Rob Ewing - The Last of Us

The ask was my fault: my bad idea. So it’s my job right away to make her feel better. I say, ‘When my mum comes back from the mainland, the worst thing will be telling her about Granny, and the cousins. And my aunts and uncles. It’s going to be terrible. I’ll be glad to see her, but it’ll be terrible all the same.’

Elizabeth says nothing. So I try again: ‘My school book last year said three new babies are born for every two people dying. So at the gates of heaven it’s: hullo, hullo, hullo. Goodbye, goodbye. That’s the rule.’

Elizabeth just stares at her singed biscuit.

‘Don’t know where my mum and dad are,’ Alex says, licking his biscuit. ‘The last time I saw Mum, she was just away for a minute. Wish they’d come home.’

‘Our dad’s away on his boat,’ Duncan says, before Calum Ian can stop him. ‘He was gone away to bring food back from the mainland. That’s why we can’t be staying with you lot. We were told to wait at home. Sorry, but he ordered us there.’

‘Always do as we’re told,’ Calum Ian says.

This makes the MacNeil brothers remember about leaving. They want to get back before it’s dark. I ask Elizabeth if I should follow them and get back our food, but she tells me just to forget about it.

Our house is the shape of a loaf tin. It’s good because it doesn’t have any wrong smell. Also, there are three beds in one room, so we can sleep together. Also, it has a gas stove (Calum Ian changes the cylinders) and thick walls and a roof with flat bits for collecting rainwater.

Also, it’s not any of our old homes. This helps us to become a fresh family. Which is especially good for Elizabeth, who has no family of her own.

Before bed it’s tick-check time, then we do the routine with the radios.

Same static-noise as always.

We unpick the cereal boxes from the skylight, and lie heads together under the window. I forgot that in the summer stars don’t exist. In wintertime you can even see them going to school in the morning.

Now Elizabeth tries to remember all the things her dad said about the stars, and the sky. It doesn’t last very long. Usually if I’ve run out of memories I make stuff up, but she has a rule for herself against that.

‘The past is precious,’ she says. ‘It has to be correct.’

It’s when she starts remembering about planets going around the sun, and moons going around the planets, that I remember – the riddle that Mum told me. And because it’s a true memory, I want to tell it.

It must be a good one, a good riddle, because it gets them quiet. I know the answer but I won’t tell them.

‘You could give us a clue,’ grumbles Alex.

‘OK, here.’

For one clue only, I hold up my drawing of the Queen.

When Elizabeth puts on the night light I promise to tell them the next day if they still haven’t guessed.

It’s not a very good day for seeing far out to sea. I sometimes forget to keep watching.

This morning the rain was marching adults in my dream. Mum used to call that sort of thing ‘wishful thinking’. She never said if wishing worked.

Then there are other things: things you didn’t wish for. Like the Gaelic weather sticker at the end of my bed. It said, ‘ Tha i grianach ’. I had to tear it, right through the happy face of the sun underneath.

All around the ferry building I put cups. Some of the plastic ones blew over, so I put round smooth stones from the shoreline in to steady them better.

Then I waited. And waited. I saw the sky go bright in a place I’d never seen bright before. So what did that mean?

Did you think it was a good idea, Mum, or not?

After the light got halfway I could see my reflection in the water under the pier.

A girl with long hair. Looking like she had a beard: her hair down in straggles, covering her face.

A reminder of who we found after we saw the painted dogs.

‘Looks like you’re facing your worst enemy,’ I say to the girl. But she wins in the end by hiding herself in ripples.

Later, I went to put flowers on the sea, to remember my friends, but the tide got me, up to my waist. That was a slip-up. I have to be more careful nowadays.

I have to think of everything.

It’s too easy to make mistakes. Two days ago, when I was on watching duty, I accidentally looked at the sun with the telescope. Since then there’s been a black moon in the middle of what I’m seeing.

Even so, I’m a smarter kid for having it. I won’t make the same mistake twice. Because the more mistakes I make, the smarter I’ll get.

Still, the thing to worry about is this: how many mistakes is a person allowed? How many mistakes can a single person make and still be ? There isn’t a rule, or none that Mum ever told me.

She’s telling me the answer to her riddle. It’s time to pay attention: everything else can wait.

Now I see her, and I bury down to the bottom of my sleeping bag as the sound of her starts to become real: ‘ What goes around the world but stays in the corner? ’

Mum’s wearing her red and blue post office jacket. She asks the question in English so we know it’s a riddle.

We pass by Mr MacKinnon’s blue-eyed collie, the one that’s always on guard. Then the phone box. Then the forest of fifteen trees, then Orasaigh, the island where the rats used to live. Floraidh MacInnes once told me that there was a storm and all the rats came ashore and ate the annoying cats, but she’s a liar, I never believed her.

‘A shy man on a boat?’ I answer.

‘Works fine. I accept it works fine, but it’s not the answer I was looking for. Try again.’

It’s my work to get the bundles together. Mum’s fingers are inky from the packets. She whistles up for hills and down for dips. She keeps spare elastic bands in a coil around her wrist which make her hand go puffy.

‘My stand-in is coming tomorrow,’ she says. ‘He’s not been before. Early ferry, with any luck. Then that’s you and me are away on our Christmas shopping. How good is that?’

I give her the thumbs-up. It’s damp, but the heaters blast dryness. We go on the east road first, because most people live on that side of the island, then onto the north road.

My favourite postbox is the one which fills with sand in a west wind. It crackles inside like a shell.

Mum hands out biscuits to all the dogs that bark. She says that if we give enough biscuits to the barking dogs they’ll be too fat and soft in the head to chase us.

‘ Chan ith a shàth ach an cù ,’ she says, testing me as we drive away from another one. ‘Your mother wants to know the English translation – go ahead.’

‘None but a dog eats his fill.’

‘Apart from auld Eric in Cleit who wants to dig his ain grave with his teeth – well done.’

Mum said she learnt everything at school but the old sayings; now she wants me to know them, too.

‘Look, will you,’ she says. ‘Washing out in the rain.’

The washing is Mrs Barron’s. Mum chaps on her door. Mrs Barron is OK. Mum gets permission to take in her sheets, and when she comes back she smells of mist. Mrs Barron has handed her a letter for posting. The letter has a lovely stamp: hummingbird, green and gold.

She hands the letter to me and I put it in the going-away postbag.

‘Using up his collection,’ Mum says. ‘Since Mr Barron died. Last year it was Jubilee editions. I’m forever telling her that it’s like tearing up ten pound notes – but she has her ain mind.’

I let my fingers sift the letters in the bag. Some are smooth, others pebbly.

There’s a sheep scratching its arse on the last postbox before we get on the round back for home.