The part about the island.
There was a phone box upslope from the youth hostel. It stood out on the hillside, a dab of red against the greens and greys. It was the same colour as my bike panniers, waxy red and waterproof, that had carried everything I needed over the last weeks, through the wind and rain.
That was a good feeling. Striking camp, slotting the panniers back on the bike, being on your way. And so was rolling on and off the ferries ahead of the cars.
You watched an island approach, like this one with its terracotta cliffs and a rock pillar rising from the waves. The shoreline slowly resolved: a boatyard, a hotel on the pier, a distillery. White and grey pebbledash houses with laundry lines outside, clothes snapping in the wind.
The ferry bumped against the tyres of the pier, the ramp clunked down. The line of wet tarmac stretched out ahead, glowing when some light came through the clouds. Just a single lane with some passing places for cars, but there were none. This island was wilder and emptier than the others.
So I didn’t expect the phone box to be in use, but I could see someone, two people, through the glass slats.
Can you help me?
She had an old-fashioned raincoat and hair with a white strip in it.
It doesn’t take my money.
He had dreadlocks and glasses that weren’t in good shape: taped-up, beaded with rain.
I realised the problem. It was one of these payphones where the coin only dropped once the call had been answered. She dialled and waited, then got through and the 50p chunked down into the box.
*
She was Mara, from Italy; he was Steve, from Belgium. They told me not to check into the hostel: it was full of rules and stinky, drying boots. I should come with them to the beach down there. There was a stone building, a bothy, where you could stay for free, or else pitch a tent in the paddock outside.
They liked it so much here that Mara had been trying to change her ticket back, calling the airline, but kept getting cut off. This had resulted in some tension, since Steve clearly did not enjoy fishing coins out of their fabric purse and dropping them in the British Telecom box.
We walked down the track to the sea, me wheeling my bike alongside. She said that Steve didn’t fly. He was like – she didn’t know the English word – but like a Taliban with these things. Steve said he liked to get high, but not with fucking EasyJet. He was going to hitch back to Italy, ride with truckers through the Channel Tunnel – he’d done it before. Not budget airlines, that wasn’t travelling.
Fancy, he said, fiddling with my panniers, looking inside.
Steve was a bit younger than me, Mara a bit older. No need to pin things down too exactly, but it was before Obama, it was Bush and Blair. It was a time before smartphones – just. My photos from the trip were taken on a disposable camera.
Most are just of the bike, with the Revolution Cycles logo, a red cog, posed against various things – a cliff, cove, a standing stone – with no one in frame. But then Steve and Mara appear, sitting at the bothy fireplace, leaning back over armchairs to look at the camera.
Steve is pale with an orange tint in his dreads, holding the camera’s gaze. Mara is darker, more Mediterranean. Though she didn’t like the sun, she said, and loved how overcast it was here all the time. She has the Susan Sontag stripe in her hair and a book in her hand.
Mara was reading the Brontë sisters and loved how they’d never really gone outside, making up all those stories without leaving their cottage. She also loved Keats and Italo Calvino (he was from Liguria, like her). And Robert Louis Stevenson and Melville, Borges, G. K. Chesterton and Robert Walser. You didn’t often get a list like that. She seemed from a slightly different era.
I wondered how she could she concentrate on all that 19th-century prose, given how much they smoked. It started over morning coffee and went on all through the day, Steve carefully lighting and then stubbing out his thin joints, storing them in a matchbox. Rationing out the tobacco, burning the lump of hash, crumbling it in.
Steve mostly read the bothy visitor’s book, reciting bits out loud to us. There was a long-running battle between those who wanted to keep the locations of these stone shelters secret, and those who wanted a more social democratic approach. Someone had crossed out the GPS coordinates of another shelter; someone else had hit back a few weeks later: Which mean-spirited pedant did this? Shame on you elitist curmudgeon! What was a curmudgeon? I tried to explain. It’s you Steve, Mara said. Actually it’s you.
The photo also shows horns, skulls and whalebones above the fireplace that they tended all day when it rained, stoking it with folded pine twigs, boiling the blackened kettle and talking about the village where they lived. A place high up in the Apennine mountains, a very old settlement, but almost deserted now – I must visit.
Mara drew the horns and skulls. She was always drawing things in her journal. Not bad, but stoner doodles and dream-catcher patterns tended to encroach from the margins.
In the corner of the room is Steve’s didgeridoo. He would sometimes take it out in the evenings, giving an impromptu performance, complete with huffy circular breathing, for whoever happened to be there.
So what do you do in this village then? asked one of the ‘Gore-Tex people’ (Steve’s phrase) who would pass through for a night or two with their hi-tech gear. Steve responded that they did nothing, they tried to be as lazy and unproductive as possible to subvert the capitalistic economy.
