Chapter Nine
Angus
Tent up. Sleeping system laid out. Dinner eaten. The sun is beginning to sink when I settle myself on a rock with a hot cup of herbal tea and a book, ready for my night’s plans.
I ease the laces on my boots to let my feet breathe. It’s been a good day. Twenty miles of tramping up and down, up and down, although I took the high road in the morning to avoid too much time by the loch where the ground is trickiest. And because it is usually quieter.
And now my reward: watching the sun set and the stars wake up, one by one. Me, my book, and the silence.
Bliss.
I’ve even climbed a hundred metres out of camp to make sure I won’t be disturbed. The view from here is unmatched: the still waters stretching south; the glinting sun on the lapping waves; the shore lined with trees; the mountains rising behind. Like a fucking postcard.
This, here. This is why I can never leave the Highlands. It is my home, through and through. This land is in my bones, every lash of rain, every gust of wind, every dawn and dusk.
A rustling in the trees behind me. A squirrel, surely. Or a deer. Now that would be something.
Then a head pops out. Hair scraped back in a familiar ponytail. That fucking hat on her fucking head: Zesty. Luminous even in the half-twilight.
Every time. Every single fucking time I manage to get a bit of peace.
I stay very still. Maybe I’ll get lucky, and she’ll not only not notice me, but also be quiet and not ruin this. I don’t have high hopes.
I track her progress over the top of the hillock. She’s come alone, and doesn’t appear to have her phone out. So far, so good. She’s wearing shorts again, lime-green today, but still tight as ever, cut high enough that I can see every inch of her long, shapely legs.
Her face sparkles in the slowly dying light.
I do a double take.
Oh. She is… Shit. She’s crying.
Crying women are not my strong suit. I hate it when people cry.
I would do anything – and I really mean anything – to make it stop, but most of the time my attempts at comfort resulted in more tears and someone else storming up to say something along the lines of “Angus, why are you always so insensitive?”
To which I have no answer. I just am.
Rowan slumps down a few metres away. She still hasn’t made a noise, but even from here I can see the tension in her shoulders, the way they shudder up and down. Holding her knees tight, as though she’s tamping something down. Locking it in.
I know a thing or two about that.
I have to say something. If I try to leave, she’ll notice me. And if I stay here in silence… then I’m the creep who watched her cry. Fuck it. Here I go.
“Nice view, isn’t it?”
“Shit!” She’s up instantly, rubbing her eyes, raising her chin. Trying to pretend. “Where did you come from?”
I shrug. “Got here before you.”
“You can’t go creeping up on women like that! You could have given me a heart attack. What if I’d mistaken you for a wolf, or, or a grizzly bear, or a yeti, and gone haring off and fallen over in the dark and broken my leg!”
“See a lot of yetis in Scotland, do you?”
“I’m looking at one right now.”
That makes me laugh. “You were looking at quite a bit more of me earlier.”
Her expression crumples, and I worry she’ll start crying again, but instead she presses her fingers to her temples and looks away.
“I’m so sorry. I only wanted to have a look. Not like that! At the loch! The sun was coming up and I thought it would be so pretty and I— Are you laughing at me?”
“Ach, it’s alright, London. If I was that worried about being seen, I wouldn’t have stripped there in the first place, would I?” I sip my tea and lean back on one hand.
“I swear I have burned the sight from my memory. I remember nothing. Cross my heart and hope to die.”
I grunt, surprised by my own pang of disappointment.
The sky is washed in tones of purple and orange, the clouds streaking to hazy pink.
“Good of you,” I say, eventually.
“It’s gone. Forgotten. Penis. What penis?” Rowan claps a hand over her mouth. “Shit. Did I say that? I meant… Pennines. Yeah, those rugged Scottish mountains. Lovely.”
“The Pennines are in Northumberland.”
“And they are lovely.”
“Nice try, London.” I tip my head back. “I meant the lad, though. Kind of you to help him out like that.”
They staggered into the campsite long after I’d already settled my things. The young lad’s arms around her shoulder, limping slowly along. The mother and little girl following them behind. An unlikely group, but that’s hiking for you. The trail can forge the most surprising of bonds.
I looked at her and thought: strong. Managing the pack and half the weight of a full-grown man, when she’d clearly never walked further than her own back door before. Stubborn set to her eyes. I was… impressed.
“You sound surprised.”
“You didn’t seem like the type.”
“And why not?”
“Big city girl, aren’t you? London’s not exactly known for its kindness and community.”
