Chapter Four

It felt good to be writing in proper notebooks again, and almost as soon as I came home with them they started to fill up. I carried the small one with me everywhere I went and scribbled down everything that came into my head. After my shifts ended I sat for hours in my room with the larger one, writing and revising page after page, often late into the night. At times I was almost possessed; I couldn’t remember when I’d last felt like this. I was writing as if my life depended on it – which, in a way, it did.

I was now paying my respects to Luan Po Tuad twice a day as I had in the old days, once in the morning and then again at night. His original gold chain gone, I would slip him instead into the change pocket of my jeans or the breast pocket of my shirt so that he was always with me. Bearing in mind all that both he and the pendant meant, together with the conclusion of that first prayer in a year, I was no longer writing for the old reasons of money, publication and success, nor even the simple enjoyment of having the ideas and writing about them. If I had been initially unclear why I had been directed back to writing, the answer had at some point become obvious: winning the competition might be my only hope of getting back together with Fon.

I realise that looks ridiculous, if not downright sad, in black and white, but there was a kind of logic to it: I didn’t have a clue where Fon was, and no means of finding out; likewise, she had no idea of my whereabouts – nobody did, in fact, except Mum and Dad, and all they knew was that I was alive somewhere on Skye. Like them, Fon had my email address, but cyberspace was all that now directly connected any of us. A few months before, when I’d first made a real effort to find her, I’d posted a few enquiries on internet message boards and chatrooms she and her old friends used to virtually frequent, and I even briefly engaged a private detective in London to see if he could track her down. But the message boards saw no response, and the detective’s initial enquiries turned up nothing. He offered to keep looking for her but his fees were far more than I could manage. In any case, although I tried not to consider the possibility, by now it seemed likely she’d gone back to Thailand. Short of going there, which I couldn’t afford to do even if it wasn’t a needle-in-a-haystack job, the only way of finding out for sure was to write to the family, but I hadn’t done that. I spoke no Thai, they spoke no English, and above all I felt it wasn’t my place to get them involved in our marital difficulties. I hadn’t even been in touch with them while Fon and I were together, except in the sense of asking Fon to send them my love while she was making one of her rare phone calls home. Her parents were quite a bit older than mine and not in the best of health, and this, together with the far more formal relationship Thais have with their seniors than is usual among British people, there was a strong possibility that she hadn’t even told them we’d split up. So it was best left alone.

Wherever Fon was, my idea was that if I could win a Sankey prize, several things would ensue which even if they didn’t lead to a reconciliation could at least put us back in touch and give us another chance. The main thing was the publicity: while normal writing competitions were never the stuff of front-page news, or even page 94 news come to that, the maverick Sankey – death notwithstanding – was always good for a story, and even if it took a while I felt sure that news of my (still hoped-for) win would eventually filter through to Fon. If I had the chance to say even half a dozen words at the prize-giving ceremony or to the press covering the competition, I’d dedicate the prize to her, or somehow work her name or a secret message into my entry to make doubly sure she knew I was still thinking about her. All she’d have to do to get in touch was send me an email, or if she didn’t have the address any more, she could contact the papers or the Sankey people themselves.

As a method of tracking someone down, it had its weaknesses. Not the least of which was that its success depended firstly on me winning a prize and secondly on Fon being the one to make contact when or if she found out about it... and I wasn’t sure which was the less likely. The ball being entirely in her court, even if I did win I’d still be in the dark until I heard from her, and if I didn’t hear from her, I wouldn’t know whether that was because she hadn’t heard the news or that she had and simply didn’t want to speak to me – and both of those were equally likely. All that gave my idea the edge over the most desperate of fantasies were the prize money and the symbolism of the award itself. My writing and our money, or the lack of both, were the main reasons we’d split up, and although our problems would never be solved simply by my being published and having a bit of cash, they would certainly help.

*

All of this must have been some kind of motivation for me to get on with it because within a few weeks I’d finished the two opening chapters and outlines of each of the first two novels I’d had ideas for, and I was working on two more. Admittedly one of these was an old theme that had been haunting me for years and which I’d never exorcised, and even though none of my old pre-Dungarry writing was still around for comparison I knew these ideas were among the best I’d ever had. By my previous standards that might not be saying much, but most people – even Vince, I suspected – recognised a good idea when it came to them; the hard part was in doing justice to it. Fortunately, I was just as happy with how I was expressing the ideas as the ideas themselves.

