Scrap Metal

Dedication

Dedicated to Jane, who shared my discovery of Arran, and to Arran itself, where the mermaids really do still sing.

Chapter One

They look small enough when you see them in the fields, don’t they? The springtime lambs, I mean. Tiny and weightless as clouds.

The first time my grandfather gave one to me to hold, I fell on my backside in the barnyard mud. They’re solid. Little lumps of muscle, meat and hoof. Granted, I was five years old when he dumped the first one into my arms, but twenty years later, after a climb up a cliff face in horizontal rain and a three-mile walk, I could still have dropped to my knees beneath the weight.

And wept, if there was any point. There was no one in a hundred wet acres to see. One great advantage of Arran in winter—you could break your heart with dignity. The rain would take your tears, the gale whip them away from you, and beyond the outskirts of the handful of towns and villages that clung to the island coasts, chances were you’d be alone.

A bleak consolation. A sudden gust caught me, flapping the lamb’s ears into my face. Even those were not as advertised, their wool abrasive, smelling of sour milk and mud. I stopped to catch my breath and resettle the creature under my arm.

I’d reached the highest point of my grandfather’s land. From here on a clear day you could see all the way up to the mountains in the far north, westward to Kintyre peninsula, and even catch a glimpse of the mainland fifteen miles away to the east. Harry’s farm occupied the southwestern tip of the island, a grand free sweep of turf bounded only by moorland on three sides, on the fourth by the cliffs that had given the land and the family its name.

Seacliff Farm, a fine inheritance. Or a poison chalice, from another point of view. The island economy was miring down in the recession and looked set to take us with it. These days if a plough or a trailer broke, I couldn’t afford to have it fixed, and the wreckage accumulated in our draughty barn. Our second quad bike had just failed, which was why I was out here on foot with my lamb. The farm was riddled with debts and weighted down with the government loans that had been meant to bail us out.

On the verge of failure. The rain made it through my ancient Barbour and sent a cold trickle down my chest. The lamb shivered miserably. Well, if I was getting wet anyway… I gave up, unzipped the coat and bundled her inside. Not her fault, after all, that she and her two hundred relatives would end up under the auctioneer’s hammer any day now.

Her hooves scraped my belly through my jumper. Ducking my head into the wind, I set off again, reflecting with bitter satisfaction that at least the place wasn’t mine, not yet. Harry had tried to make it over into my name—just in case, he said, he were to drop down dead all of a sudden, though as far as I could see, the chances of that were microscopic, the old sod being just as hale in his mid-seventies as ever I remembered him. I’d refused. I didn’t want the burden of it. He wanted to die on the land where he’d been born, and I owed him, so I stayed.

Not forever, though. A long wail rode in on the wind, and I saw, through rain and gathering dusk, the lights of the Calmac ferry. She was heading out. The storm looked set to worsen, but it took a lot to stop her, broad and stately as she was. I simultaneously pitied and envied her passengers. I’d have braved the tempest to be off this bloody island too, heading back to the mainland where I belonged. Where, until more or less this time last year, I’d been happily working towards my doctorate at Edinburgh University, while Harry, my mother and my older brother, Alistair, kept the farm.

These days I didn’t speak to anyone about my ma and Al. The reasons for their absence, and my subsequent marooning here, were too bloody stupid. The last time I’d gone through the story, I’d horrified my listener by bursting out laughing. Damn Alistair anyway, with his penchant for cheap package deals. He and Ma always took off for a fortnight in early spring, to gather their strength before the lambing started. Al wouldn’t rest until he’d found the best possible bargain. And this last time, his hard-squeezed pennies had bought him…

No. That was best kept to myself, and from myself, from now on. I could live with the silence. The only other soul who cared was Harry, and he wasn’t likely to bring it up. The ferry lights vanished off into the dark, and I began my trudge downhill. I didn’t miss Al, not as a brother. We’d been too different to be close. He’d been my granddad’s darling, though, the natural heir to his farm. My ma’s favourite too. I hadn’t minded much. His delight in mud, sheep and collies had freed me up to pursue my studies on the mainland.

