The days began to pass in a sunlit dance, and I forgot.
Chapter Fourteen
“How’s it coming on, then?”
I surfaced from an ocean of linguistic abstracts. A mug of coffee—my fifth that afternoon—had appeared at my elbow. I had an assignment due the next day, and Cam, in between taking over all my work around the farm, was keeping me supplied.
“Not bad.” I scrolled back up a few pages on my laptop screen. “If kids from non-base-positive linguistic groups can easily learn base-positive languages, there must be an inherent link to bridge the two.”
“Really? That’s fantastic.” He stood behind me, took the knots out of my shoulders with a few deft, delicious strokes then planted a kiss on the side of my neck. “If only somebody other than you on the whole planet cared.”
I grinned. “Cheeky bastard.” Other people did care, as I’d discovered since our newfound financial stability had allowed me to get broadband installed. I had a lively network of other far-flung rural academics who divided their time between their dissertations and hard manual graft. My sense of isolation, both at home and globally, was gone. “There’s a guy in Reykjavik who thinks I’m the new Noam Chomsky.”
“There’s a guy in your kitchen who might mind that if he knew what it meant.”
I stretched my arms up, drew him down to me. “Don’t worry. He’s ninety years old, and he’s got a beard you could lose a sheep in. And it just means I’m incredibly clever.”
“Oh, I see.”
He brushed his lips over my ear, and the screen blurred in front of me. He ran his hands down my chest, and his fingers probed under the waistband of my jeans, finding the target an inch below my navel where I’d touched myself the night of his arrival, dancing in the kitchen on my own. I didn’t know what lay under there—an energy centre, my ma would have said, a chakra—but he could make me hard with the lightest pressure on the spot, a clockwise circling.
“How’s things in the shed?” I managed, sounding only a little strangled.
“Not bad. I’ve started something new. Not sure if I’ll dare finish, though.”
I didn’t push. He was gruffly enigmatic about his art, and I would see the results when they were done, not before. “Are you getting time, what with Harry being out of action and doing all this stuff for me?”
“Harry’s better today. He did the light feeds. And Jen and Kenzie junior are great.”
“Okay. Good. Then have we got time for a quickie?”
His chuckle broke against my neck, making the hairs rise. “I have, yeah. Not so sure about you.”
“I want you, Cam. Want to taste you, swallow you down.”
“Och, God. Is there anything hotter than a well-brought-up island lad talking dirty?”
“I don’t know. You can tell me when I’m sucking the come out of you.”
“
Nichol…
Laundry room do for you?”
“Oh, yeah.”
I hustled him into the concrete five-by-five space where we kept the ancient washing machine and luxurious new dryer. It was well ventilated, the windows high and small. Harry had to put up with the occasional casual kiss these days, the sight of his grandson on the sofa with his arm around another boy, but there we drew the line for him.
I pushed Cam up against the dryer, blindly slammed the door behind us and dropped to my knees. He was so wound up and ready that I barely got him into my mouth before he cried out, buried his hands in my hair and let go, and I was little better. We’d managed a good few slow dances now, keeping it quiet in my room, the door firmly locked, but mostly we still jumped one another like randy tigers, the sights and sounds of climax in the one driving the other half crazy with need.
“Cam,” I choked out as soon as he withdrew. “Please…”
“Yes. On my way for you, lover.” He knocked me down with gentle force onto the concrete floor. He stretched out on top of me, pushing a knee between my thighs, reaching to cradle my skull. He drove his free hand into the gap between our bodies, clasping me so tight and hard it didn’t matter that the explosion tore me apart—he brought me home again, brought me down safe. In one piece somehow, locked in his embrace. He was the heart of my world, my gravity, my sun. My life before him was a dream from which I’d joyously awoken. He turned this dusty cell into a prince’s chamber, hung it with satin and silks. I loved him.
He helped me onto my feet. We brushed one another down, fastened zips and shirts. He put my hair back into some kind of order, wiped away traces of semen from around my mouth. Then he steered me back through into the kitchen, pulled out a chair and sat me down in front of my computer again. “There. Now work.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. That’s due in the morning, and I want to proofread it tonight. Here—your coffee didn’t even have time to go cold.”
