Collector of Lost Things (17 page)

I remembered being in the upstairs corridor at Celeste’s house. Waiting, in the chill damp air on a threadbare carpet, for sounds of her on the other side of her bedroom door. An awareness, as I bent my ear to the lock, that she was just a few inches away from me. She had spoken. A sudden, urgent whisper: ‘Save me from this place.’

‘C
AREFUL NOW,’ SYKES ADVISED.
‘Sharp eyes, men.’

The mist was impenetrable, glowing with a pale light that played tricks on the senses. Sounds could be heard, not far away, of surges of water being interrupted by rock. Of flow and backwash.

‘Mr French!’ Sykes called.

‘Aye,’ French replied, some way off in the fog.

‘Best ring a bell once a minute,’ Sykes ordered. ‘Or we’ll lose each other.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Sykes handed me a small bell. ‘Do the same, would you, Mr Saxby.’

‘
Christ and the Saints!
’ Martin Herlihy yelled.

Appearing like some falling spear of masonry, a large bird—its wings folded—had dropped through the fog and pierced the water by our boat. It vanished, almost without a splash.

‘Steady, I say,’ Sykes said, calmly. ‘What was that?’

I tried to see beneath the water, but even while I looked a second bird fell, plunging through the fog, wings closed, diving into the water.

‘Gannets, captain,’ I said.

More followed, perhaps half a dozen, falling like icicles from a church roof and vanishing into the ocean. The two Herlihy brothers became unnerved, crouching on their seats and close to letting go of the oars. One of the birds, quite near the boat, could be seen paddling thickly underwater, its neck straining this way and that, a thin chain of bubbles escaping from the nostrils on its beak, before bringing itself back to the surface with a laboured drag of wings.

‘Smack it!’ Connor urged, trying to smite it with his oar. ‘Devil!’ Freeing itself from the sea it spied us, warily, before climbing into the air with a lizard’s crawl, streams spilling from its wings as it flew away.

‘Don’t forget to ring that bell,’ Sykes uttered, unimpressed, turning his collar up. I rang it, and a second later heard French’s boat in answer. As if summoned, two puffins flew out from the mist, fast as hornets and low to the water, their wings beating so rapidly they were blurred. At the last moment they managed to avoid the prow of the boat, both turning at a precise angle to speed alongside and disappear. They were so fast I almost disbelieved they had been there, yet after they had gone, an image of an eye remained, large and comical and set amid the coloured flags of its beak, frozen in the air a few feet from where I sat. Soon, as we rowed, more birds appeared, guillemots and razorbills, rafting in groups, bobbing apprehensively as we approached, and it was seeing these birds that made us realise we had all been hearing a noise beyond that of the sea. It was a sound of hundreds or possibly thousands of similar seabirds, high above us.

‘Here she is, men,’ Sykes said.

Below us, we saw the first glimpses of boulders emerging on a seabed. The water lifted us with a new swell. Almost instantaneously a vast wall of rock loomed about sixty yards ahead of the boat, towering vertically and streaked with white as if lime wash had been thrown down it and smeared with a sea-blackened stain along its base. Dotted on its ledges were lines of birds—every inch of level ground turned into a roost or a nest. We must have been a curious sight, emerging from the mist below them, but they viewed us with indifference. I recognised the white breasts of razorbills, heads raised up to the sky, and the brightly banded beaks of puffins.

Eldey had emerged like a phantom, a rock obelisk rising sheer from the ocean. Making the same discovery as ourselves, French’s boat began to work its way, as we did, in an anticlockwise direction to the cliff. Glimpses of the top of the island could be seen now and again, two hundred feet in the air, where the rock broke to an almost perfect level. Birds were launching off this ledge, gliding in a looping flight before plunging into the water.

‘Well done, men,’ Sykes said.

‘There’s a swell,’ Martin replied.

‘Not too close, now. She has a cross-tide,’ Sykes commanded. ‘And we don’t know what’s below.’

Passing so close to the rock was an oppressive and unnerving experience. New surges of water grew, lifting smoothly and regularly against the bare cliff, a glassy lip that trembled before falling away as if a plug had been pulled. Each time it happened, a raft of seaweed rose with it, a full beard which gave the rock a pliable, velvety quality to its foundations. It smelt as damp and earthy as a cellar, but with the sharp ammonium stink of rotten eggs.

