Scrap Metal (27 page)

I found purchase in the mud. Not much, just a foothold, but it would do, and I swung round and seized Harry’s shoulder. Cam had the other one still, though his shallow sobs for air sounded desperate, a breath off dying. Between us we got the old man into some kind of a tow hold. He’d lost his hat. His head lolled back and I tried to support it, unable to bear its limp abandonment, but then I needed my free hand to clutch at the turf and help Cam haul him, inch by scrambling awkward inch, up onto the bank.

I found some solid ground beneath my feet and took over. “I’ve got him,” I rasped, taking him by the armpits, and Cam dropped to his knees, letting go.

I dragged the old man a couple of yards higher up onto the shore. He was deadweight, tearing muscles in my back and shoulders, but I couldn’t register the pain. Once he was clear of the water, I ran back for Cam, who had collapsed facedown into the shallows and looked set to drown in the last inch.

“No. Sweetheart, come on.” I grabbed him under the ribs and lifted, gasping with relief when he reanimated and began to struggle like an outraged cat. “Up here a bit. I’ve got you. Breathe.”

I dumped him on the turf beside Harry. Yes, I had both of them. One was choking and retching up the water from his lungs, so I turned my attentions to the other—to my grandfather, supine in the sunlight in his oldest anorak, the one he used for heavy-duty days, and his much-patched corduroy trousers. He’d lost one wellington too. His foot stuck up, big and bony, in its wet sock. He would be so pissed off about the other boot.

“I’ll get you a new pair,” I said, as if he’d complained, and I dredged up my memories of a high school first-aid class and tipped his head back to check his mouth for obstructions. Nothing, but he was full of water. I had to do something about that. I remembered a line from
The Odyssey
—Odysseus crawling up onto the sands, more dead than alive after a shipwreck.
The sea had soaked his heart right through.
I liked it better in the Greek. Such beautiful mournful sounds. Harry’s sea-soaked heart lay, a lead weight, in his breast, and I felt my own turn to lead and cried out, a weird harsh sound like none I’d ever made before. “Granda, no!”

Cold hands closed on mine. I looked up and Cam was there, his hair plastered down on his brow, his eyes hollow. “Let me help you.”

“No. I have to do it.” I had to breathe for Harry, if there was anywhere inside him for the air to go. I didn’t bother feeling for the flicker of life in his throat. If it was there he still needed air, and if it wasn’t he needed air anyway. Air was something I could give.

We’d never been much of a family for touching.
Go and kiss your granda
was for little boys whose grandfathers did not resemble a granite outcrop. To place my mouth on his twisted my guts with weirdness and repulsion, and I angrily curbed the response—I’d have done this without batting an eyelid for a stranger. I breathed out, remembered I was meant to close his nose off and did it again. I couldn’t remember how many times I was meant to repeat this before I pushed on his chest. I sat up, shuddering. “Shit. I don’t know how.”

“Let me try.”

“No, just tell me… How many times do I breathe?”

“Twice. Twice, I think, then about thirty compressions.”

By the time I got to fifteen my head was spinning. There was a boiling pain in my throat I couldn’t allow to be grief, and my lungs wouldn’t fill between my exhalations. My arms were trying to fold. When Cam pushed me aside, I didn’t have the strength to fight him off, and I subsided onto the turf and stared at him numbly. He was doing everything right, I was sure. Even half drowned he looked competent, his face as intent as if he were working on a sculpture. That same focussed passion. Breath after breath after breath, and then stiff-armed compressions, his palms flat to Harry’s chest. Yes, all that was good. I couldn’t understand why he stopped after the fifth or sixth round and sank down beside him. I couldn’t understand why he was crying.

The one thing neither of us had done was check for a pulse. It seemed like a solution, and I lurched forward, grabbing Harry’s wrist. Nothing, but I knew it was difficult to find there sometimes. Better to feel the carotid.

Okay. Nothing was working here. I had to find the next step, get past this stupid impasse where my grandfather, my last living relative, lay dead on the shore of a loch. It was still the same beautifully sunny day it had been when I went into the water. Solutions had to lie all around me. What the fuck did people do?

They called for help, of course. We lived in our own little world on Seacliff Farm, dealt with our triumphs and catastrophes ourselves. That was ridiculous—what did I carry a mobile phone about with me for? It was still in the pocket of my jeans, though God knew how, except Cam had said I wore them tight to drive him crazy. I knew there was no signal down here. Clambering onto my feet, I shook my head clear of stars, and then I ran.

