Scrap Metal (24 page)

Cam grabbed my hip. “Nichol,” he rasped, his voice faint with horror, and the stars cleared.

My grandfather was standing by the bed. His black shape blocked the sun. I snatched one breath and rolled off Cam, reflexively grabbing the duvet and bundling it over him to shield him. Did it make it better or worse that the old man had his damn dogs with him? Vixen’s ears were on high-pricked, astonished alert, but the other two had sat down as if making themselves comfy at the theatre.

I struggled off the bed. My crumpled coveralls were within reach—I snatched them, grimly reflecting that just now they were covering too little too late. “Granda!”

His face was like a granite block. His brows had drawn down so far I couldn’t see his eyes. “What in Satan’s name is going on in here, Nichol Seacliff?”

It was bad news when Harry evoked the devil. He hardly needed to—the sunlight behind him was giving him horns. His mud-covered boots looked ready to split and reveal his cloven hooves. I could almost smell brimstone drowning out the sweet tang of Cam’s sweat. I shifted a little to the right in a hopeless effort to hide him. “Nothing you had to see. Why did you come in?”

“I heard thy banshee wailing from the yard. A man run through by a pitchfork might make such a sound.”

“What—in my bedroom?” My voice wavered, and a warm hand landed on my spine. Oh, God—that was Cam, scrambling off the bed to stand beside me. Blindly I tried to push him back. “Don’t you knock?”

“Knock, you unmannerly whelp? In my own house?”

“Aye, in the part of it where you kindly let me lay my head!” I hadn’t meant to shout, but there was no other answer to the old man’s roar. It was that or surrender, and I loathed the infantile fear worming into my guts. “It’s your own lookout what you see, if you blaze in here like a prize bloody bull—”

“Be silent!”

My voice died in my throat. He’d never had to tell us twice when we were children, and he’d never had to raise a hand to us. That barked-out command was enough. It still was.

“You grew up without a father, lad. I thought it my duty to supply that lack.” If Harry was aware of Cam at my side, one arm tight—bless him and damn him—round my waist, he gave no sign. He was glaring directly at me, beginning to turn me to stone. I knew what was coming. I’d always known. “I fed you, housed you, clothed you. If I heard you cry, I came to you, and you didnae bid me
knock
when I pulled you off the blades of the plough you and your brother were messing with. I could see all along I had only one grandson worth rearing, but I never stinted you on that account.” He paused, and a dreadful grey bitterness gathered on his face. “Much reward I had for it. I never was a man of faith. I’m glad of it—I’ve never had to question God for taking your fine brother and leaving me with you. With a wee freak of nature who’ll never leave so much good in this world as a son of his own to carry on his name, and maybe wipe out the shame his father brought on it.”

He was done with me. At last his attention shifted to Cam. I couldn’t speak, but I put out a hand in a gesture of warning, of hopeless warding-off.
Don’t. Not him.
Useless, of course.
“And as for this bleach-polled
gille-toine
that I’ve fed and sheltered too, at least he’s shown me what you are. I’m grateful to him—I don’t have time left in my life to waste on finding out.”

He turned and walked out. He would have slammed the door if Vixen’s tail hadn’t still been in the way. I listened, breathing shallowly, to the fading thump of his feet down the stairs.

Cam padded over to the door—closed it quietly then came back to stand in front of me. He took hold of my wrists. His eyes were bleak, all his beautiful colours washed out. “Nichol,” he said. “Oh, Nic. Don’t let this break you.”

It should have. I had a crack running through me, a fracture line, and Harry had just delivered to it what should have been a mortal blow. But the truth was that I’d been cringing from the chance of that blow, dodging its ghost, since Alistair’s death. Maybe even for years before, as I stumbled through my adolescence, unresentful but always aware of Harry’s pride in my brother.

It was over, the thunderbolt spent. I was still alive—and, God knew, I’d just been spared the long-dreaded task of telling him I was gay. The only thing I cared about was the man in front of me now, naked as day, clutching my wrists.

On whose behalf I was fucking furious. “Stay here.”

“Where are you going?”

“After him. He always did this to me—dropped his bomb and walked. Not today.”

“Nichol, go easy. He’s an old man.”

