I Found My Father's Cottage in Scotland. It Wasn't On The Road Yesterday.

A man at pump three kept his eyes on the nozzle the whole time it ran. That's how you know. Honest people look at the numbers or at the road or at their phone, and this one watched his hands like they might do something without him. He'd told me diesel. The car was a petrol Astra, and I'd watched him thumb the wrong handle.

"That's petrol you've got in there," I said. "Diesel's the black one."

He went a bad colour and stopped the pump. He hadn't said anything about the mistake, which told me it wasn't one. He'd wanted the cheaper handle and thought nobody would notice. I told him to go in and pay for what he'd put in, and he did. I've been saying things like that to people for twenty-two years, at the same pumps on the same stretch of the A82 outside Fort William. It doesn't make me popular, but I'm hardly ever wrong.

That was Tuesday. On Thursday I had the day off, and I drove past the forecourt at half past two with my hood up, going south. Ewan was in the kiosk window with his head down over the lottery machine. He didn't see me. I hadn't told him or anyone else where I was going. Nobody there would have asked, and that was the thing I'd have had to explain if they had.

It's about fifteen miles down to Ballachulish. The rain started at Onich, thin at first, then steady enough that I had the wipers on their second speed by the time I turned into the garage. Four pumps, a shop with a hatch, a bin full of wet newspaper. I put in ten pounds I didn't need and went in to pay.

The woman at the till had short curly auburn hair and a garage fleece with PERKINS stitched over the pocket. Lisa, according to the badge under it. I gave her the money and asked if she'd heard of a man called Dylan Walls. I said he'd be seventy-nine now, tall, grey.

"Walls," she said. She had the sort of face that lights up when it's handed something. "Is that a Kentallen name? No, hang on." She leaned on the counter. "There was a man in last month. Big heavy coat, bought a box of matches and a tin of tomatoes and never said a word. Tall like you're saying. My cousin Fiona said he was staying out at the row."

"What row?"

"The slate-workers' row. Out past the old quarry village, at the edge of it. Four cottages, and nobody's lived in them since before I was born." She laughed a bit. "That's what I'd have said. Fiona says the fourth one. She saw smoke."

I felt the muscles across my back go tight. I don't get many surprises and I don't handle them well. "The fourth one," I said.

She looked at me for longer then, the way people do when a name and a face finally line up. "You're not from round here, are you?"

"Fort William."

"Aye. But you were." She said it kindly, which was worse. "Walls. God. You'll be the boy."

I said I'd be going, and thanked her for the directions, which she gave me anyway. Left after the old slate quarry sign, follow the single track along the loch until the road runs out of tarmac, then keep on. You can't miss it, she said. She said it twice. People say that about places you definitely can miss.

At the door she called after me, "I hope he's glad to see you."

I didn't answer that. I got in the car and sat with my hands on the wheel and the rain going sideways across the windscreen.

I was nine when my father left, in a winter with more snow than this one has any chance of. He put his coat on in the hall and picked up nothing else. My mother stood in the kitchen doorway and didn't say a word. I was on the stairs. I remember the coat, brown and heavy, and that he looked back at the stairs, or I think he did. I've turned that over so many times it might not be a real memory any more.

What followed was the part I do remember clearly. People in a place that size need a reason, and I was standing right there. Mrs Gilchrist at the post office said a boy that loud would drive anybody out. A man at the bus shelter told me, not unkindly, to think about what I'd done. By Easter it was settled. Nobody said it to my face after that, but they didn't need to. I was the boy who drove his father out. I left at seventeen. I never came back, and I never got a letter or a card or so much as a phone call from anyone there. I'd made my peace with expecting nothing.

Which is why I'd been sitting in the kitchen all week with the road atlas open and telling myself it was only curiosity.

I started the engine.

The single track begins a mile past the garage, and it's worse than she let on. There's a passing place every few hundred yards and a drop on the loch side with a low wall that wouldn't stop a bicycle. The light was already going, though it wasn't yet four. Loch Linnhe lay off to my right, flat and dark. On the far side the hills had cloud sitting in all their gaps. I drove slowly and kept the lights on dipped, and twice a sheep stared me down from the verge.

The rain thickened. I turned the wipers up to full and they still lost the fight.

I'd told myself all week that I was going to see whether he was alive. That was the reason I'd have given anyone. I'd even practised the line in the car. I was passing. I heard you were here. But the truth came up somewhere past the second cattle grid, plain and a bit embarrassing, the way things do when you're driving alone.

I wanted somebody to be pleased. That was all of it. I wanted a door to open and a man to look at me and say my name like he'd been waiting on it.

