‘There are boys your age all over Ness who would kill for the chance to go out to the rock,’ she said. ‘The one thing everyone has for those guys is respect.’
‘Yeh, sure. Killing a lot of defenceless birds is a great way of earning respect.’
‘Are you scared?’
I hotly denied it. ‘No, I’m not scared!’ Although that was not, perhaps, entirely true.
‘It’s what people will think.’
‘I don’t care what people think. I’m not going and that’s an end of it.’
There was an odd mix of sympathy and frustration in her eyes — sympathy, I think, at the clear strength of my feeling, frustration at my refusal to say why. She shook her head gently. ‘Artair’s dad …’
‘… is not my father.’ I cut her off. ‘He can’t make me go. I’ll find Gigs and tell him myself.’ I stood up, and she quickly grabbed my hand.
‘Fin, don’t. Please, sit down. Let’s talk about it.’
‘There’s nothing to talk about.’ The trip was only a matter of days away. I had thought to get moral support from Marsaili, to bolster me in a decision which would have repercussions. I knew what people would say. I knew that the other kids would whisper behind their hands that I was a coward, that I was betraying a proud tradition. If you had been accepted for An Sgeir, you had to have a damned good reason for backing out. But I didn’t care. I was leaving the island, escaping the claustrophobia of village life, the petulance and pettiness, the harbouring of grudges. I didn’t need a reason. But obviously Marsaili thought I did. I headed towards the gap in the bales, then stopped suddenly, struck by a thought. I turned. ‘Do
She hesitated a little too long before replying. ‘I don’t know. I only know that you’re behaving very strangely.’
Which tipped me over the edge. ‘Well, fuck you, then.’ And I jumped down to the lower bales and hurried out of the barn into the gathering twilight.
Gigs’s croft was one of several on the lower slopes below Crobost, a narrow strip of land running down to the cliffs. He kept sheep and hens, and a couple of cows, and planted root vegetables and barley. He did a bit of fishing, too, though more for personal consumption than any kind of commerce, and would not have made ends meet had it not been for his wife’s part-time job as a waitress at a hotel in Stornoway.
Darkness had fallen by the time I got back from Mealanais, and I sat up on the hill above the MacAulay crofthouse looking down on the single light shining out from the kitchen window. It fell in a long slab across the yard, and I saw a cat moving through it, stalking something in the dark. Someone with a sledgehammer was trapped inside my chest and trying to break out. I felt physically sick.
There was still light in the sky away to the west, long, pale strips of it between lines of purple-grey cloud. No red in it whatsoever, which was not a good sign. I turned and watched the light as it faded and felt cold for the first time in weeks. The wind had turned. The warm, almost balmy south-westerly had swung around and carried on its edge now a chill straight down from the Arctic. The pace of the wind was picking up, and I could hear it whistling through the dry grasses. Change was on the way. When I looked down towards the crofthouse again, I could see the shadow of a figure in the kitchen window. It was Gigs. He was washing dishes at the sink. There was no car in the drive, which meant his wife was not yet back from town. I closed my eyes and clenched my fists and made my decision.
It took me only a few minutes to get down the hill to the croft, but as I reached the road a pair of car headlights swung up suddenly over the rise and raked across the moor in my direction. I ducked down by the fence, crouching amongst the reeds, and watched as the car turned into the drive and parked outside the crofthouse. Gigs’s wife got out. She was young, maybe twenty-five. A pretty girl, still in her white blouse and black skirt. She looked tired, a drag in her gait, as she pushed open the kitchen door. Through the window I saw Gigs taking her in his arms and giving her a long hug and then a kiss. My disappointment was acute. This was not something I could discuss with Gigs when his wife was around. I stood up from the long grass, leaped over the fence and pushed my hands deep into my pockets, heading off then towards the bothan on the Habost road.