“He’s an old bully.” I extricated myself from his grasp and began to pull on my clothes. Suddenly pain bladed into me, sharper than anything Harry had been able to inflict. “Yeah, he’s an old man. But did you hear what he
said
to me?”

“I did. You’d be within your rights to kill him. Only…don’t.”

I found a pair of shoes. I gathered up the papers Cam had brought to me from the morning’s post. One of them had got into the bed with us and was beyond redemption, but the rest were fine. I paused in the doorway. Stupidly, childishly, I had wanted him to be wholly on my side. But he’d taken to Harry from the start, hadn’t he? And the old man, for a wonder, had returned his goodwill. They’d formed a kind of bond, which Cam had just seen shattered.

“Stay here,” I repeated more gently. “I’m not going to kill him. But I do have to stand up to him—for both of us—or he’s going to eat us alive.”

I left him sitting on the edge of the bed, looking too old for his years. Looking already consumed, as if anything I might do to fend off Harry’s wrath would come too late for him. That took some of the wind from my sails, but I still had a fair breeze in there on my own account, and it blew me into the kitchen, where the old man was waiting.

No, not waiting. He was opening tins for the sheepdogs’ lunch, his back to the door. He didn’t expect me to follow him, and why should he? After my boyhood tongue-lashings, I’d taken myself off to hide in the far reaches of the barn until the heat died down. Or until my mother interceded for me… Well, she was gone, even the bright echo of her I’d been seeing since Cam arrived.

No. Something stirred in my chest. I pulled out a chair by the table and sat down. I felt as if someone had put a soothing hand onto my heart, and done it from the inside. She wasn’t gone at all.

“Granda,” I said, and it wasn’t the bark I’d intended. “
Ag éisteachd.
”
Listen to me now.

He didn’t turn. He continued to clatter around with the collies’ bowls. Well, that was all right. I could tell from the set of his shoulders that I had his entire, bitter attention.

“You’re right. You were the only father me and Alistair had. I’ll never be anything but grateful for that, but…” I rested my elbows on the table, spread my hands. I almost wanted to laugh. “You had to be our dad because you’d scared the original right off the island and back to God knows where. He can’t have been worth much—not if he caved in to you—but we never got the chance to find out. You bullied him away. That’s why things are as they are.”

He put the dishes down and came to a halt. I wished he would look at me, but I couldn’t make him. “It’s okay,” I went on. “You were good to me. I never even minded that you loved Al best. That’s why—when we lost him and Ma, when they died, you never had to ask me to come home. You took it for granted that I would. Took for granted I’d give up my education and come back here to herd sheep. But…I couldn’t leave behind everything I was in Edinburgh, Granda, not even for you. I should’ve told you I was gay, but there’s been nobody who mattered enough until now.” I picked up the papers, organised them into a heap. “Speaking of which. Your bleach-polled
gille-toine
upstairs cares more for this place, for you, than maybe Alistair ever did. You don’t have to speak to me, or…” my voice scraped dryly and I swallowed, bracing up, “…or distress yourself by ever laying eyes on me again, but come and see these papers. Please.”

He was a nosy old sod, and curiosity got the better of him. God knew what he thought I was going to show him. He slammed down into a chair as far away from me as he could, and I slid the papers over. “He’s really good with money. He’s found all kinds of grants for us, and that forestry land of yours yields a dividend on timber. Alistair…” I hesitated. Something vengeful in me would have liked to say,
Al hid it from you
. “Alistair put it into an account I didn’t know about. But it’s all there, twelve grand of it, and more to come. Cameron found all that out. He’s paid off the worst of our debts. Just bear that in mind the next time you see him. He’s saved us.”

Harry took his glasses out of an inner pocket and set them on his nose. The gesture, his need for them—the furrow of his brow as he squinted for focus—all served to soften my anger. I struggled to remember how much I hated him. He studied the papers for a long time, and then he got up wordlessly and went to the dresser. He pulled an envelope from the drawer and dropped it on the table in front of me. “I have papers for you too.”

“What’s this?”

“I didnae open it. But I didn’t give it to you either, and what you think of that I do not care.”

The envelope was addressed to me. I tore it open, bewildered. Since when had he taken to withholding my mail? I glanced at the contents. It was just a prospectus from Edinburgh, advertising their new course in linguistics. “I don’t understand. This is nothing. Why did you hide it?”

