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Chapter 1
Water lay across the far end of the beach like pale satin. Stephen squinted his eyes against the brightness of the sand and watched the woman step delicately onto the smoothness, disturbing its perfection. She stooped and moved one of the dark objects that lay in a curving line across the water and then trod carefully back towards the sand. Ripples drifted away and died, and perfection returned.
“Oh, very arty-farty. ‘Footsteps to infinity’, perhaps.”
“Depends which way they’re going, doesn’t it?”
He looked at Katharine in pleased surprise, but she was still watching the beach below them.
“That photographer, or whatever he is, doesn’t seem too happy,” she said. “And anyway the tide’s coming in and it’ll drown those stones or whatever they are.”
The dark, skinny photographer squatted at the end of the line, writhing and bending, gesturing with an arm.
“He looks as though he’s a frog, about to eat them. One after another.” Stephen pushed his chin forwards, his beard jutting, and made gulping, swallowing movement. “Gloop … Gloop.”
Then he felt very silly and wished he hadn’t said that; it was hardly guaranteed to inspire respect. He stood up in embarrassment.
“Oh, very droll.” Katharine’s sarcasm was withering, but she was smiling her twisted smile, and Stephen laughed out loud.
“Let’s go and see what they’re doing before it all gets washed away.”
“Hang on a minute. My boots are full of sand.”
“Life’s a beach, Kat.”
But he waited while she pulled off her walking-boots and shook them: the woman on the beach had stepped with light feet. He saw how the sea, too, was creeping noiselessly across the sand. Further out, a low swell met the black reef of rocks and rose and sank, rose and sank, then, flattened, slunk ashore; only to be mocked by a static sea of twenty foot high breakers of wind blasted sand.
Stephen stretched and inhaled deeply as he looked around at the overhanging crests of the dunes, and then he squatted down and poked at the low, tight mat of silverleaf beneath his feet, breathing in the smell of the turf. Kat’s voice, as she swore at her tangled knot of laces, was an irritating intrusion. If she had been Jamie, he would have picked up some of the rabbit droppings like shrivelled currants and thrown them at her.
Instead, he spoke calmly. “There’s no hurry, Kat. Nobody hurries here.”
Not even me, he thought. He couldn’t believe how quickly he fell back into this attitude; it happened every time. For two days he had driven the Land Rover northwards, and had arrived at this tip of Scotland dazed, with aching head, his eyes creased with concentration. And yet, two hours after reaching the bothy, he could walk out here onto the dunes, the marram grass whipping at his legs, to stare out over the bleached sands and dark, jagged coast, and feel that time had suddenly ceased to have any importance. Hours, days, were irrelevant. His headache had vanished, and his eyes were creased only in astonishment against the hugeness of the land and sea and the extraordinary millions of years that had gone into their shaping.
“Okay, I’m ready. What are you smiling at?”
Katharine stood up and pulled at her dark palm tree sprout of a ponytail, then followed him down towards the beach.
The gravelly gully had trapped balls of dry grass, snail shells, feathers and fragments of paper and plastic, and she picked up a couple of chunks of hard black stone that glistened like polished coal. Stephen wondered if she would ask about the narrow band of dark rock that jutted through the sand, but she rubbed the stones on her trousers to clean them and then unexpectedly lobbed one of them over the edge of the gully.
Almost immediately, there was an angry shout and a dog barked once and growled.
“Oh, shit!” She and Stephen stared at each other in horror. “Quick, we’d better hide!”
She started scrabbling back up the gully, giggling hysterically, and, although he was shocked at what might have happened, he couldn’t help spluttering with amusement. But he hissed, “Kat! Come back,” and carefully climbed the shifting sand to peer over the edge.
The sheepdogs, tense and with ears cocked, leapt to their feet in a cacophony of barking and growling. The nearest lunged at him.
“Banner! Down! Quiet, Beth. Hissht.”
