May 2022, London
I’d spent one night in a shepherd’s hut built and owned by a holistic healer - who was in the process of being flown by emergency helicopter to Aberdeen for heart surgery at the unfortunate the moment I arrived - before deciding to drive the little white van into Stromness to see the music. I had, in fact, been in once already, but hadn’t known where to park, so had gone back out again. This time I went down the high street hemmed in by short grey buildings and tried to ignore whether this was the right thing to do or not by ignoring things said by people shoved into the walls of shops either side as I drove. I ended up at a concrete circle that looked a bit like a car park, since it had a bit more sky above and some abandoned trucks nearby, and so chose to land myself and the clunky white shoulder bone that was my van there.
Whenever I left that little van I worried about it, and wondered what it was up to: the van and I were alone together, usually. Leaving it meant, inevitably and invariably, that stories were lived that I was not part of. I once came back, for example, to a multi-storey carpark to find it had been a partaker in a midnight party, its sloping bonnet a makeshift sofa for those watching a neighbouring black flat top Jaguar get attacked with a hammer. A trail of shattered window glass and dented cans linked the two in what must have been one of more tumultuous evenings of their lives. The van, unscathed but embroiled, seemed rightfully ashamed; the Jaguar sensed glory had temporarily gone. The white van, it should be said, had been given to me by a now-deceased gardener with curly hair: Alan, who had a deep disdain of nasturtiums and firm fondness for tin foil. On almost every day of the year Alan could be found marching a wheelbarrow determinedly down people’s garden paths — except for two, on which he was instead transformed into a floating head behind the van’s windscreen as he tore down the glen road at high speed. A few moments later Alan would appear enraged upon someone’s lawn (whose or on which day nobody could ever predict), ripping at his curls with mud-stained fingernails and spending roughly three and a half hours screaming at the lawn’s owner from a distance whilst kicking up all their mown turf as fast as possible as they watched patiently from a window. This would usually go on until dusk, which was Alan’s cue to stop and, with trembling hands, unwrap and eat one of the sandwiches he always carried in recycled tin foil in his pocket, after which he’d lightly let the foil float to the gravel and drive home. This biannual event went for several decades without causing much of an issue for anyone or anything, except the lawns. Alan would always later, of course, offer to be hired to mend the turf and would occasionally accept, with bashful reluctance and plant-based morals, a Cuppa Soup from his employers, though nothing more. When he eventually died of melanoma originating from a mole that had been morphing on the back of his left thigh — a place unseen by any living soul, including Alan, for well over a decade or so — we all went to the funeral, and discovered, alongside the fact that I had for no knowable reason been bequeathed the van, that he’d once been a much admired professor of economics and a world-renowned expert on the indigenous dialects of northern Guatemala.
I suppose what I had done after parking was go down to the pier, but it’s impossible to remember why or for how long or what I did there. The reason being that the only moment that mattered was turning and walking back upwards towards the centre of town, because that was the moment I first saw Ian Sinclair. The drizzle was a wall and my feet were moving with all the weight on the front part because I was concentrating hard on removing a sway from my walk that had recently begun to unsettle strangers. The month before, for example, one man, a fast-talking new Welsh friend of my cousin’s who had the haircut of a Bayeux Tapestry character and discursive views on contraception, had apparently asked, whilst walking behind me one afternoon, whether I’d been born with spinal disfigurement or developed problems from wearing the wrong kind of shoes. When later relayed the observation by my cousin I was shocked by its perceptiveness: the Middle Aged carpet man was right: I had bought brown suede shoes with orange laces from a charity shop and worn them solidly for about two months before starting to get the sensation that something was wrong. It was whilst inspecting the soles by chance at a bus stop that I discovered one had an enormous heel and the other a very thin one, which gave me a stomach leaking sensation they’d been specifically tailored for someone in order to accommodate their spinal dysphoria and weren’t meant for me. And as I got onto the bus with a fixed stare that I hoped would distract anyone tempted to consider the regions below my kneecaps, my mind developed sullen dread regarding how I could remove the shoes that I was, at this point, reliant upon to successfully move through the day with, and about how I could go about correcting this short but somewhat confusing section of my life whilst carrying out that day’s necessary tasks.
