Bird of Passage (5 page)

She was a great one for names.

‘You have to know the names of things, Kirsty -  trees, plants, birds, flowers.’ That’s what her grandfather always told her. ‘Names are important. It’s no good being careless about such things.’

 Her grandad knew the names of all the wild flowers which grew on the island  and she liked to file the words away in her mind. Bogbean and ladies tresses. Speedwell and celandine. She liked the sounds that they made on her tongue. It was almost as though she could taste the words themselves like the luscious bramble that grew in such profusion, and the glossy but bland crowberry. In her mind, the words themselves had colours, colours that had nothing to do with the objects they described. But even more than saying them, she liked to draw and paint them.

Ever since she could first hold a pencil, Kirsty had loved to draw. When she ran out of drawing paper,  she had simply drawn on the endpapers of books,  or in the farm account books, or sometimes on the wallpaper in her bedroom. Eventually, her grandfather had persuaded Mrs McGregor, who owned the village shop, to stock large pads of coarse cartridge paper, paints, paint brushes and soft pencils, and kept Kirsty well supplied with them. She liked to make pictures of flowers and birds and animals. The kitchen wall was full of them, all sellotaped together, because her mother could never bear to throw any of them away.

‘My name’s Finn O’Malley,’ he said.

‘Finn O’Malley’ she repeated.‘Are you from Ireland like the rest of them?’ 

He pointed to the south west where the sea glittered in the light of the

setting sun.

‘Somewhere over there.’

‘Are you homesick?’

He considered this for a moment. ‘Maybe. But I don’t know why.’

‘
Why
don’t you know why?’ She was a persistent child. She would follow a question to the bitter end and beyond.

‘Because I don’t live at home.’

You wouldn’t call that place home. But then, where
would
he call home? His memories were a series of vivid pictures, like the comic books they had once been given at Christmas. Visitors had come to the school and brought Beano Annuals with them. The boys had looked at them for a day or two, but then the books had disappeared. His memories of home were like comic books with some of the pages torn out. He couldn’t always make sense of them.

‘Oh.’ Kirsty nodded sagely. He must know what he was talking about. But she didn’t really know what he meant.

‘Is your mammy not here with you?’ she asked.

 ‘No. She’s not with me.’

 ‘You must miss your mammy though,’ she said, after a  pause.

‘Yes, I miss her. But I don’t live with her.’

‘Do you not?’

‘No.’ He was reluctant to elaborate, ashamed of the truth. What would she think of him if she knew? ‘I’m away at school. With a lot of other boys. Francis as well.’

‘Is that his name? Your friend? He’s very thin, isn’t he?’

A brief smile hovered over his lips. ‘We call him Francie. He’s thin, for sure. He’s at the school with me. There’s nobody fat at the school. Well, not the boys, anyway.’

‘Is he homesick as well?’

‘I think he’s just glad to get beyond the school wall for once. We both are.’

‘We go away to school as well. When we’re older. We all have to go and stay on the mainland during the week. Is that what you have to do? Do you live on an island?’

He shook his head but didn’t choose to reply.

‘Is it nice?’ she asked. ‘Your school?’

‘No.’

‘Why not? What’s wrong with it?’

 He hesitated. ‘They won’t let me go see my mammy.’ 

 She wondered who ‘they’ were and how they could be so cruel.

‘But you can see her in the holidays, can’t you?’ she asked. ‘Oh but you’re here, of course.’

‘That’s right. I’m here. Diggin’ your tatties.’

‘That’s a shame. Well, I’m glad you’re here. But I’m sorry you won’t see your mammy.’

He was silent again, staring at the sea. He had not asked her name but she ventured the information anyway.

‘I’m Kirsty.’

‘I know it. I heard the ould man calling you that.’

‘Well, my proper name is Cairistiona but everyone calls me Kirsty just. Kirsty Galbreath.’

He nodded, but volunteered nothing more about himself,  just sat there staring out to sea, and picking at the purple thyme flowers and the small grasses with grubby fingers. 

‘It’s nice up here, isn’t it?’ she offered, after a bit.

‘It’s alright.’ He looked around as though seeing it properly for the first time.

‘This is the best place on the whole island. This is Hill Top Town.’

‘I thought it was Dunshee.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘Not the farm. That
is
Dunshee. I mean this bit. Up here. Hill Top Town. That’s what my grandad calls it. That’s what everyone calls it, though there’s no town here that I can see.’

‘There is no town. You’re right.’

‘I asked my grandad and he said there might once have been one, a long time ago.’

‘Maybe so. You mean down there?’ Interested in spite of himself, he turned to look into the shallow bowl of land, with its scattering of grey rocks, which formed the summit of the hill.

‘That’s right. And do you see the part where the flags grow, the yellow irises there? That usually means water. A spring maybe. And that means a village.’

‘Is that so?’

‘My grandad said so.’

‘And he’s always right, your grandad?’

‘Of course’ she said, unaware of the edge of mockery in his tone, and he didn’t have the heart to laugh at her.

‘Is this your first time over here? At the tatties?’ she asked him.

‘It is.’

‘And how long will you be staying?’

He shrugged. ‘A few months. We’ve only just started with the earlies. We’ll be working on the other farms, and maybe going to some of the other islands, but we’re to live here at Dunshee mostly. The gaffer likes Dunshee. He says you know where you are with Dunshee.’

‘That’s good.’ She stood up, levering herself off the ground with her hand on his shoulder.

‘Why is it good?’

‘Because I don’t have many people to play with, and you can come out with me so long as you’re here.’

 He stood up. His corduroy trousers, already solid with mud from the fields, were too small for him. He was self conscious, looking down at his naked ankles.

