Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [71]
“How?”
“Will ye promise no’ to tell anyone?”
“Aye, sure.”
“It’s up a place near the hotel.”
They crossed the beach to the road and walked along it chatting amiably.
Before reaching the village they turned up a track which ascended to the tall iron gates and yew trees of the Kin-lochrua Hotel. Past this the track became a path half covered by bracken. It led them precariously higher and higher between boulders and bushes until Coulter halted and said triumphantly, “There!”
They were on the lip of a gully sloping down to the waters of the burn. It had been used as a rubbish dump and was half filled by an avalanche of tins, broken crockery, cinders and decaying cloth. Thaw looked at it with pleasure and said,
“Aye, there’s plenty of stuff here for a den.”
“Let’s get out the big cans first,” said Coulter.
They waded among the rubbish, collecting materials, then carried them to a flat place beneath two big rocks. They used petrol drums for the walls of the den and roofed it with linoleum laid across wooden spars. They were finishing by stuffing odd holes with sacking when Thaw heard a footstep and looked around. A shepherd was passing downhill waist deep in the bracken to their left. “Good afternoon, lads,” he said.
Thaw began working more and more slowly. Until then he had been chatting enthusiastically, now he became silent and answered questions as shortly as possible. At last Coulter threw down a piece of pipe he had been trying to make into a chimney and said, “What’s wrong with ye?”
“This den’s no use. It’s too near the path. Everybody can see it. It’s not secret at all.”
Coulter glared at Thaw then gripped the linoleum roof, wrenched it off and threw it down the gully.
“What are ye doing?” shouted Thaw.
“It’s no use! Ye said so yourself! I’m taking it down!”
Coulter pushed down the walls and kicked the drums into the gulley. Thaw watched sullenly until nothing was left but a few spars of wood and a distant clanking sound. He said, “Ye need-nae have done that. We might have camouflaged it with branches and stuff and hidden it that way.”
Coulter shoved through the bracken to the path and started walking down it. After a few yards he turned and shouted,“Ye bugger! Ye damned bugger!”
“Ye bloody damned bugger!” shouted Thaw.
“Ye fuckin’ bloody damned bugger!” yelled Coulter, and disappeared from sight among the trees. Brooding blackly on the den, which had been a good one, Thaw walked up the track in the opposite direction.
The glen had taken all the streams of the moor into its gorge where they tumbled and clattered among boulders, leaves and the songs of blackbirds, but Thaw paid little attention to the surroundings. His thoughts took on a pleasant flavour. Expressions of grimness, mockery and excitement crossed his face and sometimes he waved an arm imperiously. Once he said with a bleak smile, “I’m sorry, madam, but you fail to understand your position. You are my prisoner.”
It was a while before he noticed he had left the glen behind but there was an uneasiness in the quiet of the open moor which daydreams couldn’t shut out. The main sound was the water flowing clear and brown, golden brown where the sun caught it, along runnels which could have been bridged by a hand. In places the heather had knotted its twigs and roots across these and it was possible to follow their course by a melodious gurgling under the purple-green carpet which sloped and dipped upward to the humps and boulders of Ben Rua. Thaw suddenly saw himself as if from the sky, a small figure starting across the moor like a louse up a quilt. He stood still and gazed at the ben. On the grey-green tip of the summit he seemed just able to see a figure, a vertical white speck that moved and gestured, though the movement might have been caused by a flickering of warm air between the mountaintop and his eye. To Thaw the movement suggested a woman in a white dress waving and beckoning. He could even imagine her face: it was the face of the girl