Chapter 34
Better run than fight
It happened at the shank end of a long, overly hot day at the time of year when the burn of an unnaturally prolonged high summer should have been cooling off into mellower autumn days.
Midges were not normally a problem out on the island’s edges, where there was usually enough breeze to keep them from getting airborne.
On this day the sea had been flat and the breeze dropped to nothing in the afternoon, the time she had planned to take a cooling swim.
Lack of wind always allowed the midges to get airborne in hungry swarms, and so, not wanting to subject herself to the maddening biting and itching they brought with them she had sat it out inside until the sun began to drop.
She only headed to the beach down the Road to Nowhere when the warming effect of the sun’s rays weakened and caused enough of a heat differential between the baking land and the cooler sea to trigger a breeze to ground the uncountable squadrons of midges.
The tide was on the turn, but the water had spent all afternoon on the hot sand of the shallow bay, being heated by the sun above and the sand below.
It was almost too warm, and not the bracing contrast she had hoped for.
The bay held a small uninhabited islet in the centre of it called Lingay, and when the tide went out it was possible to walk all the way across to it.
It was this shallowness that helped the sun warm the bay of the home beach so effectively and made it such a perfect swimming spot, but it also meant that unless the tide was especially high, you often had to walk a very long way out before it became deep enough to swim in.
She’d shucked out of her clothes among the marram grass on the sea side of the dunes.
There was an old shovel with a sun-bleached wooden handle that she’d found on the machair a long time ago, which she left there, stuck in the sand as a marker and a place to tie her clothes to when the wind was strong enough to blow them away.
Out of habit she draped them and the towel on it, and then had waded thigh-high for a couple of hundred metres before finding enough depth to float in.
She then just let herself lie back on the water and watch the colours in the sky change as the sun slid down towards the horizon.
She stared at the slowly shifting shapes of the clouds drifting overhead and allowed herself the luxury of imagining they were morphing into recognisable animal shapes at the behest of her imagination, not the other way round.
She’d look at a cloud and think, Yes, you look like a steam engine, but now change into an elephant for me.
It was amazing to her how often this kind of change seemed to happen, but she knew it was a trick of perception, not her actually remotely altering the objective shape of the cloud by will alone.
Magical thinking.
It was the kind of irrationality she was increasingly in danger of falling victim to, when she should instead be clutching on to hard reality for dear life.
She shook herself out of it and let her mind focus instead on the flights of seabirds that always assembled at this time of the evening, cutting across the gulf of air above her, heading for whatever home they went to each night.
In her mind she called this Rush Hour. She spent so much time floating and watching this evening commute that she became – given the marked heat of the earlier part of the day – pleasantly cold but suddenly aware the tide had pulled her to the mouth of the bay where the abyssal chill of the open ocean beyond warned that a boundary was about to be crossed.
She was a strong swimmer but initially had to work hard to swim in against the pull of the outgoing tide, and then ran out of sea halfway across the bay as it drained back into the deep ocean behind her and so had to wade twice as far to get home to the beach as she had when coming out.
It was one of those liminal evenings where the weather isn’t quite breaking, but the new chill that cut in with the strengthening breeze made her shiver as she strode in naked through the knee-high water.
It was certainly nothing as dramatic as a thunderstorm ending a hot spell, but the weather was giving a strong hint that a new front was approaching from just beyond the horizon.
The colours in the sky behind her were darkening from pale pinks and watery blues and beginning to bruise towards nightfall in deepening shades of violet and purple, streaked with contrasting oranges that were busy refining themselves down to ever more ominous tones of red.
The wind had mostly dried her body by the time she stepped off the hard ridges of the wet shell-sand and on to the softness of the warm dry drift below the dunes.
She shook the residual wetness off her hair, pulled on her underwear and stepped in to the cut-off boilersuit before striding up the steep sandy arc of the dunes and over into the marram grass beyond.
She’d left her boots on the stile over the first fence, and didn’t bother slipping into them as she began the familiar walk back across the machair to the distant house, towel round her neck, the boots swinging from one hand.
