Sophie drove the crazy twisted road across the bolder-strewn East side of the island. It took all her concentration to stay on the tarmac strip — just wide enough and no wider. One moment of distraction and they could slip into the peat bogs, smash into a roadside bolder or crush one of the thin sheep that confidently meandered across the road or even lay down on the warm tarmac watching her headlights approach unmoved and unmovable.
Thirty minutes drive felt like an hour and Tim didn’t make it any easier sitting bolt upright willing her round every bend and remarking on every hazard — just in case she hadn’t noticed it.
“Do it yourself if you think you can do it better.”
“Sorry, just a bit nervous.”
“What have you got to be nervous about? I do all the talking. You just have to look interested and be gracious. Just pretend you’re a count or something and you might find you can be polite for a whole evening.”
Satnav Jane announced, “Left turn in 50 yards.”
They turned off the narrow tarmac for a narrower dirt road signposted Craibheard and after a few hundred yards then took a left down a steep hill towards Skoon.
“You have reached your destination.”
The Prius glided quietly into the tiny yard and stopped beside a VW Camper – one of the old split screen models, brightly painted with daisies.
“You sure this is right?” Sophie asked.
“Jane is never wrong.” Tim smiled.
The car doors closed behind them with a soft click. Outside the darkness was deep and endless. No house lights, no streetlights, no moon, no stars. Nothing to prick the deep blackness of the island except their headlights.
They peered through the windows of the little white crofter’s cottage. The lights were bright and the chatter was warm. The little dining room was nearly full.
A tall young man appeared at the door.
“Good evening?”
“Hi, I’m Sophie. My husband, Tim.”
“Well, hello. I’m Andrew Morrison.”
“We’ve come to join you for the meal.”
“Really? Well… er… you’d better come in.”
Sophie waved the key towards he car. The doors locked and the headlights faded.
Andrew looked puzzled and impressed.
“Hi, what a place. So remote. So quiet.” Sophie said.
“Lovely to meet you both. Do come in. Meet Emma.”
Emma was every inch a wee Harris lassie. Compact in every dimension, with long dark hair and big black eyes. She wore a long flowery frock dribbled with strings of hippie beads. Andrew stood beside her, an earnest-looking young man, in his mid-thirties. He had long legs, made apparently longer by his flared jeans and he seemed to tower above Emma who only came about halfway up his paisley shirt. Then Andrew called into the back room and a little boy came out. “This is our boy Donald. Say hello, Donny.”
“Hello Miss.”
“Hello Donald”. Sophie smiled warmly and stroked the little boys hair.
“So nice of you to come to see us.” Emma said.
“They told us about you in the tourist office in Talbert.” Sophie said.
“So Hamish sent you. Do you like the traditional music then?”
“Oh yes we love it.”
“Well, you’re very welcome to join us.”
Andrew was anxious that the visitors should experience good Harris hospitality. He took their coats and passing them to Emma, carefully steered them to vacant seats beside a couple he introduced as Ella and Bryce. It was a wise choice. Ella immediately engaged them in conversation although it started with a barrage of questions.
“When did you arrive? Only today? So you’ve been lucky with the weather. It’s just turned. Do you like our island? The beaches are beautiful aren’t they? How long will you stay? Going back so soon? Oh such a shame.”
“We came here twenty years ago.” Sophie said, “Did Lewis and the Uists and Harris, for our honeymoon. We thought it would be nice to do it all again.
“You can’t be serious.” Ella said.
Bryce turned to Tim, “So you were a bit of a cradle snatcher.”
“Why you can’t have been more than… fifteen!” Ella said.
“No, I was thirty when we met – second marriage.” Sophie said.
“So you’re…”
“I’m fifty-five, Tim’s sixty.”
“No way!” said Ella and Bryce almost in unison.
“I suppose we age quickly here and then live long, so everyone seems old.” Ella said. She turned to the old folk at the far end of the table and chattered in Gaelic. Bryce looked at the ceiling and sighed.
