Free Scrap Metal by Harper Fox Page B

us should have been speaking it in front of a stranger, so I’m sorry.”
    “Maybe I don’t count.”
    He was smiling faintly. I considered his tone. It could just mean that the old man had felt easy enough in his company to forget his manners, a compliment of sorts. It could also mean perhaps I don’t exist.
    “Oh, you count,” I told him, not really thinking what I was saying, “or he’d never have offered you Alistair’s room.”
    “Alistair? Oh, my God. Not your brother’s.”
    “Yeah. You could’ve knocked me down. He hardly mentions Al. I don’t think either of us has even been in there since…”
    “Nichol, I can’t possibly.”
    “I know. It’s weird that he offered. But in a way I don’t see why not, and he’s right—it’s probably more fit for human habitation than anywhere else in this barrack. Come on, let’s go and have a look at it at least.”
    The door wasn’t locked. Cam watched me warily while I pushed it open. He thought me strange, I imagined, for doing so with such a steady hand. My own calm puzzled me. Unconsciously I’d avoided the place for a year, not so much as glancing at it as I went past, and now I simply couldn’t work up any sense of the occasion. After all, it was just Alistair’s room. If we’d stripped it and cleared it I might have felt more, but as things stood—untouched, unchanged—this could have been any one of the hundreds of times when I’d walked in, welcomed as a kid, in our teenage years as often as not shouted at for failing to knock. Nicky, you wee tick! In the unlikely event of you ever finding a girlfriend, I’m gonna do this to you!
    I smiled. I had been a classically annoying little brother, hadn’t I—always in the wrong place at the wrong time. There were Al’s football trophies, his collection of posters from rock festivals. He’d had this room all his life, and there were his unsuccessfully hidden traces of childhood—a box of soft toys shoved halfway into the wardrobe, the painted-over Dr. Who wall panels showing themselves in bas-relief, the ghost of a TARDIS travelled on forever now. There was his unmade bed.
    I turned away. Cam was planted in the doorway, white as a sheet. “Look,” he whispered. “It’s a grand room. And I’m the last man in the world who should be choosy, but…”
    “But you’d rather sleep in the barn. Aye. Me too.” I hustled him gently back out into the corridor and closed the door behind me, turning the latch round tight. “There’s a room just round the corner here. Use that one.”
    “I don’t want to offend him. Your granda, that is.”
    I didn’t think you meant Al. “You won’t. He sleeps off by himself at the other end of the house. Just…duck into Al’s room if you see him coming, and he’ll never be any the wiser.”
    I showed him into the bleak little cell round the turn in the corridor, which had nothing worse to face in it than a bare divan bed and perishing cold. “Jesus, it’s freezing. I’ll get you some bed linen and a load of blankets.”
    “Later. It’s okay. This is fine.”
    He’d laid a warm hand to my shoulder, as if I needed calming. I didn’t. I was abysmally cold, inside as well as out. It was just that if I didn’t do something for someone, make this room more habitable, provide food, see to the sheep, I was going to leap out of my crawling skin. “I’ll get them. They’re just in the airing cupboard down the hall. I’ll find you a couple of hot-water bottles too, and… Oh, wait. I forgot about your feet.”
    “My what?”
    “Your blisters. Come on. The bathroom’s just down here.”
    “Oh. No, it’s okay. They’re fine now. It was just walking down from the—”
    “Cam, let me see to them, all right? We’ve got work to do on foot tonight, and you’ll be screwed if you get them infected.”
    He followed me obediently, though I’d seen the puzzled shadow in his eyes. I didn’t know what the tremor in my voice had been about either.