The Last Refuge (2 page)

There was the bus which would take me an hour or so into Torshavn. That apart, there were just the ghostly outlines of a handful of cars scattered around, and beyond them what might have been the vertical shadows of telegraph poles.

My bags stowed in the belly of the bus, I found myself a seat next to the window, huddling myself against it and staring out into the summer gloom until the bus rumbled into life.

A few of my fellow passengers fell into conversation and, despite myself, I tuned into their chat. Not the words, which were incomprehensible to me, but the sound. The accent sang, like the Gaelic. It was like listening to fishermen from Galway on Ireland’s west coast or crofters from Lewis. It had a lilt and a rhythm that smiled through the murky evening.

On the connecting flight from Copenhagen, the second leg of my journey from Glasgow, I’d heard the song loudly and constantly. It had been the last flight of the day and more than a few of my fellow passengers had fortified themselves for the journey by downing plenty of beer or wine. The plane’s aisle heaved with so many cheery, ruddy-cheeked Faroese that it looked like we were flying to a farmer’s convention. The boozing didn’t stop there, either. The cabin crew were worked off their feet trying to satisfy the demand as the free alcohol flowed freely indeed.

Perhaps that explained the apparent sangfroid when the weather came calling. Despite our flimsy piece of flying aluminium being pitched and tossed left, right, up and down as we flew through a storm, the locals didn’t bat an eyelid, other than calling for fresh drinks.

I watched the wings of the plane flutter like a girl’s eyelashes, at times just yards from lush green mountaintops that emerged suddenly and threateningly from the clouds. As we neared the Faroes and circled them, trying to find a way to land, the rugged crags appeared closer and more often, looming up from the angry sea that was occasionally visible through breaks in the porridge-thick fog.

The skyline changed constantly as we rolled, unnatural angles being created and the sea coming far too close. The wind roared as it buffeted against the side of the plane, slapping it like wet towels against bare legs, and hinting at what it could do if it had a mind to. The good slaps sent it sideways, the bad ones caused it to drop alarmingly, leaving stomachs behind.

Tall, improbably balanced rock stacks reached up to us from below. Islands flashed past. If I’d cared about it, I might have seen my life passing before my eyes.

A middle-aged woman across the aisle feverishly fingered a cross round her neck and mumbled a prayer to her god, tears streaming down her cheeks. She, like me, must have been a visitor. The rest had seen it all before or were viewing it through the bottom of a glass. I watched a man in a business suit turn to his companion and shrug, a grin on his weathered face.

Then it got worse.

We must have caught the edge of the jet stream, because the plane tipped almost on its side and glasses and cups flew through the cabin as we dropped further and faster than before. In the long three seconds of freefall, I found time for three thoughts: one, that maybe there was such a thing as karma and that payback would definitely be a bitch; two, that I wished I’d drunk the last of that whisky before the glass went flying on its own; three, that I was going to die.

There is something comforting in that moment, knowing that the end has come. Particularly when your own survival isn’t something that concerns you too much. Three seconds to contemplate mistakes and weigh up regrets. At the end of the day they don’t amount to a damn thing.

We hit the bottom of whatever it was we had fallen into and the pilot had the thing going forward again, even if only straight to hell. The woman opposite was in hysterics, but the islanders merely laughed, if they bothered to react at all. Most had skilfully managed to hold onto their glasses of booze and little tin soldiers of reinforcements. A man in a grey suit, his tie at a crooked angle, signalled to a strapped-in stewardess that he’d like a refill of his vodka. She said no and he shrugged with equal measures of acceptance and disappointment.

I lacked their confidence in it all working out all right, but I cared as little as they seemed to.

Instead, I found myself mulling over the relative benefits of death and beer. It wouldn’t be my choice to make, but it passed the time while fate and the wind decided the matter for us. Death or beer? Die on that flight or get to the Faroes where the beer was said to be particularly good. Both had their attractions, although death was a cop-out and I could hardly choose it without taking a planeload of presumably innocent people with me. I’d never been one for praying, and although this was probably a good time to start, beer struck me as a pretty frivolous cause for divine intervention. But it didn’t matter, as I didn’t believe. In anything.