“I don’t speak a word of it. When they get going I just shut off — go into a sort of trance, like I’m not here. What else can I do? You play golf?”
Tim said he’d only played once with Sophie’s son. “I did OK. I hit the ball every time, and it went roughly in the right direction. But when we’d done nine holes I asked Michael ‘How did I do?’ He said ‘Great Dad’. I asked if he would take me to play again. He said ‘No way!”
“I love it. I play down at Sacrista every Sunday. Annoys the hell out of Ella. She thinks I should stay home and be there for the children. They all come around. She’s right. I should. But why waste a whole day’s golf! She’s a Harris woman all the way through even though she’s been away to university and come back to be a teacher. Ask her if she’d put the washing out on Sunday.”
“Would you?” Tim asked.
“I would not!’ Ella said, switching effortlessly from the Gallic, “It’s a mark of respect. The Sabbath is not for the daily toil. It’s for talking to God and being with the family. Mind, I don’t blame those who do. It’s a choice. He chooses to go chase a ball round a hill.”
It was 30 minutes before the soup arrived and then another 20 minutes waiting for main course, but Ella and Bryce kept the visitors well entertained. Sophie took the opportunity to indulge her famous inquisitiveness.
“Do the young people keep up the old religion?”
“No. It’s like everywhere. They watch Sky and dream of another life. They all want to get away. They have to — no work here for them. Some come back to retire, buy a piece of land next to their parents. That’s what I did when I finished teaching. My grandfather made me a feu, you know, as in ‘feudal’? It’s how we pass down land or sell it. We built a house right next door to his.”
“Why are there so many derelict houses?”
“There’s no one to live in them and it’s too expensive to renovate.” Bryce said, “Much cheaper to let them fall down and start from scratch with a kit house. The whole thing comes on a lorry. Once you’ve got the slab down, drains and such, they whip them up in a couple of days. All wood sections with the windows ready fitted. Then they throw up the blocks and tile the roof and you’ve a weatherproof house in a week. Most of the new houses here are kits.”
“How do people make a living on the island? What does the future hold for little Donny?”
“There’s nothing. Only the old age pension for the ancients, and the welfare for the younger ones!” Ella said.
“We’ve heard about the fishing and the tweed?”
Bryce sat up straight.
“Oh, now you’ll set him off!” Ella said.
“Well there’s a few still make a living from fishing, but not like in the past. There were big fleets when the herring was plentiful. But the herring come and go — you might not see them for two years — can’t run an island on that. They built a huge fish factory at Scalpay. Some big multinational. Idea was to do all the processing here. There were jobs for everyone who wanted one. But suddenly they decided they didn’t need it and just closed it down. Now we’ve got this huge empty factory.
“There’s a few fish farms — you’ll see them in the locks. Used to be owned by Harris men. But all you need is a bad storm and the cages break open and a year’s rearing goes swimming out to sea. No small concern can take losses like that. Now it’s all owned by the big boys Marine Harvest — you’ll see them all over the island. There’s jobs, but not so many and if the wind changes and they find they can do it cheaper elsewhere, they’ll be gone.”
The tweed is dying out fast — in a few years it will all be gone – maybe just a few weavers left.
“What do you do in the winter — those long dark days and nights?”
“He tried playing golf once with a torch! Twisted his ankle in a rabbit hole. Now he watches daytime TV. I read a lot, go visit friends. It’s OK. Some people let it get them down, but it’s not depressing — just different. In a way I look forward to it.”
“Is the weather really wild? We were told to expect storms this week.”
“We never believe the weather. It changes so fast. It never gets really cold, like you might expect this far north, maybe a day or two of snow in a bad winter, but it melts the next day It’s the Gulf Stream, keeps the island warm. But the wind can whip up a gale in a few minutes without warning. We get real hurricanes — ripped my shed off the hill and blew it out to sea. Did me a favour it was falling to bits — all rusty galvanized and patched up with pallets. I told the insurance it was new. Used the money for a new boiler.”