Fifty-one years old, and I gripped the wheel harder and drove on toward the fourth cottage.

The tarmac ended where Lisa said it would, and after that the road was two lines of stones with grass between. I stopped at a bend where the ground flattened out and turned the engine off. The rain was loud on the roof.

There was a stretch of old quarry rail running alongside the track, rusted orange and bent in places, and water dripped off it in a line, one drop after the next. A lamp post stood at the near end of the row with its glass cracked. I looked at it for a while, waiting for it to come on, before I understood it was never going to.

Four cottages, whitewash gone grey along the bottom where the rain splashed up. Behind them the slate tips went up in wet black ledges, higher than I'd expected. Past the last cottage the ground fell away to the pit, which was full to the brim and flat as a tray. On the far side stood the winding house. The roof had come down in the middle and the gable end was all that was holding up its shape.

I got out and pulled my hood forward. The air smelled of peat smoke, wet stone and, under that, seaweed, which made no sense that far up until I remembered the loch was right there.

"You'll want to stand under this."

I jumped. A lad was crouched in the lee of a slate wall by the rails, hoodie pulled down over his hands, with an apron tied on over the top of it. Sandy hair plastered flat. He grinned at me.

"Sorry. Didn't mean to scare you."

"You didn't."

"Aye, you did." He shifted along and made room. I went under the lean of the wall, which helped with the rain but not much with the wind. "Brett," he said. "I do the tea van at the pier. Kentallen side. You'll have gone past it."

"I didn't stop."

"Nobody does in November." He said it cheerfully. "I came up to have a look. There's been talk of smoke up here, and my pal reckons it's a squatter. I said it's a ghost. Fiver on it."

"What do you think?"

"I think I'll lose the fiver." He laughed and wiped his nose on his wrist. "You're not the council."

"No."

"Police?"

"No."

He waited for me to say what I was, and I didn't. I watched him instead. Nineteen, I'd have said, and nothing on him that was hiding. He was cold and bored and pleased to have someone to talk to. That was all.

"I was told there were four," I said. "Four cottages in the row. Is there a fifth? Further along, maybe, where the track bends."

Brett laughed properly then, head back, and the sound bounced off the slate behind us.

"A fifth? Mate, there's four. There's always been four. My gran used to say it was four families and four chimneys and that's why they built four. Nobody's built anything up here since eighteen-something." He was still grinning. "Where'd you hear five?"

"I didn't. I just wanted to be sure."

"Well, there's four."

I counted them anyway, standing at the road's edge with the rain coming off my hood in a string. One, two, three, four. I did it twice, the way I do with cash at the end of a shift. Same answer. It's a habit I've had a long time, and I couldn't have told you where I picked it up.

The fourth door stood open.

It wasn't wide open. It was ajar, maybe a foot, and the gap was gold. Not lamplight. Firelight, moving on the wet flagstones outside. I hadn't seen it from the car because of the angle, and I hadn't smelled anything different because the whole place smelled of smoke. Now that I was looking, there was a thin grey line coming out of the chimney and going flat in the rain.

"Told you," Brett said quietly. "Smoke."

"Aye."

"Somebody's in."

I walked up the path. I don't remember deciding to. The slabs were slick and the door swung a little as I got close, on its own or from the wind. I could see the room past it. A stone floor, a black range with a fire built up in it, and in front of the fire a table with a cloth on it. Two cups on the table. Two saucers. Both chairs pulled a little out, the way you do when someone's about to sit.

No steam off the cups that I could see. No teapot either.

"Hello?" I said.

The fire ticked. Rain hit the step.

"Hello. Is that Dylan Walls?" My voice came out wrong. Too polite, the voice I use at the pumps when somebody's parked across two bays. "It's Dean. I'm — Dean Walls."

Nothing. I tried once more, louder, and heard it go back across the pit and come home thin.

Behind me Brett had come up onto the path, and I heard him breathing. He'd stopped laughing.

"Someone's laid that for company," he said. "Two cups. Look at that."

"I can see it."

"Are we going in?"

I had my hand flat against the door frame. The slate was wet and colder than it had any right to be. I could have gone in, and I wanted to. The whole way there I'd been picturing a door with a man behind it, and here was the door, and the fire, and the chair. It was warmer inside than out. I could feel it on my face.

I took my hand off the frame.

"No," I said. "Not with nobody home."

"Fair enough." Brett sounded relieved, and a little let down, and he covered both with a shrug. "I've got the van to open at nine. I'm not sitting up here all night on a fiver. What about you?"

"I'll wait a bit."

