Scrap Metal (13 page)

Sternly I restrained my thoughts. The idea was not to pressure him, to let him find his way to me. If there was a sheltered half circle of soft mossy turf on the edge of the cliffs, warm enough after a springtime like this to have honeysuckle tumbling over the rocks, that was just too bad. We were out for a walk. I was going to find and show him a great northern diver, and that was all.

He took off his jacket and slung it over his arm. He was getting into better shape, but this climb was challenging him—I could hear him breathing, fast and deep. I now had such a riveting view of his backside that I forgot about the vista ahead, the one I’d brought him here to see, and when he stopped I crashed into him, instinctively grabbing hold of him to keep from knocking him down.

He didn’t seem to mind that. My arms went round his waist, and he seized my wrists, laughing, as if he wanted to keep them there. “What’s wrong with you, you great ned?”

“Sorry. Miles away. I nearly sent you off the bloody cliff.”

“Yeah.” He was still hanging on. “Way to go, though. What a view.”

“Pretty good, isn’t it?” From here, the northward side of the Skull rock, Machrie Bay opened out in a great green crescent, fringed by gleaming sand. Only a few white crofts interrupted its salt-marsh wildness. The water of Kilbrannan Sound, crystalline jade by the shore, soon plunged to black, sprinkled all over with wind-driven wave crests. I could feel the press of Cam’s backside against the top of my thighs. I was just a little taller than he was, and more broadly built—he fitted there sweetly, as if we’d been designed in two long-separated parts and were finally clicking together.

The breeze shifted. The scent of the sea rode up on its warmth. Salt, thyme and a strange coconut honey from the gorse just starting to come into serious flower on the cliffs…

Tears suddenly stung my eyes. Making sure Cam was steady, I let him go.

“Nichol? You okay?”

“Yes. Yeah, of course.” Was I? I couldn’t think of any reason to be otherwise—beautiful afternoon like this, the world spread out at my feet. My stomach had gone tight, though. Something to do with that particular scent in the air. I’d never encountered it anywhere else, not in just that plangent combination of flowers and water and earth. “You know, I haven’t been here in years.”

“Why? It’s so beautiful.”

“I think the last time was with Al.” I didn’t think. I knew. The last time was with Al because I used to come here all the time with him, even when we were older and not getting on well anymore. We’d come out here and find our truce, a temporary peace, in the clean sea air. It was Al’s favourite place. We’d even managed a day out here, a scramble around on the rocks, during my last holiday from university, when he’d spent the entire evening before carping at me about what an effete academic I’d become, afraid to get my hands dirty now around the farm. By the time we’d got home we’d been friends.

There was a fence on the far side of the track. It was a beautiful sturdy forestry one, far better than Harry and I could afford. Well, I’d told him I’d take a look. I went and leaned both hands on it. Yes, solid—far more so than anything else in this spinning, badly made world. I wondered if I’d eaten something wrong at lunchtime. If, for the first time in my life, I was going to faint.

Last year’s birch leaves rustled, the golden trail of them that lined the edge of the track. I tensed. Desperately as I’d craved Cam’s touch, just now I couldn’t have borne for anyone to lay a finger on me. He seemed to sense that and took up a place by my side, leaning his back on the fence and looking out towards Kintyre. I lowered my head until my brow was resting on the wood of the top bar. I clenched one hand round the back of my skull, which felt as if it wanted to blow apart.

“How the fuck can he be dead?” My voice sounded strange to me, hoarse and raw. “You saw his room. Everything’s the same. How can he not be…here?”

“I don’t know.”

Of course he didn’t. What a stupid fucking thing to ask him. Me, I’d have come out with some nervous platitude or other, probably—
you’ll get used to it
or
yeah, it’s a funny old world
. By contrast,
I don’t know
seemed sensible. Almost a relief.

“And my ma. Harry’s got her room locked up but that’s a shrine too. Her clothes. Her hairbrush. How can she not need them anymore? How can she be…?”
In bits on a back road in Spain
, that was going to end, but I couldn’t speak. My field of vision was fringed with black, red glitter starting to cover the rest.

“Did you see the bodies?”

I flinched in shock. The question’s blunt force swept my eyes clear, let me get a breath into my lungs. “No. There wasn’t enough left.”

