Free Scrap Metal by Harper Fox Page A

got up, Cameron rising with me. Suddenly we were an ancient tribal clan, receiving orders from our chief in the ancestral shieling. I gestured Cameron ahead of me towards the door. One day there’d have to be a reckoning, if the old man kept playing it Highlander like this. All right, he’d lost his beloved heir, but I wasn’t one of his sheepdogs to be ordered about, and I wouldn’t have him snarling—even in a foreign language—at a guest…
    “Wait a bit.”
    I stopped dead. That was the trouble. He was my lifetime’s voice of authority. I’d developed habits of obedience long before my free adult will had kicked in.
    “Which room will you give to yon lad?”
    “Granda. His name is Cameron. Not student or boy or yon —”
    “In fact it’s just Cam.”
    We both looked round. He’d spoken gently, as if shy of breaking our confrontation, which I supposed from the outside did sound as if it might get settled with claymores. “At least…that’s what everyone calls me. So…”
    An awkward silence fell. Harry chewed on the stem of his pipe, glaring at us from under his eyebrows. Then he sat up and set the pipe aside. “Give yon lad the room opposite yours.”
    “What? That room’s—”
    “I know damn well which room it is. The rest are barely furnished. Do as you’re bidden, leanabh . Go now.”
    The weird light was still in his eyes, a kind of blank sheen. I couldn’t figure it out. Perhaps he’d taken to lycanthropy in his old age. I wouldn’t put it past him, and the moon was almost full… Quickly I scooped up Cameron’s shopping bags and half pushed him out of the room. I really didn’t want to know.
    Out in the hallway, Cameron glanced at me uneasily, taking a couple of the bags from my hand. “I didn’t mean to cause a fight.”
    “You didn’t. At least—there’s not much that doesn’t cause us to fight, so don’t worry about it. Go on up those stairs.” I followed him, this time keeping my eyes to myself. I’d been a pretty naïve arrival on the Edinburgh scene, but I’d taught myself to tell a boy I fancied him by looking him in the face, not the arse. “We fight over sheep feed, politics, heating bills and every other thing we talk about.”
    “Was he all right? He looked a bit… I don’t know. Not well, maybe.”
    “Oh, he’s fine.” A flicker of concern crossed my mind, but I dismissed it. Harry was always fine. I’d never known him ail a day in my life. “Mind, it’s not like him to use the Gaelic without checking you could speak it too. He’d normally think that very rude.”
    “And is it?”
    “Traditionally, yes. The islanders had a rule—they’d never speak it when an Englishman was by. So as not to make him feel left out. And of course more and more Englishmen came, so…”
    “You wiped yourselves out with your courtesy.”
    We’d come to a halt on the turn of the stairs. It took me a moment to notice. It was one of the darkest, most melancholy places in the old house, but for once it didn’t oppress me—not the mean, chilly draught stealing in through the cobwebbed windowpanes, not the dead bulb dangling uselessly overhead because only Alistair had dared scramble the full height of the stairwell on our wobbly stepladder to fix it. If Cameron— Cam , he’d said, and it suited him better, pure and direct—wanted to stop here and talk, that was fine by me. “Yes, almost.”
    “I’m not an Englishman.”
    “No.” No, you’re a flower of the west Glasgow wasteland, a proof I’d almost forgotten that nature is everywhere, astonishing and bountiful. “I’m guessing they didn’t teach it to you in school, though.”
    “They barely taught me English.”
    “Well, no more did they teach it to me, for all there was meant to be a revival. It’s a dying language. Best they let it go.”
    “Where did you learn it, then?”
    “I didn’t. At least, Harry tried to drum some into me while I was growing up, but I never really took it in. And neither of