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the wives of The Bunker Twins. The Bunkers were not critically joined like Lynne and Rosa, who shared a bladder, a digestive system, reproductive organs. The Bunker Twins were brought together by a fatty phalanx of skin along their sides. Two sisters married them and between them, in nights of mutual passion, they fathered twenty children, all healthy. They lived to the ripe old age of seventy-three, each dying on the same night.”’
    I whispered, ‘Siamese twins, the Erin sisters were Siamese twins.’
    â€˜That’s right. Brotherhood installed them in the hotel until he’d driven both women mad with jealousy for each other. Rosa tried to hack Lynne apart from her with a carving knife; they bled to death during the airlift.’
    â€˜He would go to bed with them and they were joined up?’
    â€˜They only had one . . .
    I goes, ‘Jesus.’ I’d taken my head off his shoulder.
    He went, ‘You can imagine what gossip has been echoing round the island. There’s always a physically dominant twin; when they were children it was always Lynne who limped forward, dragging that third leg behind them. There’s tragedy written into those dynamics and Brotherhood just had to exploit it to set them against each other.’
    â€˜What’s all this about young wives in the hotel he speaks all these stories out to?’
    The guy lit another cigarette, offered, and I shook head. ‘Guests. He runs The Drome Hotel as a honeymoon place. It’s all done through travel agents in the Central Belt: couples get flown in on these light aircraft; Brotherhood picks them up in this crazy white limo with pink interior, they stay a fortnight and get the wee plane out again. Crazy scene.’
    I’d put the head back down on his shoulder and I know he was talking, warning me, but I nodded off.
    I came awake. I thought he’d gone then saw the glow of a cigarette over by a tree. My cheek was resting on his rolled-up jacket, the cold zip dugged into my cheek.
    â€˜Yup.’
    â€˜Hi
ya
.’
    â€˜You were talking in your sleep.’
    I smiled, breathed out warm air from my nose.
    â€˜You says, “Brotherhood,” and another name too, and he says the name I didn’t recognise until later, and that wasimpossible for me to know then, but truly that is what he said as if all that happens has already. Light was jumping up behind the looming mountains further into the Interior and I was bye-bidding the night-talker and lashing on past the portakabins and into more mysteriousnesses of mist banks, darkness, the lantern sky behind and gold embers of islets strewn along the river with burn-out smoke rising in the cold dawning air, making the waterway look on fire.
    Sun was up and I was near one of the Backroads when I heard the explosions up the glen, then it was feet onto the slap of tar road and on down until the purr of Knifegrinder’s motorcycle coming up from the rear.
    â€˜Man, you are zilch, you are zilch in weirdyness to things I did and saw way Down There,’ I shouted at him as he approached, the stag’s horns on his motorcycle helmet (that he was later arrested for as an accident hazard) moving slow from side to side as he braked to a stop; the old motorbike phutting away.
    â€˜Want any knives sharpened?’ he goes, produced a crab apple from his biker jacket and stuck it up onto an end spike of the antler horns. He growled, shook his head till the apple flew off and rolled a bit down the road. He took out the bird-noise whistle he used outside the kitchens, sculleries and shops to tell of his arrival; he blew its weird whirling sound.
    â€˜I don’t have a knife.’ Then my mind jumped and my fingers found the forester’s knife in the yachting jacket’s pocket. ‘Well I’ve this . . .’
    â€˜
Nice
piece . . .’
    â€˜It’s not even mine. Got any food?’ I walked to the