Chapter 3 #3
‘Maybe…’ I began cautiously, ‘maybe we aren’t in the past?
Perhaps this is an alternative reality?’ Then I remembered Planet of the Apes, a film that Dad had had an obsession with and that we’d watched regularly during every school holiday when it had been his turn to have Lenny and me.
‘Or a future? Just because it looks a bit… primitive, doesn’t mean it has to be the past, does it? ’
Then I cursed my stupid brain. Being in shock was no excuse for thoughts like this. I wanted – I needed – to get a handle on what was going on so I could get back to where I should be and forays into speculation of this kind were not going to help.
Lachlan looked at me and there was a small frown gathering itself into folds between his eyes.
‘Wow,’ he said faintly. ‘Are you certain that you’re not a rogue historian?
Because that’s the kind of reasoning I’d expect from my colleagues in the history department, not from a chemistry teacher from – where are you 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 just can’t be, 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 is not the 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, or that 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.