We look after the plants, Mara said. Tomato, rucola, amarena. We get in wood for winter. Sometimes Steve snowboard to town for flour and we make a cake.
The village was called Tonno, which sounded like Tuna, but actually it was related to tun, an old Celtic word that meant settlement. Steve and Mara were into ancient European sites, standing stones and sacred places – that’s why they’d come here. And me?
I was homeless. No, that was an exaggeration. But I had moved out of one place and could only afford another after the summer, when the festival was over and the rents came down. So I was cycling through the islands for three weeks, killing time, using these pages from a road atlas photocopied in the city library.
Killing time? Steve turned the phrase over.
The copies came out a bit light, so I’d been tracing the outlines of the islands in pen as I went. The crinkly inlets, islets, the skerries – it was an endless embroidery. Oban to Islay and Jura, then Colonsay and all the way up the Outer Hebrides with the wind at my back: Barra, Benbecula, South Uist, North Uist, Harris, Lewis – then all the way across to the north coast and here. The roads were clear enough, but what my maps didn’t have were contours or any sense of gradient.
You’ve been using this? Steve laughed.
They weren’t like the beautiful Ordnance Survey maps that the climbers brought, and which we pored over in the firelight. All those stacked contour lines, crimping at streams or watersheds, getting the famous ranges down in two dimensions: the Cuillins, the Cairngorms. Here Steve found common ground with the Gore-Tex people – a love for heights and being in the mountains. He would take himself off into the Alps for weeks at a time, Mara said – it worried her.
The climbers could read these stacked brown lines so intimately: here was an exposed scramble, a famous step, a knife-edge ridge. It was like returning to a favourite line in a book, the way they spoke about them. This route was ‘thoughtful’, that one was ‘airy’ or ‘thuggish’. There was an exposed dome of granite nearby here: Open Secret that was called, since some climber had seen the sun shining on it one afternoon, hiding in plain sight.
This was the thing with bothies: there was a changing cast of characters from day to day. Climbers and hillwalkers came and went, even some kayakers who pulled up on the boulder beach. They had fresh mackerel caught on hand lines and some peat-smoked whiskey, offering us a dram.
A sip of the white man’s firewater, said Steve after a long pause. Why not?
He was someone, I realised, who thought very carefully about what he put in his mouth – the first hardline vegan I’d ever spent time with. He and Mara mainly ate from a pot filled with a ceaselessly evolving risotto: a gunked-up pot that was never really cleaned, but just had more rice and stock and veg churned into it as needed. We would just scoop out the rice with hunks of bread.
I’m also trying to be vegetarian, said a local joiner who’d arrived with his white van and teenage daughter. He talked about his love for growing vegetables, for eating broccoli raw, just like that. He had listened respectfully to the didge performance (which Steve had insisted on doing in pitch darkness, to feel the vibrations better) and was trying to enter into the spirit of the thing.
I just cannae get enough of it. Isn’t that right Claire?
Dunno, she said, hiding behind a packet of Walker’s crisps all evening. But then next day she and Steve were hula-hooping on the beach: where had those come from? She was swivelling her hips, he was shouting instructions, telling her what she was doing wrong.
We invented pastimes. You balanced an egg-shaped beach pebble on a boulder, then threw other pebbles until it fell. Mara said it was too aggressive, too male, but Steve and I played Egg on Coast for hours. Whole sequences of different pebbles were balanced at various levels, each to be picked off until the dusk came down and the rocks would begin sparking off each other.
Steve had a minidisc player with battery life that he was carefully conserving. At a certain point each day he would allow himself a few minutes with headphones on. I had a brief listen: it was dance music, techno and trippy psychedelic stuff.
Poor boy, said Mara as we watched him dance in the paddock, jabbing the air, hamming it up for us. Such terrible music he likes.
*
The sun came out strongly for the first time. We warmed up by running along the shore, then charged the clear green swell. Because of the Gulf Stream the beaches and bays could look turquoise, tropical – even when right next to peat bogs and marshy glogholes.
Steve, there is little children on the beach, said Mara as he embarked on a nude salute to the sun. He replied that they were naked all day, and anyway his penis was so small in the cold.
He was very white, one of the palest people I had ever seen: limbs the colour of milk. And he had an unusually shaped body: something about the elongated, pear-shaped backside that ended in a high, narrow waist, more like a woman’s physique. But he was totally unselfconscious, all for public nudity and unashamed ablutions, pissing against a dry-stone wall at a moment’s notice. He wasn’t an artistic one like Mara, he didn’t need to leave any trace of his existence behind. Just a little fart, now and then.
Each day the 2 p.m. ferry rounded the headland, drawing a long wake towards the mainland. With phones long dead, it became the only way of telling the time. The bay was cupped by red-brown sandstone cliffs on each side; a grey helmet of cloud sat halfway up the slopes of the glen – these marked the edges of our world, landscape and portrait.
