Star Gazing Read online

  ‘Is it that obvious?’

  ‘Yes. Even to me.’

  ‘It’s not mine, anyway. I’m merely a custodian. A caretaker.’

  ‘You’re not there much of the time.’

  ‘No, but when I am, I take care of things.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘All creatures great and small… Och, that’s not strictly true. They take care of themselves well enough. I just make sure the right conditions prevail. I’m not really a caretaker. More a maintenance man. Part-time,’ he adds.

  ‘What sort of things do you do?’

  Keir is thoughtful, then says, ‘Keep the twenty-first century at bay.’

  ‘Hmm… Sounds like a full-time job to me.’

  As the train slows down Marianne turns to Keir and asks, ‘Are we coming into a station?’

  ‘Aye. Perth.’

  ‘Gateway to the Highlands.’ She smiles. ‘I love to hear Scots say Perth. Pairth. So much more musical than Purth, which sounds like a verbal belch… Oh, do I hear the rattle of a tea trolley? I could use a coffee. How about you?’

  Keir looks round his seat, along the carriage. ‘She won’t be here for a wee while. I’ll get them when she passes.’

  ‘Are you waiting for a call?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘You keep checking your phone. I hear you pick it up off the table, then you put it down again.’

  ‘I’m not exactly waiting. It’s a call I hope I don’t get.’

  Marianne waits for him to say more. When he doesn’t, she asks, ‘Do you have many visitors? On Skye?’

  ‘Me personally? Or did you mean tourists?’

  ‘You personally.’

  ‘No. You’re the first.’

  ‘Really? Have you not been there long?’

  ‘Years.’

  ‘So why no visitors?’

  ‘I like being alone. Usually,’ he adds.

  ‘There, and I thought this was going to be a holiday. I now feel weighed down by responsibility.’

  ‘Because you’re my first visitor?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t like the idea of being a human guinea pig.’

  ‘More of a pioneer.’

  ‘Are you taking me because I’m blind? As some kind of good deed? I have a suspicion you suffer from an over-developed Boy-Scout complex.’

  ‘I’m taking you because you’re the first person I’ve met who I think might appreciate my world the way I do.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘With your whole mind and body, not just your eyes.’

  She frowns. ‘I’m not sure I understand.’

  ‘Well, seeing seems to me a pretty narrow way of appreciating the world. Superficial.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Keir turns his head and looks at her profile outlined against the window. Something about the set of her head tells him she is alert, listening hard, but not for the first time he’s thrown by the lack of eye-contact. Instead he focuses on her ear, small, neat and convoluted, holding back her heavy ash blonde hair. A thin tendril has escaped and lies against her cheek, swaying with the movement of the train.

  Keir talks softly into Marianne’s ear. ‘Sound penetrates your body. So does smell. You heard that rattling trolley and reacted to it. You smelled the coffee and you experienced a craving. Touch affects your body too, obviously. These seats are too narrow for a guy like me. You can feel the pressure of my body against yours, can’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I can.’

  ‘If you didn’t know me that would feel like an invasion of your personal space. Och, maybe it does anyway.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t. It’s rather reassuring, actually. I know you’re there.’

  ‘But sight leaves the body untouched. There’s no physical penetration of the eye.’

  Marianne purses her lips. ‘Light rays on the retina?’

  ‘OK, but you’re not aware of them. When you see something – I mean when sighted folk see – it’s out there, beyond the self. It isn’t in your eye the way a sound is in your ear, or a smell is in your nose. It’s detached from the self.’

  ‘Fascinating! Of course, I’ll have to take your word for it.’

  Keir looks away and surveys the other passengers: reading, dozing, sending text messages as Perth recedes and the train moves out into the countryside again. ‘It’s not you with the limited perception, Marianne. Folk who can see just don’t seem to look.’

  She smiles. ‘So you are taking me because I’m blind.’

  He leans towards her and the pressure of his shoulder against hers increases. Instinctively, Marianne shrinks back against the window. Keir pulls away and she registers a fleeting disappointment. ‘If you could see them, would you still touch trees?’

  ‘I don’t know. I like to think I would.’

