The Blackhouse (14 page)

Fin laid his pint carefully on the bar. He felt sick just remembering. ‘I do.’ And Gunn waited for an explanation which never came. Eventually Fin seemed to snap out of his trance. ‘Even if he wasn’t crippled …’ Fin remembered the look on the boy’s face as he fell, ‘… I doubt if Calum Macdonald would have been capable of inflicting that kind of damage on anyone.’

‘Murdo thinks this Calum Macdonald could have put someone else up to it.’

Fin flashed him a look, wondering if that was possible, if Calum would have been capable even of the thought. But why, after all this time? ‘I don’t think so,’ he said, finally.

Again, Gunn waited for an explanation, but it quickly became clear to him that Fin did not intend to elucidate. He glanced at his watch. ‘I’d better be going.’ He drained his glass and pulled on his jacket. ‘By the way, how did you get on with Adams?’

Fin paused for a moment, conjuring in his mind a vivid image of the tall, languid animal rights campaigner. ‘It’s interesting, I’d kind of figured a man with two broken ribs wouldn’t have been up to dealing with Macritchie. But, then, it occurred to me there was a connection I was missing.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Adams is gay.’

Gunn shrugged. ‘Well, that hardly comes as a surprise, Mr Macleod.’ Then he was struck by a thought that drew a frown. ‘You’re not telling me Macritchie was gay?’

‘No, but the Edinburgh victim, John Sievewright, was.’

SIX

Fin drifted through the bar in a trance. The music was pulsating here, competing with the babble of voices and drink-induced laughter. He was aware of the lights of a gaming machine flashing somewhere in his peripheral vision, the pips and beeps and whirrs of an electronic age. He ordered a pint and leaned on the bar waiting for the barmaid to pull it. He felt as if he were hermetically sealed inside an invisible bubble. As if he simply did not exist in this place. He had decided on a drink, a fish supper and an early night, but unable to face the solitude of the lounge bar he had come downstairs to the public bar in the hope of being distracted from his own thoughts. Now he was learning again how easy it was to be lonely in a crowd. Whoever these people were, he did not know them, and he was no longer one of them.

His pint arrived, thumped down in a beer puddle on the bar. He dropped his money in the same puddle and caught the look the barmaid threw him. She swept the money into her hand and returned a moment later with a beer towel to wipe the counter dry. Fin gave her a winning smile and she replied with a sullen scowl.

This was depressing. He raised the glass to his lips and stopped before he could take a drink. A group of workmen, some of them still in their overalls, was gathered around a table in the window, empty glasses accumulating in large numbers. The banter was in Gaelic, and there was loud, raucous laughter. It was the voice, really, which had drawn his attention, like a familiar tune caught in snatches that you can’t quite place. Then he saw the face, and the shock of it was like a fist in the solar plexus.

Artair had changed. He looked ten years older than Fin. He had put on more weight than even his big frame could carry comfortably. Fine childhood features were lost in a round red face, and hair that once had been thick and black was now a fine grey stubble. Broken veins on his cheeks betrayed an over-fondness for the drink, but his eyes were clear and sharp and the same rich, warm brown.

Artair was throwing back the remains of a whisky when he caught Fin’s eye. He lowered the glass slowly from his lips and looked across the bar with something like disbelief.

‘Hey, Wheezy,’ one of the men at the table said. ‘What’s wrong? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.’

‘I just have.’ Artair stood up, and the two men looked at one another across the heads of the drinkers for a very long moment. The others at his table turned and looked at Fin. ‘Jesus wept and shrank His waistcoat,’ Artair muttered. ‘Fin-fucking-Macleod.’ He squeezed out from the table and pushed through the bodies between them, and to Fin’s embarrassment threw his arms around him in a huge hug. Fin spilled half his beer on the floor. Then Artair stood back and gazed into his face. ‘Hell, man. Where the fuck have you been all these years?’

‘Here and there,’ Fin said uncomfortably.

‘There, maybe.’ Artair’s voice carried a tone. ‘Certainly not here.’ He looked at the remnants of Fin’s pint. ‘Let me fill that up for you.’

‘No, I’m fine, honest.’

Artair caught the barmaid’s eye. ‘Gimme another dram, Mairead.’ He turned back to Fin. ‘So what have you been up to?’

