The Blackhouse

SEVEN

It was a whole year before I plucked up the courage to defy my parents and go to Marsaili’s farm on a Saturday.

Telling lies was something I didn’t do very often. But when I did, I made sure they were plausible. I’d heard other kids spinning yarns to their parents, or their teachers, things that even I could tell weren’t true. And you could see immediately in the faces of the grown-ups that they knew it, too. It was important that you made the lie believable. And if you didn’t get found out, then you had a useful tool to keep in your locker for when the right, or wrong, moment arose. Which was why my parents had no reason to doubt me when I told them I was going down the road to play at Artair’s that Saturday morning. After all, what possible reason could a six-year-old have for lying about something like that?

Of course, I told them in English, since we never spoke Gaelic in the house any more. I had found it much easier to learn than I could have imagined. My father had bought a television. Reluctantly. And I spent hours glued to it. At that age, I was like a sponge, soaking up everything around me. It was simple enough, there were just two words now for everything, where before there had only been one.

My father was disappointed that I was going to Artair’s. He had spent all summer restoring an old wooden dinghy which had washed up on the beach. There was no name on her. All the paintwork had been bleached off by the salt water. All the same, he had put a notice in the Stornoway Gazette, describing her, and offering to restore her to her rightful owner should that person come forward to claim her. He was scrupulously honest, my father. But I think he was quite glad when no one did, and he was able to begin the rebuilding with a clear conscience.

I spent long hours with him that summer rubbing the wooden hull down to the bone, holding the worktable steady while he sawed new lengths of cross-planking from yet more timber which had been washed up on the shore. He got rowlocks very cheaply at an auction in Stornoway and fashioned new oars for her himself. He said he wanted to put a mast in her and make a sail out of some canvas we had found on one of our beachcombing adventures. And he had an old outboard motor in the shed that he wanted to try to make serviceable. Then we could propel her by oars, wind or petrol. But all that could wait. Right now he just wanted to get her into the water on the first good day, and row her around the bay from Port of Ness to Crobost harbour.

He had painted her inside and out to protect her from the salt. Purple, of course, like everything else in our lives. And on either side of the bow, in flamboyant white lettering, he had painted her name, Eilidh, which to the non-Gaelic ear sounds like Ay-lay. It was the Gaelic for Helen. My mother’s name.

It was a perfect day for it, really. A fine September Saturday before the equinoctial gales kicked in. The sun was bright and strong, and still warm, and there was just a light breeze ruffling a tranquil sea. Today, my father said, was the day, and I was sorely torn. But I said I had told Artair I’d be there and didn’t want to disappoint him. My father said we couldn’t wait until next Saturday, because it was probable that the weather would have broken by then, and that the Eilidh would have to stay under her tarpaulin in our garden until the spring. If I didn’t want to go with him, he was just going to have to take her out on his own. I think he was hoping that would make me change my mind, and that the two of us would take the Eilidh on her maiden voyage together. He couldn’t understand why I would pass up the chance just so that I could go and play with Artair. I could play with Artair any time. But I had promised Marsaili, in spite of being strictly forbidden by my mother, that I would come to the farm that Saturday. And though it broke my heart, and probably my father’s, I wasn’t about to break my promise.

So it was with mixed feelings that I said goodbye and headed off down the road towards Artair’s bungalow, the lie weighing heavily on my conscience. I had told Artair I was busy that Saturday, and not to expect me. And as soon as I was out of view of my house, I took off across country on a peat track, running until I was certain I could no longer be seen from the Crobost road. It took me about ten minutes from there, cutting back across the moor, to get on to the Cross — Skigersta road and turn west towards Mealanais. It was a route I knew well by now, having spent the last year walking Marsaili home after school with Artair. But this was the first time I had dared to go on a Saturday. A rendezvous arranged in secret during a snatched conversation in the playground. Artair was to know nothing about it. My stipulation. I wanted Marsaili to myself for once. But as I scrambled down the slope to the track that led to Mealanais farm, I felt the guilt of my deception like the sick feeling you get when you have eaten more than you should.

At the white gate I hesitated with my hand on the latch. There was still time to change my mind. If I ran all the way, I could probably get back before my father had got the boat on to its trailer, and no one would be any the wiser. But a voice came to me on the breeze, bright and cheerful.

