‘It was a big green dog, wasn’t it?’ he said, surprising himself. How did he know that?
‘That’s right,’ Ally said. ‘He needs distracting with a crust or you daren’t pass his bridge and walk into the foothills for fear he’ll bark three times at your back and, on the third bark, you’ll perish where you’re standing.’ She wasn’t holding back on the drama.
‘This faerie dog’s dangerous, then?’ he was saying, his own voice somehow miles away and Ally now just an airy presence, like a voice on the radio.
‘Not always. They’re protectors, especially of children out there in the mountains. They used to say the Nithy Brig faerie dog will guide a lost child home to their parents. In fact, we were all told at the school about how, once, in the fifties, a lost child who’d been gone for days come home safe all by herself, saying she was brought there by a great big green dog. So it must be true.’ Laughter rippled through her distant voice. ‘The other tales, I’m no’ sure of. But still, you’d better throw your crust for him.’
He turned the hard bread in his hand, fixing his eyes on the dark space under the bridge and the black water glittering over slimy rock.
A billowing blue moved at the edge of his vision.
‘Throw it, Jamie, darlin’. Go on, right under the bridge.’
His mum’s voice came to him from a locked place, and he threw the crust. He turned, dazed, at the sound of a camera shutter, a cool hand slipping into his – he dared not look down at his empty palm and risk breaking the illusion.
‘Well done, my clever boy.’
The voice dissolved away, and he found himself smiling at the picture taken more than two decades ago on this exact spot, and away slipped the daylight and his mum at his side, and into focus came Ally where the feeling of his dad, young and smiling behind his camera, had been a second ago.
‘Are you all right?’ Ally was asking.
He stared down at the photograph of him and his mother on a summer’s day offering crusts to the faerie dog under the brig, the moment newly opened up to his understanding.
‘Yeah,’ he said, having cleared his throat. ‘I’m good.’ He swiped tears from his lashes.
Ally lifted her phone and snapped a picture of him by the bridge, alone under the aurora sky.
The flash firing woke him further. ‘I’m ready to go,’ he said.
Ally didn’t ask any questions as she and Jamie made their way home, side by side and alone with their thoughts, the faerie dog of ancient, ever-evolving myth having once again re-united a lost child with their family, even if it was temporary, even if it was illusory. Like the northern lights, it was still beautiful.
The aurora dimmed away into sapphire blue and a tiny part of four-year-old Jamie’s shattered heart healed.
When Ally got home that night, after a quiet ‘thank you’ from a very preoccupied Jamie, who’d nevertheless insisted on walking her to her door, she found her mum still up and sitting at the kitchen table, her sewing glasses low down her nose, her needle poised. On the table before her lay her fabric shears, a bundle of crispy cottonwool and thin slivers of orangey-brown plush fabric.
‘There you are. Saw you home, did he?’ said Roz McIntyre.
‘Yep.’
Her mum knew better than to make any smirking assumptions about why she’d been out walking at nearly midnight with a lad, not after The Thing With Gray.
‘He’s nicer than I thought. Friendly,’ she added, as a sop to her conscience about not sharing things with her mum. Not that there was anything to share.
‘Your dad’s gone to bed,’ Roz said, her eyes still on the little highland cow she was working on.
‘Is Murray still here?’
‘He’s leaving early in the morning.’ Roz sighed. ‘It was nice while it lasted.’
Ally drew her lips into a sorry smile. Her mum took Murray’s absences harder than anyone.
‘What do you think?’ Roz said, clearly trying to rescue her mood, turning the little hairy coo so Ally could admire the repair work she’d evidently been concentrating on all evening.
It wasn’t unusual for her parents to finish jobs outside repair shop opening hours; there was far more work to finish than they could fit inside the ten to five of a repair shop Saturday. Or, at least, there had been until this week. Soon her parents would have their evenings back, if things continued like this.
‘I can’t sew this little guy up until someone takes a look at this thing,’ her mum was saying, holding out a small black object.
Ally advanced, taking it in her hand.
