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
It seemed to take forever to come. My stomach growled and snarled at me. I’d put nothing in it for nearly twenty-four hours, and I felt quite light-headed. At last, I watched the light dying into darkness along the western horizon, and Donald Seamus’s old van coughed its fumes into the night. I bumped back along the track to the main road and turned north.
At Siader I spotted a track heading off into the dark, towards the sea, and I turned off on it, extinguishing my lights, and making my slow, painful way out towards the cliffs, navigating only by infrequent fleeting patches of moonlight. Within sight and sound of a sea that seemed to glow almost phosphorescent in the dark, I killed the motor and got out of the van. There was not a light anywhere to be seen, and I retrieved Donald Seamus’s tarasgeir from the back of the vehicle.
Even though the bog was soft and wet, it took me nearly an hour to dig a hole in it big enough for Peter’s final resting place. First I cut turfs off the top and laid them to one side, and then dug, and dug, deep enough that the water seeping into the hole would be displaced by the body. Deep enough that when I had filled it in, and replaced the turfs, no one would ever know it had been disturbed. And even if they did, would probably think it had been some abortive attempt to cut peat. But I knew the land would knit together in no time, sealing him in, folding him into its arms and holding him in its embrace for ever.
When I had finished, finally, I unwrapped my brother from his blanket and laid him carefully in his grave. I knelt at his head, and kissed him, and prayed for his soul, even although I was no longer certain that there was a God out there. Then I covered him over, so consumed by sorrow and guilt that I could hardly wield the spade. When I had replaced the last turf, I stood for ten minutes or more, letting the wind dry my sweat before lifting the bloody blanket and trudging over the moor and down across a jumble of rocks to a tiny, sandy inlet.
There I crouched in the sand to give shelter from the wind as I set light to the blanket, then sat upwind of it to watch its flames flare and dance briefly in the dark, carrying sparks and smoke off into the night. A symbolic cremation. My brother’s blood returned to the earth.