Flight

by Adam Thorpe

  Awesome the place may be, he thought, but it wasn’t for him. It teased you with jaw-agape glimpses, then left you to mope. He needed people. Ordinary people, not these island types who sussed you within minutes. Even the MacLeans had sussed him. They were all too deep and brooding. He wondered if they were any relation to Alistair MacLean, author of The Guns of Navarone. He’d brought it along as his beach read, got through a few pages, searched about for a bookmark (he never turned down the corners: the residual impact of a charismatic English teacher long ago). The marram blades were too tough and springy to break, but he found something in his back pocket: his Emirates Airlines boarding pass, paled and crinkly from the wash.

  Winrush/Robert C.

  From DXB

  To LHR

  The remnant of another life. He slipped it in, closed the book and read his own thoughts.

  Not one of Al’s most brilliant ideas, re-routing him up here. Listen to that ocean: precisely like a jet aircraft’s roar, not hush-kitted, and going on and on. Destination unknown. Estimated landing time, a few billion years from now. Meanwhile, his life was dissolving in wind and rain, the days left to him trickling away while some art-teacher particle rutted with Olivia, and Al swung in his sun-drenched hammock.

  And there he had thought that Al was just being his usual sardonic self: You forget what the colour blue looks like in its natural state. How to be an optimist, unless you avoided looking up the weather?

  He would go to Marcie’s tomorrow and check flights to Honolulu.

  The vane of a large white feather lay by his elbow: he was shaking the sand off it when something caught his eye, off to the right. It was moving in front of the first boulders of the headland.

  A figure – tiny from here. Someone running over the sand, heading for the sea. Long and loose dark hair, but the body was too close in colour to the sand for him to be certain it was a woman. He shaded his eyes, squinting as it splashed across the backwash. No sign of a swimsuit.

  This was the first person he had seen so far on the beach, and it was a shock. Not a pleasant one, though. Maybe there’d be a whole crowd of them: hearty German cycling types. Or contract killers toughening themselves up for the job.

  He had forgotten to bring his binos. The person hit the sea in little splashes and sparkles, hands raised high – and vanished into a black spot of head for a minute or so, to re-emerge and run back up the sand into the dunes. A dark dot between the legs: possibly a thong, possibly pubic hair.

  That was it. No one else. Normal service resumed: sea, birds, seals, rustling dune-grass, gusts flapping his jacket. It reminded him of the time he was convinced he saw Olivia skiing in Dubai. Or of those UFOs floating oval and silvery at 30,000 feet, mid-Pacific, in 2001.

  He waited a bit and then took a stroll along the beach towards the headland, casually glancing around him. The footprints were small and perfectly arched. Unlike the birds’ random chaos of arrows, there was purpose in them.

  Presuming her not to be a honeytrap, he followed the prints up into the dunes, where they gave out in the dense machair; but he guessed their route and found himself on a track skirting the peak’s foothills beyond. The track cut up through rabbit-burrowed turf, cleared a hump of bare rock and curved down onto a road tufted by grass along the middle, and with shaggy, unmarked verges: a very minor road in an island where all roads seemed minor.

  This one was visible for a few hundred yards either way before scuttling behind the usual treeless slopes. No doubt, if she was real and not some sort of sea-nymph, she had changed in the dunes and walked to her bike, or perhaps her car, its sound drowned by the wind. A spot of oil on the grass was perhaps a clue. Rabbits, seeing him motionless, bounced back to their nibbling.

  He’d been invited round to the MacLeans for a hot shower and a cup of tea, but he didn’t mention the skinny-dipper. Walking back in the starlit dark at around six thirty with a jam sponge in aluminium foil, he hardly needed the torch. He’d bought a litre of Talisker in Bargrennan. It kept him company as he stared into the fire, the radio’s mumble behind. He flicked through the pictures he’d taken before she appeared: turquoise waters and green surf ending in white; a blurry bird. Nothing else. Tahiti without the palms. He put the big feather into a glass and placed it on the chimney piece.

  Honolulu was a bad idea: apart from anything else, he wanted to prove Al wrong.

