Scrap Metal (20 page)

“Archie, are you over the limit? Could you take me back?”

“You’ve got a fucking nerve.”

I turned to look at him. He’d drawn his knees up to his chest and was glaring at me over them.

“What?”

“You turn me down for some—bloody little bird you imagine you’ve got in the bush, then you ask for a lift home. Is this it, Nicky—did you work out a way to get revenge on me?”

“Jesus, no. Of course not.”

“
Of course not.
”

God, was he mocking me? My outrage at being suspected of an unworthy thought… Given back to me like that, I sounded like Harry, whose stiff Highland notions of honour had always struck me as antiquated and naïve. Maybe I had a few of my own.

“Oh, no,” he went on, rocking himself, clutching his bony knees. “You’d never stoop so low.”

“I don’t know what I’d do. I haven’t really been tested. But I didn’t set out to take some Machiavellian bloody revenge on you tonight. I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t know myself how I felt until you started—”

“Oh,
please
spare me the details.” He unfolded from the bed. “I am over the limit. Probably just as well for you, because there’s every chance I’d drive us both off a bloody cliff. Here.” He tugged open the wardrobe door. “Pillows. Blanket. You know where the sofa is.”

I stood, clutching the blanket. The corridor was dark, the bedroom door firmly closed. I was disoriented, and I wanted so badly to be home that I gave thought to trying to walk. I hadn’t meant to screw Archie over, any more than—I could see this now—he had meant to abandon me. But there was no point of comparison, no connection between the way I felt for him and whatever the hell it was now rising inside me, unstoppable as the sun. I’d been a kid when I’d fallen for Archie. And now I was grown up.

Not that I felt too mature, marooned out here with my bedlinen. I was about to head for the living room—maybe call and price up a taxi ride—when the bedroom door swung wide.

“Give me those,” Archie said, taking my burden out of my arms. The light was behind him, but I could just see the traces of tears on his face. “You have the bloody bed. I’ll take the sofa. I’ll tell you for free, Nicky, there’s no one called Cameron registered at any of the Dumfries farming schools I know.”

“You checked?”

“Yeah. You might not have known how you felt, but I saw it the second I laid eyes on you in the shop the other day.”

“Then why did you…?”

“Ambush you? Try to sabotage it? Ah, come on. Not everyone in this world’s as fucking saintly as you. Don’t you remember that ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ song you made me listen to all summer a few years back?”

“What? Look—please let Cameron alone. Maybe he hasn’t told me everything, but he hasn’t done anything your lot need to come after him for. He’s a good lad.”

“He’d damn well better be.” He pushed past me and disappeared into the living room.

I lay down in the familiar, alien sheets. I didn’t think I’d sleep, but it took a lot of emotional trauma to disarray a farmer’s sleep pattern, and soon I was drifting. I remembered the song, of course, especially the harsh reminder in it that people seldom knew their blessings until they lost them. Not me. I knew what I had, even if to all intents and purposes I didn’t have it at all. I closed my eyes and joined my ma in the night-drenched garden at Seacliff Farm, and together we kept the watch.

This would be a walk of shame I hadn’t had to do for a while—an early-morning dash beneath Harry’s radar from the truck to my room to get changed. He was nowhere to be seen when I bumped the Toyota cautiously into the yard. Thanking God for small mercies, I slithered out and quietly closed the door. I didn’t even have a jacket to throw over the crumpled shame of my torn shirt. I’d left Archie’s flat as soon as I’d woken up sober, and taking one of his seemed a bit of a nerve after the night before.

The hall was cool and dim. Good. Maybe I’d got back at just the right time, after breakfast but before the early feeds. Maybe I hadn’t even been missed.

I was jogging silently up the stairs, and Cam was jogging silently down them, and our near collision on the landing sent both of us springing apart like scared cats. He was dressed ready for work. He grabbed the banister to steady himself. “Jesus, Nic.”

“Hi. Yes. Sorry. Er, good morning.”

“To you too.” He took me in, base to apex, and I was ready for anything to appear in his eyes but a look of pure, unguarded pain. “Are you all right? You didn’t come home.”

“I’m fine. Things got a bit…complicated. Where’s Gruffalo Bill?”

“Off in the barns somewhere. You’d better go get out of your glad rags before he comes back.”

