Driven

The last day of June, driving up, out of the shadowy wood speeding towards the open waste of Rannoch Moor. There wasn’t much on the road at that time of night, a bit after eleven, with some light still in the sky, and it was only because the van was facing the wrong way that I noticed him. Parked with the lights out, facing the flow of traffic.

Only a second or two, that’s all the time I had to take in the face. Sickly yellow in the encroaching light of night. Nothing out of the ordinary you might say, but I’m the one who saw the shadowed eyes, the hollowed cheeks, the crimson lips like plump leeches.

Yes, you might think, a skull shaved close to the bone isn’t uncommon, but it was the rugby player’s ears that nailed it. It was him. I slammed on the anchors, swung into the end of the layby, and parked. I needed to speak to him. The tick, tick, tick of my cooling engine was loud as I walked the few yards back towards the van. I rehearsed my opening line: ‘You might think this a bit weird …’ or ‘I think I saw you on the pier at Lochboisdale.’

Or maybe I should ease into it and ask him if he needed help. At the end of the day, he was stopped, just before midnight, in the middle of nowhere.

As I drew closer, I saw that the driver’s seat was empty. I stood outside the window for a moment, stunned. How could he have disappeared in the few seconds it took me to stop and walk from my car?

Shielding my eyes, I peered into the van. There was a bare plywood partition behind the seats, with greasy stains where heads had rubbed for countless miles. There was no way he could have got into the back. I turned around half expecting to be face to face with him, but for miles there was only heather, and the dimming silver sheen of a thousand lochans.

Midges crawled into my ears and down my back, so I hurried back to the car and flicked on the fan full to drive my tormentors away. I drove on south, glancing in the rear-view mirror towards the dark van that sat mute as a gravestone.

***

Four hours earlier, I had driven off the ferry onto the mainland in a downpour, bouncing blindly off the ramp. A hundred and forty miles of The Minch between Sarah and me now.

As I passed along the glens, forked lightning ripped the sky over the ridges of Glencoe, throwing the buttresses and peaks into relief, like the scenery in some kid’s cheesy toy theatre, while thunder growled around the corries. I couldn’t stop thinking back to that morning; Sarah turned up on the pier to say goodbye. Typical of her sense of duty, though it was she who was dumping me. Like she wanted to make me feel guilty.

‘You didn’t need to come,’ I told her.

I looked away, not wanting to see anything in that face of hers. Not wanting her to think I was going to beg her to take me back. No way.

We were alone on the pier except for a man in a navy-blue hoodie. I looked across at him and couldn’t avoid a slight shudder. That mouth, those dead-fish lips. I wouldn’t want to hear the sound that mouth would make.

He pulled his hood up against the chilly breeze and looked out over the bay, stuffing his hands into his pockets.

A small gull, white-faced, innocent, landed on the terminal roof. It struggled to keep its balance on the slick corrugated plastic. A foot or so above Sarah’s shoulder, its glassy blue eyes watched for any scraps we might discard.

‘You mean you don’t want me here,’ she said.

I kept silent. The seagull tilted back its head and screeched, showing its cardinal-red gullet. Sarah grabbed my elbow and just as quickly let go. She looked down at the boards of the pier, tucking a stray strand of hair behind her ear, touching the pearl earrings I gave her on our anniversary.

‘That gave me a devil of a fright,’ she said, forcing a nervous smile. ‘A bad omen, my gran used to say.’

I glanced across at the hooded man. He seemed absorbed in the antics of two terns dive-bombing tiny fish in front of the Lochboisdale Hotel. Men in yellow jackets beckoned forward the vehicles in the queue.

‘They’re beginning to board,’ I said.

‘Text me when you’re back in Glasgow. You know I worry about you, Liam, on that road. And you’re not … well, you’re not exactly … right,’ she said, placing her hand on my sleeve.

‘But I can’t go back on what we’ve agreed just because I’m worried about you,’ she added, too hastily.

I said nothing.

‘Anyway, I was thinking,’ she continued, ‘we can always be friends.’

