Bird of Passage (9 page)

Isabel was anxious, all the time they were gone.

‘I’m surprised you let her go with him!’ she said, gazing down towards the bay, where the boat was just visible, unmoving on the turquoise water, two heads in silhouette.  

‘It’s flat calm out there. And the lad knows fine how to handle a boat now. You don’t think I would have let them go otherwise, do you?’

‘All I know is, if it was up to our Kirsty, they would be off to Eilean Ronan, looking for the brownie.’

 Eilean Ronan was a nearby island, little more than a rock, with a ruined chieftain’s house and chapel and not much else. The brownie was a magical creature who was said to live there. He would do all your housework for you, so long as you didn’t attempt to pay him. But once you offered him money, he would leave and never come back.

‘He’ll not take her to Ronan, no matter how much she nags him. I told him not to go so far, in case the weather changes, and whatever else you think about the lad, he always does as he’s told.’

‘Well I’m pleased to hear it!’

 In the bay, Finn had shipped the oars, and they put out the mackerel lines, slopping about in the evening sunlight.  They still couldn’t persuade Francis to come out in the boat. He always made excuses. This time, he had agreed to walk into the village with a group of the older men.

 ‘This school of yours, is it up in the hills, then?’ Kirsty asked Finn.  She had been reading the Chalet School books, and had conceived a romantic notion of Finn’s school as a sort of Irish equivalent.

Finn sighed. He wished she wouldn’t keep asking. He didn’t want to talk about the school at all. He preferred to forget all about it when he was in Scotland.

 ‘No. You can see the hills in the distance, but that’s all. It’s very flat round about, and that’s all it is. No hills, no sea. There’s a stream. The cattle drink from it.’

‘And is the school nice? What about your dormitories? Do you share with Francis?’

‘We all share. Lots of us, rows of beds, all in the one room.’ He could smell it. Saying the words evoked the smell of unwashed bodies, the smell of sweat and piss, the smell of fear. The byre was sweet by comparison. He tried to change the subject. It was what he always did when she mentioned his school. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Look at the seal, Kirsty!’

Kirsty loved the grey seals that popped their heads up to watch them, and the shearwater skimming low with straight wings. She loved to watch Finn bending over the oars, his hair a glossy tangle, his bare brown feet planted firmly on either side of her sandshoes, and the way he looked at her, solemnly, from under dark brows. 

Afterwards, they took their fish ashore, and she helped him to haul the boat high up onto the beach below Dunshee and tie it to the stanchion. They sat together on a boulder, watching the light draining gently out of the sky. She picked up a swatch of dry bladderwrack and started cracking the little capsules, each one making a satisfying ‘pop’.

‘I wish you were here all year round,’ she said. ‘You and Francie both.’

‘You’d soon get tired of us.’

‘No I wouldn’t. I always wanted a big brother.’

‘Did you?’

‘I did!’

‘Well, you’d soon get tired of Francie trailing along behind us.’

She looked round, as though expecting to see the boy wandering down the track to the shore, a combination of hope and timidity on his face at the sight of them.

‘He was going to the village,’ said Finn, reading her mind. ‘He’s afraid of the water. You know that.’

‘He’s afraid of everything.’

‘He can’t help it.’

Finn was always staunch in defence of his friend. Kirsty threw away her seaweed. ‘Do you know any stories?’ she asked.

‘What kind of stories?’

‘Oh any kind. All kinds. What do you read? What’s your best book?’

Kirsty loved stories, especially stories with pictures. She had a bookcase in her room with a whole shelf of Enid Blyton stories and a heap of old ‘Wonder Books’ which someone had given her mother when she was a girl. Kirsty pored over the words and pictures: the Wild Swans, the Tinder Box, the King of the Golden River, she knew and loved them all. When she was younger, her mother or her grandad would read to her, but now she read the stories for herself. She liked to read her favourites again and again but more than that, she liked to draw pictures to go with them.

