Chapter 9
‘You broke my compass!’
‘How?’ Murray said, on his feet.
Finlay didn’t know how he could make it any clearer.
‘When you bumped into me. You had something magnetic in your hand. Your phone?’
He was drawing the attention of everyone in the repair shop. A startled-awake baby had begun mewling and there was tutting and angry muttering coming from the group of mums around the cosy stove but Finlay didn’t pay much attention to any of this.
He was focused on making Murray take responsibility for his actions. ‘Things get damaged when people charge around carelessly,’ he said. People can get hurt, he thought.
‘I can take a look at it for you,’ McIntyre was saying in an affable way, approaching the pair, having put down his paintbrush.
‘Something magnetic?’ Murray was saying, still way behind.
‘Ah-hah,’ said McIntyre, now peering at the faulty needle under the gently domed glass. ‘You’re right enough. It’s depolarised.’
‘That’s what I said.’ If Finlay had any patience left, that would have torn it entirely. ‘I havenae a strong magnet up at the cruive to fix it with.’
‘I can see to this,’ McIntyre offered.
‘No,’ Murray said firmly. ‘If he says I broke it, I’ll happily fix it.’
This was just what Finlay wanted. An admission. Action. So why did he still feel so riled?
‘Will you?’ McIntyre was asking his son, a dubious note in his voice.
‘Aye, I will. It just needs a…’
‘Strong magnet,’ Finlay and McIntyre said in dry chorus.
‘Precisely.’
Finlay looked down at Murray’s outstretched palm awaiting his precious compass. It suddenly felt very hard indeed to part with the thing.
He had to hold in his feelings as he watched Murray carrying it off to a workbench and muttering, ‘How hard can it be?’
‘Careful with it now!’ Finlay followed close behind, not wanting to take his eyes off his compass. ‘It was my grandfather’s. Never had a problem with it before now.’ Before you! Finlay thought. ‘What’s that you’re doing now?’
Murray turned to show him his phone screen. ‘It’s a YouTube tutorial.’
Finlay had to run a hand down his face, stopping at his mouth to prevent the words coming out. If Murray would just hand the magnet over he’d do it himself in an instant and be on his way. Instead he stood next to the man, watching the demonstration too.
‘Seems easy enough,’ Murray remarked as the video ended. ‘I just need to find…’
McIntyre, who’d been rummaging in one of the many storage tubs around the shed, had returned, bringing the metallic block with him.
‘…Thanks, Dad. Right…’
Finlay watched on as Murray positioned the magnet in his left hand, the compass in his right, shifting his weight, flexing his neck like a magician building up to a big trick.
‘What are you waiting for?’ Finlay urged, wanting to get on, and simultaneously unable to draw his eyes from Murray’s hands. Desk job hands. Indoor hands.
‘All right, all right,’ he was saying, taking his time, bringing the magnet to the face of the compass with slow caution, passing it over the face in a controlled glide.
The needle juddered and resisted, jumped and shifted, until ever so slowly it submitted to the lodestone’s pull, swinging the one hundred and eighty degrees into obeyance and staying there.
‘There!’ Murray said, Finlay reckoned more in amazement than in satisfaction. ‘I did it!’
He reached for it immediately. The way the compass fit his palm settled his agitation a little. He ran a thumb over the glass. The needle pointed directly towards Murray’s chest. North.
‘Right, well. Very good.’ He wished he could be less grudging, but this whole needless exercise was one huge inconvenience.
Murray was looking at him with those green eyes shining like he was waiting for something.
‘Uh, thank you,’ Finlay tried.
‘I’ll just need your number.’
‘My number?’ Finlay had to look down to where his boots met the ground. Was the earth shifting again? What was going on?
‘Or an address?’ Murray said as he dashed to the triage desk, bringing back a printed pad. ‘For the repair docket?’
‘Oh, uh, right. Of course.’ Finlay took the pad and hurriedly filled in his details. ‘I’ve got a phone,’ he felt compelled to say. ‘For rescues and mountain alerts.’
The awareness of Murray’s eyes upon the pen, watching as Finlay wrote the address of the cruive, deeply conscious of his poor handwriting, made him strive to do it nicely for once. All the while he could hear his mother complaining, ‘Oh, Finlay! What a scrawl!’
Murray was saying something. ‘You live in that tiny lower slope cottage on the edge of the auld wood, don’t you?’
Finlay returned the pad and pen. ‘That’s nae secret.’ He wasn’t sure why he was answering in this way. He just wanted to escape. To run, right out the door.
‘I always think how idyllic it looks.’
Finlay held in a scoffing laugh. ‘Idyllic?’ he repeated, weighing up the idea.
‘From down here, I mean,’ Murray was quick to add. ‘I imagine it can be a bit hairy up there, some days.’
Hairy was a highlander’s way of calling something wild and dangerous. Finlay had never thought of his cruive in that way. If anything, those four walls were his only safe place. He was always fine once the mountain was safely swept of silly tourists and his door was locked.
Finlay nodded, faking agreement to be polite and pocketing his compass. The way it slid in next to his heart settled him further.
‘I, uh, I’m happiest up along the tree line, in the green,’ Finlay said, wondering why he was explaining himself to this man.
He’d been raised in the Scottish Kirk by his Reverend father, but if you asked Finlay Morlich what God meant, he’d answer that it was another word for nature.
Whatever this was affecting Finlay, he was clearly the only one fighting the urge to run away, and now he risked overstaying his welcome, just to see more red curls and green irises.
‘What, eh, what do I owe you?’
