Entry Island (16 page)

She nodded. ‘I came once and stood on the hill and looked down at it. I was pretty sure I saw you on the shore. It looked as if you were gathering seaweed.’

I was excited by the thought that she had taken the trouble to come and see where I lived, but tried to hide it. ‘That’s quite possible.’

She cocked her head and looked at me curiously. ‘Why would you gather seaweed?’

‘It’s good fertiliser. We spread it on the lazy beds.’ I could see from her expression that she had no idea what I was talking about, and I didn’t want to seem like some peasant boy, so I changed the subject. ‘A tutor’s a teacher, right?’

‘A private teacher, yes.’

‘So do you go somewhere to be tutored?’

‘No, I’m tutored at the castle. My tutor has a room there.’

A group of boys pushing a cart at the gallop almost knocked us over, shouting at us to get out of the way, and we started walking along the seafront. ‘It must be amazing to live in a castle,’ I said.

But she didn’t seem impressed. ‘You live in one of those squat little stone houses with straw roofs,’ she said.

‘A blackhouse, aye.’

She shuddered. ‘I would hate that.’

Which made me laugh. ‘They’re not so little. There’s plenty of room inside for folk in one end and cows at the other.’ I knew this would get a reaction and it did.

There was horror on her face. ‘You have cows living in your house?’

‘It keeps us warm,’ I said. ‘And there’s always fresh milk on tap.’

She shuddered. ‘It sounds medieval.’

‘Not the same as living in a castle, I imagine, but I like it well enough.’

We walked on in silence for a short time and I stole a glance at her. She was quite tall. Past my shoulder, anyway, and there was a light in her smile that gave me butterflies in my tummy. She caught me looking at her and her face coloured a little, eyes dipping, a tiny smile turning up the corners of her mouth.

She said, ‘What are you doing in Stornoway?’

‘I came with my father to get provisions for the winter. He’s just back from the fishing on the mainland, so we have some money.’

‘Don’t you make money from your croft?’

I laughed at her innocence. ‘The croft barely feeds us.’

She looked at me, consternation in her voice. ‘Well, where do you get your clothes?’

‘We spin wool from the sheep and weave it into cloth for my mother to make into clothes.’ And I had that feeling of self-consciousness again as she looked me up and down, her eyes coming to rest on my bare feet.

‘Don’t you have any shoes?’

‘Oh, yes. But we have to buy them, and they wear out pretty fast. So we keep them for going to church on Sundays.’

I saw in her eyes that she could not even begin to understand how we lived.

‘What are you doing in town?’ I asked.

‘My father brought us. Some friends who are staying at the castle wanted to do some shopping. We’ll be lunching at the new Royal Hotel in Cromwell Street. And we’re staying over there tonight.’ She seemed excited by the idea.

I didn’t tell her that my father and I wouldn’t be lunching at all. We would eat the last of the black pudding my mother had made and spend the night in our cart, hoping that it wouldn’t rain. We stopped and gazed out at the water washing in along the shore, and I saw a tall ship in full sail tacking carefully into the comparative shelter of the harbour through the narrow channel between the rocks.

‘I asked the staff at the castle, but no one seemed to know your name.’ She glanced up at me. ‘Except that you were a Mackenzie.’

I flushed with pleasure at her interest. ‘Sime,’ I said.

‘Sheem?’ She frowned. ‘What kind of name’s that?’

‘It’s the Gaelic for Simon.’

‘Well, it’s a silly name. I will just call you Simon.’

‘Oh will you?’ I raised an eyebrow.

She nodded quite definitely. ‘I will.’

‘In that case, I’ll just call you Ciorstaidh.’

She frowned. ‘Why? It doesn’t sound that different.’

‘Because it’s the Gaelic for Kirsty, and I’ll see it differently.’

She looked at me with such penetration in those blue eyes that it set my butterflies going again. ‘You remember my name, then?’

Caught in that gaze of hers I felt my mouth go dry and I could hardly find my voice. ‘I remember every little thing about you.’

‘Hey! What do you think you’re playing at?’

The voice shouting so close startled me, and I turned to find myself facing a teenage boy, perhaps a year or two older than me. He had a thick head of gingery hair and was tall, a well-built lad wearing fine clothes and a pair of shiny black boots. A slightly smaller boy with short black hair stood at his shoulder. The bigger boy pushed me in the chest and I staggered back, taken by surprise.