He was gone. I drank my coffee and tried to collect my thoughts from their scattered orbit. The afternoon sunlight was delicious. Just for a while I drifted, resting my chin on my hand. Philology was fascinating, but so was the view from the kitchen window. I’d watched it through all seasons, through all the years of my life. It was perfect now, dreaming in the heat. A flock of lapwings had settled on the sweep of moor nearest the house and were involved in some mysterious parliament, emitting their curious cries, more akin to a computer game than birdsong. My lover, tanned in his white T-shirt, was making his way back to the west pasture where he was fixing a stretch of wall. Harry had showed him how to drystone, and he’d picked it up straightaway, as I never had in all the old man’s years of trying to get through to me how block fitted to block in the courses. They’d worked together wordlessly, both of them content. Scents of thyme reached me.
Thyme, crushed grass, a tang of petrol. I listened, and a familiar thrum began to rise on the breeze. Soon it was a roar, and I smiled as Harry broached the horizon on our one remaining tractor. He’d been off-colour for the past few days, but he’d sworn he wasn’t about to miss a ploughing season. His father had done it with horses, and his father before him, and so on back into the mists of Seacliff time. There’d probably been some proto-Seacliff here in the Paleolithic, stamping along behind his team of oxen.
The tractor was more or less held together by its rust. The plough blade was new, though, a grant acquisition of which Harry was savagely proud. There he was, a splendid charioteer in woolly hat. He must still be feeling the cold, and I wondered if he’d got out of his bed today just so he could try his new toy. I watched him manoeuvre the tractor into position, the southwest corner of the field he was going to plough to set our next crops of oats and barley. The engine’s snarl became a steady beat. Back and forth he would go, in a pattern that looked simple but took years to perfect. A straight furrow, a neat turn. Back and forth.
I turned my mind to my work. Words and ideas came to me, disciplined somehow by the rise and fade of the tractor’s motor. I typed rapidly for a while then stopped to check a reference in a book.
The lapwings were taking off. There were a good few hundred of them, and they cast a shadow like a lazy seal in water. I wondered what had startled them, though it only took one bird to send a ripple through the flock’s weird composite awareness. Their combined wing-beat made something flutter inside my own head, a hypnotic effect of their shimmer. Unease touched me. Probably it was only Clover or one of her grown-up, predatory brood, stalking rabbits in the long grass.
No, not Clover. She’d been asleep for hours in her customary spot while I worked, on a cushion I set out for her to keep her off my laptop board and have her within companionable arm’s reach. She was sitting up now, without any of her customary stretching and gargoyle yawns. She stared out into the warm day, and seemed to come to a grave, still attention, which transfixed mine.
I stood up. At the far end of his furrow, Harry executed a perfect turn. The field sloped downward to the north, and as I watched he picked up speed. Beyond the northern boundary lay the deep little lochan that never dried up in the warmest of summers. It was the one place on the farm I didn’t like, the water brackish and opaque, silent on its secrets. An awkward piece of land, the field above it difficult to plough, but we had to make the best of every acre. I realised I was waiting for Harry to slow down. He should be pulling up right now, getting position for his next change.
I watched. This was stupid. Why wasn’t the old bastard putting on the brakes? A flash of white caught my vision. That was Cam, pelting frantically for the quad bike parked by the gate. I didn’t see him get there, though I heard the bike roar. All I saw was Harry and the tractor hit the barbed-wire fence and sail on through.
I ran out barefoot. That was something Arran farm boys learned not to do, not unless they wanted lockjaw off the first rusty nail. I didn’t notice till the thistles were catching round my ankles, pebbles bruising my soles. By then it was too late. I’d vaulted one five-bar out of the yard and was blazing onward to the next. I couldn’t have done it if I’d been asked politely, but they felt like nothing to me now. Like toys, bits of matchwood. I took the gate into the paddock with one careless hand on the top rail and landed running. I couldn’t see over the hillcrest from here. The most direct route would be across the plough, but it was fresh, the brown earth damp and fragrant, just starting to call down the seagulls. Too rutted underfoot for speed. Instead I turned and belted up the margin of the field, where summer’s first poppies were glowing, spots of scarlet that burst on my retina and blended with blood haze.
