The bar is closed now. The hotel guests have retired and one by one the locals have stepped out into the cold night. Even Old Campbell has disappeared, no one remembers when, but his stool at the corner of the bar seems strangely forlorn now bereft of him. The American lads are very, very drunk but no amount of charm, of calling MoragLady Loch NessieorMa’am, will persuade her to serve them one for the road. Drew, the studious-looking one, is either asleep or comatose, his spectacles awry as if they’re trying to sneak away from his face. JB, finally drained of song, is trying very hard to work out how the peanut on the table in front of him is mutating into two, into four, before his eyes and why the pincer-action between his thumb and finger is not working. As for Taylor, he is not quite here and not quite there, he is Inbetween. He has made it to this island, he is here in Harris but still he is unsure why. Because hadn’t his mother said to him openly, dispassionately, that there’s nothing here – there’s nothing here at all?
Yes there’s a marathon to run but for Taylor, unlike Drew and JB, that’s not the point. Theremustbe more than nothing here.
Murdo tells Morag he will drive the visitors to Flora’s House, that theamadain—the silly sods—can find their own way back to the car hire office in the morning. He loads the boys into his car much like he did his own children when they were little and sleepy. He heaves each rucksack onto each lap so the lads have something to cling on to. It’s a hilly, twisty ten mile drive up and out of Tarbert and down and along to Luskentyre. JB starts singing again but drifts off into a quiet burble. Drew cuddles his rucksack and quietly chantsParish Harrish Parish Harrishand Taylor says nothing at all. He looks out of Murdo’s car at the nightscape, it is dreamlike and strange; the land lumbers in the shadows and the moonlight spotlights water – water all around. Ghost-sheep appear at the side of the road, their eyes luminous. It’s started to rain and the rhythmic swish of the windscreen-wipers lulls JB and Drew to sleep. Not Taylor; he’s beguiled by the night in this unknown place, the island he’s travelled all these miles to see.
At Flora’s House, Murdo eases the three of them out of his car and sets them as upright as possible. He guides them along the path with encouraging words and kindly shoving and he opens the front door to the wee white cottage. Morag had set a peat fire earlier in the afternoon and the interior is warm and welcoming. Murdo pushes and pulls the three marathon-drinking marathon runners inside and tells them to sleep well. As he heads away home, he chuckles at the thought of them navigating the steep stairs up to the two small bedrooms; imagines a rucksack tipping one of the lads backwards sending them all the way down to a crumple at the bottom. He thinksabout parched throats and sore heads in the morning, wonders whether he should have ensured they’d all had a good long drink of water. Murdo man, he laughs at himself, they’re twenty-three years old! And it strikes him that he was married with a child on the way at that age. And then he thinks how he could still outrun all three up to the summit of the Clisham without even breaking a sweat.
At Flora’s House, in their stupor, Drew, JB and Taylor could be any place that has four walls and a roof. Apart from twenty minutes on deck and the short staggering distance from harbour to hotel, they’ve been indoors the entire day. This could be anywhere, really.
Chapter 3
Monday
Taylor’s waking thought was that his arm was at a really weird angle. Only slowly did he realise it was not his arm, but JB’s. He turned his head, which was excruciating, only to get an eyeful of JB’s groin, which was alarming. They were lying, top to toe, on a double bed and Taylor was upside down. JB had at some stage wrestled off all clothing apart from his boxers whilst Taylor still wore everything including his boots which had left clods of dirt on the pillow. The curtains were open and tin-sharp sunlight sharded straight through his eyeballs making him wince. JB groaned in reply and rolled over so that his backside was now disturbingly near Taylor’s face. Gingerly Taylor sat up, placing his hands to either side of his head to prevent it from splicing in half whilst, under one foot he detected a rug and under the other, wooden floorboards. With great effort, he stood. The room appeared to shrink as he straightened but gradually he realised this was just the play between the low and slanted ceiling and the rise of the hill right outside the window. The room looked like it had been torn through by a tornado,such was the hurl and scatter of the contents of JB’s backpack and the ruck and twist of the bedding. Taylor had no recollection whatsoever of entering this bedroom, let alone the cottage. He hadn’t a clue where the bathroom was but boy did he need it.
He discovered it on the landing and, to the other side of it, was the second bedroom. Through the open door, Taylor could see Drew tucked up childlike in one of two single beds, his black hair thatching just above the sheets. The other bed was pristine. Taylor called himself an idiot and headed into the bathroom where the floor seemed to fall away from him until he realised it did indeed slope. This cottage wasancient!He caught sight of himself in the mirror, it was not pretty. He took a shower and gave himself a long blast of pure cold; felt his heart race, his lungs work, his skin goose over, his skull tighten, his balls tuck. Ilive, he congratulated himself. I’ll never drink again, he said. And then he called himself a jerk as he reached for a towel.
