For Valour (25 page)

Half an hour’s tab took me to a campsite beside a stretch of swirling rapids, randomly sprinkled with rocks, where two groups of seven in stern-rigged inflatables were paddling like crazy to stop themselves being tossed into the icy melt-water. The side of the valley rose behind them, vividly striped with green and rusty red, then topped with white.

While his sidekicks ran around on the bank in matching orange Helly Hansen gear, Big Al stood on a medium-size meteorite in an olive green parka and a kilt, waving his thumb-stick at them, like he was conducting the Last Night of the Proms. His ’tache had expanded into the kind of beard that any polar explorer would have killed for.

After ten minutes of this, I began a slow handclap.

Al turned, IDed his audience and roared, ‘Who invited you, Stoner? Didn’t you read the sign? It said “No Fucking Sassenachs”!’

I moved over to the bank. ‘There was another sign right next to it saying “No Fucking Campbells”, so it looks like we’re both in the shit.’

The rafters reached a strainer – a narrow rock corridor where the stream flowed faster and dropped four or five feet before cascading across the boulder garden. The paddle captains yelled urgent commands as they battled with the surging currents.

‘Dig! Dig!
Dig!
’

Both crews did their best to jump to it, but I could see that some of them were starting to wish they’d stayed behind their desks, within easy reach of the coffee machine.

Al leaped off his granite podium and came over to thump me in between the shoulder-blades. ‘Great to see you, Nick. We heard a nasty rumour you’d defected.’

I thumped him right back, but before I could say anything, the second raft cartwheeled against a stone pillar on the far side of the staircase, then broached. It bucked and reared and banged an anxious dark-haired girl into the froth. She flailed around for a moment and then disappeared. Her helmet bobbed back into view almost immediately, but she didn’t.

I threw off my Gore-Tex armour and dived in after her.

Fuck, it was cold.

I managed to remember which way was up, thrust my head out of the white water and attempted to carve through it with a chaotic combo of breaststroke and crawl. I felt like I’d been caught in a monster washing-machine drum with a couple of overexcited inflatable hippos for company.

I closed in on where I’d last seen the girl and spotted a spiral of what might have been weed and might have been hair below me, then a flicker of blue beneath it.

I kicked hard, arced down towards her and scrabbled around until I’d managed to hook my frozen fingers around the strap of her life jacket. Lungs bursting, I yanked her upwards, but lost my grip when I broke the surface and a rogue paddle smacked me behind the ear.

I went under again, arms and legs flapping around big-time, and now I really didn’t know which direction to turn. Highland-spring water could really mess you up when it was forced into your mouth and eyes and up your nose under pressure, at the same time as bowling you over and over and over until you didn’t care how the story ended.

The outside of my head collided with a lump of granite and the inside of it made a horrible echoing sound and then went black.

5

People talked a lot of bollocks about near-death experiences. Top of the list was seeing a man in a big white beard beckon you down a long corridor into a world of blinding light, or watching your whole life unfold in front of you, like a DVD in fast forward.

I’d been in plenty of contacts where every extra breath I took was a bonus, but I’d never been in a situation like this. Maybe I saw Anna smile her sad Abba smile, maybe I saw my boy reaching out to me. I couldn’t say for sure. But the next thing I knew was that a Jock in a big red beard was yelling at me from across the world’s most enormous parade ground.

It took me a while to stop shivering and start making sense of what he was saying.

First off, I thought he was ordering me to give him fifty more push-ups and threatening to put me on a charge if I didn’t do it double time.

Next I got the weird idea that he was awarding me the Victoria Cross, then taking it away again because (a) I was an idiot and (b) I wasn’t dead enough.

After I didn’t know how long, I realized I was managing to hang on to what Al was saying instead of just lying there helplessly as his words dribbled out through the cracks in my brain.

I was in the recovery position, wrapped in a foil blanket, sucking in air like an industrial bellows. My head pounded and my throat and chest burned as I did so, but I couldn’t get enough of the stuff.

I twisted onto my back and glimpsed another foil-wrapped figure stretched out a few feet away from me. A shock of dark hair fanned out across the heather around her head and an anxious medic knelt by her side. Gobs of bile-streaked vomit clung to the strip of coarse grass between us.