The man who was sitting with the dogs grabbed one animal by the scruff of its neck and backhanded the nose of another, so that it yelped and cringed; in seconds, the dogs were lying down again, watchful and quivering, their eyes fixed on Stephen.
“This will be yours, then.”
Impassive, the man held out the small black rock. He was dark haired, in his thirties, Stephen guessed, his face lean and dark skinned from the weather; he wore torn khaki dungarees and a grey T-shirt and, despite his narrow escape from apparent meteorite impact, lay sprawled in the hollow, relaxed and unconcerned. Stephen shifted uncomfortably on the unstable sand, aware that the dogs were neither restrained nor pleased to see him.
“Sorry about that. It was a bloody stupid thing to do. It didn’t hit you or the dogs, I hope?”
The man shook his head, once, and continued staring at Stephen.
“Stupid,” Stephen blundered on. “One doesn’t expect anyone else to be around.”
Actually, Stephen, who had worked in several very remote areas, knew that people often popped up in the most unlikely places, but he wasn’t going to blame Katharine, even though she deserved it; especially since she seemed to have disappeared. He recognised the man slightly from an earlier visit, he had seen him and his dogs herding sheep, and so, with great originality, had mentally labelled him as ‘the shepherd.’
“There are also some others who ‘are around’.” The shepherd indicated the shore, ironically.
“Yes. We were just heading down to take a look. What’s going on?”
The shepherd shrugged and lifted his hands, a gesture that seemed foreign and strange in this place. He rolled the rock in his palm and then clasped it tightly and straightened his arm in front of him.
“So it will it be yours, then, will it?” he said, as he uncurled his fingers. “This not so very valuable rock that you threw away.”
Katharine held out her hand to show him the other rock that she still carried. She had come up the slope in front and she now stood at the lip of the hollow, unafraid of the dogs whose heads had all swung round to stare at her.
“Are the dogs okay? I heard one yelp. Is that one part blind?”
She pointed at a dog that had one pale blue eye, and then stepped forward to touch its head. Her foot crunched on a drift of yellow snail shells, striped with brown, that had accumulated in the hollow, and the shepherd, briefly distracted, looked down, and then replied.
“No, she can see as well as any of them.”
“Good.” She spoke to Stephen, who was now sliding down sideways into the hollow. “Why is there basalt here? It’s crazy.”
“Interesting, isn’t it?”
Stephen was watching the shepherd who was looking very carefully at Katharine: from where he lay, she must have arisen like a silhouette against the sky. Yet again he wanted to burst into laughter, and he struggled to keep a straight face as he saw Katharine through the shepherd’s eyes. Today she was wearing what he thought of as her ‘feral look’, sealskin glossy cropped trousers with her walking boots, and a short leopard skin printed sleeveless top that showed her taut, tanned stomach. There were about twenty elephant hair bracelets on her left arm, and the plain silver stud in her navel was not hidden by the pullover knotted round her waist. He never knew what she would wear next, such was her mixture of current fashion and charity shop cast offs, smart and tatty, tie-dyed and tailored, an eclectic jumble of scarves, bracelets and fake fur, seemingly uncontrived combinations that always managed to look good.
The shepherd would be speculating about their relationship, Stephen knew; why a bearded forty-something man, fairly conventionally dressed in corduroy trousers and shirt, should be escorting an undeniably good-looking lassie among the dunes. Well, let him speculate, for now!
“We’re cluttering up your den. We should leave you and the dogs in peace. Come on, Katharine.” He bent to pat one of the dogs but then thought better of it.
“Sorry, again. I’m sorry we disturbed you.”
“Oh, any time. As long as it’s not with a lump of basalt.”
The shepherd smirked as he stressed the word, with the quickest of glances towards Katharine, who grinned and stroked the blue eyed dog before she left.
“The sheepdogs seemed to like you,” Stephen commented when they reached the firm sand of the shore. “I always think they have very uncertain temperaments, but you’re obviously not afraid of them.”
