THE STRATHANTINE IMPS

STEVE DUFFY

People always tell the truth around a campfire,” she said.

“Does this count, technically?” I said. She’d moved away from the bonfire, far back into the shadows, and I’d followed her there.

“Very good point,” she said, and smiled. So the things she told me, as the fire burned out and the noise of the festival faded away, and the short summer night wore into dawn—all those things I had to take on trust, and I pass them on to you with that caveat. Some of them can be looked up in the newspaper morgues; some you can Google. The rest, you’ll either believe or you won’t. To begin with the checkable things:

Amanda’s father was the scion of one of the biggest and most prestigious publishing houses in the UK, heir to a large family fortune which he inherited when his parents died within a month of each other in 1969. Forbes, an only child, was then just twenty-eight. He’d been married to a fleetingly fashionable clothes designer who’d left him in between bereavements. She died too, a few years later, in a motorbike smash-up in Goa.

Forbes, left with sole uncontested custody of two children, Amanda (six) and her brother Euan (coming up three), lost no time in ceding day-to-day control of the firm to the board, engaging the first in a series of identikit nannies, and abandoning his Chelsea town house for the old family estate in Scotland. There he embarked on a chemically-assisted journey of inner exploration that derailed him entirely from the whole of the outside world.

There wasn’t much room for passengers on board Forbes’ voyage. Occasionally, guests would descend on the estate, visitors from London, hippy princelings and princesses, bearded troubadours and their gauzy gorgeous girlfriends, but for months on end the family were used to going without anybody’s company but their own. Amanda’s childhood played out like a summer holiday that lasted all year round, a storybook world of no school and deliciously safe adventures in the walled grounds of the lodge.

“Dad used to come out of the library once or twice every week,” she said, “make a great thing of playing with us, banging drums and leading us around the house like some sort of crazy ringmaster. Or else he’d turn up at breakfast and get us to tell him our dreams, and he’d write them down in a journal. Most of the time it was just us and whichever Twinkle was around at the time,” ‘Twinkle’ being Forbes’ generic name for the succession of child-minders that passed through Strathantine Lodge.

The high turnover in Twinkles may have owed something to the lodge’s location, tucked away amongst ten thousand forested acres eight miles from the nearest village. The greater inaccessibility of its laird, holed up in the library with his £1000 stereo and his medicinal-grade trips, possibly also came into it. For whatever reason, none of the Twinkles stayed much longer than a season, and so there would always be a lingering sense of impermanence at the heart of Amanda and Euan’s dreamlike childhood. Otherwise, they might have thought that nothing would ever change, or would ever have an end.

The lodge was so amazing (said Amanda). You’ve no idea. It was like a dream house that made itself up as it went along, a mad little castle in Bavarian gothic dropped on the Ayrshire coast. I’m not sure the family nuttiness began with Dad, you know. Anybody who’d build a place like that can’t have been quite right upstairs, and it actually dates back to some stuffy old millionaire in the nineteenth century. All that dosh must have gone to his head, delusions of Glamis and Walter Scott and God alone knows.

There were terraces and gazebos, turrets and battlements where the piper used to play, at least one folly in the grounds, and a boathouse where a miniature steamboat lay in its own wreckage. Inside, there was a great hall and a minstrels’ gallery, it goes without saying, and on every floor rooms led on to rooms, rooms without end, each one different, each one more crazy than the last. We might have found Miss Havisham in one, and the brides of Dracula in the next, and Sleeping Beauty lying on a four-poster in the one after that. There was a big hydro pool in the basement, drained for decades, and unwashed stained glass windows like glimpses into long forgotten stories. Dad was cooped up in the library, happy enough so far as we could tell, and we were wandering around with Twinkle, or more often without her, left to our own devices. This was how we grew up, if you can call it growing up. As if Dad had been dropping the acid, but we were all of us having the trip. Those were lovely, lovely days, and we were so happy: up until the summer of 1976.

That was the heatwave summer, remember? The big drought, baking hot week after week, nothing but sunshine, not a cloud, not a sniff of rain. The lawns were dried to straw, and the whole forest felt combustible: everything smelled of dry pine and crackled like tinder. We were tanned little savages, running around half naked most of the time, and we only put our togs back on when Dad had some guests come to stay for a week or so, round about the middle of July.

His name—you’ll love this—was Alge. I didn’t know then if it was a given name or a nickname, or his surname, or something he’d just made up for himself. Twinkle and I called him “Algae”, because we both thought he was a bit scummy. The woman with him, Lettice, was kind and quiet, and I liked her a lot more. It was as if she existed wholly in Alge’s shadow, though, and she hardly ever came out from it except with us kids. She befriended us straightaway, and we let her join the club. Not Alge, though.

There was something about him I found absolutely off-putting. If Dad had taught me anything it was to be accommodating of all different types of people, so it must have been something quite marked for me to react that way. It might have been nothing more than his looks. Alge was a podgy little man with a round piggy face and thick round specs, a long thin hank of receding hair on top and a straggly handlebar moustache. He wore the same loose cheesecloth shirt with a waistcoat over it every day of his visit, and he always smelled of sweat barely masked by patchouli. So yes, it might have been his appearance, but I don’t think I was quite as shallow as all that.

