I Am an Island Read online

  I am already seizing my coat as the ferryman’s voice crackles over the phone, ‘If you don’t move now, you might not get over till after New Year.’

  Sheep on the road cluster together for warmth. The slippery surface glints treacherous as the Land Rover heads up the track, screaming in second gear in order to keep a tight grip. As we approach the slip, it is heartbreaking to see the ferry pulling away across the water. ‘Stop!’ I shout, but already the boat is turning towards the spit. Rab keeps driving furiously, flashing his headlights and hammering the horn. As the boat ploughs about, rocking from side to side, I cannot believe my eyes: it is turning back. ‘To hell with this!’ Rab yells. Slamming the wheel into lock, he runs us on to the high shingle at the top of the beach. ‘I’m not missing this for anyone!’ We hit the ground running, our arms laden with bags.

  ‘Think you must be two bright chancers, finding that gap,’ the skipper nods as the tiny boat lurches bravely across the choppy water. It is a relief when the ropes are tied up on the other side and Rab’s face lifts. He slaps the ferryman on the back. I sense that we have pulled out of a tight corner. And suddenly I feel lightheaded and ready to dance.

  Six hours later we are driving back up the island. Snow clouds have thickened over the mountains. There is fresh falling snow and a whiteout in Glasgow. The trains are cancelled. The planes are grounded. As the traffic begins to back up, the gritters have started closing the roads. We stock up on provisions in Oban and head for home. I do not trust myself to speak. After such a window of opportunity, these hasty supplies feel lacklustre and meaningless. For hours, Rab has been smoking furiously in silence. As he switches on the ignition, his face turns pale with fury. He slams his fist hard against the dashboard. ‘For fuck’s sake. Well, that’s another year on this fucking island. And that’s Christmas off.’

  And then I know to hold tight to my seat, because he rams his foot hard on the accelerator, crunching gears as the exhaust burns dark fumes. I grip on to the dashboard and feel my body start to brace itself. ‘Please, Rab, enough,’ I protest, through clenched teeth. ‘Calm down. No one’s going to have Christmas if we crash.’ Only he doesn’t. After a minute, I compress my lips and stay silent. I hate it when he shouts or gets so angry. But it scares me more than anything when we drive this fast. My body remembers a shattering windscreen, splintering metal and screams. I shut my eyes and try not to think of how it feels to crash. But it is something forever stuck inside me. There is no point in talking to Rab when that dark cloud finds him. When I get out, I am shaking. That day, I lose him for more hours than I can count. And the dark cloud takes longer than usual to evaporate.

  I long for Christmas Eve to be crisp and starlit, and when it comes, it is. The skies are clear and alive at midnight as our footsteps scrunch through the snow. We are talking and laughing again as we walk up the little track to the ancient stone church. The door creaks on its hinges when I lean my shoulder into it. Inside everyone is huddled close in coats and scarves, knees pressed tight together, backs hard against the wooden pews. There is a simplicity to the gathering that is deeply moving. I seek out familiar faces as jam jars are handed out and candles lit, and there is a peal of laughter as someone’s coat nearly catches fire. Faces glow soft in candlelight, rapt with a childlike excitement. My breath steams blue frosted wings. Sitting close, drawn together by our humanity and small company, it feels good to share others’ warmth. I close my eyes and feel my heartbeat slow. And although my family is hundreds of miles away, I would not have missed this for the world. A few minutes before midnight, the huge bell is rung. Its voice sounds ancient, strange, hollow from inside the bell tower. And then we stand and sing carols. Our voices illuminate the dark as thick snowflakes start falling.

  On Christmas Day there is a power cut, but eventually we call our friends and family. We cut up our plucked bird and cook it slowly on the open grate. Later, we split chestnut shells with the coal shovel. When I take Maude outside, our shadows are blue in the fresh powder snow. The silvering birch trees, lifting up their bare arms to winter, glow pale in the darkness. I wonder at their fortitude and resilience. They ask for nothing, scarcely drawing life from the cold air and hard, frozen soil.

