I met Adam underground and underground we stayed. We ran from our shadows in the cracks of the masquerade that played out our days. I was starry-eyed. He was the night that gave stars a home, a night without roads and signposts, or places we could ever call discovered, or know.

  We were crammed into the basement of Scotland’s National Film School, waiting for the studio door to swing open and unleash our untameable life dreams. Our lecturers were late. The rest of
us were wading in a sea of adrenaline that we needed to inject into something. We weaved amongst each other, broadcasting our charm with smiles too big for our faces. Adam didn’t. Adam lounged nonchalantly against the door looking thoroughly bored.
  I was unsure if it was him that captivated me or my fear of him. He was American, charming, and cucumber cool. But by the end of week one, he’d effortlessly unmasked the tutor’s professional veneers and rendered them jabbering idiots. Sometimes it seemed almost cruel. When he didn’t serve them back the opinions they doled out to us as facts, he laughed in all of their facades. I resented the arrogance with which he burst their façade of expertise and blew it up in all our faces. At the same time, I longed for him with a twinge of incurable lust.

  We weaved around each other at the odd house party. Our few words became loaded. He seemed to reach through my skin and see the part of me that’s most hidden, as if a separate universe existed for us that no one else would ever visit. His glare beckoned me into his mystery at the same time I heard the warning, “Beware you fucking fool, I might bite.”
  So I kept my distance until the wilderness of December on a film shoot on the Isle of Barra, a rugged, cold beauty of barren moors, rocky outcrops and turquoise waters in the southern Outer-Hebrides of Scotland. We seemed alone there, but for the freely roaming sheep and the white houses that strung out across either side of a soft, winding road, like pearls slipping
free from a snapped necklace.
  The land whispered a hundred thousand stories of the farmers, boat-builders, and fishermen that lived here, loved here and died here—or were forcibly shipped off to Canada to alleviate an
over-populated island in the blight of a potato famine. In the hazy, violet dusk, a farmer told me about a young woman milking a cow in the fields by Loch na Doirlin, who was seized by the
colonel’s guards and forced onto a boat with nothing but the clothes that she stood in.

  When the stories subsided, there was only a breath-taking stillness, the lapping of the waves, and husky cries of the sea birds. The rising sun dusted the hills in an apricot-tinted shimmer until the first glimmers of its amethyst descent. So beyond the crystal clear nights, the sky was permanently rolling in watercolours, dripping its silver-edged hues across the marshy carpet of sea-pink heather into the springs and the dykes that weaved down the hillsides.
  We rose before the sun and bundled huge, hard cases of camera equipment, lighting, props and blankets into two, hired, white vans and bounced through the muddy fields to far-flung locations.
Amongst the 14 cast and crew members, I wasn’t sure what I was doing there. The director had asked me to crew because he liked my cheer, I think. I was credited as ‘set manager’ and mostly, I held things, took photos for my own amusement and wrapped the shivering actors in blankets.
  Meanwhile, Adam framed their hopes and fears on 16mm film. He directed the camera team as if he was born for it, oozing quiet confidence and a confusing blend of patience and contempt for
the rest of us. In the chill of the starry evenings we would huddle around the hearth in the cosy cottage on the hilltop and warm our chilled bones with the closeness of our sleepy bodies, while sipping on red wine and hearty soup. We watched old films, played poker and laughed like maniacs.
  Niamh was almost always by me then. She was barely noticeable, but comforting, like the whispers of the breeze, or a sonata played on a piano far away. Niamh was half Irish, half fairy-tale. She had just started her journey in abstract painting at the art college after an aborted degree in English literature and two years of depression. Her voice was as soft as frosting and carried a lilting lyricism that soothed me like falling snow. She looked like the ivory femme printed on the little papier-poudre books of the early 1900s. She had the demeanor of a rose and the resolve of an ox. I cherished her. We shared a flat off Broughton Road with three boys and a mannequin. At my suggestion she’d been invited on the shoot to do the actors’ hair and make-up. We shared a bed on the island, though I was too cold and too lusty to sleep.
  One evening on that duvet, Adam played me his films. I fell into his fiction and found my longing. I thought I would never return from there, that home that disappears the moment I try to grasp it. I shivered with the stark realization that my feelings had slipped from my fingers.
  Like amateur thieves, we slipped through the velvety dark and broke into the tumbledown barn at the bottom of the hill. The hushed, electric air of forgotten treasure enveloped the unlit jumble we walked into. I lay down on a faded olive green sofa embroidered with gold hummingbirds and I stretched out like a cat. Adam sat in a wicker chair in the soft pool of moonlight that streaked through the trees and cascaded through the window. We rolled a joint and smoked the last of his weed. We spoke of our hopes and dreams and the glass wall that we felt between us and society that gave us the uncomfortable impression we were somehow far, far away from
everything. Our silences were pregnant with the world. He came to me and kissed me without asking, without needing to. We made love in hushed whispers like it was the only chance there ever was.
  The next evening, in the indigo alley where night kisses day, we strolled together through the moors. He reached out to hold my hand at the same moment I skipped ahead of him. This was reflex. Hand-holding was risky and threatened my vision of everything. The way I saw it, I always wanted to be free. No one could hold me down.

  The night-ferry from Castlebay back to Oban was rough and choppy. The wind whined of my lust and a longing to be held. The wall-lights fused out and rattled all night in their candle-shaped
mounts. I couldn’t sleep like the others, heaped together like seals in the cold and the sadness of an ending. In the early hours, I slipped out onto the deck and pushed my face hard against the
howling wind that almost took the door off. Her icy shrieks and slashes devoured my cheeks as I pushed through the waves that were crashing over the boardwalk.
  He was leaning against the railing like a part of the landscape, as velvet as the sky and as vast as the ocean. He took me under his coat and said, “So you found me.” The tempestuous night sucked us into its vortex. I said to myself, “This is now. The beginning and the ending.” The wind wrapped around us. We didn’t move until the sun came.
  After the Christmas holidays there was the mounting pressure to finish our screenplays. The ineptitude of the film tutors had begun to wear me thin. Niamh had met an Italian law student and spent most nights at his. I barely saw her. January was cold and miserable and I felt a horrific, unappeasable thing wriggling inside me, like a maggot that had sprouted my head.
I’d seen Adam once since Barra. I told him it was better if we kept our secret on the island, so people wouldn’t make assumptions or imagine we were in a relationship, so we wouldn’t think we were in a relationship. He agreed.
He didn’t show up to lectures any more. I phoned him one evening when I was bored and alone. I’d ran out of weed. He picked up and said nothing.
“Hi.” I said.
“Hi.”
“What are you up to?”
“Nothing much, hanging out, watching a film.”
“Do you want to come over?”
“Not really.”
“Okay.”
  And that was that. I felt like I’d been stabbed in the gut, by something small, like a penknife. In a way, that made it worse. I suppose I wished it was more poetic, I needed a scimitar through
my neck to give myself permission to feel wounded. A few days later I bumped into him in the library. He was browsing the shelves of DVDs. He greeted me as if I was a fart that had just drifted towards him from a backside that would never be identified. I wanted to ram him into the DVDs. Instead, I acted disinterested. I browsed the shelves, picked out two long, intense Tarkovsky films and left without saying a word.
  Two days later I woke tangled in his sheets. It was already clear that his moods ebbed and flowed like tidal waves. I didn’t know where he might carry me to and there was something magnetic in that. It was like travelling, in the beginning.