There was his manner as well. Twinkle instantly marked him down as a perv, and that was spot on, I think: he would touch you, quite casually it would seem, but for just an instant too long, or in a way that didn’t feel right. He would show a little too much interest if he found us on our own. He would tell us stories that were supposed to be funny, but somehow weren’t. Kids have a radar, don’t they? It’s not always switched on—it wasn’t ever on with Euan, he was everybody’s friend—but when it is, it’s very accurate. I made a point of never being alone with him, and particularly never letting him be alone with Euan.

Luckily, Alge stayed up in the library with Dad for the most part. He was doing research, he said, after a trip to Marrakech he and Lettice had just taken. He called it a “pilgrimage”, of course: none of Dad’s lot ever just went on a holiday. He showed us slides he’d taken of Morocco, and it looked a wild place, the last place on earth, perhaps, but a beautiful place. But there was always a subtext at play, some ulterior motive. I remember even during the slide-shows, he would linger overlong on the naked street boys dancing on rooftops and beaches, draped across couches, sunlight and shadow.

Euan missed most of this, of course, so I took it on myself to keep us both out of Alge’s reach. We’d pass the day playing cat’s-cradle with Lettice, or folding paper fortune-tellers, or singing songs with her taking the difficult harmony parts. I showed her all around the estate, told her the stories we’d made up about things, and generally treated her like one of our Twinkles. I was keen to drag her out of the house for rambles, but she never seemed to want to be very far away from Alge. It was as if she needed always to know where he was, every hour of the day and night. At first I thought that was just soppiness or timidity on her part, or romantic obsession, which I found pathetic. Thinking back now, it’s clear she had other reasons.

One day, I took Lettice up on the battlements to look out across the estate. The firth was absolutely placid, with hardly a ripple on the flat blue sea. The lawns and the terraces were uniformly brown, parched soil showing through in the places where we ran and played our games. Even the pines on the hillside were lifeless, like dried flowers in an arrangement. Twinkle had gone into town on her bicycle, a trip she made once or twice a week, usually with Euan on the handlebars. Alge, so far as I knew, was in the library with Dad. There wasn’t even the cry of a gull to disturb the silence.

“It’s paradise,” Lettice said, stretching back to sunbathe on the sloping leads. She sighed happily. “Does all of this belong to you?”

“Well, not everything,” I said, trying not to sound too proud. “All of the shore, and from the line of those trees over there to the folly on the far—”

I broke off. On the path that led up to the woods, two figures were heading for the treeline, walking briskly, hand in hand. One large, one small. Even at that distance I could see that it was Alge and Euan.

I glanced back at Lettice. She was looking where I was looking, and if I hadn’t already been spooked, I would have been now. Under her peeling sunburn she’d gone white: absolutely blanched out with panic. It came to me that she’d been expecting something like this all along, that this was why she’d been so nervous. It hit like a gut punch: to realise that Lettice had been on her guard ever since she’d been here, that she’d been more worried about Alge than I’d been.

Seconds later we were both running downstairs. I knew Strathantine like the back of my hand, but that afternoon I ran from room to room, finding only locked doors, unopenable windows. The mazy layout of the lodge, the very architecture, seemed to be working against us. Finally, I dragged Lettice after me to the back morning room where the French windows opened with a stiff creak, and we ran out into the stillness of the afternoon. The hot blank void seemed to swallow up any noise we might have made, otherwise I would have screamed Euan’s name.

Ignoring the path, I set off across the lawns. I knew the trail doglegged through the woods, so I reckoned this short-cut would head off Alge and Euan before they got any distance into the trees. Behind me Lettice was running full-tilt up the gravelled path—she was an ungainly sprinter, her elbows stuck out comically as she ran, but she was covering the ground fast enough.

I slipped between the trunks of the firs, and the close low branches scratched ruby-red tracks across my skin. I wiped the blood off, and I could smell it on my hand when I held it up to my nose. Just for a moment, I wondered if something else might be picking up its scent. It was the weirdest thing: I’d been running wild in these woods ever since I could remember, and I’d never known a minute’s anxiety in them, nor anywhere on the estate, for that matter. But that afternoon on the path, I felt as if I was being watched, and by something that wished me no good. I couldn’t see it, but it could see me; that was how it felt.

I shook myself like a dog shaking off water, trying to clear my head. There was no sign of anybody until Lettice, her chest heaving with exertion, came pounding along the path. Euan and Alge should have been somewhere in between us, but we’d lost them.

I suppose the panic I saw in her face must have been there to see in mine as well. I was about to say something when Lettice put a finger to her mouth. She lifted up her head and—of all the unlikely things—she snuffled at the air. At first I thought this was ridiculous: was she going to sniff them out like a lurcher? But then I realised what it was she was smelling. From in amongst the trees there came the rich, decadent scent of burning incense.

“Be quiet,” Lettice whispered to me, and gestured for me to follow. We stepped off the path on to the drifts of fir needles beneath the trees, heading down towards the banks of the stream, following our noses.

The stream ran in a little gully through the wood, around the back of the house and down the terraces in little landscaped waterfalls into the firth. It had dried to a trickle in the heatwave: normally we’d have been able to hear it clearly from the path, but I remember there was no sound of water that day. But after a few more steps, we could hear Alge’s voice. “They’re all around us, Euan,” he was saying.