“It’s from yon mainland university, isn’t it? No doubt summoning you back.”

“No. Not at all. It’s just a circular, an advert for one of their correspondence courses. Nothing I could afford to do even if I wanted.”

His frown deepened. “Damnation,” he growled. “Why must they send their junk here?”

“Why would it be a problem for you?”

No response. He sat down again and began turning over the forestry papers as if the discussion was over.

I couldn’t absorb the idea that he had tried to hang on to me. “It wouldn’t be a problem now, would it?” I asked. “If I were to go. If you were to see the back of me.”

“The back of you? I’ve just seen considerably more of you than that, you…” He met my eyes and actually thought better of whatever he’d been about to call me. “Ach, God, look at you anyway. Aren’t you the spit of your mother? She might as well be sitting there instead of you. I never thought to see her put in the ground before me—not her or your brother either. She was my bairn, Nichol. With you gone, I’d have nothing left.”

My mouth went dry. “Well…I don’t mean to go anywhere. Not unless you chuck me off your land for being a—”

“Quiet. I don’t want to hear it.” He was up again, this time heading for the door. He stopped by my chair for a moment, prodding a finger down onto the Edinburgh brochure. “This nonsense they’ve sent you—is this what you’d want?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t looked at it. Yeah, probably, but it’s not an option. Listen—before you banish Cam as well… If it’s the
gille-toine
thing that upsets you, that’s not really him.” I had to try. I didn’t know why Cam thought so much of the miserable old bastard, but that was the one thing I could save. I braced up for a big lie. “It was me. I pressured him, okay? He only did it because he felt obliged to me for—”

A swift rush of footsteps down the stairs. Only half of them, I thought, and yes, there was poor Cam, stumbling into the room with the air of a man who’d been sitting halfway up them, listening unhappily to make sure no blood was spilled. “No, Nicky,” he said, striding over to me. He stretched out a hand and I automatically took it. “Don’t you say that. Mr. Seacliff, I love this place. And I…I’m grateful to you for everything you’ve done for me, and I’ll leave if you want me to. But I loved your Nichol the moment I saw him. I always will.”

Joy hit me, a compact high-speed truck. It knocked out the ghosts from me, sent my second-best childhood flying. I wasn’t alive by grace of some administrative error on the part of God, who’d chosen to call home the wrong brother. As usual, elation sparked in me unholy laughter. Forcing it back, I stood up and wrapped an arm around Cam’s waist.

“You know,” I said, “if it’s having no heir that worries you, there’s always bonny Shona from over the hill. Maybe she’d let us have a surrogate with her. Then the kid can inherit her acres as well as yours,
and
keep the bloodline intact.” I was joking, but beside me I saw Cam give a short, loyal nod, as if the prospect of a baby with a man he’d known for less than four months was no big deal to him.

Way too much for the old man. He gazed at us for a moment as if we’d been a pair of ladyboys dressed up for a drag version of the Folies Bergère, and then he turned his back and slowly walked away, forgetting even to summon his dogs. Cam and I stared after him, hand in tight-clenched hand.

Chapter Thirteen

Seacliff Farm was quiet after that. The peace had an aftermath quality to it, as if some natural disaster had struck and left us all alive but shaken. Cam and I moved around the old man cautiously, in a state of eggshell truce he seemed for his part to return. We kept our exchanges—even a touch of hand to hand, anything stronger than a warm glance—well out of his way. Cam kept his distance altogether. He was courteous with Harry as ever, but the shy friendliness he’d offered before, the daring approaches he’d made to a joke with him, were gone. If Harry missed them, he gave no sign. We worked, ate together round the kitchen table, keeping conversation to the weather and the livestock, and let the dust settle.

On the fourth day, another letter came for me from the Edinburgh distance-learning centre. I was first to the post that morning and I took it outside, planning to glance at it and recycle before the logo on the envelope could cause any aftershocks. I sat on my ma’s bench by the porch, nursing a mug of coffee. I would have to ask them to stop sending me brochures, I supposed.

It wasn’t a brochure. It was a letter thanking me for payment and enclosing full details of the PhD course in linguistics on which I’d been enrolled. My first batch of coursework had been dispatched and an introductory phone appointment with my tutor scheduled. Cam appeared in the doorway, and receiving no response to his greeting, sat down cautiously beside me.