Pig Island Read online

  The landlord had crammed me into the back seat of the lobsterman's beat-up rust-bucket of a car. We left the dog in the pub: 'Because he's a mad rocket when he comes out here,' said the landlord, as the car pulled off the road on to a thin, muddy beach. 'Makes him crazy and I'm not putting him in a paddy just because you won't take my word for something.'

  We got out of the car and I paused. I hadn't been out on the lash or anything, but I'd sunk a fair old few in the pub and it felt good for a moment to fill my lungs with the night air. The beach was silent, and there was already a breath of autumn in the air. It was gone eleven but Craignish was so far north the sky was still edged with blue. You'd almost think that if you stood on tiptoe and squinted you'd see the land of the midnight sun peeping at you from over the horizon, maybe a reindeer or a polar bear on a giant mint.

  'See the pipe?' The lobsterman walked away to the south, totally steady in spite of the whisky, his old shoes leaving dull prints in the mud, his moon-shadow long beside him. 'The wee stank over there?' He was pointing to the long, low shape of a sewage pipe straddling the beach ahead. 'You get the conditions right – a nice westerly, an ebb and a spring tide – then everything from out at Pig Island gets washed up, not in the loch or even on Luing, where you'd expect it, but here, on this side of the peninsula. Most of it gets caught on the other side of that pipe.'

  The landlord hung back, giving me a dubious look. His face was a little pinched seeming in the moonlight. He turned up his collar like it was suddenly dead cold out there. 'Sure you're ready for this?'

  'Yeah. Why not?'

  'It's not for the faint-hearted, what's caught up under that pipe.'

  'I'm not faint-hearted,' I said, looking down the beach at the lobsterman. 'I've seen everything there is to see.'

  We walked for a while in silence, only the sound of the waves breaking on the beach, and the tinkle of a halyard on a boat moored somewhere out in the sea. The smell hit me first. Even before I saw the lobsterman hesitate at the pipe, looking down on the other side, before I saw him shaking his head and leaning over to spit out something in the sand, I knew it was going to be one of those stomach-turners. One of those times I'd regret the last pint. I took a breath and swallowed, tapping my pockets as I got nearer, hoping I'd find a stray bit of chewy or something to take the taste away.

  'Worse is it?' said the landlord, approaching the lobsterman. 'Got worse?'

  'Aye – there's more. More than there was last week.'

  I held my T-shirt up to my nose and peered down on the other side of the pipe. Dark shapes bobbed and buffeted in a yellowish foam. Meat. Decaying chunks of flesh – impossible to tell in the slime where one piece ended and the next began. The breaking waves forced them into the crevice under the pipe, tangled them in ribbons of tasselweed. Decomposition gas fizzed from under the raised flaps of skin, sending bubbles to the surface.

  'What the fuck's this?'

  'Pig meat,' said the lobsterman. 'Dead pigs. Killt in one of them rituals on Pig Island and been washed off the island.'

  'Police have seen it,' the landlord said, 'and they've not cared to do anything about it – can't prove where it's coming from and, anyway, a few dead pigs aren't hurting anyone, is their manner of thinking.'

  'Dead pigs?' I looked up at the mouth of the Firth. The moon picked out the silvery tips of waves as far as the eye could see – to where Pig Island peeped round the end of Luing, silent and hunched, like a dozing beast. 'All of this is dead pigs?'

  'Aye. That's what they say.' The landlord puffed out a series of short, dry laughs – like the world never ceased to amaze him. 'That's what the police say – everything here is just pig meat. But you know what I think?'

  'What do you think?'

  'I think that when it comes to the lovers of Satan you can never be too sure.'

  3

  Let's think about my mistakes with the whole Pig Island thing. Well, the first one was letting my wife come to Scotland with me. What was I thinking? I've had to stop punching myself in the face about it, because you have to find ways of hanging on to a bit of sanity, so I say whoever was to blame, Lexie was there with me. Course, I didn't know she was there for her own reasons, didn't know she had something on her mind. I thought she was totally made up with her job – a receptionist at a London clinic – besotted by the media-whore neurosurgeon who ran the place (you guessed I don't like him, right?). The last thing I expected was for her to want to leave London. But one minute I say, 'I'm coming to Scotland,' next thing she's on the web looking for holiday cottages.

