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
I sat on the beach until the cold nearly took me, before walking stiffly back over the moor to the van and starting the motor. Back along the track to the road, and then south through Barvas, before turning off east on a narrow track somewhere near Arnol. A track that wound out through the bog towards a rising of hills. I had been going to set the van on fire, but always feared it would be seen, no matter how remote I went. And that’s when I saw, in a moment of moonlight, the loch shimmering below me. I took my stuff out of the back and drove it to the edge of the drop. Then I cut the engine and jumped out into soft turf, my shoulder to the door, helping it the last few feet, till it took on its own momentum.
Off it went down the hill in the dark, and I heard more than saw it hit the water. In brief blinks of moonlight over the next hour, sitting up there on the hill, I saw a part of it still visible above the surface, and I thought perhaps I had made a terrible mistake. But by morning it was gone.
I used the hours of darkness to dismantle the shotgun that Donald Seamus had used to shoot rabbits, so that I could fit it into my bag. Then at first light I hoofed it back across the moor to the road. I had only been walking five minutes in the direction of Barvas when someone stopped to give me a lift. An old crofter on his way into Stornoway. He talked and talked, while I felt life slowly coming back to my limbs, warmed by the heater in his car. We were about halfway across the Barvas moor when he said, “It’s a strange sort of Gaelic you speak, son. You’re not from around here.”
“No,” I said. “I’m from Harris.” And I reached across to shake his hand. “Tormod Macdonald.” Which is who I have been all my life since.
“What’s your business in Stornoway?”
“I’m taking the ferry to the mainland.”
The old crofter grinned. “Good luck to you, then, boy. It’s a rough crossing.”
I had no idea, then, that I would come back when it was over. Drawn by the need, somehow, to be near to my brother, as if that could in some way make amends for my dismal failure to keep my promise to my mother.
“Where are we now?” I ask.
“This is Leverburgh, Dad. We’re taking the ferry over to North Uist.”
North Uist? I’m sure I don’t live there. I scratch my head. “Why?”
“We’re taking you home, Dad.”
Thirty-six
Thirty-six