Chapter Eight: Empty Spaces (Part V)

Two days later he was standing on a hill, next to an abandoned radar post, looking out at the lighthouse of Muckle Flugga, and past the small hump of the isle of Out Stack, to the empty sea. He had reached the northernmost point of the British islands. This was the edge of the board.

Instead of permitting himself guiltier pleasures, Richard had spent the night playing chess with the boy.

“Chess isn’t really my game,” the boy had told Richard. “I prefer poker.” And in an attempt to joke, or perhaps to punish Richard for his earlier display of weakness, the boy had flashed him that wicked grin that he had stolen from a friend a mere week earlier, and added: “Strip poker.”

Richard refused to be baited. He made certain the boy knew all the rules, and explained to him about openings, and control of the board, about lines of influence, forks and skewers. Then they played.

The first time Richard tried to let the boy win.

The boy scowled.

“You bought my time. And body if you want it. But not…”

He searched for the right word.

“Not your integrity?” Richard suggested. “You’re right. I apologise.”

“Sheesh, you do that a lot, don’t you?”

“I suppose so.”

“Never apologise, never explain. Some bloke said that.”

“I don’t think I agree.”

“Of course you don’t. Are you gonna set it up again or not? And this time, bloody beat me if that’s how it goes.”

So they played again. At first they played while they talked. Richard told the boy that his mother had just died in a nursing home in Scotland. He had driven down to get the last piece of furniture she had owned, the roll desk. He was a veterinarian on the Shetland mainland. He admitted he’d dreamed of young men all his life but never had the courage to go through with it.

Really? the boy thought. And you think it was morals keeping you from going through with it with me?

The boy told him more embellishments to his story, but eventually the unbroken sequence of defeats turned him taciturn. Finally, instead of accepting his 6th or 7th checkmate, he simply took the king and moved it past the border of the board.

“No, Arik, that is against the rules.”

“Never been one much for keeping rules.”

“I know.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know what the reason was for you to leave your home on the promise of some guy on the internet, and maybe you really have been check mated. But your plan, finding happiness with some Ersatz father here, at the edge of the world, that is trying to cheat, isn’t it? Your version of trying to move your king over the edge of the board.”

“What if?” Sullen again, and this time it’s no act. “I’m here, ain’t I? All those rules people make up, they’re just excuses not to accept responsibility for their own lives. Any time I hear someone say, they have no choice I want to curbstomp them.”

“Yes, you are here, Arik. And where are you going from here? Where is that place beyond the edge?”

The boy was looking at it now, from the abandoned radar post. He had reached the ultima thule, the furthest North of the British Isles. Beyond the few last rocks was the open North Atlantic. If you went in a straight line from here, there would be nothing but open water until you reached the floating ice shelf at the North Pole.

Lerwick had been bad for him. The only actual town on the entire archipelago, and with its 17,000 inhabitants way too small for a single underage homeless thief to get bye. There had been no crowds to vanish in, no anonymity. The few hostels he could have afforded didn’t buy his stories and after he beat his retreat he didn’t dare even linger in the vicinity out of fear they might have informed the constabulary.

He hiked and hitched his way further north, onto Unst. He spent a night in the colourful bus stop at Baltasound. And now he made his way down from the hill, past the cliffs dotted white with Gannets and Puffins. When he reached the rocky beach, he stared out at the lighthouse. He tried to skip stones across the water, but the waves were choppy and every stone tumbled and sank.

He remembered the lion Groagramman from The Neverending Story, the second book he ever read. Graogramman and Bastian, the main character, had talked about wishes and dreams, and about travelling.

It is not enough to wish to leave a place, the lion had told the boy in the story. You need to know where you wish to go to.

Is this me taking the king over the edge, the boy thought as he made his first step into the cold salty water. Or is this me pretending I have no other choice?

The water flooded his boots. It crawled up his trouser legs. His penis and scrotum shrank away from the cold. When the choppy waves lapped against his belly button he gasped.

And then he saw the boat, tourists on their way back from the lighthouse. He thought he heard them laugh and shout. He was certain they had seen him, were pointing fingers.

