The Girl on the Ferryboat

by Angus Peter Campbell

  The beautiful statue of the Sacred Heart stands outside the hospital, which has now been turned into a nursing home. The brand new hospital lies further to the north. I go over to the image, which is exquisite in its details and in its colours. Christ looks down with compassion, His hands outspread. He wears a beautiful red vestment and the pierced radiant heart lies at the centre of the chest, just to the right of where my father’s stopped pumping. I touch his feet with my hands. The stone is warm. On Good Friday you could go up to the altar and kneel and kiss His feet. Throughout the service the priest would slowly unveil the crucifix, bit by bit. When you entered, the Christ, the Saviour of the world, was hidden behind the black cloth, the shame of the universe. Then a shoulder, and another, and a nail-pierced wrist, and another, were revealed before the bells pealed at the end of the day, signalling that Easter and Resurrection day was on the horizon.

  And what a glorious day that was – all bells and incense and coloured vestments and the sun dancing in the sky, and the games in the afternoon, with the time of penance over for another whole year – wow, have you really not eaten any sweets at all for seven weeks?! – and the young men whispering about that first drink they would have the next weekend after the long sacrifice of Lent. And how Protestants despised the crucifix with its symbol of the Christ still hanging from the cross.

  ‘Don’t you Catholics realise that the cross is now empty? That He is Risen. That it is finished and no more sacrifice is required? Not to mention all your Marian worship!’

  Before they too were swept aside by the tsunami of atheism which discarded all our symbols, whether veiled or unveiled, as pernicious.

  I cycled inland, past the old school where girls with marvellous names had appeared, like stars on a winter’s night: Julianna Johnston, Naoise MacDonald and Diana Richards. Julianna had the best bicycle in the district – a red and green one with twelve gears, which sparkled in the twilight.

  We once went on a cycle ride together down on the machair and raced each other across the sand dunes. I tended to be faster on the uphills, but each and every time she would then sweep past me on the downhill, flashing past me like a ferris wheel. After a while we discarded the bikes and went rabbit hunting, using the bike torches as dazzlers to blind the rabbits as they emerged from the sand burrows.

  ‘There’s one!’ cried Julianna, running across the marram grass, but of course it was still too early in the day to dazzle the rabbits which just hopped merrily across the grass into the next burrow. The torches worked best at night when Uncle Donald and my cousin George would go down after midnight and come back in the early morning with a dozen rabbits in a pouch over their shoulders. I pleaded and pleaded with them, and they finally allowed me to go with them.

  It was a cold and clear October night and as we walked down to the machair we all whistled the same tune. We took it in turns to start, and then the others had to guess what the tune was and join in. Donald always began with the pipe march ‘Father John MacMillan of Barra’ and I can still hear the up-and-down sweetness of that melody in the moonlight.

  We caught eighteen rabbits that night. The whistling stopped about a mile from where the rabbits were.

  ‘They’ll hear,’ said Uncle Donald. ‘And also take your boots off now. They can hear that too.’

  So we all took our boots off, tied them together with the laces and swung them over our shoulders. Donald went first, leading us crouched to the sandbank.

  ‘We’ve to work as a team,’ he whispered. ‘George – you go over to that dune there. I’ll go to the one opposite. And you, lad, stay at this one. And don’t put that torch on until you hear my shout!’

  And the two of them crept away through the moonlight. Clouds came and obscured the light. I lay on my stomach in the dark listening to the silence. Uncle Donald would be over there, to my left. Cousin George over there, to my right.

  Everything was still until you started listening. Then you heard everything. My own breath, in and out. My heart beating against the sand. Something was scratching across the grass to my left. A strange bird hooted somewhere. Would Seonaidh the ghost come rattling with his stick across the dunes? Then the shout came.

  ‘Coineanach! Rabbit!’ And the three torches shone, illuminating the poor creature now frozen in the triple light.

  ‘Stay,’ shouted Uncle Donald, and we stayed where we were as he crept towards the blinded rabbit from behind. We kept our lights fixed on the poor rabbit, dazzled by the beams. I could see Uncle Donald now behind the rabbit. He raised his torch and brought it down with a thump on the rabbit’s neck, which fell over. Uncle Donald scooped it up and put it into his bag.