I did of course only need one good idea to win a prize in the competition, and even though I now had four, there was no way I was going to put all my eggs in one basket just yet. Inspiration to the extent I was experiencing it was rarer than the filling of a Portree steakwich, and when it goes like that, especially after such a period of drought, you quickly learn not to question it, even if it drives you mad. I imagined that when the time came to enter the competition, I’d simply pull out the best one and send it in. I didn’t know which that would be at this point, faithful (not necessarily in a religious sense) that I’d get a ‘sign’ of some sort. I might find, for example, that I was naturally spending more time and effort on one, or that one would take off in an unexpected direction and I’d want to follow it, or I’d take a fancy to a particular character and want to spend all my time with them and their story. Either way, I didn’t anticipate the choice would be that hard.

*

The hostel had a small room on the ground floor with two PCs in it with email and internet access and all the usual software. There was also a good quality printer, and George had installed a scanner and even a webcam, although what he intended to do with that I had no idea. By now I’d looked up the official Sankey competition website and printed off the rules, which were as follows:

(1) Novels will be judged on the strength of the two opening chapters, which together should amount to no more than 2,000 words, and a two-page synopsis of the novel.
(2) Novels need not be completed at the time of entry. (See point 5.)
(3) Subject matter, style and genre of novels are open.
(4) The five successful competitors will each be awarded an initial cash prize of £2,000 and a place on a five-day residential creative writing course. To participate in the course competitors must be available for the first week in June.
(5) The five remaining cash prizes of £8,000 will be awarded to each successful competitor ONLY upon the submission of the finished manuscript, which must:
(a) be completed within six months following the creative writing course;
(b) be no less than 250 pages and no more than 350 pages in length;
(c) be deemed by the judges to be of a standard commensurate with that of the initial winning chapters and synopsis.
(6) Only one entry per person admitted. No entrant may win more than one prize.
(7) Copyright in all submissions remains with the entrants.
(8) The judges will be novelist and former Sankey Prize winner Rebecca Burgess, the critic Simon Glasses and Leonard Sankey’s widow Edna Sankey.

At first glance, 2,000 words – about ten pages – for the first two chapters and the page limit for the whole thing seemed to suggest that the new Sankey prize was designed to encourage little more than crude bestsellers, and was thus likely to be dismissed by critics as commercialised and unimaginative. But otherwise the world was your oyster, and in any case, none of this meant the books couldn’t be good, as Sankey’s own marriage of popular and critical success had shown. Certainly, by comparison with most of the writing contests I’d entered over the years, the rules were extremely generous, and for once in my life none of the ideas I’d had for the competition would have any trouble fitting into the restrictions given.

The closing date for entries was now less than a month away, but I didn’t want to rush: I needed as much time as possible to see which of the ideas I had was the best one. The way I’d always approached writing competitions was either desperate or simply narcissistic (unless that’s the same thing) – to wait until the last possible moment before sending in my entry, on the basis that however good (or bad) my idea and however well (or badly) I might have written it thus far, there was always a chance I might be struck by a bolt of genius at the last minute which would make all the difference between an unconditional winner and an anonymous loser. This had never actually happened, I should add – the strategy was, I suspect, more a psychological last refuge to which scoundrels like me cling – but I had nothing to lose by doing it, and if nothing else the extra pressure of time added an element of drama to my otherwise drab existence.

No new ideas for novels came to me after this point, but I was hardly complaining: I had more choice than I had a right to hope for, and it also allowed me to devote all my creative energies to perfecting the required opening chapters and outlines of all four novels. It was quiet in the hostel, just a few French girls and a Japanese couple, so I had plenty of time to sit in the PC room and type up each potential entry on the word processor.

However, none of them seemed to be choosing themselves in quite the way I’d anticipated, so when I’d printed them all out I put them away and gave myself a week’s rest from the whole business – I didn’t even touch the pocket notebook – before sitting down to read them as objectively as possible one morning over a cup of coffee.

And this is when the trouble started. The Sankey trouble, I mean.

