Bird of Passage Read online

  The dream cellars were light and bright. He wondered why his mother had told him never to come down here when they were so beautiful. He had never known there was such magic down here, the glowing coals of a comfortable fire, soft rugs and springy couches. Although he had left her in bed, in the way of dreams, his mother was waiting for him, her legs tucked up beneath her on one of the couches. She held out her arms to him and said, ‘Come here, my Finny, and give your mammy a kiss.’ He clambered up beside her, snuggling in, and saw that his mother’s friend, Phissie, was sitting at a table. Her name was Phyllis, really, but he couldn’t say it properly. He called her Phissie, and she didn’t seem to mind. He could see that she was doing a jigsaw puzzle. Phissie was fond of jigsaws and, whenever they went to visit her, Finn liked to help her, although he wasn’t very good at it, his fingers too clumsy to arrange the fiddly pieces. He liked the big, round puzzle of scenes from Alice in Wonderland best of all, although it was hard to do. She would do the edge first, to start him off, and hand him pieces to fill in, telling him where to put them, correcting him gently when he tried to force something into the wrong space.

  ‘Come here to me, Finny, and give us a hand,’ said Phissie. ‘You have to finish the puzzle, you know.’

  Suddenly, he was beside her, staring down at the scattered pieces on the polished table. But she hadn’t done the edges for him, and he was confused by the miscellany of shapes and colours.

  ‘I don’t think I can,’ he said.

  He looked behind him for his mammy, hoping she would help, but he couldn’t see her. She wasn’t curled up on the couch any more and he didn’t know where she was, and then, just as he felt the panic rising inside him, like steam inside a kettle, he woke up. For a moment, he didn’t know where he was.

  Outside, there came the rasping call of some night bird flying over the farm. He felt the tension leave his body. Just the dream. The same old dream. He settled down again. He was aware of Francie’s quiet presence beside him. He was warm and comfortable, with a full belly. He had a sudden, piercing sense of something else. What could it be?

  Safety.

  He felt safe here. He sighed, pulled the scratchy blanket up close under his chin, and drifted back to sleep.

  CHAPTER TWO

  All day long, Finn and Francis had been labouring in the sandy fields, working on the early crop. They had been well warned that these delicate earlies could easily be damaged. Mostly, the two lads would have to follow the plough along the drills, gathering up the potatoes into baskets, but with the earlies Finn wielded the graip or fork, digging carefully to make sure that all the tubers were lifted, one by one. Kirsty Galbreath had overheard her grandfather saying, ‘he works like a grown man, that one.’ She was nine years old and an only child, living with her widowed mother and her grandfather on this ancient farm, perched high up on the windy spine of the island with its fields sweeping down to the sea.

  She had come running up the hill from school in her red summer sandals with her leather satchel on her back, and had seen her grandfather, leaning on the field gate, staring down at the workers with a frown on his face. She distracted him by running to him, and he swung her up in the air, her pigtails flying. She loved to feel his big hands birling her round and round. Fields and sky blurred around her, and then she was on her feet, holding onto his legs to steady herself. It frustrated her that there were no other children on the farm and only a handful in the village. There was so much to tell and so few people to listen.

  ‘Kirsty, my darling!’ he said. ‘Did you have a good day?’ He lifted his cap and replaced it more comfortably on his head, a habitual gesture.

  It was almost holiday time, but they never went away. There was too much to do about the farm at this time of year, and her grandfather seldom left the island except to go to the cattle market on the mainland. Once or twice, her mother had taken her to stay with relatives in Glasgow, in October, but summer holidays were invariably spent at home.

  Alasdair singled Finn out from the others, and called him over.

  ‘You there! Come here to me!’ he shouted.

  The boy shambled up to the gate, wiping the sweat from his face with a grimy hand.

  ‘Yes, mister?’ he said.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Finn, mister. My name’s Finn.’

  He looked ready to shy away, as though expecting a blow.

