The Last Refuge (10 page)

‘I get angry sometimes, my friend. Forgive me. I am French. It is my nature to love beauty and hate anything that might change that. Come on. I have more work to do. We are going to Gásadalur. One of the most beautiful waterfalls you will ever see. And a view across to Mykenes. Come.’

We were halfway back down the hill towards the car, black clouds gathering over our heads, when a raucous sound burst from the inside of Gotteri’s jacket, a mobile phone ringtone that I’d never heard before. Serge had taken a few calls in the time we’d been on the road, but this one was entirely different. It screeched and screamed its urgency. He scrambled inside his pocket, the desperate claws of his fingers matching the phone’s demand to be heard immediately.

‘Yeah?’ Gotteri’s voice was hopeful, almost pleading.

I could hear the distant chatter of the voice on the other end, an excited and extended relaying of information. I watched Gotteri’s eyes widen as he took it all in.

‘Okay. Okay. Thank you. I am on my way.’

The call was ended and the phone stuffed back into his jacket pocket. Gotteri broke into a run.

‘Serge, what’s up?’

‘There’s a
grind
happening. Just run.’

The word meant nothing to me. ‘A what? What’s a
grind
?’

‘A
grindadráp
,’ he shouted impatiently. ‘A whale hunt. There’s one happening at Hvalvik. We need to hurry!’

Gotteri threw the Skoda into gear and screeched onto the road, leaving Gjógv behind in a pall of dust kicked up from the road.

‘The
grindadráp
has been taking place on the Faroes for hundreds of years,’ he explained, without taking his eyes off the road. I noticed his hands gripping the steering wheel fiercely. ‘They consider it an important part of their culture and history.’

Gotteri drove as fast as the road allowed, cutting corners and overtaking where he could, taking chances, pushing the black Yeti to its limit.

‘When pilot whales are spotted off the coast, the word goes out to boat owners and they put to sea. They get their crafts behind the whales and slowly drive them towards shore in one of the authorized villages. It is only allowed in places where the whales can be driven ashore so that they can be killed from the land.’

‘What? They beach them?’

Gotteri laughed but there was no pleasure in it. ‘Of course. They slaughter them. Wade into the water and cut them open in the shallows.’

‘An entire school of whales?’

‘Yes. The lead boats throw stones attached to lines. Anything not on the ocean side of the rope will be killed.’

‘Who does the killing?’

A car in front was slower than Gotteri expected and he had to abruptly pull out and accelerate past it. ‘The islanders do the killing. All the men of the island are expected to participate. You will see.’

I did not want to see a slaughter. I knew that already. The thought of spilled blood was already creeping over me like a rash, anxiety mounting with every bend in the road.

Rain was coming down hard now, lashing the windscreen from leaden skies as we dashed south through Eysturoy before we would head west in search of the tunnel taking us under the sea to Streymoy. At last, a sign for Hvalvik reared up in front of us and a pretty village of multi-coloured houses soon followed, tumbling down from the fells towards the fjord. There were cars everywhere: far more than you’d expect in a village of just four hundred people.

We found a tight parking place and Serge was out of the car in seconds, jumping down from the driver’s seat and grabbing his photographic gear from the boot before hurrying towards the sea. I followed in his wake, noticing that he didn’t even bother to lock the car now that his camera was out of it.

We’d run only a matter of yards when Gotteri came to a halt, standing stock still but for his shoulders slumping in defeat. I caught up with him seconds later and immediately realized what had stopped him in his tracks.

The sight was incredible.

There were pilot whales, dozens upon dozens of them, lined up in neat rows upon the rain-lashed grey concrete of Hvalvik’s quayside. Every one of them dead.

The tarmac was streaked with blood as well as rain, muted drags of red where each whale had been moved into its position in the serried ranks of death. We walked closer, silently stalking towards the already stricken prey. The closer we got, the larger the beasts seemed, six or seven metres in length and glistening grey against the tarmac. Each bore a gruesome but mesmerizing slash across its back, towards the head, where their spinal cord had been cut, forcing the flesh apart and almost severing the head from the body.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the cuts. They’d left each whale with a deep, gaping wound that resembled a mock smile across its sleek dark-grey back. It made me think of the Joker from
Batman
. The cuts that killed the whales also mocked them.

