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about.
    People were shouting from the open door of the pub. Magnus Magnuson himself was in the street now, windmilling his arms and flinging out his feet in alarm, the bar rag still clutched in one hand like a flag of surrender. The car came on. Robbie stood there. Hopeless was the way it looked. But then we hadn’t taken the wind into account, and how could any of us have forgotten its caprices, even for a minute? At that crucial instant, a gust came up the canyon of the high street and bowled Robbie Baikie over atop the bird woman even as it lifted the front end of Duncan’s car and flung it into the near streetlamp, which never yielded.
    The wind skreeled off down the street, carrying bits of paper, cans, bottles, old bones and rags and other refuse along with it. The bird woman’s eyes blinked open. Robbie Baikie, all fifteen stone of him, lay pressed atop her in a defensive posture, anticipating the impact of the car, and he hadn’t even thought to prop himself on his elbows to take some of the crush off her. Junie Ooley smelled the beer on him and the dulcet smoke of his pipe tobacco and the sweetness of the peat fire at Magnuson’s and maybe even something of the sheep he kept, and she couldn’t begin to imagine who this man was or what he was doing on top of her in the middle of the public street. “Get off me,” she said in a voice so flat and calm Robbie wasn’t sure he’d heard it at all, and because she was an American woman and didn’t commonly make use of the term “clod,” she added, “you big doof.”
    Robbie was shy with women—we all were, except for the women themselves, and they were shy with the men, at least for the first five years after the wedding—and he was still fumbling with the notion of what had happened to him and to her and to Duncan Stout’s automobile and couldn’t have said one word even if he’d wanted to.
    “Get off,” she repeated, and she’d begun to add physical emphasisto the imperative, writhing beneath him and bracing her upturned palms against the great unmoving slabs of his shoulders.
    Robbie went to one knee, then pushed himself up even as the bird woman rolled out from under him. In the next moment she was on her feet, angrily shifting the straps of her rucksack where they bit into the flesh, cursing him softly but emphatically and with a kind of fluid improvisatory genius that made his face light up in wonder. Twenty paces away, Duncan was trying to extricate himself from his car, but the wind wouldn’t let him. Howith Clarke, the greengrocer, was out in the street now, surveying the damage with a sour face, and Magnus was right there in the middle of things, his voice gone hoarse with excitement. He was inquiring after Junie Ooley’s condition—“Are you all right, lass?”—when a gust lifted all four of them off their feet and sent them tumbling like ninepins. That was enough for Robbie. He picked himself up, took hold of the bird woman’s arm and frog-marched her into the pub.
    In they came, and the wind with them, packets of crisps and beer coasters sailing across the polished surface of the bar, and all of us instinctively grabbing for our hats. Robbie’s head was bowed and his hair blown straight up off his crown as if it had been done up in a perm by some mad cosmetologist, and Junie Ooley heaving and thrashing against him till he released her to spin away from him and down the length of the bar. No one could see how pretty she was at first, her face all deformed with surprise and rage and the petulant crease stamped between her eyes. She didn’t even so much as look in our direction, but just threw herself back at Robbie and gave him a shove as if they were children at war on the playground.
    “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she demanded, her voice piping high with her agitation. And then, glancing round at the rest of us: “Did you see what this big
idiot
did to me out there?”
    No one said a word. The smoke of the peat