The tractor had torn the fence to shreds. Three posts were out of the ground, the wire between them snapped and tangled. I crashed to a halt at the gap, breath heaving in my chest. I couldn’t tear my eyes off the ground, off the tyre marks. They ran straight out from the end of the last furrow and continued, two deep channels, into the turf beyond. From here—from the crest above the loch—there was only one place left to go. I knew that. I didn’t have to look. I wouldn’t look. I’d fallen asleep in my sunny postcoital daze, perhaps—I was asleep at the kitchen table, one elbow ready to slip off the edge and jolt me out of this dream. It didn’t fit. I couldn’t fit it into the pattern of my universe, that a minute ago I’d been there and now I was here.
But that was how disaster came. I took hold of one fence post, not flinching when a barb drove into my palm. Alistair and my mother, sitting on a bus at a junction outside a Spanish theme park. Most likely it had been sunny there too, light streaming in through the windows. That was how endings began. I raised my head. There was the quad bike, slewed to a halt on the shore. No sign of the tractor, the old man or Cam.
I’d kept my silence until now. I’d needed all my breath to run. As I raced down from the crest, the names formed themselves in my throat and began to tear out of me, cry after cry. “Granda! Cameron! Cam!”
Only the lapwings replied to me, skirring in the empty hollow sky. I didn’t understand how the surface of the water was so calm—not to have swallowed so much so fast and leave no sign. Harry had told me and Al that it was bottomless, but I’d thought that a story to scare us away. It had worked. We’d never swum here.
The shore didn’t admit a headlong dive. Too shallow for the first few strides, the mud sucking viciously—I waded in clumsily, scanning the murky water. Nothing. Then, when I was hip-deep, the bank angled sharply out from under my feet. I didn’t bother to fight. I welcomed the drop, kicking off at my last instant of purchase, plunging down.
Five thousand years of slow-layered peat had turned the water sable. Sunlight only penetrated the top few inches. Beyond that all was black. I’d snatched one shallow breath before going under, and it didn’t last me long, no more than twenty seconds of blind reaching in the dark. Not good enough. I mastered myself with a terrible effort and went up for air. With it came adrenaline, a great rush that wiped away my fear. I was a good swimmer. I was strong. Since Cam’s arrival I’d eaten and slept well, recovered from the winter. Everything I loved was just beneath me in this water—I would bring it home.
I gathered myself and dived. The water seemed to welcome me. I didn’t have to fight my own buoyancy the way I would in the sea. The freshwater cold gripped my limbs. I struck out downwards, shirt and jeans weighting me. Long pale shapes drifted near me, catching the last of the light, but when I grabbed at them they dissolved into reeds, the pondweeds that were the only things that could live in the peat-acid depths. Three more strokes and I was blind, hunting in the pitch-black. I tried for method. I should quarter my search area, not fumble over the same spot again and again. I was strong. I was, as I’d told Cam not twenty minutes before, very bright.
I was lost. My breath ran out and for a heart-stopped instant I didn’t know which way to go to get more. Up looked like down in here, just sterile blackness above and below. Fireworks silently burst in my brain, and then there was the faintest gleam of gold—oh, God, Cam’s hair, I prayed, his absurd bloody attempt at a disguise that would let me save him now… I lurched for it, thrusting out a hand, and it turned into sunlight. The surface burst open around me, delivering me into the air. I sucked it in gratefully—once, twice, three times, till the red blossoms faded—but I didn’t belong here anymore, not in this bright upper world. It was utterly vacant for me. I dived again.
Again and again. The fourth time I saw the tractor, a blue gleam as clouds came and went in Arran skies I thought I’d seen for the last time. The cab was at a sixty-degree forward pitch, and when I grasped its frame and reached inside it was empty. I convulsed and breathed water. An unwanted urge to survive propelled me back up—for the last time, I knew. The flooding of my lungs was horrible, was triggering expulsive reflexes, but beneath the seizures—already beginning to be a little less bad, less of a terror than I’d imagined—there was a waiting peace.
Shapes in the water beside me. Not reeds this time—something solid, real and struggling. I broke into the light one more, and Cam surfaced beside me, the old man clutched tight in his arms.