“No.” She didn’t elaborate. “Nor of shepherds. Not very subtle, was he?”
She seemed disgruntled and Stephen, who didn’t yet know her well, wondered how much of her cheeky confidence was a protective shield.
“Well, we rather took him by surprise, didn’t we? And he’s probably never seen a navel stud before. The weather’s usually too bracing here for people to uncover very much skin, let alone to pierce it with metal things.”
“Brass monkeys?”
“Something like that, though that obviously can’t apply in your case, of course.”
She grinned, and they splashed along the edge of the incoming tide, just for the hell of it, towards the strangers on the shore.
* * *
The stepping stones were in fact large pebbles, slightly flattened spheres. They had been positioned across a shallow flooded depression on the shore, into which the sea was now pushing, gently but insistently, through a narrow channel; a fine scum of brownish bubbles swirled in the current.
The woman had acknowledged Stephen and Katharine’s arrival with a smile, but had not spoken. She was in her fifties, her grey hair caught up in a neat roll at the back of her head, and her feet were bare beneath her trousers, which were of a soft, muted blue material. The sleeves of her cotton smock were rolled up to her elbows, and she stood quite still, looking intently at the stones. The black clothed photographer had set up a tripod on which he had placed a video camera and Stephen, who was standing well back, guessed that he was going to video the symbolic submersion of the stones. Some sort of ‘installation art’, wasn’t that what it was called? Or was it ‘organic art’?
Katharine had moved nearer to the water, and now she came back on exaggerated tiptoe, and whispered, “They’re not stones. They’re made of pottery, and they’re all speckled and different colours like pebbles.”
Stephen peered at them, and saw one of the ‘pebbles’ move.
“That’s a shame, the arrangement will be spoiled.”
Several of the pebbles shifted slightly. There was a surge of water through the narrow channel as a larger wave reached the shore and suddenly all the pebbles were afloat, drifting and rocking, going their separate ways, the ordered line shifting into anarchy.
“Shi-it,” Kat breathed in admiration. “That’s clever. How did she do that?”
Neither of them doubted that the woman had been responsible; the photographer was merely there to record the miracle of the inorganic coming to life.
The woman heard their surprise, and turned to look at them. She had a calm, dignified face, but there were crinkles of pleasure around her astonishingly blue eyes.
“How did you manage to fire them without them exploding?” Stephen stepped closer. “That’s clever and a very unexpected effect.”
“I have wondered about tethering them on threads,” she replied obliquely, “so that they would be able to bob about but not move out of position. What do you think?”
“It might be interesting to try.”
“But perhaps not now. In a moment my poor patient Izzy is going to get his feet and his tripod wet, and I think his patience will run out. And I’m afraid we shall then all suffer!”
She was not local; her English accent was slightly hesitant, a little too precise. Izzy, judging by his roar as the water poured into his clean and expensive trainers, was a Glaswegian.
“Fockin’ wet stuff! That’s it, Anna! Ye can gather up yer wee floaters and we’ll be away. Hey, youse! Can ye no’ turn back the fockin’ tide? Like that King fockin’ Newt?”
He waved his arm at Stephen, his grey curly hair a bush agitated by the wind.
“Trouble was, King Canute couldn’t. That was the whole point.” But Stephen instantly regretted saying that, it sounded pompous and was not what wet footed Izzy would want to hear. Katharine snorted, perhaps a little derisively, and to cover up his lapse he said to Anna, “Canute was Danish too.”
“That’s quite a clever guess,” she replied, “but I am in fact part-Norwegian. Of course if the King had been Norwegian he would have easily succeeded.”
“And would have been so powerful that our past would have been quite different. We might now be merely the southern province of the Norwegian Empire.”
“Oh, merely?” Her low voice was teasing.
Stephen could think of no appropriate quick response, and because Izzy was swearing and shaking his feet exaggeratedly to get Anna’s attention, he added, “If the shoot has finished for the day can we help you collect the stars of the show? Katharine and I can help you carry them, if you want. Do you have a car?”
