Free Bird of Passage by Catherine Czerkawska Page A

when he was in Scotland.
     ‘No. You can see the hills in the distance, but that’s all. It’s very flat round about, and that’s all it is. No hills, no sea. There’s a stream. The cattle drink from it.’
    ‘And is the school nice? What about your dormitories? Do you share with Francis?’
    ‘We all share. Lots of us, rows of beds, all in the one room.’ He could smell it. Saying the words evoked the smell of unwashed bodies, the smell of sweat and piss, the smell of fear. The byre was sweet by comparison. He tried to change the subject. It was what he always did when she mentioned his school. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Look at the seal, Kirsty!’
    Kirsty loved the grey seals that popped their heads up to watch them, and the shearwater skimming low with straight wings. She loved to watch Finn bending over the oars, his hair a glossy tangle, his bare brown feet planted firmly on either side of her sandshoes, and the way he looked at her, solemnly, from under dark brows. 
    Afterwards, they took their fish ashore, and she helped him to haul the boat high up onto the beach below Dunshee and tie it to the stanchion. They sat together on a boulder, watching the light draining gently out of the sky. She picked up a swatch of dry bladderwrack and started cracking the little capsules, each one making a satisfying ‘pop’.
    ‘I wish you were here all year round,’ she said. ‘You and Francie both.’
    ‘You’d soon get tired of us.’
    ‘No I wouldn’t. I always wanted a big brother.’
    ‘Did you?’
    ‘I did!’
    ‘Well, you’d soon get tired of Francie trailing along behind us.’
    She looked round, as though expecting to see the boy wandering down the track to the shore, a combination of hope and timidity on his face at the sight of them.
    ‘He was going to the village,’ said Finn, reading her mind. ‘He’s afraid of the water. You know that.’
    ‘He’s afraid of everything.’
    ‘He can’t help it.’
    Finn was always staunch in defence of his friend. Kirsty threw away her seaweed. ‘Do you know any stories?’ she asked.
    ‘What kind of stories?’
    ‘Oh any kind. All kinds. What do you read? What’s your best book?’
    Kirsty loved stories, especially stories with pictures. She had a bookcase in her room with a whole shelf of Enid Blyton stories and a heap of old ‘Wonder Books’ which someone had given her mother when she was a girl. Kirsty pored over the words and pictures: the Wild Swans, the Tinder Box, the King of the Golden River, she knew and loved them all. When she was younger, her mother or her grandad would read to her, but now she read the stories for herself. She liked to read her favourites again and again but more than that, she liked to draw pictures to go with them.
    Finn was looking down at the sand. ‘I don’t read much,’ he said. ‘I told you before. I don’t write much and I don’t read much.’
    He was wearing a faded grey jumper that was too big for him. All his clothes seemed to be too big or too small, as though none of them really belonged to him. It was unravelling at the sleeves and he picked, compulsively, at the threads. His nails were bitten to the quick and the tips of his fingers looked red and sore.
    ‘Can you still not do it?’ she asked him, candidly.
    ‘Well, I’m not the best scholar in the world, but I can get by,’ he admitted. ‘I’m better than Francie at any rate, but that’s not saying much. He’s as thick as two short planks, God love him. We don’t have any books in the school to speak of. The teachers write things up on the blackboard and we copy them out. We don’t learn very much. We once had a teacher who read to us, right enough. He wasn’t our usual teacher. He was just there because the real teacher was off sick.  He read something called The Wind in the Willows and it was such a  gas. But he never came back to finish it.’
    ‘That’s one of my best books as well.’
    ‘We were doubled up laughing. He put on all