Fin could never have imagined how awkward this would be. He shrugged. What do you say? How do you fill in eighteen years in a sentence? ‘This and that,’ he said.

Artair smiled, but it was forced friendly, and he still couldn’t keep the tone out of his voice. ‘That must have kept you fully occupied.’ He snatched his whisky from the bar. ‘I hear you joined the polis.’ Fin nodded. ‘Hell, you could have done that here, man. We could still have been rock’n’rollin’ all these years, you and me. What happened to the big degree?’

‘I flunked out of university in second year.’

‘Shit. All that time my old man put in, getting you through your exams, and you blew it?’

Fin nodded. ‘Big time.’

‘Well, at least you’ve got the good grace to admit it.’ Artair coughed and found himself short of breath. He took an inhaler from his pocket and sucked on it twice. Phlegm rattled in his throat as he drew oxygen deeply through widening airways. ‘That’s better. Nothing changes, eh?’

Fin grinned. ‘Not much.’

Artair took Fin’s elbow and steered him towards a table in the far corner. He stumbled slightly, and Fin realized that there had been a few whiskies before this one. ‘We need to talk, you and me.’

‘Do we?’

Artair seemed surprised. ‘Of course we do. Eighteen fucking years to catch up on.’ They sat down opposite each other and Artair looked carefully into his face. ‘Jesus, it’s not fair. You don’t look any bloody older. Look at me. Big, fat, fucking porpoise. Must suit you, being a polisman.’

‘Not a lot. I’m trying to get out. Doing a degree in the Open University.’

Artair shook his head. ‘What a fucking waste. Me? Well, that was to be expected. But you, Fin. You were a cut above. Made for better things than the polis.’

‘So what have
you
been doing all this time?’ Fin felt obliged to ask, although in a strange way he didn’t really want to know. The truth was, he didn’t want to know anything about this man. He wanted to remember Artair the way he was, the way they had been together as boys. This was like making conversation with a stranger.

Air exploded from Artair’s lips, an expression of self-contempt. ‘Finished my apprenticeship at Lewis Offshore just in time for them to shut the fucking place down. I suppose I was lucky to get back in when it reopened in ninety-one. Then it closed again in May, ninety-nine. Went into liquidation. Turfed us all on to the street again. Now it’s reopened making wind turbines. Can you imagine? They’re trying to persuade the government to plant big fucking windmills all over the island. It’ll make us self-sufficient in energy, they say. But it’d kill the tourist industry. I mean, who’s going to want to come to the fucking place to look at a lot of bloody windmills? Whole fucking forests of them.’ His grin was sour as he upended his glass and poured its liquid gold down his throat. ‘But Marsaili says I’m lucky they took me on. Again.’ The mention of her name gave Fin a tiny jolt. Artair’s smile was mirthless. ‘And you know what? I feel lucky, Fin. I really do. You have no idea how fucking lucky I feel. You want another drink?’

Fin shook his head, and Artair pushed back his chair wordlessly and headed off to the bar to get his glass refilled. Fin sat staring fixedly at the table. It was sad beyond words seeing his old childhood friend bitter like this. Life went past you in a flash, like a bus on a rainy night in Ness. You had to be sure it saw you and stopped to let you on, otherwise it was gone without you, and you would be left with a miserable walk home in the wind and the wet. He supposed that, in his own way, he was just like Artair, dogged by a sense of what might have been, of somehow having missed that bus, embittered by his failures and daunted by the weary trudge into an uncertain future. All those childhood dreams lost for ever, like tears in rain. They were not so different, really, he and Artair. In a way, looking at him now was like seeing a reflection of himself, and he did not much like what he saw.

Artair dropped back into his seat and Fin saw that he had got himself a double. They served quarter gills here. ‘You know, I was thinking, when I was up there at the bar. Just the mention of her. I saw that look in your face. That’s why you never came back all these years, isn’t it? Because of bloody Marsaili.’

Fin shook his head. ‘No.’ But he wasn’t certain that was the truth.

Artair leaned across the table, staring discomfitingly into Fin’s eyes. ‘Not a phone call, not a letter, nothing. You know, at first I was just hurt. And then I was angry. But you can’t keep stuff like that going. A flame always burns itself out in the end. That’s when I started feeling guilty. That maybe you thought I’d taken her away from you.’ He shrugged his shoulders helplessly, not knowing how else to express it. ‘You know?’