Again Lettice put a finger to her lips, and I stopped. She raised a hand, made sure I was following her lead, and tiptoed forward. I followed behind her, so nervous I was actually trembling.

“You know, I think they’ve been in this place forever. It’s been a special place, long before there were people. It belonged to them before we came and took it over. The air is thick with them, if you could only see. If you could only summon them. It’s a knack, like any other. I can teach you how, Euan, would you like that?”

I couldn’t make out what Euan said in response. He sounded as if he was out of breath from running. Alge spoke again, softly, crooning:

“They’re always waiting to come to you—you just need to learn how to let them reveal themselves. All you have to do is be in the right space, stare into the fire, breathe in the smoke, and you have to want to see them, and they’ll always be there. They wrap themselves in the flames, do you see? In the smoke and flame. Stop dancing now. Stop dancing and come to me, and look into the flames. Azhar nafsakya tifl allahab . . .”

I could see them through the canopy of the trees, pinned in a bright shaft of sunlight. They were sitting on the bank of the stream with their backs to us. Alge had cleared a circle about six feet wide, scraped it clear of fir needles and old branches and piled the debris into a little cone in the middle of the circle. The smoke we’d smelled back on the path was coming from several joss sticks stuck into the soil, one either side of him. Alge’s right hand was out of sight, but his left hand lay on Euan’s shoulder.

“The djinn, Euan. Just as I told you. They’ll writhe up out of the flames, naked and beautiful, and you’ll see them. Once you see them, they’ll always be with you. You’ll learn to summon them—watch!” Alge took his hand from Euan’s shoulder and reached down into his pocket. He produced a small glinting item: I couldn’t make out what it was at first, but then I heard the scrape and grind of wheel on flint, and I realised it was a Zippo lighter. He touched it to the kindling, and I saw flames licking out.

The sight of fire broke the spell. I ran towards them, yelling—and I can still hear myself, how childishly outraged I sounded—“You stupid idiot!” I pulled Euan away from him, and kicked the mess of kindling into the stream. “You could have caused a forest fire! In the middle of a drought! How can you be so stupid?”

Alge just sat there, staring at me with a slack grin on his fat face. “Aljaniu qadim”, he was saying to himself, under his breath. “Aljaniu qadim”. I dragged Euan away, and stood with both arms protectively around him, glowering at Alge. Just as Lettice dodged between us and began to stamp on the smouldering remains with her wooden Dr Scholl’s clogs, I saw one further thing, something I could scarcely begin to process. But it set me to running.

I ran all the way home, half dragging, half carrying Euan. There was no sound from behind us, and nobody followed us out of the woods. “Are you all right?” I asked Euan, but he didn’t say anything. He looked dazed, as if he’d barely woken from a long deep sleep. My mind was running in every direction, and I wondered what had been in that incense.

As we broke clear of the trees I heard the honk-honk of the horn on Twinkle’s bike. She was turning the corner of the drive around the side of the lodge, and I waved to her with both arms. We met each other by the open French windows, where I tried to explain what had happened. Twinkle lifted Euan up, turned him from side to side and examined him. Calmly, he submitted to the manhandling, still saying nothing. I could see she was panicking, and I thought, had everybody except me realised the truth about Alge? Had everybody been waiting for this to happen?

Not everybody, it seemed. When Twinkle and I took Euan up to Dad and told him everything, he took it all in with a show of polite interest, as if he was listening to one of Alge’s rambling tales of old Morocco. Once we’d run out of breath he nodded sagely and said, “We’ve all got a lot to learn from Alge, you know.”

“Dad!” In all the years of his comparative failure as a father, I’d never been so angry with him. “Dad, he had his flies unzipped!” There it was, the thing I’d hardly allowed myself to think about until I’d got Euan safe away.

He just looked at me with that bland incuriosity that was his unvarying response to the world and its events, the indifference that made me so mad. “Did he? Well, it’s a warm afternoon. Perhaps he was going to take a dip in the stream. Perhaps we all should.”

“Don’t be stupid, Dad,” I pleaded, but he was smiling at me, as if by insulting him I’d somehow lost the argument, and that was that. Twinkle did something then that shocked me: I’d almost forgotten she was in the room with us, but she announced herself by tendering her resignation on the spot. She’d barely lifted her voice except in song for all the months she’d been with us, but now she let it all go. She told Dad exactly what she thought of him, of life at the lodge, and most particularly of Alge. I was so proud of her.

“You need to get your head out your arse and look after your children, and you need to kick those weirdo friends of yours into touch,” she concluded, and then Dad did something that I now think burned the last of the bridges between us. He simply turned away and ignored her, and he would not speak another word until we all left the room, defeated as always by the sheer inertia of his beatitude.

I spent the rest of that day in my bedroom with Euan. He was unusually quiet, and seemed happy to read or to just lie on his stomach on the bed, staring through the wide-open window as the warm honey light of the setting sun filtered through the room. Lettice came knocking at the door, but I wouldn’t let her in. I said we didn’t want to talk to anybody; I wasn’t used to lying, and I’m sure she heard that in my voice.

Later that night, my stomach still knotted up from hunger and from fear, I heard the sound of car wheels on the gravel drive. Outside, Alge and Lettice’s Bentley was pulling away from the house. Dad was standing in the drive, waving them off. After their tail lights had vanished round the corner he turned back towards the house, but I’d already pulled back from the window.