“Why don’t you video them being washed up the beach?” Katharine asked Izzy, not entirely helpfully.
“Aye, ye’d like to see me up to my waist in watter, hen, would ye no’? Tell ye what, a strapping lass like yersel’ I’ll sit on yer shoulders as the tide comes in an’ we’ll just be watchin’ Anna’s wee babies there all bobbin’ and wamblin’ aboot, doin’ what they fockin’ well like! Aye, great stuff, Anna, no? This lassie here has the touch, right enough. She should be the director.”
Katharine started giggling as he carried on muttering and grumbling but with a twinkle in his eye, and Anna shook her head in amusement.
“Is she your daughter? She’s fun.”
“No. I have two sons, in their teens. Kat’s my postgraduate research student. She’s doing a PhD.”
“What can you be researching here? There is nothing but sea and sky and rocks. Sand.” She lifted her shoulders slightly, and looked about her.
“Rocks. Exactly that. I’m a geologist. This is a sort of paradise for me.”
He smiled at her, and she studied his face for a moment without saying anything, then she smiled too.
“I think so. I understand. But perhaps not for Kat?”
“That remains to be seen, she’s only just arrived. And what about you? Do you live here? I presume you made those ‘wee floaters’, so you must be some sort of potter.”
“Yes,” she said simply. “I think we must gather up the floating stones before they go ‘wambling aboot’ , perhaps they will go to America. There are some boxes over there. And my car is not far away.”
Stephen smiled inwardly, and took off his socks and boots. He marvelled at the lightness of the floating stones as he scooped each one up with both hands, but she had well hidden the secret of their making. He examined their individual patterns, speckled grey like granite, small dark scribbles of a curlew’s egg, red bloodstone flecks on milky green: rocks, but not quite rocks, the colours subtly altered, their density a lie.
Katharine helped wrap them in newspaper and pack them in cardboard boxes, while Izzy packed up his photographic kit, and they all carried the paraphernalia to the car, an aged grey Morris Traveller that was parked amongst the dunes. On their second trip to the car, Stephen hung back so that he could walk next to the photographer.
“Are you and Anna preparing for an exhibition, then?” he asked, but even as he was asking, there was a commotion of dogs barking up ahead.
Two sheepdogs were racing down the dune in pursuit of a leaping rabbit, that was almost flying in its silent terror, its ears flat against its back.
Katharine gave a little cry. “Oh no! Please let it escape!”
The shepherd appeared on the dune’s crest and whistled sharply, three times. For a moment the dogs appeared to pay no attention, so rapid and noisy was the chase, but the shrill command must finally have penetrated their brains for they both suddenly skidded to a stop in a spray of sand, and turned to look uphill, then threw themselves, panting, on their bellies. The shepherd whistled again, and they slunk back towards him, unwillingly, winding their bodies around the hummocks of sand, crawling upwards to fall at his feet.
“I hope he won’t beat them,” Katharine said.
“Oh no. He loves them.” Anna, holding a single floating stone for which there had been no room in the cartons, stood quite still and watched.
“We met him earlier. I quite like sheepdogs.”
“Did you? Donnie?” Anna looked at her in surprise.
“Yes, if that’s his name. He was sitting up there in the dunes. Having a rest I suppose.”
“Yes.” She sounded unconvinced.
The shepherd, having restored complete obedience, raised his arm in salute, and strode away.
Ten minutes later, Stephen and Katharine were alone on the shore.
“Look! Is that a seal? Over there, look, to the left of those rocks?”
Stephen looked to where Katharine was pointing but he couldn’t see anything except a yellow buoy, and suddenly a great weariness came over him. A huge yawn built up inside and, uncaring what Katharine thought, he put his head back and opened his mouth wide, stretching mightily as the yawn burst out.
“Lord, I’m tired. What time is it?”