"You'll freeze."

"I've got the car."

He looked at me, then at the cottage, then at the car, and something crossed his face I couldn't put a name to. "I'll come up in the morning," he said. "See if he's shown. I'll bring a tea, if you like. Milk, sugar?"

"Milk."

"Right." He went off down the track with his hood up, and I watched him until the dark took his back.

I sat in the car with the engine off and the seat tipped as far as it would go, which isn't far. I kept my coat on and put the atlas over my knees. Every hour or so I ran the engine for five minutes to get the windscreen clear, and each time I did the window down the row was still lit. Gold at the gap of the fourth door. The fire never dropped. Nobody went in or out. Nobody came to shut it.

Around two I stopped telling myself I was keeping watch and just looked at it.

It was grey by seven, the kind of light that doesn't come up so much as stop being dark. I'd gone through the last of the petrol fumes with the heater and had a headache from it. I got out to stretch my back and count, mostly to have something to do with my hands.

Five.

I counted again, starting from the lamp post with the cracked glass, touching each door in the air as I went. Four whitewashed cottages, and then a fifth with the same grey splash along its foot as the others, the same slate sill. It had a number painted on the door in black. A five. The track down to the A828 started past it. Last night it had started past the fourth, and I'd have sworn to that in court.

I stood in the drizzle with my mouth a bit open. The fire was still going in the fourth window. Nothing else about the place had changed, so I couldn't even be properly frightened. It was just wrong, the way a pump reading is wrong when the tank's been filled.

Brett came up the track at ten past eight with two lidded cups and his hood back. He was whistling. He was still whistling when he came level with the fifth cottage, and then he stopped and the whistle went out of him.

"That's not right," he said.

"No."

"There's four. I told you there's four. My gran—" He looked at the cups in his hands as if one of them might explain it. "Did you build that?"

"I was in the car all night."

"Somebody's had a laugh." But he wasn't laughing. He held out my tea, and I took it, and it was hot and milky and the best thing I'd had in two days. He kept staring at the new door. The number looked wet.

"I'm going to look inside," I said.

"You're not."

"I'm only going to look."

I'd said the same thing to myself in the atlas week, and in the car, and every time I'd meant it and then done more. I knew that about myself. It didn't slow me down.

"Look," Brett said. "Last night you didn't go in. You said not with nobody home."

"Nobody was home last night. It might be somebody's this morning." It was a poor argument and we both heard it. "Come on. Two of us. If it's a squatter you can win your fiver."

"I said I'd lose it."

"Then you'll lose it with a story." I gave him a grin, and it worked, because he was nineteen and it was eight in the morning and the door was right there. He put his tea on the wall. I put mine beside it.

I pushed the door. It opened easy, on a hinge that didn't make a sound.

The smell got me before the room did. Toast. Proper toast under a grill, the edges going, butter on it already. I stopped in the doorway with my hand still on the wood. I was six years old. The oilcloth on the table was yellow with a pattern of small white jugs, and the corner by the tap was split where my mother always caught it with the dishcloth. The radio on the sill was the one that only got the Gaelic station. The window looked on the wall of the coal shed. I hadn't thought of that shed in forty years.

Two cups on the table, two saucers. One chair pulled back.

"Smells like my gran's," Brett said behind me, quietly. "Is that daft? It smells like her kitchen."

I couldn't answer. I was looking at the split in the oilcloth.

Brett went past me. I should have caught his sleeve, and I know that. I'd like to say I didn't see him move. I saw it all. He went to the pulled-out chair the way you go to a chair when a woman's holding it for you, a bit sheepish, not wanting to be rude, and he sat.

"Well, it's out," he said. "It'd be a shame."

"Brett."

He lifted the cup. It was one of the thick white ones with the green band. He held it in both hands and looked at me over the rim and said, "It's tea. It's actually tea," and I opened my mouth to say put it down, and he didn't.

He didn't say anything else. He just stopped, with the cup at his chin and his eyes gone past me to the door.

"Brett." I went round the table. "Put it down. Come on, son, put it down."

Nothing. I took his elbow and it was cold through the hoodie, colder than the frame had been. I got my hands under his arms and pulled. The chair scraped and he didn't come with it. He was heavier than a lad that size should be, all of him sitting into the seat as if it had been holding him a while. I got my arms round his chest from behind and heaved, and my back cracked, and the chair moved an inch and he didn't.

"Look at me. Brett. Look at me, not the door."

His eyes stayed on the door. Waiting. That was what got me, more than the colour. He wasn't frightened. He looked patient, like someone who'd been told they'd be seen shortly.

