9

There was confusion at the ferry terminal. First, it was Isaac.

Ardrossan was only an hour or so from the city and we’d spent the journey in friendly conversation. Lou and Brett told us about their travels so far, how they’d flown in to Belgrade and worked their way west. How they’d slept on the beach in Croatia, ridden funicular railways in the Alps, eaten warm oily pasta in Florence.

‘And now we’re here,’ said Lou, casting her hand at the flat land moving by the van’s window.

‘And now we’re here,’ repeated Brett.

‘How’ve you found it?’ asked Isaac. ‘It’s shite, eh?’

‘No,’ said Lou, offended. ‘It’s a beautiful place. We went all the way up last week, didn’t we Brett? We were in Mull. Oban and Mull.’

‘Aye,’ said Isaac. ‘Bet it was shite though, wasn’t it?’

By the time we made it to the harbour the boat was already waiting. It towered above the cars, its great black hull dull and massive.

‘Em,’ piped up Isaac. ‘What’s the fucken story here then?’

I ignored him, paying the man at the stand and joining the queue of traffic waiting to embark.

‘What do you mean?’ I heard Mikey ask and I twisted round in my seat to look into the back. Isaac was on his knees, crouching down to take in the ferry’s height through the window.

‘I mean, what’s the fucken story with this great big fuck-off boat? Nobody said we were getting on a boat.’

‘We told you,’ I said. ‘We told we were going to the Isle of Arran.’

‘Aye, I know, but I thought that was just an expression. A turn of phrase.’ He looked terrified. ‘I’m afraid my good people that this is where we part ways. Nice to meet you all.’

Mikey frowned and looked at me. ‘Are you joking?’ he asked Isaac.

‘No pal, no jokes. Me and the water, we don’t mix. Like, eh, oil and water. Well,’ he said, looking at each of us and then clapping, ‘cheerio.’

He shook Mikey by the hand, opened the van door and hopped out. He slid it closed and blew us a kiss. We all watched in bemusement as he weaved away among the queuing traffic, his hair as bright as a halo.

‘What did he give you?’ I asked Mikey.

Mikey unfolded the item Isaac had slipped him and studied it. ‘It’s a map,’ he said. ‘I think.’

‘Pass it here,’ I said.

It was a napkin from the pub the night before on which Isaac has drawn a crude map of the West Coast, all the islands and sounds and peninsulas scribbled in chunky crayon. ‘Fucken hell,’ I said. Up at the top he’d drawn a star and written, in a childish scrawl, Very Heaven.

I held it up so that Lou and Brett could see.

Brett took it from me. ‘I mean...’

‘What an odd person,’ said Lou and we all laughed, even Mikey.

‘Very Heaven,’ I muttered. ‘Do you know what that means?’

Mikey shook his head. ‘No. Well, maybe. He said he was heading north didn’t he?’

‘I suppose.’

Brett handed the map back to Mikey. ‘Where did you dig him up from?’

I explained that he had tagged along with us, how we’d been camping and he’d just shown up one morning. I neglected to include where the van had come from or the reason we were camping out in the countryside in the first place.

 

I parked the van deep inside the belly of the boat and we went up on deck to watch the island approaching. It was a shadowy mass out on the horizon, mountainous in the northern regions, hulking stacks of grey hills rising from the Clyde Firth. It wasn’t a particularly choppy crossing but Lou ended up going green. I told her she could go downstairs and sit in the van.

‘I’ll come down with you,’ said Brett, taking the keys from me.

‘You don’t have to,’ I said. ‘She’ll be fine, it’s a comfortable van.’

But he went anyway.

Mikey and I got sick of watching the island so we went down to the bar. I had a shandy and Mikey had a proper pint. It was our first time alone together for a day.

‘That was funny,’ I said, ‘about the map.’

‘Oh aye,’ laughed Mikey. ‘He’s some boy.’

‘Did he say anything to you?’

‘Say anything about what?’

I drank a mouthful of the sweetened beer. ‘You know what I mean. About the whole situation. I mean, what’s he doing giving you a map like that? Just you.’

Mikey stared into the bottom of his beer. ‘He didn’t say anything in particular.’

I said, ‘Mikey,’ in one of my voices.

‘Right. OK. All he said was that maybe running away from my problems wasn’t the best solution. That was it.’

‘And what did you say?’

‘Can’t remember.’

I sighed and drank some more. There was a strong smell of grease and fish coming from the ferry’s canteen next door. ‘When are you going to learn to trust me?’

‘I do trust you. It’s just that...’

‘It’s just what?’

‘I know you said about all the newspapers and that outside, but I never saw them. You just told me.’