To my delight, they all read really well; I was extremely pleased with what I’d written and how I’d outlined each of the novels. I would have been more than happy to have written just one of them – any one of them. But that was the problem. To my horror, none of the ideas seemed any better or worse than the others: not one leapt out at me as the perfect candidate. They were all equal contenders. If they’d been boxers, they would either have knocked each other out the moment the first bell went or gone fifteen rounds before the referee called it a draw. I mean, it was a nice problem to have – as Oscar Wilde might have said, to write one decent competition entry might be considered good going, but to manage it four times was starting to look like witchcraft. Even so, given that there was now only a week before the closing date – I was beginning to wish I hadn’t left it so late after all – it was a problem all the same. I couldn’t even choose one on a sentimental basis; they were all my creations, and I loved them equally. Which I suppose is sentimental – in which case what I should say is I couldn’t choose one on an unsentimental basis. Look, I just couldn’t choose one on any bloody basis, all right?

I’m aware all this sounds egocentric in the extreme, but I honestly don’t mean it that way; it was simply how it came across to me at the time – and in any case, the extraordinary events which followed bore out those feelings. I wasn’t to know that then, of course, so I resorted to my usual approach when faced with such dilemmas by going for a long walk in the hills, smoking a lot of cigarettes and praying to Luan Po Tuad.

The conclusion I came to was that what I perceived as genius was probably no more than sheer relief that I could still write anything at all after barely picking up a pen in a year, and in any case, the most important thing for me to realise was that so far I was the sole judge of what I’d written. The only thing for it was an adult dose of objectivity. Time, the great healer, was usually the best thing for that, but by now time was what I didn’t have; the next best thing was a good friend.

Chapter Three

In the weeks that followed, ideas for novels came to me almost as often as bittersweet memories, and I wrote down everything. My plans for leaving Dungarry were shoved onto a back burner by default: what was going through my head was too important to risk disrupting with such an upheaval, and in any case all my energies were being consumed by trying to keep pace with this surfeit of thoughts as well as hold down the job at the hostel. I needed stability and familiarity, and if nothing else, I was lucky to have both at the Dungarry Inn, thanks largely to the manager, George.

George was a twenty-five-year-old Californian whose father owned the building. With his aviator sunglasses, frayed bell-bottoms and long hair that lankly traced the exact contours of his skull, he could have walked straight off the set of Easy Rider; that said, there was no irony about him, and he was no trendy sixties revivalist; he was just born that way, the real deal. Despite the yawning abyss between the Skye climate and that of his homeland, he and Dungarry seemed made for each other, both of them being ponderous, thoughtful and resistant to change. Nothing was ever too much trouble for him, if for the only reason that his answer to every problem was... nothing. ‘Don’t worry, man,’ he’d say when the roof leaked or the boiler exploded: ‘It’s cool.’ I’d suggest we get hold of Vince – he could fix anything – but George would continue to maintain that everything was ‘cool’ and carry on doing nothing. And then, just when the problem was reaching catastrophic proportions, he’d disappear completely. You’d panic, and when he turned up again, the thing would be fixed. When you asked him what had been going on, he’d say: ‘Don’t worry, man. It’s cool.’

If George ever appreciated the irony of describing everything as ‘cool’ in a place as freezing as Dungarry I never noticed it. But he was a lovely guy, and an ally at a time when I didn’t think I could ever have a friend again. That said, it’s true I still haven’t told him everything that happened to me before we met, but then he’s never asked, and that’s an important part of our friendship. And even if I did tell him, I think I can guess his response.

I didn’t come straight to Dungarry when I left London. I had no idea where to go but I had a bit of cash and didn’t have to work – thankfully, since the state I was in at the time made me more or less unemployable – so for a few weeks I travelled around the country, staying in youth hostels in places like Bristol and York and the Lake District. After a while it seemed everything was drawing me towards Scotland: it was a place I’d never been, where I knew no-one and had no ties. I had no concept of its geography, but an island was what I felt I was at the time, so Skye seemed perfect. I stayed in all the main towns – Armadale, Broadford, Portree – for a few nights each before ending up in Dungarry, where the only option left for all but the most die-hard Skye tourist is to stay or go back on yourself. By then I was spent out in both senses, so I stayed. I’d barely spoken to anyone in the previous month, and wasn’t keen to start, but I was the only guest in the hostel when I first turned up, and George was such a gentle, hospitable guy that when on the third night he offered me a can of Stella, I accepted. He put on a CD of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here and we started chatting.

I was intrigued to find that George was far from the space-cowboy first impressions his laid-back appearance had suggested. He was well-read, and it turned out we had a shared affection for T.S. Eliot. George could quote whole chunks from, of all things, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. ‘I love that bit about disturbing the universe,’ he said, turning up his palms. ‘Like, why disturb the universe? It’s much better off left as it is.’