‘It’s donations only. Entirely at your discretion.’ Murray was taking a step back, like he didn’t want to seem overbearing, a little embarrassed about the matter of money, perhaps?
Finlay had no awkwardness about money talk, not like some Scots. He pulled a twenty-pound note from his pocket and handed it over. What was money to him? He was rich beyond compare, if only he could get back to his mountain to enjoy his wealth of sky and granite in peace.
‘Anything else you need fixing, bring it down to us,’ Murray said, adding the donated amount to the form in a flowy, easy script, nothing like Finlay’s own, and making to move away.
‘You’ve no’ broken anything else of mine, have yi?’ Finlay heard himself saying, attempting a joke.
‘I don’t think so.’ Murray was returning the magnet to his father who was busy running a delicate paintbrush over a gaudy Christmas decoration. Something in Murray’s wake yanked Finlay from his spot, compelling him to follow, like a moon dragged by its planet.
Just in time, before Murray turned, the ranger managed to break away and divert himself towards the door. ‘Thank you, then,’ Finlay called out.
‘I’ll get the door for you,’ Murray said suddenly, coming for him.
Finlay caught the sound of Senga Gifford remarking to that sister of hers, ‘Save him nearly yanking it off its runners again!’
He suddenly wanted to shrink and drop through the gaps in the floorboards. Had he banged the doors when he came in? Another thing his mum had always picked at him about, charging around like a herd of elephants.
‘See you at the surgery meeting tonight?’ Murray said as he slid the doors apart for him.
‘Oh, I dinnae ken.’
Sitting in a stuffy room trying not to spill from a teacup, sharing talk about gardening and all that touchy-feely wellbeing stuff with the ancient Dr Millen and who knew how many local do-gooders and gossips? He shuddered.
‘Not interested in the environment and your carbon footprint?’ Murray said, with a maddening little grin.
This made Finlay’s feet stop upon the threshold. A spark of indignation fired within him, not something he could prevent. ‘Not interested? Not interested?’
Murray drew his neck back, his eyes rounding in alarm.
That’s more like it, thought Finlay. The man was finally looking at him the way everyone else in the town looked at him. Affronted. Dubious. Critical. And safely from a distance. It felt, not good exactly, but familiar. Better than the closeness of before.
‘I live almost entirely off grid,’ he began, determined to further widen the gulf between them.
‘My carbon footprint’ – Finlay tried to inject as much ridicule into the words as he could – ‘is next to nothing. I hike myself aboot on foot. I pick up a’body’s litter and tramp it doon the mountain to the recycling centre.
I forage the tree line for wood sorrel and chanterelles, berries and nuts.
I sleep when it gets dark, burn my own store of fallen firewood, and it’s a rare occasion I buy anything new.
Anyway, you cannae talk to me aboot feetprints…
’ He wasn’t sure that was a real word, but it was too late now, he’d said it, and when he’d been building up to his big finale too, ‘…while this place is runnin’ that godawful floodlight for hours at a time as though your carpark is flamin’ Hampden Park Stadium! ’
There. He’d done it. Roared out the only fellow that had ever regarded him with anything other than amused disdain or polite disinterest.
Only, there was that light returning to Murray’s eyes. That same look he’d had the other day, as though Finlay were somehow impressive.
‘Ah-hah! So you’re an authentic sustainability lifestyle guru? Walking the walk!’ Murray said, relentlessly cheerful.
Was he looking for things to praise about him? He couldn’t account for this level of interest.
‘As in…’ the redhead went on, ‘you’re all hashtag underconsumption core.’ He was making ridiculous air quotes with his fingers. ‘That’s very on trend.’
Finlay felt his brain turn blank. ‘Hashtag whit?’
‘You’re actually living and breathing the way of life we’re trying to engage with down here at the repair shop.’
‘Aye.’ Finlay bit the word out as resignedly as he could and turned on his boot heel to go. ‘That I am.’ He stepped out from the warm reach of the shed, the bitter cold of the courtyard hitting him.
Too right he was living sustainably. There was no other thing for it.
So many times he’d taken his morning coffee to his spot on the low wall of the storm shelter and sat there squinting down at the delivery vans clogging up Cairn Dhu high street, bringing who knew what plastic rubbish from the other side of the globe to his wee corner of it.
He’d seen the bins on the community paths stuffed with packaging and unnecessary junk every day since he moved here.
Single-use snappable light sticks. Self-heating hand-warmers (also single-use and disposed of like they were paper hankies).
Countless plastic-lidded cardboard coffee cups shoved in the gorse, as though out-of-their-sight meant this stuff dissolved into nothing.
It brought a wild rage to his belly to see the people of the world wasting its precious resources, and it looked all the more ridiculous, no, it looked all the more callous and greedy, from his vantage point up amongst the rocks and shrubs where he tried to keep peace with nature and leave no trace of himself, harming no creature, destroying nothing, taking only the barest of what he needed. These town folk hadn’t a clue.
‘It’s wind powered, you know?’ the voice called from behind him.
‘Eh?’ Finlay glanced back.
‘The floodlight? Wind powered.’ Murray was grinning from the shed doorway and pointing to the sky, in case Finlay didn’t know that was where the wind was kept.
‘Ach!’ He swept a dismissive hand, stomping away, wishing there was some way of turning back the clock hands and having that meeting all over again.
‘The other children won’t play with you if you must be so gruff, Finlay Morlich!’ came his mother’s voice as though carried on the icy gusts.
He tried his best to step lightly along the pavement after that, but knowing full well it was too late for softness now.