The slope up from the loch was steep, my clothes heavy on me. And something had happened to my muscles, which felt rigid and rubbery at the same time. The climb seemed to take me forever, but when I staggered out onto the moor near the road, I reckoned I had almost made it. The signal was good just along this stretch—I used to sneak out here to call Archie. I prised the phone from my pocket and stared at its blank, waterlogged screen.

I woke up. I returned with a shudder to the surface of my mind. I knew Harry was gone, but still I had to get help out here in case there was a ghost of a chance. I looked down the road for a car to flag down, but the black tarmac ribbon was empty and could stay that way for hours. The nearest place to make the call was from the house. I couldn’t leave Harry alone, though—couldn’t leave Cam alone with him. Best I send Cam and keep vigil myself. All right, that was something to do. Swallowing hard, I tore back down through the nettles and the bulrushes.

Cam was balled up by Harry’s body, his hands locked round the back of his skull. I dropped to my knees beside him and tried to take him in my arms, but he flinched from me, shaking with sobs.

“Cam. Cam, love, I need you to go back to the house.” He didn’t respond. I put a hand on his shoulder. “My phone’s dead. Please, go back to the house and call an ambulance.”

The wind stirred the reeds, sent a spectral pattern dancing over the water. Abruptly I ran out of everything—the shock that had kept me moving, breathing into a dead man’s lungs, and the brief commonsense that had tried to come to my rescue afterwards. I was sick and cold.

“Cam,” I tried one last time. “Help me. I need your help.”

He uncurled and lurched to his feet. His breath was coming in great ragged gasps. He took a step backward, fell on his backside and scrambled up. Tears were streaming down his face. He met my eyes, and a desolation passed between us, a hollow despair I would never forget.

“I’m sorry,” he choked out, turning away, beginning to run. “I can’t. I can’t.”

Chapter Fifteen

I sat in an office at the War Memorial Hospital in Lamlash. At last the afternoon had clouded over, as if belatedly catching up with events. I watched the rain beginning to fleck the window. I’d taken time to wash and comb back my hair, and I had on clean clothes. I was dry-eyed, composed. My hands were folded in my lap. The window looked out over Holy Island, where the Buddhist monks tended their goats.

“Nichol?”

I blinked and returned polite attention to the grey-haired man sitting opposite me. His name was Dr. Ferguson, and he was part of the background of my island life. Mumps, measles, childhood jabs. Broken bones, holiday inoculations. A kindly family doctor. If it was hard for me to focus on him now, it was just that he was so familiar. This office too, with its plants and blue-tacked art contributions from the children’s ward. If you’d asked me, I’d have said that placing a terrible one-off event on a mundane background would have highlighted the tragedy, not blurred its edges, not made it into a horror you read about in the papers in a country an ocean away.

“Nichol, is there somebody at home who can look after you? You’ve had a dreadful shock.”

Somebody at home.
I gave this thought. It was a chance for me to piece together the time between the loch shore and this quiet room, and I welcomed it. I wanted to make sense. I’d ended up making the 999 call myself. I’d dragged Harry a couple more yards up the bank so his feet wouldn’t get any wetter than they were. I’d thought about covering his face, but unless I took off my shirt—and that had seemed all wrong—I hadn’t had anything to do it with. As a last idea, I’d turned him on his side. The recovery position, that was called. I’d heard stories of miracle revivals. Then I’d run back to the house. The call itself had been easy. Everyone knew everyone on Arran. I hadn’t had to give a postcode or directions. As soon as I’d said
Seacliff
the operator knew, and then it was all out of my hands.

The house had been silent. I’d hung up and stood listening, looking through the kitchen doorway. There was my laptop on the table, the mug of coffee Cam had brought me. A small-scale Marie Celeste, that scene, a tableau in a museum. From upstairs had come a clicking sound, shocking me with flashing, unwanted images. The turn of a key in a bedroom door had come to mean sex to me, the quiet exclusion of Harry, his dogs and the world, the prelude to scenes of unimaginable pleasure. I’d gone upstairs and stood outside Cam’s room, resting my hands on the doorframe. He hadn’t responded to any of my questions, my pleas to tell me at least he was all right, until I’d threatened to kick in the door.