At this, my throat produced an odd, involuntary croak. Blood rushed into my chest, my neck. My right-arm shot out, past Sarah’s shoulder, and I plucked the gull from its perch.

It was as though I was watching someone else commit this act. The soft feathers were shockingly warm and light in my hand. Wings spun in a white panicked fury, slapping my face and chest.

Sarah screamed. As I spun around with the gull in my hand, I could see the man in the hoodie, casually resting his elbows on the railing, looking across at us, but with no visible reaction.

Holding his gaze, I pressed my thumb into the gull’s throat until I heard the click as its neck snapped. I flung the limp body over the rail where it landed on the oily surface of the water.

Sarah stared over the rail, then brought her face close to mine.

‘You’re insane!’ she blurted and ran towards her car.

‘Well rid of me, then,’ I shouted after her and gave her the finger, though she didn’t look back. I turned again to the man on the pier.

He lifted an eyebrow a fraction and tilted his head. He moved off with the air of having completed his business here. Climbing the gangplank unhurriedly, with a small rucksack slung over his shoulder, he disappeared into the belly of The Hebridean.

Sarah sat with her hands looped around the steering wheel of her little Fiat, her shoulders heaving. I upset her. Too bad! Why should I have pitied her – she brought it on herself?

In the terminal toilet, I washed the white and yellow gull-shit from my hand. I’d decided that when I got on the boat, I would explain to the watcher that I wasn’t a nutter. I was having a difficult time. A man like him, in his fifties, with the look of experience, would understand. We all reach a breaking point at times, especially when a woman is involved.

Maybe we do something that seems cruel, is cruel, but that doesn’t make us a nutter. And we don’t deserve to be punished for it. Though who was going to punish me?

I drove forward to take my place in the queue. Sarah’s car had gone up the hill, away from the harbour. Soon the deckhands waved on the cyclists in their lime-green and orange motley; the paddlers, lithe and tanned, wheeling their skinny kayaks behind them; then the bikers in black leathers and enigmatic visors. At last, they coaxed the cars, the trucks, and the campervans down the slope, through the dislocated jaw of the ship’s bow, and into the gloom of the car-deck with its stink of salt and diesel.

I parked up and squeezed out between the tightly packed vehicles, getting jabbed in the ribs by wing mirrors, snarled at by yappy terriers on extending leads. The grilled metal steps rang beneath my feet as I moved up into the realm of reheated air, larded with the smell of chips and the meaningless twitter of the TV.

Then I set out to find my mystery man. I circled the A deck, past red-faced islanders, downing the first dram of the day. Children bickered in the overheated, over-coloured lounge while a tattooed man dismembered a battered haddock smeared with red sauce.

I did a circuit of B and C decks, and the boat deck, past the smokers, sun worshippers, birders, and the whale spotters. But he wasn’t anywhere. Normally, I’m quite a conformist sort of person. I stick to the rules. But I was desperate to set the watcher straight.

I wrenched open a sea-door marked ‘NO PASSENGERS BEYOND THIS POINT’ in red letters and stepped over the high threshold into the forbidden area. On the crew side, some joker had written in permanent marker on the creamy-coloured paint ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here!’

Another pen, purple this time, had scrawled the word ‘blasphemy!’ across the legend. I pressed on along the narrow corridor, past openings in the steelwork. I could see the huge humming engines, surrounded by flashing consoles and flickering displays.

‘Excuse me, sir, I’m afraid you are in a restricted area.’

I was face to face with a woman in her twenties, in a CalMac uniform. Her gold lapel-badge announced she was Sharon, Deck Officer Cadet. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I must have taken a wrong turn.’

‘Yes, it’s easily done.’ Her lips smiled, but her narrowed eyes told another story. ‘I’ll see you back to the public areas,’ she said.

She held the pass-door open and waited while I made my way, a bit unsteady now, as the deck began to sway and tilt. As usual, when the ship passed beyond the shelter of the Uists we hit the rolling swell of the Minch.

To escape the sea-spray that spattered the deck, I stepped into the cafeteria, and straight into a pool of sick, the aftermath of a mac and cheese. The ten-year-old who was responsible gave me a look of outrage that I should intrude on his misery.