A place walled off from the world with its demands, schedules and its endless fees just to exist – we had found a kind of idyll. There was no owner or manager, no overseer. There was no rent. The whole place was wild camping, campeggio libero, ‘savage camping’ as they called it in France. Steve and Mara switched between French and Italian among themselves – I felt bad consigning them to English in my presence.
The pine smoke hung under the slate roof, warding off the biting flies. The midgies kept these islands less visited than they otherwise might be. Some of the Gore-Tex people had whole anti-bug ensembles, donning hoods and veils in the evenings, walking around like beekeepers or some kind of outdoorsy priesthood.
Most days we tramped to and from the post office which sold UHT milk, chocolate and a single postcard. All Steve ever bought was crisps for 20p: a vegan treat. They only had cheese and onion flavour but that was OK because it didn’t contain real cheese. There were just a few houses along the road and each garden seemed the same: a small flower bed, that line of wind-tormented laundry and often a trampoline, all tiny under the grey, leaky ceiling of the north Atlantic.
They both wore raincoats that were old and well used. Worn down around the collar and hood until they had gone shiny where they should have been matt, or matt where they should have been shiny. Something about those worn-in jackets gave me such a good feeling. The tic-tic-tic of rain against a rain jacket and I am back there, picking my way between tussocks, watching oiliness run out of the peat bog and pool on the water in the path.
*
Idylls are good to remember but hard to write about: there is not much conflict or drama. Though Steve, I sensed, was always ready for some, and made the most of things when it arrived.
One afternoon we came back from a walk and there were people all over the paddock. They were unloading cars and carrying boxes of booze in wheelbarrows. It was a group of teenagers from the main island to the north. They had come for an 18th birthday party.
Eighteen years my God, said Mara. The most fascistic age.
They were hooking up CD players to car batteries and lighting disposable barbecues, those foil trays filled with coals and a little grid to burn Value burgers and ‘plastic sausages’ – Steve was looking on in disgust – while scorching the grass below. All afternoon he glared through the bothy window, watching the alcopops take effect. When boy band ballads began playing early the next morning he stormed out and confronted them.
You come to a place like this – with a car battery?
All right pal, all right, said the ringleader, while some of the women laughed nervously.
Don’t smile at me girl, Steve shouted, I’ll fucking break your battery!
But on the other hand, he was out of tobacco. And so he asked if I could go and parley with these people, smooth things over and maybe get a handful of Golden Virginia – which I did, while hearing them out.
But to just come steamin’ in like that, said the birthday boy, I mean it’s our island.
Yes, yes of course. But they were from Europe, you know? Passionate types.
When the partygoers left we surveyed the mess of bottles, blackened foil, scorched grass, crushed lager tins.
I’m surprised you could speak anything to them that morning, Mara said, When I get angry my English is not good. I will only shout Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!
Steve was sniffing. That fucking plastic sausage smoke was still in the air.
The teenagers left and the idyll returned. No signal, nothing to do in the evenings but sit round the fire and talk. The kind of talking and telling that must once have been all we did as humans, Mara said. When memories and stories come up and can be related in their fullness, in their own sweet time.
Steve spoke about his years in squats and protest camps: Amsterdam and Athens, Thessaloniki. He’d worked on construction sites in Belgium, then in an auto parts warehouse. Packing pallets, wrapping them with industrial cling film and then using a flamethrower to shrink it on – good times in the belly of the beast!
Mara had been studying at university, social development or something like that. But she hated it and dropped out to care for an old woman in the mountain village, someone with special powers – a witch! Also, Mara had a problem with her ears: a perpetual ringing that was made worse by loud noise, so the quietness of the village suited her.
I told them about the big, draughty concert hall where I worked in the box office, tapping out credit card expiry dates. The sound of the orchestras tuning up and singers sound checking. The ageing clientele who came to see the symphonies on Thursday evenings, fewer and fewer each week. The database, my boss called them – they were expiring too. Sometimes an old woman would come and beg me to take her husband’s name off the mailing list: he’d been gone for years.
They asked about my cycle trip and I said it was great on the small islands but tough on the bigger ones or the mainland where there was more traffic. How much it made me resent cars and petrol engines – and the aggression of that noise. The drivers, the vans and lorries that just barrelled past on an incline with no idea how many calories it was costing you. No one had any idea of what the real cost of anything was any more. And why did people think they deserved big SUVs and Land Rovers and Jeep Cherokees anyway? Why did they take it as their due, as the most natural thing in the world?