How the heck had the three of them made it up these narrow, steep stairs with their rucksacks, drunk as skunks? Taylor was quite impressed as he made his way down. He needed coffee and he needed air and in that order. He couldn’t find a coffee machine but there was a jar of instant granules so he heaped spoonfuls straight into the electric kettle which he filled with water and set to boil. The interior of the cottage was quaint; open plan but cosy, very quiet and suffused with an earthy warm fragrance coming from the fireplace. There was a small sofa, two armchairs, a round wooden table around which mismatched chairs were conversing. The walls were stone, the floor was stone and that stone was grey shot through with more greys, yet there was no harshness in here. It all felt feminine and calm and soothing; Taylor liked that. An old photograph hung framed on the wall; some chick from the 1960s it seemed. Cute enough, he thought. The photograph drew him in and, as he wondered about this person from the past, subconsciously he ran his handover and over the tweed throw draped along the back of an armchair. He scooped it up and held it against his cheek, to his nose and he looked closely at the weave, at the colours, the pattern, and there he stood motionless and Inbetween.
The kettle clicked off and brought him back to the present and his need for coffee, and still the woman in the photo stared straight at him. Maybe she was Flora’s ma or someone. Jeesh, Taylor hoped Flora didn’t turn up here today. Her place was a mess;theywere a mess! The coffee tasted awful so he tipped in a load of sugar and took the mug outside where fuzzed drifts of someone driving them here late last night began to swim around his head.
A bench, a washing line, flower pots with spring bulbs, but the garden appeared to be just a tamed section of the wilder land beyond, fenced off by a low and tumbling wall. Taylor vaulted it and headed into the wind and off to he didn’t know where. Clouds duelled above, umpired by sections of pale blue sky, and though there was a constant breeze it wasn’t cold at all. He glanced back at Flora’s House only it wasn’t really ahouse; just a small squat cottage with JB and Drew, still out for the count, filling those little bedrooms. Briefly, he wondered if he should have messaged them but realised he didn’t know where his phone was. He didn’t think they’d wake anytime soon and if they did, there was his attempt at coffee ready for them in the kettle.
Though he’d done some quiet homework about Harris and its moors, its hills, the dunes and the peat, the lie of the land soon had its fun with him as if chastising him for his hangover, for being a dick. He’d brought limited footwear on the trip: running shoes, boots, a pair of Chucky Ts and slides which, foolishly, he was wearing now. Already, his socks were soaking. Had the guidebook said not to expect a path? Or that, soft as it looked in pictures, the grass gathered in dense clumps and the land became unexpectedly soggy? Had it mentioned the suddenamphitheatres of sand? The dunes had looked so benign online: sugary fine, a prelude to the running beaches of West Harris. In reality, Taylor had to ramble and jag his way through.
When he had shown Drew and JB the details of Flora’s House, JB had said screw small cottages in the middle of nowheresville – let’s stay in town! let’s stay in a hotel! But Taylor had booked Flora’s House anyway, sensing that, after running the Paris marathon followed by a possibly insane trip to London, nowheresville was exactly where he’d need to be.
So here he was, with yet one more marathon under his belt and another in his legs for five days’ time. Here he was, in socks and slides, giving scant regard for his ankles and knees which were much needed for the big run. He washere,on the island of his mother’s birth, the precise location of vague family history about which he knew this and that but not a lot. Scrambling and jinking his way through the dunes, and having to think about each footfall, finally Taylor made it down to the beach where the wind hit him and the tide was right out.
Pale sand filled a vast bay. Right over on the other side, scattered houses nestled while hills rolled around and the west coast flowed. To his right, a long beach galloped empty and straight captained by distant mountains. Some way ahead, small waves pestered the shoreline as if the sea didn’t have much energy today. From the maps, the Outer Hebrides had appeared to be just a small tattering of islands on the edge of the Atlantic. But now he was here, everything felt expansive and significant. He slipped off his slides and struggled out of sand-clagged socks and strode to the water’s edge, hungry for the taste of saltwater, for sand and sea to swallow his feet and gulp at his legs. Growing up landlocked in Colorado Springs, he’d craved beaches and ocean since he was a kid. I grew up with way too much water, his mother had told him. It waseverywhere, she’d said, as if thatwasn’t a good thing at all. Sometimes it felt like I was living on a sponge drifting out to sea.
Over the water, shadow and light swung nets of purple and grey, khaki and blonde, across the island whose name he had previously noted but now forgotten. Behind him, the constant sway and beat of the grasses holding the dunes together. The wind pestered his ears and watered his eyes and zipped surf along the waves. The sea rolled in bands of blues. Sand and saltwater on his lips. The air, the wind, a solid thing; a texture.