Twinkle stayed on at Strathantine for the best part of a month. I don’t think she was working out her notice: I think it was more out of concern for us, and I’m not sure Dad even paid her for those last few weeks. One day, some friends of hers arrived in a mini-van, and she took her leave of us. There were tears on my side as well as on hers; she pressed a thin piece of card with a scribbled phone number into my hand, and hugged me so tightly it made my ribs creak. Euan submitted to her embrace without returning it, then politely waved goodbye, in that flat affectless way that had become the norm with him since the encounter in the woods.

Euan was a real worry by now, and Dad was no help whatsoever. It was as if they were both retreating into their own unreachable space. Of course Dad had begun that trip a long time ago, probably before we were born, but Euan went practically overnight from being a bright, lively child into a pale and passive ghost of himself. “Dad, he’s so withdrawn,” I pleaded, but all he’d say was: “Euan is an old soul. He’s finding his own centre. You should be prepared to let him travel on his own road. You can’t make the journey for him”

Old soul or not, I was horribly concerned for him, not least because I knew that dealing with this situation was more than could reasonably be expected of me. I was, I suspected, a pretty old soul myself, but I was still just a thirteen-year-old kid on her own. I tried my best to look after my brother, having no other option but to play the grown-up. Someone, I felt, had to care enough to guide him on that road, no matter what Dad said.

In a sense my job was all too easy. Euan ate the food I prepared; he came for walks with me, trotting by my side like a stolid little gundog; he required no great effort on my part by way of entertainment. He read his books, he watched the portable TV in his bedroom, and for hours on end he’d gaze out of the windows at the Scots pines behind the house. But he didn’t chatter all day the way he used to: there wasn’t the incessant string of babble at my elbow, the endless questions and endearing observations. He hardly spoke at all. This wasn’t Euan travelling on his own road; it was Euan stuck down a dead end.

I desperately wanted to get him some help, but Dad was inflexible, not to say inert. He ignored everything I had to say whenever I tried to discuss it with him, leaving me with no other option but to carry on trying my best. To what end, though? I tormented myself with the possibility of running away. I think I might have done that, if the prospect of reality hadn’t always been so distant from us. Never having seen it for myself, I hardly felt there could be anything real outside the walls of the estate. Where might we run to? On my mental map of the world there was only white space. It defeated me before I could even begin to think about it. I just couldn’t do it; though it would have been better for all of us if I had.

One Friday at the end of August, the heatwave finally broke. I remember the black thunderheads massing out to sea, the incredible smell of the first raindrops on the parched Ayrshire countryside. The sound of the thunder was such a relief: it was as if a new dimension had appeared in the Flatland world of the drought. Even Euan seemed to rally for the first time in weeks, kneeling on the bedroom windowsill with the rain splashing in his face, watching as the lightning ripped and stabbed across the night sky. Then the next morning dawned grey and overcast, and he retreated into the new normal of unresponsiveness and passivity.

The first weeks of autumn were as damp and dull as the summer had been Mediterranean. Only into the second half of October did the sun come back, lower in the sky now, all but heatless, and accompanied by strong gusting westerlies. Dad stayed shut away in his library; I took him a meal up each day, which was left on its tray as often as it was eaten. I was allowed to phone the village shop and place an order for a food delivery each week. The van driver became our main contact with the outside world, and like the postman he came only as far as the gatehouse of the lodge. When I asked about a replacement for Twinkle, Dad said he was considering the matter. What was there to consider? It was just another of the unknowns I had to deal with.

I cleaned and dusted around the place as best I could, but in practice I concentrated on the areas we actually lived in. I found dustsheets, which I made good use of, and soon all the big rooms were shrouded and silent as we retreated to a handful of manageable spaces, like nervous squatters in someone else’s house. Outside, after each autumn storm, the estate workers would come to tidy up the parkland, clearing away the fallen branches and stacking them into a resinous bonfire for the beginning of November.

Now and again, the phone would ring, and when I picked up, there was only silence on the line. It was sometimes the case that Dad was too far away—inside his head or outside the lodge—to answer the telephone, and often he unplugged his extension; actually, very few people rang us at Strathantine Lodge. Sometimes, Euan would pick up. Once, I found him sitting with the phone to his ear with a faraway look in his eyes, and when I took the receiver from him I heard, unmistakably, Alge’s voice. Instinctively I let the phone fall with a clatter, then retrieved it only to bang it down hard on its cradle. When I’d recovered my breath I told Euan never to answer if it rang again. He looked at me with that same heartbreaking remoteness, and said nothing.

October was wearing on, and each day the dusk fell a little more quickly. All summer I’d relished the contrast between the dark coolness inside the lodge and the glaring blast-furnace of outside; now, I found myself leaving the electric bulbs on in the few rooms we used, or lighting fires in the grates. It felt as if the gloom and the chill were outward manifestations of what had become of our family, and I wanted to fight against them as best I could.

Early one evening, I was looking for Euan. I hadn’t seen him since I’d made him lunch: I’d spent the afternoon doing housework, and now it was time for the evening meal.

“Euan?” I called, standing in the middle of the great hallway. The sun was down, and what light there was barely picked out the bones of the mullions in the high narrow windows, but I moved through the shadows with the confidence of familiarity. There was nothing to scare me in all that crazy old pile of a lodge; or there had never been anything.

