'Fuck fuck fuck,' she hissed. 'Did you see that?'
Her voice alarmed the creature. The tail twitched again, then slid away into the trees and disappeared with a rustle, leaving nothing but leafy patches of shadow and sun.
'Shit,' I said, lowering the camera and staring at the place where it had been, trying to make sense of the light and shade.
Next to me Sovereign was backing away, whispering in a shaky voice, 'What the fuck was it? What was it?'
'Sssh!'
'Joe, I want to go. Let's go.' She grabbed at my T-shirt, trying to haul me to my feet. 'NOW! Please, I want to go home.'
Well, that was the choke point, of course. For the Psychogenic Healing Ministries, the moment Sovereign came fleeing across the gorge, crying and stumbling and covered with dust, I was instantly elevated to most-hated-individual status. By the time I'd given up waiting for the creature to re-emerge and had gone after her, the posse had arrived. They were watching us from high up on the graffiti ledge, and when Sovereign saw her parents she raced towards them, crawling up the streambed, scraping her knees bloody, throwing herself, sobbing, into her father's arms. Benjamin stared at me accusingly over her head. As I climbed wearily up the last few feet Blake came forward and looked me in the eye.
'I am so out of patience with you, Joe,' he muttered. 'As soon as the mist lifts I'm taking you back to the mainland.'
So there I was, the social equivalent of dogshit, excommunicated to Blake's cottage, waiting for the weather to lift. But he wasn't getting his wish: by nightfall the mist was still there, the island still shrouded like a ghost ship, and I was stranded, lying on my bed, empty supper plate on the floor. Downstairs they'd mounted a guard – Blake and the Nigerian missionary – in case I tried another great escape. As darkness fell outside the window I closed my eyes, my fingers resting on the lids, and tried to replay the few seconds of rustling wood, the way I'd replayed the tourist's video time and again. How had Dove done it? I went through every imaginable Frankensteinian scenario: Dove in mad-scientist garb, galvanizing a shaved animal tail with an electric shock; Dove plotting in his lab over a cleverly engineered robot limb, maybe wrapped in meat. There wasn't an end to my imagination on this one.
At ten I heard them spend a long time going round the house, dragging furniture about. By eleven the cottage was silent, and when I went downstairs I found a chest of drawers pushed up against the back door, the Nigerian asleep on a Zed Bed next to it, Blake in a chair next to the front door, like a sentinel. I stood looking at him for a while, his chest rising and falling. He was clutching an iron fire poker to his stomach – he must have thought he might have to batter me. Me, half his age and twice his size. I held up my hand to say a silent goodbye, feeling a moment's pity for him – for his fear and for his ambition.
The drop from my bedroom window wasn't bad. I lowered myself to a dangle under the sill, then kicked off, landing OKish on the grass, my kit banging on my back. Outside, like a silent sign from the sky, I was doing the right thing: the mist was beginning to clear, leaving a cold, moonlit night. As I headed off, wire-cutters at the ready, the only sound was the waves crashing distantly on the beaches. From time to time, going alone through those woods, across the gorge with its ghostly piles of drums, I broke into a soft whistle to keep my spirits up. Dead girlie of me. There was an explanation for what I'd seen behind the tree, I just couldn't think what it was.
By midnight I was back at the place where me and Sovereign had stopped. The smell of the rotting pigs' heads was stronger than it had been earlier. I began to walk along the perimeter, flashing the torch beam into the trees on the other side of the fence and sniffing the air. Dove's land was very quiet, only a vague, vague squeak coming from somewhere deep inside, like the sound of rusting machinery moving in a breeze. The mine? I wondered. The old slate mine? I walked for more than five minutes, and must have been nearing the end of the gorge because I could hear the sea from beyond a bluff ahead of the fence. I thought about a decomposing body, about Malachi lying in the trees, his hands folded on his chest like he did in his prayers. I pulled off my sweatshirt, tied it round my nose and mouth, hauled the wire-cutters from the kit and went straight through the grass towards the fence, ready to go.
