Naming the Bones by Louise Welsh

Author:Louise Welsh [Welsh, Louise]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: FIC000000, FIC050000, C429, Kat, Extratorrents
ISBN: 9781921799280
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2010-08-16T14:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

THE WOMEN IN the tourist board had told him his B&B was about twenty minutes from Achnacroish pier, where the ferry docked. Murray drove slowly along the one-track road that climbed away from the bay, the sea receding in the rear-view mirror as he travelled inland, the mountains ahead in the distance, getting no closer.

The crossing had been smooth, but a faint nausea stirred in the depths of his stomach, as if his own tides had been disturbed. The sky was a palate of grey, iron smudges shifting against gunmetal. The wind was getting up, but there was still a possibility the grey skies might yet blow beyond the island, taking their cargo of rain with them.

Sheep grazed stoically in the fields beyond, their fleeces grey and shit-stained, ruffled by the same wind that bent the tall grasses edging the roadside. He’d left the village behind at the pier, but now and again he would pass a cottage built out of stone as grey and uncompromising as the sky. He slowed to take a corner and saw two children staring at him, hand in hand from the edge of the road, their hair matted, faces bronzed by sun and dirt. They looked like the kind of feral kids that might commune with faeries, and he was almost surprised to notice their stout Wellington boots. Murray raised a hand in hallo and was met with incurious stares.

A few drops of rain smeared the windscreen, but there was no need for the wipers yet. The radio had died, the signal left behind on the mainland. He turned on the CD player and Johnny Cash croaked into ‘I’ve Been Everywhere’.

Murray had a sudden memory of his father singing the song in the kitchen one evening as he dried the dishes, his father’s inflections the same as Cash’s, but his words slower, his voice leaving the tune behind on his adapted chorus, I’ve been to Fraserburgh, Peterburgh, Bridge of Weir, very queer. Dunoon, whit a toon, Aberdeen where folks are mean. I’ve been everywhere, I’ve been everywhere.

Murray turned the music off and, as if on cue, saw the sign for his B&B swinging bleakly at the edge of the road.

He offered to pay in advance, but Mrs Dunn the landlady laughed.

‘It’s all right, son, I trust you. Anyway, you’d not get far if you tried to do a runner. Peter wouldn’t let you on the ferry.’

She was a pensioner of a type he thought HRT and aqua-aerobics had rendered redundant: broad-beamed, big-busted and solid-corseted, dressed in a heather-coloured two-piece too stiff to be comfortable. Her hair looked freshly set, a tinge of blue livening the pewter. He hoped it hadn’t been done for his benefit. He felt as morose as Peter, the sullen ferryman, guardian of the island.

Mrs Dunn got him to sign the visitors’ book, and then started up the small staircase.

‘Your room’s up here.’

He followed her to the tiny landing, careful not to knock his rucksack against the photographs of long-grown-up children lining the walls.

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