INSTALEMENT 1

Jamieson sat in a café at the train station, stirring his coffee. The last few drops a thick tar on the bottom of the cup. He played with the syrup of sugar and thick, bitter coffee with his spoon. The newspaper was turned to the sports pages; he wondered whether they would even reach the end of the season before call ups, call offs and rationing put paid to thoughts of sport. He was going to London. The train was due to leave at midnight, the overnight sleeper. There were a lot of people in uniform, bound for barracks up and down the country. There was a feeling of inevitability hanging in the air, of an unstoppable chain of events having already been set in action and with nothing he nor a million others could ever do. Against this intractable reality he felt compelled to accept whatever fate threw at him, with at least a quiet dignity. He owed himself that much. He didn't feel he was very long for this earth anymore. He looked around the room as a waitress dropped something, a clang jolting him from his dream and he shook his head awake. Everyone around him laughed and he felt compelled to do the same, a small smile curled across his lips.

He thought back to his childhood, those seemingly interminable skies, always stretching as far as their imaginations could take them, to stac pollaidh and beyond, the scree covered mountain's peak mysterious and yet tangible; they would climb it sometimes, in the summer. But like most around the coast of the west of scotland they turned away from the mountains as children, towards the sea, where the wide atlantic ocean crashed in on everyone's lives with vengeful force one day and calm, still beauty the next. The villagers would swim to the islands, or play in the rockpools, mermaid's purses, crabs and smashed up shellfish. The sand was clean, yet it was here that Jamieson first encountered the horrible possibilities of life, amongst the cool waves of their hopes a local shepherd, John MacLeod, was drowned as he got caught up in a swarm of jellyfish as he made his way across to the summer isles.

The kids knew then that not everything in life was going to be innocent. Funny the things you remember, he said to himself, stubbing out another cigarette in the ashtray. He made to play with the cigarette butt in much the same way he did his coffee, the granulated sugar replaced by thick ash, but instead pushed it away and looked up.


He was hit with a sudden sense of deja vu; the feeling overwhelming him, stripping back the years like wallpaper, the dusty, bubbled and torn memories peeling back, leaving him staring at the wall. He remembered he had been here before, an 18 year old, idealistic, off to join the army. His bag containing all that was dear to him, the brown label on his case had borne the address of his parents farm, a paper tag his only link to home, his mother's writing neat and precise, proud. The string tied around the handle, tied tightly, a last act of parenthood before he was lost to his home. There had been no going back. He snapped his head back again and stared again at the wall. The drooping poster on the wall reminded him of the call ups and he'd forgotten about home already. No point in getting himself lost in a reverie when there were more important things to resign himself to. He chuckled again and called the waitress over for another coffee

The swirling high pitched scream of metal against metal smashed the reverie and the train pulled into the station. Time to go.