There were very few bothans still operating after the big crackdown by the police. I never really saw what the problem was. They might have been unlicensed, but they were never run for profit. They were just places where men gathered together for a drink. But even though they were illegal, I was still underage, and would not be allowed in. There was an odd morality that still operated. Which did not mean, however, that I could not get my hands on a drink. I found a small gathering of my contemporaries in the stone shed behind the bothan, sitting around on the skeletons of old agricultural machinery, tipping cans of beer into their faces. For cash and cigarettes, some of the older boys would slip out from time to time with drink for the kids in the shed, turning it into a kind of baby bothan. Somebody had acquired half a dozen six-packs, and the air was thick with the smell of dope, and manure from the neighbouring byre. A tilley lamp hung from the rafters, so low that you would bang your head on it if you did not take care.
Seonaidh was there, and Iain, and some other boys I knew from school. I was seriously depressed by now, and intent only on getting drunk. I began pouring beer down my throat like there was no tomorrow. Of course, they had heard that Artair and I were going out to the rock. Word, in Ness, spreads like fire on a dry peat moor, fanned by the winds of speculation and rumour.
‘You lucky bastard,’ Seonaidh said. ‘My dad was trying to get me on the trip this year.’
‘I’ll swap you.’
Seonaidh pulled a face. ‘Aye, right.’ Naturally, he thought I was joking. I could have made a necklace from the eye teeth everyone there that night would have given to take my place on the team. The irony was, they could have had it for nothing. Any one of them. Of course, I couldn’t tell them that. They would never have taken me seriously or, if they had, they’d have thought I was insane. As it was, my lack of enthusiasm seemed to signal to them that I was merely playing it cool. Their jealousy was hard to take. And so I just drank. And drank.
I didn’t hear Angel coming in. He was older than us, and he’d been drinking in the bothan most of the night. He’d brought out some beers in return for a joint. ‘Well, well, if it isn’t orphan boy,’ he said when he saw me. His face was round and yellow in the light of the tilley lamp and floated through the dark of the shed like some luminous balloon. ‘You’d better get as much drink down you as you can, son, ’cos you’ll get none out on An Sgeir. Gigs is unre-fucking-lenting about that. No alcohol on the rock. Smuggle out so much as a dram and he’ll throw you off the fucking cliff.’ Someone handed him a rolled-up joint and he lit it, pulling the smoke deep into his lungs and holding it there. When, finally, he blew it out he said, ‘You know I’m the cook this year?’ I didn’t. I knew he’d been out before, and that his father, Murdo Dubh, had been the cook for years. But I also knew that his father had been killed in an accident on a trawler during a stormy February that year. I suppose, if I’d thought about it, it would have been logical for Angel to follow in his father’s footsteps. It’s what men in Ness had done for generations. ‘Don’t worry,’ Angel said, ‘I’ll make sure you get your fair share of earywigs in your bread.’
After he’d gone, another joint was lit and handed around. By now, I was feeling sick, and after a couple of drags, the suffocating claustrophobia of the shed began spinning my world around and around. ‘I’ve got to go.’ I pushed out of the door into the cold night air and immediately threw up in the yard. I leaned against the wall, pressing my face against the cool stone, wondering how on earth I was going to get myself home.
The world seemed to pass me by in a blur. I have no idea how I even managed to get as far as the Crobost road. The lights of a large vehicle caught me full-beam, and I froze like a rabbit, wobbling on the verge until it passed with a whump of air that knocked me over into the ditch. It might not have rained in weeks, but the residual water held by the peat still drained in a thick, brown sludge into the bottom of the ditch. It covered me like slurry, clinging to my clothes, running down my face. I gasped and cursed and pulled myself out to roll over on to the spiny verge. I lay there for what seemed like hours, although it was probably only minutes. But it was long enough for that cold edge on the fresh north wind to chill me through. I struggled on to my hands and knees, teeth chattering now, and looked up as another vehicle came down the road towards me, illuminating my misery in the glare of its lights. As it approached, I turned my head away and shut my eyes. The car stopped, and I heard a door opening, and then a voice. ‘In the name of God, son, what are you doing there?’ Big hands lifted me almost bodily to my feet, and I found myself looking up into Gigs MacAulay’s frowning countenance. He took his forearm across my face to wipe the mud off on the sleeve of his overalls. ‘Fin Macleod,’ he said, recognizing me finally. He sniffed the alcohol on my breath. ‘For Heaven’s sake, son, you can’t go home in this state!’
It took me some time to warm up again, huddled on a chair by the peat fire, a blanket over my shoulders, a