“And you’re so warm and fuzzy?”
She unfurls a bit, uncurling from her ball. I make a conscious effort to keep my eyes on the setting sun, and not on the dip of her breasts inside her top, or on her cherry-pink lips, or the way her blue eyes glow in the reflected light.
“What do you have against London anyway?”
“Too busy. Too loud. Too crowded. Too unfriendly. Too big.” I tick the reasons off on my fingers one by one.
“Yeah, sure.” She waves a hand dismissively.
“But think about the privacy, the freedom. You can be whoever you want and no one cares. Wear a tiara, play the banjo, put your shoes on backwards. No one gives a shit! No one even gives you a second glance. Total anonymity. And the culture, and the transport, and the cafes, and Hampstead Heath and Victoria Park, and wandering through London Fields with a flat white and a pastry. God, drinking wine on the canals, or the takeout. Whatever you want! The food, Angus. Think about the food. Anything, anytime, anywhere. It’s a miracle, that’s what it is.
” She shakes her head. “Why am I bothering? I bet you’ve never even been. ”
“I have actually,” I find myself confessing. “I lived there for a year.”
“You?” She stares at me as though I’ve grown a third head.
I roll my eyes. “Didn’t think a country bumpkin like me would survive in the big city?”
Now it’s her turn to scoff. “I’d hardly refer to you as a country bumpkin. Rugged lumberjack seems more apt. Or yeti, as I said.” She folds her arms. “It sounds like you hated it. Why did you stay for so long?”
“Job paid well.”
I can’t tell her the real reason I moved.
Or the guilt I felt. Only Mason and Ross know about that and that’s because they have it too.
I was the last survivor. The final brother to abandon the sinking ship of our Da’s alcoholism, as he went from one beer a day, to five, to ten, as he drowned himself and everything he was and everything he ever loved in drink after drink after drink.
The job offer, when it came, was an escape. I took it reluctantly, telling myself it was temporary. The salary was good enough that I could send money back to help pay someone else to work on the farm, keep it afloat while Da was determined to drive it into the ground.
I hated London. Hated every lonely, grey day I spent there, tramping down flat, dirty pavements, in the shadow of flat, oppressive buildings.
The shitty houseshare with the too-small shower and the too-low pressure and the shit, hard water.
It didn’t even have a garden, just a sad excuse for a patio, paved over because a lawn was too much upkeep.
The endless commute, always with some stranger’s face buried into my armpit because of how tall I was.
Violet was the only good thing about it.
A polished gem in a sea of concrete. She was far too good for the likes of me: a city girl from her platinum roots to her white trainers that had never seen a fleck of mud.
Proper. Wealthy. Smart. I’d never understand why she picked me up that night in the bar. Never questioned my luck.
But even she couldn’t make London a place I wanted to be.
“So why did you come back?”
I remember the phone call with pinprick clarity.
Relief and heartbreak and guilt and despair and a terrible burst of joy all at once.
Da was sick. He collapsed in the field. Pancreatic cancer, they said.
Six months at best, they said. Come back, they said.
Ross was on his honeymoon and Mason had accepted his dream job in Edinburgh.
There was no one else. I was the eldest. I was the one who had left.
My fault for not being a better person. A better son.
The next day, I grabbed the small bag of belongings I’d never really unpacked, and said goodbye to the housemates I’d never befriended, and got on a train back to Glasgow. And that was that. My life in London, over. My relationship, over.
Violet and I tried to make it work. But she wasn’t cut out for the farm. And even once Da had passed, I couldn’t leave it again.
I don’t want to tell Rowan, who is still a stranger, any of that. So I settle on a version of the truth. Palatable. Stripped clean of all the ugliness, the mess.
“I missed Scotland. Missed the fields, and the green and the shape of the sky. And Da needed me back to help on the farm.”
“That’s nice of you. I bet he’s grateful.”
“He’s dead. So.”
I hate this part. I tense, waiting for it: people can’t handle death. It makes them weird, uncomfortable. They clam up, or panic and babble. But Rowan looks at me with those wide, blue eyes and tentatively touches a hand to my arm.
“How long?”
“Four years.”
“God, I’m really sorry, Angus. That must fucking suck.”
She says it so sincerely that it takes me aback. I can feel her fingers burning on my skin. I want to shake them off. I want to grab hold of them and kiss them, every one, and I don’t know where the feeling has come from and I like it and hate it all at once.
“It is what it is.”
“Do you really feel that way?”