The colour went out of his freckles first. Then his cheeks, and the backs of his hands round the cup, and the skin at his throat above the hoodie, all of it going the flat grey of wet slate, dull, with a fine grain in it. I tried to pry his fingers off the china and they were hard. I tried again. My hands ached to the wrist, and I'd been pulling so long I couldn't feel the ends of them.

The toast smell got stronger. It was the worst part, that it was kind.

I don't know how long. Not long enough to have done anything else, and too long to have done nothing. At some point I let go, because my hands wouldn't close, and I stood there with my arms hanging and my chest going. Brett's mouth was very slightly open. He didn't blink.

I backed away from him. I got as far as the door and the door frame hit my shoulder, and then I was out.

The rain had come on hard while I was inside. It hammered on the rails and the slate and my head, and I stumbled down the path with my hood down, not able to work out how to put it up. The tea was still on the wall where we'd left it, one cup knocked over, running milky over the stone.

I turned round in the road and counted, because I couldn't help it. I got to the end of the row and there was a sixth.

I didn't go back for the car. My legs took me the other way, along the lane past the sixth door, because that was away from the fifth. I kept my eyes on the ruts and the grass down the middle and did not count anything.

The rain got into my collar and down my back. My hands hung off the ends of my arms, and when I tried to close them, nothing happened. I thought about Brett's mother, if he had one. I thought about the fiver he'd bet and lost.

The lane bent round a shoulder of slate tip, and there was a house I hadn't seen from the road. It was older than the cottages and lower, with no whitewash left on it. Smoke came out of the chimney, thin and brown, and there was a curtain in the window, an actual curtain, yellowed at the folds. A woman stood at the gate with a headscarf knotted under her chin and a heavy cardigan buttoned wrong by one. She was small. She held herself very upright, the way old women do when they've decided not to be helped.

"You've been in," she said.

"There's a lad in there. Brett. He's at the table, he won't..." My voice was going somewhere I didn't want it to. "He won't let go of the cup."

"No. He won't."

She looked me up and down without any hurry. Her eyes were very blue and very sharp for the rest of her, and there was no pity in them, and no anger either.

"You're a fool," she said. "Have you been told that before?"

"Not to my face."

"Well. It's been said now." She said it flatly, the way you'd tell someone their boot was undone. "Dana Powell. I've been in this row longer than any of them out there, and I've buried most of the ones who counted wrong. Come away from the road, you're standing in a puddle."

I moved. I was on her step then, under a bit of tin roof, and the rain drummed on it so loud we had to lean toward each other. She didn't ask me in. I was glad of that. I understood why, and it was the first thing all morning that made sense.

"I'll say it once," she said, "so listen. Two things. You don't go through a door you haven't counted from the road. Count it yourself, from the road, every time. Not from the step and not off another body's say-so."

"I counted the fifth. There were four. Then..."

"You counted it after it was there. Aye. That's the wrong end to count from, but it's the end you had." She held up a second finger, the knuckle swollen white. "And you don't sit at a table in there. You don't sit and you don't eat or drink what's set out. Not for hunger and not for manners. Not if it's your own mother's chair."

I must have made some noise, because her mouth went thin.

"Aye," she said. "It'll know the chair."

"What is it?"

"I've not the name for it. I've never needed one." She looked past me down the lane, toward the row I couldn't see from her step. "It makes room for a man. That's all it does. It gets longer around him, a door at a time, so there's always somewhere ready for him to go in. You'll have seen. A door where there wasn't one."

"Two. Then six."

"It'll be more by dark."

I thought of the lamp post with the cracked glass, and how I'd waited for it to come on. "Why Brett? I'm the one it... he didn't even want to go in. I was the one that said."

"I know who said." She wasn't unkind about it. "It was gentle with him. You'll not credit that, but it was. He's young. He's the sort that's missed, and it doesn't take the missed ones roughly. His mother will be at the pier by nine tomorrow wondering why the van's not open. Somebody will go looking for him." She paused. "They'll find four cottages and a lot of rain."

"Can I get him out? If I went back, if I..."

"You had your hands on him already."

I didn't argue. I could still feel his elbow through the hoodie, cold and gritty, and the hard way his fingers had come up against mine. I'd stood behind that chair and pulled with everything I had, and the chair had moved an inch. I'd known then. That was the truth of it. I'd known when the colour started leaving his freckles, and the knowing was still in my hands, the way the ache was.

