Scrap Metal (17 page)

I frowned. I couldn’t see the relevance. On the other hand, anything he was willing to share with me from that time, I wanted to hear, and right now I’d welcome the distraction. “Go on.”

“It’s not just that I owe him money. I was kind of…employed by him. I was broke, and I did a job or two for him, and I saw that the bunch of thugs he ran with could barely count to ten. I’m not good for much, but I do have a decent head for figures.”

“How ever did you get involved with him?” I was weirdly relieved.
Employed
had given me an instant vision of Cam on a street corner, waiting for custom while some big Glaswegian pimp lurked in the shadows.

“I was at art college, if you’d believe that. I’d been working two day jobs to put myself through, and they both bloody folded. A lad I knew from my bar work put me in touch with McGarva. I knew he was shady, but…”

“I’m not gonna judge you, Cam.”

“Well. What with one thing and another I ended up doing quite a lot for him, and a lot of his cash went through my hands. I suppose I became a bit of an informal accountant to him. That got me in deeper than I’d ever meant to go, and I—I was arrested a couple of times. That’s why I was scared your copper friend might recognise me.”

“Wow. You were an underworld money man.” I tried not to sound too impressed. McGarva’s cash could have been for anything. Drug money, trafficking… But I found it impossible to connect such badness with the man in front of me now, wrapped in a blanket, his tired face sweet with concern about my trivial problems. “You don’t have to worry about Archie,” I said. “He really is the village bobby. He didn’t know you at all.”

“You’re missing the point. If I could run a Glasgow gang lord’s finances, I might be able to help you a bit with yours. Are you serious about not letting me work outside today?”

“Deadly.”

“All right. Then let me make myself useful in here. If you bring me your accounts, I’ll take a look at them, see if I can’t find a way of squeezing out a payment for Midlothian.”

I wasn’t optimistic. I really hadn’t glanced at the paperwork I’d signed last year, lost in mists of grief and—I knew it now—sheer fury at Al for leaving me alone to deal with this. The bank wanted six grand, and soon. But I appreciated Cam’s offer, and I went through to the chilly little study next door where Al had kept the paperwork, and selected what I hoped was the most relevant box. I’d made occasional efforts to add to it, all the while feeling that it was pointless, that Harry and I and the farm were circling the financial drain at increasing speed. I brought the box back and set it down in Cam’s lap, careful not to dislodge Clover.

“Okay. But where are your accounts?”

“Er… Here. These are them.”

“Nope, handsome. This is a collection of receipts and invoices. I can see you’ve used some paperclips, and that’s laudable, but your accounts are the books where you write all these transactions down. Does Harry keep those?”

“No. Alistair did it all. God, I feel really stupid now.”

“Mmm. That’ll be why the UN offered you a job—because you’re so bloody thick.”

“Great. I can tell you how broke I am in seven different languages.”

Cam snorted. He ruffled my hair, and I remembered how it had felt to fall asleep with my head in his lap in the sunlight. I wished I could do it again.

“Look, it’ll be all right,” he said. “You must have had some sort of records last year from when you did your tax returns. Can you find me those?”

“I… I’m not sure we did. Someone came out, an inspector. He was a local guy, and he knew about Ma and Alistair. I think he just cobbled something together and took pity on us.”

“Okay. Good, I’m glad he did. I hate to say this to you, but…you do know it’s April again, don’t you? I’m not sure they’ll be lenient with you twice.”

“Oh, fuck. Shit. Fuck.”

“All right. Don’t panic. I can cobble too. Have you got a laptop with a spreadsheet package?”

“I had one. When I had to drop my thesis last year I lost all my funding. I had to pay some of it back too, so…”

“You sold it.” Once more his hand brushed over my hair. “Things really did hit rock bottom, didn’t they?”

“They did. And little sign of upward progress since. I really don’t know how the hell we’re still here.”

“Well, let me see if I can find out. Have you got an A4 notebook and a ruler?”

“Probably. No calculator, though.”

“Don’t worry. I could use the mental exercise. Find me those, and then you go and do agricultural stuff for a bit. And try not to worry too much, okay? These things aren’t usually as bad as they seem.”