Make a choice, I told myself, shades of Irvine Welsh’s
Trainspotting
coming back to me. Choose life. Choose beer. Choose death. Choose to close your eyes and let your whole shitty little existence be chewed up by your conscience till you choke on it. Choose.

As it happened, I didn’t have to. An excuse for a runway appeared through the soup and, on the third pass, the wind accommodatingly presented us at a suitable angle and the pilot successfully defied improbability and kept us in line with the landing strip.

The ground rushed at us, tyres hit tarmac with a couple of bumps and a banshee screech. A lone voice triumphantly roared ‘
Foroyar!
’ before a smattering of polite applause rippled through the cabin, reminiscent of – yet a world away from – the drunken clapping that accompanies the landing of a Spanish holiday flight out of Glasgow.

They were home and I was here. It was probably a bad time to start wondering why.

The road from Vagar to Torshavn wound its way through green countryside, rain washing down the windows of the bus. Every so often, hamlets of no more than a dozen homes would appear without warning. The square, weather-beaten houses, most made grimy by the elements, all faced the sea. All the better, I supposed, to see the next wave of weather that would come to torment them.

There were no people. Not one single soul on or by the road. I saw sheep, though, plenty of them. I saw seabirds. I saw horses. I even saw the brown flash of a mountain hare scampering across the lower slopes of a grassy hill. I just didn’t see any people.

Suddenly, the road dipped and the bus sailed down a steep incline into the black mouth of a tunnel. I’d read online that many of the archipelago’s eighteen islands were connected by undersea channels but it still took me by surprise. In seconds we were under the Atlantic in a passageway carved out of solid rock. It burrowed its way straight and long as far as the eye could see, like travelling through the stomach of a giant serpent. The concept of a tunnel with no light at the end of it was depressingly familiar.

Finally, slowly, we began to rise then turn, until we emerged gasping from the second mouth of the two-headed snake onto another island.

The process was repeated a number of times. Some of the islands only being traversed for a few minutes before the sea swallowed us up again, leaving us underwater for miles at a time. We didn’t island-hop; we burrowed.

Above ground, the terrain was a moving feast of greens and browns with russet highlights through the gloom. Hillsides studded with grey rock and cut through with lazy streams running from top to bottom. Regularly the misty showers were pierced by the sight of brilliantly white waterfalls tumbling down from the higher mountaintops, seeking a return to the sea. The landscape was a battlefield for opposing forces; earth and water colliding, with casualties of war everywhere you looked. There was barely a piece of hillside that didn’t carry the scars where rain and river had left their mark.

We ran parallel to fjords, verdant hills looking back at us menacingly from the other side, dark clouds low above their tops. When the mist cleared, you could see hill behind hill, peak beyond peak, an endless rolling maul of volcanic eruption now covered in green. Wherever the fjords or the sea made natural bays, there were houses dotted by the shore, communities formed out of opportunity.

Against that backdrop, the first hints of a near-urban sprawl came rudely into sight: a garage; a shop; a flurry of direction signs; houses packed together in rows; the floodlights of a football stadium; industrial units; zebra crossings and offices. The bus careered round a ring road, spun off a roundabout and turned left before dropping us onto a concrete canvas upon which was painted the drizzly shadows of a ferry port.
Welcome to Torshavn
.

I stood on the tarmac, two bags at my side, the rain rushing almost horizontally into my face, and shivered slightly in the chill of what was supposed to be a summer’s night. My fellow passengers trooped off to waiting cars or taxis and within seconds I was standing alone. I had wanted remote; I had no right to start complaining.

It took less than five minutes to walk into the centre of town and find the Hotel Torshavn, a tall, red building standing at the bottom of a steep hill and just yards from another section of the port. It was to be home until I found somewhere to live.

Inside, I shook the rain from my jacket and dropped my bags by the front desk. The receptionist, a slim young man with dark hair, smiled politely and asked if he could help me. I told him I had a single room booked and he began to thumb through his reservations.

‘Your name, please?’

