Clem does have a small paunch, it’s true, despite all the swimming and everything. Heaven knows which ironic god decided that the best way to lay down fat on the wife of an infertile man would be to make her look three months’ pregnant all the time. There’s no real fat anywhere else on Clem, just on her stomach. Apparently someone once even asked when her baby was due, which Clem told Ollie: a) while LAUGHING; and b) without any shame or embarrassment; and c) without really thinking first.
‘I love your . . .’
‘Anyway, what I was saying was, I hope, a bit more profound than that I am upset because no one wants to rape me. I was just thinking about all the times I’ve got cross with you for not locking the back door before going out and leaving me on my own, or leaving the kitchen windows open or something, basically because I thought that there were always, at all times, bushes full of desperate men in the garden just waiting to clamber in any open window, no matter how small, with, I don’t know, huge red shiny bell-ends sticking out of their vile stonewashed jeans – what a horrible image, sorry, I am a bit pissed – and willing to do anything to fuck me, like go to prison or be stabbed to death with a bread knife or anything. And yet here, no one will even look at me. I could lie on the floor with my legs open and they’d just step over me. So I realise that, once again, my mother was wrong. I mean, maybe men would have risked life and limb to rape her, and of course someone actually did rape Fleur’s mother – although maybe I wasn’t meant to tell you that, so just forget I said it – but me? No way. And yet I was brought up to believe I’d be raped all the time if I didn’t actually make the effort to avoid it.’
‘Stonewashed jeans? That’s the thing you’d notice? You are so posh.’
‘I mean, obviously I still blame the woman-hating film industry, which is basically the same film industry that made me grow up believing that a beautiful woman must not enter a car park or a kitchen or go on the roof of anything or accept a lift from anyone or go outside on her own ever because she will get murdered, which really means raped, although they’re too worried about certification to show any of that . . . That’s the same industry that is here now and fucking ignoring me. Oh well, at least they have good wine. Although of course anyone who is anyone is doing drugs, and at another party altogether. It’s just like the Oscars all over again.’
Ollie knows that the one response he can think of to all this will not be welcome. He knows he should not say it. But the invisible, unnamed troublemaker that exists right at his very heart is poking him and whispering, ‘Go on . . .’
‘Well, I’d want to rape you,’ he says. ‘If I were there I’d Rohypnol your drink and everything.’
‘You are such a dick. I don’t even know why I rang you.’
But he has sort of got away with it because at this moment she almost needs him. And she did ring him. Imagine that. It wasn’t him ringing or texting first but CLEM doing it.
‘Anyway, I think what I’m saying is partly that I hate my mother and partly that I hate celebrities and . . . Oh.’ She laughs. ‘I really am drunk. Sorry. It’s just . . . why does no one want to speak to me?’
‘You do sometimes look a bit forbidding . . .’
‘Not here I don’t. Here I look like the cleaner, or someone’s mum.’
And of course the last thing you’d want to look like is someone’s mother. Because of course motherhood is forbidden, and banned, and disgusting, and taboo, even though adoption would in theory be possible. But Ollie doesn’t say this. He files these thoughts away somewhere with the latest email from David, and the latest episode when he used the other flight of stairs so that he wouldn’t bump into Frank and then it turned out that Frank went the other way and . . .
‘I don’t think you look remotely like Alison,’ he says instead.
‘Well, you wouldn’t know. When did you last see her?’
Ollie is so scared of Alison that he makes sure he is at work or swimming or at the gym every time she is due to come round, and if he gets home and sees her car parked on the road outside he usually goes and parks in the cricket ground for half an hour and either has a little sleep or blasts some emails on his iPhone. But Clem isn’t supposed to know that. Clem is supposed simply to think he is a bit stupid in that masculine way and basically not at all interested in anything to do with the cleaner.
‘Anyway, I’m actually quite pleased that Zoe gets here tomorrow. At least I’ll be able to talk to her.’
The earth is black. The dark green grass frizzes on top of it like a seventies afro.
‘Is this peat?’ asks Skye.
Fleur shrugs. ‘I guess so.’