Would they rescue him? Drag him from the water? Force life back into him the way the paramedics had done some three years earlier, his first failed attempt? He had never felt more helpless than when they took his death away from him.

For a while he stood in the sea, almost chest deep. In the swell of the cold water his body’s buoyancy made him sway drunkenly. Air bubbles still crawled up his legs from his boots and little folds in his jeans. The sheepskin lining of his jacket got heavy and pulled on his shoulders.

Where do I go from here?

All he knew was that he couldn’t turn around and go south. He suspected that he knew the reason why as well, if only he could be honest with himself. But he also knew that he couldn’t be.

When he had exchanged messages with Master Daddy Matt, his Online BDSM Daddy, just after he had begun this reckless walkabout, the man had told him “not to do anything stupid.”

Was this what he had meant?

Master Daddy Matt had once attempted suicide as well. But according to the way he told it, he had been rescued by an angel.

“It had been a glowing figure of pure light. When he touched me, I knew I would be okay. I called my friend John and he sent the paramedics.”

The boy thought back to the day he had tried. There had been no angel for him. He had seen no light. When Master Daddy Matt had talked about the angel, the boy had hoped it was a lie.

The boat had changed course. The tourists had stopped laughing. They were shouting at him now, waving their hands. The guide at the rudder was focused on the rocks just underneath the surface of the sea.

I hate you, the boy thought to his God. I hate you so much.

He turned around, waded back on land. Water spilled from his clothes. He didn’t even stop to pour out his boots. Feeling a bitter sense of shame he just ran from the Samaritans on the boat.

That night he returned to Lerwick. He had no particular plan. Perhaps he would try stealing again. Get caught. He had the romantic idea of reaching under his jacket when a police officer came for him. Of that OK Corral feeling, when he got to stare into a gun. Would Bev’s Swiss Army Knife be enough of a threat?

But instead he found a legal move to take his king off the board.

For a while.

Chapter Eight: Empty Spaces (Part IV)

They got out of the car. The man eyed the boy suspiciously, as if checking for loot, or possibly weapons.

“Who gave you that shiner?”

Again the boy checked for useful lies. Would ‘a father’ work in his favour? A boy’s father, or better a girl’s? He wasn’t sure, decided to play for time.

“Someone,” he said, layering on a little sulk. His instinct told him to look down, as if ashamed or lying.

“Someone you stole from?”

 “No!” he spat, and glared at the man, suddeny certain how to play it. He forced himself to think of the man who had hit him, to pump for anger and disgust. “He stole from me. We had agreed…” He bit off the rest of the sentence, looked away again.

“He had agreed, to…” he muttered.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the man adjust his belt, then wipe his brow, and he was certain he had him. But to make sure he let the silence become uncomfortable.

“Well,” the man said. “You can carry my bag.”

A short while later, they arrived at the man’s cabin: a small windowless room, the confined space thick with the hum and thrum of the ferry’s engines. The tiny, attached moulded plastic bathroom smelled of disinfectant. The boy put the bag down. The man sat down on the bed, looked up at the boy, then took off his glasses and began to polish them on his sweater. When he had put them back on, he said:

“My name is Richard. How should I call you?” and he put his hand out, as if he had forgotten how to introduce himself without doing so.

The boy waited just long enough to make Richard remember, then shook it – his palms were unpleasantly greasy – and said: “Ariel. Ariel Storm.”

He let go, stuffed his hands into his back pockets and looked down at the toes of his scuffed boots. “Um. Friends.” He looked over to the little neon light glowing over the headboard of the bed. “Friends call me Arik.”

For a while, neither said anything. Then Richard cleared his throat.

“Are you hungry, Arik?”

The boy nodded and they went to the restaurant. Richard asked him if he wanted a burger and fries, and then ordered the Viking Burger with cheese and bacon for the boy, while he had the haddock with chips and peas himself. He insisted on apple tart for both of them for desert.

“Can I smoke on deck, please,” the boy asked afterwards. Richard lectured him about health risks, but the boy could see how it made Richard both uncomfortable and happy to have him behave like a prisoner. He got his cigarette, and they talked about the stars. The boy pointed out Cassiopeia, and Richard showed him how to find Pegasus from there.

