Scrap Metal (6 page)

Archie stopped just beyond the gate. He got out of the Rover, being careful to avoid the mud. I’d once accused him of wanting to join up just for the sake of the uniform, and he did make it look good, the smart black setting off his rangy build and the hair we’d agreed long ago was a nice shade of auburn, not ginger. He was in his dress jacket, every silver button neatly done. He looked so prim and proper. I knew better.

I ran across the yard and climbed up to lean over the top of the gate. “Morning, Sergeant Howie! Are there no’ any missing bairns on Summer Isle for you this morning?”

He slammed the Rover’s door. The once-over he gave me had something of its old appreciation in it. Come to think of it, Archie had never minded me dirty. “Oh, a
Wicker Man
crack,” he said, nodding and smiling patiently. “How original. No, no bairns—just a couple of stones gone from the top of your roadside wall. Everything been all right here?”

“Yeah, fine.” I got off the gate and swung it open for him. “Haven’t got time to keep the fences right, let alone the drystone. How are you?”

“Oh, grand. On my way to some secret policeman’s ball or other on the mainland. Thought I’d just run down and see you were shipshape… Och, Nicky.” He came to a halt in the gateway, squinting up at the barn’s eastern wall. “Have you had a break-in?”

I winced. He was always too sharp-eyed for my own good. And
Nicky
was for lazy, long-gone days at our camp on Kildonan beach, rolling around in the seagrass. “No. Just the wind last night. I patched the windows up.”

“What—the wind cleverly broke just those two little panes? Have you checked to see nothing’s missing?”

“Like what? A sheep? A bale of hay?”

He rolled his eyes. “How about an ATV or the contents of your oil tank? You need to sharpen up, you know. People are getting desperate around here. Eamon at Corriegills had six hundred gallons of boiler juice siphoned out just last Friday. Come on. Let’s have a look around.”

He set off for the barn door and I followed him, not having a lot of choice. I was grateful to be feeling more cheerful this morning. A visit from him yesterday might have put me on my knees in tears at his feet. We’d been friends since junior school, our sudden mid-teen transformation into lovers a blazing surprise to us both. We’d dealt with it shoulder to shoulder, breath to breath, just as we always had everything else in our lives.

“How’s it all going, then?” I asked, casual as I could. The barn was warm and peaceful now, dreaming in hay-scented sun. “Cleaning up the mean streets of Torbeg and Ballymichael living up to expectations?”

He was glancing between the broken window and the ladder to the hayloft. “Aye, it pays the bills. And they’re not… They’re a lot less particular than I thought they’d be, about hiring… Well. I had to sit through three or four lectures on equal opportunities and respect for gay officers. Talk about preaching to the converted.”

“And are you?”

“What?”

“Reconverted?”

I hadn’t meant to be sarcastic or harsh. There it was, my old Gaelic sandpaper, the accent the well-spoken Edinburgh boys teased me for and tried to get me fired up on a subject to hear. Precise, abrasive, quiet because it never needed to be loud. Recon-
vair
-ted.

Archie turned round and looked at me in surprise. “Well,” he said uncertainly, “what if I am? They’re a lot more liberal these days. What if I made a mistake?”

I couldn’t believe what he was asking me. I’d paid off a bit of my sleep debt, but there were still weeks of exhaustion piled up in my brain, sand in the works.
Did you just walk in here five years after dumping me cold and try to pick me up again?

No. That would be outrageous, insane even by Archie’s standards, though he’d never been lacking in nerve. The last year had made me so painfully serious, every little thing a life-or-death drama. I let the mad idea go, a butterfly out of my unclenched hand. There were plenty of others, way more likely, to replace it.

“Did you just walk in here,” I enquired, hooking my thumbs into the back pockets of my jeans, “because you’re bored and you fancy a quickie?”

“Och, Nicky—”

“Don’t you
och, Nicky
me. Look at the colour of you—bright bloody scarlet underneath that ginger, like the idea would never occur to you.” I paused, a prickle of excitement beginning in my spine. “Anyway, am I saying no?”

His mouth fell open. Well, why not? I’d had a long and lonely year. Perversely, now I had my old lover in front of me, a hard-on beginning to disfigure the cut of his uniform trousers, I was thinking of someone else entirely. Of indigo eyes dilating with horror at my dumb, tragic family history. A bony hand reaching fearlessly for mine…

For the first time in months, impulse won out over weariness. Why the hell not? I shifted, letting him see how little harm a year of hard physical graft had done me. “Cat got your tongue, copper?”