I shook my head. I was afraid that once he got started, he’d find out they were considerably worse, but I was too grateful to argue, and the sensation of someone giving a damn about me was once more threatening my self-control. Fresh air and hard outdoor graft were the best answers for me, and the truth was that I had to get away from him for a while. The more I went through with him—fistfights, tending him in sickness, sharing with him my stupid domestic griefs—the more I ached to touch him, storm his barricades.

I got up, my head spinning slightly. “Okay. It’s really good of you.” In the doorway I paused, struck by something he’d said. “You were at art college?”

“Briefly, yeah.”

“Was it painting, or…”

“Sculpture, kind of. Drawing up designs and making them out of spare parts of cars, fences, scrap metal—anything I could get a hold of, really.”

“Wow. I’m sorry you couldn’t go on with it.”

“It’s not much loss. I wasn’t setting the Clyde on fire.” He smiled and bestowed on me a look whose yearning I could have sworn equalled my own. What the hell was holding us apart? “Get me my things. Then go work the fields, bonny farm boy, and I’ll see you later.”

It was almost dark by the time I got done. Harry hadn’t returned from his mysterious jaunt, and now the lambing was over I’d had to send Shona’s lads back home. I hadn’t realised quite how much work Cam had been taking off me in his quiet way. Wearily pulling off my coat and boots in the porch, I resolved to talk to Harry about finding some way to pay him, Kenzie or no Kenzie—he was definitely worth more than just his bed and board.

I went through into the kitchen. There was no sign that he’d fixed himself any supper in my absence. Lamplight was shining from the half-open parlour door.

“Cam?” I said, pushing it wide. “I’m back. You okay?”

He was sitting at the polished table, his shirtsleeves rolled to his elbow. All around him were neat stacks of paperwork, and in front of him several sheets of calculations and the open A4 book, which I could see from here now contained column after nicely ruled column of figures. He looked utterly exhausted, but when he saw me he seemed to light up from the inside, and I felt as if I did too.

“You smell like a cool summer night.”

I came and straddled a chair next to him. “Is that a good thing?”

“It’s very good.”

“You’ve been pretty busy.”

“I wish I had better news from it all for you. Still, I can—”

“Ah, Cam,” I interrupted him. I was tired and sore, and all the muscle-wrenching labour in the world wouldn’t serve to banish my desire for him, or my conviction that I’d never be good enough—for him or for anything else. I couldn’t even keep my granda’s farm. “You can’t make a silk purse out of the sow’s ear I’ve made of things here. I’ve run the place into the ground.”

He laced his fingers together for a moment. Then he reached for the book and flipped back through a few pages. “Nic, I know you loved your brother.”

“What has that to do with—?”

“I’m sure he did his best with all of this, okay? But it’s not you who’s been running it down.”

“What do you mean?”

“Going through this stuff, I’d say Alistair was great at shifting debts around. But he was just staving off disaster. He took out loans with some real sharks then borrowed off bigger ones to try and pay them off. I reckon…best will in the world, the farm would’ve crashed in a year or so anyway.”

I sat back. I felt very strange. Weights were lifting from me, but I wasn’t sure I was ready to let them go. Al did practical things well and I did them badly. That was enshrined in Seacliff family legend. The failure of our business here had been my fault for so long that the guilt had become a kind of scaffold to me, a prop. “I don’t understand. He was always so sure of himself.”

“It might have been bravado. He was in trouble.”

“God almighty. Can I do anything to put it right?”

“You don’t want to sell the place up, do you?”

“I couldn’t. Harry was born here.”

“But what do you want? You were born here too.”

We sat looking at one another. He kept wrong-footing me by putting me first. I’d grown up in a family with a patriarch and a domineering older brother. Even my ma, loving though she’d been, had eclipsed me. I hadn’t minded—I’d never known different, and they were good people, a wolf pack tolerant of its omega when they noticed it was there.
What do you want?
A question in violet eyes now fixed on mine.

“Me? I don’t know.”

“Yeah, you do.”

“All winter all I could think about was selling it. I was on the brink of trying to tell Harry the night you arrived. Now I’m not so sure.”

“What about your studies? You gave up everything to come back here.”