“Then you’ll probably never get your head round it. I don’t know what’s best—to believe it completely or not.”

I never cried. Whether it had been growing up with a tough and sarcastic big brother or a grandfather who looked with astounded contempt upon all signs of weakness, I didn’t know, but I’d lost my capacity for tears. If I’d been on my own here, without the weird safety valves Cam’s words provided, I might have thrown up or passed out or lost the back of my skull in some mystical biochemical explosion and left Harry to clear up the remnants of his last kinsman.

My lungs heaved dryly. Hard silent waves of tension went through me, spasms that squeezed shut my eyes and tore at the muscles of my gut. The ordeal continued for a time I couldn’t measure until Cam began stroking my back—the lightest touch, just up and down between my shoulder blades—restoring pattern, rhythm, something to follow.

Involuntarily I began to breathe in time, one harsh gasp and then another. I let go my death grip on the fence. “I…didn’t even like him all that much.”

“He was your brother. I’m so sorry, Nic. About your ma too.”

I straightened. Sky and trees spun round me for a second then settled down, put in their place by the warmth of his arm round my waist.

“Thanks. I’m all right now.” I wondered who he had lost, to know so much about seeing bodies or not. A grandfather, I decided. Only a man with that sort of gap inside him would put up with Harry as he did. “Come on. I was meant to be taking you on this amazing walk.”

“So you can, when you don’t look like you’ve been hit with a bag of wet sand. It looks nice down there. Let’s just go and sit for a while.”

Down there. Yes, that was where I’d wanted to take him—the cliff’s-edge patch of turf, shining in the sunshine ahead of us. I’d been right about the honeysuckle. It was pouring over the rocks in a crazy profusion, as if the island had been putting out flags for a royal visitor. I’d had such plans for him, in that sheltered half circle, with only the gulls and the coal-eyed fulmars to watch. I’d have found and stilled all his fears. I knew what I was doing, after my apprenticeship in Edinburgh, after all those boyfriends. I’d have pleased him from the top of his bleached head to the soles of his healed-up feet.

And now I could barely walk. He had to help me the few yards down the track. My bones ached dryly, the way they had during my last bout of flu. The worst of it was that I would have to explain myself. He was too kind a lad to let an outburst like that go untended. He’d want me to talk about it, pull more thorns out of me, and I knew that would be for the best.
Talk to me about it,
the college counsellor had said to me.
You’ve just lost your family. React.
I’d sat in silence, my head and heart vacant. Walked out, packed my rucksack, caught the ferry home.

Cameron aided me over a tumble of stones and steered me to the foot of the very rock where I always sat when I’d come here alone over the years, to read and watch the birds and see how many languages I could argue with myself in. Apart from my tasks around the farm, I’d been very free.

Cam unfastened his jacket from around his waist and laid it on the turf. “There. Sit down.”

I wanted to argue—the coat was the nice lightweight fleece he’d bought from the farm store, and I didn’t want it damp—but I didn’t trust my voice. I was afraid that raw-throated monster might come back. Still, in a minute I would try and talk to him. If he was determined to help me, I would make an effort to be helped. I sank down gratefully, leaning my back against the sun-warmed stone. He came and sat on a low rock beside me, and I braced for questions.

“So…that forestry land we just walked through. Does that adjoin your grandfather’s?”

I glanced up at him. He had tenderly settled me down, and his hand was on my shoulder, but his attention was fixed on the slope above us, his deep blue gaze assessing. I found I could speak after all. “Yes. In fact I think it still belongs to him.”

“It does? What’s so funny?”

“Nothing. The land’s only leased to the Board. We’re still responsible for the boundaries, so remind me to look at the fences on the way back.”

“Okay. Do you get anything back for the timber they produce?”

“I don’t think so. Alistair set the deal up. He always handled that kind of thing.”

He’d made me look towards the plantation too. My head tipped back. The pounding pressure in it eased as my skull came to rest against his thigh. His fingers brushed through my hair, just once, brow to crown, and I relaxed.

“You look tired, Nic.”

“I’m fine. Gimme a minute and we’ll go on. There’s a cliff walk down to the caves then three miles of beach, and I’ll take you for tea at a nice pub in Auchagallon if you’re up for it.”