  Dawn was oddly white through the skylight: a thick sea-fog. He was grounded. He paced about finding things to do – sawing up driftwood into billets, cleaning windows, properly scrubbing areas he had skated over with a broom on arrival. He thought about Maria cleaning in Dubai; he’d not appreciated her properly. He decided to risk the pub again.

  It was early evening and the place was empty. A smell of cleaning fluid, Johnny Cash replaced by a football match on the telly, the sound turned right up. He was about to leave when a stab was made at scoring and Murray the barman popped out.

  He drew a pint of Hebridean beer from the painfully slow tap, wheezing behind a brindled beard: stout, somewhere in his forties. Delicious local fare was on offer in the season: haddock, steak, mussels. All they had now was a bowl of Quality Street on the bar and prawn-flavoured crisps. The gales had meant no fresh fish, so Bob was feeling peckish, bored of his home cooking. He took a Quality Street and tried to talk above the telly about the game, involving two Scottish league teams he knew nothing about. Murray grunted his responses, then eyed Bob suspiciously as he unwrapped the sweet and popped it into his mouth. It was a hard toffee and seemed to take up a lot of space.

  ‘Birds?’

  ‘That’s right, yes.’

  ‘You won’t be minding the lack of power, then?’

  ‘I quite like it.’

  ‘Not the weather for bird-spotting today.’

  ‘No,’ Bob smiled, ‘not since I arrived, to be honest. Except for yesterday. My Scottish granny from Campbeltown, she used to say, “Carry a brolly and it won’t rain.” Doesn’t seem to work here.’

  Murray said nothing, began to wipe the bar’s immaculate wood. Bob caught his own reflection in the mirror beyond his head and thought for a second it was a grizzly local’s chewing on tobacco. He selected an age-curled postcard from a stand on the bar: white beach, azure sea. Not quite the same one.

  ‘Don’t be too hopeful,’ Murray said. ‘That blue sky dates from 1980. I do recall it. Dimly.’

  Bob chuckled politely. ‘Yesterday was nice. I was up on the beach. I don’t think it’s this one, though. Lying back in the dune with my binos.’ Murray wasn’t listening. ‘Do you know the beach I mean?’

  ‘Where was that, then?’

  ‘You follow the promontory from my house, long sandy beach, ending in cliffs. I don’t know the name.’

  ‘Aye.’ He said a name in Gaelic, stopped wiping and looked Bob in the eye.

  ‘That’s probably it.’

  The cloth got going again, over and over. Murray was clearly lonely, like Bob. The pub had only a couple of houses and a church near it, the rest of Ardcorry so scattered it was invisible. Bob asked him if people generally went swimming without a wetsuit, or any suit at all, at this time of year.

  Murray chortled. ‘I wouldn’t give it a go, sir. Not even if you were a lot younger than you are.’

  ‘I wasn’t intending to,’ smiled Bob, over an imaginary Kalashnikov. ‘It’s just that I saw someone doing just that. A woman – I believe young – running naked into the surf.’

  The cloth stopped. Murray tossed it into the low sink behind, folded his arms and leaned on the bar. ‘Did she then come out, after?’

  ‘Oh yes, about a minute later. I was some distance away, so I didn’t have time to follow it up, as you might say.’

  ‘Just as well. You’ve seen a selkie.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Round here they say a selkie’s what you turn into if you drown.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘You take on the appearance of a bonny lass, to lure folk in. But you�
�re ugly as sin, in truth. Smell o’ fish. Hair aye dripping. Y’ face all full o’ lirks. Deadly.’

  ‘Lirks?’

  ‘Full o’ wrinkles,’ he said, leaving a bubble of saliva low down on his beard.

  Bob chuckled, but Murray raised a tangle of eyebrow in surprise. ‘Don’t say I didnae warn you, Mr Webb.’ He took out a pamphlet from a little metal stand and dropped it on the bar by Bob’s glass. ‘It’s all in here. The sweets are for the quiz night, by the way. A couple of quid for the pamphlet. And the postcard’s a pound.’

  * * *

  Bob returned to the croft vowing once again not to set foot in the Tinker’s Arms. His torch probed the night fog with minimal impact. He’d never been a great fan of fog. That whole business of hurtling down through a thick whiteness, approaching minimums, waiting for visual contact, was something he found tricky to accept at first; supposing the ground wasn’t where you were being told it was? He had the ground here all right, but no instruments.

