CHAPTER EIGHT

All things considered, I was doing quite well. Normally I’m only able to communicate in the morning by a series of grunts and nods. Lesley is equally uncommunicative. She is just not a morning person, but I watched in amazement as she managed to change her clothes (underwear included) whilst still inside her sleeping bag and have a wash, brush her teeth and polish the inside of the car with her portion of half a cup of tepid water – I looked at mine… and dumped a tablespoonful of coffee into it instead and considered scratching my testicles.
    I finally brushed my teeth after getting a text message from ‘Doomray’ complaining that the radiation levels coming from my mouth were throwing the readings off. Cheeky bastards. I went for a wee, too; a long one. I noticed mid flow that I was pissing on one of those horrible black slugs. It looked like a big chunk of tar that had come to life. I shifted my aim and apologised. It wasn’t some kind of Buddhist stance on my behalf about not hurting or disrespecting other creatures; well, not pissing on them, anyway. I particularly respect anything that goes well with mustard so I can’t be accused of that; no. I just wondered how the little bugger was going to explain the state he's in when he finally gets home; sometime in mid October, probably. The slug didn’t move; obviously not an early morning slug then.
    I was finding it difficult myself.
    Lesley and I needed a cup of tea to get our brains going at optimum speed. As I said, we'd used the last of the water to wash. Well, Lesley had used her half to do the decent thing and wash. The coffee I had attempted to make with my half, had been too tepid, too strong and tasted like mud.

Tea then assumed the importance of the Holy Grail because of its absence. Hot, sweet tea became the antidote to the rain that began to fall. It wasn’t a lot of rain, or forceful, more of a sort of half arsed attempt at being miserable. Almost as if the clouds themselves were embarrassed at raining so bloody often. At least it'd tried to vary the rain a little; torrential downpours, monsoon, drizzle, sudden downpours, cloudbursts and so on. The morning's shower was just soft rain, or as they would say in Ireland, a soft day; barely worth noticing, really; certainly not worth most of a paragraph but there you go.
    What is worth going on about was the lack of morning tea. The landscape was still beautiful; not as beautiful as it would have been if I had I been able to look at it over the rim of a steaming mug, but still lovely.
    As we drove toward Ullapool, we passed through several likely places where the Tetley Grail might be found but to no avail.  
    Everywhere was firmly shut, it being a Sunday.
    ‘Where the hell is everybody?’ I asked Lesley, as we passed through another clump of silent houses and closed shops.
    ‘It’s Sunday. The shops don’t open, I presume. It’s a different pace of life. They might have gone to church. Or be hungover.’
    ‘Or both.’
    My God, what must they have been up to during the night if they’re in church at such an ungodly hour on bended knee? I spent a little while observing sheep as we passed by, trying to see if any looked a little, well, sheepish and hungover.
    I remembered seeing a documentary on people who had less than hygienic relationships with livestock. It turned me off sausages for a week. It gave the impression that it was reaching epidemic proportions in some rural parts of America. I had resolved to test the theory myself, by going to see a movie, and sitting at the back. I was going to throw a stick and see how many of those so called girlfriends leapt up and chased it. I never did though. I had forgotten all about it, until that moment; when we couldn’t get any bloody tea.
    Now, it goes to show how hungry I was, the fact that I was casting aspersions on the Scots concerning dubious sexual practices. Lesley and I consider the Scots in general are the salt of the earth and I was sure there was nothing unsavoury going on in the vicinity.
    Although, tossing the caber is a national sport…
    Anyway, at one point we stopped to look at the view and I saw a couple in an estate car, just finishing their tea. I had a very strong urge to go over and ask them if they had any hot water to spare. But the idea of a refusal was too much for me to bear. The English reserve stepped in and held back the Irish gift of the gab; not that it’s a gift in my case; more of an unwanted present from an auntie who never liked you since you kicked her dog.
    ‘Not to worry,’ Lesley said, ‘we’ll find some place soon.’