‘Fi-in … Hiya, Fin.’

And I looked up to see Marsaili running up the path from the farmhouse. She must have been watching for me. And now there was no going back. She arrived, breathless, at the gate, her cheeks rosy red, blue eyes shining like flowers in a cornfield. Her hair was plaited in pigtails as it had been that first day at school, blue ribbons to match her eyes.

‘Come on.’ She opened the gate and grabbed my hand, and I was through the looking glass into Marsaili’s world before I even had time to think about it.

Marsaili’s mum was a lovely woman who smelled of roses and spoke with a strange, soft, English accent that sounded almost musical to my ears. She had wavy brown hair and chocolate eyes, and was wearing a print apron over a cream woollen jumper and blue jeans. She had on a pair of green wellies, and didn’t seem to mind them shedding dried mud all over the flagstone floor in the big farmhouse kitchen. She shooed two lively border collies out into the yard and told us to sit at the table, and poured us tall glasses of cloudy home-made lemonade. She said she had seen me and my parents often at the church, although I didn’t really remember seeing her. She was full of questions. What did my dad do? What did my mum do? What did I want to be when I grew up? I hadn’t the faintest idea, but didn’t like to admit that. So I said I wanted to be a policeman. She lifted her eyebrows in surprise and said that was a good thing to want to be. I could feel Marsaili’s eyes on me the whole time, watching. But I didn’t want to turn and look at her, because I knew I would only blush.

‘So,’ her mum said, ‘will you stay for lunch?’

‘No,’ I said quickly, then realized that perhaps I had sounded a little rude. ‘I told my mum I’d be back by twelve. She said she’d have something ready. And then me and my dad are going out in a boat.’ I was learning early that the telling of one lie often led to the telling of another. And then another. I started to panic in case she asked me something else I had to lie about. ‘Can I have some more lemonade, please?’ I tried to change the subject.

‘No,’ Marsaili said. ‘Later.’ And to her mum, ‘We’re going out to play in the barn.’

‘Okay, just watch the mites don’t bite.’

‘Mites?’ I said when we got out into the yard.

‘Hay mites. You can’t really see them. They live in the hay and bite your legs. Look.’ And she pulled up the leg of her jeans to show me the tiny red bites on the leg underneath that she had scratched and made bleed.

I was horrified. ‘Why are we going into the barn, then?’

‘To play. It’s alright, we’ve both got jeans on. And they probably won’t bite you anyway. My dad says they only like English blood.’ She took my hand again and led me across the farmyard. Half a dozen hens went skittering off across the cobbles as we headed for the barn. Away to the left stood a stone byre, where they fed and milked the cows. There were three large pink pigs snuffling about in a stye amongst scattered hay and chopped turnip. All they seemed to do was eat and shit and piss. The sweet, pungent smell of pig manure filled the air and made me screw up my face.

‘This place stinks.’

‘It’s a farm.’ Marsaili seemed to think it hardly worth commenting on. ‘Farms always stink.’

The barn was huge inside, with baled hay piled up almost to the corrugated tin roof. Marsaili started clambering across the lower bales. And when she realized I wasn’t following, turned and waved me up after her, irritated that I hadn’t taken her lead.

‘Come on!’

Reluctantly I followed her up towards the roof, to where a narrow opening took us into a space where the bales created an area the size of a small room, almost totally enclosed except for where the large hay-bale steps led up to it from below.

‘This is my space. My dad made it for me. Of course, I’ll lose it once we have to start using the hay to feed the animals. What do you think?’

I thought it was great. I had nowhere I could really call my own, except for the tiny attic bedroom my father had made, and you couldn’t do anything in there without the whole house hearing. So I spent most of my time outdoors. ‘It’s brilliant.’

‘D’you ever watch cowboys on telly?’

‘Sure.’ I tried to be nonchalant. I’d seen something called Alias Smith and Jones, but hadn’t found it very easy to follow.

‘Good, I’ve got a great game of cowboys and Indians for us to play.’

At first I thought she meant it was some kind of board game, until she explained that I was to be the cowboy, captured by a tribe of warriors, and that she would be the Indian princess who had fallen in love with me and was going to help me escape. It didn’t sound like any of the games I had ever played with Artair, and I wasn’t very keen. But Marsaili had it all worked out, and took charge in a way that left me little room for dissent.