All of it was strangely familiar because now he understood how he’d seen it all before. Wasn’t every detail in front of him also to be found in that box? The box which, every so often from when he was a kid to just last month, he’d lift off the lid and let it all out; the place he’d never been to. Until now.
Chapter 4
It was hardly a treasure chest and there really wasn’t all that much in it. Only the container itself had changed. For the last fifteen years, since Taylor’s family had been in their present home, the box was a transparent plastic tub with handles at the lid which snapped open and shut with a satisfying pop. Prior to that, the contents had been kept in a fancy orange and navy cardboard box with a label illustrating a pair of boots he couldn’t recall his mom wearing. In the furthest reaches of Taylor’s memory, he knew it first as a small and tatty wicker picnic hamper. His father had a memory box too, a wooden one with ornamental hinges and a clasp. It contained his sports medals, his first baseball mitt, various year books, a greying old Snoopy, his scarf from Harvard plus a clatter of mix-tapes from the 1980s—songs written out in a bubbly handwriting that wasn’t his mother’s and each decorated with a glittery heart which wasn’t hers either.
Both these boxes, housed but not hidden at the base of their bedroom closet, attested peculiarly to lives previously lived by these people known to Taylor simply as his parents. The difference between their boxes was that his father’s was stuffed with memories and mementos and rites of passage, whereas hismother’s contained curious and disparate items. I don’t know why I keep this stuff, she’d laugh when coming across Taylor cross-legged on her bedroom carpet, the contents of the box spread around him. She’d pop her head around the door and she would say oh, not all that old rubbish again!
But year in year out Taylor would take a handful of the small and unremarkable shells to his ear, hoping for the sound of a distant shore though it never came. He’d scrutinise the old spoon, twizzle it around and around, wondering why one side was shorn off at an angle. His mother once told him it had belonged to her grandmother. He’d imagined the woman to be all wizened and witch-like and that spoon wasn’t going anywhere near his mouth, even if it was loaded with ice cream. Then there were the lumps and chunks of rock which felt cold and dense and inert in the palm of his hand, each a twisting gnarl of light greys and dark. This is rock isnice– it is three billion years old, it is as old as the moon, his mother had told him. Taylor wasn’t sure if she was telling the truth, the moon being white and all.
There was also an old book,Gràs am Pailteas, printed in a language he couldn’t read with a name handwritten: Dàibhidh MacLeòid, his great grandfather, apparently. Then there were just the two photographs: one of the grandparents he’d never met, on their wedding day; one of his mother aged ten in her school uniform. However, most fascinating to Taylor were the four pieces of cloth woven in different colours and patterns, each little bigger than a carton of breakfast cereal. When he was young, he’d stroke them over his bare skin, drape them over his arms and legs. It’s scratchy, he’d say to his mom. That’ll be thetickle, she’d explain, brushing the fabric lightly against his cheek. And then she’d point at each piece as if it was a map. I am from here. And here. Here. And here. I am from a familyof weavers, she’d say. My father was a weaver, my grandparents and their parents too.
But that’s pretty much all he knew about her family. They were dead now. They’d never been close. His mother had left at sixteen to see the world and now she was leaving home once again.
The gusting air coming off the sea, the rush of gasp-cold water, lifted Taylor’s hangover. Here hewas, he washere. All around, speckling the sand, tiny shells whose silent cousins his mother had filled her pockets with when she left over forty years ago. These hills were strewn with the humping great slabs of grey buckled rock, small samples of which his mother had taken with her. This rock isnice. This rock isGneiss. It is three billion years old, it is as old as the moon. Taylor believed her now.
He turned a slow full circle, drinking it all in, understanding how heknewwhere he was, how this place could be familiar. The colours of water, land, sky. The textures of sand, grass, rock. The light and the shade and always the wind, changing the character of everything at any given moment. Of course he’d seen it before. Everything around him was told in the tweed, in the patterns and colour and texture. The tweed mapped and catalogued this place.
Taylor had not checked with his mother if he could take the four pieces from the box. He hadn’t asked her if it was okay to bring them to Europe and back to the island where they had been woven by his grandfather, a man he’d never met. Taylor had found his mom’s box in the pile at the back of the garage destined for the dump.
The wind was taking a break. Sun and cloud had reached a truce. A nascent warmth was released. He let the surf bibble over his feet for a few minutes more before he turned for the longtrudge back through the dunes to the cottage. Tucking his rolled-up socks into the back pocket of his jeans and with his slides in his hand, barefoot he clambered up and away from the beach.
As a little kid, Taylor worried that he would not know what to keep of his life for posterity, for his own future box. He would obsessively squirrel away all manner of stuff and hide it under his bed. As Flora’s House came into view, Taylor thought about where he was now and who he’d been then and he laughed at himself. What a weird little guy he’d been.
Chapter 5
