeheads

Blood roared in his ears and his heart thudded as he scrambled across the ice.

Behind him, thousands of heavy shapes filled the night sky and covered the frozen loch, panicked birds creating a mayhem of flapping and crying. From somewhere amongst them a flare sent fingers of violet light searching across the land. He ran on, desperate to escape the nightmare chasing him.

He looked ahead for his friends, but there wasn’t enough light to make anything out. He struggled to breathe as panic forced him onwards, his legs aching and head pounding.

There was a low, heavy creak and the ice split up ahead, slivers of black reaching towards his feet. The ice gave way under him and he plunged into freezing water, the breath hammered out of his body.

He grabbed and scratched at broken shards of ice as he went down, the shock of the cold tensing his muscles and sending spasms through him. His head went under and his face burned.

Thrashing his way to the surface with stiff arms, he tried to call out, but his lungs were empty. He sank, gulping water as he went.

His body jerked as he tried to resurface. His chest was ready to burst as he flailed and thrashed through jagged chunks of ice. His head cleared the water and he thought he saw a hand held out towards him.

He tried to reach for it but missed. He felt his body being dragged back under, the cold sucking the life from him and setting his nerves on fire.

Steeling himself for one last effort, he thrust his body upwards, hoping the hand was still there, hoping someone would save him, hoping there was a way out of this.

He pushed for a final time with every inch of effort he had left, stretching his hands up and out of the water, searching for something to hold on to.

‘What are we drinking?’

‘Take a guess.’

Adam looked at Roddy towering over him, upright and steady despite the wind. They always played this game, Roddy keen to catch out the supposed whisky expert. Adam examined the deep amber liquid in the glass as the wind swirled fiercely around them, the motion of the ferry making him shift his weight. Not the best environment for a tasting, but he stuck his nose in the glass anyway.

It was peppery, splashes of seaweed, a big hit of peat then something sweeter, maybe cinnamon. It would be an Islay, of course, given that they were on the boat to Port Askaig. Adam took a sip and let the spirit roll round his mouth, over and under his tongue, soaking into his taste buds. It was old, too much oak, vanilla and cocoa smoothing out the raw spiciness. It wasn’t any of the working distilleries, which left one option.

‘Port Ellen?’

Roddy smiled. ‘What age?’

‘Thirty?’

Roddy sucked his teeth. ‘Twenty-seven-year-old. Single cask, limited edition 137 bottles. Set me back 320 quid.’

Typical fucking Roddy, he couldn’t give you a dram without letting you know how expensive it was. Typical of him to have Port Ellen as well, the rarest and most over-hyped Islay malt. That was Roddy all over, style over substance. Adam tried to curb his bile; he would have to stay calm on this trip if he was going to get what he wanted. He looked at his new watch and pressed the button.

‘Why do you keep doing that?’ said Roddy, glugging whisky and refilling his glass.

Adam hesitated. ‘It has a heart-rate monitor on it.’

Roddy laughed theatrically. ‘Really?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And?’

Deep breath. ‘Eighty-nine bpm.’

‘At rest? Jesus wept, you’re a stroke waiting to happen. The last thing you need to be doing is keeping tabs on your bpm, Strachan, you’ll worry yourself to death.’

Adam started whispering under his breath — ‘Serenity now, serenity now.’ It had started as a joke from Seinfeld years ago, Roddy comparing Adam to uptight loser George, Adam joining in the laughter so that he was part of the joke rather than the butt of it. Now he was George for real.

‘What are you doing now?’ said Roddy, peering at him. ‘Meditating?’

Adam took another deep breath. ‘Just give me a refill, will you?’

He watched his glass fill up. At least Roddy always poured good measures. Adam looked away and tried to imagine his heart pumping slower, his veins and capillaries easing and narrowing.

They were clear of the mainland now, the scabby Portakabin of Kennacraig Terminal gone from view but the brown-green stretch of Islay still just a shrouded fist of knuckles in the distance. In this open water they were brutally exposed to the weather: pummelling, icy winds, snowclouds dark as gravestones pressing down on them as their rusting CalMac hulk strained through the sea.

A snapping noise made Adam look up to see a frayed and faded saltire flapping amongst the ship’s rotating radar bars and brick-red funnel. He looked back out to sea, his eyes bleary in the bluster. The wind chopped fat lines of white froth out of the inky water and he had a flashback to last night, ill-advisedly sharing a couple of heavy toots with Roddy in the toilets at Amber.

The venue was another of Roddy’s wind-ups, the restaurant attached to the Scotch Whisky Experience, the tourist-trap travesty next to the castle with a whisky-making tour where you travelled through time in a ridiculous dissected cask. At least Roddy hadn’t made them do that. Actually, Amber was a pretty decent restaurant if you ignored all the tartan bullshit, which was impossible. How they’d ended up scraping out lines of Roddy’s top-drawer nose powder in the bogs, he couldn’t recall. Must’ve been hammering the cask strength. No surprise, given that Roddy was picking up the tab, keen as ever to demonstrate his obscene wealth to anyone in a five-mile radius.

Adam looked at Roddy now and winced. Tall and fit, wavy hair flicking in the wind, he looked like a Hollywood rendition of a heroic frontiersman off to tame the wilderness and win his bride, all square jaw, striking good looks and smouldering stare. Adam caught a glimpse of his own hungover self in a grubby porthole. Chipmunk cheeks and wobbly chin, balding head and a short, stocky body, red-raw eyes behind dated thick-rimmed meeja specs. He was six inches shorter than Roddy, but it felt like more. It was hard to believe they were the same species, never mind the same age.

A bacon roll filled his view.

‘Thank God,’ he said as Ethan handed it to him, Luke slinking behind and handing one to Roddy.

‘You clowns took your time,’ said Roddy.

‘Truckers, man,’ said Luke, as if that explained it. He slouched into a scuffed plastic seat bolted to the deck and chewed lazily. Adam loved the way Luke didn’t give a flying fuck whether he made any sense or not. Some pretentious bastards might aim for enigmatic; Luke managed it without realising. His lanky, emaciated body, rough beard, ever-present beanie and stoned placidity added to the accidental guru effect. He was gazing out to sea, then spoke.

‘Puffins.’

Adam couldn’t see anything except the choppy waters and emerging peat moors of the island.

‘And young gannets.’

Adam looked again, thought he maybe saw tiny blades of white dive-bombing the surf, but couldn’t be sure.

‘Really?’ said Ethan, following Luke’s gaze.

Ethan was the most normal of them, Mr Average with his supposedly sensible RBS career-ladder computing job, new-build suburban semi in Gilmerton, conventionally pretty but conservative wife, Debs, and full range of Berghaus and North Face to keep the January cold out. He was average height, average weight and his brown hair was even in a carefully combed side parting, for Christ’s sake. Adam liked to be condescending about Ethan’s averageness, but who was the mug? Adam rented his tiny Abbeyhill flat, lived alone and still did a job he hated in the arse end of retail at the age of thirty-eight.