At the end of the garden was a field and we weren't supposed to play there but we did.
Bill said all the kids from his school played there, that they went there in the afternoon, after tea. First they scared the sheep away and then they set up forts and made dangerous games with hideouts and dens that the adults would never know about in that field that finished at the edge and had no fence, because it fell straight down where a fence should have been, straight into the sea.
Aunt Pam said we were never allowed to go there. For the way the grass stopped just like that, like God had cut the earth off the edges and let it drop down onto the rocks with waves that made great crashing sounds against them, making their own storm down there, their own mad and crazy weather.
She had lots of rules about staying on the farm. Rules about gates that you had to close and not bothering the cows when they had their calves with them. Rules about being gentle with the sheep because sheep were gentle, and about how long we three kids could stay out on our own without her having to come looking. She said Bill should know better than to go on about that field and how good it was to play there.
As it was, she said, she was having to phone the farmer every day to tell him that he should get a fence built there again, that everyone should know how dangerous that field was without it.
There were certain kinds of winds she knew about, that could just pick you up and blow you away; or other kinds that could push you. Then she gave Bill a certain kind of look and he turned away.
"You should know better" she said to him. But he still wasn't looking.
Aunt Pam knew about weather and the land alright. Even though it wasn't her farm and she just lived there. Uncle Robbie had been a farmer when he was alive and before Bill became a half orphan then, with no dad of his own. But now she had to phone that other farmer who kept his animals in the fields that she and Bill and Uncle Robbie used to say were theirs. She had to ask his permission for every single thing, as though the three of them had never lived there before with their own sheep and cows to look after. So it was Uncle Robbie told Aunt Pam ages ago, all that stuff about where the north wind came from and what it could do, and he told Bill too - like he knew everything about living up there where they did, about the cliffs and the air and the way there were no trees because the wind had torn them up by their roots, most of them and blown them away.
Bill said that was what came of living in "the far north". That anything could happen there.
"You girls won't know about this" he said to us, wanting to be the one who was in charge when we were up there on holidays. "You girls won't be aware, but where we live things are different from the rest of Scotland, or Britain even, or England. Because we have things like a dangerous field at the end of our garden, and kids up here know about it - but they're strong.
"Like I could take you down that field and we could play there, if you're not scared. There's stuff we could do that would be frightening, but exciting too. And if those other kids do it then why shouldn't you? So do you want to? Do you? Do you?"
In the end, I wouldn't know what to say. Aunt Pammy put down the rules but she was busy most of the time, that summer we went up there to stay. She had stuff to do in the house, or people in the village to see. I remember her as a person hanging white sheets on the line, or writing lists for shopping, sweeping the floors and I sometimes think all of it, all the business of her day was just missing Uncle Robbie and not talking about it or wanting to cry. Bill said she wasn't allowed to.
"Never, ever" he said. That was his rule. Ever since his dad was chucked off his horse at the Highland Show, he said, and his head cut wide open for everyone to see. "Because nobody can change that" Bill said. "That my dad is dead. So nobody can cry."
That happened the Autumn before though, when Mum took me and Ailsa out of school and we came up to help Aunt Pam and Bill and there was a funeral then and I heard mum and Aunt Pammy talking and talking, late into the night and it was all about Uncle Robbie and about the farm and something to do with money and how Uncle Robbie had been "pushed to the edge." And now it was summer again. And Bill never said anything else about missing his dad or any of the things I'd heard mum and Aunt Pammy talk about. "Come on" he just said instead. "Tell me you're not scared. Let me take you to the field and we'll do the dangerous game."
In the end Ailsa and I said we would, that yes we would go. Disobey Aunt Pammy and be irresponsible, for that's what we'd be, she'd told us, that it would be irresponsible and sly to disobey any of the rules of the farm. But still we went with Bill one afternoon when she was gone from the house and it wasn't sunny that day, but it was warm and grey and there was no wind to push us. "Stay with me girls" said Bill. " I'll look after you."
The game it turned out was no kind of game at all. The minute we got to the field I realised all the time Bill had been lying. About games going on there. About the kids in his class going to play after school. There was no game at all. We walked out across the grass, going deeper and deeper into the field in the still grey air, and there was nothing about us, nothing. I felt how still it was and quiet, and how in the distance the sheep moved away from us as they saw us coming, looking up and seeing us, staying for a minute and then moving away, making that sound, the lambs did, like a baby crying.