‘Are they puffins?’ the captain asked.

‘Yes.’

The captain smiled at them. ‘They are sweet animals. It was once thought they were fish—did you know that?’

I shook my head. ‘No, I have not heard that before.’

‘It’s true,’ he replied. ‘Fish.’

As we turned the end of the island, meeting a stiffer current, French’s boat drew alongside.

‘We’ll be speared by these blasted birds!’ he exclaimed, agitated. ‘I swear one was aiming for the boat, can you believe it!’

‘Have your gaff hook raised to fend them off,’ Sykes instructed, more than a little amused, ‘and we’ll see if you can skewer one.’

‘You’ll look fine with one down your neck,’ he replied.

Sykes shrugged, indicating the collar he had turned up. But he decided we should do the same, passing the hook from beneath his legs to me. I lifted it upright, pointing it into the mist. ‘Move it a little,’ he said. ‘Anything of note?’ he then asked his first mate.

‘A wretched stink, sir.’

‘Yes, my nose is not immune.’

‘On the other side,’ French continued, ‘the isle has a low broken reef. It might be possible to land there.’

‘The chart has outlying rocks to the south-west, a mile distant,’ Sykes said. ‘You’ll hear them in this swell. Mr French, you look such a fine admiral of your craft—I would appreciate it most gratefully if you would inspect those, before returning to us at the reef. We will circle Eldey and find the best place to land.’

French gave a grudging nod, making it clear he thought the whole venture was a fool’s errand, and commanded his boat off into the mist.

While this exchange had occurred, I had been searching the rock face desperately for any sign of the auks that had once lived here. But the lower ledges, the only ones accessible to a flightless bird, were bare, or had signs that the razorbills and kittiwakes had nested instead.

On the south side, low shelving rocks formed the only possible point for a landing. Above them, the cliffs were just as sheer as before, overhanging us with a presence that was unnatural and foreboding. Half the sky was rock; it felt as if the world had tipped upon its side. And the mist only made this worse. In places it was so dense it created an optical trickery, whereby new impossible cliff faces might be reflected, drifting above us where we knew they could not be.

Suddenly we heard a sharp fizzing sound as a shoal of fish broke the surface in front of the boat. An instant later, a rising tunnel of water arrowed towards us and a dolphin emerged just a few feet beyond the oars, breaching entirely from the sea with a smooth glistening arch of its back. It hung suspended in the air long enough for its tail to twist, like a weathervane swinging, before it dived back into the water. The dorsal fin of a second dolphin appeared in almost the exact spot where the first had jumped, this one scything the water in a sharp turn as the shoal of fish were harried against the surface. The fizzing returned, like a wave breaking on shingle, as the two dolphins hunted as a team, running through the shoal, dividing it in two. We watched, in awe, as each dolphin sped beneath, the bulk of their bodies enough to lift us as they passed. They used our boat as part of their strategy, utilising its shape and presence to corral the fish, both of them angling their heads to regard us. Joyously they leapt in front of the boat and cut like knives through the water, while the vibrations of their enigmatic clicking resonated through the boards.

We sat, rocking in our seats, enjoying the marvels of the spectacle. A fish jumped clear into the thwarts, landing on the wood with panic, thrashing and flicking its flanks until one of the men threw it back in. More fish leapt against the side of the boat and dropped back in a daze.

When the hunt calmed down, the dolphins raised their heads from the water, as if receiving applause. They nodded and lifted their beaks, clucking and singing with curiosity. Then, almost as quickly as they had appeared, the dolphins submerged and vanished.

After a complete circumnavigation of the isle, spying the rock ledges for any evidence of great auks, we landed at the low reef. The rocks were smeared with white guano, pellets, feathers and fish scales. It stank horribly. Several pools had collected, and they reeked with a fetid ammonia smell; in one I saw a drowned kittiwake which had been there a long time. One of the sailors referred to it as a
haglet
. The cliffs overhung us with a sense of precariousness that affected us all. I felt overwhelmed with bleakness, that this rock smelt of nothing but waste and death. Foolishly, some part of me, some residual ill-judged belief, had made me think that we might have found a great auk. It had felt possible, although I had never voiced this possibility. But to stand on the island, I felt chastened. I had dragged a whole ship to this spot. For nothing. It was a place of great absence. This damp forgotten rock in the middle of the sea was the last spot in the world, and yet man had still not let them be. And at that moment I felt ashamed to be part of the species that had done this. The previous year, three Icelandic fishermen had stood here and strangled the last two great auks. They had smashed the one egg that had been laid. And although the winter waves had swept any remnant of this species from the rock, the spectre of the violence that had finished them remained. This was the site of an atrocity.

