The Blackhouse (16 page)

At the white gate I hesitated with my hand on the latch. There was still time to change my mind. If I ran all the way, I could probably get back before my father had got the boat on to its trailer, and no one would be any the wiser. But a voice came to me on the breeze, bright and cheerful.

‘Fi-in … Hiya, Fin.’

And I looked up to see Marsaili running up the path from the farmhouse. She must have been watching for me. And now there was no going back. She arrived, breathless, at the gate, her cheeks rosy red, blue eyes shining like flowers in a cornfield. Her hair was plaited in pigtails as it had been that first day at school, blue ribbons to match her eyes.

‘Come on.’ She opened the gate and grabbed my hand, and I was through the looking glass into Marsaili’s world before I even had time to think about it.

Marsaili’s mum was a lovely woman who smelled of roses and spoke with a strange, soft, English accent that sounded almost musical to my ears. She had wavy brown hair and chocolate eyes, and was wearing a print apron over a cream woollen jumper and blue jeans. She had on a pair of green wellies, and didn’t seem to mind them shedding dried mud all over the flagstone floor in the big farmhouse kitchen. She shooed two lively border collies out into the yard and told us to sit at the table, and poured us tall glasses of cloudy home-made lemonade. She said she had seen me and my parents often at the church, although I didn’t really remember seeing her. She was full of questions. What did my dad do? What did my mum do? What did I want to be when I grew up? I hadn’t the faintest idea, but didn’t like to admit that. So I said I wanted to be a policeman. She lifted her eyebrows in surprise and said that was a good thing to want to be. I could feel Marsaili’s eyes on me the whole time, watching. But I didn’t want to turn and look at her, because I knew I would only blush.

‘So,’ her mum said, ‘will you stay for lunch?’

‘No,’ I said quickly, then realized that perhaps I had sounded a little rude. ‘I told my mum I’d be back by twelve. She said she’d have something ready. And then me and my dad are going out in a boat.’ I was learning early that the telling of one lie often led to the telling of another. And then another. I started to panic in case she asked me something else I had to lie about. ‘Can I have some more lemonade, please?’ I tried to change the subject.

‘No,’ Marsaili said. ‘Later.’ And to her mum, ‘We’re going out to play in the barn.’

‘Okay, just watch the mites don’t bite.’

‘Mites?’ I said when we got out into the yard.

‘Hay mites. You can’t really see them. They live in the hay and bite your legs. Look.’ And she pulled up the leg of her jeans to show me the tiny red bites on the leg underneath that she had scratched and made bleed.

I was horrified. ‘Why are we going into the barn, then?’

‘To play. It’s alright, we’ve both got jeans on. And they probably won’t bite you anyway. My dad says they only like English blood.’ She took my hand again and led me across the farmyard. Half a dozen hens went skittering off across the cobbles as we headed for the barn. Away to the left stood a stone byre, where they fed and milked the cows. There were three large pink pigs snuffling about in a stye amongst scattered hay and chopped turnip. All they seemed to do was eat and shit and piss. The sweet, pungent smell of pig manure filled the air and made me screw up my face.

‘This place stinks.’

‘It’s a farm.’ Marsaili seemed to think it hardly worth commenting on. ‘Farms always stink.’

The barn was huge inside, with baled hay piled up almost to the corrugated tin roof. Marsaili started clambering across the lower bales. And when she realized I wasn’t following, turned and waved me up after her, irritated that I hadn’t taken her lead.

‘Come on!’

Reluctantly I followed her up towards the roof, to where a narrow opening took us into a space where the bales created an area the size of a small room, almost totally enclosed except for where the large hay-bale steps led up to it from below.

‘This is my space. My dad made it for me. Of course, I’ll lose it once we have to start using the hay to feed the animals. What do you think?’

I thought it was great. I had nowhere I could really call my own, except for the tiny attic bedroom my father had made, and you couldn’t do anything in there without the whole house hearing. So I spent most of my time outdoors. ‘It’s brilliant.’

‘D’you ever watch cowboys on telly?’

‘Sure.’ I tried to be nonchalant. I’d seen something called
Alias Smith and Jones
, but hadn’t found it very easy to follow.

‘Good, I’ve got a great game of cowboys and Indians for us to play.’

