Gerald Seymour: Beyond Recall

Would he have killed her for the sake of the mission? Taken her life if it had helped him to go free? Might have, might not have, felt lucky the decision had been spared him.

For Gaz, the island was his new home. He worked on the garden with a bitter and frantic intensity. To a stranger, anyone ignorant of where he had been and why he had been there and what he had experienced, it was the sort of exaggerated effort of an incomer to ease himself towards acceptance. A man arrived and set up home and offered himself for casual labour, and undercut existing rates charged for maintenance work, attempted to be a friend of everybody and offered a familiarity that was almost heathen to the remote community of Westray. If Gaz had been one of them, prodding to be welcomed into the inner tribal heart of the island – and there were enough – he would barely have lasted the first winter. Those were the men and women, who came on a boat in the spring and thought it would be fulfilling, a tapestry of dreams, and talked of a former life until they were shunned. They barely survived the first of the autumn storms that gathered strength out in the Atlantic before breaking on the archipelago of Orkney, howling and endlessly beating on buildings. The first storms brought a level of rainfall unknown to the new settlers. In place of the dull and dreary summer drizzle came the ripping power of near horizontal rain, torrential and frightening. Work would dry up, but a post van still struggled along sodden roads and delivered utility bills, and food was expensive, and… they were usually gone by Christmas. Very few saw out their first winter, returning to the mainland on a tossing ferry, having survived the Pentland Firth’s fierce currents, would land at Scrabster and would say ‘Thank God to be out of there. Pretty enough when the sun’s shining. Miserable people, all wrapped up in themselves and not reaching out with help and a welcome. And the weather, it’s something else; bloody awful wind, and rain. Older and wiser and glad to be out.’ Gaz had been on Westray, a thin and twisted finger of land jutting into the sea and boasting eighteen square miles of gale-scraped land, with idyllic beaches and sheer granite stone cliffs, for two clear winters and he valued each day he survived there, and the place had a particular and especial importance to him.

Gaz was working in the garden of a holiday cottage halfway between the island’s most notable ruin, Noltland Castle, and the sole hotel at Pierowall. The cottage had a decent enough view of the bay and anchorage on the north-facing side. A combination of a mild winter, a strong Gulf Stream, and fair sunshine along with rain-saturated ground, meant that he had a day’s mowing of a rough lawn, hedges to be trimmed and beds to be weeded. The owners, a Glasgow family, would be up in a week and would stay a fortnight, expecting the garden to be manicured. Some occasional residents allowed their grass to be cropped by grazing sheep, others objected to the excreta deposited and demanded that the place be mowed, and were prepared to pay for the privilege. Gaz would mow all morning. His shadow was thrown behind him as he made neat lines on the grass, and he wasted no time because the forecast, as always, was variable and warned of coming squalls, with more expected in the coming days. He was a practical man, good with his hands and willing, happy, to work on his own because that was the style of his old life… It was old, that life, and he hoped it well behind him, but sometimes it seemed to nip at his heels – and lurk in his mind. The island was his refuge. It was a convalescence. He took one day at a time and had done since he’d arrived, a foot passenger on the ferry from the mainland to Stromness, then buses and ferries, and then a jolting journey by air: it had not bothered him because back in his life there had been many turbulent flights.

He had enough gardening contracts to see him through the short summer months, and when the autumn came and the winds gained strength he could move inside; he was a careful decorator, steady and painstaking. Those who owned second homes on the island and visited rarely, seemed to enjoy the smell of fresh paint when they deigned to come. He could also do basic electrics, rewiring and rudimentary plumbing. Gaz had learned to be alone and to solve problems by fast analysis and decision taking. He did not need to pass difficulties up a chain of command, but he could repair a fusing power supply, fix leaking taps and cisterns, and could strip and service a mower. These skills did not mark him out on the island. They were part of the way of life there. To him, the mower was no easier, no harder, to strip and reassemble than any general purpose machine-gun, and the isolation he lived with alone in his rented cottage was no different than that he had experienced in covert observation posts. That was the world he had put behind him, but their demons were in pursuit.

No cruise boat was due that day. There was a murmur of the tide pushing the stones back beyond the island’s cemetery, and oystercatchers came and went and screamed at some imagined danger, and cattle grazed, and seals slept on the rocks and in the seaweed. He was alert to danger, had lived with it pretty much all his adult life. But, in former times, he had been amongst men and women who had shared the risks and could talk about them with gallows humour. That was the world he had fled when he travelled north, carrying his rucksack on to the ferry and never looking back at the diminishing mainland shoreline. Leaving it lost in mist and hoping that memories would become as vague, ultimately be forgotten.

He realised, and it would bring a sardonic smile to his face, that he had been from the start a mystery figure in the Westray community. As intended. In the shop, to his neighbours on the nearest farm, and the more distant ones, and on the rare occasions he went to the hotel bar, and to his customers, he volunteered nothing about his background. His reticence permitted rumour to go free range. Some sidled questions to him, others were more direct and sought information: he was not rude, never offhand or dismissive, but always deflected the enquiry. He was good at it; his previous life had taught him the discipline of secrecy. In the first winter there had been a persistent beat up the path from his iron gate with invitations to join any one of the myriad of clubs that succoured the island people through the darkness of the long winter. The second year few, other than the most insistent, had come to his door. Now, he was left to himself, tolerated, accepted and greeted with a certain warmth and an understanding that he must be a man ‘with a past’, who had perhaps escaped from an old episode in his life. He was talked about, he was quizzed, and he smiled and changed the subject, and worked hard which was a requisite talent for being accepted on Westray, population a few shy of 600. The postman, of course, knew a little more than most. Brown envelopes still pursued him, and on them was his name: Gary Baldwin.

No one on the island called him ‘Gary’, nor was he, in this society, ‘Mr Baldwin’. He introduced himself as Gaz, which was what he had been called from far back. He was not paid by card or by cheque but asked for cash, using it for buying food and small items of equipment for his work. He was of average height, and had average features and his hair was of average colour, and his eyes seemed unremarkable and there were no features on his appearance which stood out. Not being noticed had been a hallmark of his craft. He spoke with a quiet voice and in two long winters and one full summer none on the island had heard his voice raised either in laughter or anger: there was a Birmingham accent, supposedly the West Midlands whine, but not pronounced. He’d had, as a child in an anonymous tower block in the Aston district, no knowledge of his father, and not much more of an idea of who his mother was. There had been a succession of ‘uncles’ who visited or took up temporary residence, and a legion of social workers who called by. He had been five years old when his life had altered… an ‘aunt’ had come, a relation of his mother. His few possessions had been packed in a small case of imitation leather. A spattered Land Rover had parked at the entrance to the block. An overweight couple, cords and tweeds, had panted their way to the door. They were friends of the aunt, he was told, and he left with them and his mother had shrugged and looked away. He remembered everything of the two-bed flat, but a keen memory for detail was a skill that he was to practise in his work… what he did before the experience, the illness, then the flight to find a refuge.