a while. Then Rory said, ‘I think I’m going to fart.’
‘Well, you’d better make damn sure it goes out the way.’
‘Can’t; got to keep it under the covers or it might ignite on the nightlight and blow the whole house up.’
‘Rory; shut up. I’m serious.’
‘... ’sail right.’ Rory turned over, settled down. ‘It went away.’ There was silence for some time. Ken fitted his legs round Rory’s back, closed his eyes, and wished that his father had concentrated on restoring more rooms in the old house rather than building courtyard walls.
After a while, Rory stirred again and said sleepily, ‘Ken?’
‘Rory; please go to sleep. Or I’ll kick you unconscious.’
‘No, but Ken?’
‘Whaaat?’ he breathed. I should have beaten him up when we were younger; he isn’t scared of me at all.
‘Have you ever shagged a woman?’
‘That’s none of your business.’
‘Go on; tell us.’
‘I’m not going to.’
‘Please. I won’t tell anybody else. Promise. Cross my heart and hope to die I won’t.’
‘No; go to sleep.’
‘If you tell me, I’ll tell you something.’
‘Oh, I’m sure.’
‘No, really; something dead important that nobody else knows.’
‘I’m not buying it, Rory. Sleep or die.’
‘Honest; I’ve never told anybody, and if I do tell you you mustn’t tell anybody else, or I might get put in the jail.’
Kenneth opened his eyes. What’s the kid talking about? He turned over, looked to the head of the bed. Rory was still lying ‘ down. ‘Don’t be melodramatic, Rory. I’m not impressed.’
‘It’s true; they’d put me in jail.’
‘Rubbish.’
‘I’ll tell you what I did if you tell me about shagging.’
He lay there, thought about this. Apart from anything else, the horrible and ghastly truth was that at the ripe old age of practically twenty-two, he had never made love to a woman. But of course he knew what to do.
He wondered what Rory’s secret was, what he thought he had done, or what story he had made up. They were both good at making up stories.
‘You tell me first,’ Kenneth said, and felt like a child again.
To his surprise, Rory said, ‘All right.’ He sat up in bed, and so did Kenneth. They waggled closer until their heads were almost touching, and Rory whispered, ‘You remember last summer, when the big barn burned down on the estate?’
Kenneth remembered; it had been the last week of his vacation, and he had seen the smoke rising from the farm, a mile away along the road towards Lochgilphead. He and his dad had heard the bell sound in the ruined estate chapel, and had jumped into the car, to go and help old Mr Ralston and his sons. They’d tried to fight the fire with buckets and a couple of hoses, but by the time the fire engines arrived from Lochgilphead and Gallanach the old hay barn was burning from end to end. It stood not far from the railway line, and they’d all assumed it had been a spark from an engine.
‘You’re not going to tell me -’
‘That was me.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘Promise you won’t tell, please? Please please please? I’ve never told anybody and I don’t want to go to jail, Ken.’
Rory sounded too frightened to be lying. Kenneth hugged his young brother. The boy shivered. He smelled of Palmolive.
‘I didn’t mean to do it, Ken, honest I didn’t; I was experimenting with a magnifying glass; there was this wee hole in the roof, and this beam of sunlight, and it was like a sort of searchlight falling on the straw, and I was playing with my Beaufighter; not the Airfix one, the other one, and I was melting holes in the wings and fuselage ‘cos they look dead like bullet holes and you can melt a big long line of them and they look like twenty millimetre cannon holes, and I pretended the sunshine really was a sort of searchlight, and the plane crashed, and I’d thought I’d see if I could make the straw go on fire, just a little bit, round where the plane had crashed, but I didn’t think it would all burn down, really I didn’t; it just all went up dead sudden. You won’t tell, will you, Ken?’
Rory pulled back, and Kenneth could just make out the boy’s eyes, shining in the gloom.
He hugged him again. ‘I swear; on my life. I’ll never tell anybody. Ever.’
‘The farmer won’t have to sell his car to buy a new barn, will he?’
‘No,’ he laughed quietly. ‘It’s old Urvill’s farm anyway, really, and being a good capitalist, I’m sure he had it