The chill air stung the bare skin below my hairline and above my right ear. I ran my fingertips over a ragged tear and they came away bloody.

‘Don’t worry about that,’ a voice said. ‘We’ll give you a couple of stitches as soon as we get you back to the centre.’

Team Orange had formed a close circle to provide us with shelter from the wind. When it came to raising the hypothermia-sufferer’s core temperature, every little helped.

Al began to swim into focus. He was standing over me with a tartan blanket round his shoulders, water dripping off his hair, his beard, at least three layers of fleece, and a very sodden kilt. His sporran was nowhere to be seen.

The veins pulsed at his temples as he scraped back his mop, and his face was like thunder. I guess I must have been dreaming about the medal. He was absolutely ballistic.

‘What the
fuck
was that about? This place is crawling with very,
very
experienced people whose job it is to make sure everything works, and that includes the health and safety piece. And you think it’s a great idea to drop in off the street and play lifeguard?’ He waved at the girl. ‘She might have died as a result of you blundering around in there.
You
might have died …’

He drew a deep, ragged breath. ‘And who’s going to pay for my fucking kilt?’

I looked up at him and tried to get a grip on my breathing. ‘Aren’t you supposed to give me the kiss of life or something? Maybe shine a torch in my eyes and ask me to count backwards from a hundred?’

One or two of Al’s lads had to turn away to keep their smiles under control, but the boss wasn’t amused. ‘I’m serious, Nick. That wee act of heroism might have been completely instinctive, but it was totally out of order.’

I sat up and shook the last of the river out of my ears. After a couple of goes the girl managed to do the same. She looked about twelve. Her skin was ghostly, but her eyes were bright. She spoke so softly that it took me a moment to register what she’d said.

‘You risked your life for me. Thank you.’

I smiled and patted her wrist, as you do when you’re old enough to be someone’s dad. Then I realized something was missing. I still had the spare mag in my left pocket but no longer had a chunk of metal digging into my small intestine. Shit. I must have lost the Browning during my close encounter with God’s washing-machine.

Team Orange took a couple of paces back as a Defender emblazoned with the AGS logo – one of the stretch jobs with a bench seat on each side running front to back – bounced off the road towards us.

I held out a hand so Al could haul me up. ‘I don’t know about you Jocks, but I reckon the swimming team could do with a brew.’

6

I’d never minded sleeping in ditches or wearing the same kit and smelling of shit and cam paint and feeling my toes stick together in my boots for weeks on end, but I couldn’t remember a shower that had felt as good as this one.

Al’s lads had bundled us into the Defender and taken us back to the centre, stitched and dressed the wound on the side of my head and handed us mugs of hot chocolate and shampoo and gel and fluffy towels.

I’d piled my spare kit on a chair, turned on the water and stepped into the cubicle. The trick was not to crank up the heat too fast, but to give yourself the chance to ease into recovery mode. I must have let the jets play on my neck, shoulders, chest and back for nearly half an hour, and by the end of it I felt like I’d had a full body massage as well as a wash.

Al looked like a new man too. I found him in the bar beside a roaring log fire with a slug of single malt at his elbow. Someone had found him another jumbo-size kilt and the freshly groomed walrus look was back in place. But there was a sadness about him too. Maybe the Glencoe thing seeped into your bones if you stayed too long.

He waved me towards a much-loved leather armchair and leaned in close as I sat down. ‘Sorry, Nick. I was a bit of a pillock back there.’

I’d been right about his mood. Light-hearted banter wasn’t called for right now. ‘No, mate. I’m the one who should be apologizing. It was your show. And a dickhead in walking kit should never try to hoick someone in a life-jacket and wetsuit out of an ice-cold river.’

One of Al’s assistants brought me another hot chocolate. I was drowning in it, but she was obviously taking the ‘no alcohol or caffeine’ instruction seriously. They both acted as vasodilators, accelerating blood flow to the surface of the skin when it should have been focusing hard on your vital organs.

We both gazed into the dancing flames.

