Lachlan looked at me and there was a small frown gathering itself into folds between his eyes. ‘Wow,’ he said faintly. ‘Are youcertainthat you’re not a rogue historian? Because that’s thekind of reasoning I’d expect from my colleagues in the history department, not from a chemistry teacher from – whereareyou from, by the way?’
‘York,’ I said, aware that coming from somewhere where history was etched into the city’s identity like acid onto glass was not contradicting his view of me. ‘But, like I said, Dad’s a McKell and Mum comes from Windsor. You seem to be the only genuine Scot on site.’
‘Apart from…’ Lachlan waved to indicate the man who’d finished horse number two and was moving on to number three, whistling to himself under his breath. The horses seemed to have calmed down a bit now, although there was some impatient ear-twitching going on. Stone-throwing boy had wandered off to poke something in the muck heap.
‘Maybe they aren’t Scots either.’ I warmed to my theme. ‘We could be anywhere. Another planet even.’ The internal klaxon, which had quietened under Lachlan’s practical assessment, sprang back into life again.This isn’t happening,it shrilled.You don’t have to make sensible suggestions. You don’t have to be rational.I bit the inside of my cheek. It hurt.
‘You’re getting carried away now,’ Lachlan observed dryly. ‘Can we just deal with falling backwards through time for now and move on to “Space, The Final Frontier” in a bit, possibly?’
‘Look. I’m about to dismiss you, the others, all this…’ I indicated the surroundings ‘…as a sharp blow on the head any minute now,’ I retorted. I could taste blood. ‘None of it can be real, it justcan’tbe, so I’m going along with everything you say as if you’re talking sense but that doesn’t mean I’m agreeing with it.’
He nodded slowly. ‘That’ll be the shock talking.’
I rounded on him. ‘It isnotthe shock! It’s bloody common sense! I mean, what’s more likely: that we’ve fallen through a hole in time to the same place a few hundred years in the past, orthat I’ve hit my head or eaten a dodgy mushroom and am having a particularly vivid dream or spooky hallucination? Seriously?’
Lachlan blinked once or twice and then said, ‘You’re a wee bit hard work, aren’t you?’
That was it. I’d had enough. I jumped up from the chopping log to the extreme consternation of the horses, who started the whole head-tossing, stamping, eye-rolling thing again, while grooming man swore a bit and scratched his head, staring directly at where I was passing through the yard but obviously not seeing anything.
I didn’t know where to go. Back to the cellar basement? I didn’t think I could face that, so I carried on past the small doorway in the wall that led to those wooden stairs, round the edge of the tower house in its huge sandstone-block presence like a giant, upright coffin, until I came out onto the open plain of the headland. The wind here came cleanly off the sea, which was rolling beneath us in a green-grey mass as far as I could see. In the shelter of the castle to its left stood a small, low building with a cross set into the stonework above the door. The kirk, still whole, squatting by the headland wall, four-square and solid.
Towards the other side of the headland there was a collection of rough drystone constructions hunched under turf roofs and huddled against the retaining wall, one window each and that small and shuttered like the eye of a tortoise. In the middle of the headland, amid pen-like structures containing nothing but trodden grass and the occasional chicken, there was a large sunken hole in the ground from where a woman in a long dress and cap was hauling water in a bucket. Her dress was flailing around in the wind and the bucket was obviously heavy. I experimented by waving and shouting ‘hi!’ but she carried on dragging at her soggy rope and fighting the skirts of her dress, which billowed and looked as though she were about to soar off into the distance. She ignored me, obviously.
There was no one else around. For a castle, I thought as my brain freewheeled around sanity seeking a foothold, this place was decidedly under-populated. Where were the men in armour striding manfully about? Where were the dogs and the lords and ladies? Where were the wimples and the tapestries and the roasting oxen? The place looked more like a campsite for a strict religious sect.
The woman had drawn the full bucket out of the well now. She left the wet rope coiled on the ground and hefted her container, slopping water, onto her hip, then set out towards the squat row of buildings on the far edge of the headland. I watched her struggle with the weight, wrestling the bucket into a more comfortable position against her side, until a sound from behind me made me turn. The little stone-throwing boy hurtled around the corner and ran towards the woman wailing a torrent of words that seemed to be all emotion and very little vocabulary.
He ran straight through me.
4
Up until then I’d been – not reconciled to what had happened exactly, not accepting, but I’d almost got my head around the fact thatsomethingout of the ordinary was going on. The stone-cold shock feeling had sunk deeper into my chest to allow room for function to continue. I was breathing and rationalising and keeping calm and carrying on. But when the small child ran right through my body as though I were nothing more than an image on the air, all my careful thought and reasoning shattered, the strength left my limbs and I sank to my knees on the ground.
Part of me watched the boy clasp the woman around her thighs, to the detriment of much of the water, while she tousled his head and led him away. The rest of me did not know where to put myself. Fear blanked out rational thought, cognitive dissonance warred with the very real feel of the ground beneath me and my throat was full of bile and blocked by screams that wouldn’t come out.
I sank my head down inside my jacket in an attempt not to see what was right in front of me, smelled the very twenty-first-century perfume that I’d put on in the guest-house bathroom only this morning, and howled.
It was close to hysteria, a complete loss of control. None of this,none of itcould be real! Sobs rose in waves up and out into hiccups and partial words as I went under, letting the horror of what was happening to me take over. I could feel the thin, sandy soil under my hands, smell the salt-flecked air around me, and hear the thin wails that issued from me, but all at one remove, as though I were watching myself. Deep inside I knew this wasn’t helping, knew that I should try to regain some measure of control before I lost all reason and tried to hurl myself from the cliffs, but I was beyond rational thought.
At last I lay flat out, exhausted with weeping and yelling, having arrived at that plateau of emotional overload when continuing starts to feel a bit self-indulgent. Overhead there were gulls calling and when I rolled over to face the sky, they were gathering in a wheeling, circling mob above me like a bunch of cut-price vultures around a corpse.
‘Bugger off,’ I said, vaguely. They were there. Undeniably, absolutelythere– I could see the savage orange beaks and the outline of feathers against the sky. My imagination was good, but why would I bother imagining seagulls? And when one of them dropped a blob of white bird poo onto the grass near my head I had to face the fact that this, whatever it was, was actually real.
‘You’re all right down there, aye?’ To my extreme embarrassment, Lachlan was standing a few feet away, hands in pockets and with his coat collar rucked up on one side, watching me.
‘I don’t know. I might not have finished yet,’ I said, from the ground.
I lay there for a few moments longer, trying to work out how to get up without further mortification, while Lachlan rocked on his heels. Eventually he said, ‘I reckon that was it. Do you want a hand up?’
‘No, I’m fine,’ I said, still supine and staring at the gulls.
‘Come on away now.’ He held out a hand and I reluctantly grasped it, being jerked to my feet by muscles that were well concealed inside that muddy coat. ‘I hope you’re feeling better after that. Are you hungry?’
‘Hungry?’ I stared at him as though he were speaking in tongues. I’d missed breakfast at the guest house and Ioughtto be hungry, but my stomach felt sealed shut.
‘Yes. You know, that feeling where you’d kill someone for a bacon sandwich? Or you might be a vegetarian, I suppose, in which case you’ve come to the right place.’ He gave me a bright smile, which sparkled in all the wrong places, and I realised that he was struggling for normality as much as I was.
‘We have to eat? We’re not like – ghosts, or something?’