I leaned over our drinks so that my whisper would carry. ‘You’re calling me a liar, is that it? You think that I wanted to go trailing over the whole fucken country? Like, that’s my idea of fun or something?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Course not.’

‘Good. I’m glad that’s not what you think because otherwise I’d be left feeling like I’m wasting my time.’

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Forget it,’ I said.

‘He also said I’d be in trouble.’

‘Why’s that then?’

‘For missing all them parole meetings. Mind, it was meant to be every week that I saw the social worker and police. And I never went to any of the psycho... psychom...’

‘The psychologist.’

‘I never went to any of the psychologist meetings they set up.’

I shook my head. ‘They’ll understand. When we get back and I explain it all to them, about the press, about the harassment.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘I’m sure.’

We finished the drinks and went upstairs to stand at the prow and watch as the ferry inched closer to land. The island was something else. The land looked alive and real. Solid and green and purple and brown with plump clouds full of delicious water. We watched as the ferry came alongside the jetty and some men threw ropes to each other. When that happened we knew we’d better get downstairs sharpish.

Lou and Brett had found a photo album.

‘Hey,’ they said, looking up as I slid the door open, ‘who’s this?’

I took it from them. It was a series of pictures of a small, blonde boy. The small, blonde boy standing beside a snowman, full of pride. Riding a tricycle down a brown-carpeted hallway. Using a fork and knife on a comically large pizza. I flicked through it, confused, trying not to show it. I came to the final photo and there was Duncan, kneeling on the grass beside the small, blonde boy. On the back cover someone, an adult, had written To Daddy, with love, from Carl.

I held up the final photo to show the Americans. ‘There’s the chap we bought the van off,’ I told them. ‘He must’ve forgot it was in here.’

The opening to the parking hangar was beginning to crack open, letting in a chink of sunlight, so I ducked into the front to start the van up.

‘Oh my god,’ said Lou. ‘That is so sad. You have to make sure you give it back to him. It’s his little boy!’

I kept the photo album on my lap and Mikey slid the door behind him. ‘Aye,’ I said. ‘Maybe.’

We followed the slow crawl of traffic out of the ferry and onto the harbour. As soon as we hit the tarmac the ocean smells started to seep into the van. There was a petrol station immediately outside the ferry terminal. I parked there and waited for the Americans to run to the tourist information office to find someplace to crash.

I flicked through the album and scoffed. ‘What a fanny that guy was,’ I said. ‘Duncan.’

‘He wasn’t a fanny,’ said Mikey. ‘He was just a bit… y’know.’

‘No, he was a total fanny,’ I said and I peeled the final photograph from the album. ‘There,’ I said, crumpling it between my hands and tossing it from the open window. Mikey watched it fly, blinking back some kind of displeasure.

‘What?’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘Nothing.’

Brett and Lou wandered back from the tourist information. ‘There’s a nice sounding spot up in the north of the island,’ said Brett, parking himself in the passenger seat and closing the door.

‘Whatever yous say,’ I said, and off we went.

The road clung to the beach for most of the journey. We went out of the main village and around the coast, heading north. A family of seals were sitting out in the bay, their heads and tails extended to heaven, their fat bellies resting on underwater stone. They watched the van pass with complete lack of interest, with dull dogs’ eyes. Above the road as we came out of the village was a grand castle or country home, red as raw bricks and empty.

‘The girl in the place said we’d pass that,’ said Brett. ‘I think she said it was an old… maybe a hunting lodge? I don’t remember. Lou?’

‘Oh yeah,’ piped up Lou. ‘I think it was a hunting lodge.’

‘It looks scary,’ said Mikey.

‘Don’t be silly, sweetie,’ said Lou. ‘It’s just old.’

We drove past the castle or house or lodge and the land above the road grew wilder. We passed through a handful of tiny villages, with their milk-white pubs and decorative fishing boats in the harbours. Eventually the road went inwards, away from the coast and into the higher land. The mountains were piles of boulders and scree up close, bare rock held together by moss and heather and damp. Much harsher than the mountains we’d had by our camp.

‘Woosht,’ said Mikey, gazing at the ragged molars of rock. ‘Look at those.’

The road began to descend again and a road sign told us we were entering Lochranza, which Lou explained was the very place in question. The village was built around a wide bay with a narrow mouth. A decrepit castle was perched on a slip of land by the opening. We passed a distillery and a campsite and a string of tooth-coloured houses, built back from the road, mangy fields between us and them.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Where am I going?’

‘Shit,’ said Brett. ‘I don’t know. The girl just said it was here, the hostel.’

