These Demented Lands

Contents

Cover

About the Book

About the Author

Also by Alan Warner

Dedication

Title Page

Epigraph

Part One: First Text

First Night

Second Night

Third Night

Part One: Second Manuscript

Saturday the Fourteenth

Sunday the Fifteenth

Monday the Sixteenth

Part Two: First Text

‘Some of them . . . 

Part Two: Second Manuscript

What must have . . . 

At nine o'clock . . . 

Wednesday the Eleventh

Another summer came, . . . 

Thursday the Second. Moon in Capricorn

Friday the Third. Dawn

The letter

Dearest pa-pa . . . 

Acknowledgements

Copyright

A young woman makes landfall on a dark Scottish island where nothing seems real – is she alive or dead, in some form of purgatory or even Hell itself?

Alan Warner is the author of five novels:
Morvern Callar
,
These Demented Lands
,
The Sopranos
,
The Man Who Walks
, and
The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven.
In 2003 he was chosen as one of
Granta
's twenty Best of Young British Novelists.

Morvern Callar

The Sopranos

The Man Who Walks

The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven

For Mark Richard,

Michael Ondaatje . . . thanks.

Juan Carlos Onetti (1909–94)

‘Multitudes of people! Walking up the hills!'

In the Name of the Father
, Black Grape

 

‘We went down into the waste, and accordingly began to make our toilsome and devious travel towards the eastern verge.'

Kidnapped
, R. L. Stevenson

I GOT NEAR
the island; Ferryman was about to ask me to see a ticket when the boat started to sink: ‘If it's the return tickets yous have got, best swim for it,' Ferryman bawled then he jamp over the side into blackwater.

It was neardark. Since Ferryman'd cut the outboard engine all was silent; could hear the loose, metal lampshade on the single bulb above the Boat Chandlers at Ferry Slipway. The lampshade was clattering in any gusts before they reached.

A low roll of cloud had circled the island and seemed to hold the luminous dayness in its depths and bulges. You could see the braes: the bare rowans, the dark spruces, larches below the cloud then the true mountainheads above, behind the five silhouettes of the passengers facing me who tilted gently to one side. Water breached the gunwhale and busily began filling the bottom of the boat.

The blonde kiddy with the sticking plaster over her eye who'd been staring at me since Mainland (apart from suddenly turning to spew then spit over the side); the telly-aerial repairers who'd been so mortal and rackety; the fat man with the cigar and huge metal-looking crucifix:

All went straight into silentness.

Big fat man shot up, ‘Car ferry's wake's gone and sunk us.' He hauled his crucifix and chain above the baldiness then tossed them over the side; the tip of his cigar glowed brighter as he rose up by the oarlocks, rocked the boat then stepped overboard. I turned away from his splash and saw the huge black ship vanishing into the dark Upsound, could still read the words on the stern:

I looked down and saw the ghostly-pale glow of the petrol tank – no more than a plastic jerry-can – that in eight months' time I would be reminded of by a catheter bag (the drop petrol in the bottom like thick, lazy urine).

I savvied right enough that the petrol tank would keep me afloat so, with the telly-aerial repairers sat like daft apeths, I stepped forward and drew a real squeal from the blonde child as I bunched her ribbons and ponytails in both my hands and hauled her up to chest level, threw a left arm round; she kneed me on the left bosom as I swung, huffed out a puff and grabbed the petrol-tank handle with the right hand – in two

steps we were up

on the transom, leaping, then,

for the split second,

soaring

over moonless nightwater,

with the blonde hair of the child in my arms,

the brightest thing in such

darknesses.

When you first hit freezing darkwater there's a strangeness and instant when you feel and see nothing, then that liquidy seep in through the most porous bits: top of jeans, front of whatevertop, slowly, slowly down your back under the air bubble of your jackets (jacket's . . . jackets': do you need these comma things??) jacket's shoulders . . . it's certain you do feel the pull of that new
dread
weight your clothes are starting to become.

When my wrecked boots hit water I was smiling and the surface shocked into my face. I'd misjudged the strength of that long-orangey-rubber-tube-thing connecting the petrol tank to the outboard and it really breenged us round twisting my arm behind my back. I shivered, opened eyes: the splash had turned the little blonde girl's (girls?) hair jet-black. I tried to yank the jerry-can; the sinking boat tugged back at me then the cap popped off freeing the petrol tank. I let go the handle to try turn myself; I just let go for a jiffy, but, with a sure movement, together, the half-blind child in my arms and I sank beneath the nightwater.

I opened my eyes in the static and rumble. A landscape of colours was glissanding on the lunar seabeds way below; my black legs slowly kicking so thin in silhouette. I hugged that wee girl tighter to me. A constellation of pinkish bubbles rose up under my feet then drifted, swole, each bubble's angle reflecting a diamond nova from both its north and south pole.
In the furthest distances of this universe the rising planets and blue stars from seabed geysers, a huge surface of tiny bubbles, wobbled under us lit by deepest flarings below: a coral reef gone insane in the colours of these killing seas.

