Amen to that, he said.
That’s the last thing I remember either of us saying because then I must have yawned and fallen asleep right there and then, foolishly warm in the fire and the sense that I had made a new friend.
I didn’t know I was wrong. Or how soon I would find out exactly how easily I’d breathe away from the safety of the sea.
Chapter 6
The theft
I knew something was badly awry the moment I woke. My head was hurting and, as I staggered up to my feet in front of the cold fire, it was as if my legs had forgotten how to walk in time with each other. The house was silent and there was no one else awake. But outside there was a noise that drew me stumbling to the door and out into the thin slant of rain.
The red-sailed boat was not at the mooring.
It was just rounding the headland at the south of the bay, so nearly gone from sight that its bows were already obscured by the rocks. Brand was at the tiller and he saw me in the instant I saw him and, just before he too was swallowed by the jagged bulk of land, he smiled, his teeth flashing unmistakably white in the red of his beard, and he half shrugged and half waved and then was gone.
Two things stopped me in my tracks, beyond the fact that he was leaving without a farewell or any attempt to trade for the much-boasted converter. First was that he was wearing my father’s rain jacket, the good yellow one with the peaked hood, which made no sense. Second was a delayed recognition of what his smile and shrug and half-wave had meant: it had been a farewell and a strange and almost good-natured admission of guilt. Honesty ran one way through the gesture, while dishonesty crossed it at right angles, like the warp and weft of Ferg’s weaving. Brand was in that moment two things at once. But only one thing mattered.
He had stolen my dog.
I knew that with cold certainty the moment I saw Jip alone in the water, barking and swimming far out in the bay, so far out that he must have fallen or been thrown off the boat in whose wake he was struggling. I saw his head bobbing and heard the shrillness in his bark and knew that Brand had taken Jess, who was nowhere to be seen.
And then I was shouting to wake the others and running for the dory. He had not cut our boats loose, but he had thrown the oars into the water and the tide was slowly dragging them out to sea.
As I ran, I noticed without stopping that the racks that had been thick with drying fish were now empty. He had stolen our food too.
The chill in the water bit at me as I dived out to get the oars, and then I splashed back into the dory and was about to unshackle it to get to my boat—which was moored in the lee of the rocks behind which Brand had disappeared—but as I took a breath I saw Jip was going to make it ashore under his own power. I had a second thought: what was I going to do when I chased Brand down? I had not had to think at all about setting off to get Jess back: that had been a natural reflex. My first thought had been to scoop Jip out of the water and then get the Sweethope under sail and start the chase without waiting a moment longer, knowing every moment of delay was putting more sea room between me and my quarry.
Then I realised I might need a weapon, so I left the dory shackled and ran back to the house, intending to get my bow and a long gun. As I ran, I was gripped by a sudden dread that the others were dead because I could not see anyone moving or responding to my shouts or Jip’s barking.
They weren’t dead. They were drugged and—once shaken awake—vomitous and disorientated. Brand had poisoned them to sleep by putting something in the marmalade. That stubborn ram that had chipped my tooth the day before had actually saved me, because without the pain from the sugar I too would have eaten enough marmalade to be as drugged and useless as they were. Brand would have got clean away and we would never even have known in which direction he had gone, or how to begin chasing him down.
There would be days ahead when I realised that might not have been the worst option.
But right then, in the moment, full of adrenaline and anger and betrayal, all I could think of was getting after him as soon as possible. I tried to explain to Bar who was the least affected by what had happened, and as I did so I grabbed food and stuffed it into a bag. Then I kissed Mum, who looked at me blankly but seemed to squeeze my hand back as I said I was going but would be back with Jess, and I took Ferg’s gun, and made sure he was lying on his side so that he would not drown in his own vomit before waking. Then I grabbed arrows and my bow from the hook by the door and ran for the dory where Jip was waiting, barking at me to hurry up.
Dad tried to stop me, stumbling after me and mumbling that he would come, that I should wait until he could get his head straight, and then he bent over and threw up what looked like everything he had ever eaten and I said I could not wait and he may or may not have heard me because he stayed doubled over, retching as Bar came out and held him upright, and then I just turned and left them, sprinting for Jip and the dory, and within four minutes I had got to the Sweethope, tumbled the dog aboard, followed him into the cockpit and slung my kit over the companionway down into the small cabin space—and two minutes later I had unloosed from the mooring buoy and tacked out into open sea, my eyes scanning for the tell-tale, treacherous red.
I was so intent on finding the small scrap of colour now halfway to the horizon that when I finally did and risked a fast look back to wave, I had cleared the headland and could no longer see my home or my family.
I had left without farewell.
Or blessing.
Or knowing if they would recover properly.
You can fall out of your own safe life that quickly, and nothing you thought you knew will ever be the same again.
Those thoughts came to me later.