    Wrong.
    We'd got to the part in a movie about the Foreign Legion where they’re being circled by vultures as they drag themselves across the desert. I was considering cutting a vein and dunking a teabag in it. It was 10:00. We’d been awake and thirsty since 6:45. Nowhere was open. Everything was shut. We even came across another lady going in the opposite direction looking for bread and eggs. She wasn’t a local. Her family had rented a cottage in the town for a holiday. She hadn’t taken into account about Sunday closing either.   The real locals were all probably looking at us through binoculars laughing their heads off and having hot buttered toast with their tea. It’s probably some kind of local sport like badger baiting; tourist teasing.
    Eventually we pulled off the side of the road just outside the town. Some place called Kerry Falls Power Station. We just had to eat something. First, though, Lesley had to have a widdle. She disappeared around the side of the car and into some bushes after I reassured her that the station was closed seeing as it was a Sunday and nobody was around to witness her ablution.
    I waited until she was suitably engaged and then called out, ‘morning vicar.'
    Her head shot up in alarm.
    Well, I thought it was funny anyway.
    She got back in the car with a big smile, relieved, and then dished out breakfast. Oatcakes and honey, which sounds nice but just think of it as cardboard and glue when you’ve nothing to drink with it and you get the idea. Also, someone had rung the dinner bell and hundreds of tiny midges turned up for a bite. The car ended up with dozens of them inside lining up for a nibble of the marvellous tinned food that had suddenly appeared. For the main course they could have ‘Lesley a la duck’ and for afters, me, ‘a great big Irish puddin.'

    We moved on from there rather rapidly to get away from the midges. Lesley shooed them out of the car, waving around the notebook that all this is written on to get them through the windows. I thought she showed rather remarkable restraint, knowing how I drive her around the bend on occasion. It would have been very easy to have accidentally on purpose whacked me with it under the pretence of getting rid of a particularly irksome midge, but she didn’t, bless her.

    Oh, and a few miles up the road we came to a set of traffic lights in the middle of nowhere. There had been a landslide from the huge rock face on the right of the road. How fantastic. The lights were right beside a big sign that read ‘CAUTION LANDSLIDE’.  Then why stop us right underneath the danger area? Only the Scots could turn stopping your car into an extremely dangerous sport.

    We turned off the A839 just after Braemore and drove down the A832 which is a long road hugging the coast, which would eventually lead to Gairloch.

    Lesley popped into a hotel along the way and asked if we could have breakfast, but they refused saying they only serve lunch and dinner to non-residents. She said the guy looked really stressed, as if half his staff hadn’t turned up. Again I wondered if being a Sunday morning, there’d been more shenanigans, therefore more sinners having to go and repent in the local church?
    But at last, long, long, long, long last we found a little café attached to a small service station in a place called Kinlochewe and hallelujah it was open.
    We could hardly believe it. It was like finding the Holy Grail.
    I popped my head in to ask if they were, in fact, open, as in actually serving people, in case it was just some cruel trick and they only serve altar wine and Holy Communion wafers on a Sunday morning.
    It was true! It wasn’t a mirage. The vultures circling overhead fucked off and decided to wait by the traffic lights beneath the landslide, and joy of joys, the delightful lady in the café agreed to make me some egg, bacon, beans and toast!  An act of overwhelming generosity as far as I was concerned because she said she normally only served snacks, like tea and scones. I was her first ever cooked breakfast customer. Lesley had egg on toast.
    We both had tea. Lots of it.

    I was unusually talkative at that point due to my gratitude and the sudden deliverance from death from thirst and starvation and I'd been so hungry I could have eaten a Big Mac; and by that, I mean a big Scottish bloke jammed between two wedges of bread.
    From her accent I presumed she was from London.
    ‘Nar lav. Nat Larnden, Essex.’ she said, quite emphatically.
    Oh, I thought, continuing to think, she’s from London. Unwilling to make the geographical adjustment in my head until the sugar from the tea hit my bloodstream. She continued; if we put her beside somebody from Larnden I’d be able to tell the difference. She was quite small with lovely ‘energy’ as the tree huggers would say, with kind, warm brown eyes that reminded me of a hamster. 
    That’s what lack of food does to me. I refrained from trying to get her to eat the crust of my toast, because that would have been rude, but mainly because I ate it all myself and virtually licked the plate, my fingers, the tablecloth and the smidgen of egg that Lesley had got on the corner of her mouth before she dabbed if off daintily with her napkin. When she placed her napkin back down on the tablecloth I briefly considered eating it and washing it down with the water out of the flower vase.
    The delightful lady also refilled both our flasks for us so we were set up for the day and could get lost to our hearts content and not have to worry about getting a hot drink.
    I was a very happy bunny, and so was Lesley who made sure to buy some sticky buns from the café for me to eat later. She handed them over to me and disappeared to get some cigarettes, the Sunday papers, fresh milk and sweeties in the little garage shop attached to the tiny café. Before I left, I gave the lady from Larnden one of the business cards I had printed up in the service station on the M6.
    She read it, and said ‘oh, you’re a journalist!’
    I am? I thought, then remembered what I’d put on them. It read ‘Geetan. Journalist. Songwriter.’ together with the website address.
    ‘Eh, yes!’ I replied, feeling rather grand; basking in the light of my new found journalistic status.
    ‘How lovely,’ she said. ‘Who do you write for?’
    A big silence popped up out of some cosmic conversational toaster. I recovered rather well, and blurted out ‘Oh, I’m freelance,’ and gave her the sort of smile that suggested I'm a very charming, world class investigative reporter, on holiday after smashing a drug ring in Miami through highly dangerous undercover work that had earned me the Nobel Peace Prize… again, for services to humanity.
    ‘Oh. And who do you freelance for?’
    Damn. There goes my cover.
    ‘For? Well, Oh, I... erm… I freelance for myself,’ I said, and beat a hasty retreat clutching my buns.

