Scrap Metal (8 page)

“Yes, but—”

“The lad’s right. Take him out on your late rounds, Nichol. If you set off now, you can check the cliff-top fences before dark.”

I looked up. Harry was scanning both of us with a kind of grim satisfaction, probably at the idea of packing me out into the cold night. Something more to it than that, though. I tried to read it. His eyes were glittering oddly. Maybe it was even more fun to have a weary, underweight town boy to kick around.

My temper stirred. “Is it all right with you,” I said, “if I show him to where he’ll be sleeping first?”

“
B’e sin a’chuirt, mas e gura bi fàg mise ’am aonar.
”

I care not, as long as thou art gone.
I raised my eyebrows. Almost impossible to translate the old language into bright modern English, particularly when it came to Harry’s thunderous pronouncements.

“Fior mhath,”
I responded involuntarily.
Very well. As it pleases you.

I got up, Cameron rising with me. Suddenly we were an ancient tribal clan, receiving orders from our chief in the ancestral shieling. I gestured Cameron ahead of me towards the door. One day there’d have to be a reckoning, if the old man kept playing it
Highlander
like this. All right, he’d lost his beloved heir, but I wasn’t one of his sheepdogs to be ordered about, and I wouldn’t have him snarling—even in a foreign language—at a guest…

“Wait a bit.”

I stopped dead. That was the trouble. He was my lifetime’s voice of authority. I’d developed habits of obedience long before my free adult will had kicked in.

“Which room will you give to yon lad?”

“Granda. His name is Cameron. Not
student
or
boy
or
yon
—”

“In fact it’s just Cam.”

We both looked round. He’d spoken gently, as if shy of breaking our confrontation, which I supposed from the outside did sound as if it might get settled with claymores. “At least…that’s what everyone calls me. So…”

An awkward silence fell. Harry chewed on the stem of his pipe, glaring at us from under his eyebrows. Then he sat up and set the pipe aside. “Give yon lad the room opposite yours.”

“What? That room’s—”

“I know damn well which room it is. The rest are barely furnished. Do as you’re bidden,
leanabh
. Go now.”

The weird light was still in his eyes, a kind of blank sheen. I couldn’t figure it out. Perhaps he’d taken to lycanthropy in his old age. I wouldn’t put it past him, and the moon was almost full… Quickly I scooped up Cameron’s shopping bags and half pushed him out of the room. I really didn’t want to know.

Out in the hallway, Cameron glanced at me uneasily, taking a couple of the bags from my hand. “I didn’t mean to cause a fight.”

“You didn’t. At least—there’s not much that doesn’t cause us to fight, so don’t worry about it. Go on up those stairs.” I followed him, this time keeping my eyes to myself. I’d been a pretty naïve arrival on the Edinburgh scene, but I’d taught myself to tell a boy I fancied him by looking him in the face, not the arse. “We fight over sheep feed, politics, heating bills and every other thing we talk about.”

“Was he all right? He looked a bit… I don’t know. Not well, maybe.”

“Oh, he’s fine.” A flicker of concern crossed my mind, but I dismissed it. Harry was always fine. I’d never known him ail a day in my life. “Mind, it’s not like him to use the Gaelic without checking you could speak it too. He’d normally think that very rude.”

“And is it?”

“Traditionally, yes. The islanders had a rule—they’d never speak it when an Englishman was by. So as not to make him feel left out. And of course more and more Englishmen came, so…”

“You wiped yourselves out with your courtesy.”

We’d come to a halt on the turn of the stairs. It took me a moment to notice. It was one of the darkest, most melancholy places in the old house, but for once it didn’t oppress me—not the mean, chilly draught stealing in through the cobwebbed windowpanes, not the dead bulb dangling uselessly overhead because only Alistair had dared scramble the full height of the stairwell on our wobbly stepladder to fix it. If Cameron—
Cam
, he’d said, and it suited him better, pure and direct—wanted to stop here and talk, that was fine by me. “Yes, almost.”

“I’m not an Englishman.”

“No.”
No, you’re a flower of the west Glasgow wasteland, a proof I’d almost forgotten that nature is everywhere, astonishing and bountiful.
“I’m guessing they didn’t teach it to you in school, though.”

“They barely taught me English.”

“Well, no more did they teach it to me, for all there was meant to be a revival. It’s a dying language. Best they let it go.”