Like I said, the big thing with me is that I'm not a superstitious guy – nothing much rattles me. Which was why, as I got close to the fence and felt all the hairs on my arms and face stand up, bristling, at once, I paused, taken aback. I stared down at my hands, turning them over and holding them up so that the moon lit the hairs. What sixth sense had touched that off? Not like me – not like me at all. I peered through at the trees beyond the fence. No movement – nothing except the creak of machinery. And the wind had died to a breeze, so it wasn't that stroking my pelt the wrong way. Frowning, I opened the cutters, reached for the fence, and as the blades met, the answer came hard on the heels of the current, static electric field, you stupid fuck, a millisecond too late – five, six, seven hundred volts and fuck knew how many amps, spasming my pectorals and slamming my biceps up so hard that my arms shot out sideways, kangarooing me backwards across the rocks, slipping helplessly, my sandal strap snapping, the wire-cutters flying in a hot silver arc above my head.
SEE. Static electric field – makes your hairs stand up.
I lay on my back in the grass, like Scouser Tommy in army shorts, with my arms out to the sides where they'd fallen, only my eyes moving, tracking the clouds going across the stars and wondering about the heaven that half the world believes is beyond them. It's a warning, old boy, a warning for the very dense. My nerves are dying, I thought, and the idea made me huff out a breath of laughter – the first clue that I'd live. OK, I thought, not dying, but breaking – my first nervous breakdown. My first electric shock. It burns a path through you. A big path of burned meat that they never know about until they cut you open on the slab. That's what Finn reckons. That they can put a finger right through it and see which way the electricity went, just the way they can put a pen through a bullet path in a wall.
It was my left foot that came to life first. First my left foot, then a travelling, crackling wave of warmth – and now it was my left leg and the left side of my body. The fingers on my left hand flexed and I could feel my nose and ears twitch. Then, suddenly I could cough. With an effort I rolled sideways, on to my side, and spat into the heather, my right arm hanging like a length of dead meat against my back – like it had nothing to do with me. I raised my chin stiffly and looked around. I must have been lying on my back for a long time. Hours. The moon had moved and there was the beginning of a pink light in the east. Dawn. I wrenched my head sideways and stared over my shoulder at the fence. No warning. Military-compound gear and not a single high-voltage sign for the whole of the stretch I'd walked.
'Hoo hoo,' went something from the other side of the fence. 'Hoo hoo.'
I froze, all the hair on my body standing up like a cat's.
'Hoo hoo.'
With my good leg I treadmilled myself round on the ground so I was facing the enclosure. The trees were dark, harlequined in shadow. Above me, one of the pigs' heads, with its ever-moving halo of flies, looked down at me. I tucked my chin in and squinted painfully, arrows going up my neck. A rustle. A break of a twig. Then silence. I held my breath.
'Haven't they told you ... ?'
My pulse rocketed. I scrabbled round like a beached fish, flailing on the ground trying to face the direction of the voice. Someone was in there – a few feet inside the fence. I could see him: a pale, bloated shape down among the trees, low, like he was crouching. A pair of eyes moved rapidly in the darkness.
'Didn't they warn you about me?'
It was him. I knew, straight off. I could see a foot in a worn-out trainer and a white hand clamped round the handle of something. A weapon. Every instinct said I was in deep fucking shit. It was something about that froggy crouch – like he was thinking of pouncing. I thrashed like crazy on the ground, trying to get a response out of my body.
When nothing would move I lay back, panting hard.
'Didn't they tell you? Don't you know about—'
He broke off and there was a long pause. His breathing got louder, more congested, like an old man's, and I could feel his interest tighten and close on me. This is it, I thought, panicking. He knows who you are. He got to his feet. I tensed, expecting his face at the fence, but instead he went backwards, disappearing between the trees. His huge body moved heavily against the branches. There was a crack of twig and a faint rustle, then nothing. The world went silent.
With all my energy I forced myself on to my side and stared into the dark space he'd left, heart thudding like a train, wondering if I'd imagined seeing him in there. The rocks, grass and trees were motionless. After what seemed like for ever, when nothing in the trees moved, and I'd been lying there so long that it was like the world had ticked a degree or two further into morning, I took a deep breath and, with all the strength I could find, pushed myself clumsily into a slumped sitting position.