  ‘You next!’ he shouted, as we all lay back down again in our positions. We kept our eyes scanned on the machair, which was now illuminated by the moon. Then I saw him, some ten feet away from me, peering its little nose out of the rabbit hole. He sniffed the air and retreated back into the burrow, but then came back out again in a few minutes. He sniffed the air again and came forwards slowly, cannily.

  I flicked on the torch, shouting ‘Coineanach’ as the creature sat five feet away from me, frozen in the torchlight. His teeth chattered. His little feet biting the earth. This was it. The moment had come. I was a man. I crawled forwards and could see the fear in his eyes. He wasn’t looking at me. He wasn’t looking at anything. Making no plea. Just frozen with terror. I raised my torch and brought it down on the back of his neck as hard as I could with one swift blow. He made no sound as he died, though blood dribbled from his mouth and neck.

  We shared the hunt and the spoils that night: six rabbits each. My mother skinned them for me the next morning, showing me how to paunch the animal before removing each leg at the joint with the cleaver, then separating the muscle covering the gut from the skin and pulling that back over the back legs.

  ‘Just like taking your socks off, you see,’ she said.

  ‘Then pull the skin forward, like this, and ease out each of the front legs. See? Pull the skin forward then, like this, and if you get hold of that cleaver yourself, you can sever the head.’ We removed the tail and the tail glands, then wiped the flesh over with a hot, damp cloth to remove the little traces of fur. We washed it and had a wonderful stew for days on end: rabbit meat, carrots, onions, celery and salt.

  Julianna and I tried to kiss, but we weren’t very good at it. It felt silly and – frankly – unnecessary. Our two mouths touched and then of course we had no idea what to do, so we just pressed harder but she couldn’t really breathe then, and so started coughing and we had to separate. So we just lay back down in the marram grass for a while beside each other, holding hands.

  I lay to the right of her, so my left hand was in her right hand, which seemed really awkward because I didn’t know whether to put it palm-down into her palm or just to lay it back-hand down on to hers. But she solved the problem by twining her fingers through mine so that my wrist lay against the grass while her fingers lay palm-down on mine. I never knew such slim fingers existed: they were like thin traces of string in my hand. After a while I squeezed her hand, and she squeezed mine back in response. We lay there like that for a while in the silence. Thin clouds moved in fantastic shapes through the sky above.

  ‘It’s an elephant,’ I said.

  ‘No it’s not. It’s a giraffe.’

  ‘A panda?’

  ‘No – no no. It’s a bear.’

  ‘Do you really think,’ she asked, ‘that I have the best bicycle on the island?’

  ‘Yes. By far. I wish I had one like that.’

  ‘But it’s a girl’s bike,’ she said. ‘With no crossbar.’

  I pondered how to respond. I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really,’ I replied.

  We were silent for another while. Then she said. ‘Do you really want a shot of it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  She sat up on one elbow and looked down on me.

  ‘And
promise you won’t break it?’

  ‘Promise.’

  She shoved me towards the bike and I leapt on to it with glee. Down the machair dunes as fast as Stirling Moss and up the slopes like Robbie Brightwell, with the gears changing through the sandy chicanes and the sparks flying from the back wheel. I freewheeled for a while, raising my feet over the handlebars as the bike travelled down the slope, until it – inevitably – hit the bump and sent me catapulting into the corn. I heard her laughing, and I don’t think I ever lived the shame down, though to her eternal credit she never told anyone, but kept it as a dark, unspoken secret between the two of us which kept us apart from then on.

  I don’t think I even realised it, but I was aiming for the boat. I knew where it was of course – about ten miles to the south, abandoned the last time I’d seen it in the old byre. Would even the byre itself be there now, after all these years? I had lunch by the roadside: sandwiches and some fruit bought from the Coop, and continued to head south. Up south as they said locally, in defiance of cartographic convention where north was always supposed to be ‘up’ and south ‘down’. Or more accurately up sous, because of the loss of the ‘th’ in Gaelic speech, where the t is always silent so that you say the word ‘tha’ meaning ‘yes’ as ‘ha’. The ‘th’ as an ‘s’ caused great local amusement.