I drove the village’s length once to try and locate the hostel but I saw no sign of it. There was another, smaller ferry terminal at the far end where the coast turned back in on itself. On the way back I parked up outside the village shop, Marigold’s, to ask for directions.

There was a young girl seated at the counter, her head buried in a book.

‘Sorry?’ I said.

She looked up, smiling, fresh faced. ‘Hello,’ she squeaked.

‘Hiya. Do you know where the hostel is here?’

‘It’s a half-mile or so down the road. There’s a big sign.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘Remember Marigold’s for your messages, eh? Sorry, I’m supposed to say that.’

I said, ‘That’s all right,’ and I went back to the van.

I told the others that we were a pack of clowns. There was a sign for the hostel facing the other way down the road. A gravel path led up the hill to a bright pink building.

‘Is this it?’ asked Mikey. ‘Is this the place?’

‘I suppose.’

I parked the van and ushered the rest of them inside. I wasn’t worried about them spying on Mikey – the hicks in these parts wouldn’t know a newspaper article if it bit them on the arse. Lou and Brett hiked their rucksacks up their backs and I carried Mikey’s and my bag. There was a vast woman seated behind the reception of the hostel. Her hair was shorn short and she wore an African-style dress. She wore a name badge that read Mother Senga.

She said, ‘What?’

‘We’re looking for some beds,’ said Lou, looking back and counting us. ‘Do you have room for four? Four people?’

‘Aye,’ said Mother Senga. ‘Yous go up and find yourself a spot. If the bed’s made it means it’s free.’

The four of us climbed the stairs and opened the first door we came to. Lou and Brett unpacked their bags onto a set of bunks. Brett’s bag fell open and a bag of grey powder flapped onto the sheets. I asked what it was and he slipped it back inside.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘It’s not a big deal.’

 

After we unpacked it was decided we would drive down the western coast. It was flatter and less wild than the east. We came across an abandoned graveyard. The stones were covered in moss and standing at acute angles. Lou begged me to park, so I did. We nipped over the road to inspect them, reading the names and dates.

‘See,’ said Lou. ‘Part of the point of coming here was that in a roundabout way Brett and I are from here.’

‘Eh?’ asked Mikey. ‘I thought yous two were Americans?’

Lou stroked the upper curve of a weathered stone. ‘No, we are. But our ancestors came from here. They got a boat over some time in the nineteenth century.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Brett. ‘Is that offensive? With the clearances and so on?’

‘I don’t feel offended,’ said Mikey. ‘Do you Paul?’

‘No,’ I laughed. ‘It’s fine.’

Brett said, ‘Phew.’

Mikey and I stood by the fence, watching as Lou and Brett examined each gravestone, comparing it to a list of ancestors they had with them. When they were far enough away Mikey sidled over to me.

‘They’re funny, them two.’

I watched Brett squat before a stone turned green from lichen. ‘What d’you mean?’

‘I mean, like, they’re just funny. They look really similar. It creeps me out a bit.’

‘But they’re a good asset,’ I explained. ‘They’re foreigners so they won’t recognise you. Say we need messages or something and I’m busy. We just send them two in for us.’

He said, ‘Hm,’ and jammed his hands into the pockets of his jeans.

After they’d checked every stone they came back towards us, Lou ahead of Brett, upset.

‘I know,’ she was saying. ‘You don’t have to be an asshole about it.’

‘An asshole?’ said Brett, following his sister past us, out the graveyard. ‘An asshole? I’m being a realist, Louise. All I’m saying is what are the chances of finding one or two names in a whole island of dead fucking bodies?’

‘So it’s the ritual or nothing?’ she shouted, slamming the van door closed behind her.

Brett stopped in the road when his sister used the word ‘ritual’. He turned to us, slowly. ‘Girls,’ he smiled.

I felt Mikey gear himself up to ask the question we were both thinking, but I got in there first. ‘I think we need some food.’

Further down the coast there was a van selling ice creams and hot dogs. It had stopped by the beach in one of the villages we went through. I sent Brett over with some cash to pick us up hot dogs and we ate them on the beach. Lou stood a few feet away from us. I watched as the man from the food van began to close his van up. He looked over to us from the harbour. He stared and then began walking over.

Mikey was pushing the last of his mustard-soaked bun into his gob, oblivious to the man’s approach.

‘Let’s head back to the van,’ I said, calmly. ‘We’ll need to get going.’

‘I thought we could maybe take a walk,’ said Lou. ‘It’s a nice beach.

‘There’s no graves on the beach, Lou,’ said Brett.

‘Oh Jesus,’ she said.