At first I thought she meant it was some kind of board game, until she explained that I was to be the cowboy, captured by a tribe of warriors, and that she would be the Indian princess who had fallen in love with me and was going to help me escape. It didn’t sound like any of the games I had ever played with Artair, and I wasn’t very keen. But Marsaili had it all worked out, and took charge in a way that left me little room for dissent.

‘You sit here.’ She led me into the corner and made me squat down with my back against the bales. She turned away for a moment to retrieve something from a little hidey-hole in the hay, before turning back with a length of rope and a large red handkerchief in her hands. ‘And I’ll tie you up.’

I didn’t like the sound of that at all and started to get to my feet. ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’

But she pushed me back down with an unexpected firmness. ‘Of course it is. You have to be tied up so that I can come and untie you. And you can’t tie yourself up, can you?’

‘I don’t suppose so.’ I conceded the point with great reluctance.

Marsaili proceeded to tie my hands behind my back, and then looped the rope around to tie my ankles together, my knees folded up under my chin. I felt trussed and helpless as Marsaili stood back to survey her handiwork and smile her satisfaction. I was beginning to have serious doubts about the wisdom of having come to the farm at all. Whatever I had imagined we might get up to, it was not this. But worse was to come. Marsaili leaned over and began tying the red handkerchief around my head like a blindfold.

‘Hey, what are you doing?’ I pulled my head away to try to stop her.

‘Hold still, silly. You have to be blindfolded, too. The Indians always blindfold their prisoners. And, anyway, if you were to see me coming, you might give the game away.’

By now I was beginning to doubt her sanity and panic was setting in. ‘Give the game away to who?’ I looked around the hay-bale room. ‘There’s no one here!’

‘Of course there is. But they’re all sleeping now. That’s the only reason I can sneak up in the dark and set you free. Now, hold still while I tie the blindfold.’

I was hardly in a position to resist, since I had already allowed her to tie me up, so I sighed loudly and submitted with indignant resignation. She leaned over again, placing the folded handkerchief over my eyes and tying it behind my head. The world went black, except for where the light leaked in around the edges of the hanky, and then it was red.

‘Okay, don’t make a sound,’ Marsaili whispered, and I heard the rustling of the hay as she moved away. Then silence. A very long silence. A silence so long that I began to be scared that she had run off and left me there as a joke, all tied up and blindfolded. At least she hadn’t gagged me as well.

‘What’s going on?’

And from somewhere much closer than I had expected came an answering ‘Shhhhh! They’ll hear you.’ Marsaili’s voice was not even a whisper. More like a breath.

‘Who will?’

‘The Indians.’

I sighed and waited. And waited. My legs were beginning to seize up now, and I couldn’t straighten them out. I wriggled to try to shift my position, and rustled the hay.

‘Shhhhh!’ Marsaili’s voice came again.

Now I heard her moving, circling around me in her secret straw room. And then more silence, before suddenly I could feel her breath hot on my face. I had not realized she was so close. I almost jumped. I could smell the sweetness of the lemonade still on it. And then soft, wet lips pressed themselves against mine, and I could taste it, too. But I was so startled, I pulled my head back sharply and banged it against the bale at my back. I heard Marsaili giggling. ‘Stop it!’ I shouted. ‘Untie me now!’ But she just kept giggling. ‘Marsaili, I mean it. Untie me. Untie me!’ I was close to tears.

A voice came from somewhere down below. ‘Hello-o … Everything alright up there?’ It was Marsaili’s mum.

Marsaili’s voice thundered in my ear as she bellowed back, ‘Everything’s fine, Mum. We’re just playing.’ And she started untying me quickly. As soon as my hands were free I pulled off the blindfold and scrambled to my feet, trying to recover as much of my dignity as I could.

‘I think you’d better come down for a minute,’ Marsaili’s mum called.

‘Okay,’ Marsaili shouted back. She bent down to untie my feet. ‘Just coming.’

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and glared at her. But she just smiled sweetly back at me. ‘That was fun, wasn’t it? Pity the Indians woke up.’ And she went leaping off down the bales to where her mother was waiting for us below. I dusted the hay out of my hair and followed.