  On Boxing Day we go visiting. The skies are crystalline, a pale turquoise that makes you feel exhilarated, like the snow glittering on the trees. We walk the few miles of the island, carrying small gifts as thanks for small favours over the months. I know Rab feels as upbeat and energised as I do. We talk of our plans for the coming months. And I feel close to him, like we did when we first arrived. But as soon as we knock on the last door and step inside, I immediately sense an atmosphere. My breath quickens and my eyes become alert. ‘Are you sure?’ I ask Rab. He just frowns and says, ‘We’ve been invited.’ And I am torn, because instinctively I want to say, ‘Let’s go home.’

  When it comes I am not surprised. A voice greets us: ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ There is a hostility underlying the jovial tone. So even after the speaker is told to hold their tongue, and we are offered a glass by our host, I am tense and on edge and keep my eye on the door. I do not feel right. I will ask Rab to finish his drink quickly so that we can get away. But he gives me a steely look and pours another dram. When talk turns to land, and some grazing that is up for rent, it all kicks off. ‘Think you can just walk in, like that, and snatch it away from under our nose?’ This single ill-thought comment provokes an argument that flares up in front of us. I say to Rab, ‘Come on, it’s time to go.’

  ‘Yes, you go home, why don’t you? Just fuck off back south where you came from.’

  We leave quickly, because I am weary. And weary of hearing those words.

  Later I am still trying to make sense of it. All it took was a second for that tinder box to ignite. And for a minute I think back to those London streets we have left behind. I tell myself not to overreact. But I know that that is only half the story. We understand that it takes time for an outsider to feel safe in a mixed gathering, and for one group to feel comfortable to invite another to sit by its fire. Proximity is both a challenge and a bond. The arcane law of kinship draws us closer even as it keeps us apart.

  I want to find the key to the secret passage that will bring us in from the cold. I long to slip that bright key into its lock. Every day I seek to fathom that impenetrable mechanism. But the harder I try, the more those subtle cogs keep shifting, as fast and fickle as the salt winds gusting in off the sea. Some days it wears you down, that stinging wind, playing you like a piece of flotsam. It hurts to feel perpetually buffeted by its force. I hope that one day it will change direction. That it will quieten, rather than always be exerting its bitter blast. Fuelled by alcohol, it is a different experience. Its strength is unstoppable, immense, of a scale and dimension that is altogether frightening.

  After the winds die down, the quietness is shattering. On the loch shore, the fragile reeds and bulrushes sparkle with hoar frost. Their long, graceful necks dip to the crystalline sunshine, like pale, frozen swans. The water is petrified. It breathes in sharp cracking gasps beneath the ice. Deep below the choked, disused mill, fresh springs are bubbling. They keep on flowing, rushing their run-off in clear, singing pools down to the sea. Salt light thaws the ice. It draws my eyes to the low horizon, revealing the brilliant-white shell sands of the islets dotted with young and adolescent seals. They lie basking, dark-mottled and snow-brindled, fat pelts gleaming. Onyx eyes watch for sleeker shadows, diving smooth, fast as bullets, through the black waters. Whiskered mouths glean kelp from the rich subterranean matriarchal feeding grounds before the return. I love to listen to the seals singing, luxuriating in frozen warmth on the rocks as the sun lowers into the viscous, frozen tide. There is a strange beauty, and also a loneliness, in that sound.

  As the ice cracks and creaks on the loch, shallow waters are frosted, marbled with whorls and pockets of air. If you stare through, you can see tiny worlds held frozen inside. Tentatively, I glide my feet over the glistening, sli
ppery surface. I watch the ice fracture, imploding in white clouds, crushing itself to powder under its hard skin. The temperatures have dipped so low there is no chance of these shallows thawing. A hard permafrost has gripped the island and there is no talk of a reprieve for the foreseeable future. Once a week the fire engine fills up its water tanks from the loch and crawls to the cottages and farms. Domestic tanks are redundant; frozen outside pipes that would normally replenish direct from ground springs all unworkable. Our galvanised outdoor tank is filled, but we have to carry buckets to and from the sink. The pump is insulated with Kingspan, hot-water bottles and warm blankets. The pipes from the spring to the pump house across the bog are lagged, but sit shallow. We try different tools to thaw the ice – a hairdryer and, in sections, a blowtorch. But nothing will shift it. I put my head against the pipes and listen, straining to hear sounds of melting. But it is dead, silent. We are locked in a frozen world for another six weeks.

