Scrap Metal (25 page)

“Is this your doing?”

“No. Not a bit of it.”

“Have you seen Harry since breakfast?”

“Yes. He was heading down to the south barn to carry on the re-roofing.”

I folded up the letter and tucked it back into its envelope. I put the envelope into a deep pocket of my coveralls, where it wouldn’t get muddy or torn, and I could take it out at my leisure and think about its promised delights. Phonetics, dialectics, morphology and syntax… My mind was reaching out like a light-starved ivy stretching tendrils to grab at a fence.

I turned to look at Cam, who was beaming broadly. “Wow,” he said.

“I know. I can’t believe it. I’d better go and find him.”

Harry was dangerously perched at the very top of a ladder on the south barn roof. I’d given up telling him we didn’t need to worry about fixing it till later in the year.

“Hoi,” I said quietly, not wanting to startle him. “I’ve had some mysterious mail.”

“Oh, have ye now?” He continued fixing slates into their place in the new wooden framework. “What interest do you imagine that could hold for me?”

“None, I should think. But I’ll have to cancel it, you know. We can’t afford this.”

“Don’t you be telling me what I can and can’t afford on my own farm.” The ladder wobbled precipitously. I made a steadying grab for it. “Yon lad has showed me his accounts. I have my money for the timber, and…” He picked up a mallet, waved it at me threateningly. “And whatever I have besides is no business of yours.”

“You’ve got it all stashed in your mattress, haven’t you? I always knew.”

He took a handful of nails, stuck five of them into his mouth and hammered the sixth into a beam. I had to wait until he’d disposed of them all before he spoke again, and when he did he sounded altered, unlike himself. “Yon lad is at odds with me, isn’t he?”

I sighed. “Why don’t you try calling him Cameron? I’m not saying that’ll fix things, but it might help.” I braced the ladder while he lurched for a new set of nails. “He’s not at odds with you, no. He’s just…upset.”

“Very well, then. Yon lad—Cameron—is upset with me.”

“Are you honestly surprised?”

“No. I have said a thing to him I now regret.”

Personally I thought it had been more than one. I considered asking him how he felt about the things he’d said to me, but I knew there was no need. His feelings, his regrets about those—his apology—were here in my pocket. “Why don’t you tell him you’re sorry?”

More hammering then a reverberant silence. “It is no’ becoming for an elder to lower his head to the young.”

“It is no’ becoming for him to call the young a bleach-polled
gille-toine
in the first place.”

“I suppose he has foolish pleasures like your own, Nichol. I suppose he’ll wish to occupy himself with something while you fill your brain with outlandish languages no honest man could ever wish to learn.”

It took me a moment to interpret the outlandish code being spoken to me now. “Yes,” I said, catching on. “He likes to make sculptures out of spare parts and scrap metal. I found Al’s soldering kit in the barn. He doesn’t need much more than that—just somewhere to work, and a bit of time.”

“Fòir le tròcair orm.” Mercifully save me
—a plea to heaven to let him understand, or bear at least, the vagaries of the young.

“He expects nothing of the sort, of course. You could just say you’re sorry.”

“Did all the sheep die in the night,
leanabh
?”

I rested my brow on the ladder’s silky wood. I hadn’t thought to be called his child again, not in that caressing old word. It shouldn’t have mattered to me. And things
had
changed—I didn’t rely on it, could live without it if he chose to withhold that or anything else from me again. Still, it was good to hear. “I don’t believe so.”

“Then you have work to do. Elsewhere.”

The storage shed nearest the house was echoing empty. I only discovered this when I went in to collect a sack of feed. I knew where everything was and hadn’t bothered to switch on the light, and I stopped, frowning, when my hands passed through the space the sacks had occupied.

A faint blue twilight was falling through the shed’s single window. Cam was sitting on an upturned crate, one knee drawn up to his chest. I might not have noticed him, but his blond flag gave him away. Dust motes floated around him, catching a sapphire gleam. He looked up at me, expression unfathomable. “You didn’t do this, did you?”

I walked into the middle of the vacant space and glanced around me. My eyes were adjusting. Only that morning the shed had been full of feed, cartons and other detritus that had no home elsewhere. A long workbench had appeared from somewhere, new electric extension cables curled on it like orange snakes. In one corner, all the tractor parts and other scrap Cam had set aside had been neatly piled up.