I remember this particular afternoon in Stromness as though I’m looking back at a snapshot of myself — frozen mid-step, long black coat and hands crossed over in my pockets, watery smile wiped across my face — because a woman coach driver in a pub would later tell me I looked like Death, and this was the image I conjured up when she said it. A pale mid-March dusk was fading over the sea behind me and Ian was taking up almost the whole shadowed rectangular entrance to the Military Workers Club. His feet, slotted into glossy black shoes, were turned outwards with long pale calves enveloped in white socks leading out of them like wish bones from a Christmas carcass. Both socks, at some point or other, were halted by a pair of rigid knees peering out sternly from beneath the hem of a kilt. A black silver-studded military hat was perched neatly on prematurely greying hair and a snare drum, taught with pale translucent skin, hung on a leather strap and rested contentedly at crotch-level. Beside Ian stood an identical albeit miniature and more sombre version of himself: a twelve-year old, whose squat cheeks and foggy glasses gave him the look of one whose upbringing has been defined by long stretches of water and recurrent thoughts of supper. Since the two were, at that moment, to my mind, a pair of toy soldiers stuck in life-size plastic casing, I didn’t feel the need to move my eye-line away from their faces. And thus began a long suspended moment as I approached, moving in what I hoped was as un-swaying a line as possible towards the soldiers as they, in turn, stayed very still and watched me with slightly, now I think of it, unnerved stares. Ian later told me that once I was out of sight, he turned to his small companion and said “Smiling at ye, buey”.
That night, in town, there was no music. The Royal Hotel was yellow-lit. Three silhouetted bodies were hunched over on the wall outside, dipping and eating chips in reverential silence. The Flattie Bar contained rows of empty chairs with wads of fat red velvet pining the lack of thudding behinds. Aside from the Military Club, the only option for a pint was the square house-like pub down the high street with four bedrooms above and a hen party below. A man propping up the bar had hollow brown eyes, a taught Italian face and hands that moved with an alcoholic’s tremor over a wrinkled leather jacket he was rotating in the air. “I bought it in this market in London, right, and I was wearing it in this restaurant, and this man comes up to me and says: that’s my jacket. I tell him I just bought it, and he tells me it was stolen from him, and I says: I literally just bought it in that market. And when he goes my friend’s like: you know that was that actor right? And I was like— my face was like that — and she was like: yeah. And so I ran after him, and he told me it was leather and that it was tailor made for him on a film set in some town in Mexico or something, and so I was like: you should have it back mate, and he was like: no, it’s yours mate, keep it. But I’m selling it. I’m gonna sell it when all the folk come in for the music festival. Not for the money, like. Just to pass on the story.” But the hen girls in their lace and pink netting — one of them’s the coach driver who’s about to call me Death, and I can tell she’s the queen with her straight dark blonde hair and lidded eyes lagging over the rim of a round glass of rhubarb gin — are reluctant to let him in. One of the girls with glittery cheeks and a smoker's husk says “Which restaurant?” and the man replies “Neil’s” and she says “Neil’s what?” and the man inspects a splinter in his thumb whilst replying “Neil’s— Neal’s Yard” and then the coach driver leans over with manicured hands attached to a pair of bony elbows and shouts across the bar “Ye fucking stole it, Lucas. We all know you stole it, and you stole Davey’s duvet last week because ye’re a fucking bawbag”. And when I leave with the van, heading over pitch black moorland under the pale thread of the milky way, along the road that leads me to my little wooden hut waiting beside the shore, I can sense they’re all still there, the seven of them, in the sweating pub, with the man muttering apologies as he folds up the jacket and the coach driver snarling at him, and he and I both wearing clothes that seem to make other people angry.