I had walked in on my own feet, and I'd walked him in. He'd said he'd lose the fiver, and I'd told him it was worth a story. And I'd have done it again for the smell of toast, if I'm honest, and that was the part I couldn't put down anywhere. There was nothing in my pockets or my car or my head that I could have carried out of that row and set against it. There was nothing to carry. He was just in there.

Dana Powell watched me work this out. I don't think she'd have stopped me if I'd cried. I didn't.

"Who lives in the other houses?" I said. I don't know what made me ask. My mouth wanted something to do. "The ones with the smoke."

"Me." She said it plain. "And I'm not for company, so you'll forgive me. You've the two rules. I'd not be giving them to a man I thought would keep them, mind. I'm giving them because there's no one else here to."

"Thank you."

"Don't." She stepped back and put her hand on the wet gatepost. "You'll want your car. It won't be where you left it, likely. Go easy on the lane and keep the loch on your left."

"Is my father in there?"

It came out before I could stop it. I hadn't said it to Lisa properly, hadn't said it to Brett, hadn't said it in the car with the atlas across my knees. Dana Powell's face didn't change.

"I couldn't tell you what's in there," she said. "Only that it's ready for you."

She went in and shut the door. I heard a bolt go across, and then nothing but the rain on the tin.

I stood a minute longer on her step, because it was dry and because it was the last place I knew where the walls stayed where they were put. Then I went out into the lane. I was wet through, all the way to the skin, and I was shaking so hard I had to hold one hand in the other. I went to find my car.

I got as far as the first bend and the lane was longer than it had been. I'd come in on it in the dusk with the loch on my right, and I remembered a short run of rutted stones and a flat place to park. Now it went on. I kept the water on my left like she'd told me and walked with my hands jammed under my armpits, since they still wouldn't close properly.

The doors started as soon as the slate tip was behind me. Whitewashed, grey at the foot from the splash, one after another along the wall side, and every window had a fire in it. Gold on the wet road. Gold on the puddles. I told myself I wasn't going to look and looked at every one. Nobody stood at any of them. Nobody shut a door or called out. They were just lit, all the way along, as if the whole row had been waiting to see whether I'd come.

I walked twenty minutes by my watch. I checked it twice because I wanted it to be wrong. The rain got heavier. By my watch it was gone four in the afternoon, though I'd left her gate before nine, and the light had gone with it, so the windows were doing most of the seeing for me.

The nearest door had a number on it. A seven, black paint, and it ran a bit at the bottom of the stroke where it hadn't dried.

The flat bend was just past it. That's where I'd left the Focus, nose to the rails, and there was a bare patch of flattened grass with a bit of oil in it. That was all. No car, no atlas on the passenger seat, no spare jumper in the boot. Past where it had stood there was only wet grass and the dark.

I said something out loud. I don't remember what. It might have been Brett's name.

I stood in the road with the rain coming off my hood in a rope and understood I wasn't going anywhere tonight. It's not a clever thing to know about yourself, but I'd got there. And what came up in me wasn't fear, or not first. It was the fires. Twenty-two years I've stood on that forecourt and handed people their change. They say thanks, or they don't, and they drive off, and nobody has ever once asked me how my day was and waited for the answer. I'm not complaining. That's the job, and I'd got used to it being the shape of things. But somebody had lit these. Seven, eight, however many, and every one of them for me. I hadn't asked. That was the part I couldn't stand. I'd never have had the nerve to ask.

I felt sick with the shame of wanting it, low in my stomach, and I wanted it anyway.

Dana said count from the road. So I did. I went back to the lamp post with the cracked glass, or where it should have been, and put my hand out flat in the rain and touched each door in the air. One, two, three. I said them out loud. Four with the fire in the window. Five, and I didn't look at five. Six. Then the one with the wet paint. Seven. I did it again from the other end, walking, and got seven, and stood at the gate feeling clever about it, which I should have known was a bad sign.

I told myself I'd only look. I'd told myself that on the step of number five, and I'd said it to Brett like it was a joke. But I couldn't see how else to get out of the rain, and there were things about the place I wanted to know. That's the truth of it. It wasn't only the cold.

The door opened without a sound.

It was our kitchen. Not the one from when I was six with the yellow oilcloth, but the one after, the winter I was nine. I knew it from the door. The brown lino gone pale in front of the sink. The calendar from the co-op hung crooked on its nail, and the clock over the range ran four minutes fast, because my father wouldn't have it fixed. His pipe lay in the saucer on the sill. My school bag was on the hook by the back door with the strap twisted, the way I always left it, and my boots stood on newspaper by the range with the laces still tied.

The fire was going. The whole room was warm the way a room is when someone's just been in it.

