That thought leads her, suddenly, shockingly, to another: the knife on Fraser’s bedside table, how she had wondered last night if he was somehow protecting himself against her.
Maybe it isn’t Rachel that Fraser is afraid of. Is it?
Fraser
The next morning Fraser is up and out before dawn. He drags Lefty out of his pit and takes him up past the bird observatory to the plateau that leads down in a gentle slope to the ruins.
Lefty, once he’s woken up, is unusually talkative. ‘Where are we getting the gravel from?’
‘We’re getting a load when the helicopter comes.’
‘The helicopter for the tanks?’
‘It’s bringing bags of gravel.’
‘They gonnae drop it up here?’
‘No. They’ll drop it where the tanks are.’
‘Can we no’ tell them tae drop it up here?’
‘Helicopters don’t like hovering for too long. So they’re drop ping the bags down there and picking up the tanks.’
Fraser has had this discussion with various organisations and companies several times. Apparently the newer helicopters need to keep moving around or they overheat; they’re at risk of malfunctioning without a constant airflow. He had always thought that hovering was the one thing helicopters were good at, but there you are.
Lefty’s attention has moved on. ‘What’s she like, then?’
Fraser doesn’t answer. He still wants to keep Lefty and Rachel separate, if he can. Which, of course, he can’t.
‘What’s she like? The girl?’
‘She’s got a name.’
‘Aye but you hav’nae introduced us, have you?’
‘Rachel.’
‘What’s she like?’
Fraser ignores him, not just because he’s already sick of this conversation but because he doesn’t really know how to answer. Nothing he thinks of quite covers it.
The sun is just coming up and it’s cold and fresh, the air bright and full of birds. The terns will be coming soon. Fraser has, as always, been keeping a close eye on the Isle of May’s blog, and the tern terrace they constructed last winter was well used in the spring. Fraser’s is going to be better. Not that he’s competitive, of course. But Must has more flat terrain at this end of the island than May has. More space for nestboxes. So that’s what they’re doing, that’s the plan. They are going to level the plateau as best they can, cover it with gravel, make boxes to provide the chicks with protection from the weather and predators, and create a nesting habitat for the terns that will be arriving in a month or so.
‘You fancy her?’
Abruptly he turns and takes Lefty by the scruff of his jacket, lifting him almost off his feet. Lefty yelps in response, scrabbling at his hands. ‘That’s enough,’ Fraser says, really quite calmly. ‘You just stay away. You hear?’
He drops the lad again and they continue in silence, Lefty keeping warily behind him.
They get to the plateau just as the sun streaks across it, highlighting the blades of grass in bright gold. It’s really rather beautiful. Almost a shame to cover it in gravel. But the terns need it and, besides, there’s nobody but him to appreciate it.
They have already constructed a rough square – he has enough gravel coming to cover ten square metres. He sets Lefty to work checking for puffin burrows; there are only three, one of which is collapsed and clearly won’t be in use this year. They can try to leave the burrows’ holes accessible, but chances are the puffins will find a new nest site, grumble about it and give him filthy looks. There have to be sacrifices and, to be fair, the terns have had a far longer migration, and two active burrows are really a small price to pay for the most magnificent tern terrace in the whole of Scotland. Possibly the whole of Europe.
He watches Lefty out of the corner of his eye, thinking that actually he’s looking well. Considering how, these days, he refuses Fraser’s home-cooked meals and lives off fish finger sandwiches, toasties, oven chips and cans of pop, there is proper colour in his cheeks, a degree of strength in the way he hefts the shovel along the line they’ve marked, the wind lifting his hair. When he’d first arrived, he’d been barely eight stone, a skinny runt who could barely lift the shovel at all, never mind tread it through the heavy soil.
I did that, he thinks. Me. I did it. I kept him alive.
Although not a day goes by without the accompanying rot of self-loathing that goes with it.
The tern terrace is coming along nicely, although Fraser won’t say that in front of Lefty. They have finished clearing the space and have laid some of the membrane that will form the base, enabling the gravel surface to drain but preventing weeds from growing through, and staked it firmly in place. For the last hour or so Lefty has been building the wooden boxes that will shelter the young birds from predators and the worst of the winds. All the wood has been cut to size down in the workshop; now it’s just a case of hammering the pieces together.
He checks his watch. It’s gone nine. From his position here he has a good view of the bird observatory, and he has not seen Rachel yet. Thinks of her request to view the cottages. Thinks that, if she’s going to go and look, then he’d better go with her.
Rachel
The lighthouse kitchen is quiet and empty.
On her way through the hall she glanced at the door that must be to Lefty’s room, which she had somehow failed to notice hadn’t been opened when Fraser gave her the tour. She had assumed it was a cupboard. He hadn’t mentioned it, of course. She has been thinking about Lefty a lot since waking up from a confused dream about school and Ryan, lying in the semi-dark with her heart beating, wondering if she’s going to end up being knifed by either Lefty or Fraser.
There is porridge in the kitchen, and coffee, and she helps herself to both, sits at the table and checks her phone. An email from Lucy, one from her bank, one from her dad. One line.