And now I was home. One light was shining—dully, through the dirty window—in the Seacliff farmhouse. There it lay, hunched down into its hill, stonily indifferent to the wind and rain. In my childhood’s memory, it had been bright enough. Always shabby, but full of life, dogs and farmhands everywhere, a smell of baking coming from the kitchen. Now I reckoned you could film a bloody horror movie there. If Harry ever did shuffle off his mortal coil, I might sell the place as a location…

Oh, and there he was. The devil in his own backyard. He must have spotted me from half a mile off. The door to the rear porch was open wide, the old man planted in its frame, blocking the light from behind him. His arms were folded over his sturdy chest, his iron-grey eyebrows lowering worse than the clouds. I wished myself harder than ever onto the mainland boat, or anywhere other than here.

“Nichol, is that you?”

No, it’s Princess Leia, come to remind you you’re her only hope.
I thought about saying it. But you never offered lip to Harold Seacliff, not if you valued your hide. He might be an old curmudgeon, but he was the patriarch, and the only father Alistair and I had ever known. “Aye, Granddad. It’s me.”

“How come you to be so damned late? I’d have locked the doors on you in half an hour more.”

“I don’t doubt it.” Reluctantly I shoved open the gate and made my way through the neglected kitchen garden to the door. “The other quad bike’s on the fritz. I had to walk.”

“Where from, to be in such a state?”

“The cliffs. They got through the wire again. Half a dozen ewes followed the ram down the track to the waterfall. It’s taken me all afternoon to herd them up again, and…” Here came the hard part. Best I got through it fast, though, because clearly he was going to keep me standing in the rain until he heard the full story. “One of them went over the edge and broke her neck. This is her lamb.”

“For the love of God, Nichol.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s the third you’ve lost this week.”

I flinched. Insolence was one thing, standing up to his injustice was another. “The third
I’ve
lost? I can’t keep six miles of fence intact on my own. The first two went into the lochan. You told me Kenzie was seeing to that stretch of wire.”

“I gave Kenzie his week’s notice last Tuesday. He’s no’ been doing his job right since then.”

“But today’s Tuesday. You… Oh, Christ. He’s gone?”

“Do not take the Lord’s name in vain in this house, Nichol Seacliff.”

“I’m not in the house.”
Besides, a more thoroughgoing old heathen than you never dodged past a minister on Sunday.
“I’m on the bloody doorstep. Kenzie was our last farmhand, Granda.”

“It was him or the coal bill.”

“Right. So it’s just the two of us now.”

For a moment his grim face shadowed. I dropped my gaze. If I let myself think about it—and I’d known since I’d opened my eyes that morning, really—it wasn’t a year
more or less
since I’d lost my mam and Al. It was a year to the day. I had no idea if Harry had realised the anniversary.

“Give me that lamb.” He pushed by me in the doorway and hauled the little creature out from under my coat. “I’ll put her to that ewe in the back barn. The one whose twins you let die of cold last week. Gyp! Floss! Vixen! Here with me now,
gallanan
.”

I stepped back and let the tide of Border collies sweep past me. It occurred to me how much time I would have saved if I’d had a dog or two with me today, but there was no chance of that. Vixen, Gyp and Floss were utterly fixated on the old man. I could whistle my way through Handel’s
Messiah
and they wouldn’t flick an ear in my direction.

I stamped into the kitchen, pulling off my coat and slinging it onto a chair. The cavernous room was almost pitch-black, Harry’s miserly candle in the window serving only to throw the space beyond its nimbus into deeper shadow. He wouldn’t switch the lights on till the cheap-rate tariff started after six o’clock. Nor would he light the Aga until everyone was home.
No sense in heating empty rooms, laddie.
No chance of a hot bath either, then. Upstairs there was an old immersion heater that would, given an hour or two’s notice, do the trick, but there was little point in my trying for that. Harry, who pronounced it
immairgency
heater, would only permit it to be used in an emergency, like when one of his dogs had a chill and needed a soak.