I watched him run down the rest of the stairs and out into the grey dawn. Why didn’t I go after him? Just the brief sight of him in his coveralls had taken my breath, made me want to snatch him into my arms and tell him that whatever he was thinking, it was pretty sure to be wrong. But what then? The last frail shield I had against him would be gone. If I told him why I hadn’t slept with Archie, knowing me I’d tell him why, in words of one syllable, fatal and beyond retraction. Grab his hand and take that running jump with him off the cliff, ready or not…

Shit. I was chilly, exhausted and disproportionately hungover. If Harry hadn’t been waiting behind the door with a rolling pin for me, that meant I’d got away with the night, but I still had one of his uniquely painful days ahead of me. Love, life and probably even death would have to wait on the old man’s schedule. I picked up a telltale button that had dropped onto the carpet, took a deep breath and ran.

Chapter Eleven

I didn’t catch up with Cam again until lunchtime. It was a beautiful blue-gold May day, and sunshine and labour had burned off the worst of my headache. I washed my hands under the outside tap then followed unfamiliar sounds of clattering to the main barn. It was empty now, the sheep all out to pasture and too soon for the autumn’s hay harvest.

On my way over I glanced up at the windowpanes I’d never got round to fixing from that fateful night in February. Cam’s repairs with the plastic and sacking had held good, and I had a superstitious fear of replacing the glass. The night of his arrival had gathered a kind of magical resonance in my mind, recalling the legends of the mer-bride my ma had told me. The mermaid was happy to stay amongst the human people of her husband’s clan, but when he became jealous of her wandering along the strand—for she’d split her tail into two legs just to please him—and he locked her in the cellar, why, a mermaid she became once more, and she swam out through a drainpipe and was never seen again. I didn’t want to seal up Cam’s gateway into my life, as if I took it for granted that he would stay.

There was little of the mermaid in the man hoisting great chunks of rusting metal from one side of the barn to the other. His hair was very blond today, though, catching pale fire in the light that fell from the high windows. I leaned in the doorway. When I said his name, he almost dropped the wheel arch he was carrying. Then he steadied himself, as if determined to finish his task, and let it gently down into the heap of engine parts and bodywork. He gave me a smile too bright for the shadowed unease in his eyes.

“Oh, there you are.” He straightened up, brushing orange flecks from his hands. “Your scrap sold off nicely, by the way.”

“Really? That was fast.”

“I told you it’d be popular. I got the bus to Whiting Bay last night after you’d gone, watched the end of the sale in the caff. It all got quite fierce. We can pay half the Midlothian bill and still have change to spare.”

“Half…” I lost a breath. That red four-digit figure was still burned into my retina. “You got three grand for that lot? No
way
.”

“Way,” he said wryly, reminding me it hardly became a good adult Scotsman to turn into Mike Myers when astonished. “The guy’s coming tomorrow with a truck to pick it up, tractors and all. And I heard back from a couple of the banks. They’ll do a consolidation loan for the rest of what you owe, get the repayments down to something manageable. Also, as a small West Highland agricultural business, you qualify for tax relief and couple of nice handy grants.”

Just yesterday I’d have gone over and hugged him. The impulse died painfully, making me clench my fists in the pockets of my coat. “That’s amazing. I don’t know how to…”

But I did know how to thank him, a little bit anyway. I was standing right beside the tool chest where Alistair had kept his welding gear. The lid creaked as I raised it, sending dust and spiders flying. “Cam, come and have a look at this lot.”

“Found something else to sell?”

“No. For you, if you want it.” Just yesterday he’d have crouched beside me and rested his shoulder on mine while he looked. Now he was keeping his distance. “Are these things any good?”

“They look great.”

He became interested despite himself and leaned in to pick up the mask and the blowtorch. I caught his body heat and a trace of peroxide. I said softly, “You got your roots this time.”

“Yeah. I’m a bit more expert now. Is it stupid of me?”

“No, I don’t think so. The world’s getting used to me having a gorgeous blond student enslaved on my farm.” There were gauntlets down at the bottom of the box as well. To get them I had to shift my brother’s childhood cricket bat, which had somehow ended up in here, initials lovingly carved into its handle. “So did you put aside a few pieces of the scrap to work with, like I told you?”

“Yeah, I did. Just a few bits that wouldn’t sell.”