And at my place, the one nearest the window with the bad leg on the chair, there was a plate of bread and butter. White bread, cut in fingers, not triangles. My father did it that way because he said triangles were for people who had time. The butter went right out to the crusts, and it had melted in a little where the bread was still warm.

My mouth filled with water. It was like being hit. I hadn't eaten since the pie at Ballachulish, and I hadn't eaten anything in that kitchen since I was nine years old, and my body had opinions on the subject that didn't ask me.

I stood on the mat and held my arms against my sides. The chair was pulled out, just enough. I could see the dip in the cushion. I looked at the back of the chair and I didn't touch it, because it would know me, she'd said, and I thought it probably would.

"I'm not sitting," I said. I said it to the room. My voice came out small and courteous, the way I talk over the counter. "Thanks. I'm not."

Nothing answered. The clock ticked. The kettle wasn't on yet, but there was a cup by the plate, a white one with a green band, and I made myself look at the wall instead.

I took one step back, and then another, until my heel found the sill. I kept my eyes on the plate the whole way. That's why I saw it.

The steam came up off the bread. There hadn't been any before, and now it rose thick and slow, straight up in the still air, and the smell of the butter came with it, and it was so much like being nine and hungry that I nearly went forward.

I got the door shut. I stood on the path with my back against it, and I could feel the warmth through the wood.

The warmth stayed in my back a good while after I stepped off the path. Then the dark came down properly, and I noticed the windows were doing all the work. No moon and no cloud edge, just rain and gold squares laid out on the road.

Then the noise started behind the cottages. It was slate moving, a dry clatter that ran and stopped and ran again, as if the tips were shifting their weight in their sleep. Something big let go somewhere up the slope and rolled a long way. I felt it in my feet. Then the pit answered. I couldn't see the water, but I heard it come up against its walls and slap back, a heavy sound, more like a thing turning over than a wave.

I looked down the lane, and the far end was closing. The hedges leaned in from one side and the slate walls from the other, and the shore came up to meet them. The gap I'd walked down was getting narrower. Whatever was down there, I wasn't going to be going back through it.

Eight was next. I went out to the middle of the road and counted from there, hand out flat, saying the numbers under my breath. Seven, and the wet number on its door. Eight, a plain door with no number, a fire behind the glass. I got eight both ways. I'd like to say that was sense. It was more that my legs wanted a reason, and Dana had handed me one.

I went in. I know how that sounds. She'd said two rules, and I'd kept them both, so I told myself the rules were the whole of it. The room was warm before the door had shut behind me.

It was my bedroom. The narrow bed under the sloped ceiling, the blankets turned down at one corner, the pillow with the dent already in it. My father's coat was over the chair by the fire. The heavy brown one, with the collar worn shiny and the left pocket hanging a bit lower than the right. I had watched that coat go out through the hall door. I was forty-two years past being able to get it back, and there it was, warm, with the arms hanging down.

The fire was built high. Somebody had put on more coal than my mother ever would have wasted. The kettle on the hob started up on its own, a low note climbing into a whistle, and nobody came to lift it.

There was a photograph on the mantel. Me at nine, in a school jersey that was too big, my hair wet from a comb. I'd never seen it. I picked it up because my hand did, and turned it over. On the back, in pencil, in a round hand I nearly knew, was tomorrow's date. The sixteenth of November.

I stood holding it. The kettle screamed. I didn't want to hurt it or hurt myself, and it didn't want to hurt me. That was what I understood, plain as the pencil. Nothing in that room was going to grab me. It was only expecting me, for tomorrow, and the day after, and the coat would be on the chair whenever I came in. That was worse. I wanted it. I stood there wanting it, and my eyes were stinging, and I put the photograph back on the mantel face up, exactly where the dust had been disturbed.

I didn't touch the coat. I didn't sit on the bed. I went out backwards, like I had from the last one, and the kettle stopped as the door shut.

The rain had thinned to a drizzle out on the lane, and the rocks behind the cottages were still sliding. Nine's door was already in front of me. I could see it from where I was standing. I still went back to the middle of the road and counted, because I'd got the habit, and I said the numbers out loud like a man reading change off a till. Nine. There was nowhere else to be. Behind me the walls had closed another few yards.

Inside nine there was a table with the cloth on, and three places laid.

Three cups. Three saucers. Three chairs, each one drawn out an inch or two. I looked at the cups because I couldn't help it. Two were plain white. The third was thick and white with a green band round it, and there was a chip on the rim I could have picked out of a hundred.

Brett's. It wasn't there yet, I mean the cup was there and he wasn't. I put my hand on the back of the nearest chair, and then I took it off again as if it were hot. Nobody had told me who the third place was for. I didn't want to know.