‘Is that what it means?’ I said.

‘I guess so,’ said George. ‘Why, what do you think it means?’

I was going to say I thought that wondering if you dared disturb the universe was the sort of thing you might do if you were full of regrets and felt ineffectual and alienated and old before your time and as if life had passed you by and it was too late to make any difference to anything. And then I was going to mutter darkly about being a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas, and disappear without a further word to bed. But although that was how I felt, and I may have had good reason, I stayed in my seat and sipped my beer in silence. George was friendly and didn’t deserve to be at the receiving end of some bitter diatribe. ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘maybe you’re right. I like that: “why disturb the universe.”’

‘If more people thought like that,’ he said, ‘and less people thought their lives would be meaningless unless they went and interfered with things, the world would be a much happier place.’

I winced, the words nauseating me as much for how they reminded me of the mistakes I’d made with Fon as for their naive simplicity. But I still didn’t say anything, and we opened another beer and moved on to Ernest Hemingway.

Under other circumstances I might have mistaken George’s non-interventionist approach to life for vacuous, airheaded optimism, but at that time I didn’t care what it was; he was a breath of fresh air, and I was grateful for his lack of inquisitiveness. In fact, almost the only other question he ever asked me was about two weeks later. ‘You like it here, don’t you?’ he said.

‘Very much,’ I said.

He didn’t say anything, and then I found myself adding, ‘I thought I might go down to Portree and see if I can get a job somewhere.’ I hadn’t thought that at all before that moment, although it was true I’d run out of money and didn’t have any particular desire to leave Skye.

‘Why don’t you stay here?’ he said. ‘I could do with some help.’

‘Really?’

‘Sure... I’ve got fifty-two beds here. It doesn’t pay very well, and you’d have to clean the john, that sorta stuff. But you get your own room and all you can eat. How about it?’

It was as simple as that. There was no employment contract, and George paid me in cash, but for once in my life I didn’t care. It quickly became clear that George wasn’t going anywhere and I would have the job for as long as I wanted it. A mutual trust had somehow been established, and that was all that mattered. It still seems funny to me, because you couldn’t wish to meet two more different people than George and me. But then, why disturb the universe?

*

Up to now I’d been scribbling my ideas on the yellow paper nicked from the office, but as my big ideas became bigger, my pockets started to bulge, my room began to disappear and I started losing important things I’d written. I no longer owned a proper notebook; I’d left all my writing gear, from paper to laptop, in my flat. It was clear I needed a new one, and since there were no shops in Dungarry, a trip to Portree, Skye’s miniature ‘capital’, was in order.

Portree was an hour’s drive away, and while not necessarily the closest source of notebooks and other items less than essential for survival, it was the most picturesque. A map would show you that, like Dungarry, Portree was on the sea’s edge, but while Dungarry’s rocks were constantly foam-dashed in time-honoured British tradition, when you walked around Portree’s haunting cliff path your eyes told you what you were looking at was an enormous black lake which wouldn’t have been out of place further south in Cumbria. By contrast, the harbour was much more gentle, with Mediterranean-style fishing boats and, around the bay, a crescent of front doors each painted a different colour. Tourism accounted for most of the town’s business, so those front doors opened almost exclusively into guesthouses, and a good half of the shops sold little else but tartan-hued and whisky-flavoured variations on just about any gift you could think of. More originally, a newish shop called Skye Batiks did a roaring trade in dazzling hand-made clothes printed with beautiful Celtic designs and Escher-like interlocking birds and fish. There was also a bakery-cum-café in the town centre whose speciality was a steak sandwich, or ‘steakwich’ as they called it, to which I was rather partial.

I was thinking about all this as I was waiting for the minibus up the road from the hostel. With ten minutes to spare, I lit a cigarette and blew blue smoke into the damp air. I knew the bus times by heart, and you could set your watch by them, but they only came once every two hours and I could never trust myself not to miss one, so I was always there early. The bus stop itself was actually a gate opening off the main road onto a path down to the Jenny. I was daydreaming about a solitary stroll around the cliff path and a long gaze into what I still considered the town’s black lake when car tyres crunched juicily up the wet, stony ground behind me.

‘Stevie-boy!’ said Vince, leaning out of his black Jag. ‘What’re you up to?’

