about what happened the night he broke his back. They had all lived in terror of what would happen when the full story came out. But it never did. Like everything else in his life, his fears, his dreams, his secret desires, Calum kept it to himself, and the expected storm never broke.
Fin parked by the gate and walked up the pavings to the kitchen door. There was a ramp there in place of a step. He knocked and waited. There were two houses behind Calum’s, and a large breezeblock garage with rust-red doors. An overgrown yard was littered with the remains of cannibalized tractors and broken-down trailers. A stark contrast with the neat and tidy garden on this side of the wall. Fin turned, as the door opened, to find an elderly woman standing at the top of the ramp. She was wearing a print apron over a woollen jumper and tweed skirt. When he had last seen Calum’s mother her hair had been the purest black. Now it was the purest white. But it was carefully arranged in soft curls around a face almost as colourless, a face scarred by a tracery of fine criss-crossing wrinkles. Her eyes were a pale, watery blue, and they peered at him without recognition. Fin was almost startled to see her. He could never quite get used to the fact that people his age had parents who were still alive.
‘Mrs Macdonald?’
She frowned, wondering if she should know him. ‘Aye.’
‘It’s Fin Macleod. I used to live up near the harbour with my aunt. I was at school with Calum.’
The frown faded, but there was no smile. Her mouth set itself in a hard line. ‘Oh,’ she said.
Fin shuffled awkwardly. ‘I wondered if it might be possible to see him.’
‘Well, you’ve taken your time coming, haven’t you?’ Her voice was hard, the Gaelic giving it a steely edge. It also had the rasp of an inveterate smoker. ‘It’s almost twenty years since Calum broke his back, and none of you even had the decency to visit. Except for Angel, poor boy.’
Fin was torn between guilt and curiosity. ‘Angel came to see Calum?’
‘Aye, every week. Regular as clockwork.’ She paused to draw a wheezing breath. ‘But he’ll not be coming any more, will he?’
Fin stood for a moment, uncertain how to respond, before deciding there was no adequate response he could make. ‘Is Calum there?’ He looked beyond her into the house.
‘No, he’s not. He’s working.’
‘Where can I find him, then?’
‘In the shed, round the other side of the house. Angel built it for the loom.’ She took a packet of cigarettes from the pocket of her apron and lit one. ‘You’ll hear it when you go round. Just knock.’ She blew out a cloud of smoke and closed the door in his face.
Fin followed the path around the bungalow. The paving stones had been carefully laid and cemented to smooth out the passage for the wheelchair, and Fin wondered if Angel had been responsible for that, too. He ducked under a clothesline heavy with washing blowing in the wind, and saw the shed in the lee of the house. It was a simple breezeblock structure, harled to protect it from the rain, and had a steeply pitched tin roof. There was a window in each face, and a door facing out to a hump of peatstack and the moor beyond. Sunlight reflected in momentary flashes on fragments of water gathered in all its hollows.
As he approached the door he heard the rhythmical clacking of the loom, the turning of wheels turning wheels, sending wooden shuttles shooting back and forth across lines of spun wool almost faster than the eye could see. When he’d been a boy, it was nearly impossible to walk down any street in Ness without hearing a loom in action somewhere, in someone’s shed or garage. Fin had always wondered why tweed woven on Lewis was called Harris Tweed. Whatever it was called, its weavers had never made much money at it. Harris Tweed was not Harris Tweed unless woven by hand, and at one time islanders had laboured at home in their thousands to produce the stuff. The mills in Stornoway paid them a pittance for it before selling it on to markets in Europe and America for a handsome profit. But now the bottom had fallen out of those markets, tweed replaced by more fashionable fabrics, and only a handful of weavers remained, still earning a pittance.
Fin raised his hand to knock on the door and hesitated, closing his eyes, and feeling again a surge of the guilt that had haunted him through all the years since it happened. For just a moment he wondered if Calum would remember him, before dismissing the thought as foolish. Of course he would remember. How could he forget?
THIRTEEN
It might seem like stating the obvious, but the Lews Castle School in those days was in Lews Castle. Many of the students and staff lodged at the school, in accommodation created amidst the castle’s rabbit warren of corridors and landings. I only mention it, because the year that Calum and I climbed up on the roof was the last year that the school was actually in the castle. The building was in a poor state of repair and deteriorating fast, and the education authority couldn’t afford the upkeep. So the school moved elsewhere, even though it was still called the Lews Castle School.
Oddly enough, the place it moved to was the Gibson Hostel in Ripley Place, where I lodged during my first year at the Nicholson, which was my third year of secondary school.
Because of his poor results at Crobost, Artair had been sent to the Lews Castle for vocational studies, and found himself in the delightful company of such old friends as Murdo Ruadh and his big brother, Angel. Calum had the good fortune to be sent to the Nicholson. He never said anything, but it must have been a huge relief for him to escape the endless bullying and beatings he had suffered through all the years at Crobost.
I never had very much time for Calum at school. He sort of tagged around after us, I think in the hope that he might pick up some of our cast-off girlfriends. Calum wasn’t very good with girls. He was crushingly shy and would blush to the roots of his ginger curls if one even spoke to him. The only way he would get to meet any girls was if he was part of a crowd. And that way he would never have to make a fool of himself by making his own introductions. It’s hard for teenage boys. Girls don’t realize it. You have to put yourself out there, vulnerable to rejection if a girl turns you down when you ask for a dance, or offer to buy her a fish supper in The Narrows. All those hormones that flood a teenage boy’s system force him into risking such rejection, then leave him frustrated as well as humiliated when it comes. I am happy not to be fifteen any more.
We were all at the St Valentine’s Day dance that year in Stornoway town hall. Usually we would go back to Ness for the weekend, but because of the dance everyone was staying over at the hostels. There was a band playing the latest songs from the charts. It’s funny how at that age music provides your memory markers. Usually it’s olfactory, a scent associated with some place or moment in your life, that catches you by surprise and transports you back through space and time, evoking with startling resonance a memory you had all but forgotten. But it’s mostly music that takes you back to your teens. I have always associated certain songs with certain girls. I remember a girl called Sine (her name was pronounced like the English
Artair was still going out with Marsaili at the time, and they went to the St Valentine’s dance together. There was a song in the charts then called ‘Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do)’. I thought it was really weird, because the lyrics seemed to fit Artair so well. All about just having a good time and not caring about other people’s aspirations for you. Artair’s Song, I called it. When they played it that night, Artair and Marsaili were dancing together, kind of close and smoochy. I was dancing with Sine, but I couldn’t help watching them over her head. I hadn’t listened to the first verse before, which wasn’t the verse about Arthur. But I caught it that time. It was about finding a girl who turns your heart around, and then losing her and not really knowing quite how you managed it. And those words stirred something inside me, some latent sense of jealousy or regret, and I found myself dancing with Sine and wishing it was Marsaili. Of course, it passed. Hormones again. They played havoc with my head in those days.
Calum was having a frustrating night. He’d been dancing with a demure little dark-haired girl called Anna. But only when it suited her. He asked her for every dance. Sometimes she would say yes. Other times she turned him