"Come on" said Bill. "This is what we do" - and he led us further and further across the field. Everything by now was getting slower. More distant. The house was at our back and the low slate garden wall and the air was soft and warm and grey and everything had stopped except our walking, getting further and further away, walking across the field and knowing at the edge there was nothing. High up I could hear the curlews sweeping and calling their sad cry but Bill wasn't talking and Ailsa never said anything much, she just followed me mostly and understood without having to say things - so when I knew there was no game and that Bill was making it all up, the game of playing in the field, I could guess that Ailsa might know it too, that Bill was doing something altogether different here.
I watched him up ahead. He had a stick and he was waving it in the air, at first just walking across the field but then I saw he was getting closer to the sheep. He was waving the stick and then he started waving it at the sheep, and they started moving faster, scattering away faster from him and frightened, running, and I knew that it was all wrong.
When Aunt Pammy said there were rules at the farm she also said she'd learned them all from Bill's dad like she learned about the weather and the other things and Bill knew the rules too in the same way that his father had taught him. So Bill must have known that if his dad had stayed alive he would never have let Bill go out there the way he did that day. He was a man who probably would have put up a fence himself there to protect the sheep from danger, to keep them safely in. He would not have let a boy go running off towards the edge of a field that dropped straight down into the sea. But he was not there. And the farm had never been his, my mum said later - a lot of unhappiness in that family, and broken hopes, for the way Bill's dad never managed to own property for himself and work a piece of land.
Maybe it was that pushed Bill's dad "to the edge" - that sentence I'd heard my mum and Aunt Pammy say, whispering together late that night when we came up for Uncle Robbie's funeral and to help. I heard them say then, as I stood at the door listening in, that worries about money and the farm they couldn't manage had driven that man to such unhappiness, that I thought when I heard about it, that of course that would be a reason that he would just have to die.
I think I thought that, anyway. Actually, I can't remember properly what order I learned about any of these things. Even now writing about that summer, and remembering it or the holidays before... It seems a long time ago. And we don't go up north any more, and we don't see our cousin and our Aunty because now they've moved far, far away.
But that day with Bill doesn't seem in the distance. Seems like just now Ailsa came up behind me and took my hand, not saying anything but frightened for the way he was being with the poor sheep. Chasing them and screaming at them and waving his big stick. I started going faster, trying to catch up with him then but I could feel the way the field was running out under my feet and I couldn't make myself go faster because of that, the way the field was disappearing into sky as we got closer and Bill was chasing one of the sheep closer to the edge.
"Stop it! I must have shouted. "Please come back! "
"Please come back!" Ailsa said as well because she was only four then and when she did speak she always had to copy.
"You can't stop me, it's the game!" Bill turned and faced us. We were close to him now and his eyes were glittering, his cheeks bright red from running and yelling. He was breathing hard in and out. "Just watch!" he said. "Just watch what I can do. Here - "
And he turned back then and for the last few steps ran the sheep ahead of him, it letting out that little baby sound and scattering its woolly tail and running on ahead from Bill's big stick and his frightening cries.
"Watch!" he yelled again and in that second the sheep went over. One minute running on the grass, the next it was gone.
"You see?" Bill shouted at us. "You see what I have done? And how dangerous is the game? Look - " and he grabbed my hand and pulled me and Ailsa closer, closer to the edge.
We were two steps away and I was sick to look down but I had to. Down the drop to the swirling sea and the big black rock jutting out. And way down there, split open with red stuff coming out of its white wool, the poor sheep he'd frightened over. Its head twisted queer off to one side, and the legs all sticking out in different ways.
I felt something swirl, like the sea that was spinning around the big rock and then Ailsa let out a scream.
"Cry Baby!" Bill yelled at her then, and pushed at her so she screamed again. "Cry Baby!" he shouted at her over and over and at me too but he was the one who had tears all down his face, not us. He was the one who was crying.
"That's where my dad went" he shouted, "so why shouldn't some old sheep get killed down there too? If I want to I'll make them all go over! The whole bloody lot of them, and everyone! All the people too, my mum and your mum and your dad and all the whole families in the world. They can all go down there to the rock!" he was crying, over and over and banging his big stick down onto the ground.
"I saw him" he said, "When he didn't think I was looking. I saw him go down onto that same rock that's down there with blood on it... And it's only fair that all of you should see! So it's not just me!" He was shouting and crying but we were away from the edge now and Aunt Pammy was coming running up behind us to pull us all away and back into the field, and he was still shouting and crying... Even when she took him in her arms, still shouting into the soft and warm grey air that felt like heaven, with no sun at all and the rest of the sheep gone quiet now in the field behind us but as Aunt Pammy held him closer and closer, tight in her arms, and tighter, little boy, just whispering in the end, "I hate it that it was only me."