‘You sit here.’ She led me into the corner and made me squat down with my back against the bales. She turned away for a moment to retrieve something from a little hidey-hole in the hay, before turning back with a length of rope and a large red handkerchief in her hands. ‘And I’ll tie you up.’

I didn’t like the sound of that at all and started to get to my feet. ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’

But she pushed me back down with an unexpected firmness. ‘Of course it is. You have to be tied up so that I can come and untie you. And you can’t tie yourself up, can you?’

‘I don’t suppose so.’ I conceded the point with great reluctance.

Marsaili proceeded to tie my hands behind my back, and then looped the rope around to tie my ankles together, my knees folded up under my chin. I felt trussed and helpless as Marsaili stood back to survey her handiwork and smile her satisfaction. I was beginning to have serious doubts about the wisdom of having come to the farm at all. Whatever I had imagined we might get up to, it was not this. But worse was to come. Marsaili leaned over and began tying the red handkerchief around my head like a blindfold.

‘Hey, what are you doing?’ I pulled my head away to try to stop her.

‘Hold still, silly. You have to be blindfolded, too. The Indians always blindfold their prisoners. And, anyway, if you were to see me coming, you might give the game away.’

By now I was beginning to doubt her sanity and panic was setting in. ‘Give the game away to who?’ I looked around the hay-bale room. ‘There’s no one here!’

‘Of course there is. But they’re all sleeping now. That’s the only reason I can sneak up in the dark and set you free. Now, hold still while I tie the blindfold.’

I was hardly in a position to resist, since I had already allowed her to tie me up, so I sighed loudly and submitted with indignant resignation. She leaned over again, placing the folded handkerchief over my eyes and tying it behind my head. The world went black, except for where the light leaked in around the edges of the hanky, and then it was red.

‘Okay, don’t make a sound,’ Marsaili whispered, and I heard the rustling of the hay as she moved away. Then silence. A very long silence. A silence so long that I began to be scared that she had run off and left me there as a joke, all tied up and blindfolded. At least she hadn’t gagged me as well.

‘What’s going on?’

And from somewhere much closer than I had expected came an answering ‘Shhhhh! They’ll hear you.’ Marsaili’s voice was not even a whisper. More like a breath.

‘Who will?’

‘The Indians.’

I sighed and waited. And waited. My legs were beginning to seize up now, and I couldn’t straighten them out. I wriggled to try to shift my position, and rustled the hay.

‘Shhhhh!’ Marsaili’s voice came again.

Now I heard her moving, circling around me in her secret straw room. And then more silence, before suddenly I could feel her breath hot on my face. I had not realized she was so close. I almost jumped. I could smell the sweetness of the lemonade still on it. And then soft, wet lips pressed themselves against mine, and I could taste it, too. But I was so startled, I pulled my head back sharply and banged it against the bale at my back. I heard Marsaili giggling. ‘Stop it!’ I shouted. ‘Untie me now!’ But she just kept giggling. ‘Marsaili, I mean it. Untie me. Untie me!’ I was close to tears.

A voice came from somewhere down below. ‘Hello-o … Everything alright up there?’ It was Marsaili’s mum.

Marsaili’s voice thundered in my ear as she bellowed back, ‘Everything’s fine, Mum. We’re just playing.’ And she started untying me quickly. As soon as my hands were free I pulled off the blindfold and scrambled to my feet, trying to recover as much of my dignity as I could.

‘I think you’d better come down for a minute,’ Marsaili’s mum called.

‘Okay,’ Marsaili shouted back. She bent down to untie my feet. ‘Just coming.’

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and glared at her. But she just smiled sweetly back at me. ‘That was fun, wasn’t it? Pity the Indians woke up.’ And she went leaping off down the bales to where her mother was waiting for us below. I dusted the hay out of my hair and followed.

I knew immediately from the look on Marsaili’s mum’s face that something was wrong. She seemed a little flushed. ‘I think, perhaps, I’ve rather given the game away,’ she said, looking at me with something like an apology in her chocolate-brown eyes.