I’d been to all the anti-war marches, but the cyclist-driver encounter was the only thing that made me well and truly furious, that made me talk in angry political italics. This kind of talk endeared me to Steve, I sensed, this and my anger at privatised rail services. The whole way north I’d argued with a conductor, since two companies ran on the same line and I’d boarded the wrong train, just a few minutes later, but run by a different operator. Up and down the carriages we went: him telling me to pay a full open fare (plus extra for the bike berth); me telling him that yes, sometimes people arrived too late to be let into the concert hall where I worked, but did I turn them away? No, I took them up to the balcony, let them in between movements, showed a bit of human feeling – and this was exactly the same situation.
No, the conductor shot back. It’s like someone arriving with a ticket to a different concert.
Ah he got you, Steve laughed. That capitalist pig got you!
*
When the cloud ceiling lifted we did longer hikes. Up along the cliffs to look at the famous sea stack, or to the colony of gulls and gannets on rock ledges of the cliffs. The birds would hang on the wind, eye-level with us having our lunch, then hinge their wings and dive while others rose up again. A raucous, swirling commotion that we watched and watched, until a Walker’s packet was whipped out of our hands. Steve gave an anguished cry. It flew up, then was rammed by a downdraft, joining the lip of the ocean far below.
To make up for it we picked litter off the beach on our way back: hundreds of ear bud axles, big hunks of fishermen’s polystyrene. There was washed-up dolphin, grinning horribly. Maroon and basalt rocks with swirling strata that got half-submerged by sand and looked like planets.
But I think it’s now part of the ocean, this? Mara wondered as I tugged at a rope encrusted in seaweed.
Thank you! said a passing walker.
Somebody’s got do it, Steve shot back.
Mara and I shared a look, and then again when he walked behind me, methodically picking up citrus peels that I had scattered along a path. They weren’t from this ecosystem: look, there was a label. They were from South Africa and could hurt a bird’s stomach.
At least not from Israel, said Mara.
Bizarrely, there was an Israeli flag draped from one of the isolated cottages in the glen. Steve kept threatening to take action: what the fuck was a Zionist flag doing on a Scottish island?
Steve per favore, Mara said. We’re on holiday.
And then told me about a march in Genoa when he had spent all morning making a banner, only to find that it read FREE PLASTINE.
Go make it on the hills with rocks Steve. FREE PLASTINE!
She laughed and laughed.
Yes it’s very funny, he said. The situation here in the Middle East.
The Middle East was the local nickname for our part of the island, just right of centre. Beyond that was the Far East, where we visited the remains of a Neolithic village.
The glaciers carved out this valley, giving it the characteristic, broad-bottomed U-shape. Steve was reading the information panel next to the excavated ruins. When the ice retreated at the beginning of the Holocene era, the soil was fertile. People had been living here 5000 years ago. It was older than Stonehenge, older than the Pyramids. Steve pointed to the artist’s impression of the Neolithic villagers.
Mara’s there’s you. My broad-bottomed Neanderthal.
I could see what he meant: the big forehead and jaw. It gave her a slightly androgynous look, but was offset by the delicate cut of her lips and eyes.
We visited a blackhouse too, a stonewalled hut bunkered down in the dunes and sea grass, covered in turf and reed. As we sat in the darkness under the corbelled roof, a memory surfaced of another time and place. A childhood scene, a school trip in the great southern escarpment, a beehive hut with a floor of polished dung. That sense of a fundamental human shelter, rounded, curved over you like an eggshell, like the dome of a dark night sky.
*
As the days went by, we began to run out of food. The hillwalkers often left provisions behind: apples and oatcakes (which were to our liking), pot noodles and instant soups (which were not). You could live like this, Mara said, you wouldn’t believe what supermarkets dumped in skips.
But as the days grew shorter, there were fewer visitors and supplies eventually ran down. I was broke, but those two seemed to exist almost completely outside the economy. Counting out any coins from their fabric purse seemed like agony to Steve.
I offered to ride to the convenience store right at the southern tip of the island – it was marked on my road atlas. But because the map lacked any topography, I badly underestimated the trip.
The road ‘sneaked’ through a range of hills in the middle of the island – one of Mara’s mistakes that you’d never want to hear corrected. Hair-pinning up and down, sneaking the long way round sea lochs that reached their watery fingers far inland.
Riding back, the red panniers were now loaded with fruit and potatoes, rice and lentils. Every ounce of it had to be paid for in calories expended, drawn out through the cogs, gears, the thick, knobbly tyres of my mountain bike – and now the wind was against me. It was the most physically taxing day of my trip, of my life maybe. My legs and lungs burned. But the provisions felt earned, valuable, sacred even. All this would nourish us in the days ahead.
I freewheeled down the glen, arriving back just as it was getting dark. Mara and Steve had been worried, and when they saw me, they began waving something. It was a bit of tarp tied onto a washed-up pole. They had made a flag out of beach flotsam and were waving it in the paddock, encouraging me, shouting:
The Revolution is coming!
I let my bike fall and staggered across the grass. They ran towards me with arms outstretched.
The Revolution is here!