Snowed In With My Stepbrother novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: Dennistoun

The message ended.

The Land Rover's engine ticked at the top of the pass.

Below us the road dropped away east into a white glen I'd never see the same way again.

Finlay switched the engine off.

He sat looking at the snow walls with his hands in his lap.

"Eight million," he said.

"Finlay."

"The fank. The burn. Old man at the end of the table with his grandfather's grazing." He breathed out. "Let him. It's not mine to save now."

"No."

He turned his head.

"We turn round now," I said, "and we're the two who got thrown out, coming back up the drive to beg. Your father shuts the door and Euan laughs. I'm not doing that."

"Then what?"

"Then we go to Glasgow tonight, and we think, and we go back when we've something better than begging."

He looked at me for a long time.

Then he started the engine.

My flat was four floors up a tenement in Dennistoun, one big room with a north window and a sink full of brushes.

Canvases stood face to the wall in rows.

The bed was under the window because that was where the radiator worked.

Finlay stood in the middle of it with his holdall on his shoulder and had to duck the light.

"It's smaller than the boot room," he said.

"It's mine."

"Aye," he said. "I can tell."

He put his bag down and looked at everything.

The tubes on the windowsill. The coffee jar of pencils. The half-finished canvas of the shack in snow on the easel, under a sheet.

I'd started it on the twenty-seventh, from memory.

He didn't lift the sheet.

He asked first.

"Go on," I said.

He looked at it for a long time without saying anything.

Then he made dinner, because he said I looked like I'd not eaten since breakfast, and I hadn't.

He fried eggs in my one pan and burnt every one of them black at the edges.

He set off the smoke alarm, and stood under it flapping a tea towel, a man who could gralloch a stag in the dark.

I laughed so hard I had to sit down on the floor.

"It's the hob," he said. "Your hob's wrong."

"My hob's fine. You're a laird. You've had a housekeeper since birth."

"I'm not a laird. I've been put out."

"Then you're a man who can't fry an egg, in a flat in Dennistoun."

He looked down at me on the floor, with the tea towel in his hand and the alarm still beeping.

Then he started laughing too.

We ate the burnt eggs on toast sitting on the bed.

Afterwards he went to wash the plates and stopped dead at the end of the canvas rows.

One canvas wasn't stacked with the others.

It was turned to the wall on its own, behind the wardrobe.

I'd put it there two and a half years ago so I wouldn't have to look at it.

He took it out before I could stop him.

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