Peter May - The Blackhouse

‘They think if we knew about it we’d be jealous and try to sabotage them.’

I was starting to get cold now. ‘Well, we do know about it. But I don’t see how the hell we could sabotage a tractor tyre.’

‘That’s just it, we’re not going to sabotage it.’ Artair’s excitement was glistening in his eyes. ‘We’re going to steal it.’

Which took me completely by surprise. ‘Says who?’

‘Donald Murray,’ Artair said. ‘He’s got a plan.’

The frost was still lying thick on the ground at playtime the next day. Everyone was out in the playground. There were half a dozen slides going. The best of them was at the end farthest from the gate, where the tarmac sloped away towards a drainage ditch. It was a good fifteen feet long. A short run-up, and gravity did the rest. But you had to jump off quick at the end or you would finish in the ditch.

I was itching to take my place in line and have a go, but Donald Murray had called a meeting of the Crobost boys and we were gathered in a huddle by the technical block, and I could only watch enviously from afar.

Donald was a tall, angular, good-looking boy, with a fine head of sandy hair that flopped down over his brow. All the girls fancied him, but he was dead casual about it. He was a boy’s boy, a leader of men, and if you were with Donald you felt safe from the Macritchie brothers. Angel had left Crobost School by that time and gone to pursue vocational studies at the Lews Castle. But Murdo Ruadh was still an ever-present threat.

Initially Donald had drawn his power from the fact that everyone was afraid of his father. Everyone, that is, except Donald himself. The minister, then, was still a very powerful figure in the community, and Coinneach Murray was a fearsome man. Coinneach is the Gaelic for Kenneth, and although it was Kenneth Murray on the board outside the church, everyone knew him as Coinneach. Although not to his face. You would only ever refer to him in person as Mister or Reverend Murray. We always imagined that his wife called him Reverend, too. Even in bed.

Donald, however, always referred to his father as the old bastard . He defied him at every turn, refused to go to church on a Sunday and, as a result, was confined to the manse every Sabbath.

There was one Saturday night we were having a party at someone’s house. The parents were at a wedding in Stornoway, and had decided to stay overnight rather than risk the drive back after drinking. It wasn’t terribly late, ten thirty maybe, when the door burst open and Coinneach Murray stood there like some avenging angel sent by the Lord to punish us for our sins. Of course, half the kids were smoking and drinking. And there were girls there, too. Coinneach roared his disapproval at us, and told us he would be sure to speak to every one of our parents. Did we not know it was the eve of the Lord’s Day, and that children of our age should be home in bed? We were all terrified. Except for Donald. He stayed where he was, lounging on the sofa, a can of beer in his hand. And, of course, it was Donald he had come for really. He pointed a trembling finger of accusation at his son and told him to get out. But Donald just sat there, a sullen look of defiance on his face, and shocked us all by telling his father to fuck off. You could have heard a pin drop in Stornoway.

Red-faced with anger and humiliation, Coinneach Murray strode into the room and knocked the can from Donald’s hand. The beer went everywhere. But nobody moved. And nobody spoke. Not even Coinneach. He had a powerful physical presence beyond anything that the dog collar gave him. He was just a big, strong man. He physically lifted Donald out of the settee by the scruff of his neck before frog-marching him out into the night. It was an awesome display of power in the face of defiance, and there was not one of us who would have wanted to be in Donald’s shoes when his father got him home.

And true to his word, the Reverend Coinneach Murray visited the parents of every boy and girl who was in the house that night, and there was hell to pay. Although not in my house. My aunt was nothing if not eccentric, and in a God-fearing community it was somehow only natural that she would be a devout atheist. She told the minister in no uncertain terms, although not as colourfully as Donald, where he could stick his self-righteous indignation. He told her she was certain to go to Hell. ‘I’ll see you there, then,’ she said as she slammed the door on his back. I suppose I learned my contempt for the Church from my aunt.

So Donald had gained a kind of legendary status in his own right. Not because of who his father was, but because of the way he defied him and went against everything he stood for. Donald was the first in our year to smoke. The first to drink. He was the first of my contemporaries whom I ever saw drunk. But there was a positive side to him, too. He was good at sports. He was second-top of our class. And although he was no match, physically, for Murdo Ruadh, intellectually he could run rings around him. And Murdo knew it. So by and large he gave him a wide berth.

There were six of us gathered there in the playground that day. Donald, me and Artair, a couple of boys from the bottom end of the village, Iain and Seonaidh, and Calum Macdonald. I always felt sorry for Calum. He was smaller than the rest of us, and there was something soft about him. He was good at art, he liked Celtic music and played the clarsach , a small Celtic harp, in the school orchestra. He was also mercilessly bullied by Murdo Ruadh and his gang. He never told, and he never complained, but I always imagined him crying himself to sleep at nights. I dragged my eyes away from the slide at the far side of the playground to focus on the plan for tonight’s raid on Swainbost.

‘Okay,’ Donald was saying, ‘we’ll meet up at the cemetery road end at Swainbost, one o’clock tomorrow morning.’

‘How will we get out of the house without being caught?’ Calum was wide-eyed and full of trepidation.

‘That’s your problem.’ Donald was unsympathetic. ‘Anyone doesn’t want to come, that’s up to them.’ He paused to give anyone who wanted to a chance to back out. No one did. ‘Okay, about a hundred yards down the road to the cemetery there’s the remains of an old blackhouse with a tin roof on it. It’s used mainly for storing agricultural equipment, and it’s got a padlock on the door. That’s where they’ve hidden the tyre.’

‘How do you know all this?’ Seonaidh said.

Donald smirked. ‘I know a girl in Swainbost. She and her brother don’t get on.’ We all nodded, none of us surprised that Donald knew a girl in Swainbost, each of us thinking there was a good chance he knew her in the biblical sense as well.

‘What the fuck’s going on here, then?’ Murdo Ruadh forced his way into the group, flanked by the same two boys who’d fallen in with him that first day at school all those years before. One of them had developed terrible acne, and you would find your eyes drawn to the clusters of suppurating, yellow-headed spots around his nose and mouth. Our circle quickly widened out away from him.

‘Nothing to do with you,’ Donald said.

‘Aye, it is.’ Murdo seemed unusually sure of himself in Donald’s presence. ‘You’re going to steal the tyre the Swainbost boys have got stashed away up there.’

We were all shocked that he knew. Then beyond that initial shock came the realization that one of us must have told him. All eyes turned towards Calum. He squirmed uncomfortably.

‘I didn’t tell, honest.’

‘Doesn’t matter how I know,’ Murdo Ruadh growled. ‘I know. Alright? And we want in. Me and Angel and the boys. After all, we’re all Crobost boys. That right?’

‘No.’ Donald was defiant. ‘There’s enough of us as it is.’