Peter May - The Lewis Man

‘That yellow building over there on the left, the one without a roof — that used to be the village store and post office. Run by a chap called Nicholson, I think it was. The only Protestant on the island.’ He grinned. ‘Can you imagine?’

Fin couldn’t.

‘Just up beyond that, to the right, you’ll see the remains of an old stone cottage. Not much left of it now. That’s the O’Henley place. But she’s long dead. Widowed quite young, too. She had a wee lassie that stayed with her. Ceit, if my memory serves me well. But I’m not sure that she was her daughter.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘Oh, heaven knows. Gone long before the old lady died. Like all the young ones. They just couldn’t wait to get off the island in those days.’ His smile was touched by sadness. ‘Then and now.’

Fin’s eyes strayed beyond the ruin towards a large white house built on the rocks above it. What looked like a brand-new driveway snaked up the hill to a levelled garden area at the front, and a wooden deck accessed by French windows from the house. Above it, a balcony was glassed in against the elements, and on the wall above that a neon star. ‘Who lives in the big white house?’ he said.

The old man grinned. ‘Oh, that’s Morag MacEwan’s house. Retired to the island of her birth nigh on sixty years after she left it. I don’t remember her at all, but she’s a character, that one. You’ll maybe know her yourself.’

‘Me?’ Fin was taken aback.

‘If you watched much telly, that is. She was a big star on one of those soap operas. Not short of a bob or two, I’ll tell you. Keeps her Christmas lights up all year round, and drives a pink, open-topped Mercedes.’ He laughed. ‘They say her house is like Aladdin’s cave inside, though I’ve never been in it myself.’

Fin said, ‘How many people are there still living on Eriskay these days?’

‘Och, not many. About a hundred and thirty now. Even when I was a lad there was only about five hundred or so. The island’s only two and a half miles long, you see. One and a half at its widest point. There’s not much of a living to be made here. Not from the land, and not from the sea now either.’

Fin let his gaze wander over the desolate, rocky hillsides and wondered how folk had ever managed to survive here. His eyes came to rest on a dark building sitting high up on the hill to his right, dominating the island. ‘What’s that place?’

The old man followed his gaze. ‘That’s the church,’ he said. ‘St Michael’s.’

Fin drove up the hill towards the little settlement of houses known as Rubha Ban which was built around the primary school and the health centre. A sign for Eaglais Naomh Mhicheil , led him up a narrow track to a stone-built church with steeply pitched roofs and tall windows delineated in white. An arched doorway topped by a white cross and the logo Quis ut Deus — Who is like God? — opened into the church at its south end. Outside its walls a black ship’s bell was mounted on a stand, and Fin wondered if that is what they rang to call the faithful to worship. The name, painted on it in white, was SMS Derfflinger .

He parked his car and looked back down the hill towards the jetty at Haunn, and across the Sound to South Uist. The sea shimmered and sparkled and moved as if it were alive, and sunlight streamed across the hills beyond it, the shadows of clouds tracking across their contours at speed. The wind was powerful up here, filling Fin’s jacket, and blowing through the tight curls of his hair as if trying to straighten them.

A very elderly lady in a red cardigan and dark-grey skirt was washing the floor in the entrance hall. She wore elbowlength green rubber gloves and sloshed soapy water from a bright red bucket. She wore a silk headscarf around cottonwool hair, and nodded acknowledgement to him as she moved aside to let him past.

For just a moment time stopped for Fin. Light poured in through arched windows. Colourful statues of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus, and winged angels bowed in prayer, cast long shadows across narrow wooden pews. Stars shone in a blue firmament painted in the dome above the altar, and the white-draped table itself was supported on the bows of a small boat.

Every hair on his arms, and the back of his neck, stood on end. For here was the church with the boat in it that Tormod had spoken of. He turned back towards the entrance.

‘Excuse me.’

The old lady straightened up from her bucket. ‘Yes?’

‘What’s the story of the boat beneath the altar? Do you know?’

She placed both hands behind her hips and arched herself backwards. ‘Aye, she said. ‘It’s a wonderful tale. The church was built by the people themselves, you see. Quarried and dressed the stone, and carried the sand and all the materials up here on their backs. Devout souls they were. Every last one of them with a place in Heaven. No doubt of that.’ She thrust her mop back into the bucket and leaned on its handle. ‘But it was the fishermen who paid for it. Offered to give the proceeds of one night’s catch towards the building of the church. Everyone prayed that night, and they came back with a record catch.?200, it was. A lot of money away back then. So the boat’s a kind of homage to those brave souls who risked the wrath of the sea for the Lord.’

Outside, Fin followed the gravel path around to the west side of the church and saw how the land fell away to the shore. Past the houses on the rise, and the headstones on the machair below, to a strip of beach glowing silver against the shallow turquoise waters of the bay. Just as Tormod had said.

Fin remembered a paragraph from the post-mortem report, which he had read only the night before in the flickering fluorescent light of his tent.

There is an oval, dark brown-black, apparent abraded contusion, measuring 5? 2.5 centimetres, over the inferior aspect of the right patellar area. The surface skin is vaguely roughened and there are fine grains of silver sand in the superficial skin.

The pathologist had found fine silver sand in all the abrasions and contusions of the lower body. Not golden sand, as found on the beaches of Harris. But silver sand, as found here, down there, on what Tormod had called Charlie’s beach.

Fin focused on the crescent of silver that led the eye around the bay to a new breakwater at the south end, and wondered why he had called it Charlie’s beach.

‘Who’s this?’

‘It’s your grandson, Mr Macdonald. Fionnlagh.’

He doesn’t seem at all familiar to me. I see some of the other inmates sitting in their armchairs like Lord and Lady Muck, eyeing up this young boy with his odd, spiky hair who’s come to see me. They seem curious. How does he make it stand up like that? And why?

The nurse pulls up a chair and the boy sits down beside me. He looks uncomfortable. I can’t help it if I don’t know who the hell he is. ‘I don’t know you,’ I tell him. How could I have a grandson? I’m hardly old enough to be a father. ‘What do you want?’

‘I’m Marsaili’s boy,’ he says, and I feel my heart skip a beat.

‘Marsaili? Is she here?’

‘She’s gone to Glasgow, Grampa, to sit some exams. She’ll be back in a day or so.’

This news comes to me like a slap in the face. ‘She promised to take me home. I’m sick of this hotel.’ All I do all day is sit in some damned chair and look out the window. I see the children across the street leave for school in the morning, and I see them come home at night. And I can’t remember anything that’s happened in between. I suppose I must have had lunch, because I’m not hungry. But I don’t remember that either.

‘Do you remember, Grampa, how I used to help with the gathering? When we brought the sheep in for the shearing.’