I knew immediately from the look on Marsaili’s mum’s face that something was wrong. She seemed a little flushed. ‘I think, perhaps, I’ve rather given the game away,’ she said, looking at me with something like an apology in her chocolate-brown eyes.

Marsaili frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

But her mum kept her eyes on me as she spoke. ‘I’m afraid I phoned your folks to ask if you could stay for lunch, and to tell them I’d run you back home afterwards.’ My heart sank, and I felt Marsaili turn a look of consternation in my direction. Her mum said, ‘You didn’t tell us that your folks had forbidden you to come to the farm on your own, Fin.’ Aw, hell, I thought. The ba’s in the slates! ‘Your father’s on his way over now to pick you up.’

The problem with telling plausible lies, is that when you do get caught, after that nobody believes you, even when you’re telling the truth. My mother sat me down and told me the story about the boy who cried wolf. It was the first time I had heard it. And she had a talent for embellishment, my mother. She could have been a writer. I didn’t really know what
woods
were then, because there weren’t any trees where we lived. But she made them sound dark and scary, with wolves lurking behind every tree. I didn’t know what wolves were either. But I knew Artair’s neighbour’s Alsatian dog, Seoras. It was a huge beast. Bigger than me. And my mother made me imagine what would happen if Seoras went wild and attacked me. That’s what wolves are like, she told me. I had a vivid imagination, so I could picture the boy being told to be careful of the wolves in the woods and then shouting ‘Wolf! Wolf!’ as a joke and bringing everyone running. I could even imagine him doing it a second time, because of the reaction he’d got the first time around. I couldn’t really believe he’d do it a third time, but I figured that, if he did, those who had come running the previous times would think he was just playing games again. And of course, my mother said, that was when there really were wolves. And they ate him.

My father was more disappointed than angry. Disappointed that I should have chosen to sneak off to see some girl on a farm, rather than take the boat we had worked on together all summer out on her maiden voyage. But he didn’t take his belt to me because of his disappointment. It was for the lie. And the sting of leather on the backs of my thighs, and my mother’s story about the wolves, led me to decide there and then never to lie again.

Except, of course, by omission.

My father took the
Eilidh
out on his own that day, while I was sent to my room to cry myself dry and think about what it was I’d done. And I was grounded every Saturday for a month. I could play in the house, or the garden, but was not allowed to venture beyond. Artair was permitted to come to our house, but I couldn’t go to his. And I had no pocket money for four whole weeks. At first Artair thought it was hilarious, and gloated over my misfortune – particularly because it involved Marsaili. But he soon got fed up. If he wanted to play with me, then he was restricted to my house and garden just the same as I was. And eventually he turned his annoyance on me and lectured me about being more careful next time. I told him there wasn’t going to be a next time.

I stopped walking Marsaili home from school. Artair and I went with her only as far as the Mealanais road end, and then we left her to go the rest of the way on her own, and we took the single-track up the hill to Crobost. I was wary of Marsaili, too, since the incident with the rope and the blindfold, so usually I avoided her in the playground at playtimes and lunch breaks. I lived in terror that someone would find out about the kiss in the straw room. I could just imagine what fun the other boys would have at my expense.

It was some time after Christmas that I came down with the flu. The first time ever. And I thought I was going to die. I think, perhaps, my mother did, too. Because all I can really remember about that week was that every time I opened my eyes she was there, a cool, damp facecloth in her hand to lay across my forehead, whispering words of love and encouragement. Every muscle in my body was aching, and I seemed to flit between burning fevers, with temperatures running at a hundred and six, and spells of uncontrollable shivering. My seventh birthday came and went that week, and I barely noticed. At first I had nausea and vomiting and couldn’t eat. It was nearly a week before my mother was able to persuade me to take some arrowroot mixed with milk and a little sugar. I liked the taste of it, and every time I have tasted it since, I think of my mother and her ever-present comfort during those dreadful days and nights of my first flu.

In fact it was, I think, the first time I had ever been ill. And it took it out of me. I lost weight and felt weak, and it was a full fortnight before I was fit enough to return to school. It was raining the day I went back, and my mother was concerned that I would get chilled and wanted to take me in the car. But I insisted on walking, and met Artair at the top of the path to his bungalow. He hadn’t been allowed near while I was ill, and he peered at me now, warily.