How to Disappear: A Memoir for Misfits

Chapter Three: Waiting for Maruma

C  T Waiting for Maruma 104 Waiting for Maruma S cotland is not a place I’d normally wish to visit, but Luca was persuasive. ‘I want you to do the story,’ he said. It was sunny and surprisingly warm in the late summer of 1995 when he flew to London from Zurich. We met at King’s Cross Station, 1 1.30 am on a Friday, and took the express up to Edinburgh. I still had my doubts and felt displaced; I’d done the Scottish capital some years before and had no reason to hang about there. Neither fortunately did Luca who found our connection and chivvied me on to the Highland railway which transported us before sundown to Mallaig on Scotland’s west coast. We spent the night in a B&B with pink plastic curtains and the following morning boarded a ferry to the Hebrides. This was more like it. I remember as a young boy, three or four years old–this is one of my earliest memories from when my family lived in Harrow–being deeply affected by the song ‘The Skye Boat Song’. Not that I knew where Skye was, but the song was a popular radio request and something sweetly strange and yearning touched me even at that age, not only in the beauty of the tune but also through the sound effects of waves and seagulls on the recording. Is this early evidence of a vagabond soul? And now fifty years later the Hebrides were happening to me for the very first time. The interpenetration of sea, sky and land, in which no one element dominated the others or was indeed readily discernible from them, struck an exalted note which lifted our spirits. Well, Luca’s didn’t need lifting but mine did (it had been a rotten year). But we were sailing not to Skye but to its small, secretive neighbour, the Isle of Eigg. At our advance it rose from the sea like a fortress of pewter and was distinguished by a Waiting for Maruma 105 dramatic natural feature at its centre, a tower of rock, which at our present distance resembled a shark’s fin, giving the prospect an air of menace out of Rider Haggard or Steven Spielberg. On deck I buttoned up my Levi’s jacket and was grateful for its quilted lining because there was a chilly edge to the wind. The ferry bumped and foamed through fluttering waters and as it came closer, Eigg’s forbidding outline inflated into three dimensions. Detail emerged in bright colours–green, purple, brown, splashes of red and white–and Luca started to bob about with his camera. The island is only twenty-four square miles in extent but has a great variety of landscape due to the distortions brought about by the cooling and erosion of volcanic rock. Among its craggy elevations, dominated always by that massive, threatening plug of stone, we would discover flowery meadows, pocket woods and lakes, and little lush valleys. I’d never seen anything like it. Joseph Brodsky , in his poem Odysseus to Telemachus, claims that to a wanderer, all islands look more or less the same. But this is untrue. A wanderer is not a blind man and every island has its particulars. At first glance it was already clear why an artist had bought this one. Nothing else was clear about that arrangement. Who was this artist from somewhere in Germany who had paid four million marks to become the new Laird of Eigg? Why did he call himself Maruma when his real name, according to newspaper clippings, was Marlin Eckhard? If that was his real name. Maybe it was Martin or Merlin or Mertin. These things do get garbled. And where had the money come from and what were Marlin’s plans? The sixty-five or so inhabitants of the island were especially keen to have a 106 Waiting for Maruma response to the last question, since their personal futures depended on it: they were his tenants. Reportedly he had purchased the island–and them–after flying over it in a helicopter, a case of love at first sight. Whereupon Maruma came down to earth and introduced himself and his girlfriend to the locals and conducted himself, apparently, in a charming manner, before getting back into the helicopter, rising into the air, and vanishing over the horizon. Since when–nothing. The...