  ‘Help me, I’m sinking,’ cried a tourist as he sank into the local bog.

  ‘Oh,’ said the local crofter as he walked by, ‘What are you sinking about?’

  Or the local favourite when all the lads, stuck in the workers’ van on a wet day, decided to play I Spy.

  ‘I spy,’ said Donald, ‘something beginning with S.’

  ‘Socks?’ someone suggested. ‘Sugar?’ ‘Shoes?’ ‘Semmit?’ ‘Spades?’ ‘Semolina?’

  ‘No, no, no no…’

  Finally they gave up.

  ‘Och, it’s so obvious’ said Donald. ‘So simple – you’ve been drinking tea out of it all morning. It’s the Sermos Flask.’

  The wind is in my face, coming warm from the south. I bend down low over the handlebars and cycle steadily, watching the dark whirl of the wheels on the paved road. I weave in and out between the caterpillars crawling ever so slowly across the tarmac. It used to boil up in little bubbles under our bare feet in the summer. The ditch flowers overflow in all their glory – orchids and primroses and spring squills and the beautiful little bog pimpernels, and as I raise my head to go downhill, there’s the loch we skated upon one frozen winter, now lipped with marsh marigolds and gilded with lilies. The row our father gave us for skating in such a dangerous place – didn’t we know the water-horse lived there who would gobble us up as soon as our foot sank beneath the water?

  Old Archie lived with ghosts. He heard hammering during the night and by the following morning the village joiner would be seen out in his yard making a new coffin. He could see things: phantom funerals, portents in the sky, movements in the earth. My brother John and I had a dare: one of us would dress up as a ghost and frighten him one night while the other watched and laughed.

  We flung stones on the loch to see who’d be the ghost: loser would be the phantom. My chuckie made fifteen leaps; his fourteen. It all took planning. We took the white sheet out of my mother’s kist a week beforehand and hid it away behind our den next to the river. Then on the Saturday night when the whole house was silent and everyone in bed we crept out through the back window and down to the den.

  I pinned the white sheet on to him and led him by the hand across the stream and up to old Archie’s house where

  I let him go at the door and then climbed over the wall to peek at the great event.

  ‘Whoo – whoo – whoo,’ wailed my brother, but nothing happened.

  He grew bolder and walked round the house calling in his best ghost voice.

  Finally we heard a noise from inside the house. A candle was lit and I could see the candle moving from old Archie’s bedroom towards the little door. My heart was in my mouth. The door opened slowly and there stood Archie in his long white underwear with a nightcap on his head. John had learned his lines.

  ‘Whoooo,’ he cried. ‘I’ve come for you! I do not belong to this earth.’

  Old Archie listened to him calmly then said,

  ‘I didn’t say you did. But then again neither do I. Would you like something to eat?’

  John ran as fast as he could, over the garden wall with the white sheet trailing behind him while old Archie stood in the door blessing him in the name of the Trinity.

  There’s the nurse’s little cottage. She would have been there the day I was born, the first person to see me come into the world. I never thanked her either, so I give the bicycle bell a long tinkle. There’s the pitch where I used to be Denis Law. On the loch the swans still bend their beautiful necks deep into the water.

  I stop by the roadside. This is where the tinker’s fair used to be. With their gaunt grey ponies and little carts laden with what seemed to us like the treasures of all the earth: balloons and festoons of coloured ribbons and toys that rattled and moved when you wound them up, and once a talking monkey in a cage who could tell your fortune. You paid him a sixpence and his little shrill voice would sing,

  ‘You’ll go far. Far away over land and sea.’

  That was to the boys. And to the girls:

  ‘You’ll meet a boy. Tall and fair. Maybe even here today.’

  The place is now a sheep fank with their little round hard black turds all over the place.

  And there on the hilltop is Cnoc nan Each, where the wild horses used to roam. And all round stretch the peat bogs which were once filled with people cutting and lifting the peat, but which today lie empty and silent.