They would turn up again and again, these people from the pub, crossing from behind a corner or disappearing into a doorway, on their way to or from work. And though I always saw them they never saw me: they were like ghosts from the pier, these islanders, whom I got to see only because I’d arrived too early for the music festival, whilst the veil between this and the real world was still thin. But the person I least expected to see, because I forgot he existed in any reality at all, was the toy soldier from the Military Club. In the Flattie that night — a belting wind having been shouldered as much as possible over at the site of Skara Brae, sea salt still tastable in the ends of my hair — I sat in a slump at the short end of the bar with my back to the window. I noticed the drum first, skin side up, sitting on the counter before a full half pint of beer. On the wood beside it a drawn down sleeve housed a hairless arm that lay thick and motionless. Ian had muggy blue eyes looking ahead at seemingly nothing much except the bottles lined up behind the bar. His back, which I came to realise would always be this way, led straight upwards from the stool. I watched his motionless mind for a while, then, feeling blurry and brash after about four pints alone, decided to interrupt it. Ian turned on his chair and took me in in a way that made me feel I’d never been looked at before. He slid the drum across the bar and I waited for a beat before giving it one tap. Ian’s face morphed strangely as he concealed a laugh, and then, without making any noise, he stood and walked over to stand quite close beside me, just behind my right shoulder. I noticed that, in Ian, each thought would take place before his body moved. It was as though he were always carrying around his plastic display case, an airspace with angles that constrained and constricted him wherever he went. He stood beside me with his rod-like back, picked up my right hand, removed a stick from his pocket and placed it into the open palm, then held and lifted up my wrist and shook it loose to let the stick bounce upon the drum to make the snare purr. I suppose people might have been looking at us at that point but the only thing I could take in was the way that when Ian looked at something he looked at it entirely, and was unashamed of the looking, and that he only ever lived, whilst I knew him, with what was going on in exactly that one moment, and I imagine he’s still probably doing that now.
It seemed inevitable, after that, that would leave the pub and weave a small part of our lives together without mentioning anything about it. Below, there was no light reflected in the sea from the town, just a slippery oil-black of water criss-crossed by boardwalks and greyscale boats bobbing all over like a flotilla of dead ducks. Ian led me to one boat somewhere down the middle and told me to get into it. This was the first moment, whilst I lowered one leg onto the darkened deck and soon after let the other one join it, in which I wondered whether I was about to die. Just to be sure, and so as not to ruin the moment, I said “am I about to die?” and Ian, with his back to me, legs spread wide and long back bent straight over as he did something with a rope attached to the pontoon, leant back to look at me under his arm and said “Whit ye on bout?”. Looking at his wide pale smiling upside down face made me at once both entirely sure this was the end of my life and reassured that nothing could be done now except calmly go out to sea. And so, as we set off sailing through the night, Ian directing a white sail and me sitting with my black coat wrapped around me, I stayed very still and wondered about everything held in hidden lair beneath our boat: the scuttled fleet of ships of Scapa Flow, U-boats standing upright like surrealist sculptures, viking tools tossed overboard, a pod of orcas mid-migration. And when I looked at Ian through the darkness, him looking determinedly into the lack of light beyond, we said nothing and moved silently through the air and I felt a deep desire for it all to be over.
Back on the shores of Stromness, sober and shivering, everything had changed. A winding chain of people formed a chasm that cut up the high street; noise hummed under street lamps; the air was dense with drunken panic: the chip van had arrived. Orders were shouted out into an envelope window containing two red-faced people with long ponytails and spatulas. A metal table laden with plastic red and yellow bottles stood dutifully within a lagoon of spilled condiments and soiled napkins. A stocky man had collapsed nearby and sat looking skywards with his mouth ajar, a dismembered burger resting over his knees. A couple were tipping up handbags and clawing at coins that were then slapped into the van’s yellow slot. Without discussion Ian and I segued under armpits and knocked into jean-covered hip bones to reach the Royal Hotel, then took two-stride steps up the sullied red carpet. We found ourselves, after scaling four floors, in a quiet world made up of closed doors. We played a game of listening for noises from the rooms either side and pretended hard not to realise that The Time had come. For what, neither of us could be entirely sure, but it was undeniably there, having arrived a bit prematurely and thus forced to hover anxiously somewhere behind us. At the end of the corridor lay a tiny window that was low to the floor and presented a view of nowhere else to go. We knelt down before it - the corridor shrinking now so that the roof fit neatly just above our heads - and watched the swaying swarm of people at the chip van below. Meanwhile, The Time caught up. It hemmed us into the wall with its bulk but we pretended not to notice. We stayed in identical positions: heads bent, cheeks at a distance, hands resting on the frame, calves stretched out long behind us. And just as The Time began to slowly wrap its large arms around our shoulders and ease us together a sound caused it to jolt into fear and immediately run away: “Let’s hope all your prayers are answered” it said through a croak and a laugh. And realising that we were alone we turned to see the sound’s emitter, a man with fumbling keys and drunken jaw, and, noticing that The Time had disappeared to find another couple, we blushed and gave no reply.