Marsaili frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

But her mum kept her eyes on me as she spoke. ‘I’m afraid I phoned your folks to ask if you could stay for lunch, and to tell them I’d run you back home afterwards.’ My heart sank, and I felt Marsaili turn a look of consternation in my direction. Her mum said, ‘You didn’t tell us that your folks had forbidden you to come to the farm on your own, Fin.’ Aw, hell, I thought. The ba’s in the slates! ‘Your father’s on his way over now to pick you up.’

The problem with telling plausible lies, is that when you do get caught, after that nobody believes you, even when you’re telling the truth. My mother sat me down and told me the story about the boy who cried wolf. It was the first time I had heard it. And she had a talent for embellishment, my mother. She could have been a writer. I didn’t really know what woods were then, because there weren’t any trees where we lived. But she made them sound dark and scary, with wolves lurking behind every tree. I didn’t know what wolves were either. But I knew Artair’s neighbour’s Alsatian dog, Seoras. It was a huge beast. Bigger than me. And my mother made me imagine what would happen if Seoras went wild and attacked me. That’s what wolves are like, she told me. I had a vivid imagination, so I could picture the boy being told to be careful of the wolves in the woods and then shouting ‘Wolf! Wolf!’ as a joke and bringing everyone running. I could even imagine him doing it a second time, because of the reaction he’d got the first time around. I couldn’t really believe he’d do it a third time, but I figured that, if he did, those who had come running the previous times would think he was just playing games again. And of course, my mother said, that was when there really were wolves. And they ate him.

My father was more disappointed than angry. Disappointed that I should have chosen to sneak off to see some girl on a farm, rather than take the boat we had worked on together all summer out on her maiden voyage. But he didn’t take his belt to me because of his disappointment. It was for the lie. And the sting of leather on the backs of my thighs, and my mother’s story about the wolves, led me to decide there and then never to lie again.

Except, of course, by omission.

My father took the Eilidh out on his own that day, while I was sent to my room to cry myself dry and think about what it was I’d done. And I was grounded every Saturday for a month. I could play in the house, or the garden, but was not allowed to venture beyond. Artair was permitted to come to our house, but I couldn’t go to his. And I had no pocket money for four whole weeks. At first Artair thought it was hilarious, and gloated over my misfortune — particularly because it involved Marsaili. But he soon got fed up. If he wanted to play with me, then he was restricted to my house and garden just the same as I was. And eventually he turned his annoyance on me and lectured me about being more careful next time. I told him there wasn’t going to be a next time.

I stopped walking Marsaili home from school. Artair and I went with her only as far as the Mealanais road end, and then we left her to go the rest of the way on her own, and we took the single-track up the hill to Crobost. I was wary of Marsaili, too, since the incident with the rope and the blindfold, so usually I avoided her in the playground at playtimes and lunch breaks. I lived in terror that someone would find out about the kiss in the straw room. I could just imagine what fun the other boys would have at my expense.

It was some time after Christmas that I came down with the flu. The first time ever. And I thought I was going to die. I think, perhaps, my mother did, too. Because all I can really remember about that week was that every time I opened my eyes she was there, a cool, damp facecloth in her hand to lay across my forehead, whispering words of love and encouragement. Every muscle in my body was aching, and I seemed to flit between burning fevers, with temperatures running at a hundred and six, and spells of uncontrollable shivering. My seventh birthday came and went that week, and I barely noticed. At first I had nausea and vomiting and couldn’t eat. It was nearly a week before my mother was able to persuade me to take some arrowroot mixed with milk and a little sugar. I liked the taste of it, and every time I have tasted it since, I think of my mother and her ever-present comfort during those dreadful days and nights of my first flu.

In fact it was, I think, the first time I had ever been ill. And it took it out of me. I lost weight and felt weak, and it was a full fortnight before I was fit enough to return to school. It was raining the day I went back, and my mother was concerned that I would get chilled and wanted to take me in the car. But I insisted on walking, and met Artair at the top of the path to his bungalow. He hadn’t been allowed near while I was ill, and he peered at me now, warily.

‘Are you sure you’re okay?’

‘Sure I’m sure.’

‘You’re not infectious or anything?’

‘Of course not. Why?’

‘Because you look bloody terrible.’

‘Thank you. That makes me feel a whole lot better.’

It was early February. The rain was really no more than a smirr, so light you could hardly see it. But it made us very wet, blowing in on the edge of an icy north wind. It got in around my neck and my collar so that the fabric rubbed my skin, my cheeks were burning and my knees were red raw. I loved it. For the first time in two whole weeks I felt alive again.