“No. No, but…”

“Come on, then. I haven’t got all day.” Not turning or taking my eyes off him, I began to back towards the door.

“Where are you going?”

“Outside.”

“What’s wrong with in here?”

I grinned. Archie had got wary, as we grew older, of alfresco sex. I hadn’t argued his caution. We’d heard of the teacher sacked from his job in Ardrossan, of two lads beaten half to death for a kiss outside a pub. Today, though, he was on my turf. My terms. “You know I never do it in front of the sheep.”

“Oh, like they’re going to tell…”

“No, but they talk amongst themselves. And the collies understand them, and Harry understands the dogs.”

“You’re nuts, you know.” He was smiling helplessly back at me.

“Ah, well,” I said, unfastening the barn door. “Catch as catch can.”

I gave him a run for his money. Out in the sunshine it felt good to stretch my limbs, and I pelted headlong through the yards and outbuildings, picking the muddiest route I could.
Police chase on remote Arran farm
, I thought, half choking with laughter. Archie’s training hadn’t hurt him any either—he was close on my heels all the way, his breathing hard but controlled.

I darted round the back of the shearing sheds and let him corner me. “All right. It’s a fair cop.”

“Oh, Nichol…”

I didn’t want him kissing me. The feel of that, on my mouth anyway, brought back too many memories, threatened my control. A stand-up quickie, this was, two busy men with something to work off on one another. I thrust him back, diving to tongue his ear and neck the way he liked.

He banged me up against the shed wall and we tussled. “Where’s your granddad today?”

“Off with his sheepdogs at the Campbeltown mart. Nobody’s gonna see us.”

“I don’t care.”

Yeah, you do
. Already he was turning me so his back would be to the wall, not mine, and he could keep a lookout. His hands were on my shoulders, pressing down. He liked our blow jobs that way round as well.

“Oh, no.” I chuckled, resisting. I whipped the smart black-brimmed cap off his head and set it jauntily on my own. “Where’s your heart, PC Silverbuttons? You owe me that much.”

“Now, Nicky, don’t you go getting sheep shit on that.” He made a grab for the hat, which I evaded. Then, as if acknowledging his debts, he sank to his knees.

It should have been great. God knew I shuddered and writhed as he unzipped my jeans, thumped my palms against the woodwork in front of me and cried out when he took me into his mouth. I snatched great breaths of the bright air to stop myself from coming on the spot. I lasted barely thirty seconds anyway. Archie wasn’t playing me for time, tonguing me hard, grabbing my backside to encourage my thrusts. It should have been great and it was, but given my year-long abstinence, unrelieved except by occasional half-asleep sessions with my own right hand, given how I’d missed him, it wasn’t the mind-blowing state occasion it ought to have been. I came, and I never lost awareness of the moment. Didn’t miss a trick of how he was hurrying me along. Not about to wait and let me see to him afterward either—through post-orgasmic tears I watched him frantically jerking off, shooting into his tight-clenched hand.

He knelt panting, resting his brow on my thigh. When full strength returned to my legs—and they’d never been in danger of giving way entirely—I took my hands off the shed wall. Carefully I helped him to his feet. I placed his cap back on his head then did my best to brush off some of the mud and hay strands that had attached themselves to his uniform. I fastened my jeans. His hands trembled as he dealt with his own zip and buttons.

“All right,” I said hoarsely, wiping away a glimmer of semen from his lower lip with my thumb. “That was grand, Archie. But…we should leave it at that. Yeah?”

His relief was palpable. I could see him trying to hide it. “Yeah. Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to screw you around. I don’t really know what I was doing, coming here and…”

“You were horny. Me too. Don’t look so devastated.”

“Yeah, but…”

“Shut up. Come in and have a cup of tea.”

I moved around the kitchen quietly, letting him compose himself. I was getting a hell of a lot of traffic through here today. I superimposed Cameron’s thin, untidy image over Archie’s, where that solid policeman was sitting now in the same chair, and I wondered if I’d ever see my night visitor again. I couldn’t sense him eastward back towards the mainland. Maybe he’d kept going west, hitched a ride on a trawler and was headed off to Kintyre. My heart ached out after him. I’d known him for five minutes. I didn’t understand.