All around, passengers slewed across benches or slumped in airline-style seats, ashen-faced or heads buried in brown paper vomit bags. The air was sour with the stench of puke as the sound of retching and whimpering undulated like a free-form top line above the bass thrum and shudder of the ship’s passage. From the car-deck rose the tortured whoops and wails of a dozen car alarms.

A flashback to the fish-reek of seagull shit sent me diving into the cramped toilet to throw up. After sluicing my face in the handwash basin, I renewed my search for the watching man. I explored a series of overheated stuffy spaces: the Reclining Lounge, the Coffee Cabin, the shop.

I had that dream-panic; losing the chance to explain myself. And that smile. What did it mean? He seemed to know more than a casual bystander ought to. Then I turned a corner and spotted him sitting reading alone in the Quiet Room.

I opened the door and stepped in. The room was freezing, but he wore a black sleeveless T-shirt.

I plonked myself on a stool and faced him across the table.

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I saw you on the pier …’

He continued reading for a few seconds before inserting a bookmark and deliberately placing the paperback on the table between us. The title on the cover: The Divine Comedy, by some Italian author. Allegro, Alleghri, something like that. By the look on his face, he wasn’t finding a lot of laughs in it.

‘Yes, and I saw you,’ he said, fixing me with an icy stare.

‘Must have seemed a bit strange … what I did … to the gull, and all.’

‘Not in the least. I’m used to dealing with people in extreme situations. You could call it normal in my line of work.’

I guessed he was some kind of counsellor, and that made me feel easier about opening up a little.

‘My wife, Sarah, and me … you know, it wasn’t working out …’

‘Really?’ He raised an eyebrow and tilted his head to one side.

‘No!’ I said, banging my fist on the table, realising that I was walking into the same old trap. Just repeating what Sarah would say. Letting her off the hook. Again. I leaned forward.

‘That’s not right,’

‘That’s better,’ he said with a sympathetic smile.

‘She was the one who jilted me and wouldn’t even talk about trying to work it out.’

‘She just didn’t want it to work, is that it?’ He said calmly, reassuringly.

‘Exactly!’

‘Not prepared to put in the effort?’

‘Not at all. So, who’s to blame, in that case?’

‘I think you know the answer to that already.’

‘Dead right, I do.’

‘So the gull, it was what you might call … a scapegoat’.

‘I suppose so.’

‘Not fair on the gull, really,’ he said, with what might have been a chuckle.

‘Guess not.’

The door opened and an elderly couple hovered on the threshold. My inquisitor glanced up, and they retreated in a fluster of sandwiches and spilled coffee.

Returning his gaze to me, he continued: ‘Folks sometimes look to me to right that kind of wrong.’ He straightened his book so that the spine lined up exactly with the edge of the table.

‘Make amends – for what happened to you, that is.’

‘I’m not sure I understand.’

‘Well, often people – good people like you – lack the courage to face up to what they really want. So they take out their hurt and anger on an innocent. That can be a child, a friend, or, sometimes, a dumb animal. When what they really want, or need, is to send back the hurt to the person who hurt them. Does that make sense?’

And it did. Right there and then in that frigid, cramped room, tossing and pitching somewhere in the middle of the Minch, it all made perfect sense.

‘Yes, you’re right,’ I said.

‘There’s no doubt about it. But you need to know this: when you hurt someone else, you will suffer too. That’s the deal. It’s a matter of balance.’

‘I’m kind of past caring about that,’ I said.

He nodded in agreement.

‘But it’s all too late,’ I said. ‘It’s over.’

‘Maybe not.’

I looked at him in surprise.

He said: ‘Leave it with me, I’ll see what I can do.’

I was just trying to get my head around that when he stood up, slipped his book into his pocket, walked calmly across to the door, crossed the lounge, and stepped out onto the deck.

***

Just now, on Rannoch, in those fleeting seconds in the north-facing van, I had known him again.