‘Mikey,’ I said. ‘Do you want to get into the van for me?’

He looked over at me, puzzled, then he spotted the oncoming man behind my head. ‘Aye,’ he nodded. ‘All right.’

The two of us headed away from the man and towards the van, pulling the Americans along. They were so angry with each other that they didn’t seem to care and didn’t even notice the man until we were driving off. He was standing on the beach, watching us drive away.

‘Hey,’ said Brett. ‘That’s weird. There’s the hot dog guy. Was he following us?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Huh,’ said Brett.

 

I stopped in at Marigold’s on the way back to the hostel and I bought a paper from the fresh-faced girl there. I’d dropped the van off with the rest of them at the hostel, so I walked back from the shop flicking through the paper.

I found something bad.

On page eight there was a sizeable spread on Duncan. I folded the paper over to display the half page he was featured on, skimming the article. The headline ran:

 

Colleague makes emotional appeal for info on missing archaeologist.

 

The gist of it was that Sam, who the paper called Samantha Swart, that sour bitch, had done a big look-at-me press conference asking for any information about her pal.

My blood was kicking in big time and it was only going to get worse.

I read the article’s final line. ‘Reports that recently released and wanted-for-parole-violations Michael ‘The Beast’ Buchanan was casually employed by the same company as Duncan Weddle are, as yet, unconfirmed.’

I could read between the lines. Who else but Sam could have given the papers and the police and whoever else the info that Mikey was even involved? That fucken cunt, I thought, crumpling up the paper. The article mentioned that she’d said she would ‘stop at nothing to make sure those responsible would be met with justice’. The cunt.

 

The hostel put on an evening meal for its guests. It was a bowl each of pink, quivering stovies. The four of us and most of the hostel piled into the dining room and paid our two pounds to the woman and wolfed down our food. I was still in a black mood from reading the paper. Mikey was the only one of us whose spirits remained high and he scraped his bowl clean.

Lou and Brett excused themselves early, leaving most of their food behind.

I told Mikey, in a whisper, about what I’d read. He nodded as I spoke. I waited for him to react. He didn’t.

‘Am I going mental?’ I asked. ‘Does that not worry you?’

‘Nah,’ he said.

‘How not? It’s there in black and white. We’re associated with him, in the paper. It’s there.’

‘I mean, aye, it’s bad. But what can we do about it? You shouldn’t worry about the shite you can’t change.’

‘Where did you hear that? On a fucken beer mat?’

‘I think someone told me that once,’ he said. ‘Inside.’

‘It’s bollocks,’ I said. ‘You can always change the shite.’

The van was the main thing. Perhaps I couldn’t fix the exterior but I could certainly do a job on the inside. I stole a bin bag from the hostel’s kitchen and went to work, stripping off the remnants of Duncan’s travels. I tore off Estonian bumper stickers and decorative plates from Jordan. I untangled the beads from the rear view mirror and I threw the photo album down on top of all that tat inside the bin bag.

Checking that no one at the hostel was observing, I stole down the gravel path to the road with the bag in my fist. Sam would not beat me. I would not allow it. She could try her very best but in the end she would find, like everyone did, that I would always come out on top. I stuffed the bag down deep inside the bin at the end of the path. I stood and rolled a fag. Try and calm down, I told myself. If you’re stressed and angry then that’s where the mistakes slip in.

I held my nail of a fag between shaking fingers and looked across the bay, at the castle, at the mull and the black sloping hills beyond, falling forever into red water. There was a family of deer in the bay. They too were black against the sinking sun like ideas of animals, black shapes, like cave drawings. The old mind’s knowledge of what the deer looked like, black legs and black bodies and black antlers.

I thought about the day where it all went wrong. I had let a mistake slip in then too. After Mr Pin had chased us from the bridge, after the mums had chased us from the swing park, we’d wandered. We’d been aimless. Full of the anger that you have at those ages – frustrated, aimless anger. Deep in the woods we’d found a pile of decaying bricks, arranged as if they’d once been a building. We took turns hurtling chunks of pink brick at the trunk of a vast tree. Our missiles had flown through the air, stinging the tree’s sides, nipping off a sliver of bark here, a chunk of fibrous wood there. We’d thrown bricks until we were exhausted, until it looked as if an animal had attacked the tree in a frenzy.

Out in the bay one of the smaller deer approached the biggest one, the one with the largest antlers. It butted its side or perhaps just licked or smelled the old male. Something harmless. The old bastard put his head down low and used his antlers on the youngster, sending him packing with a wave of the gnarled head-bones. I threw the wizened butt of my fag into the trickle of water than ran down beside the gravel path.

