Chapter 5: Hands Only

In the morning the Chief of Glen Ardach found me on my knees in the Tie Hall passage with a scrubbing brush.

He told me the flags were a disgrace.

He said it in front of a dozen people eating porridge.

I said, "Yes, Chief," and went on scrubbing.

My thighs ached in a way I was not ready to think about.

He stood over me a moment longer than he needed to.

Then he walked out into the yard, and the back door banged.

"Well," said Peigi, setting a bowl of porridge on the floor beside me. "That's him told you."

"Aye."

"And you're pink to your hairline."

"It's the steam," I said.

"Is it?"

I ate standing at the long table.

The Tie Hall kitchen had a rota chalked on a slate and a smell of toast.

Sixty-one people sat there, and most of them looked a good deal older than I was.

They were quiet folk, nearly all of them, with a red cord on every left wrist.

A man with a stoop gave me his chair.

A girl of my own age, with her arm in a sling, slid me the butter without a word.

"That's Peigi's funeral loan on the slate there," the stooped man said, nodding at the chalk.

"Nine hundred pounds, twelve years back."

"Nine hundred?" I said.

"It's fourteen thousand now. Dugald keeps the Book."

I looked across the table at Peigi, who was banging a pan down with more force than a pan wanted.

"Don't you start," she said. "I've had twelve years of looking at it."

"Why does it grow?" I asked.

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