Ahead, I could see the long ruins of Slains with the one tall square tower that stood at the end overlooking the sea, and I looked at the windows and tried to decide which ones should be Sophia’s. I would have liked to spend a few minutes in the castle, but there was another couple walking round the walls this morning, loud and laughing, tourists, and the atmosphere was not the same. And Graham must have felt it, too, because he didn’t slow his steps, but followed as I set my back to Slains and started off again along the coast.
I found this new part of the path disturbing. Not the walk itself—it wasn’t really all that difficult, for someone used to walking rough—but just the sense that everything around me, all the scenery, was familiar. I’d had flashes, in my life, of déjà vu. Most people had. I’d felt, from time to time, a moment’s fleeting sense that I’d performed some action once before, or had some conversation twice. But only for a moment. I had never felt this long, sustained sensation, more a certainty, that I’d already come this way. That just up here, if I looked to my right, I’d see—
‘Dunbuy,’ said Graham, who’d come up to stand behind me on the path, where I had stopped. ‘It means the—’
‘Yellow rock,’ I finished for him, slowly.
‘Aye. What turns it yellow is the dung of all the seabirds nesting there. Come springtime, Dunbuy is fair covered with them, and the noise is deafening.’
The rock was near abandoned now, in winter, but for several gulls that stood upon it sullenly, ignoring us. But I could hear, within my mind, the seabirds that he spoke of. I could see them. I remembered them…
I frowned and turned away and carried on, still with that sense of knowing just where I was going. I might have been walking the streets of the town where I’d grown up, it was that sure a feeling.
I knew, without Graham’s announcement, when we were approaching the Bullers of Buchan. There wasn’t anything remarkable to see at first, only a tight-clustered grouping of cottages built at the edge of a perilous drop down another deep gully, and in front of them a steep path winding upwards to what looked to be an ordinary rise of land. Except I knew, before we’d even started up that path, what waited at the top. I knew what it looked like before I had seen it—a circular shaft, like a giant’s well, cut at the edge of the cliff, where the sea had eroded the walls of a mammoth cave till the cave’s roof had collapsed, leaving only a strip of stone bridging the cleft at its entrance, through which the waves sprayed with such force that the water appeared to be boiling below when I stood at the edge to look down.
Graham stood at my side with his hands in his pockets, and standing there he, too, seemed part of a memory, and I wondered if this was what people felt like when they started going insane.
He was talking. I could hear him, vaguely, telling me the history of the Bullers, and how its name had likely come from the French word for ‘kettle’， bouilloire, or perhaps more simply from the English, ‘boiler’， and how in the past small ships had hidden there from privateers, or if they were smugglers themselves, from the Scottish coast patrols.
On one level, I took this in quite calmly, and yet on the other my thoughts swirled as fiercely as the waves below me. I didn’t think Graham had noticed, but in the middle of telling me how he and his brother had ridden their bikes the whole way round the rim of the Bullers once, when they were younger and more daring, and how he’d almost lost control going over the thin bridge of sunken earth not far from where we were standing, he stopped talking and gave me a penetrating look.
‘You all right?’ he asked.
I lied. I said, ‘I’m not so good with heights.’
He didn’t move an inch, or take his hands out of his pockets, but he looked at me and gave his pirate’s smile and said, ‘Well, not to worry. I won’t let you fall.’
I knew it was too late. I had already fallen. But I couldn’t tell him, any more than I could tell him what I’d felt today on our walk here, and what I was still feeling. It was craziness. He would have run a mile.
The sense of déjà vu stayed with me on the long walk back, and worsened when I saw the jagged walls of Slains, and I was glad when we’d gone past and down into the wooded gully. On the little bridge that crossed the stream I thought that Graham hesitated, and I hoped he might suggest we take the pathway to the right and stop in at a pub for lunch, but in the end he only walked me back up onto Ward Hill and across the tufted grass until we stood before the cottage.