Eyes still watering from the yawn, he looked at his watch. Well after seven. His headache was threatening to come back, and his back had stiffened from the tension of a day of motorways and narrow roads, where his stomach had tightened with apprehension at every blind, single track corner.
“I’m starving.” Katharine said. “And I’m dying for a ciggie.”
“I thought you’d given up. What’ll you do when you’re out in the field?”
“Die?” She grinned, then looked concerned. “You look as though you’re about to die. The boys should have unpacked by now, let’s go back.”
“Yes. We’ll get Andrew to cook. Surely even he can manage something basic like sausage and beans.”
* * *
Andrew and Max hadn’t wanted to come for a walk to ‘stretch their legs’, as Stephen had suggested, and had indeed started to unpack a few of their belongings but, because it was soon obvious that the bothy’s communal sleeping quarters (the three sets of double bunks with thin hard mattresses hardly qualified it to be called a bedroom) had little space and no storage room, they had abandoned their rucksacks on the floor almost untouched. Instead, Max had started to stow away the food and drink, putting some of the perishables in the Calor fridge that Stephen had already lit. But this scheme became too complicated, too, since the food was going to have to be apportioned to each of them when they shortly went their separate ways in the field.
“Let’s find something easy that we can have for supper,” Max suggested, tentatively. “We can’t ask Kat to cook, she’ll say we’re being sexist.”
He was nearing the end of his second year as a research student with Stephen and, although Kat was a newcomer, having joined the group only two weeks previously, he felt a little in awe of her. Kat was older and taller (and probably stronger too) and she’d done so much, travelled, held a variety of jobs, all kinds of things. He, on the other hand, had gone straight from school to university and, after he’d gained his First in geology, had spent the summer working in the local supermarket, stacking shelves. The following autumn he had moved straight to Stephen’s lab, looking forward to immersing himself in research in his favourite subject. Last summer he’d come up here with Stephen and the two of them had stayed in a bed-and-breakfast in the village; he liked fieldwork, he liked the solitude and working on his own. He wasn’t sure how much fun the overcrowded bothy was going to be on this trip, and he was already looking forward to being abandoned in his study area with his tent. It wasn’t that he was unsociable, he just felt that he didn’t have anything very interesting to talk about and, sometimes, looking at himself in the mirror, seeing his thin face with the prominent bones and his nondescript brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, he wondered if the others thought that he was a nerd.
“Shall we sort out something for supper, Andy?” he asked again, starting to look through a likely box.
“Yeah. There’re some beans and tinned sausages in there somewhere.” Andrew had taken off his trainers and was padding round on the wooden floor in his socks, which were already filthy. “We’ll get Steve to drive us to the bar after. They’ve got chips.”
“I bet he won’t want to, he’ll be sick of driving.”
Max felt protective of Stephen who, after all, was not Andrew’s supervisor. Andrew was a geographer and, because he was coming to the end of his third year, was supposed to be finishing writing up his thesis; but he had to check some data for his study on the impact of tourism in the northern highlands (the results of which seemed pretty self evident to Max) and so he had more or less hitched a ride.
“I could drive the Land Rover, if only they’d let me.”
“You’re not insured and you wouldn’t be able to drink, anyway.”
“Yeah, yeah. All that crap. What can we eat now? I’m fucking starving. Why don’t you fill that kettle and put it on the stove? Is there any cheese?” Andrew rooted around and found a sliced loaf and a tub of margarine, and then squatted by the fridge. “Hey, yeah, there’s some of that orange plastic stuff, I love that.”
He took a thick packet of ready sliced processed cheese to the table and, slitting it open, peeled several slices off the pile.
“Marmite and marmalade ... where are they?”
Max watched in fascination as Andy smeared slices of cheese alternately with the spreads.
“That’s gross.”
“No, man, you’re wrong. It’s fun. This is the ‘food is fun’ scenario.” He placed two of the slices together and rolled them into a cylinder. “Here. Finger foods take on a whole new meaning!”