    After driving off rapidly redfaced, Lesley hooting with delight at my denouement, we took the A896 to Torridon where for the first time we took a wrong turn; a very beautiful wrong turn I must say. It was a narrow, precarious track wending its way along the side of Loch Torridon itself. The left hand side of the road that looked out over the loch, had a very steep tree covered drop. Death played peek-a-boo through the trees. I tried not to look as I have a habit of turning the steering wheel in the direction I’m looking at; some kind of multi tasking flaw in my head.
    The wrong turn deposited us at a spot overlooking the expanse of water, on a steep slant of rock overlooking the loch to the hills on the other side. Unfortunately that's the side we should have been on. It would have been too much for us to turn back and retrace our path so we stopped for a while and read the Sunday papers, sipped the ubiquitous tea and munched the buttered scones from the lovely lady at the Larnden café.
    Best of all though, we settled down for a snooze.
    During which I had an odd dream:-

    I was sitting in a black car when I noticed the Queen. She was late for a function, and needed a lift. She approached the back of the car and I came over all patriotic; but rather than getting out of the car myself and opening the door for her, I sent some unknown person around to do it. Before they reached the door, she hitched up her royal skirt and hopped in the front with me and we took off at speed.
    The next thing I remember was me being aware I was some sort of wizard. Two women were trying to get me to do something but I was not interested in their offer.
    They had sent a messenger to me. The messenger had serious indigestion. I recommended that he take some Slippery Elm powder.
    Then, I’m walking down a spiral staircase in my castle, when suddenly; I am propelled forward and out into the open ground in front of the castle itself. I understand that I am being attacked at the behest of the two women.
    Five dog creatures are lopping toward me. They are known collectively as ‘Shings’ and are magical creatures. Using my powers I caused them to collide and three of them burst into flames. The other two project balls of fire at me, but miss, and I end up in a tree, but strangely enough, I am actually looking at myself up there and I am Harry Potter.

    I woke up, somewhat alarmed.
    As the dream faded away I remembered that some of the 'Shing' dogs had at one point been in a Police Motorcycle Display Team formation; five across the bottom and three on their shoulders, and two on theirs and one on the top; obviously a very practical formation for magical ‘Shing’ dogs to attack you in.

    We retraced our tracks to Torridon and then continued along the correct road, the A896 to Shieldiag along the opposite shore. Along the way, we came across an interestingly named hotel/eatery on a bend along the tree-lined road. Of course, the name would only be of interest to a few of my mates and me. This is because a few years ago, it occurred to one or other of us when drunk, that the noise made when going to the toilet, after a successful delivery, as in when the Apollo spacecraft achieves splashdown, was a very full yet hollow sound. We called this, rather poetically in my humble opinion ’Ba-dumph’. The latter part of the syllable went up in scale about an octave.
    Well, the name of the hotel is ‘Be Damph’.
    Not an exact match admittedly, but close enough for me to hold my sides laughing. It also took my mind off the fact that I had somehow managed to summon up indigestion out of an interesting tube called my small intestine. It brought to mind one time when I had taken a remedy called charcoal tablets for the same complaint. Being a man of extremes, rather than take the suggested dose, I tripled it. Now, charcoal tablets are, literally, charcoal; and give them their due, they cured my indigestion. Unfortunately, given the fact that I had taken liberties with the dosage, I was passing nutty slack for weeks, every time I had a bowel movement.