‘So, what’s been happening while I was off?’

Artair waved a hand vaguely in the air. ‘Not much. You haven’t missed anything, if that’s what you’re worried about. Oh, except the times tables.’

‘What’s that?’ It sounded very exotic. I imagined tables laden with clocks.

‘Multiplication.’

I had no idea what that was either. But I didn’t want to appear stupid, so all I said was, ‘Oh.’

We were almost at the school before he told me. Very casually, as if it were nothing. ‘I’ve joined the country dancing group.’

‘The what?’

‘Country dancing. You know …’ And he raised his arms above his head and made a funny little shuffle with his feet. ‘The pas de bas.’

I was beginning to think he’d lost his marbles in my absence. ‘Paddy Bah?’

‘It’s a dance step, stupid.’

I gawped at him in amazement. ‘Dancing? You? Artair, dancing’s for girls!’ I couldn’t imagine what had come over him.

He shrugged, making lighter of it than I could have imagined possible. ‘Mrs Mackay picked me. I didn’t have any choice.’

And I thought for the first time that, perhaps, I had been lucky to be off with the flu. Otherwise she might have picked me. I felt truly sorry for Artair. Until, that is, I discovered the truth.

We were walking up the road at three that afternoon with Marsaili. I hadn’t been at all sure that she was pleased to see me back. She’d said a cool hello when I took my seat beside her in class, and then proceeded to ignore me for the rest of the day. At least, that’s how it appeared to me. Every time I looked at her, or tried to catch her eye, she seemed to be studiously avoiding mine. In the playground at break times she stuck close to the other girls, skipping and chanting rhymes and playing peever. Now, as we headed towards the main road, other groups of primary kids strung out before us and behind us, she said to Artair, ‘Did you get the date of the Stornoway trip from Mrs Mackay?’

He nodded. ‘I’ve got a note for my parents to sign.’

‘Me, too.’

‘What Stornoway trip?’ I was feeling distinctly left out. It’s amazing how much you can miss in two short weeks.

‘It’s a dancing competition,’ Marsaili said. ‘Schools from all over the island are competing at the town hall.’

‘Dancing?’ For a moment I was confused, and then like the haar lifting along the northern coast on a warm summer’s morning, all became clear. Marsaili was in the country dancing group. And that’s why Artair had joined, even at the risk of ridicule from his male peers. I gave him a look that would have turned milk. ‘Didn’t have any choice, eh?’

He just shrugged. I caught Marsaili looking at me, and I could tell she was pleased by my reaction. I was jealous, and she knew it. She rubbed salt in the wound. ‘You can sit beside me on the minibus if you like, Artair.’

Artair was a little self-conscious by now and so played it cool. ‘Maybe. We’ll see.’

We crossed the main road to the Mealanais road end, and I wondered if he had been walking her all the way home in my absence. But we stopped, and it was clear that she did not expect us to be going with her. ‘See you on Saturday, then,’ she told Artair.

‘Yeh, okay.’ He shoved his hands deep in his pockets as he and I turned away towards the Crobost road. As I glanced back, Marsaili was skipping off along the Mealanais road with a lightness in her step. Artair was walking much faster than usual, and I almost had to run to keep up with him.

‘Saturday? Is that when the dancing competition is?’

He shook his head. ‘No, that’s on a schoolday.’

‘So what’s happening on Saturday?’

Artair kept his eyes fixed on a point somewhere on the road up ahead. ‘I’m going to play at the farm.’

I couldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t have been able to identify them accurately then, but I was suffering from all the classic symptoms of jealousy. Anger, hurt, confusion, melancholy. ‘Your parents won’t let you!’ I was grasping at straws.

‘Yes, they will. My mum and dad and Marsaili’s mum and dad are friendly from the church. My mum even gave me a lift over to Mealanais last Saturday.’

I think my mouth must have been hanging open. Had it been June, I’d have caught flies. ‘You’ve been before?’ I was almost incredulous.

‘A couple of times.’ He flicked me a look, a smug little smile on his face. ‘We played cowboys and Indians in the barn.’

I had nightmarish images of Marsaili tying Artair up with the same length of rope, blindfolding him with the same red hanky. I asked, my mouth so dry I could hardly speak, ‘Did she kiss you?’

