Питер Мэй - I'll Keep You Safe

I stood up, startled, thinking he was going to catch them.

There was blind panic among the boys. A bunch of them detached from the others and took off across the croft, heading down towards the shore. There were only two boys left with the gate. Ruairidh, and a lad with acne that everyone called Spotty. Carrying it between them, they starting running along the road towards the Free Church.

But even as they reached it I saw Ruairidh stumble and fall. He had gone over on his ankle. And although he was up again in a flash, I could see that he was limping heavily.

They ran around the side of the church, out of sight of their pursuer, stopping only briefly to heft the gate up on to the roof of a workers’ Portakabin where construction was under way on a new toilet block for the church. And then they split up. Spotty sprinted away past the lights of the community hall, where the girls were still inside playing music and fantasizing about boys, while Ruairidh limped around the back of the Church of Scotland next door and headed off down a path that would take him past my house.

I could see he was in distress, almost dragging his twisted ankle behind him. His stertorous breathing seemed to fill the night air. I saw Yankee Eachan come around the church, and knew he could see Spotty disappearing beyond the curve of the road. There was no chance that he would ever catch him.

Then he came round the back and saw Ruairidh hirpling away down the path. It was no stretch of the imagination to think that the old man might catch him quite easily. But he hesitated, looking around for a moment, and I knew that he was wondering where the gate had gone. But it was quite safely out of sight on top of the Portakabin. So he started after Ruairidh with another mouthful of profanity.

That’s when I had an idea, and went hurtling down the hillside, arms windmilling to stop me from falling. Coming from the hill I could cut across the curve of the path and get to my house before either of them.

I reached the gate just as Ruairidh was approaching, and I waved to him from behind the caravan, calling his name as loudly as I dared without alerting my folks inside the house. He seemed startled to see me, and stopped dead, glancing back to see Yankee Eachan approaching as fast as a man in his late sixties could. ‘Come on!’ I urged him, and signalled him to follow me around the back of the house. I was at the peat stack before he turned the corner, pulling out peats as fast as I could to open up the entrance to my secret place. ‘Get in!’

He looked at me as if I was mad. ‘In where?’

‘The peat stack. There’s a wee den inside.’

The sound of old Yankee Eachan approaching on the path made his mind up for him, and he clambered quickly inside, squeezing himself into a space that I had made only for myself. It was a tight fit, and he couldn’t move once he was in. I quickly piled the peats I had pulled out back into the hole and sealed it up. And just for good measure swung an old gate lying at an angle against the gable of the house, to lean up against the end of the stack. I even had time to dwell, if only for a moment, on the irony of it.

Yankee Eachan came puffing around the corner and stopped in his tracks when he saw me there. ‘Where’d that boy go!’ he shouted.

‘What boy?’ I said.

‘Don’t you play the innocent with me, young lady. I saw him come around the back of your house.’

‘The light’s not so good, Mr Macrae,’ I told him. ‘Your eyes must have deceived you.’ I’d read that in a book at school — about eyes deceiving you — and it seemed like the perfect use of it.

But it only seemed to infuriate him. He looked at me as if I were the devil incarnate. ‘Don’t mess with me, you wee bugger. You think I came up the Mississippi in a bubble? Where’d he go?’

The back door of our house flew open, and a slab of yellow light fell out across the back garden, the shadow of my father standing right in the middle of it.

‘What’s going on here?’ he bellowed.

‘Your wee girl’s hiding a boy who stole my gate,’ Yankee Eachan said indignantly.

‘What boy?’

‘I’ve no idea what his name is.’

My father gasped his irritation. ‘No I mean, where is he, this boy? Where’s the gate he took? And where would my wee lassie be hiding them?’

Yankee Eachan was at a loss. He looked around. It was evident that there was no boy and no gate, except for the one leaning against the peat stack. My father looked at the belt dangling from the old man’s hand.

‘And what were you going to do with that, might I ask?’

‘Give the bugger a good leathering.’

‘Watch your language in front of the lassie. And you a church elder, too.’ He snatched the belt from Eachan’s hand and examined it. ‘You’d do some damage with this. For heaven’s sake, man, it’s just a bit of fun. It happens every year. You know that!’

‘Aye, and I’ll be out half the night gathering my bloody sheep.’ He snatched his belt back. ‘Gorram sumbitch!’ And he stomped off.

When he had gone my father turned and gave me a dangerous look. ‘Where is he?’ he said.

‘Who?’

‘Don’t play the innocent with me, young lady!’ The same expression that Yankee Eachan had used. I put on my most earnest face.

‘Honest, Dad, I’ve no idea. I’m just back from a walk up on the hill.’

‘I thought you were going to the Halloween party.’

‘Nah...’ I scuffed my toe on the path. ‘Couldn’t be bothered this year.’

He held the door wide. ‘Time you were in anyway. It’s getting dark.’

I had no choice but to go inside. My father hesitated for a few moments on the step, casting an eagle eye all around the garden in the twilight, before banging the door shut.

I spent a restless and frustrating evening then, trying to think of excuses why I should go out into the back garden. But I couldn’t think of any that wouldn’t arouse suspicion. We had plenty of peats in for the night, so that wasn’t an option.

Ruairidh was jammed tight into the peat stack, and wouldn’t be able to get out without my help, and I couldn’t stop thinking of him stuck in there, and hating me for abandoning him. What if he needed the toilet? It didn’t bear thinking about.

Eventually my folks packed me off to bed, and I lay wide awake in the dark, fully dressed beneath the covers. I heard Anndra and Uilleam coming back, and could hear my father cross-examining them about who it was who had stolen Yankee Eachan’s gate. But they were no clypes, my brothers, and so no one ever knew that it was Ruairidh.

Eventually, my brothers went to bed. And I lay for what seemed like a further eternity before I heard my parents’ bedroom door shutting. I forced myself to wait a good fifteen or twenty minutes beyond that before I eased open my bedroom window and dropped down into the back garden.

There was a good moon out, so I had plenty of light to see by as I carefully swung the gate off the stack and peeled away the peats one by one. I felt the heat of Ruairidh’s body in the air that greeted me as I opened up the hole to the hiding place inside.

‘What the fuck?’ I heard him whisper. ‘Where the hell have you been?’

‘I had to wait till everyone was in bed,’ I whispered back at him. Surely he would understand?

He scrambled out into the dark, stretching painfully stiff muscles that had all but gone into cramp. I saw the dark patch around the crotch of his jeans and realized he had wet himself. He turned and glared at me, humiliation writ large all over his face. ‘Find someone else to rescue next time,’ he hissed. And I thought what an ungrateful pig he was.

I had ruined any chance I might have had with him. But right then I didn’t care if I never saw him again for the rest of my life.