“No,” I said. “Not me. I’m not sure how he did it either.”

“I saw Dave and Eddie from Shona’s farm about the place this morning. I didn’t think anything of it.”

“Did he give you…? Are Al’s tools in here somewhere?”

“Yes. In that beautiful wooden chest over there, along with new gauntlets and half a dozen canisters of propane for the torch.”

I went to stand beside him. “Budge up,” I said, and made room for myself on the packing crate. I put an arm around him, and held him close when he leaned into me. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

“What am I going to do? How do I thank him for this?” He rubbed his brow against my shoulder, and I felt the heat of his conflicting thoughts. “I’m not even sure I should, after the other day. The things he said to you.”

“He lost his daughter and his grandson. He’s never, ever talked about it. Those things he said—that was him grieving for them. He’ll probably never mention them again.”

“He might as well have stabbed you. How could you bear it? How could you bear coming second with him all your life?”

“I came first with my mam.” Kissing the top of his head, I considered this. “No. Just differently. I come first with you.”

A fervent nod, a silky brush against my cheek. “Always. Forever, if I get any choice in the matter.”

I closed my eyes. This was how it would feel, then, to want a whole future with someone. To see it unspooling in front of me, a wide Highland track, swept with sun and infinite possibilities. I hadn’t thought to find out this soon in my life. Forever.
A-chaoidh
, in Gaelic. A beautiful, dangerous, mesmerising word. “Yes. Me too.”

“Good.” He shifted a little, pressing his mouth to the pulse in my throat, to the sensitive angle of my jaw. “But what do I do about this? I’m still so pissed off with him. And I kind of want to go and throw myself at his feet.”

“I know. He has that effect. Look, we’re not a family who talks. We never have been. He’s never going to say to us,
sorry, lads, I was wrong, I’m proud of my gay grandson and his partner
. And he’d die if you went in and tried to thank him for setting this place up.” I took his hand, undid it from its tight clench on my shirt and kissed its palm. I’d do better than a seagrass ring for him shortly, I decided. There was a Celtic silversmith away up in the north whose work was almost fine enough to do justice to such a hand. “Just…be the way you were with him, if you can. He loved that—having someone around who respected him but wasn’t afraid to tell him what was what, have a bit craic with him. And come in here and use this stuff, just like I’m going to open up the pile of papers and books that arrived this morning from the uni and use those.”

Harry and I circled the new structure in the shed. We moved warily, slowly, neither of us wanting to be first to speak. His idea of art was the print of horses in moonlit waves that had graced every respectable household wall in the ’50s, and my realm was words. Neither of us was qualified to judge. Normally that wouldn’t have stopped the old man, but a dynamic had shifted between us and he trod carefully around me now where Cam was concerned.

Finally he stopped, put his head on one side and took in the skeletal, gaunt arrangement of warped metal plates from top to bottom. “Is this what you young ones call art these days, Nichol?”

I wasn’t sure. I’d have liked to ask the artist, but he had made himself scarce, slipping out into the yard as Harry and I came in. For me, the picture had been Cam himself, at work on this strange construction. He’d looked more like a docker than a sculptor, a welder riveting bulkheads in a shipyard on the Clyde. For all Harry had eased off on his schedule—mine too, giving us both time for new projects—Cam seldom got in here before dusk, and he liked to work by the light of the torch. In its ice-blue glare he was ready for the Olympian forge, I thought, a young Hephaestus restored to straight-limbed health. The rhythmic clang as he hammered out sheets of metal called me from my books and into his domain, and I would sit quiet and watch. There was nothing subtle or tranquil about his approach. He went at it with the same focussed effort he brought to his tasks around the farm. It was a beautiful struggle, and soon he would be daubed in rust stains and soot, red-black on sweat-damped, straining muscle. I always meant to leave him be. But when he noticed me—when he flipped up the plate of his visor and grinned at me, the gun still burning in his hand—I was lost.