John Rae, the benevolent Orcadian explorer, lies beneath a replica of himself installed in St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall made of thick, dark white marble. His laguid arms prop up a resting head, his long legs are wrapped nonchalantly about one another, his waist curves underneath heavy clothes. I imagine the real John Rae, the man who walked and walked and then died alone from an aneurysm in a small London flat, huddled in bones and dust beneath his representative made of stone. I realise I’ve spent a few timeless hours standing in front of the sleeping statue whilst thinking of nothing other than Ian Sinclair. When the van and I returned to Stromness for the third time the veil had been well and truly tossed into the sea and the music festival had begun. A clattering pipe and drum band flooded the air though was nowhere to be seen. A lurking glacier, they drifted through narrow streets, nobody knowing which corner they might suddenly appear from until it was too late and pedestrians were forced to pin themselves one by one to the walls to allow the immense sweeping tartan parade to pass. Sounds and saliva ricocheted off the sides of the island and found nowhere to root themselves but within the helpless watching bodies, of which I was one. I saw the miniature bespectacled soldier first, getting a sock thrown at his face by a school friend, before I saw, just in front of him, the Drum Major. Ian’s drum, the one I had touched, rested on his kilt whilst his sticks, one of which I’d held, soared into the air to land in strange unison with about fifteen other pairs. Watching his furrow of concentration, his long back radiating silent instructions to the pack behind him, gave me a sensation familiar to the one I’d experienced with the spinal-correcting shoes. He, fortunately, did not see me, though as he swept past, so close I breathed on his shaven cheek, this became the only thing I wished had happened.
There was nothing to do but hope The Time would find us once more. It had clearly had much work the night before and was most likely taking a short break after many first night festival encounters and a few morning ones too. I was in the dark square pub again with memories of the hens and the homeless man, whom I felt might materialise into existence before the mahogany bar at any moment. Drinking beer for lack of anything else to do I gradually came to recognise the hunched fiddle player in the corner of the room as childhood school science teacher, Mr Clark. Bespectacled Clark, greyer now and suiting the gloom, seemed uninspired by my re-introduction, and became somewhat angry when I relayed to him the memory of his killing my two pet millipedes after his being designated their carer during the summer holidays. This was his time to live out his role as the revered musician he’d clearly always wanted to be, and his star turn was not to be ruined by an ex-pupil. But it was during the millipede story, which I told leaning over the shy adolescent tin-whistle player, in which I had an odd sensation Ian was about to enter, which he did, altering everything again by tapping me lightly on the shoulder and telling me we had to go.
Ian’s house sits in shades of yellow naivgated by a stream of scuffed brown carpet. I hovered by the chipped white bannister in the hallway chewing my thumbnail and listening to noises he was making on the floor above. A twinge somewhere in my chest made me want to leave immediately but for some reason nothing happened. Sensing I had time to kill whilst Ian made the unknown noises I felt my legs moving and soon discovered myself standing in a living room unchanged since the 1950s. I took in the clothes horse with broken arms supporting multipack pairs of overly dried blue boxer shorts. Then, on the opposite windowsill facing out to sea, a large decorative dagger balanced on a stand. I bent to look at the small framed photograph beside the knife that showed Ian, no older than seventeen, with four other young men, all in beige uniforms. One had a cigarette in his mouth and was wince-smiling with the drag. Ian, at the other end of the line from the smoker, looked excited to be included in the group. And then the real version, I could sense, had entered the room and was standing behind me, beside my right shoulder with a soldier’s silence, just as he had done in the pub. Without turning and containing the vague panic that’d begun somewhere around my knees, I heard myself say “What’s this?” and took in the quiet reply of “Knife”. I heard my wavering voice say “What for?”, received “got if off Ebay”, and so followed with “Were you in the army?” to which I got “Aye. Was in Iraq”. I then found myself moving to the fireplace to touch the mantlepiece for no reason at all and felt, all the while, Ian taking in parts of my body from his patch on the carpet. To dismiss the knowledge I said “oh” whilst picking up a small wooden crest showing a stag's head, and followed with “I know what this is”. “I know ye do,” Iain said without moving. “We have this crest on our front door” and he replies “I know”. “How?” I ask to which he replies “Because I looked ye up”. “And what did you find?”. “Found out that that’s your family crest. And where you live. And that you’re pretty posh”. And I felt long stretches of brown carpet between us as his face broke into a malicious smile and he scuffed the sole of his heavy boot on the floor.