“It looks more like a kite with a tail, than a horse,” the boy said.

“True.” Richard looked at it for a while and cocked his head. “But it can still fly, can’t it?”

Richard watched the boy finish his smoke. Then he put a hand on the boy’s back: “Back inside, now.”

The boy knew he should shake it off angrily, it would fit the character better, but he felt too tired. They went back to the cabin. Richard guided the boy inside, and then locked the door from the inside, pocketing the key after a moment’s hesitation.

His voice shook slightly when he said: “Make yourself comfortable. I’ll be with you right away.” Then he went to the bathroom and closed the door behind him.

The boy stood uncertainly in the room. There was no sound from the bathroom. He sat down on the bed, opened his boots and kicked them off. Suddenly he felt embarrassment for the sour smell of sweat coming off him. Hastily he peeled off his socks, then his jeans, then his jacket and sweater. He bundled all of his clothes together and put them underneath his backpack in the corner by the door, farthest from the bed. Then he sat down on the bed, with his back against the wall, knees drawn up, blanket over the knees. And he closed his eyes and waited.

After a while he heard Richard flush and run the tap and then open the door.

Richard had undressed, too. He was wearing his unbuttoned shirt over a ribbed undershirt and grey retro boxers, and dark socks. He looked most naked without his glasses.

Richard came over to the bed in little steps, and sat down next to the boy. He put one hand onto the boy’s covered knee, looked at him. With his other hand he brushed the boy’s bruised cheek. Twice he wanted to say something, but failed. As if to release him, the boy let the blanket slide down, went to his knees and pulled his dirty white T-shirt over his head. Then he took Richard’s hand and placed it on his shoulder, as if to dance. He took the other one, but instead of placing it on his hip he tried to guide it between his legs.

Richard stood up.

“I am sorry…”

He disappeared again in the bathroom.

The boy waited for a while. Eventually he went over to his backpack, and got dressed. He took the dog eared copy of William Butler’s “The Butterfly Revolution” he had nicked from the Kirkwall hostel out of his pack, sat down with the back to the cabin door and started to read.

Eventually the bathroom door opened again.

Richard was dressed, too. The boy put his finger between the pages and dangled the book between his knees. Richard came over and sat down next to him.

“I am sorry.”

“It’s okay,” the boy said. “Do you want to try again?”

Richard shook his head, took off his glasses again and wiped them.

“I should never have even thought it. It was…”

“It’s really okay, Richard.”

“No,” Richard suddenly said fiercely. “It’s not.” And when the boy flinched, he added more quietly: “Not because…” He hesitated but then forced himself to say it. “Not because of the gay sex. But because you are a kid in trouble, and it was vile of me to even consider taking advantage of that.”

To his own astonishment the boy found himself smiling wanly, instead of bristling at the diminution. He patted Richard’s knee. I would deserve it, he thought. I would deserve so much worse. Why couldn’t you be a little bit less decent?

“So, what now? Want me to get out? I can make my way from here.”

Richard stared at the opposite wall for a while. Then he asked: “Do you play chess?”

Chapter Eight: Empty Spaces (Part II)

For two days he drifted around Orkney. He got onto public busses when he saw them and got off at random stops, to walk along the one track country roads or simply across the windswept plain. On the seemingly limitless sky clouds and sunshine changed periodically according to an inscrutable schedule determined by far away currents and convection.

At the Standing Stones of Stenness, a Neolithic circle of stones set on a narrow peninsula between two shallow lochs, he met an old man walking with two hounds. The boy had been standing in the shadow of one of the stones smoking and watching two crows argue in coarse voices when the man suddenly spoke.

“Memories, huh?” the man asked. His windbreaker was the dark blue of municipal uniforms, and he had a lazy eye that made it hard to know what he was looking at.

The boy smiled noncommittally and tossed aside the cigarette. The old man slapped the cold stone next to them. “They got memories, too, you know?” he said, and when the boy didn’t answer he answered himself.

