There was silence behind and above me and I had no sense of anyone being there. The inescapability of having to go up for a look was only a shade worse than actually making the effort; but I couldn't stay where I was for ever.
With reluctant muscles and a fearful mind I got laboriously to my feet and began the climb.
No evil faces grinned over the plateau above. My instinct that I was alone proved a true one, and I crawled the last bit on hands and knees and raised my head for a cautious look without anyone pouncing on me with a yell and kicking me back into space.
The reason for the silence and the absence of attackers was immediately obvious: my jeep had gone.
I stood erect on the plateau, figuratively groaning. Not only had I lost my transport, but the door of my home stood wide open with heaps of my belongings spilling out of it - a chair, clothes, books, bedclothes. I walked wearily across the plateau and looked in at a sickening mess.
Like all who live purposefully alone without provision for guests, my actual household goods were few. I tended to eat straight out of the frying pan, and to drink all liquids from a mug. Living without electricity, I owned none of the routinely stolen things like television, stereo or computer, nor did I have a mobile phone because of not being able to recharge the batteries. I did own a portable radio cassette for checking that interstellar war hadn't broken out, and for playing taped music if I felt like it, but it was no grand affair with resale value. I had no antique silver. No Chippendale chairs.
What I did have was paint.
When I'd moved into the tumbledown building five and a half years earlier I'd made only the centre and largest of its three divisions habitable. About fifteen feet by nine, my room had been given a businesslike new roof, a large double-glazed window, and a host of anti-damp preservation measures in its rebuilt walls and flooring. Light, heat and cooking were achieved with gas. Running water came from a small clear burn trickling through nearby rocks, and for a bathroom I had a weathered privy a short walk away. I'd meant at first to stay on the mountain only during the long northern summer days, but in the end had left my departure later and later that first year until suddenly the everlasting December nights were shortening again, and I'd stayed snug through a freezing January and February and had never since considered leaving.
Apart from a bed, a small table, a chest of drawers and one comfortable chair, the whole room was taken up by three easels, stacked canvases, a work stool, a wall of shelves and the equivalent of a kitchen table covered with pots and tubes of paints, and other essentials of my work like jugs of brushes and painting knives and jam jars full of clear or dirty water.
Lack of space and my own instincts dictated order and overall tidiness, but chiefly the disciplined organisation was the result of the very nature of the acrylics themselves: they dried so fast when exposed to air that lids had to be replaced, tubes had to be capped, only small quantities could be squeezed onto a palette at a time, brushes had to be constantly rinsed clean, knives wiped, hands washed. I kept large amounts of clean and duty water in separate buckets under the table and used tissues by the jeep-load for keeping mess at bay.
Despite all care, I had few clothes free of paint stains and had to sand down the woodblock floor now and then to get rid of multicoloured sludge.
The mess the four demons had made of all this was spectacularly awful.
I had left work in progress on all three easels as I often painted three pictures simultaneously. All three were now face down on the floor, thoroughly saturated by the kicked-over buckets. My work table lay on its side, pots, brushes and paints spilling wide. Burst paint tubes had been squashed underfoot. My bed had been tipped over, chest of drawers ransacked, box files pulled down from the shelves, ditto books, every container emptied, sugar and coffee granules scattered in a filthy jumbled chaos.
Bastards.
I stood without energy in the doorway looking at the depressing damage and working out what to do. The clothes I was wearing were torn and dirty and I'd been bleeding from many small scrapes and scratches. The bothy had been robbed, as far as I could see, of everything I could have raised money on. Also my wallet had gone and my watch had gone. My chequebook had been in the jeep.
I had said I would go to London.
Well… so I bloody well would.
Mad Alexander. Might as well live up to the name.
Apart from moving back into the room the chair and other things that were half out of the doorway, I left the scene mostly as it was. I sorted out only the cleanest jeans, jersey and shirt from the things emptied out of the chest of drawers, and I changed into them out by the burn, rinsing off the dried trickles of blood in the cold clean water.
I ached deeply all over.
Bloody bastards.
I walked along to the privy, but there had been nothing to steal there, and they had left it alone. Of the two original but ruined flanks to my habitable room, one was now a carport with a grey camouflage-painted roof of corrugated iron, the other, still open to the skies, was where I kept the gas cylinders (in a sort of bunker) and also rubbish bins, now empty, as I had taken the filled black bags down to the post office for disposal that morning. Let into one tumbledown wall there were the remains of what might have been a fireplace with a small oven above. Perhaps the place had once been a kitchen or bakehouse, but I'd been happier with gas.
Nothing in these two side sections had been vandalised. Lucky, I suppose.
From the jumble on the main bothy floor I harvested a broken stick of charcoal and slid pieces of it into my shirt pocket, and I found a sketch-pad with some clean pages; and armed with such few essentials I left home and set off down the wandering path to the road.
The Monadhliath Mountains, rising sharply to between 2500 and 3000 feet, were rounded rather than acutely jagged, but were bare of trees and starkly, unforgivingly grey. The steep path led down to heather-clad valley slopes and finally to a few pine trees and patches of grass. The transition from my home to the road was always more than a matter of height above sea leveclass="underline" up in the wild taxing granite wilderness, life -to me at any rate - felt simple, complete and austere. I could work there with concentration. The clutching 'normal' life of the valley diminished my awareness of something elemental that I took from the palaeolithic silence and converted into paint: yet the canvases I sold for my bread and butter were usually full of colour and light-heartedness and were, in fact, mostly pictures of golf.
By the time I reached the road there was a hint in the quality of light of dusk hovering in the wings getting ready to draw together the skirts of evening. It was the time of day when I stopped painting. As it was then September, watch or no watch, I could pretty accurately guess at six thirty.
Even though it had been by-passed by the busy A9 artery from Inverness to Perth, there was enough traffic on the road for me to hitch a ride without much difficulty, but it was a shade disconcerting to find that the driver who stopped to pick up a long-haired jeans-clad young male stranger was an expectant-eyed fortyish woman who put her hand caressingly on my knee half a mile into the ride.
Lamely I said, 'I only want to go to Dalwhinnie railway station.'
'Boring, aren't you, dear.'
'Ungrateful,' I agreed. And bruised, tired and laughing inside.
She took the hand away with a shrug. 'Where do you want to go?' she asked. 'I could take you to Perth.' 'Just Dalwhinnie.' 'Are you gay, dear?' 'Er,' I said. 'No.'
She gave me a sideways glance. 'Have you banged your face?'
'Mm,' I said.
She gave me up as a prospect and dumped me half a mile from the trains. I walked, ruefully thinking of the offer I'd declined. I'd been celibate too long. It had become a habit. Bloody feeble, all the same, to pass up a free lunch. My ribs hurt.