“We were told to make contact with the McLeods?”
“Oh my. Nearly everyone on the island is a McLeod or related. I’m a McLeod. When I dio the register at school all the kids are McLeod, McCauley, Morrison or McKinnon and just one little Akra from the General Store.
She gestured to the older folk. “Iain’s a McLeod. Pat’s a McKinnon, Angus and Duncan are both McLeods. In fact, there are so many Duncan and Angus McLeods all over the island, we all have nicknames to tell us apart. So I’m called Ella Head-the-Bay because that’s where I live. We’ve got Angus the Piper and Duncan the Post. There’s a lot more to life on this island than you’d ever guess.”
“I bet there is!” Tim said.
“What is that thing?” Ella asked, nodding towards Andrews mobile, “You’ve been fiddling with it all evening.”
Sophie glared at Andrew.
“It’s the new iPhone,” he said, and he showed Ella and Bryce some of the features – he took their photo, played them a tune from the iPod and a snatch of the Jurassic Park movie. Then he wrote an email and sent it to Emma’s Blackberry. Ella the teacher seemed interested in the predictive text and multilingual spell checker.
“It works in every major language in the world.” Andrew said.
“Does it know the Gaelic?” Ella asked.
“Not yet,” Andrew said, “Maybe that will come soon.”
All the islanders were paying close attention and they seemed to be very impressed.
He showed them the cottage on Google Earth.
That seemed to impress them most and they spoke earnestly amongst themselves.
“You don’t have iPhones here yet?” Tim asked.
“Er… no. Never seen anything like that.” Ella said.
Andrew reappeared from the kitchen with a guitar in hand and the band extricated themselves from the group of diners. They made their way to the tiny stage, perched on their stools. Iain played an E and Pat, Andrew and Duncan tuned up. Then away they flew into a lively jig that forced the foot to tap and promised a great night’s music.
Iain was a large soft man with large soft fingers that ambled over the accordion keys. The movement of the bellows was like his breathing — laboured and wheezy. His eyes were closed tight and his mind was floating somewhere over the lunar landscape of East Harris while he played in perfect rhythm and without fault.
Pat the fiddler was a small tight-knit woman with graying brown hair in a schoolmarm bob, brown-rimmed glasses, brown eyes. She played everything at a regular measured pace without colour or emotion. Even when she played Danny Boy there was not a tearful eye in the house.
Angus the Piper, a dark haired man, pumped his blue bladder and fingered all the tunes in unison with Pat and Iain, while guitar and base punctuated the rhythm.
Andrew played guitar like a beginner, straining to finger the harder chords. Those were his paintings on the wall behind the tiny stage — enthusiastic and amateur, like his music and his cooking. He looked well fed, like the lucky sheep on the rich Machair on the West side of the island. It was no mean feat to cook tomato and basil soup, skewered Harris salmon, boiled vegetables and two scoops of mash followed by carrot cake and custard with coffee for ten guests and then to take his part in the band between the main course and pudding.
Duncan the bassist was a thin wasted middle-aged man, more like the hungry sheep who scratched a living on the heather growing between the random boulder-fall of the East side.
Every tune seemed to have twenty verses — which would have been tolerable had one of the band been brave enough to sing the stories. But neither they nor the audience, whom they shyly cajoled, sang a note all evening. So we had twenty verses of fiddle, pipe and accordion playing in unison.
The audience of local East side islanders didn’t seem to mind. They were probably used to long stretches of time with nothing much happening except the passing of the weather. They were used to space uninterrupted by people — long winding roads across endless bouldered hills, immense dark mountains stretching from sea to sea, long empty sandy beaches slowly changing hue. They were used to Presbytarian churches without decoration or colour and long dull Calvinist services focused on the very word of God without frills. So twenty verses of a fiddly reel or a jaunty jig were no challenge to their ability to appear interested.
After about 20 minutes, Tim kicked Sophie under the table.
“Well, it has been so lovely, but we need to think of leaving. We’ve a long way to go.” Sophie Said.