“Yes, old memories. Do you know that they have been set up at the same time the earliest civilisations started out in Egypt and Sumeria, India and China.”

The boy looked around, across the lochs and the pastures dotted with gorse and tufts of wild oats, all the way to the end of the land and the sea many kilometres distant.

“What did people do in this place?” he asked the old man. “There’s nothing here.”

The old man looked around as well, with his mismatched eyes, and then watched his dogs chase each other between the standing stones.

“Maybe that is what they came for.”

In Kirkwall he had two strange encounters that would haunt him for a long time. One of those happened as he picked pockets in the cathedral. A clump of tourists was listening to a guide tell some tale about a woman unjustly accused of witchcraft, and who mysteriously disappeared from a dungeon cell underneath the church the night before her execution. The boy had mingled with the group and used their shoving and pushing and the distraction through the guide to steal wallets. Just when the guide encouraged them all to peer inside the gloomy hole that lead down to the dungeon and everyone was craning their heads, a hand closed itself around the boy’s wrist.

“Not this one, Jack. Believe me. It’s not worth the trouble.”

The man was tall and stared at him with intense eyes. Then he let him go. The boy slowly walked away, so as not to rouse the attention of his other victims and make sure nobody else would remember his face.

He strolled through Kirkwall for a while, and listened to two heavily tattooed girls play Minstrel Boy near the harbour. The long-haired, dark one sporting raven feathers on her arms was playing the guitar, and the cropped, blond one with the Celtic knots and heavy leather choker and bracelets played a fiddle.

At dusk he walked around the Peedie Sea, a small body of water at the Western border of the town, cut off from the sea by a narrow sandbank with a road running across. The sky was overcast and reflected the town’s lights a sickly sulfurish yellow. In the shadow of a silo, amidst high stands of pricklyburr he met the tall man from the Cathedral again.

“Hold this for a moment, Jack.” The man was holding out a red glow stick. The boy took it and in its light watched the man set fire to the spiked fruits of the pricklyburr, drop them into a bowl and inhale the lazy white smoke.

“Thanks.” The man took another hit and the boy thought he could see the man’s pupils widen and swallow all of his pupils until there was nothing but two limitless black wells. The man’s voice was cracked and strangely quivering when he spoke again: “I have something for you, Jack.”

The man took something small out of his coat pocket and handed it to the boy. The boy turned it over in his fingers. It was a guitar-pick made of ivory, with scrimshaw filigrees and patterns winding around in it in slanted likes like some sort of unearthly writing, and a silver framed hole. The boy didn’t play the guitar, but the pick seemed to be almost too heavy to be useful.

“My name is not Jack.”

“Isn’t it? Well, it should be. Run a string through the hole, wear it like a charm. You’ll never be caught again. And now go away, Jack, and don’t come back. Take the light and go back to where you came from.”

By then darkness had fallen, and the boy made his way to one of the hostels.  That night he had some problems bluffing himself past the age and ID check of the Kirkwall hostel. He tried to sell the yarn that he had gotten separated from his sister (the girl at the check-in counter seemed more receptive to a boy with a big sister than one with a big brother) who he was travelling with, that his papers had been in the backpack she carried, and that she would arrive the next day, but the girl at the check-in counter wasn’t buying it.

“Ah’m sohry, bit Ah cannae do it, luv.”

He nodded, resigned to try another hostel. He pushed his hands into his pockets and encountered the strange, heavy guitar pick. He took it out and looked at it again.

“At’s a pretty thing. D’ye play the guitar, luv?”

“Do you have a string or something?”

Maybe feeling sorry for denying him earlier, she hunted around her desk and handed him a length of some gilded cord.

“There ye are, luv.”

He ran the cord through the hole in the pick, just as the stranger had recommended, and tied both ends off. He slipped it over his head and centred the pick on his chest, underneath his T, when the girl said:

 “Leuk, there is yer sis.” And at his startled expression: “’At is yer sister, luv, in’er?”

