The Chessmen (12 page)

I suppose the band’s real rise to fame began with a bet.

Roddy and Strings had written most of the original material that Sòlas was playing at its gigs during fifth year at school. Like Lennon and McCartney, they were a formidable creative duo. But like the visionary force behind the Beatles, they didn’t much like one another.

There was an artistic jealousy, a constant competition to prove who was the more creative. And, of course, there was Mairead. Somehow she was at the centre of every conflict in the band, if not the cause of it. In this case she had engaged in a three-month fling with Strings during a period of fall-out with Roddy. The atmosphere both on and off stage had been horrendous.

But by June of that final year at the Nicolson the brief liaison with Strings was over, and Mairead was back with Roddy. Everything in the universe was in its proper place again. Except that Roddy and Strings could barely speak to one another without breaking into an argument.

The bet came about because although everyone agreed that the band needed a change of name before going to
Glasgow, it was impossible to reach unanimity on what it should be.

Sòlas was too comfortable, too soft. They wanted something more edgy, that would reflect the unique blend of Celtic folk and rock that was their hallmark.

In the end there were two front-runners. One Roddy’s, the other Strings’s. But no one was going to choose between them because it would have been like taking sides.

Roddy’s preference was Amran, old Irish for song. He felt it would take the band out of what he called the Gaelic ghetto and into the wider Celtic world. Strings hated it. His choice was Caoran, the Gaelic for those little pieces of peat that are the hardest and blackest, and burn the hottest. Roddy ridiculed it by saying its pronunciation –
kuuran
– made it sound like Koran.

The solution to the impasse came during the first week in June. We had all sat our Highers by then and were just treading water till the end of the school term, so nobody was bothered about going to classes.

Since the revelations about the
Iolaire
, the motorbike group had stopped meeting at Holm Point, and gathered instead at the Bridge to Nowhere, an old concrete bridge above Garry beach beyond the village of Tolastadh on the east coast, about twenty-five minutes north of Stornoway. It was the beginning, and the end, of the Road to Nowhere – both so-called, unsurprisingly, because they went nowhere. The bridge was built and the road begun in 1920. They were the brainchild of the then owner of Lewis and Harris, the entrepreneur and visionary Lord Leverhulme. He had
wanted to build a road that would lead all the way up the east coast linking Tolastadh to Sgiogarstaigh in Ness. But Leverhulme died before his grand plans for the islands could be realized, and the Road to Nowhere petered out very quickly into a rough track traversed ever since only by walkers.

It was one of those rare, delicious, early summer days when the wind was soft out of the south-west and the sky was broken by high white clouds that only occasionally masked the sun. Spring flowers shimmered yellow and purple and white across the moor, and the midges were kept at bay by the breeze. Of course, there was always something to spoil a perfect day, and in this case it was the cleggs. The little biting bastards were out in force among the long grasses. Horseflies the English call them, and they give you a real dirty bite, even through clothes if they’re tight-fitting.

We were all gathered on the bridge. About a dozen of us, drinking beer, scraping our names in the concrete, or just lying along the parapet sunning ourselves, fearless of the drop into the gorge below. The sun washed across the golden sands of Garry beach and out over the Minch, and I remember thinking there was something almost idyllic about it. The exams were by us, and a new, exciting future lay ahead. Escape from the island, the first chance any of us had had to spread our wings and fly. At that moment, anything seemed possible.

I lay with my eyes closed, my head resting on my folded blazer, drifting away into an imagined future. Which was when angry voices crashed into my idyll.

‘Okay! Okay!’ I heard Strings’ voice raised to an almost hysterical pitch. ‘You’re on. We’ll do it. Tomorrow.’

I opened my eyes, annoyed by the interruption, and swung my legs down on to the bridge. The others were all gathered at the far end where the Road to Nowhere snaked off towards the cliffs. I sighed and jumped down to make my way towards the group.

‘What’s going on?’

A grinning Whistler turned in my direction. ‘We’ve figured out a way to choose the new name.’

I frowned, surprised. ‘How?’

Mairead said, ‘Roddy and Strings are going to have a race on their bikes. To the blasted rock, and back.’

I wasn’t impressed. ‘That’s not very far.’

Rambo said, ‘It’s about two miles. It’s enough.’