The sight stirred memories and guilt. My breath hid inside me, not daring to come out until it had to, only emerging in stilted gasps.

I did the calculation, counting the carcasses of the whales in front of my eyes. There were 105 of them. We had missed the hunt and had arrived only in time for the funeral procession.

Gotteri was furious. He muttered bitterly in French, his mouth contorted and eyes ablaze. At last he fixed a lens on his camera and, almost reluctantly, photographed the kill.

I walked in between the corpses, both fascinated and repulsed by what I saw. The cuts to the spine revealed a gory glimpse of the meat and blubber inside. To the other side, the whale’s snub nose, dark eyes and mournful mouth. All dressed in mundane grey but for the lighter anchor-shaped patches under the chin and a saddle behind the dorsal fin.

Serge had told me on the drive down that Hvalvik meant ‘Whale Bay’ in Faroese. There seemed a grotesque irony about that now.

I saw he had begun walking away from the rows of carcasses towards the quayside and then beyond it to where the fells met the sea, the grass and rocks giving way to the shallows of the ocean. I followed, seeing his camera lifted towards his eyes again.

I stood beside him, seeing what he saw. I was equally aghast and enthralled. The sea was red. Dark, blood red.

It pooled out forty or fifty yards towards the horizon, where a small flotilla of boats bobbed peacefully in a semicircle on the water. My stomach turned at the sight of it, unwelcome memories flooding my mind, drowning reason. I was lost, enduring another nightmare, but this time with my eyes wide open. It was as if the islands were taunting me, with sleep and the lack of it, night mirroring day.

Gotteri’s camera whirred as he fired off shot after shot, his trigger finger thumping down fiercely.

‘Serge,’ I said at his shoulder. ‘Are you so angry because this happened, or because you missed it?’

The camera fired off more shots before Gotteri let his arms drop to his side and he whirled to glare at me.

‘Just get back in the fucking car. We’re leaving.’

Chapter 15

After the long day spent outdoors and the exhaustion of Gotteri’s company on the silent drive home, I should have been ready only for food and bed, but I felt the need for something more. I needed to wash the taste of the whale hunt from my mouth and my mind.

It was doubtful that there was enough alcohol in town to wipe away the sights from the quayside, which continued to bother me long after my eyes were closed. Memories, new and old, swirled together, disturbing me. As if my own guilt wasn’t enough, there was some shame at just being part of the human race, and I felt compelled to drown it in beer.

The Cafe Natur was busy inside, a young, happy crowd, oblivious to my sensitivities. No one batted an eyelid at my entrance and that suited me just fine. I nodded at a draught tap of Klassic, not having the energy for words, and looked around.

At a table near the window was Karis. She looked up and held my gaze for a brief moment, her face expressionless, before turning back to her friends and ignoring me.

Fine. I didn’t need any hassle about her boyfriend who wasn’t her boyfriend, or whatever all that nonsense had been about. There was something about her, no doubt about that, an intriguing mix of dark and light. Whether it was worth the aggravation was something else.

I downed a greedy mouthful of beer and let my eyes slide shut for the length of a heavy sigh. Long enough, it turned out, to see ranks of dead whales carved with bloody smiles.

Minutes turned into a half-hour or more as I worked my way down one pint and most of another, my nerves settling like the head on a beer. The bar hummed around me and I allowed myself to feel safe in the company of strangers, people who either didn’t know who I was or didn’t care.

Then the door opened behind me and I knew the newcomers for who they were immediately. Even the laughter that burst into the pub with them came with accents. Mostly from north-eastern Scotland, Aberdeen and beyond, but there were a couple of Glasgow voices too. Glottal stops. Fucking this and fucking that. In seconds, I was back in Whiteinch and the hairs on the back of my neck were standing on end.

I turned, as casually as I could, and saw six of them coming through the door. Loud and lairy, obviously full of drink but looking for more. Ruddy-cheeked fishermen, some with hair gelled as if for a Saturday night on the pull, likely lads here for a good time not a long time. I knew Scots boats headed north towards Icelandic waters, and with growing unease I realized this was a stopping-off point. This wasn’t good, not good at all. I felt panic rising inside me.