In that moment, in the wide empty world, all that mattered to me and Jip, who was quivering on point at the prow of the boat, was the tiny shard of red in the sea ahead of us.
That was how the hunt began.
That was when things were simple.
That was when we thought we were just chasing a dog thief. That was before we went into the empty mainland and found we were chasing something else entirely, something we didn’t even know we had lost.
That was how I ended up going where I’ve been. Into the ruins of your abandoned world. Seeing what I’ve seen. Doing what I’ve done.
And doing what I have done is how I ended up here. Alone. No one to talk to but a photograph of a long dead boy with his dog and his sister. Nothing to do but write this down for people who will never read it.
Solitude is its own kind of madness.
Like hope itself.
Chapter 7
Running before the wind
I couldn’t see red sails. The wind was blowing out of the north-east, and Brand had got out of the wind shadow of the great cliff at the back of our island a good quarter of an hour before I was able to get the Sweethope loose from its mooring. She was a small enough boat, though you might have called her a yacht. One person could manage her if you were lively about it and knew how to do it, but in truth it always went a bit smoother with two, and the pair of bunks below always reminded me she was not quite designed for one sailor. But I was used to sailing her on my own. By the time I’d got out of the bay and rounded the rocks to the south, he’d been able to put on every scrap of sail he had and must have been running at full speed ahead of the wind, putting more and more sea between my dog and me as I struggled to get out into the faster air.
And struggle was the right word. It felt like the boat was dragging herself through a peatbog. It was my frustration, I knew, but the sea around us seemed sticky, like it was trying to suck at the hull to slow us down. I think Jip sensed something similar. He stood on the forepeak and barked his own frustration into the sea-waste ahead of us, looking back at me every now and then, as if our slow progress was something I could do more to fix.
Visibility was good, and I should have been able to see him as I cast around the empty sea in front of the boat, but I couldn’t. Given the strength and direction of the
wind, it only made sense that he would be running south, and so I concentrated on getting up our speed and making sure I had as much sail spread as the boat would bear, and then, when I finally felt the kick of the strong air catch the canvas and heard the water begin to really fizz past on either side of the cutwater, I ducked below to grab the binoculars.
Jip must have seen Brand before I did, because he’d stopped barking and was just standing stiffly on the bow, still on point, back legs shivering with what Dad called terrier-shake, which I always took to be a controlled excitement. I found the dark sails a minute or so later, far ahead of us and racing for the horizon.
Something happened in my stomach when I finally saw them, a sort of flip and a dropping sensation. I think if I had not seen the sails again then Brand and his theft would have become a nightmare that would have haunted me for the rest of my life. Though maybe that life would have been longer than the one I’m now facing. I would have begun to think his disappearance was too sudden, too impossible to be real and perhaps even begun to wonder if he had been something supernatural. That was half of what was behind the flip and drop I felt inside—relief that the careful walls I had built around my sense of the world had held. Maybe in your busier world with more distractions like the internet and football matches and other people, you never felt the tug of the uncanny the way that I did. Now I am alone and stuck here with little to do other than write all this down and think, I realise how much time I used to spend with my head in a book, filling the emptiness of my world and letting the pages distract from the darkness in the shadows behind me. I put a lot of effort into not letting myself believe in the supernatural. I think we all did. Of all the stories we used to take turns reading out loud around the fireplace, none were ever ghost stories. I know that was no mistake. Every empty house we passed might easily have been full of ghosts, if we chose to see them that way. But Brand disappearing into thin salt air would have been just the kind of thing to put a fatal chink in that protective wall.
The other thing in my belly was fear, not so much fear of Brand himself, for my blood was still up and against him, but a fear of what I now had to do. The truth was I had no plan. I had an aim, which was to get my dog back. My eye caught the long gun and the bow I had thrown down into the cabin. The fear was not for myself. I was young and angry enough not to feel that, though this wasn’t courage: young and angry is not the same as brave. I was not scared of Brand at that moment, and that was a further stupidity. The fear was fear of myself. Of how far I would go.
You, in the picture I found, have nothing but sunshine and laughter in your face. Your eyes shine with it as you hang there caught in your star jump, forever lighter than air, caught between grass and sky between a sister and a dog who love you. Your thoughts can never have borne the sudden dark burden I felt when I looked at the gun.
A sea chase with the wind at your back is a long thing, and there was plenty of time for thinking as the miles flew past. In the open water that stretched between the last of home and the southern islands and mainland proper, it was also cold. I had a long sleeveless coat in the cabin, made from three sheepskins stitched together, with the wool on the outside. I got it and cinched my belt around the middle to hold it close around me. The smell of the wool reminded me of home. So did the cap I pulled over my ears, a stretchy knitted thing Bar had sewn for me made from an old jersey we had found preserved in a plastic bag at the back of a tall cupboard in a low house on Eriskay the summer before. The yarn was more than a century old, and Bar had overstitched it so many times to keep it together that it was easily as much stitch as sweater, but there was something of her in each of those tacks, so I felt a little less alone when I wore it. I’d watched her painstakingly working on it over a winter month and had come to secretly covet it as she did so. Then she unexpectedly and casually gave it to me, as if it were nothing.