‘Alright, Vince. Just going into Portree.’

‘What, on the bus?’ He made it sound as if I’d said I was going to Mars by donkey.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I thought if I waited here long enough the ground would freeze over and I could skate there.’

‘Stevie-boy,’ he grinned. ‘I’m going there myself. Hop in.’

I couldn’t exactly refuse. I’d barely got my seatbelt on when he started.

‘What’re you doing in Portree?’ he said. He was driving with his right hand, or rather his whole arm, on the steering wheel, while rolling a cigarette with his left.

‘I’m not there yet, am I,’ I said.

‘What’re you going there for, then?’

‘Just some stuff.’

‘Stuff?’

‘Yeah, some shopping, a few bits and pieces.’

‘Ah, you should’ve asked me, I’d’ve got it for you.’

‘Well, you know – I haven’t been there for a while. Fancied a stroll.’

‘A stroll? Around Portree? You can do it in five minutes, can’t you?’

‘I don’t mean the town, I mean the lake. You know, the sea. The harbour, the cliff path, all that.’

‘Oh, aye. What’re you gonna buy?’

‘Like I said, just some stuff.’

‘Come on!’

I couldn’t believe I was in for another fifty minutes of this.

‘First, you tell me why you’re going to Portree,’ I said.

‘Oh, nothin’ much. See my girlfriend, you know.’

‘Your girlfriend...’ I said, trying to cover up the fact that I had no idea who he was going out with at that moment.

‘Margaret,’ he said, smiling. ‘Ah, what a beautiful word, eh? “Margaret.”’

‘Oh, Margaret,’ I said. ‘Isn’t she the one sort of with – brown hair and – ’

‘You haven’t met her yet,’ he said. ‘Well, I mean you might’ve done, but...’

‘I probably have,’ I said, ‘if she’s from Skye.’

‘Oh, she’s from Skye all right... Skye born and bred. Speaks the Gaelic and everything.’ The Scots dialect was pronounced ‘garlic’.

I chuckled. ‘I still can’t get used to that expression. It always makes me think it’s some secret language spoken only by chefs.’

‘Anyway,’ said Vince, ‘you still haven’t told me what you’re going to buy in Portree.’

I sighed. ‘A notebook.’

‘A what?’

‘A notebook. A book for making notes in.’

‘Oh, aye! What d’you want one of them for?’

‘For making notes, Vince.’

‘About what?’

‘About – ideas I’ve had.’

‘Ideas!’ he said. ‘You want to be careful with them, you know. Ideas can be dangerous things.’

I laughed. ‘I shouldn’t think my ideas would do much harm.’ Then I thought of the ideas I’d had which had driven my wife away, and stopped smiling.

‘Whenever I get any ideas,’ he said, ‘I tell ’em to piss off. Not that I really have any ideas, that is, but if I did...’

‘Why do you do that?’ I said. ‘You might have a good idea one day. You tell it to go away and then you spend the rest of your life wishing it’d come back.’

‘Naw,’ he said. ‘All ideas are dangerous. Best ignore ’em. What sort of ideas have you had?’

‘How can you say that?’ I said.

‘What?’

‘You say ideas should be ignored, and in the next breath you want me to tell you about them. You can’t have both, can you?’

He thought for a bit. ‘Well, these are your ideas,’ he said. ‘They don’t count.’

‘Thanks, Vince.’

‘No, I don’t mean they don’t count, I mean – ’

‘I know what you mean. I dunno... they’re nothing very interesting. Not even worth talking about, really. It’s just... stuff.’

‘Stuff?’ he said. ‘You’ve had ideas about stuff? That sounds really dangerous.’

‘What can I say?’ I said, exasperated. ‘My head’s full of stuff at the moment. It just keeps coming.’

‘Sounds like you need to have your sinuses drained,’ said Vince, ‘not a notebook.’

To my relief, Vince’s mobile phone rang then and he spent the next twenty minutes ignoring me entirely while he talked to a woman who wasn’t, frankly, called Margaret.

Eventually we got to Portree, where I managed to convince Vince I’d be able to do my shopping and get back by myself. I went into the newsagents-cum-stationers and bought a couple of spiral-bound yellow-paper notebooks, the custard-coloured A4 from the office having seemed lucky. One was pocket-sized for jotting things down whenever they came to me, and the other was a bumper A4 job for spreading my thoughts out in my spare time. I was going to get a few of them, given the amount of writing it looked like I was going to be doing, but I didn’t want to tempt providence. Too much blank paper can be bad luck for a writer; you should only have just enough to be getting along with.