I grabbed some firelighters and a handful of kindling and crouched down before the Aga’s vast, intimidating frontage. My ma had known how to call up its fires. It wanted a good clean. I could have done that for myself, but I’d put it off in favour of more pressing daily tasks.

No. More to my neglect than that. The stove had been the heart of the house, and my own heart sank utterly when faced with it. I put a match to the firelighters.

I hadn’t let the damn lambs die of cold. I’d put them in a pen with a heater that had given up the ghost in the middle of the night for want of a top-up of fuel because bloody Kenzie had siphoned some off for the chainsaw. We were running on empty, all of us. I wasn’t a bad farmer—I’d helped out in the barns and fields here all my life. But I didn’t love the work, not the way Alistair used to, and over the last year I’d seen the place fall apart under my hands.

To hell with it. I was soaked to the skin. I pulled off my jumper and the vest underneath and sat shivering in the uncertain light for a minute or so. Then I got up, grabbed a towel from the rail by the sink to towel dry my hair, and defiantly switched on every light in the room. Harry wouldn’t allow a microwave in the house, but we did have a battered kitchen radio via which, when the wind was in the right direction, I could sometimes pick up reminders of modern music and my former life.

I switched it on. A jolt of amusement went through me in spite of the night and the cold. “Traktor”,
the song was called, its main assurance being that the singer would ride its beat like one, or indeed like a motherfucking train. The profanity was just barely glossed over for the radio edit
.
The bass with its merciless one-two-three thud jounced into the room, laying hold of my hips like a pair of strong hands. God, I had loved this track, danced away dozens of messy Edinburgh small hours in its grasp. I could see myself by neon in the window’s dirty glass. I’d been considered quite an asset to the scene, though no one who saw me in my wellies and woolly hat, up to my ankles in sheep shit, would ever know it now. At least the farming kept me fit. Muscles shifted under my skin as I took one awkward, self-conscious dance step and the next. I wasn’t all that tall, and I was too stocky ever to be graceful, but I’d been popular enough.

I closed my eyes. I danced better that way. And I’d always had guidance, some sexy lad or other willing to stand behind me, press up close and sway when I did, and…

I dipped my fingertips just inside the waistband of my jeans. Paul had done that for me, while we bumped and ground in the heaving nightclub crowd, slid his hand down and spread his palm flat on my belly, encouraging, grinning against my ear. Or had it been Ricky? Maybe Jem Purdey from the engineering school, or my postgrad supervisor Mitch… It was all a bit of a blur. I’d played very hard, making up for the years of devoted teenage monogamy on this island. And I was still warm and alive down there, wasn’t I, ready to respond to a touch…

The radio signal died. Static hissed, and the beat broke up into shortwave gabble from a shipping channel. I smelled Harry’s vile tobacco one crucial instant before the kitchen door banged open.

“What the de’il are you about in here, Nichol? What was that bloody banshee racket?”

I whisked round. I supposed I should be grateful I’d had time to get my hand out of the front of my pants. The old man stood foursquare in the doorway like a bull about to charge. “It was a song called ‘Traktor’, Granda,” I told him meekly. “By a band called Wretch 32.”

He observed me in silence for a few seconds. Gyp, Floss and Vixen peered at me around his legs, adding to the scrutiny. “Naked as a babby,” he growled, “and the curtains nae drawn.” He shook his head. “If it’s a tractor ye’re interested in, Kenzie’s left one broken for you in the barn.”

Five hours later I crawled into my bed. I’d fixed the tractor, only to clamber up into her cab, switch her on and have her jerk beneath me like a dying horse and lapse into silence again. Probably I was getting oil stains on the sheets. I couldn’t bring myself to care. I’d had to take the one remaining quad bike and make good my temporary fix on the cliff-side fence then slowly prowl the boundary Kenzie had abandoned. The dark little loch, barely more than a pond but apparently bottomless, exerted a dire fascination on the flock. The rain had turned to sleet, and I’d worked by the bike’s headlamps, hammering stakes and cutting lengths of wire, my hands turning numb.