  ‘Slow down, lad,’ said Alasdair, abruptly, almost angrily. ‘Take a rest for God’s sake! I’ve been watching you. You’ve been going at it like a mad man.’

  Finn looked back along the drills, wondering whether he should obey the farmer or whether he might catch it from Micky Terrans if he did. But Micky was elsewhere in the field, deep in conversation with one of the Scottish workers. Behind Finn, Francis looked up from his own, slower work. He could not bend over for long. The pain in his back half killed him. So he preferred to kneel down, shuffling along in the mud. He almost spoke, but caught Alasdair’s eye, thought better of it, and turned his attention to his work again. Kirsty watched the slender boy stagger to his feet and haul on his basket, lugging the potatoes over to the big containers at the side of the field. She wondered that his arms could hold the basket and its contents without snapping in two. It was uncomfortable to watch him. Instead, she turned back to Finn who was stretching out his arms, loosening the tight muscles.

  ‘What age are you?’ said Alasdair. ‘Both of you. You and your pal over there...’ Then he smiled. ‘No. Don’t answer that. I don’t want to know. But take a rest. And tell your friend to do the same when he comes back. Take a drink of water and ten minutes rest. This isn’t a chain gang, lad, and you’re not slaves.’

  ‘I don’t think we’re allowed...’

  ‘This is my farm, and I say what is and isn’t allowed here. Don’t worry. I’ll speak to your gaffer. In fact I’ll do it now.’ He strode off along the side of the field. Young as she was, Kirsty knew that look. You didn’t cross her grandad when he was in this mood.

  She stared at Finn, unashamedly curious. He gazed back and blushed, his cheeks flushing scarlet. Francis came over, carrying the empty basket. He looked scared. ‘What are we to do, Finn? What was he so angry about?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I don’t think he’s angry with us. And we’re to have a breather. He said so and he’s the boss.’

  ‘He thinks you’re working too hard,’ said Kirsty. ‘He’s my grandad. And he is the boss. So you’d better do as your told.’

  She skipped away, following in her grandfather’s footsteps, caking her red sandals with mud. Francis stretched out on the lush grass at the side of the field, glad of the rest. But Finn watched her go, watched her swinging fearlessly from her grandfather’s arm, even while the man seemed to be having some kind of altercation with Micky Terrans. She was not shaken off. Instead, the farmer slipped his big arm around her, and pulled her in close, hugging her gently.

  In the summer, when the nights were light, Kirsty was allowed to stay up late and wander where she pleased on the farm, so long as she stayed away from dangerous machinery, (they had drummed the danger of tractors into her so thoroughly that she couldn’t see the old red Ferguson without a thrill of horror) and the precipitous cliffs on the far western side of the island. While Kirsty was still a baby, her father had been crushed when a tractor rolled on top of him. They had rushed him to hospital by boat, but it had been too late to save him. Although she didn’t remember him, she knew what he looked like. There was a black and white photo of him in the living room. It was taken at some farm show or other. He was standing beside a prize ewe: a smiling young man in overalls and a flat cap like the one her grandad wore.

  She had no-one on the island to play with. There were only half a dozen children at the primary school, and most were much older or younger. Kirsty had collected a family of dolls, and she would take them down to the shore or to the burn that ran at the back of the house. There, she would kneel on the big flagstone that served as a bridge
, and toss them into the water, seeing which of them emerged first, pretending that they were having a race. In truth, they looked more as if they were drowning than swimming, with their rigid arms raised in supplication. The peaty water did them no good at all. They were a worn and haggard bunch, but she loved them.

  Annabel Laurence, who sometimes lived at the big house, was just a little older than Kirsty, a year maybe, but she already went to boarding school on the mainland. She spent most of her holidays in London, and only visited the island occasionally. Even then, she hardly acknowledged Kirsty’s existence, but once she had sat in church and pulled faces at Kirsty during the whole long sermon. Kirsty had responded in kind, indignant but enthralled, until her mother noticed, and shook her by the shoulder.

  ‘Will you stop that nonsense!’