Andrew noticed them stand up and came down from the stage to say goodbye.
Tim held out his credit card to Andrew and said, “Can we settle up then?”
Andrew stared at the card.
“Can we pay you?”
“Oh goodness, no,” Andrew said, “It has been our great pleasure and privilege to entertain you this evening. It is so good to meet visitors who love the music as much as we do. Will you come back and see us again soon?
“Thank you, we certainly will.” Sophie said.
Andrew and Emma escorted them to their car. Sophie flicked the key and the lights flooded the yard. They settled into their seats. Sophie opened the drivers window, said, “Goodbye. We’ll take you up on that invitation and be back as soon as we can.”
Andrew and Emma smiled and waved as the Prius silently glided away into the darkness.
“Well what happened to the Count?” Emma asked. “You showed no interest in them. In fact you were texting your precious mates most of the time and hardly spoke until they asked about your mobile and then you showed off like some teenage geek.”
“Sorry, Em, but I do find old people a bit boring, and that interminable music!”
“You could have made more of an effort.”
“I suppose. I was a bit embarrassed when he wouldn’t take any money. Felt more like a private party than a real restaurant. Pretty amateur. Felt like we’d gate-crashed.”
“We could go back tomorrow and offer buy one of his pictures before we leave.?”
“They’re a bit naff. Anyway have we got time?”
“Yes. The ferry’s not until ten.”
When they returned the following morning, the drive seemed to pass much faster. In the daylight, the road didn’t seem so treacherous and the sheep were mostly content to graze on the grassy banks.
“You have reached your destination” said Jane, as they pulled into the yard.
“Wrong, know-all!” Sophie sang. “Wrong house Jane.”
This yard was half overgrow with weeds – waist high in gorse and brambles. There were no cars – just a rusting wreck half buried in the weeds. The cottage was certainly wrong. It was a derelict. Rose Bay Willow herb sprouted from what was left of the walls, the roofed had completely caved in long ago, exposing some well-weathered beams. What was left of the window frames were without glass and the only curtains were long-undisturbed cobwebs.
They headed back to the Prius and were about to drive away, when Sophie shouted, “Wait!” She carefully made her way through the unforgiving brambles towards the wreck. “Look at this.” She said.
It was the very rusty hulk of a VW camper, almost completely buried in the brambles, with nettles growing up through what was left of the floor. Tim looked towards the windscreen. The two rubber-ridged panes had fallen out leaving just a rusty trace of the central spar.
Tim and Sophie looked at each other. They had no words. What could they say? What did it mean? Tim just shrugged and they walked to the car. They drove away in stunned silence, neither wanting to give words to the crazy thoughts racing around their skulls.
On the way back they saw a farmer working on a blue water pipe that snaked across the rocky hill. Sophie drew alongside and looked at Tim. He nodded and they both left the car and approached the man.
“Excuse me,” Tim said, “That cottage just down the road.”
“You mean the Morrison place?”
“It’s derelict.”
“Yes, has been for years.
“But we were…” Tim glared at Sophie.
“We were… interested in buying somewhere to do up.” Tim said.
“Well I wouldn’t bother with that place. Been with the agents for years but no one will go anywhere near it.”
“Why not?” Sophie asked.
“Well it all happened thirty years ago. In fact thirty years to the day almost. 15th September 1977. I’ll never forget that day, nor will anyone on the island.”
Realizing he had a captive audience, he took a pipe and a box of matches from his jacket pocket, lit up and settled down on a grassy hummock. Sophie and Tim perched on a couple of boulders in front of him.
“It was back in the seventies when there was all that talk of UFOs. They’d been seen over the islands. Lots of reports. Mostly rubbish of course – Northern Lights, planes, that kind of thing, but people were taking it seriously. We thought it was just a matter of time before one of them landed or crashed maybe and it would be proven true. Anyway it kept the visitors coming – hippies mostly, not big spenders, but no trouble – well, a bit of wacky-baccy sometimes.
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