The boy turned around and saw a young woman carrying two backpacks, a violin case, and a naked guitar. It was the blond girl with the Celtic knot tattoos who he had listened to earlier. Something about her indeed bore an odd resemblance to him. And somewhere nestled in the corners of her eyes there was weariness he recognised. Trusting his gut, he rushed towards her to help her with her luggage and said loudly:

“Hey, I thought you’d arrive tomorrow, sis. I forgot my ID in the backpack. Stupid of me. Good thing I was wrong.”

The young woman sat down the larger of the bags and handed him the other one without perceptible hesitation. “I don’t think so. You didn’t forget it in Aberdeen, you numbskull, did you?”

The boy knelt down and began to rifle through the strange bag. The young woman started to chat with the check-in girl, telling her about the annoying wet end of a little brother, and got three beds on her ID.

“Come on, wet end,” she said, jingling the room keys. “You carry the bags.”

And in the hallway: “Listen, kid.  I only agreed because I really can do without a scene right now. Don’t let me regret it.” After a pause, “Annie. You are?”

“Wet End. And thank you.”

Annie laughed. “Alright.”

In the room they were joined by her dark haired friend with the raven feather tattoos.

“Did you get it?” Annie asked, voice discordant with tension.

The raven girl nodded but asked:

“An’ who would tha’ be?”

Annie looked around as if she had completely forgotten her new relation.

“That seems to be my little brother, Wet End. Wet End, this is Bev.”

“Mistaek,” Bev said, with a broad Irish accent. She took a small package from a pocket which Annie grabbed with obvious greed. “Ye don’t want her fer a sister, ye want me. I’m the fun one. But ye can be my brother as well, if ye want te.”

Annie excused herself to the bathroom. Bev took up the guitar. She strummed it once, rolled her eyes and began to tune it. The boy sat on the edge of a bed and relished the pain her comment had caused him. It took Bev a while, but when she was satisfied, she started in on what the boy eventually recognised as “Johnny I hardly knew you”.

He and Bev then spent the night talking and her teaching him the basics of playing the guitar, while Annie lay in blissful stupor on one of the beds. The boy wondered how his sister might have turned out if she had still been alive. Early in the morning he got up and searched through the packs of the sleeping girls. He took almost a hundred pounds and an old but well-whetted, well-oiled Swiss army knife. He gave Bev a light kiss and then snuck out of the room.

That day he travelled the islands again, and slept on fresh hay in small, lonely barn in the middle of a wide, lonely field. The next night he took another ferry further north.

Chapter Seven: Storm (Part III)

Conall’s family lived in one of those long, whitewashed stone-built cottages, with small awning windows along the front and back and none in the narrow side walls that peak in a chimney. It was set a little back from the road, on a rise yellow with high, flowering gorse. The Defender roared as Conall raced it up that last bit before killing the engine in a choked stutter. When I stepped out, the coconut smell of the gorse washed over me. The sea, on the other side of the road, was dark, and quiet.

Conall took me inside. Everything was crowded with boots and coats and people. The air was steamy with the smell of boiling cabbage, and wet dog, and many conversations being carried on at once. In the living room a table was being set while a boy and a girl were hastily finishing homework. Three older men in work clothes were discussing something in Gaelic in the hall next to the front door. In the kitchen a matronly woman, her long hair streaked with silver, was directing more young people to cut bread and fill jugs. Lamps were spaced haphazardly, so that some areas were gloomy and others brightly lit, increasing the sense of buzzing chaos.

Conall shouted over the din to several people that I was “Danny” and that I would stay for tea. Several people nodded to me. The boy at the table, who was maybe a year or two younger than me, and who had dark, curly hair, bright eyes, and a chipped tooth, looked up from his homework and asked something in Gaelic. Conall laughed and answered back. I understood that he made it clear that my name was “Daniel”, not “Dana.”

Then he said to me “Masel buist fault tae yowes” and left again. I had no idea what that had meant. A young woman, maybe three or four years older than me, greeted me. Her English had the same beautiful Scottish sing-song, and the dry, harsh “r”s, but was a lot more intelligible than most of her family.

“Hi Danny. A’m Iona. Pleased tae meet ye. Tae’s awmost ready. D’ye want tae wash oop?”