‘It’s Callum. John Callum.’

‘Ah yes, I see it. Are you in Torshavn for holiday or business, Mr Callum?’

‘Neither. I’m here to live.’

The desk clerk’s head rose from his paperwork and he regarded me oddly. ‘Really?’

The room was tiny but functional. A three-quarter bed pushed up against one side yet floundering halfway along it with no headrest or wall behind. The door of the narrow wardrobe banged against the wall-mounted television and everything was in touching distance of everything else. The windows ran the length of the far wall – a somewhat insignificant feat given the size of the room – and murky light poured through them despite it being so late. I closed the blackout curtains, pretending it was night, and poured myself a generous glass of the malt I’d bought on my way through the airport. After a movie on television and several revisits to the bottle of whisky, I found some sleep, my six-foot-two frame cramped into the inadequate space.

I woke what seemed like five minutes later, snapped from sleep by the sound of banging on the wall. Sitting upright, my head whirled, eyes searching as I tried to work out where the hell I was. My mouth seemed sour with the taste of words that had died on my tongue, a sentence suddenly interrupted and forgotten. I was soaked in sweat and disorientated, my breathing heavy and my system in shock. I sat there, recovering and wondering.

My laboured silence was enough for the angry greeting from the neighbouring room to stop. A final single-word complaint was shouted through the wall, an angry foreign-language protest that I guessed wasn’t wishing me goodnight and wasn’t particularly complimentary. My sleep, and whatever nightmare it had held, were over.

Getting to my feet, I pulled back the curtains and was dismayed to see the day had already begun. It was going to be a long one.

I tumbled into the shower, enduring the jagged needles of hot water, then put on some clothes and left the room. The receptionist looked up, bemused, as I walked through the automatic doors onto the streets of Torshavn.

I walked where the wind took me. Up one deserted street and down another, daylight and drizzle on my shoulder, in search of something but not knowing what. There was an eerie sense of solitude about the place, disturbed by neither cars nor people, that only increased my sense of confusion.

I stopped to look in the window of a shop that sold locally made knitwear and, above a range of chunky-knit sweaters, I saw a large white clock hanging on the wall. It was 2.30 a.m.

My heart sank at the realization that it was still the middle of the night.

At least my legs were strong even if my morale wasn’t. I started walking again.

Chapter 3

I walked for days. Not constantly, but it seemed that way. My wanderings were interrupted by stops for food and short nights of occasional sleep, but little else. The local newspapers,
Vikubladid
,
Dimmalaetting
and
Sosialurin
, whose offices were directly opposite my hotel, had some job listings, but these were, not surprisingly, in Faroese. The phone calls I made yielded nothing. So I walked.

I walked until the fresh air blew away every cobweb except the ones hidden deepest. The wind and rain blasted me and cleansed me. I walked and looked. I avoided people where possible.

In my bad mood, Torshavn reminded me of a Scottish east-coast fishing port; somewhere like Anstruther or Pittenweem. On a Tuesday. In the 1980s. When everything’s shut and everyone’s gone home. Even to someone from Glasgow it was depressingly grey. I walked through a constant, soul-destroying drizzle, the kind that makes you wish it would just rain properly and get it over with. But it just drizzled. World-class drizzling.

I wandered through the oldest part of town, Úti á Reyni, situated on a rocky promontory by the port. Grey fingers of stone pointed out into the North Atlantic and on them sat remarkable little black-tarred doll’s houses with white windows and turfed roofs. Some of these homes dated back to the fourteenth century and were still inhabited. The tiny dwellings were crowded in on each other on narrow alleys paved with stepping stones and sprung with grass, the houses so close that your arms could reach from one side to the other. Further down the hill towards the sea, they gave way to former warehouses, painted blood red and perched on the water’s edge. This area was called Tinganes and the former warehouses were now government buildings. Some had corrugated green roofs; others the traditional grass crowning that required the handiwork of a brave gardener to maintain. In amongst them, sitting opposite a covered slipway that led directly into the dark Atlantic, a modest building carried a plaque proclaiming it to be the Prime Minister’s office.