Max took the oozing cylinder, trying to ignore Andrew’s grimy nails. Head tilted, lips pulled back, he took a bite and the contents squirted out of the open end.
“Yeugh!” he shouted, jumping back. But the mixture had fallen inside the open neck of his shirt, and now there was marmite on his cheek as well.
The latch clattered and the door was shouldered open.
“Yow!” Kat stood rubbing her shoulder. “That hurt. Who’s yelling? What’s wrong? Max, you look disgusting! What are you both doing?”
Max was scrabbling at his neck, spluttering about needing a cloth and waving his finger food so that marmalade dripped onto the floor, and Andy was guffawing with laughter.
“You too, Kat! Here’s one I made earlier.”
“No thanks. Here, hold still, Max.” Kat dampened a dishcloth and dabbed at Max’s neck. “The thingy round your neck’s covered, you’d better take it off and wash it separately. What is it, anyway?”
Max untied the leather thong and showed her the strange metal shape.
“It’s the runic letter M. My mother brought it back from Iceland for me one Christmas. I kind of think it’s lucky because I wore it through finals, and the exams went okay.”
“It’s cool, I like it.” She smiled at him. “I used to have a lucky wristband, but it broke. Bummer. Hey, you’d better get this mess cleared up before Stephen gets back or he’ll be pissed off with you.”
“Where is he, anyway?”
“He stopped at the phone box. This cheese gets all over the world, you know. You wouldn’t believe where I’ve seen it on sale. One time I was making my way down through Kenya, in the back of beyond and there was a guy making cheeseburgers at a roadside stall, peeling off the slices!”
“Weren’t you scared, travelling on your own?”
“Not really. There were a few occasions when things got a bit dodgy, but if you try to look friendly and not to get too impatient …” Her voice trailed away, and she shrugged. “It’s something you learn as you go on. And I travelled for two or three years, on and off. Before and after I was at uni.”
“So what made you decide to do a PhD in geology, for fuck’s sake?” Andrew was scathing. “Why geology ? I’d have thought geography, human geography or something, at least would’ve been more relevant.”
“ ‘People are places, places are people’.”
“What’s that supposed to mean, then?”
“Geology tells you about geography, and that tells you about people, doesn’t it? Oh anyway, I just did, that’s all. I just wanted to be outside and look at rocks for a bit. Not stuck in this crappy hut with a geographer with stinking socks.”
For a moment there was real tension between them, and Max sunk his chin into his chest and pretended to be engrossed in counting slices of white bread.
“Stephen’s a long time, perhaps the phone box is out of order,” he muttered, wishing his supervisor would return.
“He was going to call his family, to let them know he’d arrived.”
“Have you met them yet?” Max asked, relieved at the change in topic.
“I met Chris once when she came into the lab. She seemed nice, sort of down-to-earth.”
“She is. She’s a midwife.”
“What are the boys like?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Max was at a loss how to describe them. “They’re okay, though I hardly know them. Adam’s just done his A levels and he’s taking a year out, I think. And Jamie’s doing GCSEs. He’s the sporty one. He comes into the department more often because he’s always needing a lift home, and so on.”
“Strange to have a family and then to go off on field work and leave them behind for weeks,” Andrew said. “Not much of a life for a family. But he’s got the reputation of a real workaholic, hasn’t he? I know a girl who was in his tutor group and she said he was a real slave driver. ”
“His family life’s probably not our business, is it?” Max said, mildly. “They’ve probably got it all sorted out. And anyway, Stephen once told me that when the boys were young and Chris wasn’t working, they often went along with him on fieldtrips.”
“That must have been fun,” Kat said. “I wish I’d been able to do things like that with my dad. But you should have seen him when we were down on the beach. He was incredibly laid-back, going on at me about how there wasn’t any rush and it never got really dark so life seemed longer. Ssh! Is that him coming now? Quick, light the grill, Andy. Where’re the beans?” |
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