One of them, a heavy-built and heavily bearded guy in a red jumper, pulled a wad of notes from a pocket and flourished it before the others. He had the kitty, the key to their next round of booze, and so he was their king for now. Orders were made and taken and he swayed towards the bar to fulfil requests.

I turned back round, away from them, staring into my beer and wishing I was anywhere else. Above and in front of me I heard the man ordering up the round. Definitely from somewhere near Aberdeen, his vowels pitching and turning like the North Sea. I could feel his eyes on me and looked up to see him tilting his head to one side in amiable greeting. ‘A’ right?’

I shrugged as if I didn’t understand and went back to my beer. Just before I did so, I saw the fisherman’s eyes narrow in a shade of confusion, a man unsure of what he might have seen. Then he too shrugged and turned back to the bar to pick up pints of beer.

This wasn’t what I wanted, far from it. I needed out, away from the Scots. These guys always trawled nets behind them and could catch fish even when they didn’t know they were looking for it.

Most of them were in a clump near the front door, but a couple had spread out in search of local talent, spreading their charms in a way that only those who have swallowed their self-awareness can.

One of them, a lanky type with close-cropped dark hair, was at the door at the far end of the pub, drooling over a local girl with long blonde hair. She was laughing at or with him – either was enough encouragement for him to continue. The guy had positioned himself as close to her table as he could, but with another table behind, there was no way past without going right through him.

Cafe Natur suddenly seemed smaller than it had ever done before. The walls were closing in on me, noise tumbling over movement, the narrow corridor teeming with threat. I had to get out of there, but the very process of doing that offered me up as someone to be seen. Someone to be recognized. Scots were the last people I wanted to see or be seen by.

The bearded guy in the red jumper was looking at me again, curiosity knotting his eyebrows as some cogent thought struggled to be heard among the swill of booze in his head. He was trying to join some dots in his addled brain and I knew it couldn’t be a good thing for me.

I turned away from him to find something interesting behind the bar, making myself count the beer taps and then the bottles on the shelves. If he couldn’t see my face then there was much less chance that he’d work out where he might have seen it. And if he couldn’t do that, then hopefully he’d just shrug his shoulders and give it up. Pinning my hopes on the logic of a drunk was like hoping for sunshine on a Torshavn weekend.

The biggest thing I had going for me was that he hadn’t heard me speak and so had no reason to think I was Scottish. Maybe that was enough to keep him from making the connection. Why would he think he might recognize some Faroese guy sitting in a bar? All I had to do was not talk, and hide my face. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Karis looking at me oddly. She must have wondered why I was taking so much interest in the fixtures and fittings of the Natur bar. I was staring at them like a drunk in the desert, eyeing up a mirage of booze. Shit, was she going to come over and talk to me? Any other time I might have welcomed it, crazy as she was, but not now. The last thing I needed was her to call me ‘Scotsman’ or say anything that meant I would have to answer out loud. I focused back fully on the beer taps and threw my last scrap of hope at the wall.

She was to my left, while the Bearded Wonder was behind me. The lanky guy was guarding one door and another four or five were near the other. I was surrounded by threats and my own paranoia. Stick or twist, stay or try to leave?

As I watched, the bearded man’s eyebrows rose in surprise and his mouth fell open in a round O of disbelief. His hands gripped the side of his chair and he began to push himself to his feet. I turned to my left and saw Karis staring back at me, clearly aware of the growing panic that must have been stitched across my face. Even if I got up and marched straight past her, the lanky guy was still on duty at the far door, and he was taking up even more room than he had before.

I could feel it building inside. A familiar feeling coloured in reds and blacks, an anger fathered by anxiety. My hands balled into fists and my breathing quickened. I didn’t know where it was going, but I knew it was spilling out and I had no control of it. I had to get out of there – it was as if I was claustrophobic, and maybe I was. The walls and the people and the talking and the laughter were like a straightjacket that was winding itself ever tighter round me.