Artair’s head snapped around to look at me, an expression of pure disgust and incomprehension written across his face. ‘Kiss me?’ I could hear the horror in his voice. ‘Why on earth would she want to do that?’

Which was, if nothing else, a crumb of comfort in the depths of my misery.

The wind was blowing in from the north-east on Saturday. A bitter February gale with sleet on its leading edge. I stood by our gate in my yellow oilskins and sou’wester and my black wellies watching for the Avenger going past. My mother called to me several times, saying I’d catch my death out there and that I should come and play in the house. But I was determined to wait. I think, perhaps, there was a part of me hoping that Marsaili and Artair had just been playing some kind of cruel joke. And I’d have stood out there happily all morning if only that car had never passed. But it did, just after nine-thirty. Artair’s mum driving, and Artair’s face pressed against the window in the back, blurred by the condensation, but clearly grinning. His hand gave a little triumphal wave, like royalty in training. I glowered at him in the wet, the sleet stinging my face red and disguising my tears. But I could feel the hot tracks they made down my cheeks.

On Monday morning I surprised Mrs Mackay by suggesting to her that since I was now almost self-sufficient in English I no longer needed a translator, and that she could rearrange our seating alphabetically as she had originally intended. The idea must have appealed to Mrs Mackay’s sense of orderliness, because she readily agreed. I was shifted from the first row to the second and was now several desks removed from Marsaili. Her dismay was undisguised. She turned and lowered her head slightly, raising doe eyes to give me her injured animal look. I steadfastly ignored her. If her plan had been to make me jealous, then it had succeeded. But it had also backfired, because from now on I was going to have nothing to do with her. I caught Artair smirking his satisfaction from two desks away. From now on I wasn’t going to have anything to do with him either.

I gave them both a wide berth at playtime, and when the bell rang for the end of school I was the first out of the door, and halfway up the road before Marsaili and Artair had even left the playground. At the main road I looked back and saw Marsaili hurrying to try to catch me up, with Artair trailing a little breathlessly behind her. But I turned determinedly away, and headed off up the Crobost road as fast as I could without actually running.

The trouble with jealous revenge is that while you might inflict hurt on the other party, it does nothing to lessen the effect of the hurt you are feeling yourself. So everyone ends up unhappy. And, of course, once you have adopted a certain attitude, it is hard to change it without losing face. I had never been as unhappy as I was through the next two days, and never more determined to stay that way.

On the Thursday at midday the country dancing group left for Stornoway in the school minibus. I watched from a window in the dining hall, rubbing a little clear patch in the misted glass so that I could see them standing by the gate waiting for the minibus to come around from the garage. Four girls and two boys, Artair and Calum. Artair was talking animatedly to Marsaili, trying hard to hold her attention. But she was clearly distracted, peering towards the school, hoping to catch a glimpse of me watching. I felt a certain masochistic pleasure. I saw Artair fumble for his puffer and take two long pulls at it, a sure sign that he was under pressure. He was losing her focus.

But that was no consolation to me during what seemed like an interminable afternoon. The five of us left in class were set the task of copying out words from the blackboard. Capital letters then small letters. I kept gazing from the window at the low cloud blowing in off the Atlantic, tearing itself ragged along the coastline and throwing out squally little showers in between very occasional blinks of sunlight. And Mrs Mackay gave me a right rollicking for not paying attention. That was my problem, she told me, I had no concentration. I was a dreamer. Plenty of ability, but no will to work. In truth, I had no will to do much of anything. I was like some sad, love-sick little puppy locked away on its own in a cupboard. It is strange, looking back, to remember how early I was afflicted by such emotions.

