Peter May - The Blackhouse

‘Afraid not. Is your mum at home?’

‘She’s gone down to the store.’

‘Ah.’ Fin nodded, and there was a moment of awkwardness between them. ‘Have you been to the surgery yet, to give your DNA sample?’

A surly expression fell across the boy’s face, like a shadow. ‘Yeh. Wasn’t any way I was going to get out of it.’

‘How’s the computer?’

The shadow passed and his face lit up again. ‘Brilliant. Thanks, Fin. I’d never have figured that firmware thing out for myself. System Ten’s brilliant. I’ve spent half the day copying my CDs into iTunes.’

‘You’ll need an iPod to download them to.’

The boy smiled ruefully. ‘You seen the price of them?’

Fin laughed. ‘Yeh, I know. But the Shuffle’s pretty cheap.’ Fionnlagh nodded, and the two of them fell into another uneasy silence. Then Fin said, ‘How long d’you think your mum’ll be?’

‘Dunno. Half an hour maybe.’

‘I’ll hang on, then.’ He hesitated. ‘You fancy going down to the beach? I feel like I need a good blast of sea air to blow away the cobwebs.’

‘Sure. I’m getting nowhere fast with this anyway. Give me two minutes to clean up and get out of this boiler suit. And I’ll have to let my gran know where I’m going.’ Fionnlagh gathered his tools back into their box and took them into the house with him. Fin watched him go and wondered why he was torturing himself like this. Even if he was Fin’s biological son, Fionnlagh was still Artair’s boy. Artair had said to him that morning, It hasn’t mattered for seventeen years, why the fuck should it matter now? And he was right. If it had always been that way, why should knowing about it make any difference? Fin kicked at a spiny turf of grass with the toe of his shoe. But somehow it did.

Fionnlagh appeared in jeans and trainers and a fresh white sweatshirt. ‘Better not be too long. My gran doesn’t like being left on her own.’

Fin nodded and the two of them set off along the top of the cliffs to the gully that Artair and Fin used as boys to get down to the shore. Fionnlagh made easy work of it, not even taking his hands out of his pockets until he jumped the last four feet on to the flat, slightly angled slab of gneiss where the young Fin had once made love to Marsaili. Fin found climbing down to the rocky outcrop a little harder than when he had last done it eighteen years before, and fell behind as Fionnlagh skipped sure-footedly over the slippery black wedges of rock to the beach. He waited on the sand for Fin to catch him up.

‘My mum said you two used to go out together.’

‘That was a long time ago.’

They headed down to the water’s edge and started walking towards the Port. ‘So why did you break up?’

Fin found himself slightly embarrassed by the boy’s directness. ‘Oh, you know, people do.’ He laughed at a suddenly returning memory. ‘Actually, we broke up twice. First time, we were only eight.’

‘Eight?’ Fionnlagh was incredulous. ‘You were going out when you were eight?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t really call it going out. We had a kind of thing between us. Had done ever since we started school. I used to walk her home to the farm. Are her folks still there?’

‘Oh, sure. But we don’t see very much of them these days.’ Fin was surprised and waited for Fionnlagh to elucidate, but he didn’t. Instead, he said, ‘So why did you break up when you were eight?’

‘Oh, it was all my fault. Your mum turned up at school one day wearing glasses. Awful things. Blue, with wings, and lenses so thick they made her eyes look like golf balls.’

Fionnlagh laughed at the image Fin had conjured up. ‘Jees, that must have made her attractive.’

‘Well, exactly. And, of course, everyone in the class made fun of her. Four eyes , and goggle eyes , all that kind of stuff. You know how merciless kids can be.’ His smile faded into sadness. ‘And I wasn’t any better. I was embarrassed to be seen with her. Avoided her in the playground, stopped walking her home from school. I think she was devastated, the wee soul. Because she was a pretty little girl, your mum. Very self-confident. And a lot of the boys in the class were dead jealous of me. But all that went when she got the glasses.’ And even as he remembered it, he felt a stab of guilt and melancholy. Poor Marsaili had gone through hell. And he had been so cruel. ‘Kids. They have no idea how hurtful they can be.’

‘And that was it? You just stopped being an item?’

‘More or less. Your mum pursued me for a while. But if I saw her coming towards me in the playground, I made sure I was suddenly involved in a conversation with someone or joining in a game of football. I was always out of the school gate ahead of her so I wouldn’t have to walk her up the road. Sometimes I would turn around in class and find her just looking at me with big doe eyes, glasses discarded on the desk in front or her. But I always pretended I didn’t notice, And Jesus …’ Suddenly something came back to him that he hadn’t thought about in nearly thirty years. ‘There was that time in church.’ The memory returned in unexpectedly vivid detail.

Fionnlagh was intrigued. ‘What? What happened in church?’

‘Oh, God …’ Fin shook his head, smiling remorsefully. ‘Except, I’m sure God didn’t have much to do with it.’ The incoming tide forced them to step smartly up the beach to avoid getting their feet wet. ‘In those days my parents were still alive, and I had to go to church every Sunday. Twice. I always used to take a tube of sweets with me. Polo Fruits or something. It was a kind of game to relieve the boredom. To see if I could get them out of the packet and into my mouth without being caught, and then suck them away to nothing without being seen. I suppose it was a kind of small, secret victory against the power of religious oppression if I could work my way through a whole packet without them ever knowing. Although I doubt if I thought about it quite like that at the time.’

Fionnlagh grinned. ‘Couldn’t have been too good for the teeth.’

‘It wasn’t.’ Fin ran his tongue ruefully around his fillings. ‘I’m sure the minister knew what I was up to, he just never caught me. There were times he would fix me with a steely eye, and I would just about choke on the saliva gathering in my mouth as I tried not to swallow until he looked away. Anyway, there was this one Sunday when I was trying to slip a sweet in my mouth during a prayer. You know, one of those long, maundering prayers that the elders deliver from the front of the church. And I dropped the tube of sweets on the floor. Bare floorboards, loud clatter, and the bloody thing rolled right out into the middle of the aisle. Of course, everyone in the church heard it, including all those up in the gallery, which used to be full in those days. And everyone opened their eyes. And there was hardly a soul in the church who didn’t see that tube of Polo Fruits lying there. Including the elders, and the minister. The prayer stopped mid-sentence, and hung there like a big question mark. You know, I’ve never known a silence to last as long in my life. And I knew that there was no way I could get those sweets back without admitting to them being mine. That’s when a little figure darted out from the pews on the other side of the aisle and snatched them up.’

‘My mum?’

‘Your mum. Wee Marsaili took those sweets in full view of the entire congregation so that she would get the blame instead of me. She must have known the trouble she would be in. I caught her eye about ten minutes later. Big, golf-ball eyes peering at me through those awful lenses, looking for some hint of gratitude, some recognition from me for what she had done. But I was just so relieved to have escaped a leathering, I looked away as quickly as I could. I didn’t even want to be associated with her.’