I did have a steakwich at the café, and after that I walked up the cliff path and gazed over the ‘lake’. But the water looked blacker than I remembered it, and the immensity of it scared me. Strange thoughts clouded my mind: the surface of the water was as mirror-smooth as ever, but I couldn’t help thinking that at any moment it would start to rock and dip and something would rise out of it – some huge, black Krakenesque creature the entire length of the lake that had been sleeping deeply in it for centuries. I couldn’t understand it but I didn’t like the idea so I walked back to the bus stop and went home.

Chapter Two

Nobody in Dungarry, not even my best friends, knew I was a writer. This wasn’t just because I’d never made any money or a name for myself as one, or that I wasn’t writing then; the main reason was that I hadn’t told them. Because – and this becomes clearer to me every day – I still was a writer despite all the evidence to the contrary. It’s not something I do, it’s something I am, whether I like it or not. I don’t know whether I can say it’s in my blood as such; I should say perhaps it’s in the leather of my shoes or the ash of my cigarettes or the dregs of my coffee. It’s been in me for as long as I can remember, and, as I was finding out, I could run as much as I wanted, but I couldn’t hide from it, not even somewhere like Dungarry. It was something that would always be with me, like a curse.

The rest of the conversation at the Jenny that afternoon was forgettable. Most of our conversations were, of course, but that was because they were meant to be – a panacea, a cure-all to get you through the days, the hours. This time though my head was too fired-up by the idea of the Sankey competition for me to be able to enjoy the badinage: all I wanted to do was go back to my room and start scribbling. I managed to resist the urge with the aid of more beer, some of Eric’s best steak-and-ale pie and a huddle of German backpackers, chewing the fat in all senses right up to closing time. But even so, I still barely slept that night, my head teeming with stories and characters, plots and dialogues, situations and dreams – some that were new to me, but quite a few remembered or half-remembered from things I’d written, or started writing, long before.

The past year had been the longest period I’d ever gone without writing since I first discovered I could write. I date this life-defining moment to the age of eight, when I won a school prize for a story about a small boy who climbed a mountain. It’s tempting to say it was all downhill from there but although it always brought me more trouble than money, writing was the one constant in my life, the only thing I ever really knew for sure about myself. It started out as the one thing I was any good at in school, and by the time I left it was all I wanted to do for a living. I’ve followed it (and it was always several steps ahead of me) with varying degrees of enthusiasm for most of my thirty-six years at the expense of any kind of career and several relationships, and in spite of my family’s frustration. Having fought for generations a kind of crusade to prove Napoleon was right about the English being a nation of shopkeepers, Mum and Dad had hoped I would follow suit and ultimately take over the family grocers, a small but important local store in the Surrey village where I grew up. It was a disappointment to them at first when I developed no taste for the business, but they got over it; some of the other things I’ve done they’ve found less easy to forgive.

Anyway, thus far, all I’d scribbled at the Dungarry Inn were greetings to new guests on sheets of recycled card saying things like,

GOOD MORNING, HELGA! HERE IS YOUR BREAKFAST. PLEASE LET STEPHEN OR GEORGE KNOW IF THERE’S ANYTHING ELSE YOU’D LIKE. ENJOY YOUR DAY!

which were placed on trays with bowls of muesli, rolls, bananas and yoghurts on a counter at one end of the dining room. I sometimes thought of myself then as an ex‑writer, in the way you might call yourself an ex-junkie: not just someone defined by what they used to be rather than what they were, but literally a kind of recovering addict – in my case, one who’d gone cold turkey, shaken off a dangerous habit and was determined to stay off. This was no more evident than from waking up the day after reading about Sankey with a complete and finished idea for a novel I could enter into the competition, and not only not having a pen or paper to write it down with, but not looking for any.

That said, now that I think about it, that analogy of being a drug addict didn’t quite fit my personal condition: I don’t have any experience of real cold turkey – the occasional attempt at giving up smoking excepted – but it goes without saying that it’s excruciating; by contrast, when I stopped writing I didn’t feel a thing. I was too numb to feel anything at all after what happened with Fon, my wife.

