The Visitors (7 page)

A walking stick waggled in my peripheral vision. I looked up.

‘If you want to read that for free, hen,’ scowled an old lady, ‘piss off and find it in the library.’

I paid my fifty pence, stashed the book in my bag, and left.

Crossing to the Co-op, I strolled the harbour edge, weaving between the mooring posts, looking down into the water. It was tinged turquoise and astoundingly clear. Clusters of weed hung russet in the wash. Tiny fish flickered around a hanging hawser, long-forgotten and now without a purpose, thick with barnacles and slime. For those little fish, that hawser was a universe. I knew how they felt. My shoes scuffed on the old stone blocks that edged the harbour.

Mum was talking on the phone, but smiled and waved me in, gesturing five minutes with her free hand. The shop was empty of customers, the strip lights low on the ceiling and too bright. On a pinboard, classified adverts offered window cleaning or babysitting, drum lessons or chess club, ashtanga or bikram yoga. The magazine racks were pretty much empty,
ready for the new editions. I browsed the headlines on the various island papers while Mum chatted with head office, ordering next week’s charcoal, wine, flour, sweeties.

The Co-op stocked a host of papers and newssheets from the local islands. Several of them ran small pieces about Doug MacLeod, and a couple of them featured his disappearance as a sidebar on the front page. They didn’t have much to say about it. Dougie had last been seen at closing time at the Ship Inn in Tanno on a Friday night, and hadn’t showed for work in Clachnabhan on Monday morning. He was a much-loved friend and neighbour. Friends and family were concerned for his safety. Anyone with information was urged to contact DC Duncan of the Northern Constabulary at Tanno police station.

I knew Tom Duncan. He used to live on Bancree. He was seven or eight years older than me, but Ronny knew his parents pretty well. He’d gone to college, joined the police force and come back a detective. He was a nice enough lad. He had an earnest face which was always pink from shaving.

‘Such a shame about Dougie,’ said Mum. She hung up the phone, walked out from behind the counter and stood beside me.

‘Do you think they’ll find him?’ I said. ‘I mean – alive.’

‘I don’t know, love. Honestly, I don’t think it looks good. You don’t always know what you’re doing when you’re drunk, and Dougie was drunk most of the time. He wasn’t in great shape.’

‘I hope they find him.’

‘Hang on,’ she said, mildly, ‘shouldn’t you be in school?’

I grinned. ‘Sixth year now, Mum. Study periods. Popped in to see you before the ferry leaves.’

‘Studying the charity shops, more like.’

‘I bought a Sesame Street T-shirt.’

‘Of course you did. How was the first day back?’

‘Bits were good. History was good.’

‘So what wasn’t?’

‘Tina Robson.’

‘Who’s that?’ frowned Mum.

‘She’s a fifth year,’ I said. ‘Johnny Robson’s eldest girl. The hardware guy. She had a crush on Richard, and she’s pissed off because he hung out with me instead of her. Now he’s gone, she’s decided to give me a hard time of it.’

‘She might have a point.’

‘Mum!’

‘Oh, not because of Richard. That’s just daft. But you two have done everything together for so long. Ronny and I worry about you. We worry you’re not very, well – social. And it’s not easy living on the island, I know, but I wish you’d make the effort to get on with a few more people.’

‘Well, I met a new person today, if that puts your mind at rest.’

‘It does, yes,’ she said, surprised. ‘Who’s that?’

‘The girl from Dog Rock. She’s called Ailsa.’

‘Our next-door neighbour,’ said Mum, dripping sarcasm. ‘Still, it’s a start.’

I tried to remember her surname. ‘Ailsa Dobie, I think. They move around all over the islands.’

‘Well, good for you. What was she like?’

‘She was OK. Seemed quite quiet. And a bit weird. But I would be too. First day at a new school, can’t be a lot of fun.’

Mum grinned. ‘Quiet and weird sounds like most of the teenagers I know, come to think of it.’

‘Very amusing, Mother. I get it all from you.’

‘I’d better get back to my orders,’ she said, then looked over my shoulder. ‘Didn’t you say you wanted the afternoon ferry?’

I twirled – sure enough, Jow was cranking the engine, and cars were clattering down the ramp.

‘Cheers, Ma. I’m off.’

‘You going home to do some work?’ called Mum.

‘Aye, in a bit,’ I said, heading for the door. ‘But I’m going to see Izzy first.’

‘Izzy? What do you want with that old tinker?’

‘I’m pretty sure he can help with my homework,’ I said.

