He held the phone. What he had looked forward to, like a talisman, through the despair of the late afternoon and early evening as the storm curdled over the horizon to the west, was the arrival the next morning of Aggie. She would have come on the plane from the small sister island of Papa Westray, or hitched a ride on an open boat, both rough and turbulent but both usually running whatever the weather.
“Sorry and all that, Gaz, but you know how it is… Just a foul summer dose of ’flu. Best to see it out and get it behind me. Give it a few days, and I’ll have shaken clear of it. Look after yourself, my big boy. Bye-bye.”
The phone purred in his ear. She did not say, not ever, that she loved him. Did not say that it hurt her to cry off from travelling to see him… She made pottery for sale in the hotel on Gaz’s island, and was a dab hand at simple watercolour paintings and designed her own cards with illustrations of her island views. She would have been four or five years older than Gaz and he had met her when a gale had damaged her roof and it had needed a partial rebuild, and the weather had been foul and it had needed strength, ingenuity and luck to keep the tarpaulin in place while he had done the work, and she had paid him in cash and he had been captivated. She had been on her island three years longer than he had been on Westray so was a veteran and took the bad times with the good; unflappable, unfazed whatever the elements chucked at her, and seemed not to share any of the black dog days he entertained. It had been weeks before they had kissed and months before they had gone to his bed – probably too much drink taken that evening in the Pierowall hotel bar, but not regretted. Most weeks she came on the twenty-five minute ferry link or the two-minute fixed-wing flight, and greeted him as he met her as if it were the one thing – a kiss and a hug – that she had most missed since last seeing him, but she would call and stand him down and sound relaxed about it, no huge deal. Gaz had told her that she was the most important woman he had known in his adult life, had tried to tell her about previous relationships – all in the disaster folder – and been shushed. She knew he had been a serving soldier, not what he had done and not where he had been, and she did not know any of the detail of the psychiatrist’s assessment… and of her he knew next to nothing. Easier. What he did know was a verdict on him that she had given a friend in the bar who had told him on one of the rare times he was there by himself, and this woman had passed on Aggie’s description of him. ‘Nice enough, and bloody useful round the place, but I don’t really know him because he wouldn’t let that happen. A guy you hardly remember, see him and think he’s all right but the memory is sort of vague. Something happened but I don’t know what, and he’ll not tell me, and I don’t ask.’ What he had learned about black dog days from the few therapy sessions he had gone to before the uprooting and the journey north, was that no one outside the experience gave a toss what he and other sufferers went through and in military terms it was still ‘Get a grip’, and the days of a diagnosis of ‘lack of moral fibre’ still lurked. He needed her, and with a storm coming he had counted on her presence to help him through. Sometimes, when the weather was bad and his bungalow seemed to shake with the wind’s buffeting he would sit on the floor in the hall and let the draughts whistle round him and put a blanket over his head and just shake and tremble. Sometimes – if the tremors were slaughtering him and his legs were weakened and his head in torment, he would go out – likely having the back door open – and trudge up the hill and past the Noltland ruin and maybe start to run, pounding ahead in the darkness as they had done in the fitness sessions before being accepted into the unit, and he would run until the lighthouse beam caught him and then keep going until he was at the edge of Noup Head. He would hear the waves crashing on the rocks some 400 feet below and sway on his heels and let the wind shake his balance. When the lighthouse beam came round again it would fasten momentarily on the narrow ledges to the left of where he stood and show him the white bodies of the gannets. They were never blown off their roosting points and it might be the only place where he could fight his way through the black dog sessions. With the gannets, up on Noup Head, were guillemots and kittiwakes and fulmars, and farther to the right where the ground dropped towards a bay there were old rabbit holes refurbished as homes for puffins. Once – only once – he had seemed to stumble and a gust of wind might have come at him at a different angle, and he had lurched towards the edge and had regained his balance. Had Gaz saved himself by regaining his foothold? Had the wind shifted and veered off him? Had he struggled to prevent himself being pitched over the cliff? Was he resigned to ending the agonies? Not sure… And it had passed and he had turned and gone back towards the ruined castle with the wind hammering at his back. It was about controlling levels of stress and minimising them. Hard to do, but it was why he had fled to the island.
He sat in his chair with the lights off and the bungalow creaking and it would have been good if he had a dog, by his feet or on his lap, and he hoped to sleep – not dream and not remember.
Chapter 2
Four days of hell, and then a minute in which it seemed to Gaz that a cloud had lifted.
She was coming first thing the next morning, had a ride on a boat that needed a minor repair done in the Pierowall harbour, and she was bringing stock for the hotel’s gift shop. In the kitchen he shrugged into full waterproofs, nearly dry from the day before. It was lunatic to be out on such a day but he was a man persecuted by the weight of obligation and must get up the hill and beyond the castle and repair a paddock fence that had come down because of rotten posts. He would do it because he had promised it would be done, and the weight of the wind would make his efforts ludicrous but he was driven, could not escape a sense of duty.
In Gaz’s life Aggie shared twin roles. She was both lover and carer, companion and therapist. She would have acknowledged the first, was ignorant of the second. Fetching the tools from the shed, which shook in spite of the steel-woven cables anchoring it, he was belted by the wind and rain splattered on him. No man and no beast would have volunteered to be out that day. Gaz thought that love came to Aggie on a ‘take it or leave it’ ticket, but to him it was precious and his life had had little of it.
The friends of his ‘aunt’ were Betty and Bobby Riley, childless, with a 200-acre farm east of Stoke on Trent and off the A50. A new life. Nothing had prepared him, aged five, for rural life. He had gone to the village school, arriving first because he was taken directly after milking was finished and last to be collected, after the second milking in the afternoon. Different to other kids and never belonging; every mother within miles would have masked her mouth and gossiped about the child now living at the Riley farm… he knew some said he was bought for cash. A rough and ready life, without frills or luxuries, and a gruff fondness shown him but not open love. Treated, in fact, like one of the dogs, cursed at, head ruffled and given a decent place by the fire in winter – love of a sort. He had understood it best when one of the older dogs, bad hips and sagging on its haunches, had been taken outside by Bobby Riley who had carried a shotgun and had cartridges in his pocket and put a spade by the kitchen door. Just one shot in the early morning fog, and he’d returned for his breakfast, nothing said, but dirt on his boots and the smell of the discharge on his hands, and his eyes swollen. That sort of love was shown him. Nor was his mother ever spoken of, and he had never returned to the tower block. At first he had been driven to school and back, then had walked both ways, at least an hour, then had bicycled. Then there had been a comprehensive in Stoke and a school bus… there were girls there, and he was ridiculed for his shyness. What love he did know as a teenager was for the isolation and the quiet of the farm, and most of his spare time was spent out in the woodland beyond the fifteen-Acre. He knew the haunts and habits of badgers and foxes and occasional deer, and the rabbits: killed none of them, never used a snare or a trap or a net.