By the time the bell went I was almost suffocating. I couldn’t wait to get out into the blast of icy wind and fill my lungs with fresh salt air. I scuffed and dragged my feet all the way up the road and went into Crobost Stores to buy some tablet with the last of my pocket money. I felt the need of something sweet to comfort me. There is a gate there, just opposite the store, that takes you on to a tractor track leading up the hill to peat trenches which have been dug there by generations of Crobosters. I climbed over the gate and, with hands sunk deep in my pockets, trudged up the boggy track to the peat cuttings. From there I had a view of the school in the distance, and I could look down on both the Mealanais and Crobost single-tracks. You could see the main road all the way up to Swainbost and beyond, and I would be able to see the minibus returning from Stornoway. I had been up here the previous May, cutting peats with my father and mother; hard, back-breaking work slicing down into the soft peat with a special spade, and then stacking the turfs in groups of five along the top of the trench to dry in the warm spring winds. You had to go back later and turn them, and when they were properly dried, you went with a tractor and trailer and took them back to the croft to build your great, humpbacked peat stack, herringboned for drainage. Once properly dried, the peats became impervious to the rain, and would fuel your fire throughout the long winter. The cutting was the worst bit, though, especially if the wind dropped. Because then the midges would get you. Tiny biting flies. The Scottish curse. The single midge is so small you can hardly see it, but they gather together in clusters, great black clouds of them, getting in your hair and your clothes and feeding on your flesh. If you were to be locked in a room filled with midges you would go insane before the day was out. And sometimes that’s just how it was at the peat cutting.

There were no midges now, though, in the depths of a Hebridean winter. Just wind blowing through dead grass, and the sky spitting its anger. The light was going fast. I saw the headlights of the minibus coming over the rise from Cross before I realized that’s what it was. Where the road turned down to the school, it stopped, orange emergency lights flashing, to let off the kids from Crobost. It was just Marsaili, Artair and Calum. They stood talking for a moment after the minibus drove off, then Artair and Calum hurried off in the direction of the Crobost road, and Marsaili started up the farm road towards Mealanais. I sat on for a minute, sucking on the crumbling, sugary sweetness of my tablet, watching Marsaili on the single-track below. She looked tiny from here, lonely somehow in a way that it’s hard to explain. Something in her gait, something leaden in her steps that suggested unhappiness. I suddenly felt unaccountably sorry for her and wanted to run down the hill and give her a big hug, and tell her I was sorry. Sorry for being jealous, sorry for being hurtful. And yet something held me back. That reluctance to give expression to my feelings which has dogged me most of my life.

She was almost out of sight, lost in the winter dusk, when for once something overcame my natural reticence and propelled me down the hill after her, arms windmilling for balance as I stumbled clumsily in my wellies across the squelching moor. I snagged my trousers on the barbed wire as I fell over the fence, sending sheep running off in a panic. I clopped along the road after her at a half-run. By the time I caught her up, I was breathing hard, but she didn’t turn her head, and I wondered if she knew I had been on the hill watching her the whole time. I fell in beside her and we walked some way without a word. When, finally, I had got my breath back, I said, ‘So, how did it go?’

‘The dancing?’

‘Yeh.’

‘It was a disaster. Artair panicked when he saw all the people, and he had to keep puffing on his inhaler and couldn’t go on stage. We had to go on without him. But it was hopeless, because we’d practised with six and it just didn’t work with five. I’m never going to do it again!’

I couldn’t help feeling a sense of satisfaction that verged on elation. But I kept my tone sombre. ‘That’s a shame.’

She flicked me a quick look, perhaps suspecting sarcasm. But I looked suitably saddened by her news. ‘It’s not really. I didn’t like it, anyway. Dancing’s for daft girls and soft boys. I only joined because my mum said I should.’

We lapsed into silence again. I could see the lights of Mealanais farm ahead of us in the hollow. It would be pitch-black on the road home, but my mother always made me carry a small torch in my schoolbag because there was so little daylight in winter that you never knew when you would need it. We stopped at the white gate and stood for a moment.

Eventually she said, ‘Why have you stopped walking me up the road after school?’

I said, ‘I thought you preferred Artair’s company.’

She looked at me, blue eyes piercing the darkness, and I felt a sort of weakness in my legs. ‘Artair’s a pain in the neck. He follows me around everywhere. He even joined the dance class just because I was in it.’ I didn’t know what to say. Then she added, ‘He’s just a daft boy. It’s you I like, really, Fin.’ And she gave me a quick, soft kiss on the cheek, before turning and running down the track to the farmhouse.

I stood for a long time in the dark, feeling where her lips had touched my cheek. I could feel their softness and their warmth for a long time after she had gone, before putting my fingers up to touch my face and dispel the magic. I turned, then, and started running in the direction of the Cross — Skigersta road, happiness and pride swelling my chest with every breath. I was going to be in such trouble when I got home. But I couldn’t have cared less.