‘George!’ Kirsty shouted at him, but he ignored her, angry green eyes fixed on me.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing talking to my sister?’

‘It’s none of your business, George,’ Kirsty said.

‘Any cotter boy talking to my sister is my business.’ He shoved the flat of his hand once more into my chest. Though this time I stood my ground.

Kirsty stepped between us. ‘This is Simon. He’s the boy who saved my life the day the trap went into the ditch and Mr Cumming was killed.’

He pushed her out of the way, puffing up his chest and moving close so that his face was just inches from mine. ‘Well, if you think that gives you any rights, then you can think again.’

‘We were just talking,’ I said.

‘Well, I don’t want you talking to my sister. We don’t associate with tenants.’ He said the word tenants as if it made a bad taste in his mouth.

‘Oh, don’t be such an ass, George!’ Kirsty tried to insinuate her way between us again, but he held her at bay.

He never took his eyes off me. ‘If I ever see you with my sister again, I’ll give you such a hiding you’ll remember it the rest of your days.’

I felt my honour at stake now, and I lifted my jaw and said, ‘You and who else?’

He laughed in my face, and I recoiled a little from his bad breath. ‘Hah! I don’t need an army to deal with the likes of you.’ And from nowhere a big fist swung into my peripheral vision catching me square on the side of my face. Pain and light exploded in my head and my knees buckled under me.

The next thing I knew, the smaller boy was leaning over me, taking one of my hands in his and helping me back to my feet. I was groggy and still a little in shock, and so quite unprepared for the boy suddenly stepping behind me to pull both my arms up my back. George’s pale, freckled face ballooned into view, leering at me, and I was
helplessly exposed to the fists he pummelled into my stomach. The other boy let me go and I doubled over on my knees, retching.

I could hear Kirsty screaming at them to stop, but her protests were ignored. George lowered his face to mine. ‘Just stay away,’ he hissed, then turned and, grabbing his sister by the arm, dragged her off protesting, the other boy trailing after them and grinning at me over his shoulder.

I was still on my knees, leaning forward with my knuckles on the ground, when I felt strong hands lifting me to my feet. A fisherman with a woollen hat and a face weathered by sun and wind. ‘Are you all right, lad?’

I nodded, only embarrassed that Kirsty should have seen me humiliated like this. Nothing was hurt as much as my pride.

It must have been an hour or more before I met up with my father again. He looked at me, concerned, and saw how the knees were out of my trousers and my knuckles all skinned. ‘What happened to you, son?’

I was too ashamed to tell him. ‘I fell.’

He shook his head and laughed at me. ‘Damn, boy! I can’t take you anywhere, can I?’

*

It was just a few days later that I saw her again. There was very little sunshine that day. The wind was whipping itself up out of the south-west and bringing great rolling columns of bruised cloud in from the sea. But the air was not cold
and I liked the feel of it blowing through my clothes and my hair as I worked. Hot work it was, too, moving great big lumps of stone up the hill to chip at them with my hammer so that they fit just right in the wall.

My father had taught me how to build drystone dykes almost as soon as I could walk. ‘You’ll aye be able to keep some beasts in and others out, son,’ he had said. ‘Or put a roof over your head. The fundamentals of life.’ He liked to use big words, my father. I think he learned them from the Gaelic bible that he read to us every evening and half of Sunday.

The day was waning, but there were still some hours of daylight left and I was hoping to finish the sheep fank by week’s end when my father would inspect my work and give it his approval. Or not. Though I would have been devastated if he hadn’t.

I straightened up, back stiff and muscles aching, to look down on Baile Mhanais and the shore beyond it, strips of croftland running down the hill to the sea. Which was when I heard her voice.

‘
Ciamar a tha thu?
’

I turned, heart suddenly pounding, to find her standing there on the crest of the hill. She wore a long dark cape over her dress, the hood pulled up to protect her hair. But still strands of it managed to break free and fly out like streamers in the wind. ‘I’m well, thank you,’ I replied in English. ‘How are you?’

Her eyes dipped towards the ground, and I could see her hands clasped in front of her, one ringing the other inside of it. ‘I came to apologise.’