  ‘Aye, it’s natural human behaviour! Think of the way we clamber on rocks and climb trees when we’re kids.’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘But you probably wanted to.’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘Everybody does! We want to feel our bodies in touch with the Earth, with other living things – with pets, trees, the sea… It’s how we are as kids. Then we forget. We… disconnect.’ He turns away again. Leaning back in his seat he murmurs, ‘That’s when the trouble starts.’

  ‘Trouble?’

  ‘Some people think conservation is about saving animal species. Especially the cuddly ones. They don’t realise we’re also trying to prevent the human race from committing suicide.’ He pauses for a moment and then says with careful emphasis, ‘We’re links in a chain. The chain only works when we’re all linked together.’

  ‘People and animals, you mean?’

  ‘Everything.’

  As the percussive tea trolley approaches Marianne says, ‘You know, I have a feeling this trip is going to be an education…’

  * * * * *

  Marianne

  Keir’s voice was his own now. I’d heard it often enough and for long enough to become acquainted with its distinct timbre. The Highland understatement was there but also the Highland energy, a combination that at times made me wonder if he might be suppressing laughter or apoplexy. There was something pent up, reined in by his careful precision of speech. I realised now that the pitch and accent were Harvey’s but the vocal mannerisms weren’t. The vocabulary wasn’t. The silences weren’t.

  Keir had become his own man but my enjoyment of his company, his conversation, his attentiveness, even the proximity of his body next to mine in the railway carriage, all this was coloured by memories I was reluctant to revisit. The pleasure of various kinds that I felt in his presence was marred by fear of various kinds. To my utter dismay, I knew the fear uppermost in my mind – already – was that of loss. But how could I fear to lose what I didn’t even possess?

  Perhaps it was just habit. It’s hard to describe the loneliness of being an oil wife, the hatefulness of it. Life is never normal. It’s lived at two extremes. You are miserable or euphoric. When your husband’s offshore you wish your life away waiting for him to come home. That’s on good days. On bad days, you worry. You are consumed by worry. You are haunted by premonitions of danger, injury, even death. I had no premonition of the Piper Alpha tragedy but afterwards some people said they did. The fact is, dread becomes so much a habit, it would be difficult to recognise a presentiment of anything untoward. If your husband can’t get off an oil platform for three days because of appalling weather, you tend to dwell on the fact that all that stands between him and annihilation is a monstrous Meccano-like construction clinging to the seabed. You trust it’s safe. He trusts it’s safe. Everyone trusts. We have to. How to live otherwise?

  When your man is home, it’s Christmas, whatever the season. Special food, special wine, sex, catching up on news, shopping, more sex. (Do oil couples have sex more often on average because of the enforced celibacy, I wonder? Do oil wives try harder, competing subconsciously with the porn that we know is available an
d suspect our husbands watch, even though they assure us they don’t?)

  Because of my blindness there were special hardships. I could never comfort myself with photographs. When Harvey was abroad, I couldn’t anticipate long love letters to be read and reread in private, in the bath, in bed. I had to content myself with phone calls until a friend, finding me in tears one day after speaking to him, suggested I tape our calls to play back at leisure. It was a short step from there to Harvey buying a dictaphone and sending me taped letters and journals, self-conscious at first, but eventually entertaining and briefly romantic in their closing moments as he signed off. (Try getting a male Highlander to talk about his feelings. You’ll need the conversational equivalent of the culinary device that removes snails from their shell.)

  I dated and labelled all the tapes in Braille as I received them. When he died I put them away with his clothes, his books (which I would never read) and his CDs (which I would never play). After a year I was able to get rid of the clothes, with Louisa’s help. She was very good, very practical. The removal was surgical in its swiftness and precision and I was anaesthetised by exhaustion after a year of grief – first for Harvey, then for the baby. Selling up in Aberdeen, getting rid of Harvey’s stuff, telling people about the miscarriage, Louisa saw me through all of it with a large box of Kleenex and a constant supply of gin and tonic. She was tactful but brisk. It was necessary. I was only twenty-seven. I needed to begin again.