Archie looked up as I handed him his tea. He’d regained a little colour. “Ta,” he said. “Seriously, Nicky—thank you for not freaking out.”

“No reason to.” I didn’t take the chair opposite, as I had with Cameron. I hitched myself up to sit on the work surface, not too close, not too coldly far away. “We don’t have to talk about it any more now.”

“Okay. Well, leaving all that aside… I didn’t come here just to mess with you, believe it or not. I think someone did come over your wall, and I’m pretty sure you had a break-in. Seriously, are you and your granddad all right? I worry about the pair of you, all the way out here. Especially now you’re on your own.”

I watched him thoughtfully. He’d always been leery as hell about letting anyone know we were lovers, and ultimately that had finished us, but that had been his sole cowardice. He was a good man. His concerns for me and the old man were genuine.

“We’re managing. The last few months have been tough, but once we get through lambing we’ll be fine.”

“Are you sure? I heard in town you had to turn off Joe McKenzie.”

I made a face. “Good news travels fast. Just tightening our belts a bit, that’s all.”

“Mind you don’t run out of buckle holes. Er…did you hear about Shona Clyde, by the way?”

I frowned. A twinge of anxiety touched me. Shona was our neighbour, or the nearest thing we had to one, the owner of the wealthy dairy farm inland across the hill. She was a lovely woman, a real West Isles flower, who like many a one before her had allied herself to a mutton-headed brute of a husband whose idea of fun was to get himself leathered in the Brodick pubs on Saturday, drive home and knock her about. “No. Jimmy hasn’t hurt her, has he?”

“Not at all. He’s done her a great big favour and dropped down dead of a stroke.”

“No way. You’re kidding me.”

“Serious. Happened last week while he was on the rampage in town. Shona gets everything—the farm, the house, the livestock. You want to think about her, Nicky, once her natural grief has subsided a wee bit. She’s a wealthy widow. And the land adjoins your own.”

I swallowed my reflexive shout of laughter. In fact I managed to school my expression to an earnest mask, a mirror of Archie’s, as if I were giving the proposal thought. “Well, I will,” I said at length. “Only—I don’t want to shock you, mate. It’s just that I think I might be gay.”

“Oh, funny.” Archie picked up a Biro from the table and flicked it accurately in my direction. “All right. If you won’t marry money, will you take a loan off me? Just to tide you over, let you hire a replacement for Kenzie till the lambing’s finished?”

I pushed down off my perch by the sink. My throat was hot and sore. I couldn’t keep up with the melting of my permafrosted world, the places where the tundra was breaking into flowers and streams. Archie got up before I could reach him, his expression apprehensive, but he caught me as I walked into his arms. I did kiss him then, just once on the cheek, like the brother he was trying to be to me.

I held him tight. “Don’t be soft,” I whispered. “I don’t want your hard-earned police pennies.”

“I mean it. What are you living on? You can’t run this place by yourself.”

I eased him back. I wasn’t much of a strategist, and I knew the chances were I’d never see Cameron again, but this seemed like an opportunity. “I won’t be. I forgot to say—one of the farming colleges is sending me a student out. A free one, believe it or not.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I’m expecting him any time, unless he’s thought better of it. So we’ll be okay, especially now spring’s coming. Now, aren’t you late for somewhere?”

“What?” He glanced at his watch. “Oh, bloody hellfire. The ferry. I’m going to miss the two-fifteen.”

“Not if you run for it now. Put your blue light and the siren on. Go.”

He returned my kiss, swift and sincere, a warm press to the corner of my mouth. “All right. I love you, Nichol. We won’t be strangers, eh?”

“No. We’ll stay in touch. Now go.”

I followed him out. I stood in the yard and watched while he scrambled back into the Rover, and gave him a wave as he drove off. The sound of his engine gradually died, and there was only the song of the offshore breeze, one note for the cliff-top turf and another for its passage through the leafless hawthorns and gorse that lined the track up to the road. The sky, though still brilliant, felt empty and vast overhead, a kind of ringing vacancy. The sheep had fallen silent, and there was no sign of the barnyard cats, my own in particular. Maybe luck, like Archie Drummond, had only made a flying return visit to the farm.