Mum looked baffled. I waved goodbye, and raced across the road to catch the claptrap
Island Queen
.

As the lurching ferry crossed the Bancree Sound, I thought about Izzy. He was a beachcomber. He’d moved to Bancree a few years ago, and everyone on the island knew him. When he’d first arrived, bringing nothing but a bulging rucksack, he’d set up beside the last wall of a tumbledown barn, halfway between Tighna and Grogport. Over the next month, he brought more and more timbers to his campsite, sometimes hauling them halfway round the island. He borrowed a shovel. He dug holes and sunk the timbers, making uprights, then lashed purlins and spars all the way around. By the time a tarpaulin had been draped over the top and weighted with stones, he’d built a perfectly respectable shack. He’d dug a pit for a campfire.

Even though it was out of sight, it had rattled a few cages that he’d dared to build there at all. Most islanders were content to leave him alone, but a few sent the council complaints about planning permission. An inspector turned up to examine Izzy’s hut, only to find it had disappeared overnight. Someone had tipped him off. The grizzled beachcomber was sitting on an orderly stack of sea-washed timber, quite content, smoking a pipe and warming his hands around a driftwood campfire. He made the inspector a breakfast of sausages in seaweed and stovies with butter, then sent him on his way. By nightfall the shack was up again, and the moaning
islanders knew enough not to bother again. And besides, he started coming in useful. He did odd jobs for cheap prices, or sometimes just for food. He mowed lawns and helped people move house. He was there for the lambing, or for picking fruit, or unloading the ferry, and he washed dishes in the Bull when the tourists were in full swing.

Most days, though, Izzy walked the beaches, combing the high-tide line with expert eyes, picking out sea-rinsed glass and the prettiest shells, jetsam logs and useful lengths of net or rope. With the shells and glass, he made wind chimes and necklaces, or simple mosaics glued to planks of wood. He sold them to tourists throughout the summer. He collected mushrooms and berries. He fished the inland burns and kept crab pots in the deepest rock pools. Island rumour said he’d once caught a four-foot lobster. Island rumour also said that he was a practising shaman, that he’d killed a man, and that he used to be a don at Cambridge University. Island rumours weren’t worth salt from the sea.

Parents disapproved, but every kid on Bancree loved him, and Izzy loved the kids. He gave away little trinkets he’d found or made. Last summer, he’d given me an old champagne cork he’d carved to look like an Easter Island stone head. He’d become steadily integrated into the community, and now it felt like he’d always been there.

I disembarked the deserted ferry, feeling extremely smug about how early I was back on Bancree. The September sun had finally burned away the cloud and I decided to walk, past Clachnabhan, past the Bull Hotel, past the old building site and the abandoned rows of concrete pipes, across the road and down onto the beach. I took off my shoes and wriggled my feet into the sand, enjoying the cool squeeze of the grains between my toes. The sound of waves relaxed me, hushing always on the shore.

It was a gentle stroll down to Izzy’s shack, maybe a couple of miles along, and the afternoon sun soaked soft and woozy. Gulls wheeled in columns, turning on the wind, and tiny birds skipped along the beach ahead of me. On the far side of the Ben, I could just make out the tips of the wind turbines. Two were turning, gently, and one wasn’t moving at all. It was a rare day when all three moved at once. Engineers were sent to repair them, but no sooner had they fixed one than the next failed. The dull weight of the mountain grew fainter with haze.

The sand was clean and white and free from tourists. Every now and then, I stopped to examine things caught amongst the seaweed scraps. Izzy would have already been through it, but I enjoyed looking. Dark little spiders rushed beneath the damp, smelly weed, and sand fleas skipped between the bleached and sea-smoothed twigs. Keeping fifty yards ahead of me, a dunlin griped from the flotsam. There were scraps of plastic, old dolls and party poppers, bottles of water or detergent. An old buoy or a ping-pong bat, bald without its rubber skin. A chair leg. A trainer, the sole and laces ripped away. Running through it like a single cord were tangled miles of rope and twine, their faded blues and oranges sewing everything else together. The tide heaved it up in rafts.

Izzy’s hut came into view. It wasn’t on the beach itself, but well above the high-tide line, through a few dozen yards of pitted peat scrub and dune grass. At first sight it looked like a village bonfire, stacked high and ready for a match, but as the distance closed, parts of the building came into focus. Flashes of bright blue tarpaulin showed beneath a corrugated iron roof. Holding the metal up, thicker timbers were planted into the sand, and smaller lengths joined and supported them, making a lattice of old wood. The door was an actual door. He’d found it washed up by the Knorritaven pool. The sea had
left it warped and rounded and stripped of paint, but there it stood, hinged to the old railway sleepers that held the whole thing up.