“Or you could just close your eyes. It’s all right. I’m here.”

“That’s just it. I meant to make the most of you.”

I felt the ripple of his amusement, a twitch in the muscle where my cheek rested. “Some other time, eh, Romeo?”

“If you knew how often we were gonna get time off together round here, you wouldn’t…” I caught my breath. Up from beyond one of the great stark ribs of rock that reached from the beach out to sea, a cry arose. Three notes, the first two a musical sob and the third a wild reach heavenwards, a call to wake up God. Cam’s hand went still on my head. I pointed down towards the glittering waters. “There’s your night monster, love.”

I hadn’t meant to call him that. It had fallen from me so naturally that maybe he wouldn’t notice. The Celtic language groups had a range of endearments that passed easily from man to man, and still influenced English speakers within their old domains, like a Dubliner’s
darlin’
to his best mate, perfectly acceptable.
That’s right, Nichol. You explain that to him.

“More like a mermaid than a monster now.”

He didn’t sound perturbed. His fingers had resumed their movement through my hair.

“It’s odd you should say that,” I said, a little dryly. “You know the town Lamlash, just down the road from here? It’s named after Arran’s local saint—in a way, anyway. He was called Molaise, and his island was Eilean Molaise, which nobody could pronounce, and over the years it got boiled down to Elmolaise, Limolas, Lamlash… Anyway, he wasn’t a bad sort as far as Christian saints go—didn’t chop down the groves or turn the merry dancing girls into circles of stone—but he couldn’t abide all the mermaids.”

“The mermaids, eh? Were there a lot of them back then?”

“Oh, yes. Ten a penny, singing their hearts out on the rocks, with all their bonny bosoms on display. So he turned them into birds, and the only thing left of them was their song.”

“It seems a shame.”

“Yeah. My ma says they were only fooling him, though. Just humouring poor old Molaise so he wouldn’t be bothered by thoughts of their attractions in his lonely cell at night. She told me she once saw one turn back.”

“She must have been quite something.”

“She was. She…”

If I began telling Cam what had been extraordinary about my mother, the cramping pain would start again. I could feel it trying now—coiling in my guts, clenching an iron grip round my lungs. I couldn’t do it again.

He leaned close over me, drawing my fringe back from my brow. “Tell me all about her later. Sleep for a little bit now.”

“I don’t need to sleep.” The dance of the sun on the water was hypnotic, though, a million flakes of gold continually shifting form. As I watched, a dark shape emerged from behind the spar of rock. He was sleek, majestic, the light flashing off his white breast. “There’s the diver. See? That one’s a male.”

“Yes, I see him. Beautiful.”

“And there’s the female after him.”

The lights were blurring. I leaned my head into Cameron’s lap. He rubbed at the back of my neck, scratching lightly, and I shuddered, falling safely, letting go.

“There,” he whispered, his mouth a moth brush over my ear. “The love song must’ve worked.”

Chapter Eight

“Nicky Seacliff! You wee fucker!”

Not the most traditional Highland greeting. I came to a halt, shopping bags swinging in my hands. I recognised the voice. We were just outside the Hamilton, Kenzie’s favourite pub in Brodick. Slowly I turned around. Oh, great—there he was on the pavement, his fists bunched by his sides. Pissed as a fart, his accent thickened by booze to a hairy, barely penetrable blanket. That was good going, I had to admit, for eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning.

“Hello, Kenzie,” I tried. “You all right, then?”

“No, I am nae all right, you mockitt little queer.”

I took a deep breath. You could score worse things than cheap Scotch in the Hamilton Arms. I set down my shopping bags. It was coming up to the middle of the busiest day in Arran’s one busy town, and the street was full of passersby, neighbours, friends and tourists. I had to keep this low-key if I could. The worst of it was that I’d brought Cameron with me. He hadn’t wanted to come, but I’d been feeling so much better that the thought of a day off the farm, a bit of shopping and a nice lunch out, had made me almost lightheaded. And I loved his company. I wanted to share my pleasures with him. It had been long enough now that he didn’t have to worry about thugs from Glasgow spotting him, I was sure of that. I’d persuaded him. We’d jumped into Harry’s old battered Toyota and torn off.

“Nichol, who is this guy?”