  I leave my bike by the road and walk across the bogs to my father’s old peat bank which once seemed as large as the promised heavenly mansion. I measure it out. Seven metres by five. I lie down in the shade of the curved stone where

  I used to lie as a child. Three two one, I found you, you are It! This is where we would have our picnic: bread and cheese, and milk from a corked ale bottle.

  Over there stands The Big Stone where the giant lived. If you shouted your name into the hollow, he’d hear and shout it back like an echo. The trick was to shout your name at him and then get away as fast as you could before he called after you. You never made it, even if you ran as fast as Paavo Nurmi himself: no sooner had you called and turned than you would hear his hollow voice calling you back, just by the time you got to the wet dip on the other side of the rock.

  They all said that James had managed it once, but no one really believed that.

  ‘James – that cripple!’ we’d protest. ‘How could he have done it?’

  And then they would explain that he hadn’t always been crippled and had once been the fastest boy in the whole village until the accident had happened. Then they wouldn’t say any more, as if that ended all discussion and argument.

  You can see everywhere from here. To the west, right out into the Atlantic as far as America. To the north, up towards Lewis. To the south, down to Barra and to the blue mainland beyond. And to the east, over towards Skye and the high hills of heaven.

  I always used to wonder where heaven was. I thought at first that it was up somewhere in the skies, then after my Mum’s aunt came home from a visit from Canada I refused to believe that, because I heard her tell my parents about her journey, and how she’d flown first through the clouds and then high above the clouds ‘where everything was clear and blue and empty, with no buildings or traffic’. So it couldn’t be there, otherwise she’d have seen it and said, for she was an extremely kind and honest woman. She brought us wonderful presents home that year – a ski suit for my brother John and a pair of ice skates for me which I soon ruined by using them on the local quarry slope. It was here after all.

  There was the site of the local school which had been demolished in the 1970s. One morning I was the only pupil to arrive there, having walked through the snowstorm. Th
e teacher, Miss MacDonald, lit the peat fire and read me a story. Ivan and the Beech Tree was the name of the story. Creak, creak, creak said the beech tree is the only line I remember from the story, except that it was a fantastic story and I remember Ivan got £20,000 out of the trunk of the tree at the end. Or maybe it was £20. What a tragedy we had no trees on our island, though later I found medals stashed between two stones by the river and gave them to my parents. They were from the Peninsular War. At school, Seonaidh and I were the champion fighters: he would sit on my shoulders and between us the two of could shove anyone else off their stance. The game was called casan-cuinneag, the legs of the milk churn, with Seonaidh’s legs dangling fowards over my shoulders, and my head the milk pail.

  It was a Victorian school. By which I mean that it was built in her time, though even in my time we were surrounded by the maps of Empire. How pink the world was, which belonged to us. Look – there’s the British Dominion of Canada and all that stretch there, Iain, also belongs to us! Egypt, Sudan, Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia, India, Burma, Australia and New Zealand. Bets we’re the best. And we’d trace the rivers of the world. ‘Now, boys and girls, just follow my pointer. There – we’ll begin here, between Putumayo and Tabatinga and trace it all the way west. Look – past St Paolo de Olivenwa, then up to Fonteboa, down past Teffe and Manaos and Itacoatiara and Parintins and Santarem and down into and past Almeirim into the mouths of the River Amazon!’

  ‘Sir! Sir! Please – can I hold the pointer? Sir?’ And the chosen one would stand there proudly holding the universe at his fingertips. ‘Now then, John, point out London to us!’ And then a host of hands would go up and each in turn would ask John to locate their own magic name – Rio de Janeiro! Bahia Blanca! Tierra del Fuego! And I asked if I could trace the Nile, and slowly moved north across the Nubian Desert all the way to Cairo and beyond. ‘And do you know how long the Nile is?’ he asked and we all guessed foolishly. Ten miles. A hundred miles. A million miles. And with a triumph he would tell us, ‘Four thousand, one hundred and thirty-two miles,’ and of course we would all ask how they knew – did someone go along and measure it, and where did they get a measuring tape that long, and what happened if they made a mistake – would they then have to walk all the way back to the beginning and start all over again? – but the answer was always indistinct and mysterious – ‘They have ways.’