Macbeth

Ewan turned to his mother. ‘Then liars are stupid because there are lots more of them than there are honest joes. They could beat the joes and hang them instead.’

‘Listen!’ Emily said.

Meredith pricked up her ears. And now she could hear it too. The distant rumble of an engine getting closer.

The boy jumped down from the bench. ‘Here he comes! Emily, let’s hide and give him a fright.’

‘Yes!’

The children disappeared into the bedroom while Meredith went to the window. Tried to shade her eyes from the sun. She felt an unease she couldn’t explain. Perhaps she was afraid the Duff who came home wouldn’t be the same one who had left that morning.

Duff put his car in neutral and let it roll the last part of the gravel track to the house. The gravel murmured and fretted like subterranean trolls beneath the wheels. He had driven like a man possessed from Caithness, had broken a principle he had always adhered to, never to misuse the blue light he kept in the glove compartment. With the light on the roof he had managed to jump the queue on the road to the old bridge, but once there the carriageway was so narrow that even with the light he’d had to grit his teeth as they moved forward at a snail’s pace. He braked hard and the subterranean voices died. Switched off the engine and got out. The sun was shining on the white sheets on the veranda welcoming him home with a wave. She had done the washing. All the bedlinen so that he wouldn’t think she had only done the sheets on the marital bed. And even though he was sated with love-making, the notion warmed his heart. Because he had left Caithness. And Caithness had left him. She had stood in the door, wiping a last tear, given him a last goodbye kiss and said that now the door was closed to him. She could do this now that she had made up her mind. One day maybe someone else would come through the door he was leaving. And he replied that he hoped so, and the ‘someone else’ would be a very lucky man. On the street he had leaped in the air with relief, happiness and freedom regained. Yes, imagine that — free. To be with his wife and children! Life is strange. And wonderful.

He walked towards the veranda. ‘Ewan! Emily!’ Usually when he came home they ran out to meet him. But sometimes they also hid to launch a surprise attack on him.

He dodged between the lines of sheets.

‘Ewan! Emily!’

He stopped. He was hidden between the sheets, which cast long shadows that moved across the veranda floor. He inhaled the soap’s perfume and the freshwater in which they had been washed. There was another smell too. He smiled. Broth. His smile became even broader as he remembered the good-natured discussion they’d had when Ewan insisted on having the beard glued on before he ate his soup. It was perfectly still. The ambush could come at any second.

There were tiny dots of sunshine in the shadows the sheets cast.

He stood staring at them.

Then down at himself. At his sweater and trousers covered with tiny dots of sunshine. He felt his heart skip a beat. Ran a finger over a sheet. It found a hole at once. And another. He stopped breathing.

Pulled the sheet at the back to the side.

The kitchen window was gone. The wall was holed so badly it looked more like a hole than a wall. He looked in through where the window had been. The pot on the hotplate looked like a sieve. The stove and the floor around were covered with a steaming yellowish-green broth.

He wanted to go inside. He had to go inside. But he couldn’t; it was as if his feet were frozen to the veranda floor and his willpower was deactivated.

But there’s no one in the kitchen, he told himself. Empty. Perhaps the rest of the house was empty too. Destroyed but empty. Perhaps they had escaped to the cabin. Perhaps. Perhaps he hadn’t lost everything.

He forced himself to pass through the opening where the door had been. He went into the children’s rooms. First Emily’s, then Ewan’s. Checked the cupboards raked with machine gun fire and under the beds. No one. Nor in the guest room. He went towards the last room, his and Meredith’s bedroom, with the broad soft double bed where on Sunday mornings they made room for all four of them, lay on their sides, tickled bare toes to the children’s loud shrieks, gently scratched each other’s backs, talked about all sorts of weird and wonderful things and fought to decide who should get up first.

The bedroom door hadn’t been shot away, but the gaps between the bullet holes were the same as elsewhere in the house. Duff took a deep breath.

Perhaps not all was lost yet.

He gripped the handle. Opened the door.