‘I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere this wild before.’
‘It is kind of remote, I agree.’
They have set off from the back of the hotel and are walking towards the sea. They have a map, sort of, drawn in biro by the hotel owner. It has one squiggly line to represent the coast, and then an arrow showing which way they should go. There is a faint blob representing the village they are looking for. It is not to scale.
‘But you’re used to the countryside, right? You live in it.’
‘Sort of. We have shops. Sandwich is a town – you know that, you’ve been there loads of times. Anyway, what about your parents’ place? That’s out in the wilds of Devon somewhere, isn’t it?’
‘We have a pub. It sells everything. There don’t seem to be any pubs here . . .’
‘And I live five seconds from a bus stop . . .’
‘There are bus stops here, I suppose.’
‘No buses on the Sabbath, though.’
‘What the fuck is that all about?’
‘Yeah. I don’t know.’
‘I quite like walking on this stuff, though.’
‘I know. It’s like . . .’
‘It’s like walking on a giant’s pubes.’
‘The pubes of the universe.’
They walk up a small hill and then down the other side. There are little piles of stones that have a special Scottish name that Fleur has forgotten, and jagged edges of cliffs and soft blurs of heather and gorse. Ahead of them is the deep blue sea that goes all the way to America. Above them, low cloud. There are pink flowers growing out of the peat. Fleur bends down.
‘This must be the Hebridean spotted orchid,’ she says. ‘Look at the leaves too. Charlie would love to see this.’
The leaves are green with black splodges that seem to have been flicked on by a creator in something of a hurry. The orchids are everywhere. And all among them are the ubiquitous white dabs of cotton grass, making the landscape look as if it had recently gone through the wash with a tissue in one of its pockets.
‘Where do we go now?’ Skye asks Fleur.
‘I thought we should turn right up the coast.’
‘Cool.’
‘Right.’
‘I have a horrible feeling this is going to take hours.’
‘I know.’
‘How are your feet?’
Skye is wearing the hotel owner’s daughter’s wellies. Fleur is in MBTs.
‘Fine. Yours?’
‘Yeah. For now.’
They smell the village before they find it. Peat fires sending what smells like thousands of shots of Laphroaig into the air. Skye’s feet are bleeding. Fleur’s legs and arse are almost completely numb. The blackhouses are made of old stone and thatch and look as if they are sinking into the ground. Smoke curls from chimneys. A woman in tie-dyed dungarees comes out of one of the houses and lights a cigarette; she is followed by a bald man with a yin and yang symbol tattooed on his head. Fleur looks at the number on the door. It’s a five. It’s the right place.
‘I thought Ina lived alone,’ Fleur says.
‘Maybe these are tourists,’ says Skye.
‘Why are they in her house?’
‘Hello!’ says Ina, when she sees them. ‘You’re just in time for the retreat.’
‘Retreat?’
‘Well, you’re three hours late. B
ut that’s OK. We’ll do a recap.’
‘But . . .’
Ina drops her voice. ‘It would be good if you would make up the numbers, just for the rest of today at least. We can talk tomorrow. Although tomorrow we’re at Sylvia’s place. Tomorrow evening.’
‘My feet,’ says Skye. ‘I need to sit down.’
‘Good,’ says Ina. ‘I’ll put more water in the kettle.’
They come by plane.
