Entry Island

As he approached the final stretch of the sandbank on the west side, he saw the tanker terminal off to his right, where huge ships docked several times a week to fill their holds with salt. A long shed with a silver roof caught flashes of sunlight from the broken sky. A concrete pier extended out into the lagoon where a red-and-cream tanker was now docked, an elevated length of covered conveyor belt feeding salt into its belly.

The conveyor tracked back along the line of the shore for nearly a kilometre to the tower of the mine shaft itself, where a high fence topped by barbed wire delineated the secure perimeter of the mine. Thirty or forty vehicles were parked along the fringes of a muddy, semi-flooded car park. Sime parked up and found his way into the administration block where a secretary told him that Jack Aitkens would be off shift in about twenty minutes, if he would care to wait. She waved him towards a seat, but Sime said he would wait in his car and walked back out into the wind. It had been hot and claustrophobic in there. And he found it unimaginable that people could spend twelve hours a day underground in dark confined spaces. It would be worse than a prison sentence.

Sime sat in the Chevy with the engine running, hot air blowing on his feet, a window open to let in air. He gazed across the waters of the lagoon towards rock that rose almost sheer out of the sea, and the brightly painted houses that ran along the strip of green that topped it. Hardy folk, these. Fishermen mostly, the descendants of pioneers from France and Britain who had come to claim these uninhabited and inhospitable islands and make them their home. Until their arrival, only the Mi’kmaq Indians had ventured here on seasonal hunting forays.

Sime felt the wind rock his car as it blew in gusts across the open water, fading only a little now in strength. And he let his mind drift back to the diaries. Somehow it seemed important to understand why his subconscious had picked that particular moment from them to animate his unexpected dream.

It was odd. He could only have been seven or eight when their grandmother first read them the stories. Sitting out on the front porch in the shade of the trees during the hot summer holidays, or huddled around the fire on a dark winter’s evening. He had lost count of the number of times he and Annie had asked her to read them again. And being the same age as the young boy described in the first of them, Sime had always remembered it in great detail.

But somehow it wasn’t his grandmother’s voice that he had heard. Not after being drawn into the story. It was as if his ancestor himself had read it out loud, as though he had been speaking directly to Sime and his sister.

Chapter eleven

When I was very young, it seemed I knew lots of things without ever really remembering how or where I learned them. I knew that my village was a collection of houses in the township they called Baile Mhanais. And if I were to try to spell it in English now it would look something like Bally Vanish. I knew that our village stood on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis and Harris in the Outer Hebrides, and I remember it was at school that I learned that the Hebrides were a part of Scotland.

The teacher was sent by the Church, which seemed to think that it was important for us to learn reading and writing — if only so we could read the Bible. I used to sit and listen to that teacher, overwhelmed by everything I didn’t know. At eight years old, my world seemed such a tiny place in the greater world beyond, and yet it filled my life. It was everything I knew.

I knew, for example, that there were nearly sixty people living in my village, and almost double that if you took account of the crofts that extended north and south along the shore on either side. I knew that it was the Atlantic Ocean that beat its relentless tattoo on the shingle shore below the village, and I knew that somewhere far away on the other side of it was a place they called America.

On the other side of the bay, fishermen from Stornoway sometimes laid out their catch of whitefish on the rocks to dry in the sun. They paid the children of the village a penny each to spend the day there and scare away the birds.

There was a jetty, too, built by the estate before Langadail was bought by its new owner. My father used to swear that the new laird spent nothing on improvements and that the place would go to rack and ruin.