And Skins added, ‘Whoever wins gets to choose the name.’

I found all their faces turned towards me, as if somehow seeking my approval. ‘Bloody stupid if you ask me,’ I said. ‘And dangerous.’

There were a lot of groans and faces turned away again. And Roddy said, ‘Who the fuck’s asking you anyway?’

Whistler and I walked the proposed course the following morning. It was another glorious day, and with the wind dropping away to almost nothing the midges were out in force. For the first part of the walk, as the road wound across the moor towards the cliffs, rising all the way, we were slapping our faces and necks and waving our hands around our heads like demented puppets.

The surface of the road here was rough. Tightly packed small stones, with moss and grass growing in between. Rocks rose away to our left, and to the right the land dropped by increments towards the shore, in turn smothered by bracken peppered by tormentil and scarred by peat banks. We rounded a bend and startled a clutch of grazing sheep, coats brightly slashed by green and purple markings, and they skittered away ahead of us.

‘I’m not going to uni,’ Whistler said suddenly, and I was startled.

‘Jesus! Why not?’

He shrugged. ‘Can’t be bothered.’

I stared at him in disbelief. ‘Christ, man, it wouldn’t be any bother at all to you. I sweat blood trying to pass my exams. You sail through them without even opening a book.’

‘So where’s the challenge in that?’

I was open-mouthed. ‘But what would you do?’

‘Stay here.’ He gazed off impassively across the sands.

‘Are you mad? I don’t know anyone that doesn’t want to get off the island. And there’s not a kid at the Nicolson who wouldn’t give their right arm for half your brains and the chance to get into uni.’

He shrugged again. ‘Fair enough. But none of them are me. And I want to stay.’

My mind was racing, trying to come up with arguments that would persuade him of the folly of this decision. ‘What about the band?’

‘What about it?’

‘Well, everyone else in Sòlas is going to go to Glasgow.’

‘So?’

‘So you can’t still be in the band if they’re there and you’re here.’

‘So?’

‘You’re not serious?’

He turned his head slowly and fixed me with his big dark eyes. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

‘Because you’re a brilliant flute player. Because it’s your life.’

He shook his head. ‘Nah. I can blow a whistle okay, but what use is it? And it’s not my life. Never has been. It’s Roddy’s band. Him and Strings. It’s their lives, not mine.’

I knew he was not to be argued with when he’d made up his mind about something, and so we walked on in silence to the first big bend in the road. The breeze stiffened, blowing away the midges and carrying a smell of fish and dampness to us on its leading edge. Fulmars dipped and shrieked above our heads, and we saw shags down on the water. Looking back you could see Garry, and beyond it the curve of Tràigh Mhòr, literally the big beach. Tolastadh Head and the village itself stretched out on the rise, treeless and stark in the sunlight.

The road dipped, then, before rising to the second bend. It was sharper and closer to the sea, which seemed a long way below us now, and we saw the coastline stretch away to the north, rising sheer from the deceptively tranquil azure of the Minch. The sky was streaked with high cloud, almost luminous in the morning sun, as if brushed across it by some impatient watercolour artist.

Not much further on, a short stretch of grass at the left poured straight over the edge of the cliffs into an almost vertical chasm, or
geodha
in Gaelic, that slashed down sharply into the rock. Peering over from the top of it, you couldn’t see the bottom.

I leaned over as far as I dared to look down. ‘Bloody dangerous this is,’ I said. ‘We should post somebody here, just so the boys are aware of it.’

The plan was to station us in pairs at the bends, and at the turning point at the end, just to make sure there was no cheating.

Whistler left the road, and started making his way down the south side of the
geodha
to try to get a better view of it.

‘Careful,’ I shouted after him. It was steep. I could see sheep on a narrow grassy ledge about halfway down, but nothing beyond that.

He waved his arm. ‘Come and see this.’

I picked my way cautiously over the grassy banks and rock until I could see what he saw. Household rubbish. Tons of it dumped over the edge, no doubt by the good folk of Tolastadh over many years. A skein of rusted metal, prams, bicycle frames, fish boxes, old nets, fencing wire. The sea had clawed out the bottom of the pile, but much of it was stranded halfway down, caught by clusters of jagged rock.