‘What for?’ Although I knew fine well, but my pride wanted her to believe that I hadn’t given it a second thought.

‘My brother George.’

‘Nothing to apologise for. You’re not his keeper.’

‘No, but he thinks he’s mine. I am so ashamed of how he treated you, after what you did for me. You don’t deserve that.’

I shrugged, feigning indifference, but searching desperately for some way to change the subject. Humiliation ran deep. ‘How is it you’re not with your tutor?’

And for the first time her face broke into a smile, and she giggled as if I had said something I shouldn’t. ‘It’s a new tutor I have just now. A young man. Just in his twenties. He only arrived a few weeks ago, and I think he’s fallen hopelessly in love with me.’

I felt a jab of jealousy.

‘Anyway, I can wrap him around my little finger any time I like. So getting away from the castle is not a problem.’

I glanced down the slope towards the village, wondering if anyone down there had seen us. She didn’t miss it.

‘Ashamed to be seen with me?’

‘Of course not! It’s just …’

‘What?’

‘Well, it’s not normal, is it? The likes of me seen talking to the likes of you.’

‘Oh, stop it. You sound like George.’

‘Never!’ The comparison fired up my indignation.

‘Well, if you’re so worried about being seen with me, maybe we should meet somewhere that no one can.’

I looked at her, confused. ‘Meet?’

‘To talk. Or maybe you don’t want to talk to me.’

‘I do,’ I said a little too quickly, and I saw a smile tickle her lips. ‘Where?’

She flicked her head beyond the rise to the curve of silver sand below us on the other side of the hill. ‘You know the standing stones at the far end of the beach?’

‘Of course.’

‘There’s a wee hollow below them, almost completely sheltered from the wind, and you get a great view of the sea breaking over the rocks.’

‘How do you know about that?’

‘I go there sometimes. Just to be alone. You’d not have to be scared about people seeing us together if we were to meet there.’

*

It was late afternoon the day I set off to keep my tryst with Kirsty. I made solitary tracks in sand left wet by the receding tide as I followed the curve of Traigh Mhor north, glancing a little nervously across the machair in case someone was watching. But I might have been the last person on earth. There was not a soul to be seen. I had for company only the sound of the sea breaking on the shore and the gulls that wheeled around the rocks.

At the far side of the beach I climbed up through the cemetery, head and foot stones poking up through the long grass, and I trod carefully, aware that my ancestors lay here and that one day I would join them. I stopped and glanced out over the ocean to see the sun starting its slow descent towards the horizon, edging distant clouds with gold and sending shards of light skimming across the surface of the water. What a view it was from eternity that I would share with the folk who had inhabited this land for all the centuries before me.

The standing stones cast long shadows over the machair. Some of them were more than twice my height. Thirteen primary stones that formed a central circle, with a long approach avenue of stones to the north, and shorter arms to the south, east and west.

A movement caught my eye, and I saw a furl of skirt in the wind, half hidden by one of the taller stones, before Kirsty appeared, turning around the edge of it to stand looking down the slope as I climbed towards her. As I approached I saw that the colour was high on her face. Her skirts and cape streamed out behind her, along with her hair, and she folded her arms and leaned against the grain of the gneiss.

‘Did they teach you about the stones at school?’ she asked when I reached her, a little out of breath.

‘Only that they’re about four thousand years old and nobody knows who put them there.’

‘My tutor says if we were able to look down on them from above they would form the rough shape of a Celtic cross.’

I shrugged. ‘So?’

‘Simon, they were put here more than two thousand years before Christ was born.’

I saw her point and nodded sagely, as if the thought had occurred to me long ago. ‘Yes, of course.’

She smiled and ran the flat of her hand down the stone that she was leaning against. ‘I love the texture of the stones,’ she said. ‘They have grain running through them like wood.’ She tipped her head back and looked up towards the top of it. ‘I wonder how they moved them. They must be terribly heavy.’ She grinned then and extended her hand towards me. ‘Come on.’ I hesitated for only a moment, before grasping it, feeling it small and warm in mine. She pulled me away from the stones, and we went running down the slope together, almost out of control, laughing with exhilaration before coming to a halt where the elements had eaten away at the machair and loose, peaty earth crumbled down into a rocky hollow.