Rob Ewing - The Last of Us

Elizabeth turns on her torch. I see her giving Calum Ian a furious stare.

‘My mum never lied,’ I say. ‘It’s true.’

‘Don’t be dull, Gloic . Mums and dads don’t break up over baby names. There has to be other stuff. Y’know, like fights, arguments. Over money, dishes.’

My face feels red hot. Even in the dark it seems like everyone’s looking at me, staring.

‘What about yours? Your dad’s probably dead.’

Calum Ian grabs the torch and shines it right in my face. ‘ You fuck off! Bheir mi dhut sgailc! He told us: all we had to do was wait – at home. He said sit tight, collect water, save our food, keep strong, he’d come back. And if it wasn’t for you we’d still be there waiting for him!’

‘You don’t collect food; you steal ours.’

‘ You did worse to us. If you hadn’t’ve done it then none of this would’ve happened. You killed the pictures we had of Mum. Of our sister Flora.’

‘Your teeth are brown and stinky.’ Now I try to think of the worst possible thing I could ever say: and knowing how angry he got already about it, this is it: ‘Hope your dad’s dead.’

In the torchlight I see his eyes go tight.

The next bit happens too quick, or too slow for me to understand all at once.

I see him reaching for his rucksack. Hear the zip of the top of it opening, fast.

Then Elizabeth lunging forward: she calls out, half a scream, half a shout. Her torch is knocked to the floor.

Then she’s crying.

‘You stupid, stupid boy,’ she’s saying. ‘Stupid, stupid. How will we keep going like this?’

Duncan and Alex come to see what happened. Duncan shines his torch on her leg: and we see where the dart he tried to stab me with jabbed into her instead.

A few drops of blood running down.

Calum Ian makes a sad sound – why should he also be the one to cry? Then grabs his rucksack and goes off to sleep in one of the other rooms next door.

I have to go out, get away. Out to the back green, where I throw stones at a wooden fence, imagining Calum Ian’s face being smashed into a thousand tiny pieces.

My breath comes back; my anger goes down. I look around. I recognise Mrs Barron’s house, just up the road. There’s rubbish snagged in her fence, under the washing line where Mum stood, once.

I touch her letter, hidden still in the fold of my jumper. The paper of it warming my stomach.

Mum sits on the fence, five posts along. I try and bounce her up. She doesn’t bounce back.

‘You should’ve been here to stand up for me,’ I say in a huff.

‘Been here loads.’

‘Well you could help, you could help a bit more… Did you post this letter earlier on today?’

‘For me to know.’

I look to the sky, back again. She’s still there.

‘If you’re going to stay, I’ll tell you – today’s news is: Calum Ian is my enemy. He makes weapons. He’s just hurt Elizabeth. Plus he says you and Dad didn’t fall out over any baby names.’

‘You keep a good hand to that letter. It’s the early bird that catches the worm.’

‘Alex is always picking up worms.’

‘ Tch, dirty boy.’

‘I’m going to get back at Calum Ian. I know what his weak spot is now. It’s his Dad.’

‘Top marks, mo a ghraidh ! But I can’t always be minding you. Stay away from bullies. Never—’

‘—run with knives. You said that the last time, Mum. Can you not say something different this time?’

Mum turns into only air.

I close my eye and catch her in the tear it makes.

To the edge of the dunes, God. Layers of the world.

Sometimes bones stick out: of sheep, rabbits.

Don MacPhail put cars in the sand dunes to stop the island from blowing away.

‘Come see my traffic jam,’ he said to me once, when I met him with Mum on the beach.

He surprised us with steering wheels, engines, seats in sand. His collie dog ran ahead, tail circling the wind.

The island – always moving, he said. Like a giant that hasn’t decided yet where it wants to be.

And now, from up here, I can see most of it.

The hill gets me sweating. The grass gone-yellow, tough so it scratches my legs. Bits of bog-cotton wafting. Then, keeping away, small birds, not seagulls, with wings so thin they might be made of paper.

I look away out to sea. No boats. Just islands, black with shadows on one side, gold the other.

There’s the tanker, or trawler. It’s too square-long to be an island, too brown. I don’t like to look at it for very long in case there’s ghosts on deck.

Then I think I see something that’s not an island.

My arms know it first. My arms are moving, even before my heart or my head catch up. It’s a boat. Not an island, or a wreck, it’s too white. Surely it’s a boat with the sun on it, with the shine of sun coming and going?

I shout, shout until my voice gives up. The paper-wing birds go up, circle me high in the sky.

Then the shine tells me something different.

It’s only a buoy. Guarding the entrance to the bay. And worse: I’ve seen it before. It did the same thing to me before.

Mum, back to this memory: You keep me in the van. You don’t go to the doors as you do your round. There’s other stuff for delivery, but not as many letters as usual. You’re smoking, which you said you’d stopped for ever. It makes the van stink. When I tell you not to you don’t even notice I said anything.

‘Why’d he go?’ I ask.

You don’t hear until I shout, then I have to tell who I’m meaning: Mike, the stand-in postman. He never even made a single delivery. Plus he left all of your laminate cards on the floor of the van, just to keep reminding us about his going away and leaving us.

‘Had family,’ you say.

Then you turn up the radio. As we go around the side of the island to the north end it loses signal. You switch around stations until you get it back.

‘Hush – trying to hear.’

But I wasn’t saying anything, not for ages.

On the ribbon road there’s two lorries from the fish factory. You flash your lights and roll down the window at the passing place, to indicate you want to talk.

‘The tankers get in?’

The driver in the red overalls shakes his head. He talks about diesel, something else I don’t understand. Then you talk about the bank, the ferry, most of it in whispers. When I turn down the radio to hear a bit better you turn it up again and get out of the car.

Some other cars come; you wave them past.

It starts to rain when we’re driving again. You keep turning the radio to get any kind of signal.

‘Will Dad come?’

You light another cigarette with the car’s red glow button. Then say, ‘He’ll be looking after himself.’

‘Why are the ferries cancelled?’

‘It’s temporary.’

‘But there isn’t a storm. Or even any fog.’

‘I know.’

‘Did the ferry engine break like it did last summer?’

‘No.’

‘So why, then?’

You pull the car into a passing place, then turn around to speak to me. Sometimes when it’s raining your face gets dirty from the ink on the letters. Like today.

‘To stop people coming in.’

The shadow of Beinn Tangabhal gets long. It grows like the tongue of a giant over our village.

I climbed over the counter at the post office. In a dusty cupboard I found cartridges of ink.

I cracked a black one open, then used the ink to make my cheeks smudged, like Mum’s.

But with only halfway light in the mirror at home it looked stupid. Like a girl with scars had decided to draw all over her face, pretending she had a beard.

‘Like you’re facing your worst enemy,’ I say to the girl.