On the higher part of the beach, an array of homemade wind chimes hung on a simple frame. Built of driftwood and stone, glass and bone, they clicked and knocked together, constant, brittle and tuneless. In this breeze, they danced. Whenever I came to visit the old beachcomber, I took a moment to run a hand through them, enjoying their percussion.

Outside the hut was Izzy’s campfire. Ringed with smooth grey stones, it was never out for long. A constant supply of wood lay in arm’s reach. He spent most of his time beside the fire, making his various trinkets. A number of improvised seats were stationed in a ring around the campfire. People came to see the beachcomber, to swap things and shoot the breeze. It wasn’t unusual for Izzy to get drunk with tourists in the beer garden at the Bull, then bring them down the beach to his hut, seat them round the fire and scare them shitless with his ghost stories.

Stories were the reason I’d come to see him.

I knocked on the salt-scrubbed wooden door, tracing my fingers along the whorls.

‘Izzy?’ I called, ‘are you there, old man?’

There was no reply. I hooked my foot around an upturned wine crate, dragged it closer to the fire and took a seat. The fire pit was about a metre or so across and kerbed with hefty stones, spattered with grease from cooking. I’d thought the fire was out, but a low, steady warmth radiated from the ashes. Little zephyrs caught crumbs of ash and sent them soaring in a rush. I reached over, took a handful of driftwood twigs and chucked them into the centre of the fire, scattering more ash on the updraft. They started smoking and smouldering immediately. After a few minutes,
flames burst from the wood. I added logs, and the fire caught fast.

While I waited for the beachcomber, I had another flick through the weird selkie book, leafing through in more detail. With the sun at my back and the fire at my shins, I curled up and lost myself in the strangest, saddest book I’d ever read.

I’d always thought of selkies as fairly gentle beasties, but Mutch wrote of seal folk with a wicked rage. According to the book, selkies were wily, malicious, devious, manipulative, contrary, stubborn, twisted, nasty, brutal things, utterly devoid of any good and hell-bent on making people miserable. A bit like Tina Robson, really. The book told tall tales of selkie maidens luring sailors to their deaths by drowning, ambush or assault, stoving their heads in with rocks and oars, tangling them in nets and lines, holding them under. They cast spells, making people fall hopelessly in love with them, then fled, abandoning the stricken men or women to lifetimes of solitude, misery and suicide. In every page, I could feel the frenzy in the author’s voice, could trace the spite in every word.

‘You’re pure crackers, pal,’ I muttered.

A strange, strange book.

It was the illustrations that made my mind up. Like the drawing on the cover, each picture was a mess of limbs and stretching skin, showing the selkies in various states of disrobe and transformation. A full-page drawing showed a selkie in seal form, but its entire shape was morphing, disfigured and distorted, the skin loose and jumbled. There were clearly more than two arms and two legs inside the skin, and it bulged with obscenely human shapes. The selkie was sneering, even while its head hung empty as a mask. Low down on the body,
in the shadows, the fur drew taut across a screaming face. The fine details were obscured but the expression showed clearly as one of pain and hate, twisted by fury, bulging outwards against the mottled fur.

It repelled me, but my mind was made up. I’d write my school report on selkies. It’d be interesting. I jotted down a few places I could try for information. The library, obviously, for slightly more academic books of myths and legends. And the tiny museum in Tanno might have something. It occurred to me that it would be great to talk to the author, too. I checked the book again for a biography or picture, turning the battered dust jacket inside out, leafing through the pages at the front and back, but there was nothing about him – or her, maybe. Mutch. Odd name. It was almost hidden on the cover.

I studied the pictures closely. They were quite something. Dark and distorted, but beautifully realised, capturing seal and human in single images, both beings combined in a single too-tight skin. Some of them were like that cover image, with body parts emerging from a silken skin. One of the most lurid was of a selkie emerging from its skin in the form of a naked woman. As she stood up from the fur, the skin hung loose from her buttocks, draped loose like a sarong. She was turned away from the artist, but she was looking back over her shoulder, and her face was cruel. Oh, it was cruel. She was icily beautiful but fierce and snide, oozing superiority. Her eyes were inked completely dark. Her breasts jutted a fraction beyond the cover of her arm, catching a curve of light. Fanboy titillation. I closed the book with a snap, and reached into my bag for a crumpled A4 pad. Using the hardback Mutch book as a rest, I scribbled some more notes for my project report.