35
Finlay’s mouth was the only dry thing about him. His clothes clung to his damp and clammy skin beneath his waterproof coat. The fog had seeped in between every layer.
In a dim spot at the back of his brain he pondered how it was possible he could hate clouds now when they’d always been a source of intense interest for him.
He’d already categorised his life up until this moment as The Time Before. Now he was in the ethereal In Between and even that was loosening its tenuous grasp upon him.
His pain had gone, leaving a drowsy numbness in his entire body. He wasn’t even cold now. His body still draped, shaping itself like a wet ribbon over the contours of the rock.
His gloveless hand lay in contact with the ancient granite, the thing that had been his touchstone in the last years of his life. Stone that the last ice age had scoured of soil like his mother’s bubbly washing-up sponge cutting through grease as she did the dishes.
There she was, before him at the sink in some sort of nineties camcorder home movie, projected on the white cloud, looking like the prim lady in the washing-up adverts when he was wee.Cuts through even tough grease at low temperatures.A TV jingle played in his brain. He smiled weakly at it, closing his eyes, seeing his mother’s tight perm and even tighter smile. She turned to look at him with despairing eyes, as though choosing words designed to wipe away his stains. The kitchen faded. His mother slowly vanished until she was just a voice.Can’t you at least try? Look at all the other boys, out playing football together. You can’t hide in your room forever. What am I going to do with you, Finlay Morlich?He’d heard it all, even though she accused him of never listening. The main thing he’d learned was that he was easy to dislike and very, very hard to love.
Were these going to be his last thoughts? That didn’t seem right.
How was it he’d fled here and found his Eden, some place that loved him back, cosseted him in beautiful green nature, and yet he’d spent his time here terrified that one day he’d stumble across a body lost in the snow or at the foot of a landslide? And nowhewas that body! He’d become the thing he feared most.
A thought for Jemmy arose. Would he be distraught to find him here in a day or two, mottled and moulded to the rock like… like… Finlay couldn’t even remember the name for the Cairngorm rock lichens he loved so much, the ones that looked like weather-bleached flesh stretched over stone… He was forgetting himself.
His head bobbed with each shallow, laboured wheeze.
The winter sun was about to set, he knew that much. He could detect the sudden change in light, even through shuttered eyelids. He prised them open to catch the last glow lighting the clouds as the sun sank beneath the unseen horizon.
On any other day, he’d be able to remember the sunset times. It didn’t matter now. With the loss of the sun, the temperature would plummet in seconds, drawing him down with it. But he wanted to see the spectacle for himself. Mother Nature, innocuous, harmless, his true mother, not minding him dying. He opened his eyes as wide as he could.
The mass of white before his eyes had thinned, he realised, allowing hazy fingers of his last day’s last light to penetrate the gloaming. He couldn’t even tell where the sun was in relation to him.
A thought struck him. He wanted to say farewell to this last light before he became rock and lichen and dew and dark sky.
Inhaling as deeply as he could in order to power the necessary movement, he fought against gravity and his rubber legs to draw himself to a crumpled kneeling position. The strain made him wail out in pain. It was worth it to look at the golden blaze through the fog.
‘Ah!’ Finlay gasped at the sight of his own ghostly shadow on the glowing cloud-screen before him as it flushed a rosy peach. It was his own Brocken spectre coming for him, his own sorry shape projected onto the cloud by the low sun at his back. So he knew he was facing east. He was orientated on the earth, at last. This was good.
He raised a hand to welcome his shadow, and it too lifted a hand, waving goodbye. The effort of holding up his body was too much and he slumped forward, his shoulder jarring as his hands hit hard stone. He heard sinew crunching in his neck in a burst of sickening pain.
Still he raised his one good hand again as his shadow drew nearer, but this time the Brocken spectre didn’t lift its arm.
His shadow must be broken, Finlay concluded. It was detaching itself from his body, the way Peter Pan’s shadow could come loose and get lost.
This was it. The parting with his body.
He turned his lips to the earth and whispered into it the only Gaelic he could now remember, taking leave of his friends, his mountains.
‘Mar sin leibh, Am Monadh Ruadh.’
He kept his hand raised, watching his ghost shadow looming larger, just the way mountaineers had for centuries described the optical illusion. Finlay Morlich, in the end, was nothing but a short-lived trick of the light. He rolled forward, face against hard rock, eyes still fixed on the spectre.
His shadow, however, refused to kneel. It kept coming for him.
Through barely opened eyes, and accompanied by the sound of laboured breathing not his own, he watched the grey figure loom larger out of the glowing fog, now not like a shadow at all, but like a human taking its angel form.
It drew nearer still, seemed almost to bring with it the sound of heavy footsteps reverberating through the rocks against Finlay’s skull. It brought panting breaths, too. There was no heavenly music playing, no harps like his kirk minister father had foretold, but the shadow angel held out its hand to him, revealing a silver glinting disc.
Finlay closed his eyes, exhausted.
‘Thank God!’ came a voice, breaking free of the mists, but Finlay was insensible to it now. He didn’t know the figure wasn’t his own shadow and it wasn’t an angel either. It was a pink-cheeked, pale and puffing man, and the glint in his hand was Finlay’s grandfather’s compass, picked up only a few feet away, and arriving by his side now was Nell the Labrador, the dog that had led Murray McIntyre all the way here through the dense fog.
‘Finlay!’ Murray called, shaking him by his coat, finding him unresponsive.