James had wanted to come on the boat. He said it would be more authentic. But the plane looked much simpler – Ramsgate to Saint Pancras, Circle line to Paddington, Heathrow Express to Terminal 5, BA to Glasgow, Flybe to Islay (pronounced Eye-la), ferry to Jura. And all to see this ancestral pile that everyone has inherited and that no one really remembers. Charlie is coming later. Fleur might drop by as well. Of course James moaned about aircraft fuel, although really, how much fuel does it take to fly a thirty-six-seater over a couple of islands and mountains, compared with how much it would cost to drive a car all the way from Kent to remotest Scotland? Not to mention the sheer mental torture of going more than five miles in a car with Holly and Ash. And James, sweet, innocent James, even bothered to moan about Glasgow airport, with its tiny amount of shops and bars and basically – albeit on a small scale – everything Bryony likes about airports. All those clean, happy, disposable things shelved outside of real life, in a place where, let’s face it, everyone is waiting to die and therefore anything goes. But no one is allowed to eat any of the lovely, shiny crap because James has brought packed lunches. To go on a fucking plane! OK, Bryony did feel sorry for him when they confiscated the cartons of organic apple juice he’d so lovingly packed for them all, but not so much when he then said loudly, ‘Do we really look like the kind of people who are going to bomb the plane with cartons of organic apple juice?’ as if he was the first person ever to have thought of that joke. Bryony pointed out that however much everyone secretly thought that the only people who should ever be searched in airports were brown men with peculiar beards, it would be kind of wrong if that actually happened, and equality in the world depended on James being treated exactly the same way as everyone else, and then HE accused HER of being racist!
But whatever.
Bryony manages to stash three small bottles of red wine – for sale in the Starbucks just beyond security – in her handbag AND sit next to sleepy Ash rather than prying Holly AND end up behind, rather than in front of, James. Result, as the kids say. Epic. Elephant poo in China.
When they land on Islay it’s like landing on a picture from a book of perfect islands. There are vast beaches of yellow sand, and mountains, and grass. You can’t get lost on Islay: there are only two main roads. And it must be even easier to find your way on Jura, where apparently there is only one. The sun is shining. Things twinkle. James drives the hire car past old walls and cottages and trees. Over the brow of a hill and there in the distance are the Paps of Jura. A pap is, apparently, a breast. These ones are at least DDDs. Bryony realises that if she didn’t have her dissertation to do, life would be perfect. And also, actually, if James wasn’t such a total arsehole. No, arsehole is wrong – too damp and earthy and pungently sweet for James. Ollie is an arsehole, and Charlie, quite obviously, is a cock. James, at his worst, is more of an elbow. Or maybe an earhole or a nosehole. Or a plughole. WTF??? Bryony’s thoughts are tumbling out as if it’s closing time and they’ve all got to go home but they can’t quite remember where they live . . . Bryony shouldn’t really drink any more until this evening because she drank enough on the journey to have a real headache now, but the ferry doesn’t go until . . .
‘What time is the ferry?’
James shrugs. ‘You’re in charge of this journey,’ he says.
Bryony sighs. ‘Right. Well. Um . . .’
The ferry timetable is on a website on her iPad, but she didn’t look at it closely because she assumed it would be one of those back-and-forth kinds of ferries and they’d just get the next one when they arrived, but now there’s no 3G or any kind of mobile signal at all so she gets out of the car to look at the timetable pinned to the wall of the ferry office. But what it says can’t be right, so she asks a woman sitting in the sun leaning up against the ferry office with a book.
‘Are you waiting for the ferry?’
‘Yes.’
‘When does it go?’
‘Six thirty.’
‘But that’s over an hour from now.’
The woman shrugs. ‘Sunday service.’
‘Oh, Mummy,’ Holly says when Bryony tells them. ‘I knew Daddy should have organised this.’
And Daddy can drive a fucking ferry, can he?
Port Askaig, where they are stuck, has about five houses, a pub and a shop, which is closed. Through the window it is possible to see stickers saying I ♥ Port Askaig, and postcards and tea towels of local whisky distilleries. Opposite, there is a tiny beach, where clear, cold-looking water laps nonchalantly at some bright green seaweed.
‘Ow!’ says Holly, adding at least one unnecessary syllable as usual. ‘Ow!!!’
She starts swatting at the air. These must be the famous Scottish midges that they have heard so much about. Whenever James makes them all watch Springwatch, which is set in Wales, but same diff, the presenters are always complaining about being attacked by midges. You can see why. Bryony thought they’d be smaller, but they are like normal-sized flies, and they bite quite hard.
‘Ow,’ says Ash. ‘Get off! Mummy!’