Writing was such a constant feature in my life, and I was so stubborn about it and such a loner in general, that I never expected to get married at all, not just because I didn’t think I’d ever find a woman willing to put up with me but because it basically didn’t seem fair, let alone sensible, to inflict myself on someone till death us did part. I had high expectations of everything, I was impatient, moody and sensitive, and I liked my independence and my own space. But I also knew a good deal when I saw one, and deals like Fon don’t come along more than once in a lifetime.

Of course she was more than a deal, she was more than the sum of her parts, and believe me her parts alone were wonderful. It could be that I romanticise it all out of proportion, but increasingly now I think that what we had was as close to perfection as any of us are ever likely to get. Given my faults and shortcomings, I used to wonder what she saw in me, but then I’d tell myself that that wasn’t my concern; it was a question you should never have to ask. Love doesn’t bear much analysis – thankfully; we’d all be in trouble if it did. It was enough that she loved me and I loved her; nobody has a right to ask for more.

The trouble is, I did. I was the Oliver Twist of relationships. I was always asking for what they couldn’t give me without realising that at worst, that was all you had, and if you had it then you were very lucky, and at best, what they did offer was more than enough for anyone if you knew what you were doing. But who does know what they’re doing in the war between the man and the woman? Not me, that’s for sure.

I didn’t ask for more in the sense of being unfaithful; I did have fleeting pangs for other women every now and then, but they were mostly abstract – faces I passed in the street whom I’d never see again, models in magazines, the occasional dimpled newsreader – and even when they were actually within reach, I was always able to keep those fantasies in my head where they belonged and not confuse a passing crush with real love. I used to think these feelings came from being a romantic, but in my marriage I wasn’t nearly romantic enough; if only I could have saved for my wife some of the intensity and passion I felt for those abstract women, or even for some of the stories I wrote, we might still be together. No: I was faithful to my wife. But it was still due to my betrayal of her that our relationship fell apart.

*

It was a mixed blessing that it was my rota day: with everything playing on my mind, I would have been lousy company for my various friends and colleagues, but being alone meant I had more of an opportunity to dwell on it all. Traditionally on my day off I had an extended breakfast and read the paper from front to back; that morning I had two breakfasts, read a second paper and smoked half my daily quota of cigarettes all before ten o’clock, but it was clear that neither the good ideas nor the bad memories were going away without a fight. The rain wasn’t too bad by Dungarry standards – you could see your hand in front of your face – so I pulled on my anorak and hiking boots and sneaked out onto the hills, thankful that I didn’t bump into anyone on the way.

Depending on how you look at it, or how good you are at dealing with it, Dungarry is either the best or the worst place on earth for confronting your demons. It’s on the northern coast of the Isle of Skye, so about as remote as you can get without being really silly and heading for the Outer Hebrides, and apart from the hostel, the Jenny and a couple of houses and farms down the road, there’s absolutely nothing there: it’s all hills, rocks, sheep, sea and silence – booming, thunderous silence. There’s no name for a place like it: you couldn’t even call the few homes and amenities there a village, dwarfed as they are by the hills and so spread out that by the time you’ve walked around it you’ve got to a whole other village without even realising. And that’s not a village either.

In that sense it’s a boon for the imagination: there’s nothing false and very little man-made there to confine it; you have to draw the boundaries, fill in the details, do all the invention yourself. And you might think that even the stoniest of hearts could hardly stand on top of a hill, as I was doing now, in the middle of that terrible, searing beauty, a valley plunging away to my left and a cliff skyscraping to my right and the sea vanishing miles ahead of me, and not feel inspired. But I’d managed it, for the best part of a year. It’s almost funny that it took a daft writing competition, one I hadn’t even entered yet, to make me see that landscape properly for the first time – and, right in the middle of it, the complete prick I’d been for closing my heart and mind to it for so long. Of course, complete prickness went back further than just Dungarry, and as memories of the time before I arrived started to burn into me, there was nothing much I could do except stand there and cry in great racking sobs which shook my whole body, leaving me kneeling with my face in my hands in the soaking grass, the great woolly arses of sheep scattering in every direction.

After about ten minutes of whimpering helplessly in the mud, it got easier. Gradually managing to smile, I walked in the hills all that morning and most of the afternoon, fuelled as much by adrenalin as my extra breakfast. By the time I got back to the hostel, I had a second complete idea for a novel to add to the first, but again I put it out of my mind, too shattered to contemplate it.

