Chapter 3
Monday
Taylor’s waking thought was that his arm was at a really weird angle.
Only slowly did he realise it was not his arm, but JB’s.
He turned his head, which was excruciating, only to get an eyeful of JB’s groin, which was alarming.
They were lying, top to toe, on a double bed and Taylor was upside down.
JB had at some stage wrestled off all clothing apart from his boxers whilst Taylor still wore everything including his boots which had left clods of dirt on the pillow.
The curtains were open and tin-sharp sunlight sharded straight through his eyeballs making him wince.
JB groaned in reply and rolled over so that his backside was now disturbingly near Taylor’s face.
Gingerly Taylor sat up, placing his hands to either side of his head to prevent it from splicing in half whilst, under one foot he detected a rug and under the other, wooden floorboards.
With great effort, he stood. The room appeared to shrink as he straightened but gradually he realised this was just the play between the low and slanted ceiling and the rise of the hill right outside the window.
The room looked like it had been torn through by a tornado, such was the hurl and scatter of the contents of JB’s backpack and the ruck and twist of the bedding.
Taylor had no recollection whatsoever of entering this bedroom, let alone the cottage.
He hadn’t a clue where the bathroom was but boy did he need it.
He discovered it on the landing and, to the other side of it, was the second bedroom.
Through the open door, Taylor could see Drew tucked up childlike in one of two single beds, his black hair thatching just above the sheets.
The other bed was pristine. Taylor called himself an idiot and headed into the bathroom where the floor seemed to fall away from him until he realised it did indeed slope.
This cottage was ancient! He caught sight of himself in the mirror, it was not pretty.
He took a shower and gave himself a long blast of pure cold; felt his heart race, his lungs work, his skin goose over, his skull tighten, his balls tuck.
I live, he congratulated himself. I’ll never drink again, he said.
And then he called himself a jerk as he reached for a towel.
The kettle clicked off and brought him back to the present and his need for coffee, and still the woman in the photo stared straight at him.
Maybe she was Flora’s ma or someone. Jeesh, Taylor hoped Flora didn’t turn up here today.
Her place was a mess; they were a mess! The coffee tasted awful so he tipped in a load of sugar and took the mug outside where fuzzed drifts of someone driving them here late last night began to swim around his head.
A bench, a washing line, flower pots with spring bulbs, but the garden appeared to be just a tamed section of the wilder land beyond, fenced off by a low and tumbling wall.
Taylor vaulted it and headed into the wind and off to he didn’t know where.
Clouds duelled above, umpired by sections of pale blue sky, and though there was a constant breeze it wasn’t cold at all.
He glanced back at Flora’s House only it wasn’t really a house; just a small squat cottage with JB and Drew, still out for the count, filling those little bedrooms. Briefly, he wondered if he should have messaged them but realised he didn’t know where his phone was.
He didn’t think they’d wake anytime soon and if they did, there was his attempt at coffee ready for them in the kettle.
Though he’d done some quiet homework about Harris and its moors, its hills, the dunes and the peat, the lie of the land soon had its fun with him as if chastising him for his hangover, for being a dick.
He’d brought limited footwear on the trip: running shoes, boots, a pair of Chucky Ts and slides which, foolishly, he was wearing now.
Already, his socks were soaking. Had the guidebook said not to expect a path?
Or that, soft as it looked in pictures, the grass gathered in dense clumps and the land became unexpectedly soggy?
Had it mentioned the sudden amphitheatres of sand?
The dunes had looked so benign online: sugary fine, a prelude to the running beaches of West Harris.
In reality, Taylor had to ramble and jag his way through.
When he had shown Drew and JB the details of Flora’s House, JB had said screw small cottages in the middle of nowheresville – let’s stay in town!
let’s stay in a hotel! But Taylor had booked Flora’s House anyway, sensing that, after running the Paris marathon followed by a possibly insane trip to London, nowheresville was exactly where he’d need to be.
So here he was, with yet one more marathon under his belt and another in his legs for five days’ time.
Here he was, in socks and slides, giving scant regard for his ankles and knees which were much needed for the big run.
He was here, on the island of his mother’s birth, the precise location of vague family history about which he knew this and that but not a lot.
Scrambling and jinking his way through the dunes, and having to think about each footfall, finally Taylor made it down to the beach where the wind hit him and the tide was right out.
Pale sand filled a vast bay. Right over on the other side, scattered houses nestled while hills rolled around and the west coast flowed.
To his right, a long beach galloped empty and straight captained by distant mountains.
Some way ahead, small waves pestered the shoreline as if the sea didn’t have much energy today.
From the maps, the Outer Hebrides had appeared to be just a small tattering of islands on the edge of the Atlantic.
But now he was here, everything felt expansive and significant.
He slipped off his slides and struggled out of sand-clagged socks and strode to the water’s edge, hungry for the taste of saltwater, for sand and sea to swallow his feet and gulp at his legs.
Growing up landlocked in Colorado Springs, he’d craved beaches and ocean since he was a kid.
I grew up with way too much water, his mother had told him.
It was everywhere, she’d said, as if that wasn’t a good thing at all.
Sometimes it felt like I was living on a sponge drifting out to sea.
Over the water, shadow and light swung nets of purple and grey, khaki and blonde, across the island whose name he had previously noted but now forgotten.
Behind him, the constant sway and beat of the grasses holding the dunes together.
The wind pestered his ears and watered his eyes and zipped surf along the waves.
The sea rolled in bands of blues. Sand and saltwater on his lips.
The air, the wind, a solid thing; a texture.
All of it was strangely familiar because now he understood how he’d seen it all before.
Wasn’t every detail in front of him also to be found in that box?
The box which, every so often from when he was a kid to just last month, he’d lift off the lid and let it all out; the place he’d never been to. Until now.