  The tapes now live in a beautiful oblong mahogany box. I know it’s beautiful. I can feel. The box is Indian and ornately carved. I used to enjoy running my fingers over the patterns on the lid and on the sides, trying to read them. After Harvey’s death the box became the repository for his tapes and the photos of us he used to have on display. When he was alive I’d kept the tapes on a bookshelf with my CDs and audio-books but after the worst was over, I took them off the shelf and put them in the wooden box he’d given me, for which I’d never found any practical use.

  After I’d placed the tapes inside, shut the box and put it away, I felt as if I’d put them in a coffin, buried Harvey’s voice. It’s perhaps an indication of my dire mental state at the time that I derived a kind of comfort from this mock-burial. Perhaps this too was necessary. There had been no funeral. His body had never been recovered, had never been laid to rest in a coffin. I don’t doubt that my subconscious selected an appropriate last resting place for his voice: a beautiful wooden coffin, made in India, a place we’d said we’d visit one day for a second honeymoon, one day, when life wasn’t quite so mad.

  I can’t listen to the tapes. I tried once or twice many years ago and it all but destroyed me. Now I don’t dare. To hear Harvey’s voice is for him to live again. With the passing of time, ink and photographs fade. A letter becomes worn along the creases and eventually falls to bits, but the tapes are ageless, immortal, the voice unchanging, unbearable. It’s as if he’s in the room.

  To listen to those tapes is to summon up Harvey’s ghost. But he was a ghost even while he was alive. Each time he went away, it was a kind of death. He ceased to exist for me. He became an exercise in imagination, at best a disembodied voice. My husband existed for me only when I could hear him, touch him, hold him in my arms. When I couldn’t do that, I took his existence on trust. I had to. The joy of his homecomings was intensified by a sense that he’d come back to life, had justified my faith in his existence. Each time he came home safely, it felt like a small miracle. No, a big miracle.

  After Harvey died, I used to jump whenever the phone rang and my heart would pound with hope. It was months before I stopped praying it would be Harvey, my husband resurrected, his voice telling me he was on his way home, there’d been a terrible mistake… When Keir first spoke to me, I thought for a moment the miracle had occurred again, that Harvey had come home. The sensation passed quickly, but I was shaken. Memories were stirred – some good, mostly bad.

  Now Keir sounds like himself. I know his voice and delight in it. But when he’s not there, when I have only the memory of his voice, when I cannot feel (as I do now) the pressure of his body adjacent to mine, a small, fearful and familiar voice asks if he exists. If Keir doesn’t speak, doesn’t touch me, he becomes a ghost, like Harvey. Something I must will into existence as an act of faith. My faith.

  Keir’s shoulder is at the level of my ear now. I sense the slight rise and fall as he breathes. Perhaps he’s asleep… No, his arm moves as he turns the page of a magazine. If I angle my head slightly, I know my hair must fall onto his shoulder. My scalp senses the contact. It seems the most comfortable and natural thing in the world to incline my head further, to rest it on his shoulder and close my eyes.

  He says nothing but becomes very still. I enjoy what is for me a rare luxury: Keir is silent but I know he is there. I don’t have to believe it. I know.

  * * * * *

  After lunch in Inverness, Keir escorts Marianne from the restaurant to the car park. Cold gusts of wind scythe the air and she turns up the collar of her coat, her teeth chattering as she waits for him to load their luggage.

  ‘Have you travelled in a Land Rover before?’

  ‘No. Louisa and I tend to get the bus to Jenners.’

  He opens the passenger door. ‘There’s a step up. Quite high. Then there’s a handle… here.’ He takes one of her hands and places it on the inside of the door. ‘But the really useful one is here. Lean in.’ He places a hand between her shoulder blades and presses gently, indicating the direction she should bend, then places her other hand above the dashboard. ‘You can haul yourself in using that bar. When the road gets a bit bumpy – as it will when we’re on Skye – you can steady yourself using that. But otherwise I think you’ll find it a pretty comfortable ride.’

  ‘I can’t wait.’ She lifts her foot and pedals in mid-air, searching for the step.

