Danny stood up and raised his glass of water in a toast: “Everybody! To Ryan! And may all the students in this college be as worthy as him!”

 “To Ryan!” the others concurred, chinking their tumblers together.

 Ryan looked like he was on the verge of tears and left before betraying any more emotion.

CHAPTER: 12

 Except for occasional fallouts, the college was getting along fine. Thanks to passionate teaching and a co-operative ethos — which saw the more able students obliged to coach those lagging behind — astounding advances were made during that first term. Consequently, meal time conversations evolved from idle gossip to full-on intellectual debates, which rarely saw anyone leave the table until midnight. There’d also been something of a revolution in the preparation of the meals themselves, with every resident student and teacher being partnered off to do their stint at the range. Despite a few burnt meals early on, by winter everyone had become a competent chef, except for Danny. In fact, his meals were so abysmal, he got banned from all kitchen duties except washing-up, and even then he left a lot to be desired.

 That December, the students went home for a month, leaving Danny, Judith, Angie, Fin and Ryan, who’d been invited to stay in Hamish’s room rather than be all alone. While enjoying Christmas dinner together, they were interrupted by someone knocking at the door. It was just after three o’clock. The Highland dusk had already fallen, so that when Judith answered she could only make out a man’s silhouette. Being the season of goodwill to all men though, she brought the stranger into the candlelit kitchen where it took a moment before she recognized Dickens without his glasses. Still wearing his old brown suit, he’d been walking all day from Kinlochewe.

 Judith did the utmost to make Dickens welcome, but he threw it back in her face. Taciturn and sullen, he inhibited what had been a merry gathering, rudely smoking his roll ups while everyone was still eating. It was obvious he wanted her exclusive attention, so she took him up to her room where they sat together on the bed.

 Just out of prison, Dickens had hitched-hiked from Glasgow to Kinlochewe on Christmas Eve, having acquired the college address from a cell-mate whose daughter was a student. It turned out that he’d been arrested for fare dodging on a London bound train the day after Judith had last spoken to him at Herman’s house. Typing Dickens’s name into their computer, Motherwell Police had discovered he was already on the run, having jumped bail for two assaults, one in Edinburgh and another in Dundee. Not only that, but Bob Fitzgerald had made an allegation against him the previous day, when Dickens had been round to his apartment and dispensed a farewell head-butt. All three assaults had been inflicted upon former acquaintances who Dickens had felt let down by. One was beaten up for asking him to leave their family home, after he’d been sleeping on the couch for two months, another for not inviting him to their wedding. As for Bob Fitzgerald, well, Dickens had elevated the singer to hero status and he’d repaid him with ridicule.

 Judith was perturbed to learn that Dickens had been harbouring a dream of him and her being a couple. Indeed, to him it was destiny. He kept banging on about “us” and “we” as if their future together was ineluctable and it had only been prison bars keeping them apart. She was paying the price now for her affectionate farewell eighteen months earlier, when she’d said she loved him, in that way women do with men whom they have no physical attraction to whatsoever. She tried subtly to disabuse him of this fantasy, all the time fearing that she might become another victim of his violence.

 “Dickens, I don’t want a relationship with anybody, Ok.

 Dickens sprang up from the bed and banged his palm violently against the wardrobe.

 “Dickens, please, calm down,” Judith implored.

 “I am calm!”

 “You’ve got to stop demanding so much of people.”

 He spun round to face her again. “Demanding so much of people? Demanding so much of people! I’ve never had anything!” Then he turned and, this time, punched the wardrobe with all his might.

 Judith stood up and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Until you stop seeing every little thing that doesn’t go your way as a personal slight, you’re not going to develop one jot — and I know you don’t want that.”

 But there was no assuaging him at this time and he stormed out of the room. She followed, but by the time she’d got downstairs he’d gone. Temperatures of around minus five had been forecast, so Judith took the minibus and searched the only available road, stopping every hundred yards to holler Dickens’s name across the pitch black moorland. After a fruitless twenty minutes, though, she drove back, relieved not to have found him if she were honest.

 Three days later Hamish came back and Ryan returned to the student quarters, where he encountered absolute carnage. All the computer monitors had been smashed, wash basins and pipes torn from walls — flooding the wash rooms — while every book in the recreation loft had had its pages torn out and strewn across the pool table, its blue felt in shreds. A discarded Old Holborn tobacco packet betrayed Dickens as the culprit and explained why Judith hadn’t found him on Christmas night.

 Everyone wanted to report Dickens to the police, except Ryan and Danny. The youngster — viscerally opposed to the authorities — wanted to hunt him down and dispense his own justice, while Danny pleaded for some understanding on behalf of the homeless orphan, whose vandalism he perceived as the honest expression of a powerless man.

 “Can anyone of us here begin to imagine the sense of rejection and exclusion that poor man must be suffering? I can see no practical purpose in sending him back to prison. The man needs a family. Perhaps we should be that family? Perhaps we should take him in and forgive him, like a mother or a brother forgives when a close one goes berserk — as so often happens — smashing household objects out of hurt.”

 This was a step too far for the others, so a compromise was reached and Dickens went unreported.

 Danny postponed the students return until February, by which time the byre had been restored to its former glory. Unfortunately, one of the lads — Mucky Tea from Castlemilk — got embroiled in a gang fight during the interim period and ended up on remand at a youth offenders centre. A month later he received a six month jail sentence — something for which even Danny struggled to forgive Dickens. Mucky Tea’s place in the byre was soon filled though, by one of the local students who had trouble at home with his father.

CHAPTER 13

 By summer, Gairloch College was back on track. The art students were exhibiting their work at the village hall and Ryan was due to sign a publishing deal, thanks to Angie, who’d sent sample chapters of his work to her mother to distribute among the London literati. It had been the first time she’d contacted her family in over four years and Judith admired the way she’d swallowed her pride to help others.

 An even more miraculous event occurred after Ryan’s celebratory meal, when he ended up snogging Belinda. This wasn’t the sudden phenomenon it might have seemed. The morning after their spat at the dinner table, Ryan had taken advice from Danny and sent her some flowers as an apology, bringing them onto speaking terms for the first time. Thereafter, his teaching sessions helped develop the situation from one of polite diplomacy to mutual respect, before literary success finally wooed her.