I ran upstairs and checked the bedrooms, his and mine. No sign of him, apart from the crumby plate that had held his sandwich. I came back down the creaking oak staircase and turned left, heading for the kitchens.

As I passed the phone nook in the hallway, I noticed the receiver was off the hook, dangling from its cord. I was about to replace it when I heard voices coming from the earpiece. Or no, a voice, one only; quiet and furtive and only too familiar.

“Never call this house again!” I screamed at Alge, and slammed down the receiver hard enough (I hoped) to make his ears ring. But who had he been speaking to? Dad was a creature of his library; he just wouldn’t have picked up the downstairs extension. There was only one other possibility. And listening now in the re-established silence, I thought I heard something from the kitchens.

The builders of the lodge had tucked away the staff and their various functions in a miniature wing all to themselves. To reach the kitchens you passed through a back parlour where the housekeeper used to hold court, in the days when there had been more staff than inhabitants. This back parlour was approached through a corridor with stone flagging, which opened on to a broad low-ceilinged space. An inglenook fireplace with the family shield in oak above it was flanked on either side by great high-backed settles made cosy by heaps of plump cushions. It was a favourite place of ours: to be sitting there with Euan and Twinkle when the fire was lit felt as snug and companionable as anywhere in the whole house.

But Twinkle was long gone now; and yet, as I paused at the end of the corridor, I could hear voices.

From where I stood I could see only the back of the nearest settle: the fireplace was recessed into the wall to my left, and the settles shielded it from view. The room was unlit, with only the flickering of the flames in the grate to set the shadows at play. The voices, like the firelight, were coming from the deep heart of the inglenook. Had I lit the fire down here? I was sure I hadn’t, and it was not a thing that would have occurred to Euan, or so I thought. Dad, needless to say, would never think to do anything so practical.

Still I could hear the crackling of the fire, and mixed in with it, I could hear whispers. They were as soft as the flames that licked away at the logs, and in my heightened state of nervousness they seemed to me just as dangerous. They reminded me of the sound of Alge’s voice on that summer afternoon, drifting through the trees, whispering words in some foreign language. But who were those words being whispered to?

The answer came when I heard Euan’s laughter. He hadn’t laughed much since Alge’s visit, but I recognised his happy snigger immediately. How could I not? It had been at the centre of my world for so long. The voice seemed to respond, or perhaps it was only the rustling of the flames, and that’s what made me break cover and dart around the side of the settle.

There was Euan, quite alone, silhouetted against the firelight as he knelt on the stone surround of the inglenook. He seemed not to hear me at first, and I called his name. He turned slowly, almost reluctantly, I thought.

“Euan, who was with you?” I asked him.

He just looked at me, and said after an uncomfortable pause, “What do you mean, Mand? There’s no-one here.”

“I thought I heard voices . . .”

“Oh, I might have been talking,” he said, and turned back towards the fire.

And I felt at that moment that I was going entirely crazy, and I did not walk out of the parlour, I ran.

It’s a terrible thing to be forced to consider, especially when you’re only a child: the proposition that you might be going out of your mind. And I had nobody to help me through it. All I had was Dad, and I ran to him without the faintest expectation of help or even consolation. The library, ten times as large as the back pantry and three times as high, was likewise lit by nothing more than a log fire. Dad was sitting in his armchair with his feet up on a low table piled with books and papers. He opened his half-closed eyes as I burst in and said “Well?” His voice was lethargic and somehow long-suffering, as if I was in the habit of disturbing his journeys in the higher void.

Now I was here, I didn’t know what to say. In some sort of horrible fast-forward I imagined myself telling him my fears, pouring it all out as you might do to a parent who actually cared, and I supplied for myself the languid scorn with which he’d answer me. All I could manage in the end was to ask: “Were you on the phone just now?”

“On the phone.” He gave it exaggerated consideration, as if to emphasise the banality of the question. “No; no, I wasn’t. Were you?”

“I picked it up,” I said, trying to talk around the lump in my throat. “It was that friend of yours.”

“I have many friends,” he said serenely, and I thought, lucky you. “Which friend in particular?”

“You know,” I said, and when he shook his head I said, “Alge.”

“Alge?” He gave a little snigger, without any real mirth. “Oh, I don’t think so, Amanda.”

“I know his voice,” I insisted. “It was him.”

“That surprises me.” Still his voice was low and even.

“It’s not the first time—he’s been ringing on and off since he was here with Lettice. He’s been talking to Euan.”

“And he phoned just now?”

“Yes!” I was sure of that if of nothing else. “I think he was talking to Euan again.”

He didn’t answer me. Instead, he reached for the table, selected a newspaper from the pile, and handed it wordlessly to me.

It was a copy of the Evening Standard from the previous week, folded to a quarter-page article. Over a photo of a wrecked and burned-out car, the headline read CRASH COUPLE IDENTIFIED.

“Read it,” my father invited me. I got as far as the first paragraph, and then I had to stop, because I thought I was going mad again.