  ‘May I?’ Keir bends, circles her ankle with his fingers and lifts her foot up to the step. ‘There you go. It’s higher than is convenient for a woman, even one as fit as yourself.’ He closes the door behind her and reappears at the other.

  ‘All right, Sherlock – how do you know I’m fit?’

  ‘Muscle tone. And you don’t get out of breath keeping up with me, for all you complain.’ He climbs in and fastens his safety belt. ‘You must walk a lot.’

  ‘I do. And I swim.’

  ‘Gym too?’

  ‘Sometimes. Louisa and I go together. It’s part of her eternal and entirely unsuccessful weight-loss plan.’

  ‘That’s where I’ve seen you before. I thought when we first met I knew you from somewhere.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘My voice?’ He sounds surprised.

  ‘Yes. You sounded – you sound a bit like my husband. Like Harvey.’

  The name hangs in the air between them for a moment, then Keir says softly, ‘The accent, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes. When we met, for a minute I thought—’ She breaks off. Tactfully, Keir turns the ignition key and puts the Land Rover into reverse.

  Two hours later, they stretch their legs at Kyle of Lochalsh on the north-west coast, in sight of Skye. Marianne’s spirits lift at the smell of the sea and the sound of squabbling gulls. As they set off again Keir says, ‘In a minute or two, when we start to climb, we’ll be going over the bridge to Skye. Beneath us will be a wee island, Eilean Bàn, a wildlife reserve. Gavin Maxwell ended his days there.’

  ‘The otter man?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘He’d approve of his home becoming a wildlife reserve.’

  ‘He’d maybe not be so keen on the bridge being built on top of it. Eilean Bàn holds the bridge up.’

  ‘I suppose the building work drove the otters away?’

  ‘Aye. But they came back.’

  ‘With their suitcases, no doubt. I wonder if Maxwell’s spirit patrols the island?’

  ‘I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts?’

  ‘I don’t. But just because I don’t believe in them doesn’t mean to
say they don’t exist. People used to believe the world was flat, but it wasn’t.’

  ‘That’s a neat way of hedging your bets.’

  Marianne sits up, alert and smiling. ‘We’re going downhill now, aren’t we? I can feel it.’

  ‘Aye. You’ve arrived. Welcome to the Misty Isle, Marianne. Welcome to Skye.’

  They have been driving for a few minutes and Keir is describing a view of the islands of Scalpay, Raasay and the mainland beyond when his phone rings. He looks down at the display briefly. Swinging the wheel, he pulls over to the side of the road and answers the phone.

  ‘Annie? Any news?’ He listens while a woman talks. Marianne hears his breathing change, then the sound of a woman sobbing at the other end of the phone. Keir utters a single word on a despairing out-breath: ‘When?’

  Marianne reaches for the door-handle and starts to get out of the car. Keir’s hand shoots out to restrain her. ‘It’s OK,’ he whispers. He speaks into the phone again. ‘Annie? Are you there? The signal’s not so good. Can you hear me?… Is your mother with you?… Aye, that’s good, that’s good… You’ll let me know then? About the funeral?… No, I’m on Skye just now. But I’ll be there… Och no, I’m fine – a few bruises, is all… Look, Annie, if there’s anything – Aye, I know. But if you need me for anything, anything at all… Aye, you too, pet…’

  Keir hangs up and tosses his phone onto the shelf above the dashboard, startling Marianne. He opens his door, jumps down, strides across the road and stands, shoulders hunched, his hands plunged deep into his jacket pockets, staring grim-faced out to sea. It begins to rain and he turns his already wet face to the sky.

  ‘Keir?’

  He looks back and sees Marianne standing beside the Land Rover, calling out, facing in the wrong direction. She gropes her way to the edge of the road and stumbles into a shallow ditch. Reaching out, her palms meet bare, vertical rock and she flinches at the film of icy water trickling down over the steeply angled planes of stone. She wipes her hands on her jeans and calls again, the wind whipping her voice away. ‘Keir? Where are you?’

  He jogs back across the road to her side and takes her arm, guiding her out of the ditch. ‘Sorry, I just wanted – I needed a bit of space. I knew this was coming. I mean, it was… not unexpected.’