“Good. You could’ve taken more, though.”

“The point of the sculptures was kind of that they used up things no one else wanted. Burst tyres, rusty wire. I used to go scavenging around the landfill sites.”

“Well, Harry would be only too happy if you’d scavenge off the rubbish from around this farm. Where is he, by the way?”

“He went off in the truck about half an hour ago. He said…” Cam paused, and for the first time that day I heard the quiver of amusement in his tone. “He said it smelled like a tart’s boudoir.”

I snorted. “Great. Where was he off to? Did he have on his good tweed coat?”

“He just said he had business elsewhere. And yeah, he was quite dressed up.”

“My God—I’m starting to think the old sod’s got a girlfriend.” I stood up, gently closing the lid of the chest. “You know, if he’s not around, we could get away with lunch. I mean stopping for it. It’s not that I don’t love gnawing on a loaf while I herd sheep, but…”

“I shouldn’t really. I’ve got a lot to do.”

“Come on. It’s lovely out there. We’ll grab an hour and a picnic on the cliffs. And…” I swallowed dryly, with a sound he must have heard. “And I’d like to talk to you, Cam.”

Lunch was quick to prepare—a couple of slabs of fruitcake lifted from what Harry thought was his secret supply, and a pack of Cheddar cheese. These unlikely partners went well together and had always been the picnic of choice for me and Al, high energy, low maintenance and easily shoved into a pocket. I was glad it didn’t take long because Cam wouldn’t even come into the kitchen with me, and when I went back outside, he was perched uneasily on the top bar of the gate, looking ready for flight.

I led the way down the path towards Kildonan beach. I hadn’t been there since my return to the island, not on account of painful family memories but because the ruins of the abandoned runrig farms struck painfully on my imagination. A few hundred years, I’d thought, and Seacliff would be no more than a tumble of stones in the turf.

I saw Cam looking at the parallel lines that marked the moor as far as the cliff’s edge. “They’re cultivation strips,” I said, slowing up so he’d hear me over the fresh breeze. “The soil’s so poor, the people who lived here back in the 1800s had to heap it into ridges for drainage and fertilise it with seaweed. You can grow quite a bit that way—enough to scrape by, anyhow.”

“What happened to them?”

“No matter how hard they worked, they were always in debt to their landlord. So when he had the chance to lease the land to a wealthy single tenant, he called in his arrears and evicted them. A lot of landowners thought that was a great idea at the time.”

“The Clearances.”

“Yeah. It’s a lonely place. Haunted.”

“Beautiful too.”

I looked again. Yes, it was. A minister had come to the rescue of the homeless, starving villagers here, paid them steerage class to Canada on the next ship. I’d often thought half-wistfully of their sorrowful escape, the island disappearing into their dreams and their memories as the horizon receded. But there was new life on this land now. The runrigs lay peaceful in the sun, clothed in green. Down on the beach, on the bars of black volcanic rock that ran into the breakers, I could see groups of seals hauling out to enjoy the midday warmth.

I touched Cam’s arm, just lightly but enough to make him start. “Come on. The tide’s turning—we might see otters if we’re lucky.”

We didn’t talk for the rest of our way down the rock-strewn climb to the sands. Once on the beach and not struggling to find our footing, the silence became electric, and I knew I had to speak, though my heart was beating harder than the wings of the raven I could see fighting the wind to regain his cliff-face perch.

“Listen,” I began, roughly, as if I were about to tell him off. “When I went to Brodick last night—”

“Nichol, don’t.”

I stopped. Cam had halted a few feet behind me and was watching me miserably.

“I want to explain,” I said, but he held a hand out to me.

“No. You don’t have to struggle to tell me things I already know. Let me talk.”

“Okay, but…”

“Hush up. You got back together with Archie last night. I’m glad about that, because somebody like you should never have to be lonely. All I want to say is—I’m sorry I didn’t find you sooner in my life. I’m sorry I didn’t know you while there might have been a chance.”

I took a breath. For a moment I studied the ripples in the sand at my feet. The air was rich with the tang of seaweed. No wonder my ancestors had lugged it up to the cliff tops to revive their land—it smelled of life, of brine and blood. For me from now on it would always mean happiness, the dawning of a joy so great I wasn’t sure I could contain it.