Peter May - The Blackhouse

But Murdo was quite relaxed. ‘It’s a big tyre. It’s gonna weigh a ton. Gonna take a lot to carry it.’

‘We’re not going to carry it,’ Donald said.

Which knocked Murdo momentarily off-balance. ‘How’re you gonna get it back to Crobost then?’

‘We’re going to roll it, stupid.’

‘Oh.’ Murdo Ruadh clearly hadn’t thought of that. ‘Well, it’s still gonna take a lot of hands to get it upright and keep it that way.’

‘I told you.’ Donald stood his ground. ‘We don’t need you.’

‘Look!’ Murdo jabbed a finger in his chest. ‘I don’t give a shit what you told me. Either we’re in, or we blow the whistle on you.’ He’d played his trump card and stood back triumphantly. ‘What’s it to be?’

I could tell by the slump of Donald’s shoulders that for once he was beaten. None of us wanted the Macritchie brothers and their pals along. But, then, neither did we want the Swainbost boys to have the best bonfire on Guy Fawkes night. ‘Okay,’ Donald sighed. And Murdo Ruadh beamed his satisfaction.

I couldn’t have slept that night, even if I’d wanted to. I sat up late doing my next week’s homework for Mr Macinnes. There was a small two-bar electric heater with a concave reflector in my room, but it made no impact on the cold, unless you were six inches from it, and then it would burn you. I had two pairs of socks on, and my big crofter’s leather boots. I wore a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, a shirt, a heavy woollen jumper and a donkey jacket. And still I was cold. It was a big, cheerless house this, built in the 1920s, and when the wind gusted in off the sea the windows and doors rattled and let it blow through at will. There was no wind tonight, but the temperature had dropped below twenty degrees, and the peat fire in the living room seemed a long way away. At least if my aunt looked in on me before she went to bed I would have an excuse for wearing all these clothes. But, of course, I knew she wouldn’t. She never did.

I heard her coming upstairs about ten-thirty. Normally she was a late bird, but tonight it was too cold even for her. And bed, along with a hot water bottle, offered the only prospect of warmth. I worked on by the light of my bedside lamp for another hour and a half before finally closing my study books and listening at the door for any sign of life. I heard nothing, so I crept out into the darkness of the hall. To my horror I saw a line of light under my aunt’s bedroom door. She must have been reading. I slipped quickly back into my bedroom. The wooden staircase was old and creaky, and I knew there was no way I could negotiate it without being heard. The only alternative was to climb out of the window on to the roof and slither down the rone pipe. I had done it before, but with the frost lying thick on the slates tonight it would be a treacherous undertaking.

I eased the rusted metal window frame off its latch and swung it open. The hinge screeched horribly, and I froze, waiting for the call of my aunt’s voice. But all I could hear was the constant rhythm of the sea washing up on the shingle beach fifty feet below. The cold air pinched my face and penetrated my fingers as I held on to the window frame to lever myself out on to the roof. The tiles dropped away steeply from the dormer to the gutter below. I found it with my feet and inched my way along it to the gable, where I was able to hold on to the coping and lower myself until my boots found a grip on the rone. And it was with a huge sense of relief that I let myself slide down the cold metal pipe to the ground. I was out.

The air smelled of winter frost and peat smoke. My aunt’s old car stood on the tarmac apron in front of the house. Beyond the shadow of the ruins of an older dwelling, the shingle shore below was lit as bright as day by the moon. I looked up and saw the light still burning in my aunt’s window, and hurried to the concrete shed that abutted the east gable of the house. I retrieved my bicycle, and with a glance at my watch, pedalled hard off along the single-track road towards Crobost, the moor sparkling darkly on my left, the ocean shimmering on my right. It was just on half-past midnight.

My aunt’s house was about a mile south of the village itself, standing on its own on the cliffs near the tiny Crobost harbour cut into a deep cleft in the rock. I covered the distance back to the village in a matter of minutes, passing my old home, dark and empty, closed up now and falling into sad disrepair. I always tried not to look at it. It was an almost unbearable reminder of how my life once was, and how it might still have been.

Artair’s bungalow sat down below the level of the road, the shadowy mound of its peatstack silhouetted against the silver ocean, moonlight picking out the carefully constructed herringbone pattern of the peats. I pulled up at the gate and peered into the shadows that pooled around the house. Artair had long ago been nicknamed Wheezy , but I could never bring myself to call him that. ‘Artair!’ My whispered call seemed awfully loud. But there was no sign of him. I waited more than five minutes, becoming increasingly agitated, glancing time and again at my watch, as if by doing so I could slow the progress of time. We were going to be late. I was on the point of giving up, when I heard a loud clatter from the side of the house next to the peat stack. Artair came wheezing out of the darkness, shaking off a plastic bucket whose handle had managed to attach itself around his ankle. He ran across the grass and almost somersaulted over the fence, propelled by the tension of the top wire which he had somehow failed to see. He landed on his backside at my feet, grinning up at me in the moonlight.

‘That was subtle,’ I said. ‘What the hell kept you?’

‘My old man only went to bed about half an hour ago. He’s got ears like a bloody rabbit. I had to wait till I could hear him snoring before I was sure he was asleep.’ He scrambled to his feet and cursed. ‘Oh, Jesus! I’ve got sheep shit all over me.’

My heart sank. I was giving him a backie, and he’d have his shitty breeks on my saddle and his shitty hands around my waist. ‘Get on!’ He swung a leg over the saddle, still grinning idiotically. And I could smell the shite off him. ‘And don’t get that stuff on me!’

‘What are friends for, if not for sharing.’ Artair grabbed hold of my donkey jacket. I gritted my teeth and pushed off down the single-track towards the main road, Artair’s legs shoved out wide on either side of the bike for balance.

We hid the bicycle in a ditch a couple of hundred yards from the cemetery road at Swainbost and ran the rest of the way. The others were waiting impatiently at the road end, huddled in the shadow of the old Co-op building which had been taken over by Ness Builders. ‘Where in God’s name have you been?’ Donald whispered.

Angel Macritchie ballooned out of the darkness and pushed me up against the wall. ‘You stupid wee bastard! The longer we’re hanging about here waiting for you, the more likely we are to get caught.’

‘Jeeesus!’ Murdo Ruadh’s voice fizzed in the shadows. ‘What the fuck is that smell?’

I glared at Artair, and Donald said, ‘Come on, let’s get on with it.’

Angel’s big hand released me, and I followed the others as we slipped out of the cover of Ness Builders and into the moonlight that slanted across the road. It seemed very exposed out here. Higgledy-piggledy fenceposts marked out the line of the road all the way to the cemetery itself, sparkling headstones on the distant headland. Our footsteps crunched on the frost beneath us and seemed inordinately loud as we hurried past the gardens of the houses on our left. Our breath condensed in the freezing air and billowed around our heads like smoke.

Donald stopped outside an old blackhouse with a corrugated-iron roof. It had stout wooden doors with a large padlock threaded through a sturdy iron clasp. A triangle of roof had been built up above the door to allow bigger agricultural machinery in and out. ‘This is it.’