The Ferry to the Island

The ferry left Tarbert at ten past six, which was later than the board said and earlier than anyone on the pier believed. There were eleven of us. A woman with a cello case wrapped in a bin bag against the drizzle. Two boys in school blazers who had clearly not been to school. An old man in a tweed cap who knew the crew by name and was handed a mug of tea before the ramp was even up. And me, with a rucksack that weighed more than it should have because I had packed for weather that did not come.

The water in the sound was the colour of pewter and completely still. I had been told to expect a crossing that would turn my stomach, and instead the boat moved like something sliding across a table. Gulls followed us for the first ten minutes and then gave up, wheeling back toward the harbour and the fish vans. The engine had a low note under everything, the kind you stop hearing until it changes, and it did not change for an hour.

The island came up out of the grey the way islands do in the stories, which is to say slowly and then all at once. First a darker band on the horizon that might have been cloud. Then the shape of it, low at the south end and rising to a single hill in the north, with the lighthouse on the far point like a chess piece somebody had left standing. Then houses, white, six or seven of them along a single road, and a church with no steeple, and a jetty that looked too short for the boat until the boat reached it and it was exactly long enough.

Nobody met me. I had not expected anyone to, but there is a difference between not expecting and not hoping. The old man in the cap walked off up the road without looking back. The boys ran. The woman with the cello stood for a moment on the jetty as if she had forgotten why she had come, then set the case down, sat on it, and lit a cigarette with the calm of someone who has done this a thousand times and will do it a thousand more.

The house I had rented was the last one before the road gave up and became a track. It had a green door and a key under a stone that was so obviously the stone that I laughed out loud on the step. Inside: a kitchen with a range that took me forty minutes and most of a box of matches to light, a front room with a window that faced the sea and nothing else, two bedrooms upstairs with sloped ceilings, and on the kitchen table a note in careful handwriting that said the milk was in the cold press, the tide table was on the back of the door, and the lighthouse keeper was called Iain and did not like to be visited before noon.

I did not visit the lighthouse keeper before noon. I did not visit him at all that first week. I walked. The island was four miles long and less than a mile wide and I learned the whole of it the way you learn a face, by looking at it so often that you stop seeing it and then one day see it completely. The hill in the north was called Beinn Bheag, which I was told meant small mountain, which it was. From the top you could see the mainland on a clear day and on most days you could see nothing but the idea of it, a thickening in the air where the land should be. The beach on the west side was white shell sand and completely empty and the water there was so clear and so cold that putting a hand in it felt like touching a live wire.

On the eighth day the weather I had packed for finally arrived. It came in from the southwest in the afternoon, a wall of it, and by five o'clock the window in the front room was streaming and the sound of the wind in the chimney had become a voice. The power went at six. I lit candles I had found in a drawer and sat in the front room and watched the sea throw itself at the rocks below the house, white on black, over and over, and thought about nothing, which is harder than it sounds and which I had come here to practise.

That was when I saw the lamp. Out on the point, in all that dark, the lighthouse turned on. Not a flash at first but a slow warming, the way a filament comes up, and then the beam swung out across the water and lit the rain from inside so that for a second the whole storm was visible, every drop of it, hanging. Then it swung on and the dark came back and then it swung round again. I sat and counted. Every twelve seconds. I do not know how long I sat there. Long enough that the candles burned down and I did not notice. Long enough that when the power came back at some point after midnight and the kitchen light snapped on behind me I jumped like a child.

In the morning the sea was flat again and the sky was the pale washed blue that only comes after a night like that, and there was seaweed on the road a hundred yards from the water, and the cello woman was standing at the end of the jetty looking out at nothing in particular. I walked to the point. It took an hour. The lighthouse was smaller than it had looked from the house and larger than it had looked from the boat, white with a red band, with a low cottage attached and a door painted the same green as mine. It was half past eleven. I sat on the wall and waited. At noon exactly the door opened and a man came out with a mug in each hand and did not seem surprised to see me at all.

Make this a short video.