The Herlihy brothers had climbed out of Sykes’ boat and were standing with the look of the recently shipwrecked, not quite knowing what duties they now had to perform. I had no answers. Why had I directed a ship and its crew across the Atlantic to land at this inhospitable place, only to be greeted by the undeniable proof of man’s murderousness? This was folly indeed! Sykes, spotting my uncertainty and wanting to salvage something from a purposeless visit, pointed to a breach in the cliffs.

‘Well, Mr Saxby, my only idea is that you, Martin and Connor might climb that gully over there—if you wished, that is—to see the top of the isle. There may be sights of interest to a naturalist?’ I was thankful for his sympathy. A man used to salvaging situations, he seemed, at heart, equally disappointed. ‘I shall be perfectly content,’ he said, ‘to sit here on this wretched boulder.’

‘Thank you, captain. I appreciate your suggestion.’

The Herlihy brothers climbed swiftly, and several times we gathered to help each other onto the ledges, while below us I heard the distorted sound of the sea rising in false currents. I dared not look down. The rock felt harsh, with a mineral scent of saltpetre, and the streaks of guano resembled dry waterfalls spilling from ledge to ledge. In the cracks of the rock, what had appeared to be vegetation turned out to be bones and pellets that had formed mats.

Our relief on reaching the top was fleeting, for we quickly emerged onto a stage of dizzying and confusing sound that was diabolic in its feel. In front of us, largely free of the mist, was a perfectly flat field of bare rock, covered by a seething colony of ten or twenty thousand fully grown gannets, their white bodies forming what appeared to be an impossible covering of snow. They made a dreadful and insane noise, of barking and grumbling, formed from a restless sea of throats, most noticeable nearest to us, inflaming with vibration as we stood to watch. The egg yolk coloration of their napes, by the thousand, gave the colony a sunset shine, as if it had managed to emit its own light.

‘I can’t move,’ Martin said, his boots placed awkwardly between the ragged territories of three nests.

‘Me neither,’ his brother replied, braving his fear. ‘What’s your orders, sir?’

The closest birds eyed us warily, falling from their nests and aiming at our legs as we passed. Their beaks opened wide and their throats were vivid with a bright pink anger. Their eyes were startlingly clear and empty.

‘They’s gutless, Marti,’ Connor decided, setting off at a healthy stride to kick out a path. The air seemed to rise around us, full of black-tipped scythes, as birds took to the wing.

‘
Hah! Hah!
’ Martin shouted. ‘Off you go, bastards!’ The brothers began to enjoy the sport, giving heavy kicks to the gannets and swiftly pocketing eggs in canvas bags. I followed the path they created, as if we brought with us a rising wind, scattering the birds and causing a panic that spread far beyond.

‘Watch the gulls,’ I warned, noticing several glaucous gulls sitting among the gannets. They were large and ghostly white in plumage, and were considerably more vicious than the gannets. They would wade towards us, hissing, their wings unhinged and their necks low and strained. The colony was overwhelming. There was such noise, such a squalor of smell and scrabbling and unpredictable pecking, that our nerves were very quickly shot through.

‘I’ll not stand much more o’ this, sir!’ Connor whined.

‘Me neither!’ I shouted, stopping abruptly, all three of us standing as one does in a crowd, shoulder to shoulder. The gannets closed around us, a flowing mass acting as water does, filling gaps and rising unstoppably. I felt engulfed by a sense of drowning, that somehow an acre of the ocean had risen to the top of this rock and we would soon be overrun. I stood, in awe of nature’s sheer abundance. Its noise. Its restless and unquenched activity.

‘Would either of you have any complaint if we climbed down again, as quickly as we might?’ I said.

The brothers laughed, relieved.

‘We have us some eggs, anyhows,’ Martin said, immediately turning back.

‘Look at yous, Marti,’ his brother jeered. ‘Quick as a new bride on her weddin’ day!’