  He tripped over one of the two blue plastic milk crates in front of the house that had once served as flower beds and were now rooted so thoroughly he couldn’t shift them. I’m only here for a little while, he thought, picking himself up from the shaggy bison hair they called grass. Until things blow over. Change as little as possible.

  Back inside, crouched by the lamp’s glow, he read the pamphlet: it was a local illustrated guide to Scottish legends, the selkie’s pneumatic breasts hidden by long black locks. His own selkie had seemed small-breasted, although she was a fair way off. Too far to see the eyes, though. ‘Some witnesses report selkies as having cold, filmed-over eyes – like drowned folk. Others say their eyes are bright but full of sadness, like a seal’s. They don’t stipulate the colour!’

  The fog lasted a week. All he could make out was the wet plumes on the tall cotton grass growing in front; each plume was full of black spots he identified as last year’s midges, now dead. Then another south-easterly, with dark-grey cloud but no rain.

  He ventured out in the rainless gale to the shoreline, his face blasted by blown sand from as early as the edge of the machair. He could hardly stand upright, leaning forward sustained by wind power only, shielding his eyes. The air was passing too fast to bother with his lungs, and it was full of salt and spindrift. He’d expected to see massive waves but it was unnervingly calm, with dishwasher froth on the tideline and the water a stressed dark grey, big rollers toppling far out in streaks of white. The wind’s howl was louder than a Dubai disco: he couldn’t even hear himself yelling. This place was good. No hired heavies in ski shades would ever dream of venturing up here, shaking their big watches: this was not just another continent, but another planet. He pictured them floundering in the hidden bogs and ditches on the blacklands, lashed by force-nine rain. Top Gun guys on the wrong channel. Al, you’re a genius.

  There was a lull one morning and he climbed the headland’s peak by a thin path, pushing down on his thighs for the last misty lap. He blew like a horse. He’d work out two hours each day, an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening, until sweat poured off him. Forty press-ups. Thirty pull-ups. Up and down the stairs, grunting like a marine. All the rest. But he had to work harder for the same result, these days. All he could see from the top was the summit itself: wind-flattened grass and a cairn. It seemed possible, suddenly: to be dead.

  He tested the Makarov pistol the same day, firing across the loch water’s flat calm. He was worried the damp might have seized it. The trigger was a touch stiff, requiring a good squeeze, but the shot echoed nicely off the rocky slopes. The little loch spread longitudinally: a natural shooting gallery. The grinning skeleton of a sheep lay on its shore, ribs fluttering shreds of fleece. The water was chocolate dark.

  He liked the Makarov, despite its weight: it had accompanied him through thick and thin during his days as a freight dog. He’d started out with a Walther PP, but its slide was mounted too low and kept nipping his shooting hand. I’ll buy a rod and tackle, he thought to himself, and some fancy lures. He heard his father’s bark: Robert, they’ve got to hit the water like real flies, not like ruddy bricks!

  The bright red call box stood in a patch of dead bracken beside the road to the causeway. The few houses visible along the way were mostly bungalows; the one opposite the call box had burned down to a heap of charred rafters. Maybe it had all got too much, looking out on rocks and tarns and grazing. TERRIBLE ANGELS WANNA FUCK ME had been written in capitals on an address label and stuck on the door. He took it as a warning, trying not to look at it during his calls to his children or his confabs with the solicitor – who thought he was in Costa Rica. He didn’t call anyone else, apart from Al: like the solicitor, his friends believed he was on a world tour. Midlife crisis. Time of Riley. About time young Bob moved on. Wine, women and song.

  He reckoned Sophie and David were almost as happy to hear his voice as he was to hear theirs through the crackles and hiss of the phone wires swaying in the wind. He assumed the calls were safe. They kept them neutral, content-wise: no dangerous goods, no inflammables. Any news from campaign HQ was sent to Bob’s anonymous Hotmail address.

  ‘You really think that’s watertight, Dad?’

  ‘Airtight, David. Why shouldn’t it be?’

  ‘Everything leaks. There are biddable guys everywhere. The world’s porous, as Tim puts it.’

  ‘Hey, don’t let suspicion rule your life.’