  Not long after the arrival of the tattie howkers, Kirsty climbed up the rocky slopes behind the farmhouse, scrambling through heather and bracken which grew almost as high as herself, scratching her bare knees, raising clouds of crane flies that blundered unpleasantly about her head. She flapped her hands to beat them off until she reached the summit where the breeze deterred them. Up there was a wide saucer of land which sloped gently to a tumble of rocks in the middle. From the furthest lip of this saucer, she could see the great, blue-grey expanse of the western sea, pied here and there with patches of wind. Her grandfather called this place Hill Top Town. That’s what she called it herself, though sometimes she wondered why, when there was no town here at all; there was only this shallow bowl of land, with jagged rocks, a thin covering of lumpy turf, and drifts of purple thyme papering the crevices. It was her secret place. Her palace, her fortress, her sanctuary.

  Except that tonight there was an intruder. The Irish boy, Finn, was sitting on a rock, looking out at the sea, shading his eyes against the setting sun. She was not dismayed by his presence, only curious. His shoulders were hunched and, even from behind, he looked dejected so, because she was not yet shy of boys, she went and plumped herself down beside him.

  ‘Hello!’ she said. ‘What are you doing here?’

  He turned to look at her. ‘Just sitting,’ he said. ‘Why? Am I not allowed?’

  ‘Why should you not be allowed?’

  He didn’t reply. He had learned very quickly that there were a great many things which the visiting Irish were not allowed to do, a whole catalogue of rules. Micky Terrans had hammered them home. The men and women, not the boys, were allowed in the public bar of the hotel, but not in the lounge. They were not made welcome in the shop although they were tolerated, two at a time. They were not supposed to light bonfires, or stray too far from the farms where they were working. If anything went missing, however small, they would be blamed. Jimsy Murtagh had declared that the most that had ever gone missing on the island was a clutch of eggs or the odd turnip out of the fields, but the tattie howkers were blamed anyway.

  Kirsty knew it too. She remembered her grandfather saying, ‘They must always be watching their step for fear of putting a foot wrong.’

  ‘And why not?’ her mother had replied. ‘You know as well as I do what they are like!’ But her grandfather would never agree.

  ‘It’s bigotry, nothing more. We are the same blood,’ he said, strangely, and Kirsty had no idea what he meant.

  She looked sideways at the boy. It didn’t seem to her as though they could possibly have the same blood. He was very dark, with short sooty hair like her favourite cat and a thin face with marks like bruises under his eyes. But he had beautiful eyes like little fishes. He seemed too old and grown-up to be a playmate. He looked very sad, and she saw that there were tears on his eyelashes, and her own eyes filled up with sympathetic moisture.

  ‘Ooh don’t cry,’ she said, and watched as he rubbed his eyes fiercely with a grubby hand, leaving sandy smudges around them.

  ‘I’m not cryin’,’ he said, angrily. ‘Why would I be cryin’? The wind’s in me eyes. That’s all.’

  Surreptitiously she lifted the hem of her skirt and pulled a faded blue handkerchief out of her navy knickers. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘You can have my hankie anyway.’

  ‘I don’t want it.’

  ‘But look at you, you’re all muddy.’ She licked her hankie, and wiped briskly at his cheeks, the way her mother sometimes cleaned her own face and hands when there was no soap and water to hand.

  He started to laugh. ‘I’m alright, sure. I’m fine. Leave me alone will you?’ he said, pushing her away. His accent was funny. He took the hankie from her and rubbed his eyes. When he handed it back to her, it was streaked with sandy marks of soil from his face and fingers.

  ‘What do you do with your handkerchiefs?’ her mother would say, when she was sorting them out for the weekly wash.

  ‘Where’s your friend?’ she asked him. ‘Where’s the other lad?’

  He looked round, uneasily. ‘How should I know? Down in the byre maybe. Sleeping. I don’t have to spend all my time with him, do I?’

  ‘I was just asking.’