But it was impossible for him to be there on the moor. He had boarded the ferry as a foot passenger and couldn’t possibly have overtaken me on the road, even if he had picked up his van on the mainland side. But there he had been, just a few hundred yards from the deer warning sign. He was as large as … I was going to say life, but it was not the living that he put me in mind of.

From a high heather bank, a young stag arced onto the road. After a moment’s hesitation, he vanished into the mist that was seeping down the gullies and peat hags.

I’d driven these roads often enough to know that where there’s one deer, there will be others. So, I pumped the brake and, sure enough, six of his pals trotted across the road. I was going slowly enough by now to admire their graceful movement, pleased I had expected, and avoided, the danger.

I shifted gear and pushed on towards the turn off for the Kingshouse Inn. The hotel’s lights glimmered through the gloom, and they tempted me to stop for a bite to eat and some conversation with strangers, but I nudged the speedo up to seventy.

I would make good time on a clear road, and I liked driving in the dark, led on by the glittering cats-eyes. I shifted my backside in the seat and punched some buttons to pick up a radio station, but all I got was static.

I was aware of it before I hit it, or should I say before it hit me, because it felt as if it had flung itself at the car. A dark shape without colour loomed over the bonnet, above the headlights’ beam.

I braked instinctively, and came up short, so the airbag didn’t go off. A doleful brown eye caught the green light from the dashboard display. The antlers tilted awkwardly back, then, with a twist of the hindquarters, his legs smashed through the windscreen, showering me in a brittle dross of glass.

His neat, sharp hooves beat on my chest like he would dig my heart out. The antlers jammed on the front bar of the roof rack, but his frantic efforts to free himself were useless. A desperate lurch brought his feet level with my head. I felt, or rather heard, my teeth, then jaw, forehead, cheekbones, crack and splinter. Breathing speared my ribs with white-hot daggers. Still the deer thrashed and twitched. A cold back light picked out the sweat-soaked hairs on his coat, and the mist of its desperate breath plumed in the dark night.

Two muscular hands seized the antlers, and with an adept twist, they set the deer free. A figure shouldered the full-grown stag like it was a drowned whippet. He slung the deer, still living, but twisted in dreadful pain, into the ditch and turned towards me. I could just make out the van behind the glare of its headlights. ‘I thought I was dead’, I said, or tried to say, as bloody slurry dribbled from my mouth. The cold air hit the open wounds and pain drilled into my bones. The figure who had released the stag now spread his hands wide on the bonnet and lowered his head level with mine. Through the stinging blood in my eyes, I could just make out the shiny bald head, the rugby player’s ears. He fixed me with steel-blue eyes, framed by the crazed kaleidoscope of shattered windscreen.

Those lips, unmistakable. His smirk took me back to the pier. The soft click of the seagull’s neck. Sarah crying. Had that been today?

‘No …’ I whimpered.

‘No,’ he rasped. ‘Not this time, friend. Not you. Not this time.’ He pulled a rag from his pocket, wiped his bloodied hands, and threw it on the road.

‘Not yet.’

He looked up the road, checking, then leaned in and lowered his voice almost to a whisper.

‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to deal with your unfinished business.’

That smirk, again. Then he was out of sight. His steps clacked on the tarmac as he walked towards the van.

He swung the van out into the road and headed back in the direction I had come from. I sat there, unable to move. The stag in the ditch gave a final juddering sigh. Then there was silence, punctured only by my own ragged breathing.

***

My phone chirped.

I did not know how long I had been sitting there, blood seeping down my chest. Light crept up into the sky. I glanced at my mobile screen mounted on the dash, knocked crooked by the flailing stag.

A text. From Sarah. I slowly reached out, every inch a new agony; my bloody fingertips just brushing the screen.

‘Sarah’s Uncle Alec here. S. hit a deer hind btw Lochboisdale and home. Car turned over. It’s serious. Phone ASAP. Alec.’

A sigh escaped from my broken mouth, my breath ballooning in the dawn air. Another chirp.

An unknown number. It simply read: ‘Job done.’

Another chirp, another text. I fought to keep my head erect, my eyes open. The same unknown number.

‘See you soon, Liam.’