They sat near the back like a childish conspiracy, the bad kids on the school bus

As a kid Finn had spent summers in Orkney, his mother, Sally, shipping him off during the holidays while she worked a cleaning job and behind the reception desk at the DCA, scraping together enough to pay the mortgage. Finn wondered about that, why Sally never asked Ingrid for help. Sally was artistic and had gone to Dundee to study fine art.

When she got pregnant with Finn in her final year, she carried on and passed her degree two days after his due date.

Whoever the dad was, he’d never been in the picture, and when Finn got older and asked about him Sally just shrugged and said the two of them didn’t need anyone else.

She’d kept on with art for a while, collages and crafty stuff, sculptures of found objects. She did waitressing and cleaning, anything flexible that fitted around childcare.

She could’ve gone back to Orkney, to Ingrid, but she never did.

Maybe she saw that as defeat, an admission that she couldn’t make it as a grown-up and a parent. Finn would never know.

But she was back in Orkney forever now, and Finn’s trips north kept him connected to her.

Attraction

So he knew Orkney pretty well but not like a local, not like Ingrid, who’d rarely left the islands since she was born.

These days she worked part-time at the Tomb of the Eagles, the Stone Age tourist attraction at the tip of South Ronaldsay.

It was a couple of miles along from her cottage, as far south as you could get on Orkney before you fell into the sea.

It was an amazing place, a chambered cairn full of human remains and eagle bones, and the cliff it was built on was just as dramatic.

While Ingrid showed tourists around, Finn would spend the summers helping out and exploring. Then, when he was older, he borrowed her car and drove around the islands, finding the hidden nooks that tourists never did.

Maddie had said she lived in Stromness, the main town on the west mainland. Orcadians referred to the main island of Orkney as the mainland, as opposed to the mainland of Scotland, which they insisted on calling Scotland.

Like it was a different country, which of course it was to many of them. Stromness was the second biggest town in Orkney after Kirkwall, which wasn’t saying much. There was precious little to it except a couple of streets, the harbour and 2,000 hardy souls.

Finn tried to imagine what Maddie did with her time there, what kept her there for 10 years. She hadn’t said if she had a job or not and he hadn’t asked about the man situation, for obvious reasons. But she seemed too big a personality to live in such a sleepy town.

She was restless, not someone content to sit around watching daytime television. But then what did he know. He was making assumptions, creating a woman he could fall for in his half-cut mind.

She came back from the toilet and they headed to the gate. The four oil workers were finishing their pints as Finn and Maddie walked past, and one of them grunted in their direction. The big guy she’d knocked back just eyeballed them.

Hold-up

A middle-aged couple were in front of them getting their boarding cards checked. They’d turned up in a fluster just after the delay was announced, complaining in Yorkshire accents about their taxi driver.

They relaxed when they realised the plane was late, getting iPads out to play Candy Crush and Sudoku. They had matching fleeces and backpacks, the man placing his hand at the woman’s waist now as they went through the gate, guiding her to the runway.

There was a hold-up on the tarmac. A guy in a yellow hi-vis jacket held his hand up for them to stop at the steps of the plane.

He spoke into a radio then angled his head to listen to the reply. The evening was blowy but Finn felt hemmed in, the fog damp on his face.

They were only a few hundred yards from the sea, over to the north behind the plane, but he couldn’t see much past the tail of the aircraft.

He loved flying on these little twin-props, the informality so different from the herding of package holidays.

With eight passengers in a 28-seater there would be plenty of room to spread out. He and Maddie could sit together despite their allocated seats being six rows apart, no one cared about that up here.

“What now?” Maddie said to Hi-Vis, then looked behind her. Finn followed her gaze and saw the oil workers coming out of the terminal. He chewed the inside of his cheek.

“Come on, mate.” It was the tallest oil worker, the knock-back guy, approaching Hi-Vis. “We’re freezing out here.”

The guy turned away and spoke into the radio. Finn thought he heard something like “fuel cap”. He imagined a car’s fuel cap dangling loose as it drove away from a petrol station. Ridiculous, this was a small flight but it had all the same safety regulations as bigger planes.

Maddie looked past the oil workers, at the terminal. Hi-Vis gave them the all clear and the middle-aged couple started up the steps. Maddie put her holdall down on the tarmac, opened it and rummaged inside. She lifted her head and spoke to the oil workers. “On you go.” They bustled up the stairs.

Conspiracy

“Everything OK?” Finn said.

“Just pretending. Let those boors go in front so we don’t end up sitting next to them.” She zipped up the holdall, slung it over her shoulder and stood up. “Let’s get out of here.”

They sat near the back like a childish conspiracy, the bad kids on the school bus. The middle-aged couple were in the front row like swots, the oil workers spread across rows E and F.

The weekend before Christmas, the last flight off the island, and the alcohol made Finn feel loose and edgy. Charlotte the stewardess had greeted them as they boarded.

She was about the same age as Finn, with hipster glasses, braided blonde hair and no make-up, and she somehow managed to make the Loganair purple and blue uniform seem cool.

More tomorrow.

Crash Land is published by Faber, paperback priced £7.99. dougjohnstone.co.uk