    It was 3.30pm before we caught our first glimpse of the Isle of Skye glimmering on the horizon. The road rose suddenly like a cobra to a hair-raising bend and drop. Loch Torridon to our right, back on the right road and the water was the colour of gunmetal. It looked thicker than water, and even appeared to move slower, like cold metal reflecting the cold leaden belly of the clouds above.
    We parked up at a vantage point looking over the water between us and the island beyond the Isle of Skye, called the Isle of Rona.
    As we sat having a snack, I with my notepad on my lap, tapping lightly on my bottom lip with my pen, realised, I had nothing new to write about. I had gotten used to the scenery and the effect had worn off somewhat. It was now just a lovely landscape rather than a vision on the road to Damascus as some of the journey had been. There was also nothing to bring to mind an anecdote about going to the toilet or having sex with horses so I thought, well, I’ve got nothing of interest to write about.
    Then, and it just goes to show that life does its best to entertain us, and there is always an ongoing story if you look around you; a couple of bikers pulled up beside us. I could hear their leathers creak as they dismounted and stood looking out over the water at the view. Both had thick Scottish accents, so it was hard for me to hear what they were saying; as well as the fact that I wasn't listening properly; my ears just loitering, really.
    One of them pointed to the islands across the way from us and casually dropped in the words… ‘and that’s where I lost my fingers.’
    Curious, I looked over and he had. He had only two fingers, a thumb and two stumps. That set off my memory of a friend telling me how somebody he knew lost his testicles. I always say losing one testicle is careless, but losing two is just asking for trouble.
    Apparently the poor man involved was a despatch rider or Don R as they are also known, with the Irish army. He’d had cause to break suddenly at speed and hadn’t braced himself with his arms before applying the brake. Consequently he slid forward at a considerable rate of knots and so did his puplets; that is, until they hit the cap of the petrol tank which faced upward in the path of his balls.
    He kept going but they chose not to, having snagged on the cap.
    There are places in darkest Africa that have never encountered Western civilisation that speak of the strange day when they heard a distant cry of:-
    The ambulance turned up very quickly. I imagine when they heard about what he'd done, they dropped the stretcher case they already had on the floor, perhaps somebody having a major heart attack but something not as serious as losing one's lucky bag. How the driver got there so fast with his legs crossed I’ve no idea. I’ve got mine crossed typing this. Anyway, when they arrived, they bunged him in the back of the ambulance and left the Gardai (police) to look for his testicles. They searched high and low, under cars and down grates. Even up a conker tree but to no avail. They had simply disappeared. They issued a photo-fit of them but people kept phoning in, thinking they were twin Clive James, and saying one of them was on the telly.
    They had gone on the run.
    Meanwhile back in the hospital, the poor man, minus his nuts was being prepared for surgery.
    He was still conscious when they cut his pants off, and removed his boots…
    At which point one of his missing nuggets rolled out and across the floor and was promptly trodden on by the anaesthetist.
    And… well, I just can’t go on with the story. It’s far too uncomfortable to recall. I couldn’t even play conkers for a good twelve months after hearing the tale.
    I only mention it just to illustrate that life is an ongoing story and if you look around there is always a bizarre little episode or so going on.

    I listened to the bikers for a while longer but the wind picked up and I could only make out certain snippets of conversation here and there.
    ‘Get yer crayfish oot…Hebrides…Kyle…huge fleet mon, aye…walking up yon hill…submarine base…in the Clyde…old dog…Martians…fingers…such and such lost a whole hand.’
    Between each half heard sentence the other biker said. ‘Aye.’
    I have to say I don’t make a habit of this. In fact, Lesley will confirm the fact that I hardly listen to anybody, even when they are talking to me. I’m usually in a world of my own; or they’re boring the life out of me, so my eyes glaze over.
    They say people who listen in to other people's conversations deserve what they hear. I’m just glad I didn’t hear the words ‘if that guy doesnae stop writin’ doon what am sayin’ am gonna…’
    And so on...

    They left after about ten minutes. Then two very expensive black 4X4s turned up out of nowhere. Well, we were in the middle of it. The male occupants were dressed in the huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ style that is de rigueur for country estate weekends. As they got out of their cars to look at the view, an expensive scent of leather seats and manservant polished shoes wafted across. One of them had a pair of binoculars. I said they looked like a pair of binoculars but they looked to be so powerful they just might pull the horizon a few inches closer like a drunk stumbling, clutching the tablecloth and bringing everything clattering down on top of him. They were so powerful I wouldn't  have been surprised if what he was looking at was the back of his own head.
    They would probably have been called something like Zweiss mark 14 double optical back flip Nucleonic Cloudmaster binoculars for the discerning voyeur. Well, maybe without the voyeur bit. Lesley pointed something out.
    ‘Do you realise,’ she said, ‘that we haven’t seen a single woman with a camera or a pair of binoculars?’
    ‘You’re right. How odd. I wonder why that is?’
    We came to the conclusion; that with a camera, it's something to do with the old hunting instinct; ‘capturing’ the moment and bringing it back to the cave after you've taken a shot you are pleased with. It's a very caveman thing to do, despite the technological advances made since, so you don’t have to go out clubbing your dinner.
    Binoculars are much the same thing. The guy with the pair beside me was obviously looking for something to mate with.
    Some things never change.