And she showed me a tiny bathroom next to the kitchen. It had just about space for one deep, chipped enamel sink, and a loo with a rickety, wooden seat, and two feet, and it smelled very strongly of soap.

I closed the door, and breathed deeply. I washed my face and my hands rather thoroughly, and combed wet fingers through my shaggy and by now shoulder long hair. I looked down on myself: I was wearing my patched fatigue trousers, and – under an old black leather motorcycle jacket – a black T with bold, mustard yellow letters inviting everyone to “Guess where I’m pierced”. I had appropriated the T from an Australian backpacker on Skye. At the time I had thought it was pretty funny, but now I felt decidedly uncomfortable in it. But I couldn’t very well keep the jacket, that I had taken along when I’d left the sleeping Ruth, buttoned up to hide it, could I?

So, when I came out again and Iona took my jacket to hang it on a hook in the hall that had already two or three other pieces of garment hanging from it, the boy at the table nudged the girl and pointed out the words on my chest. Both giggled.

Iona said something to them in Gaelic, rather sharply, and they began gathering up their pens and papers. People filed into the room and sat down on chairs.

“Hey! Ta’ss ma sait!” the boy shouted when someone else wanted to sit on the chair he had been on before.

“Awricht, awricht, Sim. Dinna tak a sparey. Whit’s wi aw yir gibbles on ma ane cheer?”

“Chust sit on Conall’s fer noo!”

Sim – that’s pronounced shim – cleaned up his mess, and by the time he was done, everybody had taken their seat and  the only one that remained for me was the one next to him, from which he just then removed his book and papers.

I was officially introduced to Mr. and Mrs. MacLeod – he was one of the three men from the hall, a broad-shouldered, big-handed man with closely cropped, steel grey hair, and a dashing scar on the right side of his face; she was the woman the kitchen with the silver in her hair, and eyes surrounded by a nest of crow’s feet.

When Mr. MacLeod shook my hand across the table, he greeted me, but left my name hanging, expecting me to complete it: “Daniel…?”

“Balnchard, Sir. Daniel Blanchard.”

Gerald Daniel Blanchard is a Canadian master thief, who burgled amongst other places an Austrian castle in 1998, and who had finally been caught in 2007. I had followed his process with fascination and awe.

“Thank you for sharing your supper with me,” I added. “It was very kind of Conall to invite me.”

Mr. MacLeod seemed pleased, and for the rest of the meal, I was mostly left alone. Soon enough the necessary information transfer that always occurs when a large family sits down together took up everybody’s attention. And when Conall came back, he had to explain about the cut on his face – he had gotten plastered and fallen in to a barbed wire fence – and then about the sheep, or yowes, he had bought.

Only Sim kept quietly bugging me.

“Whaur ye frae, mo caritsh?”

“Canada.”

“Uss’at sae? Whaurawa frae tare?”

“Winnipeg.”

“Och, aye? Nae frae Quebec?”

“No.”

“Bit Blanchard uss a French naem, nae?”

“Yes, but people have French names outside of Quebec as well.”

“Yer accent ussna Canadian, uss’t?”

“My mum is from Austria.”

“Hou auld ar ye?”

“Sixteen.”

“Awricht? Ye leuk yunger. Masel uss fourteen!”

That last bit he said with all the pride of someone who only earned that distinction very recently.

“Sae, whit ar ye daeing in bonnie auld Alba?” He grimaced and thre a quick look at his dad, before he added: “In Scotland A meant.”

“Just travelling.”

“Aw by yersel?”

“My rents are back on Skye. Your brother Conall picked me up hitchhiking.”

And so on.

While Sim kept up this constant Q&A, I tried to figure out the peeps at the table and their relationships. Mr. MacLeod was a right patriarch, he kept the pose of the unmoved mover at the head of the table – and even though the table was round, it was very obvious that the head was wherever he sat. The others seemed to regard him with a mix of fear and respect. Most of the other were his children, and their general management was apparently left to Mrs. MacLeod. There were two daughters and three sons present, though I gathered that a few more had already left the house. One girl was a friend of Iona, and one boy a mate of seventeen year old Boyd. One of the older men from the hall had left when supper had started, but the other was a friend and neighbour, and I got the impression that he and Mr. MacLeod were working on some project or deal together, but could not pick up any details.

