‘The village,’ said Hugh. ‘Down here, with the snow on it.’
‘Snow?’ Malcolm said, in a disbelieving tone. ‘That wasn’t snow. It was just the brightness.’
‘Uh-huh,’ Donald added, catching his breath. ‘After the dark, it was so bright I could hardly make out anything.’
‘And then,’ Malcolm chipped in, ‘you jumped back and nearly knocked us over and we thought something was wrong, so we ran.’
‘You didn’t see him?’ Hugh asked.
‘See who?’
‘The man coming up the hill.’
‘Now you’re having us on,’ said Donald, sounding uneasy.
Malcolm laughed. ‘That’s like the stories about crashes and dead pilots.’
Donald glowered. ‘It is not!’ he said. ‘It’s like the stories we believed when we were wee.’ He raised his hands, fingers dangling and shoogling. ‘Woo-oo-ooh!’
Malcolm clouted him. Donald kicked. They exchanged a few more blows. Hugh grabbed shoulders.
‘Stop it!’ he yelled.
They both pummelled him for a change, and then everyone backed off. No recriminations. They had outgrown telling on each other, but not outgrown hurting each other.
‘Forget about the man,’ Hugh said. ‘But you saw it, you saw the land all bright at least.’
‘So? It was the sun in my eyes,’ said Donald.
Malcolm nodded along. ‘Yes, that was it, the sun.’
Hugh knew they were lying. They’d seen what he’d seen.
‘Och, that’s what it was,’ he said. ‘And maybe I just saw a shadow, or a sheep.’
‘We were fleeing from a sheep?’ Malcolm asked, his voice squeaking with disbelief.
They all laughed, Hugh too.
‘I’ve got a new game,’ said Donald.
They ran down the last green slope to the back of the house and jumped on their bikes and raced away.
That evening, by way of explaining how he’d got his clothes, shoes and skin in such a state, Hugh told his father about how he’d been exploring a tunnel or cave or passageway up in the hills. He didn’t say anything about what he’d seen.
‘Show me your phone,’ his father said.
Hugh handed it over and his father punched up the GPS tracker app. He slid the phone back across the table.
‘See the place where you turn around?’ he said.
Hugh looked down at the black squiggle of his route on the screen map.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Now flick to… wait a minute.’
His father tapped at his own phone. The route line remained but the underlying map had changed, from a satellite pic with tags to a gridded white sheet with contour lines and little symbols. Right at the point where the route line doubled back was a row of tiny red arrowheads.
‘Culvert,’ his father said.
‘What’s it doing up there?’ Hugh asked.
‘The company was going to site a windmill there, a few years ago,’ his father explained. ‘Changed their minds, that’s all, but not before they’d gone ahead and started building a culvert to draw off flash floods.’ He frowned. ‘Speaking of which. One rainstorm and that would have been you.’
‘There was no chance of a rainstorm,’ Hugh said, in a sulkier tone than he’d intended.
‘Don’t give me lip,’ said his father. ‘There’s always a chance, you know that.’
‘The water would just have washed out,’ Hugh persisted.
‘No, it wouldn’t,’ his father said. He stabbed a finger at Hugh’s phone, magnifying the map. ‘The culvert wasn’t finished, see? It doesn’t have a lower opening. It’s probably flooded at the bottom already. So you stay out of culverts in future, got it?’
‘OK, OK,’ said Hugh.
‘Promise.’
‘Yes, Dad, all right.’
‘Now help your mother with the washing and then go to your room.’
He didn’t sound angry, or anxious, and Hugh left with some relief that he wasn’t in as much trouble as he could have been.
He didn’t go up that hill again.
7. Second Life
After Hugh had gone to work on Monday morning, Hope took her time over breakfast and found herself running late. She skipped the usual ten minutes of talking Nick into his clothes, and just picked him up and started inserting him in them. Underpants, warm vest, shirt, trousers… at that point he kicked – not deliberately at her, but walking his legs in midair and landing an occasional random heel on her shins.
‘Stop that!’ Hope said.
‘I’m not I’m not I’m not.’
He was drumming his heels on her now, squirming in the elbow she had around his waist.
‘That bloody hurts,’ she said. ‘Stop it!’
Instead of doing what she instantly expected and gleefully repeating the bad word that had slipped out, Nick acquiesced in sudden sullen silence, stepping into his trouser legs one by one as she set him down and held them out in front of him. He even buttoned the waistband and buckled the belt, in a belated display of independence.
Then, as she held out his cagoule, he put his arms in one by one and said as he turned away to zip up the front: ‘This is such cack.’
He said it in such a weary, resigned voice that Hope was more shocked by the tone than the content. His accent on the last word was like Hugh’s, with a long vowel and a gutturaclass="underline" caachck. And he didn’t say it in the defiant way he usually repeated naughty words, or as if said to provoke her. It was an aside, a remark.
So she didn’t reprove him.
‘What is cack, Nick?’ she asked.
‘It’s what comes out of people’s bottoms,’ he said, without so much as a giggle, then added: ‘You know – poo.’
‘Yes, I know,’ she said, getting into her own cagoule. ‘But what is “such cack”?’
Nick pouted. ‘The weather,’ he said. ‘Everything.’
‘Surely not everything?’ Hope said, holding out her hand.
‘Not you and Max and Dad,’ Nick allowed.
‘Or nursery?’
‘Nursery’s all right,’ he said.
They went out the door and into the rain.
‘Well, I’m glad to hear that,’ Hope said, locking the door. ‘Off we go!’
Nick went up the steps. To him, they were high. His legs swung out to the sides as he clambered up.
They walked down Victoria Road, rain rattling on their hoods.
‘Who did you hear saying that word?’ Hope asked.
‘What word?’
‘You know,’ Hope said.
‘I don’t know.’
‘All right, “cack”.’
‘I meant I don’t know who said it.’
‘Was it your dad?’ Hope asked, in an amused tone.
‘Oh, no!’ Nick looked up at her from under his hood.
‘So who was it?’
‘Don’t know, don’t care,’ Nick sang.
That wasn’t like him, either.
His hand tightened on hers as he swung over a puddle.
Oh well, Hope thought. Probably one of the kids at nursery. She’d have to have a word with Miss Petrie about language.
Miss Petrie, as it turned out, was outside the nursery gates when Hope and Nick arrived. She was standing talking to – or being talked to by – three mothers. One of them – Carolyn Smith, an Adventist faith-kid mum whom Hope knew well enough to nod to – saw their approach and pointed. Four heads turned. Miss Petrie looked worried, Carolyn a little embarrassed, the other two tight-lipped.
Hope marched up.
‘Good morning, Miss Petrie,’ she said. ‘Hi, Carolyn.’
‘Good morning, Miss Petrie,’ Nick said.
Miss Petrie gave him a brief smile. ‘Be a big boy and go in by yourself today, Nick,’ she said.
She glanced at Hope, as if getting permission, then stooped and pushed the small of Nick’s back with one hand while waving her phone at the gate with the other. The gate began to slide open. Nick seemed taken with the idea.