Питер Мэй - I'll Keep You Safe

I grabbed on to the side of the boat and saw that Ruairidh’s torch was still lying inside it. I reached in to snatch it and fumble with the switch. Suddenly I was directing the glare of its light on to Ruairidh’s assailants, and they stepped back, arms half-raised to shadow their eyes. I recognized almost every one of them. Boys I had been at school with. Including Peanut. They seemed startled, and frozen in the cold light of my recognition. But Peanut stepped boldly forward. ‘Since when did you become a traitor to your class, Niamh Murray? Siding with the fucking toffs.’

I felt anger spiking up my back. ‘Maybe about the same time you became a fucking thief, Iain Maciver.’ I looked around the faces. ‘Don’t think I don’t know who you are. Every last one of you!’ My voice was shrill, and I could hear it echoing back off the hills.

Peanut said, ‘You breathe a fucking word of this to anyone...’

‘And you’ll what?’ I screamed back at him. ‘Make things worse than they already are? You stupid bloody boys.’

They almost seemed chastened, shrinking back from my anger. Except for Peanut himself. He turned to look at Ruairidh still curled up on the ground, and sank his boot in one last time. ‘That’s for ruining my life, you bastard!’ he shouted, leaning right over him and spitting on his prone form. He nodded to the others and as they turned away they were absorbed by the night just as quickly as they had appeared.

By the time Ruairidh got to his feet I could see blood on his face, and vomit on the ground where he had lain. He brushed aside my helping hand and marched off into the dark, following the well-worn track along the banks of the stream that led down to Loch Three. I struggled to keep up, and couldn’t get a word out of him all the way back to the lodge.

Ruairidh wasn’t the same after that. He spent the remainder of our stay at Linshader Lodge, it seemed, trying to avoid me. I never knew whether it was the humiliation of taking a beating in front of me, or being branded a turncoat for siding with the toffs. Or maybe guilt at the part he had played in ruining Peanut’s future. Whatever was ailing him, he had no intention of sharing it with me. I almost started to believe that he blamed me for everything that had happened.

The change in his mood and demeanour was marked. He would turn up sometimes at the bonfire on the beach without his guitar, the worse for drink. He was smoking a lot of dope, and went off quite often at night with the watchers. I think he spent most of the remaining weeks of the summer sleeping up at the bothy at Macleay’s Stream. We never passed another night together.

Of course, Seonag could barely conceal her glee. She would make a point of sitting talking to him those evenings he turned up on the beach, glancing in my direction to make sure I was watching. And I remember her once coming into the kitchen to inform me that, anyway, I was better off without him. It was with clear satisfaction that she said, ‘My folks tell me that the Macfarlanes are outcasts in Balanish these days. No one’ll talk to them because of Ruairidh getting Peanut arrested.’

I turned and almost spat in her face. ‘It wasn’t Ruairidh that got him arrested. It was that bastard Staines. And everyone knows he’s in with the poachers.’

Seonag’s eyes narrowed and she lowered her voice. ‘You’d better watch yourself young lady. You could get into big trouble if people hear you talking like that.’

‘Oh, yes? And you’d be the one to tell them, I suppose.’ I had long suspected that someone had tipped off Peanut and the Balanish boys that Ruairidh and I were up at Macphail’s Island that night. And I wouldn’t have put it past Seonag being the one to do it.

She put on her hurt face and her little girl’s voice. ‘We used to be friends,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what’s happened to you.’

Me? I wanted to shout at her. Me? You’re the one that’s changed! But I said nothing as she turned and retreated into the lodge like some wounded animal.

It was about a week before the end of our stay at Linshader that my mother took ill. A recurrence of shingles, that awful rash with its accompanying nerve pain and headaches. The doctor put her on antivirals and she retired to her bed. I had to excuse myself from duties at the lodge and return home for a couple of days to cook for my father and Uilleam, who was still at home then, and do their laundries. It never ceases to amaze me how hopeless men are at looking after themselves.

As it happened, I was able to get everything done during that first day. It was perfect drying weather, and I had all the laundry washed, dried and folded away in cupboards and drawers by teatime. The rest of the time I spent cooking. Meals that could be reheated and served at any hour that suited them. I had intended to stay overnight, but as it turned out there was no need. Uilleam drove me back to the lodge and I arrived shortly after ten.

It wasn’t the warmest of nights. I sensed a change in the weather. Those seemingly endless summer days of warm sunshine and gentle breezes were already beginning to feel like a distant memory. The summer never seems to last, and the older you get the shorter it becomes, like the days themselves. While the winter stretches endlessly ahead towards some far-off and uncertain spring. The change comes in a moment and you detect it immediately. Like the first faint stab of pain in the sinus that presages the onset of a cold.

I dumped my stuff in my room. There was no one at the lodge, except for the guests, and I headed off along the path to the beach. I met the cook and several of the others on their way back. My roommate was among them. She said, ‘I wouldn’t bother, Niamh. Everyone’s packing it in for the night. Too cold.’

‘Is Ruairidh still down there?’ I was anxious to see him. We had so little time left together before heading off again on our very separate ways, and I was desperate to try to put things right between us.

She seemed evasive. ‘I’m not sure.’ Then, ‘Listen, we’ve got some beer and vodka. We’re planning a wee ceilidh in the boys’ hut.’

But I wasn’t interested. ‘Thanks. I’ll catch you later.’ I was so intent on finding Ruairidh that I missed her warning.

I hurried on down to the beach, and as I rounded the dunes I saw them sitting side by side in the light of the dying fire. Ruairidh and Seonag, huddled together as if for warmth. The wind was sending smoke and sparks off into the night, and fanning the embers to cast their light on the pair. There was no one else there. They didn’t see me coming as I walked with heavy legs through the sand towards them, stopping then in my tracks as Seonag turned her head towards him and they kissed.

My gasp was involuntary. Forced from me, as with a fist in the gut, and they broke apart, startled. I saw regret in Ruairidh’s eyes immediately. Something verging on panic. Seonag just looked at me with her penetrating green eyes, glazed slightly from too much alcohol, but shining with something that looked very much like triumph.

There were no words to express my sense of betrayal. I turned and ran back up the path, the way I had come. And almost immediately felt, more than heard, the pounding of Ruairidh’s footsteps in my wake. He caught up with me shortly before the lodge. His hand on my arm pulling me to a halt, half-turning me towards him.

‘Don’t!’ I shouted at him. ‘Don’t dare tell me it’s not what it seemed.’

‘It’s not.’

I turned my head away in disgust.

‘I missed you.’

My head snapped back around, eyes blazing with anger and hurt. ‘Is that right? Well, you’ve got a really interesting way of showing it.’

‘I was drunk. Depressed, and...’