‘They won’t let me do
that
, will they? And not with a
girl
!’

 She saw that his boots were very worn, each sole parting company with the top, in a gaping grin. His feet must be wet all the time.

‘They will so. My grandad will. He’ll let you, if I ask him. You don’t work on Sundays, do you?’

She could twist her grandad around her little finger.

‘Leave the child be,’ he often said to her mother, Isabel. ‘Let the child do what she wants.’

‘You spoil her!’

‘And why not? What else would I be doing with my one and only grandchild? How can you spoil someone by loving them?’

 ‘Do you like fishing?’ Kirsty asked.

‘Maybe.’

‘I’ve got a rod. We can go fishing. There’s a loch with trout. It belongs to the estate but my grandad’s allowed to fish there.’

‘I don’t know …’ Finn hesitated. ‘I’m here to work. I have to work. I can’t just be going off at your say so.’

‘You’ll get a bit of time off to go fishing though. I’ll ask my grandad if you can come with us.’ 

He would say yes. She was the apple of his eye. When he was just a boy himself, Kirsty’s grandad had spoken only Gaelic. He had learned his first English at school. Now there was hardly anyone on the island, except for some of the older people, who remembered the old tongue. But sometimes he would call Kirsty ‘
a’ghraidh
’. Darling. She was his darling and he would do whatever she asked.

‘Listen, we’ll take you fishing. Me and my grandad. Francis can come too if you like. I don’t mind. And there’s the beach down there. We can go to the beach some days. Make sandcastles. Swim. It’ll be good. You’ll see.’

As an adult, Finn often found himself rehearsing this first conversation in his mind, polishing the story like a beach pebble, making it perfect in his memory. What was it about her, he wondered, that had so drawn him to her? Or her to him, for that matter. He had never been instantly popular, not with anyone except his mother, and she didn’t count. Was it pity for his loneliness? Curiosity about the stranger – for it was clear that there were few visitors to the island? Or just a childish perception of his  need: the same instinct that made her so anxious to bottle feed the orphan lambs for her grandad? Finn O’Malley looked up at her as she stood over him, small and ingenuous, her red hair in two fat plaits, hanging on either side of her freckled face,  and he grinned at her. 

 ‘Alright,’ he said. ‘If you like. I don’t mind if I do.’

CHAPTER THREE 

Kirsty asked her grandfather about the fishing and he agreed. ‘Aye, if you like. Tell him to bring the other lad as well. What’s his name?’

‘The dark one’s Finn. The fair one’s Francis.’

‘They could both come. That Francis looks as if he could do with a good feed. If I had a beast that was looking like that, I would be giving it extra rations and calling in the vet.’

‘Is this wise?’ asked Isabel.

‘Why not? They’re only young lads. They need a holiday now and then. The work’s back breaking. They’re young to be over here. God knows why they were even sent. Or where they come from. I asked the gaffer, but he wasn’t very forthcoming. They have a strange look about them, that pair.’

 ‘What kind of look?’

‘I can’t quite put my finger on it. There’s something in their eyes
.
Do you mind that dog we had one time? Came from that big farm on the mainland. Never could do anything with him. I always wondered what had happened to that dog before we got him.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, dad.’ Isabel always called her father-in-law ‘dad’. She had lost her own father not long before she herself was widowed, but she had never been close to him. He had been a straight-laced man, good and God-fearing, but humourless. Alasdair was a benign soul by comparison, although you wouldn’t want to cross him.

‘I mind the dog well. It had to be put down in the end. But what has a rogue sheepdog to do with the tattie howkers?’

‘The money, I suppose. It could only be the money. That must be why they send them. They come from a boarding school you know. Some big place run by the Christian Brothers. That’s what Terrans told me. But why they’re there, I have no idea, and I couldn’t get anything more out of him. Does that mean they’re orphans, or what? Perhaps he doesn’t know himself.

‘Heavens above!  Why are you so worried about them? They’re just a pair of daft lads. Maybe they misbehaved themselves. Maybe it’s a borstal or something.’

‘I don’t think so. That Francis looks as though he wouldn’t say boo to a goose. He’s no delinquent.’

Isabel sighed. She couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Sometimes her father-in-law’s social conscience exasperated her, although she would have been the first to admit that it was what distinguished him from her own father who had been content to pay only lip-service to the concept of ‘loving thy neighbour as thyself.’

‘You wouldn’t like to see our wee Kirsty in the same situation.’

‘That’s a different matter altogether and well you know it. But taking these lads fishing now… making  favourites of them… I just think…’

‘What?’

‘Is it quite suitable?’

‘Don’t be so po-faced woman.’

It was the mildest of rebukes but Isabel knew when she was beaten. Alasdair only ever bothered to argue with his daughter-in-law about points of principle but then he was  unmoveable.

Alasdair often took Kirsty fly fishing to the loch at the back of  Ealachan House. He was on reasonably friendly terms with Malcolm Laurence who practically owned the whole island, and had stocked the loch with trout. Alasdair was casually deferential. He would have preferred it if he were not a tenant farmer. But what couldn’t be cured must be endured, and permission to fish was one of the perks of the tenancy. He was  teaching Kirsty to cast. The rod was long and too heavy for her, but she managed.

Sometimes they met Malcolm Laurence’s son, Nicolas.  Like his sister, he was away at school during term time, but he spent at least part of his  summer holidays on the island. The family had a house in London, but twelve year old Nicolas was said to be ‘chesty’, and they sent him north for his health. Kirsty and her grandad often saw him, walking the island paths with his black Labrador at his heels, looking like a youthful version of his father. He wore the same tweedy clothes, the same polished brogues. His  appearance always exasperated Alasdair.