“Where did you learn it, then?”

“I didn’t. At least, Harry tried to drum some into me while I was growing up, but I never really took it in. And neither of us should have been speaking it in front of a stranger, so I’m sorry.”

“Maybe I don’t count.”

He was smiling faintly. I considered his tone. It could just mean that the old man had felt easy enough in his company to forget his manners, a compliment of sorts. It could also mean
perhaps I don’t exist.

“Oh, you count,” I told him, not really thinking what I was saying, “or he’d never have offered you Alistair’s room.”

“Alistair? Oh, my God. Not your brother’s.”

“Yeah. You could’ve knocked me down. He hardly mentions Al. I don’t think either of us has even been in there since…”

“Nichol, I can’t possibly.”

“I know. It’s weird that he offered. But in a way I don’t see why not, and he’s right—it’s probably more fit for human habitation than anywhere else in this barrack. Come on, let’s go and have a look at it at least.”

The door wasn’t locked. Cam watched me warily while I pushed it open. He thought me strange, I imagined, for doing so with such a steady hand. My own calm puzzled me. Unconsciously I’d avoided the place for a year, not so much as glancing at it as I went past, and now I simply couldn’t work up any sense of the occasion. After all, it was just Alistair’s room. If we’d stripped it and cleared it I might have felt more, but as things stood—untouched, unchanged—this could have been any one of the hundreds of times when I’d walked in, welcomed as a kid, in our teenage years as often as not shouted at for failing to knock.
Nicky, you wee tick! In the unlikely event of you ever finding a girlfriend, I’m gonna do this to you!

I smiled. I had been a classically annoying little brother, hadn’t I—always in the wrong place at the wrong time. There were Al’s football trophies, his collection of posters from rock festivals. He’d had this room all his life, and there were his unsuccessfully hidden traces of childhood—a box of soft toys shoved halfway into the wardrobe, the painted-over Dr. Who wall panels showing themselves in bas-relief, the ghost of a TARDIS travelled on forever now. There was his unmade bed.

I turned away. Cam was planted in the doorway, white as a sheet. “Look,” he whispered. “It’s a grand room. And I’m the last man in the world who should be choosy, but…”

“But you’d rather sleep in the barn. Aye. Me too.” I hustled him gently back out into the corridor and closed the door behind me, turning the latch round tight. “There’s a room just round the corner here. Use that one.”

“I don’t want to offend him. Your granda, that is.”

I didn’t think you meant Al.
“You won’t. He sleeps off by himself at the other end of the house. Just…duck into Al’s room if you see him coming, and he’ll never be any the wiser.”

I showed him into the bleak little cell round the turn in the corridor, which had nothing worse to face in it than a bare divan bed and perishing cold. “Jesus, it’s freezing. I’ll get you some bed linen and a load of blankets.”

“Later. It’s okay. This is fine.”

He’d laid a warm hand to my shoulder, as if I needed calming. I didn’t. I was abysmally cold, inside as well as out. It was just that if I didn’t do something for someone, make this room more habitable, provide food, see to the sheep, I was going to leap out of my crawling skin. “I’ll get them. They’re just in the airing cupboard down the hall. I’ll find you a couple of hot-water bottles too, and… Oh, wait. I forgot about your feet.”

“My what?”

“Your blisters. Come on. The bathroom’s just down here.”

“Oh. No, it’s okay. They’re fine now. It was just walking down from the—”

“Cam, let me see to them, all right? We’ve got work to do on foot tonight, and you’ll be screwed if you get them infected.”

He followed me obediently, though I’d seen the puzzled shadow in his eyes. I didn’t know what the tremor in my voice had been about either. Great—probably he thought I was some kind of foot fetishist. To dispel this impression, I turned my back on him while he sat on the edge of our tomb-like bath. “Take your wellies off. First-aid kit’s in here somewhere. Looks like it last saw action at the Somme, but Ma keeps it well stocked up. Yeah, here we go.”

“Sorry. These bloody things seem stuck.”

“They’re always tricky at first. Here, let me.”

He hesitated then extended one foot to me. Not looking at him, I grasped the boot behind the heel and drew it off. There was a knack to it. Al had showed me, helping me in to and out of my first pair. “Okay. Other.”

“Ta. I haven’t had wellies since I was about six.”

“Floral ones, were they?”

“They might have been.”