  ‘You certainly haven’t, Dad.’

  ‘What, you mean my text message to Sharansky?’

  ‘I was referring to your late career.’

  ‘Oh, let’s stick to trivia.’

  At least David called him Dad, and not Bob. They called their mum Olivia. There must be meaning in that. The receiver smelt of waste substances.

  He’d decided in the end to phone Al once a week, just to check on the latest position. While Bob got whipped in the face by his anorak draw-cords, Al wiggled his toes in the sun. Here, Bob told his friend, just popping out for milk in the morning entailed a head torch and checking the double storm flaps on your pockets. Now Al was on a yacht. The yacht was his: a thirty-footer! They were moored off an uninhabited gem near Jost Van Dyke. No news, otherwise. Oh, Jane’s back from California and feeling fit as a fiddle. Keep your head down, Bob: no romantic entanglements, OK?

  On the way back, he looked up into a spread of welcome cumulonimbus and open patches. He wished he was out in the blue above the clouds, free of entanglements. He skirted the cottage and stood by the loch, thinking. A rent in the clouds let the sun through and a patch of bright light crept slowly over the grazing and hit the water in a magnesium dazzle. A living old-master painting that threw his shadow for a long way behind him.

  He was crouched before a roaring fire in the sitting-room when the prince’s soft voice in the sauna popped up. The man owned the Dubai flat, he had the Worcestershire address via the UAE work visa; but he knew nothing about Crowthorne. They’d discussed classic cars during one flight: His Eminence had a fleet of metalwork including a one-seater Maserati from the 50s and a 1921 Bugatti type 35. Get jealous. Was the humble Healey ever mentioned?

  His Royal Dishrag had cousins who were top Saudis. The Saudis funded the Taliban. Evron Bensoussan, close chum of some top Israelis, was selling the Taliboys weapons paid for in Saudi cash. Shine a light under a rotten log and it all wriggles a lot more.

  Bob threw on a peat brick for the smell and took another slug of whisky. The heroin did not fit in. Evron hated narcotics. Someone was sharing the transport infrastructure without Evron’s knowledge: Lennart? Pedro Diez? Yes, this would make a mafioso type like Evron very cross. But multiple elimination usually draws a lot of attention, at least in Europe. It’s an idiot’s gambit. He listened, suddenly, tensing up: here was nothing like the African bush, where the night noises were loud and rhythmic and full of life, frogs and monkeys and crickets, jackals on the veldt like angry babies crying. Here it was a moaning off the cold black wave-tops, suspicious whispers, the
creak of a door.

  ‘Go away,’ he shouted, tolerably pissed.

  The wind ignored him.

  One thing he did know: the men in their ski shades and concealed holsters would only have to enquire in Bargrennan or the Tinker’s Arms after out-of-season English visitors, and Bob Winrush would be dead meat.

  ‘Och aye,’ he muttered, ‘you’ll be talking about Mr Webb with the straight back and broad shoulders, stuck in that hoose wi’oot the electrics near Ardcorry. Here for the birds. Feathered variety.’

  Why was it so difficult to vanish, these days?

  One thing he did know about the Saudis was that they were patient. They moved slowly and deliberately, like overweight gulls. He pictured a royal plumpness in his dishdasha twirling a beringed finger from his bed in a five-star suite in a Kensington hotel (which he owned), and shoulder-padded minions scurrying away to the Robin Regent hangered somewhere in Essex, making a fuel stop-over in the wife-stuffed Highland castle owned by their boss, before a 40-knot gust factor over the Minches tears the frame apart – light aircraft may be viceless these days, but these guys were going too fast.

  Wishful thinking. He emptied his glass.

  If all this was a private vendetta by little, quick-moving Bensoussan, then he had the means to hire the top guns. The deadliest hit guys. The ones with sniper sights that could pick you off a mile away. Hollow-point bullets. Eyes of sea eagles. No trace.

  All character-building, of course. He poured himself another and swirled its amber glow, lit by miniature flames. Living was in the details, like flying.

  Marcie wanted him to comment on the bird photos taken by Kier, Astra’s late da.

  ‘Yeah, he skidded on his motorbike a couple of years back. Anyway. Can’t be helped. Look at this one. What do you think of this?’