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Winnie rubs her back around my legs, as though I had just sat down for her pleasure.
    He chuckles. “Sounded like an awful lot of nothing to me.”
    “I was just caught up in my work, research.”
    He looks at me, as though I’ve handed him a measure by which to gauge me. “Aye, they were saying in the village that you were up to something of the sort.”
    The noise comes back. “Something of what sort? What is that supposed to mean?”
    He turns back to his line, which is bobbing all of a sudden. “No need to get your knickers in a twist.”
    Jim lands his fish, little shriveled thing that he ought to throw back, while I’m wondering about my dream. I can’t put it away, because I want to know what the fire was about and who the privileged few were that made up the cheering crowd. I want to go into that village at the base of Dunadd on the sheep field and see the life there. Suddenly I’m finding myself wondering what effect it would have for me to miss a day’s course of pills and perhaps find myself back in that dream. I don’t know what year of the Dark Ages I was in, or if it even matters.
    “Throw the damn fish back,” I say, watching the poor thing writhe, its gills sucking hopelessly. I slide close enough to its tail to flick it with the toe of my boot. Using my foot, the fish bounces itself back into the water.
    “Hoi,” Jim shouts. “That was my dinner!”
    I hadn’t meant to throw the fish back, but I am suddenly giddy that it managed to do it for itself.
    “Nothing to laugh at,” he says. “Now it’ll be beans on toast.”
    I say, “You wouldn’t have found any meat on that thing anyway. I’ll get your dinner for you to make up for it. I’m sure the fish will approve. It was probably some poor little shy’s mother.”
    “Bloody skinny mother, if you ask me,” he says. “What’ll you make me?”
    I hadn’t meant to promise him anything, not least of all more of my study time.
    I sigh, “Sardines on toast?” I can’t help but laugh.
    “Oh aye, very funny. I’ll be over at six.”
    “Fine.” I walk off.

    He comes at five to six, and he’s wearing a silly cravat tucked into the neck of his shirt. It might have worked when he was courting his wife back in the 1950s, but it doesn’t work on me, and not because the “lady doth protest too much,” just because I don’t want his overtures, plain and simple. I’m thirty-eight, and not so desperate yet I need to ponder some old wrinkled bum.
    He’s brought me flowers from the local shop, a few white roses mixed in with fern. “It was the least I could do,” he says, “after you threw back my fish.”
    I take them to the sink; the arrangement falls into a pleasing spray in a vase. “Not threw back exactly. Besides,you should leave the poor fish alone. You can buy a kipper at the shop.”
    He shakes his head. “Not the manly way.”
    I sigh. “I think we’ve had enough of men and their manly ways. Can’t you just all lay off it?”
    He takes a seat at the table and puts his elbows on it in the way I’m sure his mother told him not to. “You’re not one of those ballbusters or whatever the hell it is the Americans call them, are you?”
    He has defused the moment. I shake my head and smile. “No, not a ballbuster.”
    He nods towards my books and papers removed from the dinner table to a chair. “What’s all that about, then?”
    “That’s the ‘something of the sort’ that local gossip has me working on. It’s about witches, as a matter of fact.”
    “Oh, I see,” he says, looking me over, as though I suddenly make sense to him. I wish I made sense to myself.
    I set the vase on the table in front of him. “Did they ever have fires on the top of Dunadd?”
    “Aye, they did. Even up into my day, every Halloween we would build a fire up there. We used to jump over it, and that’s a piece of antiquity right there, though we didn’t know it then.”
    I go back to the kitchen. “What was it for?”
    He shrugs.