Peter May - The Lewis Man

A pale smile drifted across the boy’s face. ‘Thanks, by the way.’

‘What for?’

‘Stepping in last night. I don’t know what would have happened if you hadn’t showed up.’

‘Running away’s not the answer, Fionnlagh.’

The sudden fire of indignation flared in the young man. ‘Then what is? We can’t go on like this.’

‘No, you can’t. But you can’t throw your lives away either. You can only do the best for your child by making the best of yourselves.’

‘And how do we do that?’

‘For a start you need to make your peace with Donald.’

Fionnlagh gasped and turned his head away.

‘He’s not the monster you think he is, Fionnlagh. Just a misguided man who thinks he’s doing the best for his daughter and his granddaughter.’

Fionnlagh started to protest, but Fin raised a hand to stop him.

‘Talk to him, Fionnlagh. Tell him what it is you want to do with your life, and how you intend to do it. Show him that you mean to support Donna and Eilidh when you can, and marry his daughter when you’re able to offer her a future.’

‘I don’t know what I want to do with my life!’ Fionnlagh’s frustration caused his voice to crack.

‘Hardly anyone does at your age. But you’re bright, Fionnlagh. You need to finish school, go to university. Donna, too, if that’s what she wants to do.’

‘And in the meantime?’

‘Stay here. The three of you.’

‘The Reverend Murray’ll never accept that!’

‘You don’t know what he’ll accept until you talk to him. I mean, think about it. You’ve got much more in common than you know. He only wants the best for Donna and Eilidh. And so do you. All you have to do is convince him of that.’

Fionnlagh closed his eyes and took a deep breath. ‘Easier said than done.’

The rubber teat slipped from Eilidh’s mouth, and she burbled her protest. Fionnlagh refocused his attention on her and slipped it back between tiny milky lips.

Fin recognized Donald’s car parked where his own should have been, on the curve of the road above the derelict croft and his wind-battered tent. Heavy low cloud scraped and grazed itself against the rise and fall of the land, pregnant with rain, but holding it still as if in realisation that the ground below was already beyond saturation.

Fin reached the car and looked around. But there was no sign of Donald. At least his tent was still there, beat up and bedraggled, guys slack and vibrating crazily in the wind, but still clinging to their pegs. He slithered down the slope towards it, and through the open flap saw that there was someone inside. He knelt down and crawled in to find a tousled-looking Donald Murray sitting crosslegged on the sleeping bag, the hit-and-run folder open on his knees.

Anger spiked through Fin and he grabbed the folder away. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

Donald was startled. And seemed embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry, Fin. I didn’t mean to pry, honestly. I came down looking for you and found the tent open, and the contents of your folder blowing all over the place. I just gathered up the sheets, and …’ He paused. ‘I couldn’t help seeing what it was.’

Fin couldn’t meet his eye.

‘I had no idea.’

Fin tossed the folder towards the back of the tent. ‘It’s old news.’ He backed out of the tent and stood up into the wind. The great rolling banks of cloud seemed to be just above his head, pressing down on him, and he felt the odd spit in his face. Donald clambered out after him, and the two men stood side by side, looking down the slope of the croft towards the cliffs and the beach below. It was some minutes before they spoke.

‘You ever lost a child, Donald?’

‘No, I haven’t.’

‘It’s gut-wrenching. As if your life no longer has any meaning. You just want to curl up and die.’ He turned quickly towards the minister. ‘And don’t give me any shit about God, and some higher purpose. That would only make me more mad at Him than I already am.’

‘Do you want to tell me about it?’

Fin shrugged and pushed his hands into the pockets of his oilskins and started off down the slope towards the cliffs. Donald hurried to catch him up. Fin said, ‘He was just eight years old, Donald. We didn’t have a great marriage, Mona and me, but we’d made Robbie, and in a way that made some kind of sense of us.’

They could see now, below them, the sea rolling in off the Minch in great slow-motion waves that smashed in white, frothing fury on the rocks all along the coast, sending spray thirty feet in the air.

‘She was out with him one day. They’d been shopping. She had bags in one hand, Robbie’s hand in the other. It was a pelican crossing. Go for pedestrians. And this car just came straight through the lights. Bang. She went up in the air, he went under the wheels. She survived, he died.’ He briefly closed his eyes. ‘And we died, too. Our marriage, I mean. Robbie had been the only reason for staying together. Without him we simply fell apart.’

They had almost reached the edge of the cliffs now, where weather erosion had made the soil unstable and it was unsafe to get any closer. Fin squatted down suddenly, and plucked the soft wet bloom from a single head of white bog cotton, rolling it gently between thumb and forefinger. Donald squatted down beside him, the ocean growling and snarling beneath them, as if hoping to pluck them from the cliff’s edge and suck them down into the deep. It spat its spray in their faces.

‘What happened to the driver?’

‘Nothing. He didn’t stop. They never got him.’

‘Do you think they ever will?’

Fin turned his head to look at him. ‘I don’t know that there’s any way I can move forward with my life until they do.’

‘And if they found him?’

‘I’d kill him.’ Fin twisted the bog cotton between his fingers and threw it into the wind.

‘No you wouldn’t.’

‘Trust me, Donald. Given the chance, that’s just what I’d do.’

But Donald shook his head. ‘You wouldn’t, Fin. You don’t know anything about him. Who he is, why he didn’t stop that day, what kind of hell he’s been through since.’

‘Tell it to someone who gives a damn.’ Fin stood up. ‘I saw you last night, Donald. The look in your eyes, when you thought you were losing your baby girl. And all she was doing was catching a ferry. Think how you’d feel if someone laid hands on her, hurt her, killed her. You wouldn’t be turning the other cheek. It would be an eye for an eye, and fuck what Gandhi said.’

‘No, Fin.’ Donald stood up too. ‘I can imagine I would feel many things. Rage, pain, a desire for revenge. But it wouldn’t be my place. Vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord. I would have to believe that somehow, somewhere, justice would be done. Even if it was in the next life.’

Fin looked at him for a long time, lost somewhere in myriad thoughts. At length he said, ‘There are times, Donald, I wish I had your faith.’

Donald smiled. ‘Then maybe there’s hope for you yet.’

And Fin laughed. ‘Not a chance. Souls don’t come any more lost than this one.’ He turned quickly away. ‘Come on. I know a path down to the rocks.’ And he headed off along the cliffs, too perilously close to the edge for Donald’s comfort as he chased after him.

After about fifty yards, the land dipped down, cliff giving way to crumbling peat and shale, sheltered from the sea’s assault by a towering cluster of rocks that stacked up from the shore. A ragged path led down at an angle to a protected shingle beach, almost hidden from the sea itself and nearly impossible to reach from either side. Only a matter of feet away, the ocean vented its anger all along the rocky shallows, the roar of it muffled by the stacks that kept it at bay. The clearest of water gathered in pools among the rocks below them, and the spray blew high over their heads.