  That year of the freeze, I could see how the quiet was starting to get to Rab. I saw it on his face. I felt it in his thinning body. In years to come, I saw it deepen until it became etched into his features and skin. December and the long cold months in London are a whirl of parties, events and late-night lock-ins. Sometimes I think of our old lives, sitting around a full table, surrounded by friends. Those years, those memories, are full of bright lights, glasses chinking, eyes illuminated by laughter, reaching across an intimate space and a shared outlook on life. When I look at Rab now, I sigh. I do not know how I can help him. I do not know how I can help us.

  Celtic knots are frozen on the twisting fence barbs. The crisp, dry air burns away the stench of dead crows strung on gibbets. Desiccated feathers blow ragged along the sprawling boundary lines of the small crofts and farms. It is a bleak warning to wildlife, and a summons to spring. The piercing call of the buzzard echoes the thin cries of lambs already born on the frozen hills. Visitors turn in horror from those dark, dead flapping shapes, skewered cruelly on to metal barbs. Yet they are blind to bleeding eyes and pink tongues ravaged by talon and beak. Winter is brutal, but early spring is rapacious in its savagery.

  There is an old saying in the islands that winter is the dead month. Walking across the fields, I remember that we are one head fewer on the croft. It is the time of year when male wether lambs are slaughtered. When I get to the twisted elder tree, I stop, take a deep breath then walk hesitantly towards the open barn. A dead two-year-old is hanging, skinned, suspended from a meat hook to cure in the salt wind. Its back and rear haunches are striped with pink and white darkening streaks. The bare muscle and fascia are already hardening, as their moisture is sucked dry by the freezing temperatures. Its abdominal cavity is hollow and empty, the glistening white coil of intestines having been scooped soft and steaming into a bucket.

  It is a necessary procedure, one that takes out weaker animals and provides food for the coming year. There are no euphemisms for the stark realities of eating meat. There is no turning aside from the harsh verities of taking life. Death is death. Yet I always pray that it comes quietly and with dignity. After the stun bolt is drawn back and pressed close against the temple, it is fired at high velocity, instantly traumatising and deadening the brain. A razor-sharp knife is pressed into the aorta and a swift, clean incision is made. It is then that I would like to be present. For my own hands to hold that life gently, talking to it softly, for all the time it takes for the river of blood to stream away. But I cannot. It is a step too far.

  ‘Killing’s no place for a woman.’ The farmer shakes his head firmly. ‘Can’t have fuss and hysterics when a beast’s getting killed.’

  I am frustrated because I believe I should be there. Brutalising though it may be, it is a matter of taking a final responsibility for the meat that is placed on the table and the life we have chosen to lead. But I am also quietly grateful.

  ‘I will help butcher,’ I tell Rab. It is strange to see that solid carcass, once a living, breathing body, being pared away for meat. It is a relentless, forensic process. I try to do the same with my emotions. Butchering a carcass from start to finish strips you back and leaves you exposed, compelling you to examine your own life, the interconnective tissue of your own relationship, dispassionately – in its entirety as well as its minutiae – and not to turn away your eyes.

  7

  The Unborn

  It is a beautiful day. I am sitting next to Rab. Across the desk, a clear light is spilling through the window. The gynaecologist is encouraging us to visualise their tiny faces. I try to imagine the nails on their fingers as little hands reach out to mine. You do that when you are given permission. Hope is like that. It feels reckless, like taking a beautiful drug.

  I trust my gynaecologist. It makes the four-and-a-half-hour journey to Glasgow worthwhile. She has been here before. She knows how arduous it is to travel down from the islands. I am a statistic. I know this. But I am grateful that she tries not to make me feel like one. ‘These are real babies,’ she tells me. ‘Real, living, beating, breathing. You have to believe in them. Trust me. It works so much better this way.’ So I do what she says. I put all those hopes, expressed and unexpressed, into an oak box. It is my birth box. Every part of me goes into creating beautiful thoughts and dreams. Each morning, I pick flowers, paint small sketches. I collect feathers and write poetry. I offer my hopes to the moon.