“The driver of the Bentley that burst into flames on the Chelsea Embankment at the weekend has been identified as Algernon ‘Alge’ Venables, poet and contributor to various journals of the so-called counter-culture. Mr. Venables was the driver of the car, and his passenger is said to have been Miss Lettice Barkley, his partner. The identities of the couple were established at post-mortem, the blaze having been so fierce as to render them unidentifiable by the usual means . . .”

I couldn’t read any more. I was biting my lip so hard that I drew blood, or else I think I would have fainted. The taste of the blood filled my mouth as I let the paper drop to the floor.

“Poor Alge.” If there had been anger or bitterness in Dad’s voice, that would have been understandable; likewise, grief. It would have been the natural response. Instead, he said, “I don’t think it was him on the phone just now, do you? No matter how badly he wanted to talk to Euan.”

I couldn’t answer. I had to believe what I’d heard on that phone line, even if it meant I was crazy after all. But Dad was still speaking.

“Amanda, don’t you think you’re getting slightly obsessed with being a mother to your brother?” In that same tone, he continued: “You know, if you really want a wee bairn of your own to play mummy with, you could always go down to the village dance on a Friday night. I’m sure there’d be plenty of the local lads who’d oblige.” He looked at me quizzically over the top of his granny glasses, and I had to run again. But where to? Only to another wing of the prison, a shuttered room where I could lock the door and cry behind it, and nobody would ever hear me.

The weeks after that were unbearable, and yet I didn’t have a choice in the matter. I had to bear it; someone had to look after Euan. I feared for him in every possible way: I felt as if I was all that stood between him and something I couldn’t even put a name to. All I could see was its shadow, that was all, its silhouette against the firelight.

Through it all Euan remained unreachable. Later that same evening, when I asked him if he’d been on the phone, he smiled distantly and said “I picked it up, yes.” I asked who he’d been talking to, and he said, “Oh, no-one.” So much for that.

Dad, though, showed signs of coming out of his shell a little as October came to an end. The high winds of autumn had brought down all the loose branches in the woods, and a few of the rotten older trees besides, and the bonfire on the old tennis courts was piled a good twelve feet high. The Strathantine bonfire was a local custom, probably the only one of which Dad approved. It was certainly one that he fostered: each Guy Fawkes’ night all the local children were invited to the burning and encouraged to make masks, and sweeties and sparklers were laid on at the laird’s expense. Dad would give a little lecture about ancestral fire ceremonies held at the waning of the year, and nobody would pay him the slightest bit of attention, and then the fire would be lit and everyone would have a grand time.

This year I was looking forward to the bonfire more than ever. For the first time since Twinkle left there would be outsiders around the place, if only for an evening, and it didn’t really matter who they were, they would be other people, real living individuals. Dad constructed a poster that might have advertised a gig by Pink Floyd at the Roundhouse in ’67, and I was sent on my bicycle to pin it up in the village shop. Even Euan bucked up, or seemed to: he spent hours with papier-mache and poster paints, designing masks for bonfire night and tossing them into the fire because they “weren’t right”, apparently. When he finally came up with one he considered appropriate, I wasn’t allowed to see it. I took this as an encouraging sign of individuation.

The night of the fourth was clear and cold: the moon was waxing gibbous, and there were only stray wisps of cloud. I was a long time getting to sleep that evening, and I ended up going down to the kitchen to get a glass of milk. As usual, I didn’t bother with a light, and when I passed through the corridor into the back parlour I was surprised to see the low flicker of firelight in the hearth. Nobody had been in the back parlour all day, so far as I knew, but a small pile of kindling was alight in the fireplace. As I looked at the flames they smouldered out into wisps of acrid smoke, and the parlour was swallowed up again in darkness. Behind me in the corridor, I heard the patter of bare feet on flagged stone floors, and what might have been the stifled sound of laughter.

Guy Fawkes’ day came in bright and cold, a thin nagging wind that tore the last of the clouds from the sky. I spent the day making chocolate crispies and toffee apples for the evening’s celebrations, and Dad went out and played the part of a responsible adult with the gardeners as they made the last structural adjustments to the bonfire. Euan was with him, and I took all this to be a good sign.

By half past four the sun was dipping into the sea: I watched it go down, like a great beacon out on Ailsa Craig. For once, Dad actually came and ate with us in the back parlour. It was the last time we were together as a family, and I can hardly bear to think of it now. At six, we went to open the gates and lit the braziers to guide our guests, and by seven there were fifty or so villagers and their children gathered happily around the pyre, the adults in their scarves and gloves, the children in their home-made masks.

A polite cheer greeted the appearance of Dad, on the once-yearly occasion of his wearing of the kilt. He looked, as usual, both embarrassed and amused. I glanced around for Euan, but I couldn’t spot him among the masked children clustered around the eats. “Welcome, feasters,” Dad announced, his quiet voice straining to be heard above the ambient chatter. “Welcome to the closing of the year gone by. Welcome, imps,” and the kids obligingly whooped and squealed, “welcome to the fires of Samhain.”

He held aloft the resinous torch, and then touched it to the nearest brazier. The fire bit into it eagerly, and he lifted it again, before thrusting it into the heart of the pyre.

In no time at all the bonfire was alight, and the people around it oohed and aahed and began to clap. Dad imposed a steady beat on the applause with his rhythmic clapping and stamping, and began to sing in a high piping voice:

Circle of light, circle of sound,

Circle of ancestors, gather around,

Come to the fire, come to the light,

Come to the dance on a Samhain night!