I sat there, blinking in the pink dawn, digging my good fingers into my right biceps, trying to wake it up. I looked to my side, down the long expanse of fence. Silence. Was there a gate in the fence to let him out on to my side? Was that where he was heading? My rucksack – fuck knew where that had got to, but my torch was lying on the ground about ten feet away, its dying beam lighting up the sparse heather. And there, glinting in the beam, the wire-cutters. I swivelled round, propelling myself on my arse, like a baby that hadn't learned to walk, scraping my legs in the rough heather. Wire-cutters. Get up, Oakesy, old mate. Do it now. Get the fuck up and get to them. I grabbed my numb right leg, moved it to one side out of the way and rolled clumsily on to my good left knee. 'Come on. Come on.' Somehow I got my left foot under me and straightened the leg, my right leg dragging uselessly. But I didn't have the strength or balance to get any further. The effort had half killed me and I couldn't get upright. I had to stay there, arse in the air, staring at my grazed kneecaps, swaying a bit, trying not to faint. Wondering whether to throw myself on the ground in the direction of the wire-cutters.
I saw him between my legs. Upside down and silhouetted against the pink sky. He crested the hill calmly, at his leisure, a huge shadow, like a mountain, blocking my vision. I had a moment where I couldn't move, where I was frozen, clocking all these details. He was massive, wearing something threadbare and filthy, and over the years he'd grown himself man-breasts. There was no strap-on tail dangling between his legs. But he was carrying an axe. Yeah, I thought, my leg going weak. It is an axe. An axe.
'Come on,' I hissed at my kneecaps. 'Straighten up, you fuckers.' But I couldn't. I'd lost it. I had to stay there like a fucking hairpin, swaying from side to side and shivering like I was drunk, while he came calmly up behind me. He didn't change his pace or run or bulldozer me, he just walked up to me and casually bumped into me from behind.
I couldn't stop myself: I went down, landing face first in the grass, my hands under my stomach, the sound of my nose crunching echoing through my head. A noise barked out of my mouth. 'Uhhh.' I lay for a second, head spinning, face mashed against the earth, a long rope of bloody mucus drifting out of my nose, like it was attaching me to the ground. 'Uhhhhohjesusuuh.'
He got down on his knees behind me and gently, methodically, manoeuvred his body so he was lying on top of me, all his weight on my back, breathing against my neck like he wanted to fuck me. I lay there, heart hammering, forcing myself to breathe in and out with his weight on me, too scared to move, waiting to see what he was going to do. But he did nothing, just lay there on top of me, in this weird, kind of companionable way, with his face turned sideways so it lay against my cheek. A strand of his hair fell down the side of his face, just in the field of my vision. It looked about a hundred feet thick.
I flexed the fingers on my left hand feebly. You can probably still move, old mate, I told myself. I clenched my mouth a few times, trying to get my jaw to click. You probably can. I swallowed the blood that trickled down the back of my throat. If I rolled my eyes back I could just see the beam of the torch. The wire-cutters were right next to it. On top of me, Dove stiffened.
'Whad?' My voice came out of me thick and loud, like I had a heavy cold. 'Whad you doing?'
'Your peace of mind,' he whispered. 'Remember your peace of mind, Joe Finn? Well, now I'm fucking with it. I'm fucking with your peace of mind, Joe.'
He pushed himself off me and I rolled sideways, lungs sucking up air, arms coming up convulsively. He grabbed the axe, and before I could even begin to sit up he was swinging it down, blunt side first. I made a weak grab for it, blindly, my left wristbone colliding with the head and getting a slippery grip for a second before he hefted it away and I dropped back, my hands bleeding, the world rocking and bucking all around me.
And that was it. Bang bang! Maxwell's silver hammer came down on my head. And, bang, bang, down went old Oakesy. Not dead, of course. But pretty fucking close.