  When you have had years of disappointments, you tell yourself you will never go through it again. But you do, and every time, you cling more tightly to those hopes.

  Later, the gynaecologist’s advice is reiterated by my consultant. ‘It’s important you see them, really feel them,’ he tells me as we wait for fertilisation to take place in a Petri dish. His voice is earnest. ‘Blastocyst cells are microscopic. But you have to trust that these are your own little ones.’

  I try to imagine this. It is easier when I picture us walking together. I imagine their tiny faces looking up at me, and a great blue sky above us.

  There is so much at stake. After years of failed treatments, I am only now receiving the specialist IVF procedure that can at last offer us fresh hope. We have lost nine years trying to conceive naturally, exploring other options and jumping through all the hoops that each medical stage has demanded to reach this point. It has been painful, invasive, uplifting and agonisingly destructive in that uniquely intimate way that only trying desperately to conceive a child can be. Every month you carefully build an increasingly fragile, medicalised structure of hopes, only to find it torn to shreds again a few weeks later. I am sickened by the debris of that silent war zone. Whilst Rab can walk away, I live amid its dust and rubble. I am weary of inhabiting my failing reproductive body. Sometimes I think of giving up but I am not yet ready to walk away. Sometimes you have to trust in your own future, so that when you reach it, you can say, ‘I did everything possible. I tried.’

  Stress takes its toll on both of us. Some days are better than others. In an ailing relationship you hold on to the bright times all the harder, so that the darker moments feel less dark. As our relationship slowly deteriorates, I have questioned whether I should keep going. But I long for a child. I hope that child will touch Rab, motivate him to commit to testing himself in ways he is reluctant to test himself now. Sometimes it feels as if he has a switch I just can’t reach. I think, if only I can get to it, some inner light will come on. At other times, I reason, if, God forbid, it comes to it, I will raise this child alone. When you have got so far, investing so many years, including your childbearing years, it becomes harder, almost unimaginable, to let go. IVF binds you to its looping circuit and it becomes increasingly hard to step off its track. There are days when it doesn’t feel right to continue, yet, for right or for wrong, it also feels too late to stop. I hope our relationship will improve, and with it our chances of success. Outside the treatment, I do my best to keep our lives simple.

  Initially the treatment was scheduled for Edinburgh. With timing critical now on every front, I had rented basic ac
commodation so that I could more easily make the tight windows for scans, blood tests, hormone injections and monitoring. It seemed a small concession to make. Rents in the capital are expensive, so I found a tiny cottage in the Borders. ‘You’ll have to take Maude,’ Rab told me. ‘She won’t cope with you away.’ And I was glad at the thought of her company, because Rab would have to stay on the croft. ‘You’ll be fine,’ he smiled. ‘It’s only a few months. We can talk on the phone. It will be too hard for me to visit. And who else will look after the croft?’ I felt uneasy but there was no other way. I wondered how other couples cope when one has to stay behind.

  I had packed my bags and readied myself, when, at the very last minute, the hospital rang. ‘We’re switching you to Glasgow.’ I was confused and inexplicably tired at the thought of this unforeseeable change of plan. It felt more than I could cope with. It was too late to cancel the accommodation without losing the first month’s rent and deposit. It meant more travelling and a dog-sitter to look after Maude. Suddenly it seemed a step too far. ‘I feel overwhelmed,’ I confessed to Rab. ‘I don’t think I should go.’ He looked me in the eye. ‘I think you should. If you don’t, you will never forgive yourself.’ I hugged him, with tears in my eyes. Sometimes all you need is that extra push to set you back on track. I told myself, ‘Life can turn itself round in an instant. All it takes is a little luck.’ Every bright spark can give you hope – and hope can change everything.

  And then one day, everything does change. Finally, I am given a little-known blood test. It detects that I am lacking sufficient levels of an overlooked but vital hormone. Without this, it is near impossible to produce any mature eggs. It is the one hormone that cannot be replaced synthetically, but I can be better supported. ‘You have a chance,’ my consultant smiles. As each procedure is more rigorously monitored, I am given ever higher dosages of drugs to inject into my abdomen every day. It is painful, but when you are given fresh hope, that discomfort feels pleasurable.