Summer is out, winter is in

Samhain night and the veil is thin

Come to the imps as they dance the old round

Come to the bonfire, come out of the ground!

Some of the children took up the chanting, and soon they were weaving in a laughing, skipping conga line around the bonfire while the adults waved their sparklers and clapped gloved hands. Tigers, lions and monkeys, dogs and cats and hares, their masks brought to life in the dancing of the firelight. Dad beamed at them like a priest well pleased with his congregation.

Usually I would have been in amongst them, circling the fire. At this moment, though, I was starting to worry about Euan. The imps had danced past me three or four times, yet there was still no sign of him. Was he with the adults? I decided to climb the side of the hill till I could look down from above and see everybody all at once.

The hillside ramped sharply by the side of the tennis court, and soon I could see everything; but I still couldn’t see Euan. The emotional fatigue of the last few months had left me constantly on the edge of panic, and I could feel that formless fear rising again in the pit of my stomach as I squinted through the mounting shower of sparks. Behind the bonfire, away from the circle of light, lay the dark bulk of the lodge.

Not entirely dark.

Up on the battlement where Lettice and I had once basked in the summer heatwave, there was a gleam in the darkness; a lit torch, being swung in circles. I couldn’t see from that distance who was swinging it, but I knew it had to be Euan.

For a second time and space seemed to become inverted, and I was simultaneously staring down from on high at Euan, running towards the woods in the glare of the hammering sun, and squinting up through the bonfire blaze in the here and now. The same panic that had overtaken me on that July afternoon came back, redoubled, and I ran once more towards the danger. Dad saw me, and he called out, “Amanda!” but I was already halfway to the lodge.

Inside was dark, and I fumbled for the lights. Nothing. I snapped the switch up and down, but the power was off. As I’ve said before, I didn’t need light to find my way around the house, and I was off running again, dodging the furniture in its dustsheet shrouds, those dull and hulking ghosts who shared the lodge with us.

As I clattered around the echoing wooden gallery, making for the staircase that gave access to the battlements, I thought I could smell smoke, and I tried to remember which rooms I’d lit a fire in that day. None on this floor, I was certain. There was dad’s library, but as always he’d have locked the door behind him on leaving. The question was far back in my mind, though, because all I could think of was Euan.

At the top of the spiral stairs, the door to the roof was open wide. It wasn’t just the exertion that choked off my cry of “Euan! Euan, are you there?” Panic takes you by the throat and by the pit of the stomach and most crucially by the brain; it pummels your body while it stops your mind from putting two and two together. A case in point: there was nowhere to hide on the battlements, and very soon I realised that Euan wasn’t up there. Far below the bonfire imps sang and laughed and shouted, and for precious seconds I was totally incapable of working out what to do next. Into the stunned silence came a whisper. He came back down before you could make it up here,said the Sensible Amanda who’d been pushed out of my consciousness. You need to go back down and look from room to room.

And, more insistently, find out what’s that burning smell.

At the foot of the spiral staircase there was no doubt about it: the smoke was thick enough to catch at my throat. I think if there had been any light I must have seen it. Light was coming from the minstrels’ gallery, though: the big tapestry that took up one whole wall was on fire. The flames had taken hold of the old thick material, the stag and the hounds being eaten up along with the hunters and the trees. Oh Euan, I thought, no . . .

Fire at my right. I swivelled round to see a figure with a torch, a small figure, racing along the corridor and darting into one of the bedrooms. Again my mind seized up. I didn’t know whether to run outside and sound the alarm or chase down Euan and rescue him. The speed at which the tapestry was burning left me only one option: I had to make sure Euan was safe.

When I burst through the bedroom door the four-poster bed was already ablaze. Keeping my distance, moving around the walls, I checked out the whole of the room. No Euan. How could it be? I hadn’t seen him come out again. The answer was in the small connecting door, which I discovered by falling backwards through it.

The door led to a bathroom, tile and porcelain, non-combustible. A further door opened to the next bedroom, which was already on fire. I managed to skirt around the flames and reach the door to the hallway. Back in the direction of the gallery, that small shape with the torch was silhouetted against the orange glow of the burning tapestry, and I thought I could hear laughter down the corridor. “That’s not Euan,” I thought, even as I raced towards it. “That’s not his voice.” But I thought I knew the voice from somewhere; and again I got a flash of that afternoon, back in the woods, standing next to Lettice while strange murmurs drifted through the pines.

Long before I could reach it, the figure was gone. I came up with a hard thump against the banister of the gallery, and what little breath I had was knocked out of me. Across the gallery, on the farther side, the figure was moving. It paused and turned to face me, as if we were playing a dreadful game. Instead of Euan’s face, I saw the frozen features of a mask.

The papier-mache was painted red, with blue and yellow swirls running up and down it. It had huge white eyes with round staring holes to see through, and it must have been a trick of the firelight, because for a second I thought that behind those eyeholes there was real fire.

“Euan!” I couldn’t help it. The scream was dragged out of me.

And I swear there was a reply, from somewhere back in the corridor; I thought it was my brother’s voice, crying out my name.