Finn was looking down at the sand. ‘I don’t read much,’ he said. ‘I told you before. I don’t write much and I don’t read much.’

He was wearing a faded grey jumper that was too big for him. All his clothes seemed to be too big or too small, as though none of them really belonged to him. It was unravelling at the sleeves and he picked, compulsively, at the threads. His nails were bitten to the quick and the tips of his fingers looked red and sore.

‘Can you still not do it?’ she asked him, candidly.

‘Well, I’m not the best scholar in the world, but I can get by,’ he admitted. ‘I’m better than Francie at any rate, but that’s not saying much. He’s as thick as two short planks, God love him. We don’t have any books in the school to speak of. The teachers write things up on the blackboard and we copy them out. We don’t learn very much. We once had a teacher who read to us, right enough. He wasn’t our usual teacher. He was just there because the real teacher was off sick.  He read something called The Wind in the Willows and it was such a  gas. But he never came back to finish it.’

‘That’s one of my best books as well.’

‘We were doubled up laughing. He put on all the different voices.’

‘Which bit did he read?’

‘He got through half of it before our proper teacher came back. He told us that we shouldn’t laugh out loud though. Brother Michael heard us laughing once and came in to find out what was happening and there was hell to pay.

‘Is that why you don’t laugh much, Finn?’

 ‘I do so laugh. Sometimes.’

‘Well, not much.’

‘They don’t like us laughing. We’re not supposed to make too much noise in the school.  The one that read to us, he never hit us. I think he couldn’t stand it, couldn’t stand to see it happening and him not able to do anything about it, so he took himself off.  He was a bit like Brother Patrick. He never hits us either.’

‘Do they really beat you?’ she asked, distracted by the repetition of something he had told her earlier. ‘I mean
really
?’

He pulled a face. ‘All the time. Don’t they beat the children here?’

‘Well. The boys sometimes,’ she admitted. ‘The teacher keeps a tawse in her desk. She calls it her Lochgelly. That’s the name of the place where they make them. I hate it. It’s this brown belt with a split at the end, so it hurts more.’

‘That’s nothing at all. Brother Michael uses a piece of a car tyre with the metal still in it.’

 ‘He doesn’t!’

‘He does. Haven’t you never caught it, Kirsty?’

‘Not me. My grandad won’t have it. He said if our teacher ever belted me, he would go straight down there and give her a good smack with her own Lochgelly. See how
she
liked it! But a car tyre, Finn? A car tyre!’

‘Would he do that?’ asked Finn, in wonder. ‘Give her a smack?’

‘I think he might. I behave myself anyway, so it doesn’t matter. But they don’t hit the wee ones do they, Finn?’

He frowned. ‘How do you mean?’

‘The wee ones in the primary? They don’t ever belt the wee ones here.’

He gazed at her in silence for a moment. ‘I don’t remember,’ he said, at last.

‘What do you mean, you don’t remember? You must remember whether they hit the wee ones?’

‘I tell you I don’t remember! Jesus, Kirsty, you’re enough to try the patience of a saint.’

He stood up and began to walk back up the hill towards the farm, hauling the bag of mackerel with him.

She ran after him, trying to keep up. ‘So what did you like best about the Wind in the Willows?’

Finn hesitated. ‘I liked that whole… that whole thing. The picnics. I always wanted to be rowing home in the sunshine like that.’

‘Well now you can be.’

‘What?’

‘Rowing home in the sunshine like that,’ she told him, triumphantly, ‘And you can be doing it with me.’ Kirsty always liked to live her literature.

Just as they got back to the farmyard, carrying the bag of mackerel between them, a big car pulled up in front of the farmhouse. Malcolm Laurence leapt out and slammed the door behind him, the sound of it echoing round the old buildings, causing the swallows to rise into the air in alarm. Isabel came running out of the front door.

‘Malcolm!’ she said, her face breaking into the kind of smile that Finn had never seen there before. ‘What brings you here?’