Just then Ferryman's boat sank – away there – past us, its bow pointed deaddown and you saw the gilt, hand-painted lettering on its stem flashing a last time in the wildlights before

the black hull darted into a bank of turquoisey bubbles, the orangey fuel pipe, trailing behind – straight up as a plumb line.

Though it forced us deep towards those seabed burnings, I tried to heave-ho the little girl up: shove her surfacewards. I was sorry for our death . . . I'd heard around that the drowning could be no so bad but there was that book that had scared me: the
Pincher Martin
book; the book of drowning. Just when I was getting the All Dramatic I felt a trickle of cold on my wrist in naked air, rolled and was on the surface. Bruised-blue sky above was now dark though I was fairly positive there was still a little light when we'd gone under; now was nightimeness so I brought the kiddy onto my chest. The fuel tank was just bob-bobbing beside, I grabbed at it and then the bright and coloured water around us just flickered and switched off like swimming-pool lights.

‘What was it?' she whimpered.

I goes, ‘I don't know, darling.'

The sticky-on patch had come away in the salt water and a dead eye, like a green jewel of frozen phlegm on some winter pavement, stared down at me from her beautiful little button face.

By holding the handle of the jerry-can to my side and kick-kicking, we curved a shaky course in towards the lonesome single bulb above the door of the Boat Chandlers at Ferry Slipway.

Ahead, a minute point of tangerine light flourished then dulled; through the perishing cold I creaked a nervous smile. Big fat man was grimly wheezing shorewards, the cigar still miraculously alight in his mouth.

‘Ahoy there,' I says.

He spoke out the side of his mouth, ‘Saint Moluag challenged Saint Columba to a race, from Mainland to this island: first one to touch the land. So they spun across in their coracles and Saint Columba was holding a good lead close to this shore; Saint Moluag took up his axe, chopped off his little finger, hurled it onto the island shouting, “There,
I
touched the shore first.”'

He clached out a snigger then sucked on his cigar. I thumped the petrol tank over to him, ‘Kick in on this and we'll race you.'

‘Race him, race him!' the wee girl was bouncing, flooding water over my bosom. Big fat man took the cigar stub out his mouth and dropped it into the spout of the jerry-can. A ten-foot spew of flame jamp out the cap-hole propelling the fat man furiously towards the shore. He screamed, the orange
fountain of light – for a second – lit up other heads, clutching seat-cushions or other stuff, kicking in shorewards to Ferry Slipway.

A patch of burny water sailed away west, upsound, before withering into a shape at the back of my mind. Then I saw it: an echo of the flames up there above the cloud – the ancient and dour light of campfire, high on the ben sides.

Dripping sodden-wet, still holding the child, I booted in the door of the Boat Chandlers and one of the telly-aerial repairers lunged towards me holding out a bottle of Bunnahabhain. I shook head no and let the child down to the ground, ‘Lights. I saw such strange lights out there, deep in the waters,' I says.

‘The Phosphorous Beds,' the Harbour whispered behind and sort of nodded to the kid at my leg. ‘They dumped hundreds of tons of phosphorus bombs in the Sound after the war; last few years they started burning up. Who knows what else's down there. Those colours: divers won't go near; the canisters sometimes come up in lobster pots on fire . . . you see a streamer of white smoke whipping above a well-decker.' The Harbour turned away, spoke even quieter, ‘Sometimes, burning phosphorus canisters wash up on the beach, and
sometimes
kiddies find them, you know?'

I nodded. ‘Did all get safely ashore?'

‘No sign of the Devil's Advocate, Ferryman's way out in the dinghy and we've phoned for Nam the Dam to do a fly-by in his chopper.' The Harbour accepted the whisky bottle offof the redhead telly-aerial repairer.

‘Be as well with yon Argonaut and his line,' the redhead says.

The tall one from amongst the telly-aerial repairers squinted at the redhead who explains, ‘Argonaut's some kind of crazy salvage-diver-cum-Armada-treasure-hunter from across the island.'

The Harbour says, ‘He's a body-finder too; anyone drowns in these waters it's aye Argonaut who can find where the bag of bones'll wash up or where the currents'll have it lying in fathoms.'

The redhead goes, ‘Sails round the islands in a kayak with all these words from the bible writ all over.'

‘He moves between the islands. Big ships have sighted him in his kayak miles out to sea,' The Harbour tilted back the bottle so its base near touched the ceiling.

The tally one asked, ‘Who is that fat guy, some sort of a lawyer or a religious freak, or what?'

The Harbour goes, ‘Nah, nah he's a pape from the church. He's the Devil's Advocate: decides who should get to become a saint and who shouldnty and all yon; wandering hills with his tent, researching into saints; canonisation it's called, trying to find out dirt in the past of already-saints . . . he's sort of an investigative journalist for God.'

‘Well if he's on the ocean bed getting his eyes ett out by crabs, the church'll be down on this ferry like a shot . . .'

‘Shush!' I snapped at the Tall, jerking my head down at the child.

‘Is big fat man drowned or all burned up?' the kiddy says.

‘That Argonaut,' the Harbour smirked, ‘He's pulverised
out the mind on the drugs. He goes down diving on acid, to fix a line on those bodies he finds, and conducts a wee religious service with a flare.'