Bryony has packed seven different types of insect repellent: Citridol, Jungle Formula in ‘Natural’, Jungle Formula in ‘Outdoor and Camping’, Boots own brand in ‘Natural’, DEET from the camping shop, tropical strength Ultrathon and, hilariously, Avon Skin So Soft, which was raved about on TripAdvisor as being a cult product used by all Scottish fishermen, workmen etc. as well as people in the Caribbean, even though it’s supposed to only be a body moisturiser and is not designed to repel insects at all! Bryony grabs the DEET spray as it’s the nearest and also the most horrible-looking.
‘Oh. My. God. Mummy, that’s disgusting. It’s in my mouth!’
‘My eyes!’
‘MUMMY!’
James, of course, refuses insect repellent.
‘Shall I get us some drinks?’ he asks.
‘I’ll get them,’ says Bryony.
She knows she should appear with only a mineral water, which is why she has a double Laphroaig at the bar. After all, it’s made on Islay, and when else do you get the chance to drink a single malt on the island it comes from? But the rest of the family probably wouldn’t understand that. So it’s a Diet Coke for Holly, which she usually isn’t allowed because it gives you cancer, or at least gives cancer to rats – but they are on holiday, which everyone knows makes you immune to cancer – and an apple juice for compliant little Ash, who does what he’s told far too much for it to be good for him, and the same for James, except now he’s sticking his head through the door . . .
‘Actually, Beetle, get me a half of something local.’
‘OK, I’ll join you, I guess.’ She smiles.
She considers getting half pints of whisky, as that’s the only thing that’s really local, but then it turns out that there’s something called Islay Ale, so she gets that.
Back outside and those midgey things really are persistent. Bryony is sure she’s being bitten, regardless of the DEET. But when she looks again there are no red marks, so who knows what is happening? James and the kids paddle in the water and then walk around the little port looking at ropes and creels and boats. When they come back they are full of stories of cormorants and seals. Seals!
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘You never like looking at nature, Mummy.’
After waiting for an hour and fifteen minutes they drive the car onto the ferry for the five-minute journey across the Sound of Islay. And then they are on Jura. It’s all craggy shoreline, sparkling blue water, dark green bracken and acres of pink foxgloves. But
where are all the people?
‘We’re here!’ says Ash.
‘Yep,’ says Bryony. ‘Only about another twenty-five miles to go.’
The bald guy speaks first, straining his face as if it were a muscle about to reach failure on a set of very hard reps.
‘OK, so the basic thing – do you know the basic thing? No? Right. OK, so the basic thing is, well, did you ever have that thing when you were a kid and you wondered how there could be a God when everything in the world is so shit? I did. I remember watching the famine in Ethiopia on the news and going into RE the next day at school and asking the teacher, and the teacher saying that God moves in mysterious ways, and then all the other kids were making Ethiopian jokes anyway, and basically that was the first time I contemplated suicide because I could not bear to live in a world that cruel.’
‘I was already trying to be a Buddhist then,’ says the woman in dungarees, who is called Mog. ‘My teacher – what was her name? – anyway, I remember very well her saying that the starving people must have accumulated so much bad karma in previous lives that they had to suffer through this one. I thought that can’t be right. I mean, I got all the stuff about reincarnation and karma but I didn’t see why it had to be so . . . Yes, I suppose the word is cruel, like Joel said.’
‘Evolution did it to me,’ says Tony. He looks like a garden gnome. His wife is called Mary but has not yet spoken.
‘Why evolution?’ asks Ina.
‘Maybe not evolution, exactly, but nature. When we went on our gardening trip last year, that was when I first realised. The whole thing’s a bloody competition. Every beautiful garden is the result of dreadful violence and mass slaughter. And it’s not just stupid things killing other stupid things, like bindweed versus penstemon, or blackfly versus sweet pea. All the snails, slugs, aphids, weeds. Humans kill those. Who decided that these things do not deserve to live and other things do? I gave up being a vegetarian when I realised that animals eat each other, that it’s “natural” to kill things and eat them. But it’s horrible. I don’t really want to eat a sandwich made out of something that could fly, and had feelings, and probably felt very frightened at the moment that . . .’