 ‘Issie, I’m glad you’re here. There’s been a bit of an incident in the village.  One of your workers got himself into a spot of bother. I thought I’d better bring the lad back. See for yourself.’

He opened the back door of the car, like a taxi driver, and Francis slid out, staggering, a white handkerchief splattered with crimson, clutched to his nose.

‘Oh dear God!’ said Isabel. ‘What happened?’

‘I think some of the village lads had a go at him. They’d been in the hotel after work, and there was some kind of altercation going on between the tattie howkers and the local lads. You know how it is?’

‘But not Francis.’

‘Ah well...’ Malcolm glanced at Francis who had made his way to the stone bench outside the house door and was sitting there, forlornly, with the bloody hankie still clutched to his nose. Kirsty went and sat beside him, offering silent sympathy. Finn hovered in the background, unsure whether to run away or to stay.

‘That may explain it.  I think they went for a soft target, Issie. They wouldn’t want to take on some of those older men, would they now? The ones that can handle themselves. But there was a skirmish and I think your poor lad here just got in the way. Or didn’t get out of the way quickly enough.’

‘Oh, Francie!’ Kirsty slipped her arm around his shoulders.

‘Somebody landed a lucky punch, I’d say. He went down like a pair of breeks. Lucky I arrived on the scene. They were so fired up they might have given him a kicking while he was down.’

‘Lucky you did,’ said Isabel. She seemed torn between the impulse to help Francis and the pleasure of Malcolm’s attention.

‘Well, they slunk off as soon as I put in an appearance. As expected. His friends had all disappeared by that stage. Left him to it.’

 ‘It’s so kind of you to take the trouble to bring him back!’  Isabel moved a little closer to Malcolm and whispered, ‘He’s a poor soul, you know. I sometimes think he’s a wee bit simple. Lights on, nobody home. I don’t know why he’s here, to be honest with you. He’s nothing more than a liability. Oh, but your handkerchief.’

Malcolm seemed embarrassed both by the confidence and by the mention of his handkerchief. ‘Don’t worry about it. Plenty more where that came from.’

‘I’ll make sure it’s washed. I’ll make sure you get it back.’

‘No need. It really doesn’t matter.’

He was already on his way back to the car. ‘I’m pretty sure he hasn’t bled on my seat.’

‘You wouldn’t like to come in for a cup of tea, would you?’

‘No, no – thank-you very much but I’d best be getting home. Things to do, you know. Busy, busy, busy.’

Isabel watched the car until it disappeared around the bend in the track and then – galvanised into action -  turned her attention to Finn.

‘Where were you, when all this was going on?’ she asked, furiously. ‘Why did you leave him alone? I thought you were his friend.’

Kirsty leapt to her feet. ‘Mum! He was with me. On the boat. You know where we were. We were fishing for mackerel. And Francie didn’t want to come. We asked him, but he wanted to go to the village instead.’

‘Oh you!’ said Isabel. ‘You’re always defending him!’

‘But he hasn’t
done
anything. The village lads hate the tattie howkers. That’s why they only go down there in groups. You can’t blame Finn.’

Alasdair had come to the door by this time, and overheard the tail end of the exchange. He pushed past his daughter-in-law and bent over Francis.

‘Let me see,’ he said, pulling the boy’s hand away from his nose. The handkerchief was sodden with blood, but the flow seemed to be easing.  ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Dizzy.’

Francis was trembling and swaying a little, even though he was sitting down. He looked as though he might be going to faint.

‘I think it’s Francie here who needs the cup of tea,’ said Alasdair, mildly. ‘Never mind Malcolm Laurence. Go and make a pot, Isabel, strong and sweet. And put a wee dash of whisky in it as well. And a key to put down his back for the nosebleed. Never had you down for a bonnie fighter,’ he teased. ‘Kirsty, come back and sit beside him, and you too, Finn. I think he needs a bit of support. Pity it wasn’t Finn here who was down in the village. You might have given them a run for their money, eh?’