‘It wasn’t like that, Artair. It was over between me and Marsaili.’

Artair held the eye contact, like a hand held too long in a handshake, and Fin became self-conscious. ‘You know, I never believed that. Not really. I might have got her in the end, but you and Marsaili … well, that’s how it was supposed to be, wasn’t it? That’s what it should have been.’ Finally the eye contact was broken and Artair took a mouthful of whisky. ‘You married?’

His hesitation was imperceptible. ‘Yeh.’

‘Kids?’

A month ago the answer would have been, yes. But he could no longer lay claim to being a father, and it was not a story he was about to tell. Not here, not now. He shook his head.

‘We just got the one. Finished school this year. Takes after his old man. Not too bright. I’m trying to get him a job at Arnish.’ Artair tipped his head gently, smiling fondly now. ‘Good kid, though. He’s coming out to the rock with us this week to kill himself a few gugas. His first time.’ He chuckled. ‘Come to think of it, he’s just the same age as you and me when we went out there the first time.’ He emptied his glass and banged it on the table. Fin could see the effects of it dulling his eyes. He looked up at Fin, suddenly serious. ‘Is that why you never came back? Is it?’

In a way Fin had dreaded the moment. But it was a confrontation with the past he had known he could not avoid from the moment he set foot on the island. ‘What?’ he said, disingenuously.

‘What happened that year on An Sgeir.’

Fin couldn’t meet Artair’s eye. He shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, and meant it. ‘I really don’t know.’

‘Well, if it was, it was no fucking reason at all.’

‘If I hadn’t been so bloody careless …’ Fin realized he was wringing his hands on the table in front of him, and he laid them palms down to stop himself.

‘What happened, happened. It was an accident. Not anybody’s fault. Nobody ever blamed you, Fin.’

Fin looked up quickly to catch Artair’s eye, and wondered if he meant, nobody except Artair. But he saw no sign of hostility there, no indication that his old friend meant anything other than what he had said.

‘Are you ready for that refill now?’

There was an inch of beer left in Fin’s glass, but he shook his head. ‘I’ve had enough.’

‘Fin,’ Artair leaned confidentially across the table, ‘there’s never enough.’ And his face divided itself into a big infectious smile. ‘I’m for one for the road.’ And he headed off again to the bar.

Fin sat nursing his glass, memories crowding his thoughts. An Sgeir, Marsaili. The sound of voices calling across the bar made him look up. Artair’s workmates were leaving, shouting their goodbyes, waving from the door. Artair raised a cursory hand of acknowledgement and made his way unsteadily back to the table. The seat creaked as he dropped himself into it. He banged another double down on the table. There was a smile fluttering around his lips like a butterfly trying to find a place to settle. ‘I was thinking … You remember that history teacher we had in second year?’

‘Shed? William Shed?’

‘That’s him. Remember he had that gap between his front teeth, and every
s
came out as a whistle?’

Fin remembered very clearly, although he hadn’t thought about William Shed in more than twenty years. And the memory made him laugh. ‘He used to make us read paragraphs from our history book out loud around the class …’

‘And everybody made their
s
’s whistle, like his.’

‘And he would say, “Stop that whistling!”’ Fin said, making his s’s whistle just like Shed’s had done. And the two of them laughed like schoolboys at the absurdity of it.

‘And you remember that time,’ Artair said, ‘when he tried to separate us, and he grabbed my ear to drag me off to another desk?’

‘Aye, and you kept reaching to get your bag, and he thought you were trying to get away from him, and the two of you ended up wrestling in front of the class.’

Artair was almost helpless with laughter remembering it. ‘And you, you bastard, you just sat there laughing.’

‘Only because he kept whistling, “Stop that, sonny!”’

Which sent Artair off into a fresh paroxysm of laughter, tears streaming down ruddy cheeks, until he couldn’t breathe and had to resort to his puffer. The laughter somehow unlocked all the tension in Fin, releasing him from the stress of dealing with a friend who’d become a stranger. They were both just schoolboys again, laughing inanely at childish memories. No matter how much they had grown apart in the intervening years, their memories were something they would always have in common. A bond for life.

The laughter faded as they regained control, and they sat looking at each other, serious again. Adults once more. Until laughter exploded suddenly from Artair’s trembling lips and they started all over again. Several heads in the bar turned towards them, wondering what the joke was. But they would never get it.