I went to work with the TCP and plasters. No wonder the poor sod had been limping—he had blisters the size of bottle tops on both heels and under his anklebones. I tried to keep my touch impersonal, but it was hard. His feet were clammy cold. I wanted to rub them, clasp the toes between my palms…

I glanced up. He was clutching the edge of the bath. “Sorry,” I muttered. “Can’t think why I didn’t let you do that for yourself. Didn’t mean to freak you out.”

“You haven’t. It’s just…” He withdrew his foot from my grasp, not hurriedly. “I haven’t had a proper wash in days. God knows what state they’re in.”

I smiled in relief. “They’re fine.”

“It was nice of you to do that. I don’t get looked after so often I’m going to chuck it back in anyone’s face.”

“Och, it was nothing.” A warmth was stealing up the back of my neck. It would be a blush if I wasn’t careful. I concentrated on packing the first-aid things away, trying to lose the echo of his cool, silky skin on my palms. “I wish I could help you with the wash, as well, but there’s virtually no hot… Although wait. Hang on.”

I got up. For a second I stood still and listened, but all was quiet from downstairs. I pushed the bathroom door open and followed a well-worn track down the corridor, the one that wouldn’t call any telltale creaks from the boards. Reaching into the airing cupboard, I found the switch for the water heater and threw it, careful not to let it clunk. The old man could pick that sound up from half a field away.

Mission accomplished, I crept back to the bathroom. “I’ve put the emergency heater on.”

“The what?”

Immairgency.
Oh, God—I
was
turning into Harry. “Sorry. The immersion. It takes about an hour to do anything, but by the time we get back there might be enough for a bath. Me and Al used to share one—I mean, we’d share the water, take turns, if one of us wasn’t too filthy, fight over who got in first…”

“Nichol. Breathe.”

I had been breathing, hadn’t I? Now he mentioned it, though, my lungs were in a knot up under my throat. I’d been on the edge of nervous babble. “Sorry. Just didn’t want you with an image of me and my big hairy brother—”

He broke into laughter, and the weird tension building around us dissolved. “Okay. Why is it a covert op to switch your water heater on, then?”

“Old man won’t have it. He thinks it’s too expensive. And he’s right, but you’d not think once a week was pushing the boat out too far.”

“What about that great big lamb incubator you’ve got downstairs?”

“The Aga? Yeah, that should give us water. But the only one who really knows how to deal with it is Ma, and…”

“That’s the second time.”

I was tucking the first-aid box, with its rust flecks and red cross big enough to be seen from passing Spitfires, back into the cabinet. I was distracted. “Second time what?”

“That you’ve said
is
instead of
was
about your ma. Did you realise?”

Such a gentle, ordinary question. We’d used to be better, in the Highlands and Islands, at dealing with the dead. Infant mortality, outbreaks of typhus, hard winters—we’d lived with our departed closely, often outnumbered, talking to them easily in poetry and songs. Now we had inherited—I had—a modern-day mainland silence. I hadn’t opened my mouth about Ma, and no one, not even Archie, had dared ask. I wished we had a loo in here so that I could sink down on the seat. But that was off down the corridor, something she really had insisted on, in a household of three men and a shifting population of farmhands. There was only the edge of the bath, if I wanted to sit down.

Cam was making room for me. I went to join him, a little stiffly, not touching. “I didn’t realise, no.” I didn’t realise I’d left the Aga in its state of neglect because that was her job, hers—she kept the fires in my home as surely as she kindled them at Beltane and Samhain in the fields.

“Does it feel like sometimes she’s still here?”

I started. He hadn’t asked it like a counsellor, a well-meaning comforter trying to get me to talk. He was watching the bathroom’s shadows intently, as if…

The door creaked and swung open. This time we both jumped. It took me a moment to look down far enough to match cause to the effect. Keen-edged relief swept me. A tiny dark shape, insinuating itself into the room by main force. “Oh, is it you, Miss Buttinsky? Don’t you knock?” Yes, my cat—with a huge moustache. “Oh, God.”

The rat was the size of a small squirrel. She was having trouble carrying it, not that she’d admit it, but I could tell by the set of her shoulders. There must have been a battle royal to bring it down. The weight of it was making her waddle slightly. As I watched, she came to stand in front of me, looking me over consideringly. Then she turned and dropped her prize onto Cam’s naked foot.