Before he walked to his hut, he said, ‘We will see the chapel hut another day, Dorotea?’
I had walked back to the infirmary, my hand warm from his.
Now, as I build a fire in the bothy with Con, I can still feel his fingers through mine.
I am frightened also, he had said.
Con places the last piece of wood in the grate and leans forward to light the match. As she does so, I see a flash of gold at her neck.
‘What is that?’
‘What? Oh!’ Her hand flies to her throat and she pulls up her jumper so that the gold chain she is wearing is entirely hidden.
We stand, looking at one another. A dry log shifts in the growing flames. It is hard to tell whether the colour in Con’s cheeks is from the sudden heat or something else.
‘It’s nothing,’ she finally says. ‘I must get another log for the fire.’
She pushes past me, out of the bothy, and I hear her footsteps going around the side of the building, past the woodpile. Where on earth could she have got a necklace? It doesn’t look like anything our mother would have left behind – she was never one for jewellery, and we sold the rings she had left long ago, during that first hard winter. Could Con have found the necklace somewhere, perhaps, or – and this is a troubling thought – could she have stolen it? I don’t recognize it, but I do know the expression on Con’s face. It’s the look she used to wear after shouting at our parents. It’s the expression she wore when she returned to the blue Kirkwall house last year, with her skirt torn and livid marks on her neck.
Shame.
There is a scrape against the wall, and I can imagine her, leaning her back against it, looking out into the swelling darkness.
I place my hand against the wall where she must be standing on the other side. I close my eyes, willing some peace, some calm, to pass through the thin layer of plaster and brick.
When Con returns to the bothy, some minutes later, she isn’t carrying a log for the fire. She walks past me and begins undressing for bed. I watch, from the corner of my eye, as she pulls her sweater off over her head.
The necklace is gone – no glint of gold. Around her throat instead, are deep, red scratches, as if something has clawed at her. Or as if, standing there, alone in the dark, my sister has tried to scrape off her own skin.Cesare
When he first sees the old metal huts, half rusted and moss-coated, Cesare has to work hard to keep the smile fixed upon his face. He and a small group of men, including Gino and Marco, have been released from digging duties to decide what supplies they might need.
All of them stare at the building that is to be their ‘church’. A bundle of tangled barbed wire lies next to the decaying huts.
The guard who had accompanied the prisoners up the hill pokes the wire with his toe. He is young and blond and new – just recently put in charge of supplies. He’d introduced himself by name, as Stuart, and then, perhaps worried about seeming too friendly, had shouted at them to get moving. When Cesare had met his eye, the guard had given a nervous grin, which he quickly turned into a frown.
But he had soon relaxed, and as they walked up the hill, he’d told Cesare about his five younger sisters: how much they argued and how much they ate.
‘Gannets, they are. Bloody gannets.’
‘What is gannets?’
The guard had glanced at Cesare in surprise and said, ‘You know, those birds. Greedy buggers.’
‘Yes.’ Cesare had smiled, not knowing which bird the guard meant, but enjoying, for a moment, the familiarity – the companionship in assuming that another person understood what you were saying. You know, those birds.
Now Stuart stands, blinking nervously, holding a clipboard and a scrap of paper flapping in the wind, and pokes at the wire again.
‘And this is a church you’re making? A church, from this . . . stuff?’
Cesare nods, more confidently than he feels.
‘And,’ Stuart says, ‘you don’t think someone’s pulling your leg?’
‘He is right,’ Gino says in Italian. ‘This is a pile of shit. They’re laughing at us.’
‘Fooling us,’ Marco agrees, ‘so that we will work on their barriers.’
The other men agree loudly, in Italian, and Stuart watches them, listening to the patter of foreign language, the angry gestures. Cesare notices his hand moving towards his baton.
‘Stop!’ Cesare says in English, but to the Italians, not to the guard. ‘Stop this complaining. We ask for a place to pray. This is our place. It does not look like a church – it is not a church. It was a prison, this place, or it was used in war. These huts are the dark places. We live in the huts like this. We know. But –’ he holds up a hand so the men can’t interrupt ‘– but we will make this a beautiful place. We will bring light to this place. In these huts, there will be no more the war. In these huts, we will make the peace.’
The men nod. Some of them smile. And they follow Cesare, one by one, into the darkness of the first hut.
Like the huts they sleep in, it is cold and draughty. The whole structure is a single semicircle of corrugated steel. In some places, rain has corroded the metal and scrawled curlicues of rust over the ceiling and walls. The air smells sharp and bitter, and Cesare is reminded strongly of the Punishment Hut, of the terror that had gripped him, of the way that the cold air had seemed to squeeze him, like a promise of death to come.
The men gaze around them, their eyes wide, and