You need a hat, she said. And that was that. Except that for a moment, and in truth a long time after that, it was everything. Bar didn’t talk much, but she did a lot. It was in doing that she showed what she thought. That kept me as warm as the hat itself.
Thinking of Bar made me duck back into the cabin and get the mackerel line. There was no telling how long this might go on, and Bar would say there was no sense in going hungry. I could do more than one thing at a time.
Not well, as it turned out, because in grabbing the line I felt a sharp stab as one of the hooks went deep into the side of my finger.
There was no choice other than to grit my teeth and get out my Leatherman. The Leatherman goes everywhere with me, same as the dogs. It’s my prized find, a long small and still stainless steel rectangle that unfolds into a pair of pliers and a wire cutter with knives and saws and screwdrivers and all sorts of useful tools that are tucked away in the handles. I found it in the rotted glove box of a car on Eriskay. It’s a wonderfully useful thing. Swearing at myself for the stupidity, I pushed the hook all the way out of the pad of flesh on the side of my finger until the barb was clear, and then snapped it off with the wire-cutters. Then I was able to pull the hook back out without tearing myself up with the barb.
The long mass of the next two islands ahead was looming when I was done with my de-hooking, and I put the mackerel line overboard. I had to keep half an eye on the distant red sails which suddenly became camouflage as the land ahead became background. By the time the gap between the islands had revealed itself, cutting the long mass in two, I had thirteen gutted fish in the bucket at my feet and my hands were bloody with the work.
There’s an old lighthouse on the shore and as I passed it I realised that I was now as far south as I had ever been in my life. The island on the other side was another like Barra, to be seen and not landed on. When we had come this far south before, we were looking for turbine parts in the fallen thicket of windmills on the north end of the island. But the sea was suddenly humped with bobbing corpses of seals, maybe thirty or so. We had smelled them before we saw them, and when we did see them Dad had simply turned the boat for home, saying the sea was sour here. And the sour sea was why we never came down this way again.
I had been small when that happened, and excited to be going on an expedition. I had thought I would return home with some exotic find of my own, maybe viked from the little harbour township said to be on the eastern side of the island. Instead I took home something equally unfamiliar—the memory of the fear I saw flash across my father’s face before he remembered to hide it.
The sea didn’t look sour, nor were there now any sea-bloated seal bellies to be seen. The air was fresh and the wind kept its strength up. Only the light was beginning to fade as I made what was really the choice that changed everything. It seemed small enough at the time, a matter of navigation, just the best way to sail through the sound ahead without going aground. Because I’d never crossed that southern limit of my world.
Somewhere in the back of my head, a voice told me that this threshold was a place to turn back. I looked at Jip and thought of Jess. She was every bit as tough as he was, but where Jip always kept the tiniest bit of himself reserved, even when allowing himself to be scratched or when choosing to sleep tucked in close to me in the winter months, Jess gave herself without keeping anything back. Her tail wagged that bit faster, and she was always a step ahead of him when running to greet us when we returned home. The voice in my head wondered if it was maybe that less guarded nature that allowed Brand to grab her. But thinking of her sweetness was not doing anything other than making the tears prick behind my eyes, so I pushed the voice away, far out of hearing, and watched the unknown passage ahead for shoals or skerries. And so, by concentrating on the job on hand, I sailed past the known boundaries of my world without noticing the exact moment when it happened.
Through the sound between Coll and Tiree, everything changed. The sky darkened and the wind, which had been constant at my back, now shifted and became difficult. As if he too sensed that some invisible boundary had been crossed, Jip finally dropped his he
ad and curled up on the bench next to me. He didn’t close his eyes, just rested his head on his paws, sighed and then stared fatalistically into the blank wall of the cockpit in front of him. His look was a little dispiriting, but the companionable warmth against my leg was welcome.
The Sweethope had been cutting smoothly through the powerful heave of the regular Atlantic swell, but passing within the protection of the barrier islands, the boat’s motion changed and began to toil as the water around us changed to a queasy wind-blown chop. Visibility had been good for most of the day, but now it was as if several squalls of rain had been pinballing back and forth on the other side of the islands, waiting for our arrival. Within five minutes, one blew across the gap between us and the red sails in the distance, and then we were lashed with a short but vicious hail of rain that hit so quickly it seemed to have materialised out of thin air. There was so little warning that I barely had time to get my oilskin coat on over my sheepskin. Jip dropped off the bench and slid and skittered his way into the better shelter of the cockpit where he lay nose to tail on a slab of fishnet, positioning himself so that his eyes remained fixed on me through the narrow hatch.
A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World Page 5