  She found a crappy one-bed bungalow on Craignish Peninsula that my budget stretched to. It was hot and unventilated and Lexie slept restlessly. The night I got back from the beach she was already in bed, turning over in her sleep, whimpering and pushing at the pillow. I got in silently and lay next to her, staring up at the ceiling. Tomorrow I'd be on Pig Island. I needed to think about what I was chasing. I was going to have to play it dead carefully. Going to have to concentrate, be ready for anything.

  The Psychogenic Healing Ministries wanted me at their Positive Living Centre on Pig Island because of Eigg, the little Hebridean island fifty miles to the north. They hadn't said it, but I knew it anyway. On Eigg the tenants had raised the money to buy the island from the owner. They got donations from everywhere, all over the country – even the National Lottery. Booted old Schellenberg and Maruma out. And how did they manage that? Good publicity. Simple as that. Someone was there to spread their story to the world. And that someone was me. I'd been there – helped break the story in the press. How I saw it now was the Psychogenic Healing Ministries probably had some legal hassle they wanted to raise money for. Thought I could help. If they'd known I had history with their founder, Pastor Malachi Dove, if they'd known that eighteen years ago I'd written an article on him under the name Joe Finn, that he'd been so arsed off about it he'd tried to sue me for libel, I'd never have got even a little bit close to Pig Island. But, like I said, canny bastard, me.

  I lay awake half the night ticking off kit in my head: MP3 player, camera, batteries, spare camera card, phone ... Didn't get to kip until three in the morning and the next day I was on edge. After breakfast, when I'd packed and was ready to set off for Pig Island, I got the laptop out one last time.

  I never had found out what came first – the rumours that the Psychogenic Healing Ministries were practising Satanism, or the video. But when the public saw it they made up their mind it was an image of the devil, brought down on to Pig Island by the Satanic ritual of the PHMs. A great steaming pile of bollocks, naturally, but even I had to admit there was something dead creepy about the video.

  First of all, it wasn't trick photography. It had been through every AV specialist unit in the country, passed every test, been torn apart frame by frame, but even with all that gadgetry thrown at it, it kept coming up clean over and over again. Whoever had cooked up this little bit of chicanery hadn't used trick photography: something had definitely been on the island beach that hot 18 July two years ago.

  That morning I played it again on my laptop. I sat forward on the edge of my seat, concentrating hard. I'd seen it a thousand times and knew every frame. It started off kind of ordinary, with the camera lingering on the horizon out to sea, tilting gently as the single-engined boat bobbed on the waves in the Firth of Lorn. I dragged the RealPlayer toggle to the bit where a shout went up on the boat. This was the exact moment when one of the other tourists saw something moving on the island. A few indistinct shouts came from the TV – a lot of camera movement as the surprised tourist whipped the videocam sideways, taking in one or two shocked faces on the boat, then focused across the bay on an indeterminate line of green-brown – the seaward shoreline of Pig Island. Someone close to the camera spoke. The words were totally unintelligible because of the wind on the soundtrack, but the BBC unit had added sub-titled dialogue to my copy: 'What in fuck's name is that?'

  This was the important bit. You could feel the guys on the boat in
ching forward in curiosity, staring at the beach where a creature no one could put a name to moved ponderously through the foliage at the water's edge. It stood at about five foot eleven; the BBC technicians figured this out from comparative measurements using sun and trees. In most ways it appeared like a naked human being – the video showed its back from the waist down; the upper half was concealed in shadow. Except it wasn't human. There was something dangling from the base of its spine. Estimated to be about two feet in length, the same battered brown flesh as the body, it looked just like a fleshy tail. It banged once on the back of the creature's legs as it moved.

