These Demented Lands by Alan Warner

Fifteenth
    FROM MY NOTES of that day:
    8 a.m. That drugged-out alcoholic’s helicopter passed over the runway with a large grizzly bear dangling beneath in a netting.
    Stool: colicky/green. Certainly no darkenings of blood from a – for instance – ruptured rectum.
    In the afternoon I had to walk to that old bastard Gibbon’s Acres to barter for the left cabin door of Hotel Charlie. There was no sign of the Newcomer around the hotel.
    Smoke-like mist was tight down on the low slopes of 96-Metre Hill above me. Across the Sound the ragged, torn line of vapour ran along the mountain range. I tugged up the hood on the functional jacket then trotted down to the shore, legging up shingle until I had walked along as far as I could at the rocks. I stepped up onto the Big Road verge. Because of the hood, my view to the rear had been obscured for so long that when I finally turned around, with a shock, the view I thought so familiar to me seemed suddenly foreign, as if I were seeing it for the first time. As if my experiences pacingout the dimensions of every metre on the runway were simply rehearsal.
    The mile of shoreline to the delta beyond the graveyard, the slow-moving tidal waters of the Sound, the hotel, its outbuildings, the boathouse where I was re-constructing the two doomed planes, the Celtic crosses of the ruined chapel among the pine plantation by the airfield: all these constituted my universe and my future. But my familiarity with those dimensions, every piece of earth covered by my own feet – that certainty was gone for a bewildering instant, then just as suddenly it leapt back to me and I recognised this land I saw. I frowned and walked on.
    Mr and Mrs Heapie passed in their ancient Austin and I nodded grudgingly. Joe the Coal passed in his ex-Army Bedford and I waved.
    The jacket was heavy with drizzle when I reached the long, puddled dirt track to Gibbon’s farmhouse. Old Gibbon was working in the outhouse itself with a clown: the Knifegrinder. I walked to the side wall: the lower sections of the bizarre barn were constructed out of heavy railway sleepers, which in itself was unusual because there was never a railway on the island, save the miniature affair along at the military zoo. Cheap plywood had been nailed onto the sleepers and now warps and curls were prising gaps of light between the boards. Gibbon had been delighted to find an economical way to get a lick of something waterproof to douse the boards. He’d been too mean to buy paint: when the biscuit bakery at Far Places had gone bust, Gibbon had taken away gallons of raspberry food-colouring from theauction. To his amazement, the stuff was completely waterproof; the lower sections of the outhouse were soon crucially pink: raspberry pink. As a paint it proved sturdy enough but the outhouse’s downfall came when Gibbon’s cattle strayed from the fields into the yard and began licking the walls. Not only did they remove all the colouring up to five feet round the structure, the constant licking and pushing of the cattle wrecked sections of the walls and Gibbon had to fence off the outhouse to keep it from destruction.
    I crossed the muddied yard. The upper sections of the building, where the cabin door to Hotel Charlie was incorporated, was a hodge-podge of corrugated iron, the side walls of a caravan, plastic greenhousing material, unidentifiable sheets of metal and see-through plastic and even an old island road sign, so a large side section of the wall read:

    â€˜Hullo,’ I yelled. The door was on the far side of the outhouse so I’d called out before marching around to it.
    The two men, who were hunched over Knifegrinder’s motorbike which he used to turn the sharpening stone with some kind of belt mechanism, suddenly swung round together – which surprised me, since the noise of the bike inside the outhouse must have been quite bad. The Knifegrinder had a selection of douse-slashers and scythes laid