The window on the far wall was the wrong window. It should have looked out on the pit and the winding house with its roof fallen in. It looked out on the row. The cottages went on and on, door after door, every window gold, the rain slanting through the light. The loch was gone from behind them. There wasn't any water on that side, or any hill. There was just the row.

Something was moving between the houses. It was long and pale, taller than a man, and thin in a way that took me a moment to take in. It was carrying a lantern, held out at the length of its arm, and the light was pointed at the window I was standing at.

I didn't run at it. I didn't run away either, because there wasn't anywhere that wasn't the row. I looked at the lantern for a good while. Then I turned round, went out through the door I'd come in by, and started walking down the lane the only way it went.

The last door had no number on it. The paint hadn't even been thought of yet. It was plain whitewash gone grey at the foot, with gold coming out round the frame. I'd stopped counting somewhere past eleven. There wasn't much point when the lane only went one way.

I had walked a long time. The walls had crept in so far that I could touch both sides with my elbows, and the sliding behind the cottages had gone quiet. Behind me, the light from that lantern lay on the back of my jacket. I didn't turn round to see how close it was.

I went in. I'm not going to say I decided to.

The fire was going steady and low, and the room was warm right to the corners. There was a table with a cloth, and two cups on it. Brett was sitting at it.

He was in the same chair, or one like it, in the same hoodie with the apron still tied over the top. The grey had gone up past his elbows and into his sleeves. His face was slate now, with that fine grain in it, and his sandy hair looked like something painted on. Both hands were round the white cup with the green band. The chip on the rim was under his thumb.

The other chair was pulled out from the table. There was a dent in the cushion already.

I looked at it longer than I should have. Whatever had built the last eleven rooms had done its homework on me, and this one had nothing in it I recognised. No oilcloth, no coat, no photograph. Just a chair and somebody sitting across from it who couldn't leave. It knew that was what would work.

On Tuesday I'd told a man at pump three to go in and pay for what he'd put in the tank. Nothing comes free at a forecourt, and I'd never once been wrong about that. I hadn't thought I'd ever be the one standing at the pump with my hand out for the wrong handle.

"Brett," I said.

Nothing. His eyes were on the door behind me.

I kept my back to the empty chair and stepped round the table sideways, so I never had my legs near it. Then I took hold of his right wrist. It was cold and heavy and gritty, like a kerbstone. I put my other hand over his knuckles and pulled the hand off the cup.

It came. That was the worst of it. I'd expected it not to.

His fingers broke off at the joints, in flakes, the way a slate splits when you get a knife in the grain. They fell on the cloth and on my boots and made a little dry clicking. The cup stayed where it was with the rest of him printed on the china.

His mouth moved. It opened around a name, one short name, and stayed open on the end of it. It wasn't mine. I don't know who it was. His mother, maybe. I hope his mother.

"I'm sorry," I said. My voice came out ordinary. That's what I remember, that I said it the way I'd say it to a customer whose card had been declined. "Brett, I'm sorry. I can't get you out."

His eyes didn't move. I don't think he heard me, and I've thought about that more than anything else since.

I let go of his wrist. I left him there. I walked away from a nineteen-year-old in a chair with his mouth open and his hands in bits, and I'd do it again, and that's the thing I'll be carrying about me for good.

Then I turned round to the second chair, the one with the dent in it, and I kicked it. Hard. It went over on the flags and one of its legs snapped, and the noise was so loud in that little room that I nearly stopped. I didn't. I took the two cups off the table, the white one and the one with the band, which I pried out of what was left of his other hand, and I threw them at the hearth one after the other.

They broke. Bits went everywhere, into the ash, under the range, one piece across the floor as far as my boot.

The fire went out. It didn't die down. It just stopped, all at once, and the room went dark and cold and smelt of wet stone. The gold went out of the window. Brett's shape was still in the chair. I could make out the pale of his face, and I kept my eyes off it.

I felt along the wall with both hands because they wouldn't close on anything. There was a door at the back that I hadn't seen when the fire was up. The latch was iron and freezing. I lifted it and pushed and the door swung out easy on a hinge that made no noise.

Cold rain hit my face. It was the proper sort, wind in it and a smell of diesel and wet tarmac. In front of me was the A828, black and shining and empty in both directions, and a white line down the middle of it, actual paint, a bit worn. My Focus was parked on the verge with two wheels in the grass and the driver's door shut and rain running down the glass.

The keys were in my jacket pocket. They'd been there the whole time.