The figure on the far side of the gallery laughed again. I could hear it even from a distance. “Amanda!” it called, and I couldn’t tell if it was the voice of Alge, dead in a blazing car on the Embankment, or the voice of Euan, who I loved so much, or the voice of something that has no voice in the rational world except the crackle of hungry flames in dry tinder.

I looked back down the corridor, but the fire was already out of the bedrooms and surging along the walls and ceiling towards me. Euan’s voice came again, or so I thought; this time it was from below, somewhere in the great hallway, and I pelted down one set of stairs while the masked figure danced along the parallel flight on the other side, touching its torch to the draperies and paintings as it went. Everything was burning.

I ran from room to room calling for Euan, but I couldn’t hear him any more. The sound of the fire was loud now, the roaring of a beast set free and feeding on the dry dust of centuries. Outside I could see people, come down the hill from the bonfire and clustering at the windows to see what was going on. I screamed to them to look for Euan, and ran on. Some of those faces looked like the mask of the creature upstairs, and then when I looked again it would be just another of the village children, close up to the glass, watching me as I ran and screamed.

As on that day back in the summer, the very bricks and mortar of the rooms seemed to be working against me now. Several times I ran head-on into a closed door I’d thought was open, or a wall where I thought there was a door. I picked myself up out of sheer desperation and stumbled on, trying to keep my mind clear, covering my face with one arm to keep from breathing in the smoke.

Back in the hall, I heard voices from upstairs again. Without stopping to look I ran for the stairway, but when I was halfway up a whoosh of flame at my feet sent me staggering backwards, arms flailing for balance, feet unable to find the steps. I must have landed on my head, if I ever landed at all and I’m not still falling, because that’s my last memory of childhood and of home; the sensation of falling, and there being nothing to stop me.

The next I knew I was lying on the lawns, high up on the terraces, barely conscious, pressing myself flat against the damp chilly grass as if I might fall off the surface of the earth into the void above. The lodge was fully ablaze, flames streaming from the windows, black smoke blotting out the moon and stars. Dad was by my side, not holding my hand or stroking my head, just staring at the conflagration with all the concern of a curious passer-by. “Amanda,” he said, when he saw I’d come to. “You’re all right—just a bump on the head.”

“Where’s Euan?” It came out as a scream, and Dad flinched as he always did from conflict.

“They’re doing their best,” he said, turning back to the fire. “You see, they can’t go in there. The firemen. It’s past that now.”

And gravity came unstuck, and I fell off the earth’s inert surface.

My memories start up again in a patchy sort of way the morning after, when I woke on a sofa in the gatehouse of the lodge. Again, Dad was with me; again, he told me that they hadn’t found Euan. All the memories of the night before hit me at once with the force of a boxer’s punch; I started sobbing and I didn’t stop. Dad didn’t leave my side through it all, but there was no reassurance in his presence. He told me I was lucky they’d found me and brought me out, but for my part I wished they’d left me inside, with my brother, where I belonged.

We stayed on at the gatehouse for a week while the fire crews searched the rubble of Strathantine Lodge and the police took statements out of nothing more than habit, it seemed to me. They were unable to determine the source of the fire, which had taken hold with unnatural rapidity. They were unable to say if an accelerant had been used, or who might have had a motive to do such a thing. Worst of all, they were unable to find any trace of Euan, or of anybody else that might have been in there. The fire had taken every clue.

In the end, there was no active requirement for us to stay on the scene; nothing except the sucking, aching absence of my brother, the hopeless draw of the smoking ruins. Dad had been in touch with the family firm, who wired us money to buy a change of clothes and a second-hand car. We set out for Dad’s old pad in Chelsea, and all through that long journey I don’t think we spoke about anything that mattered. The space between us was unbridgeable.

The flat had been kept in good order by cleaners who came once a month. Dad unlocked the front door and let himself in, as if only that morning he’d stepped out for a stroll down the Kings Road to Alge’s place, perhaps, for one of their adventures. “Are you coming?” he asked, when I didn’t follow him.

“I thought I’d get us something for dinner,” I said, and he smiled vaguely. “Aren’t you the sensible one,” he said, and turned away, for the last time as it happens.

I didn’t bother with dinner. Instead, I found a phone box and used up the last of my change calling the number I’d kept safe in my pocket all this time, written down on the inside of an old Rizla packet. Then I waited in Sloane Square like one of London’s dead-eyed street waifs, until Twinkle emerged from the underground and carried me away.

I spent the next decade roaming round the country with Twinkle and her traveller friends, living in caravans and draughty farmhouses and sometimes old buses with the seats ripped out, learning the way the world worked, making friends with other outcasts just like me. It wasn’t easy; I kept having spells in which everything became too much for me, and once or twice I almost fell backwards down that staircase for good, but the travellers helped me through as best they could, and here I am, more or less reconciled, the best Amanda I can be given what I had to work with.

Dad never came looking for me. After I phoned and told him who I was with, but not where I was, he set up a bank account and fed monthly payments into it, and in this way he washed his hands of the last of his encumbrances. I didn’t miss him much, but I did miss Euan, I missed him horribly. I miss him still.

And on nights like tonight (she said, staring at the embers of the bonfire),you know, I still look for him in the flames. I always, always look for him. I never see him, but sometimes there’s that other face, the face of papier-mache, the one I wish I’d never seen. If only I could have looked behind the mask that evening, just to be sure, you know? Just to be sure.