Rory sat back, legs drawn up too. Kenneth couldn't make out his brother's expression; there was a soft glow from the small nightlight candle on Rory's desk, near the door, but it was too weak to let him see the boy's face clearly.

"Ha; I told him he was wrong."

Kenneth lay back down. Rory said nothing for a while. Then Rory said, "I think I'm going to fart."

"Well, you'd better make damn sure it goes out the way."

"Can't; got to keep it under the covers or it might ignite on the nightlight and blow the whole house up."

"Rory; shut up. I'm serious."

"… "sall right." Rory turned over, settled down. "It went away." There was silence for some time. Ken fitted his legs round Rory's back, closed his eyes, and wished that his father had concentrated on restoring more rooms in the old house rather than building courtyard walls.

After a while, Rory stirred again and said sleepily, "Ken?"

"Rory; please go to sleep. Or I'll kick you unconscious."

"No, but Ken?"

"Whaaat?" he breathed. I should have beaten him up when we were younger; he isn't scared of me at all.

"Have you ever shagged a woman?"

"That's none of your business."

"Go on; tell us."

"I'm not going to."

"Please. I won't tell anybody else. Promise. Cross my heart and hope to die I won't."

"No; go to sleep."

"If you tell me, I'll tell you something."

"Oh, I'm sure."

"No, really; something dead important that nobody else knows."

"I'm not buying it, Rory. Sleep or die."

"Honest; I've never told anybody, and if I do tell you you mustn't tell anybody else, or I might get put in the jail."

Kenneth opened his eyes. What's the kid talking about? He turned over, looked to the head of the bed. Rory was still lying down. "Don't be melodramatic, Rory. I'm not impressed."

"It's true; they'd put me in jail."

"Rubbish."

"I'll tell you what I did if you tell me about shagging."

He lay there, thought about this. Apart from anything else, the horrible and ghastly truth was that at the ripe old age of practically twenty-two, he had never made love to a woman. But of course he knew what to do.

He wondered what Rory's secret was, what he thought he had done, or what story he had made up. They were both good at making up stories.

"You tell me first," Kenneth said, and felt like a child again.

To his surprise, Rory said, "All right." He sat up in bed, and so did Kenneth. They waggled closer until their heads were almost touching, and Rory whispered, "You remember last summer, when the big barn burned down on the estate?"

Kenneth remembered; it had been the last week of his vacation, and he had seen the smoke rising from the farm, a mile away along the road towards Lochgilphead. He and his dad had heard the bell sound in the ruined estate chapel, and had jumped into the car, to go and help old Mr Ralston and his sons. They'd tried to fight the fire with buckets and a couple of hoses, but by the time the fire engines arrived from Lochgilphead and Gallanach the old hay barn was burning from end to end. It stood not far from the railway line, and they'd all assumed it had been a spark from an engine.

"You're not going to tell me —»

"That was me."

"You're joking."

"Promise you won't tell, please? Please please please? I've never told anybody and I don't want to go to jail, Ken."

Rory sounded too frightened to be lying. Kenneth hugged his young brother. The boy shivered. He smelled of Palmolive.

"I didn't mean to do it, Ken, honest I didn't; I was experimenting with a magnifying glass; there was this wee hole in the roof, and this beam of sunlight, and it was like a sort of searchlight falling on the straw, and I was playing with my Beaufighter; not the Airfix one, the other one, and I was melting holes in the wings and fuselage "cos they look dead like bullet holes and you can melt a big long line of them and they look like twenty millimetre cannon holes, and I pretended the sunshine really was a sort of searchlight, and the plane crashed, and I'd thought I'd see if I could make the straw go on fire, just a little bit, round where the plane had crashed, but I didn't think it would all burn down, really I didn't; it just all went up dead sudden. You won't tell, will you, Ken?"

Rory pulled back, and Kenneth could just make out the boy's eyes, shining in the gloom.

He hugged him again. "I swear; on my life. I'll never tell anybody. Ever."

"The farmer won't have to sell his car to buy a new barn, will he?"

"No," he laughed quietly. "It's old Urvill's farm anyway, really, and being a good capitalist, I'm sure he had it well insured."

"Oh… okay. It was an accident, honest it was, Ken. You won't tell Mr Urvill, will you?"

"Don't worry; I won't. It was only a barn; nobody hurt."

"It was an accident."

"Sssh." He held the boy, rocked him.

"I was that frightened afterwards, Ken; I was going to run away, so I was."

There now; sssh."

After a while, Rory said, groggily, "Going to tell me about shagging, Ken, eh?"

"Tomorrow, all right?" he whispered. "Don't want you getting all excited again."

"You promise?"

"I promise. Lie back; go to sleep."

"Mmmm. Okay."

He tucked the boy in, then looked up at the dull crosses of the planes, poised overhead. Young rascal, he thought.

He lay back himself, toyed briefly with his own erection, then felt guilty and stopped. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep, but couldn't stop thinking of the girl whose hair had gone on fire. He'd seen quite far down her pyjama top when he'd put his arm round her shoulders.

He forced himself to stop thinking about her. He reviewed the day, the way he often had since childhood, trying to fill the time between the light going out and his brain finally relaxing, letting him go to sleep.

Well, so much for his plan to tell his parents as soon as he got home that he too wanted to travel, that he didn't want to stay here, or get a job at the factory, managerial or not, or become a teacher like Hamish. Maybe something settled and bourgeois like that could come later, but he wanted to taste the world first; there was more to it than this wee corner of Scotland, more to it than Glasgow and even Britain. The world and his life were opening up before him and he wanted to take full advantage of both (apart from anything else, there was always the Bomb, that lurking presence forever threatening to close it all back down again with one final, filthy splash of light that heralded the long darkness, and made a nonsense of any human plan, any dream of the future. Eat, drink and be merry, because tomorrow we blow up the world).

He had intended to tell his parents all this as soon as he got in, but the incident with the girls and their tent and that poor, shocked, bonny lassie with her hair on fire had made it impossible. It would have to wait until tomorrow. There would be time. There was always time.

He wondered what her skin would feel like. It had been the colour of pale honey. He wondered what it would feel like to hold her. He had touched her — he had been sprawled on top of her, dammit — but that wasn't the same thing, not the same thing at all. She had been slim, but her breasts, soft globes within the shadows of those silly pyjamas, had looked full and firm. There had been something fit and limber about the way she'd moved, even when she'd been shivering after her ordeal. He would have believed she was an athlete, not a student of — what had she said? — geography. He smiled in the darkness, touching himself again. He'd like to study her geography, all right; the contours of her body, the swelling hills and deep dales, her dark forest and mysterious, moist caves…

The girls stayed at Lochgair for another six days. The McHoans were used to keeping open house, and wouldn't hear of the girls just packing up what was left of their possessions and cycling or taking a train back to Glasgow.