11
It was three weeks before I got back on to Cuagach. I never stopped thinking about it, not once. All the time I was lying in bed, too weak to get up, half asleep, half dreaming about Dove's Beelzebub, I never once stopped thinking about how to get revenge on the gobshite. Turned out he'd given it to me good. He'd split a big chunk of my scalp away and fractured my skull. Not an open fracture, no bits of bone forced into the brain tissue, but bad enough – a three-inch-long hairline fault in the 'parietal bone', whatever the fuck that is. And, bad fracture or good fracture, he took out a large chunk of my memory too. What I remember about the first forty-eight hours is almost nothing.
Christ knows how I got back to the community. Probably Blake raised the alarm, came over and found me lying on my back in the heather where Dove had left me, flies circling above my face like planes in a stacking pattern over Heathrow. I've got flashes of being carried through trees, and of being so cold my bones were shaking: I remember the taste of blood too, and every five minutes puking all over myself (try getting the human stomach to tolerate uncooked blood: it just won't do it). I know that at one point I was taken somewhere freezing and dark and laid out like the dead on a stone floor for what seemed like fucking-ever while Blake and Benjamin argued nearby, their voices echoey, like we were in a tomb: Blake wanting to call the police on Dove – saying this was attempted murder – and Benjamin screaming like a girl that he wanted nothing to do with it: 'We should never have had a journalist on Cuagach in the first place!' Eventually someone – I imagine it was Blake – must have put me in the boat and got me to the mainland (he didn't take the card out of my camera – you never really know who's on your side, do you?), because the trusty lobsterman found me at six o'clock the next morning, lying under a blanket on a jetty outside Croabh Haven.
Later Lexie said, when she opened the door to find me standing supported by the lobsterman in the doorway, my left hand cupping the right like a dead animal, my head caked with blood, puke all over my T-shirt, the first words out of my mouth were 'Bolt-cutters, Lex. Insulated handles. I need you to get me some.'
She thought I'd had a stroke, seeing my face, and I've still got a memory of the Hallowe'en mask I saw when she held up a mirror to me: the right side of my face had slackened, like melted candlewax, and my right eye was hanging so loose I could see the red bottom of my eyeball. Sometimes that face comes to me still, mixed in with all the other nightmares. But I refused point-blank to go to the police or the hospital – I wasn't having the police coming along and arsing it all up before I'd had a chance to get back to the island – and over the next few days, whenever I had the strength to speak, me and Lex argued about it. They all ended as class arguments, just like we always had, her raging around the room throwing her arms in the air and mourning the upper-class husband she should have married: 'I don't believe this! You've never trusted the police because you and Finn grew up little criminals and you think we're all living in some Orwellian bloody dictatorship where you can't trust the authorities – and becau
se of this perfectly reasonable thinking, you're not going to report an attempted murder.'
'Lex—'
'I for one was brought up to respect authority. It'll come back to haunt you, Oakesy, not reporting this. Listen to what I'm saying. It will come back to haunt you ...'
She was far, far more pissed off with me than she was with Dove. The only time she stopped shouting was when she brought me food, or changed the sheets, or wiped the caked blood out of my hair and tried to tape together the two sides of my scalp. It was weird the mixture of affection and fury she lavished on me. On the second day – 2 September – she crawled naked under the sheets, her feet cold against my calf, and slid her hand on to my knob. I lay there in silence, my eyes closed, knowing I'd never get a hard-on in that state, and after ten minutes of lying there, neither of us speaking, she burst into tears and jumped out of bed, running out of the room and slamming doors. For the rest of the night I heard her in the living room, sobbing loudly – loud enough for me to hear it. Which, of course, I was supposed to do.
Even if I could've got out of bed I wouldn't have known what to say to her. I couldn't tell what I'd fallen in love with any more: Lexie or a particular black mini-skirt she was wearing the night I first met her. The mini-skirt, and the kind of distant look Finn got on his face when he saw her in it. I married her two months later – the bride and the Neanderthal are just coming up the aisle, the bride looks stunning in organdie, the Neanderthal has got his hand up her dress. Now my friends tell me they never liked her – now, not from the get-go. Cheers for the caveat, so-called mates. That night in the bungalow I lay there, staring at the ceiling, while she cried and cried. From time to time I heard her push open the living-room door. Probably poking her head out to check I was listening.