Питер Мэй - I'll Keep You Safe

It didn’t take long for word to spread around the village that Yankee Eachan had lost his gate and couldn’t find it anywhere. Over the next few days he was to be seen tramping around the village, and from croft to croft, searching for it. Stories of how he had pursued the boys with a belt and buckle, intent on doing them harm, meant that no one had much sympathy for him. As my dad had said, it was just a bit of fun after all.

The story reached its conclusion on the sabbath.

Yankee Eachan always sat up in the balcony during services at the Free Church, despite his position as an elder. It was a tradition. Or, at least, his tradition. Perhaps he felt closer to God up there. Nobody knew. But on his way down the stairs at the end of the service, he passed a window that looked out on to the building work for the new toilet block, and the roof of the workmen’s Portakabin. And there, plain as day, lay his gate. He stopped on the stairs and glared at it through the window. His voice reverberated all around the church. ‘Gorram sumbitch!’

Her father fetched a trolley and lifted the two suitcases Niamh had brought back with her on to it. And then, with evident reluctance, as if it might somehow be contaminated, retrieved the plain cardboard box with the shipping straps from the carousel and placed it on top of them.

As they stepped from the terminal building, the wind blew Niamh’s hair into her eyes. She swept it back with both hands to scan the car park. It was less than a week since they had flown out, and yet she had no recollection of where Ruairidh had left the Jeep.

Then she spotted it. He had parked the 4×4 two rows back. As they reached the vehicle, sunlight chased the shadow of a broken cloud across the tarmac and then vanished again in a moment. It felt strange to be opening up the SUV without him. Her father lifted everything from the trolley into the boot, and Niamh slipped into the driver’s seat. She had to slide it forward to reach the pedals, and bring the back more upright. A change of the settings Ruairidh had needed for his longer legs. She adjusted the mirror. And every little thing she changed felt like losing one more piece of him.

Her parents stood by the open door and her mother said, ‘You’ll just follow us back to Balanish, then? Or would you like me to come with you?’

Niamh shook her head. ‘I’m going home, Mum.’

Her mother looked surprised. ‘Balanish is your home.’

‘No. Taigh ’an Fiosaich is my home. The house Ruairidh and I built.’

Her mother drew in her chin, disapproval colouring her face. ‘I still don’t understand why he made you build a house way out there on the edge of the earth.’

‘Maybe it was to get away from you.’ The words were out of Niamh’s mouth before she could stop herself, and she immediately regretted them. She added quickly, ‘When it feels like the whole world is against you — my family, his family — you retreat into each other. We found peace at Taigh ’an Fiosaich. All our memories are there. And that’s all I have left of him.’

The drive up the west coast to Ness in the north was a painful one. It was a journey she and Ruairidh had made together countless times since building their house out on the remote headland of Cellar Head, beyond the old ruined settlement of Bilascleiter.

The success of Ranish had put money in their hands for the first time, and they had decided to build their home in one of the remotest corners of the island. There had been more than a little truth in the words Niamh had spoken in haste to her mother. Maybe it was to get away from you. In fact it had been to get away from everyone. From the claustrophobic family atmosphere of the Macfarlane croft where the house they had restored in the early years of their marriage was now the headquarters of the company. To avoid the disapproval of Niamh’s parents. And the gossip, sometimes malicious, that so characterized the community of Balanish. And although never acknowledged, it was also an attempt to escape the event that had driven so sharp a wedge between their two families. An event they had not once discussed in all their years together.

A hardcore track, pitted and scarred by time and weather, had already led south across the moor, along the east coast to the gathering of shielings at Cuishader. They had repaired and extended it, providing access to the headland for the building of the house.

So what if it was a fifty-minute commute south to Balanish? Folk on the mainland would think nothing of that. And while they would sit in lines of traffic, breathing in the pollution that belched from countless exhausts, Niamh and Ruairidh would see the sun rising pale in the east, or setting blood-red in the west. In all the summer daylight hours, when the sun barely ever set, the vistas offered by the drive up and down the west coast were incomparable. The mountains of Uig and Harris as they headed south. The Northern Lights as they returned late to Ness. The spring and summer flowers that turned the winter-dead moor into a sea of shimmering colour. Sunshine and rain spawning rainbows in profusion. On some days, it seemed, there was one around every curve of the road. Even in winter, under angry skies, Atlantic gales battered the cliffs which had stood resolute against the forces of the ocean since the beginning of time. Spume rising hundreds of feet into the air, white against leaden cloud. Before dispersing in a moment to salt the machair and saturate the bog.

Today there was very little sun to light Niamh’s heart on this drive north. The equinoctial gales were late this year and the sky lay low on the island, grey and featureless. In this light, every village on the road seemed drab and depressing. Harled houses huddled together in treeless clusters, exposed to the full force of the weather. A profusion of Protestant churches feeding the faith of a hardy people who had put down their roots in this desolate place thousands of years before. And although it was always the desire of the young to leave, to get away, it seemed programmed somehow into their DNA that in time they would come back. If not them, then their children, or their children’s children. In truth, there was no escaping the island. It was in your blood.

At Cross, in the shadow of the church that dominated the skyline, Niamh turned on to the road to Skigersta, cutting off the northern tip of the island and heading east. From Skigersta the track south bumped and rolled its way across several miles of peat-scarred bog to the retreat she had built with her dead husband.

There was a spattering of rain as she drove down the slope past the old tin huts and caravans at Cuishader where crofters used to bring their beasts to graze during the summer months, allowing crops to grow on the crofts back home. Someone had even brought an old bus out here as shelter against the elements. Maclennan Coaches was barely visible now in red lettering along one side of it, almost obliterated by the weather. One wheel, still visible, lay at an odd angle. Beyond the shielings, to the east, a deep cleft in the cliffs cut right down to the shore, where a small sandy cove was hidden from view.

Niamh was forced to slow down to traverse the concrete slab laid over the stream that ran down from the Galson moor. In heavy rain the bridge would be submerged by this tiny waterway in spate, and crossing it could be treacherous.

On the other side the track rose steeply again, until Niamh had a clear, unobstructed view south across the moor towards the great fingers of gneiss that reached out into the Minch, as if holding on to it for dear life.

Her Jeep lurched and rattled over the rutted hardcore, swinging around the ancient village of Bilascleiter. All that remained of it now were the footings of a dozen old blackhouses, and a solitary shieling of green-painted corrugated iron with a rust-red and silver tin roof.