I’m all right. Leave me.

I’d gone back down. I’d heard a siren, for a second as faint and sweet as the beginning of the great northern diver’s song, then just an oncoming wail. I’d stumbled up the track to the road and waited. There’d been police—not Archie, who was off at a conference in Glasgow, thank God—as well as an ambulance. Later, when the paramedics were struggling with the stretcher and the angle of the slope, a fire crew had arrived. Nobody had let me help. I knew most of them—the bobbies, the medics, the firemen—but they had had their grim business masks on, and they had set me aside. I’d stood clutching a gatepost and listening to the fire crew’s plans for retrieving the tractor until one of the ambulance lads had told me it would be a few minutes, that I had time to go and get changed.

“Nichol. Are you with me, son?”

I blinked. Doc Ferguson was watching me in concern. He’d actually had to wave a hand in front of my face. “Yes. Yes, sir. I’m sorry.”

“Is there someone at home? Because I heard… Well, I don’t want to pry, laddie, but I heard you had a friend living up there with you now. A bit more than a farmhand.”

I floundered for something to say.
Yes, he’s my lover,
didn’t seem right, to the nice old man who’d looked at my six-year-old tonsils, weighed me and told me I was a fine wee lad. I wanted to say something about Cam, something good to silence in myself the rising howl of loneliness. Just yesterday—Christ, a couple of hours ago—I’d have sworn my life away that he’d have been here by my side.

“He helped me,” I blurted out, clenching my hands in my lap. “He tried to save Harry too.”

“All right. And he’s at home?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” Dr. Ferguson got up. He went to a trolley in the far corner of the room, and I sat watching passively until he turned back to me, a syringe in his hand. “Roll up your sleeve for me, son.”

“What’s that? I don’t need…” I quickly reviewed my words and actions since I’d arrived at the hospital in the backseat of the police Rover. I thought I’d done pretty well. “I don’t need sedating or anything.”

“No, I know you don’t. It’s a broad-spectrum antibiotic, that’s all. Some of those deep lochans have bacteria in them, legionella. It’s not like pulling someone out of the sea.”

“Then Cameron…”

“Your friend? Yes, he’ll need something too. I’ll give you a prescription to take back for him. They’re tough on the guts—that’s why I’m giving you yours as an injection—so make sure he has something to eat with them, and a glass of milk to help keep them down.”

“Okay.”

He swabbed my arm and popped the needle home. I tried to feel the sting of it, but it happened to someone else, some other tidy, pale-faced zombie sitting in a neon-lit office. Somebody else could still taste loch water, and deep under that—a warm faint trace from another world—the salt of his lover’s come.

Ferguson put his kit away and sat down opposite me. One of the papers on his desk was a police report. “I see you told Sergeant Maguire that Harry just…took his tractor through the fence and into the field.”

“Yes. He was ploughing.” I wasn’t a bad hand with the furrows myself. I could still see in my mind’s eye the moment when he ought to have turned. I could feel the dragging weight of the blade, the resistance of the soil. “He ended a furrow and just carried on.”

Ferguson sighed. “I bitterly regret the necessity of carrying out an autopsy on your grandfather. He’d have detested it. In fact, given the circumstances and what I’ve seen of him lately, I’m going to recommend strongly to the coroner that we give it a skip.”

“Right,” I said automatically. I couldn’t begin to link the concept of Harry and autopsy in my head, so I was spared the horror of it. His death was unexplained, though, and Doc Ferguson was trying to do me a favour. My ma had taught me always to be grateful when there was cause. “Thank you.” I rubbed my brow, trying to think. “Er… Have you seen my granda recently?”

“Ah. He didn’t tell you. He said he’d give it thought, but…I’m not surprised he didn’t.”

“I’m sorry. My brains are full of water. Tell me what?”

“He wasn’t well. Och, I’ve seen it a hundred times with men like him around here—great husky farmers, so strong in themselves that by the time they do start to fail and come for help, it’s too late. He had a heart problem, a bad one. I had a few appointments with him, gave him medication, but really it was only a matter of time.”

“Christ… No, he never told me. Couldn’t it be treated?”

“No, not by then. It was nothing congenital, so we don’t need worry about you, except…if I know you, lad, you’ll have just about killed yourself trying to get him out of that loch.”