shallow dive, angling towards us a few hundred metres away.
‘Just pipes and tanks,’ Helen shrugged. ‘There was a loft door into mum and dad’s room.’ She smiled. ‘When we started getting interested in sex, we used to pretend we’d get up there one night and see if we could catch them at it, but we were too frightened.’ Helen laughed lightly. ‘Had us giggling ourselves to sleep a few nights, though. And anyway, Ferg had put a bolt on it.’
The little white Cessna roared overhead, waggling its wings. Lewis and Verity and Helen all waved. I stared up, seeing the single tiny figure waving in the cockpit. The plane banked, circled round the hill the castle stood on and came back over, lower, engine loud and echoing in the woods beneath.
I made myself wave.
Oh dear fucking holy shit, I thought.
The plane waggled its wings again, then straightened out over Dunadd as Fergus took the Cessna - his Christmas present to himself - back north to its home at Connel.
‘That it?’ said Verity.
‘Yup,’ Helen said.
‘What did you expect?’ Lewis asked. ‘A crash?’
‘Oh ...’ said Verity, heading for the door to the stairs. ‘Let’s get back in the warm.’
Blam! Remember, remember. Amman Hilton. Look -! JUST USE IT Kiss the sky, you idiot ...
‘Prentice?’ Lewis said, from the little door. I looked over at him. ‘Prentice?’ he said again. ‘Wake up, Prentice.’
I’d been staring after the departing plane.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Yeah.’ On still shaky legs, I followed the others down from the wind-blown battlements and into the warm bulk of the great stone building.
‘So the televisions weren’t going wonky at all,’ I said, still struggling to understand.
‘That’s right,’ Rory said. ‘It just looked like it, to me only.’ He plucked a long piece of grass from beside one of the standing stones and sucked on the yellow stalk.
I followed suit. ‘So it was in your head; not real?’
‘Well ...’ Rory frowned, turning away a little and leaning back on the great stone. He folded his arms and looked out towards the steep little hill that was Dunadd. I stood to one side, watching him. His eyes looked old.
‘Things in your head can be real,’ he said, not looking at me. ‘And even when they aren’t, sometimes they ...’ he looked down at me, and I thought he looked troubled. ‘Somebody told me something once,’ he said. ‘And it sounded like it had really hurt him; he’d seen something that made him feel betrayed and hurt by somebody he was very close to, and I felt really sorry for this person, and I’m sure it’s affected them ever since ... but when I thought about it, he’d been asleep before this thing had happened, and asleep again afterwards, and it occurred to me that maybe he’d dreamed it all, and I still wonder.’
‘Why don’t you tell him that?’
Rory looked at me for a while, his eyes searching mine, making me feel awkward. He spat the blade of grass out. ‘Maybe I should,’ he said. He nodded, looking out across the fields. ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’ He shrugged.
I stood there, back at the same stone my Uncle Rory had rested against, a decade earlier. I’d left the castle and driven here to the stone circle shortly after we’d come down from the battlements. There was still plenty of time to get back to Lochgair for dinner before I had to set off for Glasgow, and Ash.
I leant against the great stone, the way Rory had when he’d talked about the man betrayed, the man who’d seen - or thought he’d seen - something that had hurt him. I looked ahead, out over the walls and fields and stands of trees. I shivered, though it wasn’t especially cold.
‘See?’ I said, quietly, to myself.
Maybe Rory had been looking at Dunadd that day, as I’d assumed at the time. But beyond Dunadd, just a little to the right on this line of sight, I could see the hill where Gaineamh castle stood, its walls showing blunt and steel grey through the naked trees.
‘Prentice!’
‘... Yeah?’
‘Food! Come on, it’s getting cold!’
Mum had been calling from the bottom of the stairs. I was sitting at the desk in the study, curtains open to the darkness, just the little desk light on, its brass stalk gleaming, its green shade glowing. I looked back down from my reflection in the dark computer screen, first to my watch - still half an hour before I had to leave to pick up Ashley -