I got in. The seat was wet where my coat had dripped on it the day before. I shut the door and sat with my hands on the wheel, and I did not look in the mirror. It took me three goes to turn the key, because my fingers were numb and still stiff from the slate. When the engine caught I put the heater on full and the lights on dipped and pulled out.

I drove north. I didn't put the radio on. The road went along the loch and then away from it. I passed the garage at Ballachulish with its four pumps and a light on over the hatch, and I kept going. I passed the Onich turn. I didn't stop for the sheep on the road at Corran or for the lorry that flashed me at the narrows. I didn't stop for petrol, though the gauge was well down.

My hands were sore all the way. Ninety minutes, and I never once took my foot off, and I never once looked to see if anything was following me.

It was still dark when I turned in at the forecourt. The clock on the dash said ten to six and the canopy lights were on their timer, white over the wet concrete. I pulled up by the air machine, a good way from the pumps, and switched the engine off. My hands stayed on the wheel. They'd been on it so long I had to think about opening them.

The kiosk light was on.

That was the first thing. Ewan wasn't due till seven and his Corsa wasn't in its space, and I'd locked that kiosk myself on Wednesday night. The light was the strip over the counter, the one we leave off. I sat and looked at it for a bit, and then I looked at pump four, because that's where the other light was.

There was a door beside it. White, wet, grey along the bottom. It stood on the island where the bollard and the squeegee bucket go, and there was no wall round it and no house behind it, just the door in its frame with the rain coming down on the lintel. The window in it was gold. I could see the fire from the car.

I got out. I'm not sure why I thought getting out was a good idea, except that staying in the car would've meant sitting with it. The rain was the ordinary sort. Lorries went by on the A82 with their tyres hissing, and a man in a cab looked across at me and didn't look at the door at all.

I walked to within about ten feet and stopped. I know that spot. It's where I stand when somebody's running the nozzle and I'm deciding whether to say something.

Through the glass I could see a table with a cloth on it, and one chair, pulled out. One cup on a saucer. Steam came off it. There was a little wet ring on the cloth where somebody had set it down, just now, and there was a plate with a biscuit on it, a plain digestive, the kind I keep in the drawer under the till. Nobody's ever made me a cup of tea at that forecourt. Twenty-two years. I make my own, and I make Ewan's when he's on nights, and I wash my mug and put it upside down on the rack.

The other places had been for a nine-year-old and a six-year-old and for two. This one was for one, and it was for me, exactly as I am, the man who takes his own mug home. I hadn't got it out of my head yet, that wanting. It was still there in my stomach and my mouth and the backs of my knees, the way the cold was still in my fingers. Nobody had to tell me the tea would be right. Hot, milk in, no sugar. Brett would've got it right too.

Brett's mother would be at the pier by nine. Somebody would go up the single track after that, and they'd find four cottages and a lot of rain. I'd known that since Dana said it and I'd known it in the car for ninety minutes and it hadn't got any lighter. I thought about ringing Lisa Perkins at the garage and saying something, and I couldn't think what. I was in your row. The boy from the tea van's in the last house. She'd have said I hope he's glad to see you again, or nothing at all. She'd have been right to.

The door wasn't going to come after me. That's what I understood, standing there. It didn't need to. It had the whole day and I had a shift to do.

"No," I said. It came out very polite, the voice I use for a card that's been declined. "Thanks. I'm not."

The steam went up off the cup. The fire moved on the wall. Nothing else happened, and I hadn't expected it to.

I turned my back on it, which was harder than smashing the cups had been. I walked to the kiosk with the keys already out. The lock was the same lock. The door was unlocked, and I don't know who by. I went in and stood in the strip light with the smell of coffee grounds and floor cleaner and my own wet coat, and everything in there was in its place: the lottery machine, the tray of lighters, the sign about drive-offs that Ewan has never once read. The till was shut. I put the key in, turned it, and the drawer came out with the little ding. Three hundred in the float, in the trays where it always is. I looked at it. I didn't count it.

I took my hands out of the drawer and went back out and walked down to the edge of the forecourt, to where the tarmac meets the pavement and the road begins. I stood with my heels on the kerb and my back to the traffic so it was all in front of me. The canopy. The pumps. The kiosk with its one light. The island by pump four.

Dana said from the road. Not from the step, not on anybody's word. So I put my arm out flat, the way I had at the row, and I counted with the sore fingers of my right hand, touching each one in the air.

I got one. I did it again from the other end, and I got one. There was a fire in it, and the tea was still steaming, and I stood there with my arm out until the first lorry of the morning came round the bend and lit me up.