That day we ran ourselves out. We rampaged through the trees, yelling and screaming. More animal than child.

Why were we so angry?

The evening before, Mikey had come home in a strop. He wouldn’t tell our mother what the problem was but I got it out of him. I’d always had ways of getting things out of him. I’d pushed him up against the wall of our bedroom and threatened to spit in his face if he didn’t tell me what the problem was.

I was a very curious teenager.

He’d admitted he’d had a problem at school. He’d been in his English class at the end of the day. Mr MacPherson was one of the ones who took English. I’d never had him myself but there were myths of his brutality. You heard that he once denied a boy access to his asthma inhaler. You heard that he positioned short skirted-girls in the very front row of his classroom.

They’d been studying some book or another and Mikey had given a less than satisfactory answer. Mr MacPherson had demanded he stand at the front of the class. He’d told the room that this boy, this Michael Buchanan, was an example of a young person who would never amount to anything. The reason? Because people like this boy were too lazy, too bone idle to ever really try at anything.

He told me all of that, then I let him go from our bedroom wall. He wouldn’t meet my eye. I said that we would take the next day off, that we’d just tick it. That would show them. That would show them all.

The deer herd out in the bay had vanished while I’d been lost in my memories. The sky was warm and filled with misty fingers of cloud. I strolled up to the hostel, feeling better. I’d purged Duncan from the van and, in addition to that, I always felt better when I thought about that fateful day. It reminded me that, in the end, I always won.

I found the Americans sitting on Brett’s bunk. The packet of grey powder rested on the duvet. They stopped talking mid-word and Brett’s hand covered the packet.

‘Hey Paul,’ said Lou. ‘Could you give us a moment?’

‘What’s going on?’ I asked.

Brett smiled at me. ‘I’m not supposed to say.’

‘Oh my God,’ moaned Lou. ‘Why are you constantly so full of shit?’

‘In what way am I full of shit?’

‘All this, oh no, I can’t tell, my bitch sister won’t let me. You’re not a fucking martyr Brett.’

Brett shrugged at me and said, in a nasty, sharp voice, ‘She says all that but ask her if I’m allowed to talk about it?’

I rubbed my face. They were so young. I had little experience of the way people that age, twenty, twenty-one, could be. I’d missed Mikey’s late teenage years of course.

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Tell me, don’t tell me. I could not give a shit.’

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Look. So. Brett’s got this batshit crazy idea in his head. About this powder. About a ritual.’

‘See Paul, that’s the best thing about my sister,’ he said, pointing to his temple. ‘She is so fucking open minded.’

‘Let me explain OK? So Brett here’s got it into his head he can use this mushroom stuff,’ she prodded the packet, ‘to get in touch or whatever, to communicate I suppose, with our ancestors.’

‘She’s talking as if I’ve done, like, zero research.’

‘You’ve gone on-fucking-line. Anybody can go online and find out whatever they like.’

‘Places have an energy, you’d agree with that Paul?’

‘I suppose,’ I said.

‘But where does that energy come from. Why does location A have energy X and location B have energy Y? What’s the reasoning? See? You can’t tell me.’

‘I suppose I can’t,’ I said, realising I would agree with whatever the boy said.

‘All I’m saying is we could use a little something extra to assist us in exploring that energy. Cultures all over the world do it, or used to. Indians, aboriginals. Even,’ he said, pointing out the window, ‘the Celtic Gaels.’

‘You see what I mean?’ asked Lou, at her wit’s end. ‘You understand this is crazy, Paul? This is not what I had in mind when I agreed to some light genealogical research.’

‘She would rather hang around in graveyards all day. So fucking morbid. At least I’m showing respect.’

I ground my knuckles into my jaw. ‘I don’t think it’s a bad idea,’ I said, enjoying the scandalised look on Lou’s face, relishing the jubilant look on Brett’s.

‘That’s settled then,’ said Brett. ‘Tonight. I have a print off of this amazing-sounding Hopi ritual. It’s going to really be something.’

Lou pushed herself off the bunk and stormed into the toilets. I took her place.

‘You shouldn’t listen to her,’ I told Brett. ‘I think she’s holding you back.’

He curled a hair around his finger. ‘I sometimes think so too.’

I picked up the packet of grey powder and turned it over in my hand. Something was itching at me. I couldn’t place it. An insistent worming-away at a certain area of my mind. It was like when you’ve left something at home, your wallet or your keys, and your brain’s screaming at you to remember and you can hear the commotion even before you pat your pocket and realise – it’s gone.

And then, I had it. I put the packet down and looked around. ‘Brett,’ I said. ‘Have you seen Mikey?’