She turned and checked out the spectacle in the sky behind her, which had now sharpened into something almost overdramatic in its intensity and range of contrasting colours.
“Beautiful,” she said to herself and any wildlife that might be around to hear her. “Can’t say it’s not beautiful…”
She wasn’t exactly happy, but she was, in this moment, content, relaxed and pleasantly tired.
Or, to put it another way, her defences were down.
She ducked under the wire on which she normally left her towel to dry, but didn’t for once leave it, since she hadn’t used it.
It was round her neck as she walked up the last hundred yards to the back of the house and flapped in the wind as she turned the corner that led to the front, slapping her in the eye.
She winced and instinctively tried to rub the sting away as she turned the next corner, so she was for a moment too preoccupied to notice the unfamiliar quad bike and trailer parked on the grass in front of the garage.
It was so still and unexpected that she almost walked past it on the way to the kitchen door, as if her mind had just decided it was obviously impossible and so, since it couldn’t really be there, there was no point bringing it to her attention.
And then she did see it and stopped cold. She forgot to breathe. She’d spent so long trying not to hope that this moment would happen, but here it was. Not the wish, but the thing itself.
Him.
Just as he had promised.
Him. Here. At last.
She was about to run into the house to find him when she heard the chunk of wood on wood coming from the garage and heard a muffled grunt of pain.
She knew exactly what had happened without seeing it, and her heart soared even higher at the thought: He was getting peat and wood from the log pile to make a fire to welcome her home.
They had always sat on the rug in front of the fire to warm themselves after cold swims. She associated the smell of a peat fire with happiness.
It was also why she liked and missed smoky tea and peaty whisky now the shops were empty and the distilleries presumably closed.
He must have seen her walking back across the machair.
Something unlatched inside her chest and she felt a warm glow of relief and happiness flood through her as she ran to the door of the garage and stopped abruptly to take in the longed-for figure bent over the jumble of logs back where the shadows were at their thickest in the far corner of the room.
She saw the shoulders tense as her feet crunched to a halt on the loose stones of the driveway.
“Hey—!” she said, and then ran out of words as he turned from the woodpile.
It wasn’t him.
It wasn’t anyone she’d ever seen before.
“Hello,” he said, voice croaky as if rusty from long disuse. “Who are you then?”
It was the “then” that instantly flushed all the warmth of the evening swim and the sunset and the surge of excitement she’d felt when she thought this stranger was the Boy straight out of her system.
It was replaced with the icy certainty that this strangely weak-looking man was not going to be a friend, no matter how much he was trying to smile reassuringly as he moved calmly towards her.
He wasn’t much bigger than she was. He didn’t look monstrous or threatening or obviously dangerous, but his unremarkable features contained bulgy eyes that were hot and slippery, as if some secret shame slithered guiltily just beneath the skin.
It wasn’t clear whether it was shame at what he had done or what he was doing – or what he was going to do.
She had a strong impulse to run, but an even stronger one not to turn her back on him when he was this close and still walking towards her.
“Hang on,” she said, struggling to keep her voice pleasant and unthreatening. “Sorry. What are you doing here?”
“Me? Just having a looky-loo.” He smiled. “No harm intended. Didn’t know there was anyone here.”
He was still walking towards her, and the more he emerged from the gloom into the last of the evening light coming from behind her the less she liked his expression.
On closer inspection she saw he had a neck that was the same width as his head, and his throat was bulgy like his eyes, which gave him an unsettling toad-like look.
She held up her hand, palm out.
“Please stop,” she said. “You gave me a shock. I just need a moment.”
He was passing the wide section of tree trunk she used as a chopping block to split kindling wood. There was a hatchet with a neon orange handle stuck in it. He paused right next to it.
“My bad,” he said. “Anyone else in the house?”
She didn’t answer. He smiled wider, but with his mouth closed, which made him look even more like a toad. His eyes stayed wet and hot.