The sea was abnormally calm where it washed into the fissure, emerald green and clear as day. You could see the rocks beneath the surface, magnified, and simmering in
the current. And even this high above it, you could hear the sea sucking and sighing, its breathing amplified by the acoustic effect of the
geodha
, almost as if it were alive.

We scrambled back up to the road. Whistler nodded then. ‘Aye, we definitely need to mark this as a danger spot.’

The road beyond followed the line of the cliffs to where its builders had been forced to blast through a giant rock that blocked the way ahead. Part of it, twelve or fifteen feet high, had been left standing on the cliff side, all of its strata exposed, seams of red running through its broken surfaces, like a geological diary going back to the very beginnings of time.

This gateway to nowhere was to be the turning point. We stood in the gap blown through the stone more than ninety years before and saw how the spoil from it lay all across the hillside, a jumble of shattered rock nestling still where it had first settled after the explosion. And looking back, as the road curved away, we could see straight across to the distant peaks of mainland mountains so hazily familiar to generations of islanders.

‘You know what?’ I said. ‘This is crazy. Why don’t you guys just have a secret ballot? Majority vote wins.’

Whistler shook his head. ‘Roddy would never agree. He’d be scared of losing.’

Word had got around, and apart from the dozen or so regular members of the bike group another twelve or fifteen kids turned up that afternoon to watch the race. Everyone was gathered at the bridge. Someone had brought a can of spray
paint, and some of the kids were decorating the concrete parapets with their names. Roddy and Strings were hyped up and silently tense, focused on the race. There would be no problem distinguishing one from the other. Roddy with his bright-blue Vespa scooter, and the violent yellow of Strings’ machine.

Whistler and I were stationed at the second bend. Skins was on duty at the blasted gateway, and Rambo was standing guard at the
geodha
. Mairead and another girl were at the first bend. Curiously she had expressed no opinion whatsoever on either of the proposed names, which I took to mean that she probably favoured Caoran, but didn’t dare say so.

We heard the shout go up from the bridge, and the roar of revving engines, but we had no sight of the bikes until they rounded the bend. Strings appeared first, crouched low over his handlebars, totally focused on the road ahead of him. Roddy was just a few feet behind, swerving to avoid the dust and stones being kicked up by Strings’ rear wheel.

They passed me and Whistler and picked up speed on the straight stretch, engines screaming as they flew past Rambo. Then they vanished from sight. When they reappeared, on the return, it was Roddy who was marginally ahead, tyres skidding and spinning as they both changed gear on the bend. We retrieved our own bikes from the bracken and set off after them, Skins and Rambo not far behind us. Even before we got back to the bridge we could hear a loud cheer going up. Mairead had got back ahead of us, and everyone
was gathered around the blue and yellow bikes, voices raised in excitement.

‘What happened?’ Whistler said as we drew up beside them.

‘Dead heat,’ someone shouted.

And one of the other kids said, ‘They were neck and neck when they hit the bridge. No way to separate them.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Honour satisfied. Now why don’t we toss a coin?’

Strings wiped the sweat from a dust-stained face as he swung his leg over the saddle and tipped his bike on to its stand. ‘I suppose we might as well.’

‘No!’ Roddy was adamant, and still sitting astride his Vespa. The voices around him fell away to a hush. ‘There’s another way to settle this. We do it again. Only this time we time it. One after the other. It’s the only way to separate us.’

A girl called Dolina went delving into a pink knitted bag slung over her shoulder. ‘I’ve got a stopwatch. We use it for sprint training at the athletics club.’

‘We’re on, then.’ Roddy grinned his satisfaction, and looked to Strings for agreement.

Strings shrugged. ‘Sure.’

‘We’ll toss for who goes first, then.’ Roddy dug out a tenpence piece and spun it into the air. ‘Heads,’ he shouted, and everyone gathered around to see how it landed when it came down. Heads it was. Roddy grinned. ‘Me first.’

Rambo set off on his bike to the turning point to scrape a line in the track that each bike must cross, and to make sure that it did. Dolina stood with her stopwatch at the end
of the parapet, and Roddy manoeuvred his front wheel on to the line that marked the end of the bridge and the beginning of the road. We waited to give Rambo sufficient time to get to the blasted rock, and then there was a countdown from three that everyone joined in. Roddy revved and was off as Dolina pressed the start button.