I tried to pay attention to the product. He’d let it be known it was finished, casually throwing out over our morning coffee and the newspaper that he was done. There’d been no signs of any grand opening, so Harry and I had made our awkward way there after hours, embarrassed to have arrived at the same time. I wanted to be able to say something intelligent about the sculpture when next I saw Cam. I could see that it was powerful, as tensely packed as he was with hidden significance. But whereas I’d picked my way past a good few of his locks now, I couldn’t quite grasp this. It seemed oddly chaotic, for all the intent that had gone into its creation. The shadows fell strangely on it.

I realised the overhead bulb was on. Harry had automatically pulled the cord when we came in, and a dusty yellow glare lay over everything. There was still plenty of light in the western sky, so I switched the overhead off and came to look at the sculpture again, from the window side this time.

I broke into laughter. It was just so bloody perfect. “Granda,” I said. “Come over here for a second.”

He saw it immediately. No one who lived around here or loved this part of the island coast could miss it. In this light, from this angle, the random sheets and links became a down-rushing flow. I could almost see the rainbows.

“
Damnar mi,
” Harry declared under his breath, a phrase as near to
well, I’ll be buggered
as Gaelic got. “It’s the
Cliaradh
waterfall, as sure as you’re standing there. You know—the place where you lost all those sheep.”

I now had so many better associations with the place that I barely registered the gibe. “Yes, I know. It’s fantastic.”

“Aye. You can fairly hear the mermaids.”

I glanced at him, puzzled. If he’d even been aware of any mermaid tales around here, he’d never given any sign of it. He wasn’t a man to hear them or to see them combing their hair on the rocks. To me, if anything, he was the rocks himself—crusted with barnacles, unchanging, same now as he had been when he put me on his shoulders and bore me down to see the seals on Kildonan strand.

Movement in the doorway distracted me. There was Cam, leaning one shoulder on the far wall, hands in his pockets. The step I’d taken to see him had thrown his sculpture back into dynamic chaos, beautiful still, demanding interpretation. Our eyes met. “So,” I said to the old man, who was still absorbed in his study of the piece. “What do you think?”

“If you’d told me so sorry looking a lad had such a thing in him, I’d have laughed. Why doesn’t he make more and put them for sale?”

“Don’t be mercenary. He’s only just started.”

“If he wants to starve, he can do it in a garret, not my farm. We could stick a few up by the roadside. Tourists will buy anything.”

Cam’s head went down. His shoulders quivered. I decided to push it. “Is that all you have to say, you old Philistine?”

“What do ye want? I’m glad I cleared the shed for him.” He was silent for a moment. There was better to come, I could tell—Harry Seacliff face-to-face with modern art. “He’s no’ such a waste of space as I’d thought.”

That finished the poor artist off. He buried his face in his hands.

“Well, maybe he’s like his sculptures,” I said, loud enough for him to hear. “You have to see him by a certain light.”

In the weeks that followed, there were things I forgot. Summer blossomed over Arran, and I forgot the black winter cold. Forgot the sting of hail on my nape, the world of freezing mud and incipient frostbite. Cam and I worked hard as ever, but we took our leisure out into the gilded, heat-hazy hills, and there—watching their slopes and crests over his shoulder, clinging to him while he loved the living daylights out of me—I forgot about pain.

I felt I had it all. My mind had shaken off the rust of a year’s disuse, and I’d made a fresh start on my thesis. Having that reconciled me to the dumb-muscle labour of the farm, which transformed into valuable thinking time for me, and then, as the season went on, something more—a work I’d undertake willingly, for the sake of seeing this patch of land I’d grown up on thrive and flourish under my hand. The old man seemed to sense the change and started to work with me instead of frogmarching me from behind.

The three Leodhas wool tups grew up big and healthy. With the money from the grants we were able to bring in more help for the planting season. Kenzie had vanished off the island, but his missus and his eldest kid were just as good at fencing and herding as he had ever been and came up from Brodick part-time, evidently more relieved than anything else at his departure. Archie ceased to press on my conscience—the next time Cam and I ran into him, the circumstances were even less promising than our performance in the grocery-store aisle, but if he’d noticed the swift ravenous kiss we’d stolen in the front of the Toyota before putting on our best behaviour for our shopping run, he gave no sign, and greeted Cam civilly, talked to him about the weather.