“I’d love to finish. I’d love to…” I paused, long-neglected dreams reaching surface, “…to pack up the Toyota, get on the ferry—not the Calmac, the Brittany one—and drive down through France. I’d like to rent a medieval tower in the Southern Pyrenees in some sizzling-hot valley where it never rains, stay there all summer and figure out the origins of Basque.”

“See? You did know.”

I began to laugh. That had been pretty specific. “Looks like. What can I do, though? The farm’s Harry’s, not mine. I couldn’t sell it even if I wanted, and these guys from the Midlothian will come and break our kneecaps if we don’t pay up.”

“No, they won’t. I phoned them this afternoon. I hope you don’t mind.”

“You… Wow.” For me that was the equivalent of walking into the dragon’s cave and calmly requesting a chat. “No, I don’t mind. But…didn’t they ask you security questions and stuff?”

“The ones your brother wrote in red Biro on the back of their first letter?” He picked the paper up and showed me. “Sometimes it’s easier to call and say you can’t do it—put the ball in their court, see how they’ll react.”

“Don’t they just call the bailiffs? Foreclose?”

“Expensive exercise for them. And if you go bankrupt, chances are they’ll get next to nothing from your assets. I suggested a year’s extension, twelve instalment payments.”

“Won’t they kill us with the interest?”

“I told them to freeze it where it stands, or we wouldn’t be able to do anything for them at all.”

“They never accepted that.”

“The agreement’s in the post. It’s tough times—everyone’s just trying to grab what they can.”

I drew a deep breath. I seemed to have extra space in my lungs for it now. “Bloody hell. Look at the big pair of Wall Street balls on you!”

“That’s all right with you, then?”

“Christ, yes. Thank you. Even with that sorted, though—can we make it? What about the tax return?”

“Well, now that I’ve made you some books, I reckon I can fix them up.”

“What—cook them, like for your criminal taskmasters?”

“No, you idiot. But there’s things you can claim—allowances, grants, low-income supplements—that you haven’t been doing. Legally. And these loans your brother took out, I can consolidate those. The reputable Scottish banks don’t want to see farms like this shut down. They go for a song then get turned into caravan parks. I bet I could find you a good deal. And, looking at all this lot…” He pushed the papers around thoughtfully. “I’m not sure you’ve even earned enough this year to go over the threshold. You might not need to make a return at all.”

I got up. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. He looked so lovely sitting there, weary in the lamplight. He wasn’t ill, I decided—he’d been shaken so badly by his encounter with Archie that it had made him sick, and the marks of his fright were still on him. I vowed I’d never let him be so scared again, whatever had happened in Glasgow. I didn’t care what he’d done.

I put out a hand to him. “Come here.”

“Don’t get too excited, Nic.” He let himself be drawn to his feet. “I’ll do the research, fill in the forms if you’ll let me, but it might not work.”

“I don’t care. I mean, I do, but it’s the fact that you’ve spent all day even trying to sort this stuff out for me.
Beannachd do t’anam is buaidh
.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Blessings on your soul and your future. It sounds horrible in English.”

His hand tightened on mine. “No, it doesn’t. Please don’t take it back. You’ve no idea how much I need a blessing.”

“And you’ve worn yourself out. Come here with me and sit down.”

The fire I’d lit for him earlier had settled to a glow, a little sunset to match the vast one casting its last lights into the room. I led him by the hand to the sofa that faced the hearth. It wasn’t a large one, and when we sat down, our shoulders touched. Thighs too, and there were our joined hands. I wasn’t much given to admiring myself, but I loved how my arm looked curved over his. Like Harry, I had year-round weather tan. His skin was paler, ivory in the firelight. His upcoming musculature matched mine. I turned my head and found him already looking at me, lips parted, eyes fathomless.

“Nichol…”

“Yes?”

“If this place is Harry’s, why doesn’t he help you out with the finances?”

“Harry? Um…” I grabbed a cushion and flipped it as casually as I could across my lap. “Harry doesn’t do money. Not since it was beads and barter, anyway.”

“Well—I adore your granda, but I think he should at least try and get his head round it, to make life a bit easier for you.”

“Oh, right. Will you be telling him that, then?”

“I might have a go.”

“Cam, love—do you really want to talk about Harry just now?”

“No. And you can move that cushion.”