I was the first to break the silence. I tapped the dressing above my temple. ‘I must be going soft in the head. I used to be able to make a pretty cold-blooded risk and reward assessment at times like that, but now, if a kid’s involved, I just leap in with both feet.’

He sipped his Scotch and rolled it across his taste-buds. Then he tilted his great hairy head. ‘Me too. Especially since Catriona got sick.’

‘Catriona? Al, I had no idea …’

‘You’ve not been around. And we haven’t broadcast it. Partly because it’s private …’ He hesitated. ‘And partly, to be honest, because I just don’t want to believe it … Cancer. She was diagnosed four months ago.’ He kept his eyes on the fire. ‘I must be losing it. Spend my whole life meeting every incoming round head on, now this happens and I’m running for cover.’

‘The girls?’ Mel and Elspeth were late teens, early twenties.

‘In pieces, obviously. Not that they’d let you see it. They’re a whole lot better at dealing with it than I am. You know how it is with women. They do useful shit and tell you what’s on their mind. I’m just a big fat inarticulate jelly.’

He finally turned back to me. ‘D’you fancy coming up to Arisaig for tonight? I could use the company. Cat’s halfway through her chemo at the Beatson, so she’s staying in Glasgow.’ He paused. ‘And I guess you’ve not come all the way to the Highlands simply to take a wee dip in our legendary spring water.’

7

We piled into the Skoda and headed north to Fort William, then west along the road that would take us to the sea.

Al was in the mood to talk, so I let him. My very old Jock mate needed to say some things out loud and listen to how they sounded. He didn’t need my input.

I wasn’t surprised that Catriona’s illness had rocked his world. They’d been together since the dawn of time, and family was everything to them. I’d always envied him the stuff I’d never had, but now I found myself being quite relieved that I hadn’t completely lost the ability to cut away when everything went to rat shit.

The sun began to dip below the hills as we skirted Loch Ailort, turning the ridges black and highlighting the ribbon of sky beneath the cloud with red and gold. For a moment I thought I understood why you might want to tell the rest of the planet to fuck off, and disappear to a place like this. And the loneliness you might feel if the woman you’d always counted on sharing it with might no longer be there to enjoy the view.

Fort Gillespie was a traditional white pebble-dashed house with a steeply raked slate roof, sheltered by the hill but high enough up it to look out over the beach to the islands beyond. You couldn’t get much further west than this on the UK mainland, and it felt wild and elemental, close to the edge of the world.

Inside it felt like the kind of place you’d never want to leave on a winter’s night, especially if you fancied antlers hanging on your walls, sheepskin draped across your chairs, and everything else in sight to match your kilt. Even the photo frames were tartan.

Al must have pointed a camera at his daughters every five minutes for their entire lives, but the stand-out shot was of Catriona, the spitting image of the girl Mel Gibson went to war for in
Braveheart
.

Al looked a bit sheepish when I came into the kitchen and spotted a sink overflowing with unwashed dishes. I got busy with hot water and Fairy Liquid while he dived into his fridge and produced a haggis the size of an RPG, left over from Burns Night. He brought out pots and pans and busied himself at the range. I peeled some potatoes, then made myself useful with the log stack and sparked up a fire. He unearthed a couple of candles and an unopened bottle of whisky.

We sat down in front of bowls of steaming mashed potato and some orange shit that tasted a whole lot better than it looked. I poked my haggis with a fork. ‘Remind me. What’s in this stuff?’

I knew he was watching me.

‘Food of the gods, my friend.’ He attacked his with relish. ‘Nothing better on a cold winter’s night, apart from a sixteen-year-old Lagavulin.’

He reached for the Scotch and popped the cork.

We raised our glasses.

The first toast was to Catriona and his girls.

The second was to Trev.

I frowned for a couple of beats. ‘Trev?’

He looked startled. ‘You don’t know?’

‘Don’t tell me, let me guess. All those Swedish words he learned have suddenly come in useful. He’s bouncing around in Stockholm with some gorgeous blue-eyed blonde instead of taking my calls.’

His face fell. ‘Trev’s dead, Nick …’

My surprise might have been manufactured, but my distress was still closer to the surface than I’d bargained for. ‘How? When?’