Moments later we were going to the place to which we were meant to be going, clambering over ragged rocks, me traipsing behind Iain as we squeeze ourselves sideways between two high planes of cliff face with the ocean crashing beside us. And it’s now I get a rush of fear that perhaps the dagger has come with us, and a flash of wondering as to why I seem to want things desperately and then almost instantly regret the wanting. But we are soon out of the grey rock and into the wider grey of the sea and the sky. Light spreads itself wide in all directions. And it’s now I notice how beautifully and naturally Ian blends into this pale surrounding, and in noticing this I also pick up a sense of his desperation to touch me. Turning away to postpone the moment I now dread happening - The Time having sent us on our way with satisfaction of a task well delegated - Ian suddenly seems annoyed and says “Well it’s not this I come to show you” in a flat tone, then moves with ease along another thin rock-corridor. The sea is fighting to pull us into it now and the wind whips in attempts to help whilst I dutifully follow to emerge onto another part of where the cliffs end and open and leave us with only pummeling waves beyond. We stand on this small plateau and I see Ian is looking at something behind me. I sense I should do the same so turn to find myself facing a rock face twenty feet high and covered in carved symbols. “Never took anyone here before” Ian says and moves towards me. “Nobody comes to the naming rock except those who know” he continues, and to this I feel ill underfoot and decide to focus on the engravings. They are names, endless names etched in over hundreds of years: people immortalising themselves in stone as they’ve always done. And immediately, strangely, one stands out from the thousands: ‘Ian Sinclair’ I say, pointing high up to the white chalky letters squeezed into a space. And Ian’s approach towards me is halted for a moment as he frowns and says “That’s not me,” and I say “Then who?” and he frowns more and says quietly “Must’ve been dad. But he never said”. And after a long silence, the sun dipping fast, us standing close with nowhere else to go, I feel the material on my shirt move and realise Ian has pulled my back close into his stomach on the tiny portion of cliff ledge. And so it is now that I choose to say “I can’t” and we stand, him holding me tethered to the wind-slapped rock. “Why not?” he says; “Just can’t” I say. “Why?”, he repeats, and as soon as enough time has passed with me saying nothing I feel an electric current shoot down my spine and realise that the sensation is coming from Ian’s anger and his grip. And as we stayed in that position for a few minutes, the water chopping up the rock below us, I wondered how to escape this situation that I had yet again both followed someone and led myself into.
Days went past as the festival continued and I moved about within it, waiting, now, to leave the ghosts from the pier behind me for the mainland. And as the van and I finally lined ourselves up to park on the ferry that would lead us away from Stromness, I sensed steps behind and saw Iain pacing down the boardwalk, back straight, mouth slack, eyes fixed ahead. He stops on the other side of the van and rests the tips of his fingers lightly on the bonnet, the bonnet that was once a makeshift beer-holder. “When will I see you again?” he eventually asks. “I’ll come back in twenty years”, I say. And Ian, looking out over the water, mutters “that’s what everyone says” and keeps that immensely still position as he follows with “You’re not the only one”. And we stand like this for a while. And it’s only when I’m back on the mainland, driving over Bonnar Bridge, that I realise I can’t move the gearstick and that the traffic behind me is closing in and that I am panicking as I realise the van is breaking. And as it starts to die, lights flashing and engine sputtering, I think about Alan, and whether he’d be disappointed or glad that his van’s life ended as unexpectedly as his own, and whether the man in the pub ever did sell the leather jacket, and whether the shepherd’s hut’s owner will survive the Aberdonian heart surgery, and whether Mr Clark was always dreaming of music whilst teaching us chemistry, and whether John Rae is satisfied that his tale is told by marble in a cathedral. And it’s only later, when the van is gone but I am home again, long after the rosy-cheeked mechanic told me that the gears had been tampered with and that the van’s fate was to live out its final days in a car graveyard, it’s only some months later, in short, when I’m back in Inverness, when there’s a week long heat wave in June, that I’m getting into the peat-watered river to swim and notice there’s a fresh cut in the wood of the my familiar bent Scots pine whose branches hang low and crooked over the water. And when I look closer at the white gashes in the bark, runic and cryptic, I realise they spell out a name: a name I know. And I remember, in that moment, that Ian lives in the moment for whatever he does, and that it was his father’s name on the rock and not his, and that he will come to make sure the bark doesn’t eradicate his memory as it warps, and that he may make sure it will be less than twenty years until we meet again.