  Even in that stifling bungalow, with the sun coming through the picture windows, lying in great squares on the dingy patterned carpet, and Lexie a few yards away in the kitchen, I got this crawl of discomfort across my skin. I leaned nearer to the TV and stared at the wavery brown line of empty beach, the camera holding steady on the island in case the beast reappeared. A full three minutes elapsed until the tourist gave up waiting and turned the camera back to the other men on the boat. They stood at the gunwales, all four of them in their Bolton Wanderers shirts, holding the stanchion line and staring in silence at the spot on the beach where the creature had been.

  The people at the BBC reckoned it was an actor, someone in a costume. Their AV unit had worked on the Bluff Creek Bigfoot film, and they thought this video had some of the same hallmarks: Sasquatch, as we all knew, was just some guy in a Hollywood gorilla suit – and the technicians decided that was probably what was happening in the Pig Island film. The problem was, because the video was taken from a boat about two hundred yards offshore, because the 'creature' emerged from the trees at frame 1,800 and had disappeared into the foliage by frame 1,865 (at a rate of thirty frames per second that meant a shade over two seconds), and because the movement of the boat had the picture jumping all over the place, the Beeb couldn't get a good enough image to analyse it any closer. They could only say what it appeared to be.

  Half beast. Half human.

  'I'll put your lighter in the rucksack,' said Lexie, suddenly, from the kitchen. 'I'm putting it in the front pocket.'

  I paused the video and turned to look at her. She was standing at the table, her hair held back in the Alice band she'd got for her snobby job, and a pair of shorts I had a vague idea I was meant to notice. I didn't answer her straight off. Her voice was kind of casual, but both of us knew how serious she was. I'd 'given up' smoking months ago and I reckoned I'd hidden the occasional sneaky rollie pretty well. Except now there was the lighter.

  I watched while she zipped up the rucksack.

  'It was in your jacket pocket,' she said, reading my mind.

  'I got it for the stove. There's no pilot.'

  'Yeah,' she said, laughing. 'You're so transparent.'

  I laughed too. Just a bit. 'Transparent or not – I used it for the stove.'

  'OK,' she said lightly. 'OK. I believe you. You're so believable.' She set her tongue at the back of her front teeth and smiled up at the ceiling. Her smiling made the sinews in her neck stand out. She'd got skinny recently. I waited a few more moments to see if we were going to pursue this. Not dropping the smile or taking her eyes off the ceiling, in that same high voice she goes: 'And there was tobacco in the shorts you had on yesterday.'

  'You're going through my pockets now?'

  'Yes. My husband lies to me about smoking so I go through his pockets.' She dropped her chin then and met my eyes and I saw she'd flushed a deep purplish colour – like her cheeks were bruised. 'My husband thinks I'm stupid. So I have to fight back.'

  The most important thing about me and my marriage was I didn't fancy my wife any more. I'd known it for months and done nothing about it – it's one of those things you can stick in the back of your mind and ignore if you're clever enough. But, and this is true, I cared about her. Weird fuck I was, I did still care for her. And I cared, in some rusty old-fashioned way, about fidelity. Back in London half my friends were already blasting their way through first, second divorces: I was the sanctimonious one, believed in thick and thin, wasn't going to end up in a frigid, three-minute-egg of a marriage. Touché, Joe Oakes, you pious arse. This'll teach you.

  I stood slowly and went to stand in the kitchen doorway, looking at her. 'I'm sorry,' I said. 'I am.'

  She didn't move for a moment. Then her shoulders slumped and she let out a sigh. 'That's OK,' she said, shaking her head and holding out the rucksack to me. 'It can't be easy, giving up.'

  'No, but I'm working on it.' I pulled on the rucksack. 'Believe me.'

  She forced a smile. 'I've put some water-bottles in, at the bottom, and some factor ten.' She smoothed down the rucksack straps across my chest and, finding an imaginary stain on my T-shirt, wet her finger and rubbed at it. A compulsive neatnik, Lex, this grooming, this shrimping, was her way of showing I was forgiven. 'Now,' she said. 'I know it's your turn to cook tonight, but you'll be exhausted, so I'll do a pasta salad. Avocado, bacon, olives. It'll save if you're late.'