How are you doing, chick? Let us know. We miss you.
Dad misses her. Mum doesn’t, as far as she can tell.
She can’t finish the bowl of porridge, so she swills it out into the sink and washes up.
In the hallway she stands and stares at the closed door. There’s no way he’s here. She can tell by the cold, frozen silence of the building. Nevertheless, she knocks at the door, echoingly loud in the open hallway.
She tries the door, and it opens on to a messy bedroom. There’s an unmade single bed, a chair with random clothes thrown on to it. On the floor by the bed is a plate smeared with drying ketchup, a fork, a pint glass. There is a TV on a chest of drawers and an Xbox console, a controller on the tangled duvet attached to it by a lead that snakes across the floor. A few scattered Xbox cases. The room smells of unwashed clothes, old food, and sweat. There is a window – the curtains are drawn – and on the far side of the room is another door through which she can see a toilet and a shower. The tiles are a lurid floral pattern and the shower curtain, hanging off three hooks, is some dark colour. She closes the door again.
She didn’t imagine it, then. Lefty is real. Lefty has been here for quite some time.
And nobody knows he’s here.
How has Fraser got away with it?
She’s just about to get her boots on and head down to the bird observatory for more cleaning when there’s a noise outside and the door opens, and Fraser walks in.
‘Ah,’ he says, as if he’s about to make an announcement. Then he just stops and looks at her.
‘Thanks for the porridge,’ she says. ‘I’m hoping you did leave it for me and you weren’t saving it.’
‘Aye, I’ll leave you breakfast, if you’re not gonnae get up.’
‘Am I supposed to?’
‘No.’
‘I probably would have got up earlier if I’d had a full night’s sleep,’ she says.
‘Oh aye? Bed not comfy?’
‘The bed’s fine,’ she says. She thinks about saying something about the shouting, then sees his wary expression and changes her mind. It’s rude, she
thinks, and maybe unkind, and that’s not who she is. ‘Just – you know. It’s a strange place. I’ll get used to it.’
‘Aye,’ he says.
He helps himself to the remainder of the coffee in the pot, drinks it in three gulps. Bess comes over to the table to say hello, leans damply against her knee while Rachel rubs at her fluffy chest.
‘Thought maybe you’d like a walk,’ he says from the sink, his back to her.
‘A walk?’
‘You wanted to see the cottages.’
She thinks about the bird observatory, about the list of things she still has to do before serving dinner to the birders. But there’s still the possibility of moving to the cottages, perhaps tomorrow, or even this evening, once she’s finished at the observatory. Nothing had happened in the night, other than Fraser shouting again, but there is still something disturbing her about sharing a house with two men who haven’t done much to put her at ease. If she’s going to stay on the island – and she is, because she is determined that this is her chance to prove to herself that she can stick at something – then being on her own feels preferable to staying here in the lighthouse.
‘Great,’ Rachel says. ‘It won’t take too long, will it?’
‘Nah,’ he says.
He’s already out of the door.
Fraser
The cottages are at the bottom of a ravine that bisects the island at a diagonal, a row of them, with a rough potholed track that leads down to the harbour. The remaining half of the ravine is a deep loch, perhaps thirty metres long and five metres wide, silent black water. At the seaward end of it is a rocky wall, a sort of dam that was built two centuries ago to close the end of the loch, to make it deeper, and stop the water draining to the sea. It had been used as a cooling system when the light was powered by engines. Huge rusting pipes still run from the lochside to the lighthouse, alongside the steep path leading up from the cottages, difficult to negotiate in either direction. The long way round, the track that leads down to the harbour then snakes up from the shore at the other end of the chasm, gives access with the quad. But the path is the most direct route from the lighthouse, and Rachel needs to see the worst of it.
She probably won’t even need to go inside the buildings to make that decision. This is what he’s hoping for.
Bess has no problem with the slope, but in places the loose stones slide beneath Fraser’s feet and he has to steady himself. More than once he has slid down the slope on his arse, gathering momentum all the way. He walks in front of Rachel, thinking that if she slips he might be able to stop her from another fall. In reality the slope is so steep that she would probably take him with her.
He stops when the roof of the cottages is in view, to let her have a proper look.
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Right. Bloody hell.’
There are three cottages in the terrace, with a fourth, nearest the loch, that has become a storage building for spare cans of fuel for the generator. The two at the harbour end are in the best condition, which isn’t saying much. The third one is missing several tiles and part of the floor inside has caved in.
He would have fixed the roof if they had provided him with the wood, and the tools with which to do it. He asked many times, before the floor collapsed, quite willing to patch things up to at least stop the damage getting any worse. They had told him yes, they had even told him to get what he needed the next time he went to the mainland, but he’d never managed to get the agreement in writing that they would reimburse him, and he knew full well that he would pay out the money and they would somehow wriggle out of refunding him, so he’d never done it. As a result, the cottage with the damaged roof has fallen into total disrepair and the remaining two, which were certainly habitable when he first arrived, are now both damp and getting worse every winter.
They have reached the bottom of the ravine. The cottages are right in front of them, in all their dilapidated sadness.
‘Oh,’ she says, again.
