Peter May - The Chessmen

I lay with my eyes closed, my head resting on my folded blazer, drifting away into an imagined future. Which was when angry voices crashed into my idyll.

‘Okay! Okay!’ I heard Strings’ voice raised to an almost hysterical pitch. ‘You’re on. We’ll do it. Tomorrow.’

I opened my eyes, annoyed by the interruption, and swung my legs down on to the bridge. The others were all gathered at the far end where the Road to Nowhere snaked off towards the cliffs. I sighed and jumped down to make my way towards the group.

‘What’s going on?’

A grinning Whistler turned in my direction. ‘We’ve figured out a way to choose the new name.’

I frowned, surprised. ‘How?’

Mairead said, ‘Roddy and Strings are going to have a race on their bikes. To the blasted rock, and back.’

I wasn’t impressed. ‘That’s not very far.’

Rambo said, ‘It’s about two miles. It’s enough.’

And Skins added, ‘Whoever wins gets to choose the name.’

I found all their faces turned towards me, as if somehow seeking my approval. ‘Bloody stupid if you ask me,’ I said. ‘And dangerous.’

There were a lot of groans and faces turned away again. And Roddy said, ‘Who the fuck’s asking you anyway?’

Whistler and I walked the proposed course the following morning. It was another glorious day, and with the wind dropping away to almost nothing the midges were out in force. For the first part of the walk, as the road wound across the moor towards the cliffs, rising all the way, we were slapping our faces and necks and waving our hands around our heads like demented puppets.

The surface of the road here was rough. Tightly packed small stones, with moss and grass growing in between. Rocks rose away to our left, and to the right the land dropped by increments towards the shore, in turn smothered by bracken peppered by tormentil and scarred by peat banks. We rounded a bend and startled a clutch of grazing sheep, coats brightly slashed by green and purple markings, and they skittered away ahead of us.

‘I’m not going to uni,’ Whistler said suddenly, and I was startled.

‘Jesus! Why not?’

He shrugged. ‘Can’t be bothered.’

I stared at him in disbelief. ‘Christ, man, it wouldn’t be any bother at all to you. I sweat blood trying to pass my exams. You sail through them without even opening a book.’

‘So where’s the challenge in that?’

I was open-mouthed. ‘But what would you do?’

‘Stay here.’ He gazed off impassively across the sands.

‘Are you mad? I don’t know anyone that doesn’t want to get off the island. And there’s not a kid at the Nicolson who wouldn’t give their right arm for half your brains and the chance to get into uni.’

He shrugged again. ‘Fair enough. But none of them are me. And I want to stay.’

My mind was racing, trying to come up with arguments that would persuade him of the folly of this decision. ‘What about the band?’

‘What about it?’

‘Well, everyone else in Solas is going to go to Glasgow.’

‘So?’

‘So you can’t still be in the band if they’re there and you’re here.’

‘So?’

‘You’re not serious?’

He turned his head slowly and fixed me with his big dark eyes. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

‘Because you’re a brilliant flute player. Because it’s your life.’

He shook his head. ‘Nah. I can blow a whistle okay, but what use is it? And it’s not my life. Never has been. It’s Roddy’s band. Him and Strings. It’s their lives, not mine.’

I knew he was not to be argued with when he’d made up his mind about something, and so we walked on in silence to the first big bend in the road. The breeze stiffened, blowing away the midges and carrying a smell of fish and dampness to us on its leading edge. Fulmars dipped and shrieked above our heads, and we saw shags down on the water. Looking back you could see Garry, and beyond it the curve of Traigh Mhor, literally the big beach. Tolastadh Head and the village itself stretched out on the rise, treeless and stark in the sunlight.

The road dipped, then, before rising to the second bend. It was sharper and closer to the sea, which seemed a long way below us now, and we saw the coastline stretch away to the north, rising sheer from the deceptively tranquil azure of the Minch. The sky was streaked with high cloud, almost luminous in the morning sun, as if brushed across it by some impatient watercolour artist.

Not much further on, a short stretch of grass at the left poured straight over the edge of the cliffs into an almost vertical chasm, or geodha in Gaelic, that slashed down sharply into the rock. Peering over from the top of it, you couldn’t see the bottom.

I leaned over as far as I dared to look down. ‘Bloody dangerous this is,’ I said. ‘We should post somebody here, just so the boys are aware of it.’

The plan was to station us in pairs at the bends, and at the turning point at the end, just to make sure there was no cheating.

Whistler left the road, and started making his way down the south side of the geodha to try to get a better view of it.

‘Careful,’ I shouted after him. It was steep. I could see sheep on a narrow grassy ledge about halfway down, but nothing beyond that.

He waved his arm. ‘Come and see this.’

I picked my way cautiously over the grassy banks and rock until I could see what he saw. Household rubbish. Tons of it dumped over the edge, no doubt by the good folk of Tolastadh over many years. A skein of rusted metal, prams, bicycle frames, fish boxes, old nets, fencing wire. The sea had clawed out the bottom of the pile, but much of it was stranded halfway down, caught by clusters of jagged rock.

The sea was abnormally calm where it washed into the fissure, emerald green and clear as day. You could see the rocks beneath the surface, magnified, and simmering in the current. And even this high above it, you could hear the sea sucking and sighing, its breathing amplified by the acoustic effect of the geodha , almost as if it were alive.

We scrambled back up to the road. Whistler nodded then. ‘Aye, we definitely need to mark this as a danger spot.’

The road beyond followed the line of the cliffs to where its builders had been forced to blast through a giant rock that blocked the way ahead. Part of it, twelve or fifteen feet high, had been left standing on the cliff side, all of its strata exposed, seams of red running through its broken surfaces, like a geological diary going back to the very beginnings of time.

This gateway to nowhere was to be the turning point. We stood in the gap blown through the stone more than ninety years before and saw how the spoil from it lay all across the hillside, a jumble of shattered rock nestling still where it had first settled after the explosion. And looking back, as the road curved away, we could see straight across to the distant peaks of mainland mountains so hazily familiar to generations of islanders.

‘You know what?’ I said. ‘This is crazy. Why don’t you guys just have a secret ballot? Majority vote wins.’

Whistler shook his head. ‘Roddy would never agree. He’d be scared of losing.’

Word had got around, and apart from the dozen or so regular members of the bike group another twelve or fifteen kids turned up that afternoon to watch the race. Everyone was gathered at the bridge. Someone had brought a can of spray paint, and some of the kids were decorating the concrete parapets with their names. Roddy and Strings were hyped up and silently tense, focused on the race. There would be no problem distinguishing one from the other. Roddy with his bright-blue Vespa scooter, and the violent yellow of Strings’ machine.

Whistler and I were stationed at the second bend. Skins was on duty at the blasted gateway, and Rambo was standing guard at the geodha . Mairead and another girl were at the first bend. Curiously she had expressed no opinion whatsoever on either of the proposed names, which I took to mean that she probably favoured Caoran, but didn’t dare say so.