Peter May - The Blackhouse

‘Will you take me?’ Fin asked him patiently. He knew it was a big ask.

Padraig lowered his head and peered out from beneath the roof of the wheelhouse. ‘It’s a hoor of a storm out there, sir.’

‘You’ve been out in worse.’

‘Aye, I have that. But never by choice.’

‘We’re talking about a boy’s life, Padraig.’

‘And I’m thinking about my boat, and the lives I’d be putting at risk by taking her out.’

Fin said nothing. He knew that the decision was in the balance. He had asked. He could do no more. Padraig sucked on the last half-inch of his cigarette, but it had gone out. He looked at Fin.

‘I can’t ask the boys to go.’ Fin felt hope leaking out of every pore. ‘But I’ll put it to them. It’ll be their decision. And if they say yes, then I’ll take you.’ Hope gathered itself again in Fin’s heart.

He followed the young skipper out through the galley. Oilskins hung from hooks along one wall, above a row of yellow wellies. Dirty dishes slopped about in cloudy water in the sink, a skin of grease reflecting the harsh electric light. There was a kettle on the gas hob, beneath a row of chipped porcelain mugs hanging on pegs.

Rungs set into a riveted metal shaft took them down to cramped living quarters in the rear of the trawler. Six berths were set into the hull around the stern of the boat, and a triangular table with benches along each side took up most of the available space. Duncan and Archie were sitting with mugs of tea and cigarettes watching a snowy picture on a tiny TV set mounted on the wall high up in one corner. Anne Robinson was being rude to some miserable contestant and insisting that they were the weakest link. A middle-aged woman with a face like fizz stormed towards the camera on her walk of shame. Padraig turned off the television and quelled the protestations of his crew with a look. He had something about him for a young man, a quiet, powerful presence that made itself felt.

In a low voice, in the insipid yellow electric light in the hold of the rusted old trawler, he told them what Fin was asking of them. And why. The two young men sat in their ragged pullovers and torn jeans, broken nails ingrained with oil and dirt, pale, mean faces born of generations of island poverty, listening to Padraig’s story. Glancing occasionally at Fin. They barely made a living, these boys. And it was not much of a life, eating, sleeping, shitting aboard this old, painted whore of a trawler twenty-four hours a day, five, sometimes six days a week. Day after day they risked their lives, in order that they might live like this. When Padraig had finished, they sat in silence for a moment. Then Archie said, ‘Well, it’s cheaper than going to the pub, I suppose.’

It was after seven when they left port, tipping past Cuddy Point into the outer harbour and facing into the rising swell that drove in off the Minch. By the time they had cleared Goat Island and motored out into deeper water, the sea was rising and breaking about them as they ploughed their way through the advance regiments of the storm. Padraig stood at the wheel, his face furrowed in concentration, green in the reflected phosphor of the battered radar screens that flashed and beeped all around the console. There was a little light left in the sky, but it was impossible to see anything. Padraig was guiding them by instruments and instinct. ‘Aye, she’s wild, right enough. Not so bad here in the lee of Lewis. It’ll be a lot worse when we round the Butt.’

Fin could not imagine anything much worse. He had thrown up twice by the time they passed the Tiumpan Head Lighthouse, and he declined Archie’s offer of fried egg and sausage that the boy was somehow managing to conjure in a galley that no longer had any fixed point of reference.

‘How long’s it going to take?’ he asked Padraig.

The skipper shrugged. ‘Took us just under eight hours last night. Could be nine or more tonight. We’ll be heading right into the teeth of the storm. It’ll be well into the early hours before we get to An Sgeir.’

Fin remembered how it had felt eighteen years before when they had rounded the Butt of Lewis, and the beam of the lighthouse had finally faded into darkness. The security of the island behind them, they had set out into the vast wilderness of the North Atlantic, kept safe and dry only by a few tons of rusting trawler and the skills of her skipper. He had felt scared then, lonely, incredibly vulnerable. But none of that prepared him for the fury with which the ocean would fling itself upon them this time as they rounded the northern tip of Lewis. Diesel engines hammering in the dark, they fought against seemingly impossible odds, water rising sheer all around them, like black, snow-capped mountains, crashing over the bow and hammering into the wheelhouse. He hung on to whatever he could, wondering how Padraig could remain so calm, and tried to imagine how it might be possible to survive, sanity intact, another seven or eight hours of this.

‘Before my father died,’ Padraig had to shout above the roar of the engines and the anger of the storm, ‘he bought another boat to replace the Purple Isle. ‘ He nodded and smiled to himself, keeping his eyes fixed on the screens in front of him and the blackness through the glass. ‘Aye, she was a right beauty, too. The Iron Lady he called her. He spent a lot of time and money making her just the way he wanted her.’ He flicked a glance at Fin. ‘There are times you wish it was that easy with a woman.’ He turned and grinned back into the darkness, and then his smile faded. ‘He was going to sell this old dear when he got the chance. Only he never did. Cancer of the liver. He was gone in a matter of weeks. And I had to step into his shoes.’ He took a crumpled-looking cigarette one-handed from a Virginia tobacco tin and lit it. ‘Lost the Iron Lady first time I took her out. A ruptured pipe in the engine room. By the time we got to it, there was more water coming in than we could pump out. I told the rest of them to get the dinghy out, and I tried everything I could to save her. I was up to my neck in the engine room before I finally baled out. Just made it, too.’ Smoke swirled from his mouth in the turbulent air of the wheelhouse. ‘We were lucky, though. The weather was good, and there was another trawler within sight. I watched her go down. Everything that my father had put into her. All his hopes, all his dreams. And all I could think was, how was I going to tell my uncles I’d lost my father’s boat? But I needn’t have worried. They were just glad that we were safe. One of them said, “A boat’s just a bunch of wood and metal, son. The only heart it has is in those who sail her.”’ He took a long pull at his cigarette. ‘Still, I get goosebumps every time I go over the spot where she went down, and I know she’s just lying there on the seabed, right beneath where we last saw her. All my father’s dreams, gone for ever, just like him.’

Fin felt the young skipper’s intensity like a third presence in the wheelhouse. He looked at him. ‘We just went over that spot, didn’t we?’

‘Aye, Mr Macleod, we did that.’ He snatched a quick look at the policeman. ‘You should go and lie down in one of the berths for a while. You never know, you might get a bit of sleep. It’s going to be a long haul.’

Duncan took his place in the wheelhouse as Fin went below and pulled himself up into the same berth he had occupied the only other time he had made the journey. He had no expectation of sleep, just the knowledge that in the long, slow hours ahead of them he would have plenty of time in which to turn over, again and again in his mind, all the unanswered questions that plagued him. Questions he knew would not be answered until they got to An Sgeir. And even then, there was no guarantee. Artair and Fionnlagh might already be dead, and he would never know. And never forgive himself for not having had at least some inkling of what was to come.