Fraser has no intention of taking the guided tour any further than this, so he stands with his arms folded until she takes herself down to the far end and pushes at the door.
Bess has gone off looking for rabbits, which are plentiful, although she never actually catches any. She likes looking at them, the hunting instinct thankfully overridden by her training. Occasionally he’ll trap some, kill them and cook them. It’s damage control. The puffins are what the public want him to protect, not the rabbits. There are only so many burrows that the island can accommodate. Besides, he likes a rabbit stew.
He lets Rachel wander in and out, scraping the door across the stone floor, looking up at the rotten floorboards, the bird shit everywhere, the damp, the moss and the pervading smell of mould and decay, and worse besides.
She comes out and goes straight to the next cottage, without meeting his eyes. She’s in there for a full five minutes. The longer she’s in there, the more he feels it, a twisting anxiety in his gut, because he knows what’s in there and if she notices it, if she makes the connection, then there will be trouble. He fidgets from foot to foot and he is about to follow her when she emerges again.
‘See what I mean?’ he asks, expecting some sort of demand for an explanation, but there isn’t one.
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘it’s grim.’
She has clearly seen enough. She shuts the door firmly, the way he left it. It takes her considerable effort to close it. It would take a similar effort to open it again, should she want to try.
Rachel starts back up the hill.
There is no sign of Bess and so he whistles for her. She is down at the edge of the loch, not moving.
‘Bess!’
He comes up behind the dog slowly, talking to her, not wanting to startle her and provoke her to jump in. What the fuck would he do then? He can’t go in there after her.
She whines at the water and he sees something white, moving, just under the surface.
Not for the first time, he thinks about murder. How easy it would be. How easy it would be to get away with it.
He puts his hand on Bess’s fur and pulls her gently away. She’s been in a trance, almost, and starts into action, galloping up the slope past Rachel. He turns away from the loch and follows.
Rachel is waiting for him halfway up the slope. She has turned to look down at the loch below them. ‘That looks deep,’ she says, barely out of breath, as he joins her.
‘I guess,’ he says, not looking. ‘I’d best get back to the tern terrace, anyway.’
‘Oh, sure,’ she says.
He does not particularly want to end up discussing the black water. He has felt the pull of it too many times. Does not want her to start to feel the same attraction to it.
Once, in his first year on the island, there had been a group of ecologists studying the grey seals that arrived in the autumn, with the first pups usually born in October; thousands of them return to the island every year to breed. One of the group, a Swedish woman called Anne, was studying the seals and had wished she had an intact seal skeleton to work with. As it turned out there were occasional seal corpses washed up – killed through fighting, malnutrition or old age – but she could not see how to get the bones bare without a damaging process of boiling and scraping. He had suggested taking one of the carcasses and dropping it, in a net bag, into the loch. It was an experiment of sorts but he had read about how the lighthouse-keepers had had to fence off the loch after sheep had fallen in there and been reduced to bones very quickly through the action of whatever bacteria, or flesh-eating creatures, lurked within.
The seal bones had been white and clean within a few months, and Anne had been overjoyed to have a complete seal skeleton of her own.
He stands, now, and looks back down into the blackness. He thinks it would be easy to tip forward, to roll down the slope and fall the metre or so into the water. You would be instantly stunned by the cold, and unable to breathe. Cold water shock, it’s called. And, if you did manage to override your instinct to pani
c and drown, it would not be possible to pull yourself up and out.
He wonders what’s living in the loch, if anything. There might be huge fish in there, or it might be dead and empty. It feels dangerous. Fraser does not like the way that, between the two walls of rock which form the ravine, nothing reflects in the smooth blackness of the water. He has no idea how deep it is but, judging by the near-vertical granite surfaces either side of it, if you fell in it you would find it very difficult to get out again.
Rachel turns and keeps walking, and quickly she’s ahead of him again, heading for the lighthouse.
‘Come on, slowcoach,’ she says, over her shoulder. ‘I thought you were in a rush to get back to your terns?’
‘Fuck off,’ he says, ‘I’m an old man.’
In the afternoon the weather takes a turn for the worse and Fraser has to give up on the tern terrace.
They have done a good amount, anyway, and they should be able to finish laying the rest of the membrane tomorrow – then they will be all set for when the gravel is delivered on Tuesday. Assuming the weather is good enough for the helicopter to fly. The bi-annual collection of the island’s shit has been postponed three times already because of high winds.
Besides, Lefty is on the verge of collapse.
He has been like this from the start. It’s hard to get him to work, but once he starts a task he will carry on until he’s about to drop. If Fraser sets him on a job that is physically demanding, or doesn’t have a recognisable conclusion, he has to watch him, look for the signs.
‘That’ll do for today,’ he calls across.
Lefty stops, the shovel waving precariously. Staggers a little.
‘Put it down. That’s enough.’
The shovel drops. Lefty goes to take a step, and then abruptly sits on the step he’s created by cutting away the turf. The ground is wet through, but there’s no point telling him off. Fraser goes over to him and realises that he’s overdone it, the pale face and the vacant expression telling him everything.
You, Me & the Sea Page 10
