vho, as Rory would have written, nsg at all.
There had been a phone-call for me; Hugh Robb, from the farm near the castle, reminding me I'd agreed to come and help with making the bonfire for Guy Fawkes" night. He was coming out to pick me up.
This, of course, was not really what I needed (any more than I needed dad lecturing me on how unsound a custom it was to build bonfires on November the fifth and so celebrate religious bigotry; didn't I know it had been an anti-catholic ceremony, and the effigy burned on the fire used to be the Pope?), but I couldn't admit to mum and dad I'd been drinking and had a hangover, so I had to get dressed with my head pounding and my insides feeling distinctly unwell. I waited outside on the porch steps, taking deep breaths in the cool clear air and wishing the hangover would just go away. Then I suddenly thought maybe it wasn't a hangover; maybe this pounding in my head was the first symptom of a brain tumour… and so I ended up praying that I did have a hangover.
Hugh Robb was a big, amiable Scotch Broth of a lad; he was a full year older than I was but we were in the same class at school because he'd been kept back a year. He arrived in a tractor hauling a trailer full of branches and old wood and I rode with him in the cab, wishing that the tractor had better suspension and that Hugh could have thought of something else to talk about other than the prolapsed uterus of one of the farm's cows.
Round the hill from the castle there was a big east-facing field; it was surrounded by trees on all sides but the slope gave it a view towards Bridgend. I still thought of it as the ponies" field because it was where Helen and Diana's ponies had been stabled originally before they'd been moved to a more level paddock west of the castle.
Hugh and I unloaded the broken planks and the great bare grey branches from the trailer. We worked together for a bit, then I continued to stack the wood while Hugh went to collect some more. He made a couple of trips, dumping what looked like about a tonne ot wood each time before announcing he was off to another farm where they had even more wood.
I let the tractor disappear, bumping along the track towards the castle, then collapsed back in the huge pile of branches awaiting my attention. I lay, spread-eagled and half-submerged on the springy mass of grey, leaf-nude wood and stared up at the wide blue November sky, hoping the bass drum inside my head would hit a few thousand rest-bars reasonably soon.
The sky seemed to beat in time to the throbbing inside my head, the whole blue vault pulsing like some living membrane. I thought about Uncle Rory and his discovery that it was not possible to influence TV screens from afar by humming. I wondered — as ever — where he was; he'd been gone a couple of years by that time.
A bird swung into view over the trees behind my head, and I lay there and I watched it; broad, flat-winged, flight feathers at the square wing-tip ruffling like soft fingers, the small, quick head flicking this way and that, the brown-grey body between the soft density of wings tilting and turning as it glided the cool air, tail feathers like a rich brown fan.
"Beauty," I whispered to myself, smiling despite the pain in my head.
Then suddenly the buzzard burst and sprayed across the sky; it fell plummeting, limp and trailing feathers, to the ground. A double crack of sound snapped across the field.
The bird fell out of sight behind me. I blinked, not believing what had happened, then rolled over, looking through the mask of branches at the trees edging the field where the sound of the shots had come from. I saw a man holding a shotgun, just inside the trees, looking to one side then the other, then running out into the field. He wore green strapped wellies, thick brown cords, a waxed jacket with a corduroy collar, and a cloth bunnet. One more prick in a Barbour jacket, but this one had just shot a buzzard.
He gazed down at something in the grass, then smiled. He was tall and blond and he looked like a male model; enviable jaw line. He stamped down on the thing in the grass, looked around again then backed off, finally turning and walking smartly back into the woods.
I should have shouted, or taken the bird to the police as evidence — buzzards are a protected species, after all — but I didn't. I just watched the Barbour disappear into the trees, then rolled over and breathed, "Fuckwit."
He was at the firework party the following night, laughing and talking and sharing a dram from Fergus's hip flask. I watched him, and he saw me, and we looked at each other for a few moments before he looked away, all in the furious, writhing light of the pyre that I had put together, and which contained — pushed in near its now blazing centre — the corpse of the bird he had killed.
CHAPTER 16
We stood beside the observatory dome, on the battlements of Castle Gaineamh, facing into a cool westerly breeze. Lewis, in cords and a grease-brown stockman's coat, looked through the binoculars, his black hair moving slightly in the wind. Verity stood at his side, face raised shining to the winter blue sky, bulky in her thermal jacket, her ski-gloved hands clasped thickly under the bulge of her belly. The plain beyond the woods below, holding Gallanach and cupping the inner bay, was bathed in the deep-shadowed sunlight of late afternoon. Wisps of cirrus moved high above, tails trailing up, promising clear weather. A two-coach sprinter moved in the distance, on the viaduct at Bridgend, windows glinting in the sunlight. I took a deep breath and could smell the sea.
The unopened air-mail packet from Colorado, lodged next to my chest between shirt and jacket, make a crinkling, flexing noise, giving me a funny feeling in my belly. "No sign?" Verity asked.
Lewis shook his head. "Mm-mm."
Verity shivered. She hunched her shoulders, bringing them up and in towards her neck. "Brr," she went. She linked arms with Lewis.
"Ah," he said, protesting, still looking through the field glasses, though now at a slight angle.
Verity tutted, and with a gorgeously pretended scowl moved away from her husband and stepped over to me. She slid an arm round my waist, snuggling. I put an arm round her shoulders. She rested her head against my arm; I looked down at her. She was growing her hair a little. The sides of her head weren't actually shaved any more. She smelled of baby oil; Lewis had what sounded like the enviable job of smoothing it over The Bulge, in an attempt to fend off stretch marks later. I smiled, unseen, and looked back to the north.
"Is that what-do-you-call-it?" Verity said, nodding.
"No, that's thingy-ma-bob," Lewis said, just as I said,
"Hey; well remembered."
"Dunadd," Verity said patiently, ignoring both of us. She was looking at the small, rocky hill a kilometre to the north. "Where the footprint is."
"Correct," I said.
Lewis glanced at us, grinned. He lowered the binoculars a little. "Can't see it from here, but that's where it is."
Dunadd Rock had been the capital of Dalriada, one of the early and formative kingdoms in Scotland. The footprint — looks more like a bootprint, actually, just a smooth hollow in the stone — was where the new king had to place his foot when he made his vows, symbolically — I suppose — to join him to the land.
"Can I have a look?" Verity said. Lewis handed her the glasses, arid she leant against the stone battlements, supporting her belly. Lewis stood behind her, chin lowered onto her shoulder.