Chapter 24
Walking blind
More than a year has passed. Something irretrievably bad has happened to the world, dysfunction and conflict radiating out from that flashpoint somewhere in the Gulf.
The islanders who remain have known the Girl since she was a child and knew her parents even longer.
In the first year, people did come looking for her and her boat as she had feared they would.
They canvassed the community in depth and found no trace of her.
They questioned the fisherman in the tiny harbour on Berneray, unaware that the yacht behind him was not – as the newly painted and then cleverly aged name on her stern proclaimed – the Flora out of Portree, but the Hope herself.
The fisherman admitted knowing the Girl, but lied cheerfully and said she had not been seen on the island for years.
He directed them to the house her family had always stayed in, and suggested they look there.
They sourly nodded and dismissed his suggestion, thanking him but saying that they’d already done that.
The house had been empty and damp and palpably unlived in for quite a while.
They asked around the smaller island and heard the same story from everyone they spoke to.
They left cards with their numbers and email addresses on in case the Girl was seen, all the while unaware that one of the two figures in bright yellow oilskins out in the red boat zigzagging across the Sound of Harris, pulling lobster-pots was the Girl herself.
The old islanders knew her story by then and had decided since she was again one of their own, she was to be protected.
She did not live at the family’s old holiday house on North Uist, but across the causeway on a croft at the back of Berneray, looking towards Harris, where she stayed waiting for the Boy.
Who never came. And though she tried not to think it, the longer she waited, the more certain she became that he had not escaped the flashpoint, and she had condemned herself to a waiting vigil held for someone who would now never come.
The madness she fears she is becoming prey to is, thus, partly the derangement of grief postponed.
She’s not suicidal or anything, but she just can’t see her way through the sense-dulling miasma that increasingly surrounds her, muffling her ability to touch the joys of life any more.
Of course it’s because he isn’t coming, but it’s more than the shock and the heartbreak of that.
She’s still young, but she feels old, out of gas, worn out.
She’s felt like this since she arrived, since before she realised he isn’t coming.
She used to worry about him, stuck in the roiling mass of refugees clogging the arteries of the Eastern Mediterranean perhaps, but it was still inconceivable that he was dead.
He was hers; had always been tough, funny and resourceful.
She had known back then that he would turn up, maybe more battered round the edges but full of new stories to tell.
She understood why he didn’t contact her.
It had been one of the protocols they had discussed when gaming out her escape, back in the days when it was just a mind game to pass the time and ease the boredom of her then voluntary exile from the world in the facility.
No contact, because every contact left a trace, and even if he left a message with someone else on the island, that message would point at her.
It really had been like plotting a spy novel.
It hadn’t been real. Certainly not as real as her voyage north, scudding under full sail, not sleeping, cold and wet all the time, bone tired and exhausted.
She’d slowed once she was in sight of Skye, passing the small isles in a sea mist that had felt like a timely cloak thrown over her passage by a kindly weather god, and had slunk up the east coast of the long isle in the dark, running with no lights, skulking homewards less like a prodigal daughter than a thief in the night.
She wondered if her general mental unease and more specific sense of physical wrongness was all a consequence of the exhaustion of her escape, those long and lonely sea watches with no company but the gulls and the single pair of dolphins that had raced along with her, dodging back and forth across her bow-wave as she passed Mull’s northern tip, and headed for the Outer Isles.
The tiredness she felt had not really resolved, even with rest, warmth and food.
It was as if she had broken her mechanism by depleting her energy too far.
The passage north sat like that sea fog between her now and her past.
Before the escape she had felt worried and tense, but she had also felt sharp and physically capable.
Now she could not reach back through that fog and get a grip on those qualities, the vigour and health she had taken for granted, certainly not a good enough grip to drag them back inside herself and recharge.
Something was undoubtedly wrong with her, and the other thing she feared was that it was not the result of her exhaustion at all, but a marker of the damage the treatment she had undergone at the facility had done, the side-effects the stern nurse had hinted at.
“The new hormone treatment,” she had said.
“They overclock your whole system. It’s really good, or it’s really bad.
If you’ve something wrong with you, something that might otherwise lie dormant and maybe never peek above the parapet to harm you, the treatment kicks it out of that dormancy and lets it flame through your system. ”
“Like wildfire,” the Girl had said.
“Like cancer,” the nurse had replied. “I’ve seen it, and I’d do you no favour by sugar-coating it.”
The Girl had taken the word like a blow and tried not to show how much she flinched at the thought of it.
“Of course that’s just the physical side,” the nurse had said. “If you’re a bit wobbly by nature, the treatment can topple you right over the edge of your mind.”
“Right,” the Girl had said. She exhaled long and hard, blowing her cheeks out as she did so. “OK. I guess it’s too late for sugar-coating now, right?”
“Cat’s out of the bag.” The nurse had smiled. “I’d say sorry for telling you, but you’re smart enough to know I’d be sorrier not telling you, like I said.”
She’d looked at the Girl in a curiously motherly way.
“Look. You’re still healthy and you’ve not started to go loopy, so I’m warning you because you’ve likely got a chance to stay that way. If you can, get yourself free and clear. I’d not be so cruel as to tell you this if I thought you were already too far in and trapped down the bad road.”
She’d taken some heart at that, as much at the unasked-for smile as the words. It had made her feel courageous. And now here she was, on the other end of that courage, shaky and definitely wobbly, and likely starting that descent into loopiness.
“Probably just a matter of time,” she said to herself as she thought all this, looking down at her feet walking the long flat West Beach on sand so packed in and wind-seared it scarcely took a footprint.
She walked to stay fit and to clear her mind, but most of all to tire her body enough to sleep properly. Some days it worked, most not.
“I’m already going a bit nuts,” she said. “Talking to myself.”
She turned round, suddenly self-conscious, sure that someone had heard her, but there was nothing but a clutch of turnstones and oystercatchers working the tideline to her right, and beyond them a cormorant that dropped into the sea and out of sight, plunging like a missile.
She resumed her path and closed her eyes.
This was one of her games, something she’d done ever since she was a small girl, she’d keep her eyes closed and carry on walking confidently in a straight line, counting her paces and trying to best her record of the day before.
It was a wide and hard-packed strand, so the major danger was tripping over the giant lengths of sea-kelp or tangles of bladderwrack that got thrown up and beached by the tides.
Usually she could easily get up north of a thousand paces without losing her nerve and opening her eyes.
There was a knack to walking parallel to the tideline and not veering off into the sea on one side or stumbling diagonally into the high dunes on the other.
You just had to be very aware of the firmness of the sand and stick to the path you began on.
Soft sand that was wet meant you were heading to the water, soft sand that was dry meant you were likely heading inland.
She let her feet find her way and allowed her mind to relax into the closest she seemed to be able to get to calmness these days.