  The truth was that Francis had wanted to come, but he had given him the slip, desperate to spend a little time on his own for once.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she asked him. ‘Finn what?’

  She was a great one for names.

  ‘You have to know the names of things, Kirsty - trees, plants, birds, flowers.’ That’s what her grandfather always told her. ‘Names are important. It’s no good being careless about such things.’

  Her grandad knew the names of all the wild flowers which grew on the island and she liked to file the words away in her mind. Bogbean and ladies tresses. Speedwell and celandine. She liked the sounds that they made on her tongue. It was almost as though she could taste the words themselves like the luscious bramble that grew in such profusion, and the glossy but bland crowberry. In her mind, the words themselves had colours, colours that had nothing to do with the objects they described. But even more than saying them, she liked to draw and paint them.

  Ever since she could first hold a pencil, Kirsty had loved to draw. When she ran out of drawing paper, she had simply drawn on the endpapers of books, or in the farm account books, or sometimes on the wallpaper in her bedroom. Eventually, her grandfather had persuaded Mrs McGregor, who owned the village shop, to stock large pads of coarse cartridge paper, paints, paint brushes and soft pencils, and kept Kirsty well supplied with them. She liked to make pictures of flowers and birds and animals. The kitchen wall was full of them, all sellotaped together, because her mother could never bear to throw any of them away.

  ‘My name’s Finn O’Malley,’ he said.

  ‘Finn O’Malley’ she repeated.‘Are you from Ireland like the rest of them?’

  He pointed to the south west where the sea glittered in the light of the

  setting sun.

  ‘Somewhere over there.’

  ‘Are you homesick?’

  He considered this for a moment. ‘Maybe. But I don’t know why.’

  ‘Why don’t you know why?’ She was a persistent child. She would follow a question to the bitter end and beyond.

  ‘Because I don’t live at home.’

  You wouldn’t call that place home. But then, where would he call home? His memories were a series of vivid pictures, like the comic books they had once been given at Christmas. Visitors had come to the school and brought Beano Annuals with them. The boys had looked at them for a day or two, but then the books had disappeared. His memories of home were like comic books with some of the pages torn out. He couldn’t always make sense of them.

  ‘Oh.’ Kirsty nodded sagely. He must know what he was talking about. But she didn’t really know what he meant.

  ‘Is your mammy not here with you?’ she asked.

  ‘No. She’s not with me.’

  ‘You must miss your mammy though,’ she said, after a pause.

  ‘Yes, I miss her. But I don’t live with her.’

  ‘Do you not?’

  ‘No.’ He was reluctant to elaborate,
ashamed of the truth. What would she think of him if she knew? ‘I’m away at school. With a lot of other boys. Francis as well.’

  ‘Is that his name? Your friend? He’s very thin, isn’t he?’

  A brief smile hovered over his lips. ‘We call him Francie. He’s thin, for sure. He’s at the school with me. There’s nobody fat at the school. Well, not the boys, anyway.’

  ‘Is he homesick as well?’

  ‘I think he’s just glad to get beyond the school wall for once. We both are.’

  ‘We go away to school as well. When we’re older. We all have to go and stay on the mainland during the week. Is that what you have to do? Do you live on an island?’

  He shook his head but didn’t choose to reply.

  ‘Is it nice?’ she asked. ‘Your school?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not? What’s wrong with it?’

  He hesitated. ‘They won’t let me go see my mammy.’

  She wondered who ‘they’ were and how they could be so cruel.

  ‘But you can see her in the holidays, can’t you?’ she asked. ‘Oh but you’re here, of course.’

  ‘That’s right. I’m here. Diggin’ your tatties.’

  ‘That’s a shame. Well, I’m glad you’re here. But I’m sorry you won’t see your mammy.’

  He was silent again, staring at the sea. He had not asked her name but she ventured the information anyway.

  ‘I’m Kirsty.’

  ‘I know it. I heard the ould man calling you that.’

  ‘Well, my proper name is Cairistiona but everyone calls me Kirsty just. Kirsty Galbreath.’