  'Lexie,' I said, 'I told you. Didn't I? I said I didn't know if I'd be back tonight. I told you this. Remember? I said I could be out there a few days.'

  She bit her lip. 'A few days?'

  'We talked about it. Don't you remember? I said I'd probably have to stay over and you said you'd be all right on your own.'

  'Did I? Did I say that?'

  'Yes.'

  She shrugged. 'Well, don't worry about it. I mean I'd've loved some time with my husband on our holidays, and obviously I'd rather not be in this place on my own.' She opened her hands to indicate the bungalow. She'd hated it at first sight. She'd booked it but turns out to be my fault it was so shitty. 'But, don't worry, it's all right, I'll be all right.'

  'Lex. I said it was work, remember?' Remember how I said it was—'

  'Please!' She cut me off, holding up her hand in the air. 'Please don't. Please just go. I'll be fine.'

  'I'll call you. If there's a signal out on the island I'll call you. I'll tell you how it's going – when I'll be back.'

  'No,' she said. 'Don't. Really – don't. Just... just go. Do your thing.' She drummed her fingers on the table, not looking up at me. 'Go on,' she repeated, when I didn't turn to go. 'Just go.'

  I sighed and touched her shoulder, opened my mouth to say something, then thought better of it. I tightened the rucksack and left, not bending to kiss her goodbye, quietly closing the kitchen door behind me. That was how it went, these days. Outside I stopped. At the end of the bungalow's long, rhododendron-crowded driveway the land opened into a funnel. There, basking in the glittering sea, was Pig Island.

  4

  'Rage against the Philistines of science. Do not allow the arrogance of the medical community to rape and subdue your natural self-healing powers. Wrest control over your life.'

  The Psychogenic Healing Ministries, volume 14,

  chapter 5, verse 1

  The Psychogenic Healing Ministries would say my problems with Lexie were all about my godlessness. They'd say that if I only opened my heart to the Lord, that if I'd only grow towards his cosmic love, in no time I'd find myself growing back towards Lexie. And she'd grow towards me too. I'd never been to the Positive Living Centre on Pig Island, but I knew more than I needed about what the PHM would say about me and Lex. I knew their philosophies like I wrote them myself.

  What happened between me and their founder, Pastor Malachi Dove, all starts back in Liverpool twenty years ago. It's the mid-eighties. Liverpool's the unemployment capital of Europe, and my cousin Finn is the closest thing to a God I know. He's a charm bird, totally does not look like my cousin with his blond, mosh-pit hair and ratty nose. The Kurt Cobain of Toxteth. He's the first in our family to get into university and he comes home summer holidays to Self-pity City talking like a Londoner. He tells us all about university and the birds he's shagged. He's going to be a journalist, travel the world. Everyone hates him. Me – I think I can see the sun shine when he bends over.

  It's probab
ly the girls that do it for me, because by the next year I've got a place at UCL and I'm ready to follow him down south. Me and Finn together, I'm thinking, the copping potential is unlimited. Then something happens. Something that changes the course of our lives. Finn's ma gets cancer.

  Now, I've always really liked his ma, always thought she was totally sound. Actually, what I've always thought is, she's clever. But what does she do, good Catholic girl, when she's told she's dying? She refuses chemo. She scoffs down shark cartilage and flower remedies by the lorryload. She visits Lourdes. She ends up selling the house and trailing some faith-healer around the United States. His name is Pastor Malachi Dove. He believes in NO MEDICAL INTERVENTION. He believes in the power of prayer and positive thinking. Two months later she comes back to Toxteth and dies in agony in a hospice in Ormskirk. So it goes, as Vonnegut would say.

  For me and Finn, religion's what you get twatted for. Aled up on a Saturday night it'll be Everton and Liverpool, or Papes and Prods that starts the fight. And seeing Finn's ma die like that gives us a rage for Pastor Malachi Dove that won't go away. We get copies of Charisma magazine and find he's in the south-west US. With the money Finn's ma leaves we get on the next flight to New Mexico. We think we're gonzos. Bad Boys doing the Right Thing.