Chapters (43)
- Pronunciation
- Prologue
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
- Forty
- Acknowledgments
Fin reached the car and looked around. But there was no sign of Donald. At least his tent was still there, beat up and bedraggled, guys slack and vibrating crazily in the wind, but still clinging to their pegs. He slithered down the slope towards it, and through the open flap saw that there was someone inside. He knelt down and crawled in to find a tousled-looking Donald Murray sitting cross-legged on the sleeping bag, the hit-and-run folder open on his knees.
Anger spiked through Fin and he grabbed the folder away. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Donald was startled. And seemed embarrassed. “I’m sorry, Fin. I didn’t mean to pry, honestly. I came down looking for you and found the tent open, and the contents of your folder blowing all over the place. I just gathered up the sheets, and . . .” He paused. “I couldn’t help seeing what it was.”
Fin couldn’t meet his eye.
“I had no idea.”
Fin tossed the folder towards the back of the tent. “It’s old news.” He backed out of the tent and stood up into the wind. The great rolling banks of cloud seemed to be just above his head, pressing down on him, and he felt the odd spit in his face. Donald clambered out after him, and the two men stood side by side, looking down the slope of the croft towards the cliffs and the beach below. It was some minutes before they spoke.
“You ever lost a child, Donald?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“It’s gut-wrenching. As if your life no longer has any meaning. You just want to curl up and die.” He turned quickly towards the minister. “And don’t give me any shit about God, and some higher purpose. That would only make me more mad at Him than I already am.”
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
Fin shrugged and pushed his hands into the pockets of his oilskins and started off down the slope towards the cliffs. Donald hurried to catch him up. Fin said, “He was just eight years old, Donald. We didn’t have a great marriage, Mona and me, but we’d made Robbie, and in a way that made some kind of sense of us.”
They could see now, below them, the sea rolling in off the Minch in great slow-motion waves that smashed in white, frothing fury on the rocks all along the coast, sending spray thirty feet in the air.