Catherine sulked over to the opening and climbed down into her brother’s den. Leek pulled the loose pallet closed over their heads. Inside it was as musty as an open grave and dark as a closed coffin. Catherine no sooner began the low exhale that preceded her moaning than Leek warned her, “Haud yer wheest,” as he shuffled about in the pitch-blackness. In the farthest corner there was a clinking of metal, and the space lit up with a faint smoky light.
The camping lamp threw long shadows around the cave-like space. The centre of the hollowed-out pallets was easily twice the size of their bedroom at home, but the ceiling was only about six feet high. Leek had covered the floor and the walls in old bits of discarded carpet and flattened cardboard boxes. Through the narrow hole in the top he had dragged old bits of furniture and broken kitchen chairs. The pallets had been arranged to make supporting columns, and some had been angled and covered with old rugs to make a type of hard-looking settee. On the carpeted walls were naked pictures of Page Three girls. Someone had put up a picture of Maggie Thatcher and another joker had drawn a veined cock going into her haranguing mouth.
Catherine watched her brother go about making his home comfortable for her. She had known some of the older Sighthill boys who had hollowed it out a few years before. After the wildest of them had stabbed a nosy night watchman they had been left pretty much alone. It was a great place to get drunk and sniff bags of glue. Most of the younger boys just liked that it was a space free from their heavy-handed fathers. Some of the boys brought girls here and would make beds out of borrowed coats and jumpers. Slowly, as good reputations became ruined, the Sighthill girls stopped coming to the pallet den. The boy’s voices kept breaking and their hormones kept raging, so most of them skulked away in randy pursuit. The pallet house became emptier and quieter. Now Leek could often spend the entire weekend there alone.
If Agnes would take a drink on a Thursday, then Leek would take some tins of beans and powdered custard from his granny’s kitchen and come here to hide. When he’d come back on a Sunday night, they would all be watching the television. Agnes would be soft and repentant, the demon drink having left her. She would make a cuddling space on the settee next to her, and he would sit close, enjoying the warm, perfumed smell of her bath. Lizzie would look at him with a distant smile and ask him if he’d been in his bed all weekend. It was good to be a quiet soul.
Not that he was small. By the time he turned fifteen he was already over six feet tall. He had always been skinny, and as he grew he became even more thrifty and efficient in build. His hair, like his build, he had inherited from his long-forgotten real father. It was fine and wispy, mouse brown in colour, and hung softly over his ears and eyes. His eyes were grey and clear but always slow to show emotion. He had long perfected the art of staring through people, leaving conversations to follow his daydreams through the back of their heads and out any open window.
Leek was as economical with his emotions as he was spare in build. From his real father he had inherited a gentle personality, quiet and pensive, lonesome and faraway. His only real physical concession to his mother was his nose, large and bony, too severe to be Roman. It broke the line of his soft, shy fringe and sat upon his thin face like a proud monument to his Irish Catholic ancestors. Agnes had gotten it from Wullie, and Wullie had gotten it from his own father, who had brought it from County Donegal. It left no one unscarred and overlooked no man or woman in the Campbell lineage.
The den was a carpeted fort, a boy thing. It smelled like beer, glue, and semen, and Catherine did not personally see the appeal. Walking around the room, she shrank from the mess and the tins of half-eaten food. She wiped the tears from her face and sniffed. “How long have you been here today?”
“Dunno,” he said, pulling a discarded coat from a mouldy heap in the corner. “She blootered the dregs of the christening whisky by lunchtime.”
He held the dry overcoat out to her. Catherine stepped out of her good green coat and slid into the man’s Harris tweed. It smelled of lanolin and sweat, but the crispy dryness of the rough wool felt good. Leek took an old biscuit tin from the shelf above the girlie pictures and handed it to her. They sat together on the home-made sofa. He put his arm gently around her and climbed inside the coat till they had an armhole each.
Catherine lifted fingerfuls of the sweet cake from the tin. She could taste the amber sugar of the syrup her granny was fond of. It made her feel better. “I haven’t eaten anything the day. There was no one to cover the phones, and Mr Cameron said he would bring me in a sandwich when he got his own lunch. But he didn’t. And, well, I didn’t like to say, or else he would know he had hurt my feelings.”
“Feelings are for weaklings.” He was using the Dalek voice she hated.
Catherine drew her head out of the collar and looked at him coldly. “Well, hiding is for cowards.” The long shy eyelashes fell low on his pink cheeks. Ever since he was a boy, he had been easy to hurt. She drew her arm back inside the mothy coat and wrapped it around his back; she could feel his thin ribs through his school jumper. “I’m sorry Leek. It’s terrifying coming out here to find you. I’m wet, and I was afeart, and now my new boots are ruined.”
“You can’t keep anything good around here.”
She pulled him to her, two years younger and already a foot taller. She buried her damp crown in the crease of his broad chin. She let herself cry quietly and tried to let the anger she felt for the neds and their fishing knife bleed out of her. “Have you been hiding here all day?”
“Aye.” His sigh ran through her. “I told you. She woke up and I could tell over the cartoons that there was a belter coming. She was shaking something terrible, so she asked me to watch the wean while she went out to the shops . . .” He trailed off.
She knew he was staring into the distance. “Did she take a drink in a pub?”
His eyes had glazed over again. “No. I . . . I don’t think so. She had the whisky, then I think she got a carry-out and battered some in the lift back up.”
“Well, it is very dry up at that altitude.” Catherine licked the last of the sticky mess from her fingers and put the tin down.
“Aye, she seemed fair parched,” he said sadly. There was a long silence between them. Leek took out his top set of porcelain dentures and rubbed at his cheek as if they had been pinching. Agnes, annoyed with the constant trips to the dentist, had convinced him to have his teeth, weak and riddled with aluminum fillings, pulled for his fifteenth birthday.
“Do they still hurt?” Catherine asked, grateful that her teeth were still her own.
“Aye.” He flicked the slabber from the plate and put it back in his mouth.
“I’m sorry, Leek, and I’m sorry I left you the day.” She gently kissed his cheek.
It was a tenderness too far. He put his hand over her face and held her away from him. “Get off me, ya minger. Besides, don’t ever feel sorry for me. I’m done feeling bad about this shite.” Leek unbuttoned the oversize coat and stepped back out into the cold. He pulled the sleeve of his black school jumper over his knuckles and wiped his sister’s kiss from his face.
Watching him, Catherine thought how Leek would have looked twelve had it not been for the large Campbell nose. She watched how his long fingers, as delicate and fine as a clockmaker’s, worried it, ran the length of it constantly, fidgeted with it, measured it, and then regretted it. He lowered his hand from his nose. “Stop gawking.” He stepped out of the lamplight into the dark side of the den.
Catherine picked up a black sketchbook. Leek had been drawing again. She flicked through the pages holding intricate sketches of bikini-clad