Eventually tea was over. I offered to help with the dishes, but Ceana, the youngest, and the one who had been doing homework together with Sim when I’d arrived, wanted me to help her with her chores, namely feeding the horses and rabbits. Sim, who would have had to go also, asked if I could fill in for him, so he could help Conall with something (a lot of technical farming terms were used, in Scots or even Gaelic, too boot, and it all went right by me.)

Ceana showed me their four horses and the rabbits they kept in boxes behind the house. From her I learned that her family were crofters, people who kept a small farm next to a main job. Her father captained a whale-watching boat from Port Maree and her mother did some administrative work for the Highland Council. But they also raised quail, held sheep, offered hiking tours in summer, and hunting tours in autumn. And they had two hunting cottages to rent to tourists.

It my be girlish, but I really like horses. When I had been younger and begun getting into trouble, this one counsellor got me a place in a stable in the Southwest  of Berlin. I was told that it was a job, taking care of the animals. I only learned later that in fact my mum had to pay for it, and that it was therapy. I still bristled at the memory of the deception, but I really enjoyed spending some time with the horses. And when Ceana noticed that I got along with them, and knew what to do, she warmed to me. That was how I found out that Sim had put her up to getting me out of the house.

When I got back, Conall told me that I would stay in his and Sim’s room for the night. He would sleep in the room of another sibling who wasn’t there that night. It seemed a bit complicated but I went along. From the pitying looks I received from Mrs. MacLeod and Iona I understood that Conall had relayed my tale of woe.

Sim showed me to the room and gave me some washed out PJs from one of his older brothers. I had expected him to take up his interrogation again, but he hurried away and left me to my own devices. I was fine with that, and sank into the thick covers. I had had more to eat than in a long wile, and since I had begun the day early and with some serious walking on Skye before getting that ill-fated lift, I was quickly asleep.

Not much later, Sim shook me awake.

“Wheesht” he hissed, signalled me to be quiet, and handed me my jacket.

“Pit on yet claes!”

“What?”

“Yer claes.” He also tossed my trousers and T onto the bed. “Coorie oop!”

“Why?” I asked, but instinct had me obeying already.

“Akis ye coud fuil ma glaikit brusser wi yer yairn, bit nae ma paw, ye bawheid. An me naisser. Tsat T-shert o’ yers, nae lad what’s feart o’ his paw wat pe caucht deid in it. And oniewey, A ken what Gerlad Blanchard uss. So A ken yer nae what ye said ye ar. Bit ma paw onlie suspects, sae he’s callin’ t’ polis in An Gjerestan reit noo! Tsat’s hou ye want uptail tis bluidy seicont!”

He opened the dormer window and looked out.

“Kin ye sclim o’er tae t’ ruif and…”

But I was already at his side, then up on the window sill, and pulling myself onto the eave line and the dormer roof.

I looked down from there and said: “Thank you, Sim!”

That was the first time, I used his name.

He smiled up at me: “Isheh do veha, Dana.”

That was, what he would call me from then on forth.

There was a noise on the landing outside his room. I froze. He ducked inside but after a second he had his head back outside.

“Fause alairm. Hey, haud on fer a sec. Masel uss richt back.”

He disappeared and I heard him hurry out of the room. I considered scarpering anyway, but while I was still checking out the best – and that meant quietest – way down from the roof, he was already back.

“Here, tak tsir.” He held up a ring with two keys. “Tay’re fer ane o’ oor deer stalkin’ boossies.” And he explained to me how to get there.

“It’s toom richt noo,” and at my confused look: “Empty. Nae occupied. Ye kin scug tare. A’ll come by t’ morn and bring ye sum scran… sum food.”

“Okay.”

I wanted to turn away, but he whispered: “A kin onlie come efter schuil us soot. Ye promise ye’ll be tare, Dana?”

He looked zp at me, his face pale in the darkness.

I promised. He nodded and ducked back inside. I crawled across the roof to the windowless side wall and down the downspout, and disappeared in the night.