I crashed out, woke up a few hours later, went down to the kitchen, knocked up a quick dinner, and still not keen to speak to anyone, decided to eat it in my room. On the way upstairs I passed the office, and just inside the door was a ream of yellow A4 we used for the fax machine, roughly torn open as if in haste, with several sheets of the crisp new paper sticking out temptingly. It was quiet in the hostel and George, my boss, wasn’t about. I tried to ignore it, protesting to myself that my dinner was getting cold, but the yellow paper wasn’t having it. Knowing I’d regret it, but with no idea exactly how much, I took a few sheets and a biro and went up to my room.

I sat down at my desk, tossed down the paper and ate my dinner. Afterwards I looked out the window for a long time, smoking and gazing over the sea, while the yellow paper seethed silently in the corner of the room like a sulking girlfriend. I wasn’t sure what I was more afraid of, writing the ideas down or not writing them down: if I wrote them, the whole thing might start all over again and I’d end up back where I was before, frustrated, messed up and lonely, but if I didn’t write them, the ideas, promiscuous things that they are, would fly off across the universe and into the head of someone who actually wanted them, following which I would forget them, the competition would come and go and I’d spend the next two years scrubbing toilets and kicking myself. In short, I didn’t know what to do... and then I remembered the monk.

*

Fon was Thai, and we were married in her home village just outside Hat Yai, a bustling market town in the south of the country. Her family, who were some of the warmest and most impeccably hospitable people I’ve ever met, had given me a number of gifts, among them a special Buddhist pendant. Inside a triangular glass locket about two inches in length and framed in bright gold was a likeness, carved intricately in dark stone, of Luan Po Tuad, a seventeenth-century monk particularly revered in the south and loved by Fon’s family. Images of the monk – a thin, stooped, wrinkled old man, either sat cross-legged or walking with a stick in one hand and a furled umbrella in the other – were as omnipotent as those of King Bhumibol and other members of the royal family, and could be seen in shops and eating houses, inside taxis, and in people’s homes, especially those of Fon’s parents and siblings. To pay their respects, bring themselves luck and protect themselves from misfortune, Buddhist Thais would bow to likenesses of such monks, pray to them and carry them around with them wherever they went. To be given the pendant by the family, as I was the night before Fon and I flew back to London after our honeymoon, was to be officially accepted into the household, the family, the culture, the country, the region, and the religion all at the same time. As a white suburban Englishman for whom prayer had never meant much more than ‘give us this day our daily bread’, I was honoured and deeply touched. I wore it every day, kissing and bowing to it as I put it on in the morning and took it off at night and again whenever I was in need of help or strength. I wasn’t fanatical about it, not least because a fanatical Buddhist is a contradiction in terms, but I embraced the gift with the respect I felt being given it deserved. It seemed to fill a hole in me I hadn’t known was there until that day.

When Fon left me and I ran away from what had been our home, the locket was one of the few things I took with me, not just because I was unable to look a selfless monk or Fon’s family in the eye, even from a distance, and disown them. I needed guidance and strength of spirit, that was for sure, although under the circumstances I didn’t know whether I had a right to ask for them. I didn’t feel worthy of anything much, least of all the ministrations of a Buddhist monk, and perhaps worst of all I knew that holding on to it would make it impossible for me to truly put everything behind me. In the end I reached a compromise: with one last kiss and bow, as apologetic as it was reverential, I wrapped it up in the tiny green velvet sack it had come in and buried it in a corner of my suitcase, where I resolved to keep it until I felt the time was right to take it out again.

There had been a number of occasions over the year that followed that I’d wanted to open the case, but each time it was the same low self-esteem that stopped me. This evening, things felt different; right, somehow. I blew the dust off the case, opened it and took the locket from the sack, a distortion of my own distorted face rising and falling in its curved glass. Clearing a space on the floor of my room, I knelt down, bowed to an imaginary Buddha three times, and holding the monk’s likeness between my palms as I used to do, prayed silently for a long time. Apologising for my neglect – of the monk, of Fon, of my parents, of many people and many things – and asking for forgiveness and guidance, it was probably more a Christian kind of prayer than a Buddhist one, but my Church of England upbringing, mild as it was, had obviously left its traces. In any case, I’ve never been one for labels.

When I opened my eyes again I found more than an hour had passed. I went to the desk, lit a fag and sat up writing until three o’clock the next morning.