Medina nodded. He glanced over to his boots then back at Calley. “My friend,” he said, “you say you know things but the truth is you know very little. You are, I believe, the most ignorant man I ever met.” He bent down to pick a flower by his bare feet, a yellow flower the length of his little finger. “Do you know this? Do you know what this is called? No?” He bent down again and picked another, a purple flower or, arguably, a blue one. “Or this?” he said. “You know what this is?”

As he stood with a third flower—it is difficult to stop these things once you start—he felt himself lifted and saw the flower, or something he took for the flower, flash past his face. Then he was gazing up at the birds. There were thousands of them, their dark forms in frantic movement so that it seemed incredible they did not collide with each other. Calley came into view and looked down at him. The birds circled his head like a crown. His mouth was moving but whatever he was saying Medina couldn’t hear him. More surprisingly, he could not hear the birds either. He wondered if he had become deaf. But then he heard the slow rush and roar of the sea, and he knew that all was well.

19

The Oban coach should have left at two o’clock but some trouble with an axle delayed it. For this reason, Emily and Lacroix, reaching the coaching office at a quarter past, were able to buy tickets, though there was only one place left inside. The other passengers looked out with deep interest at the sight of a woman with her head bound in a grey silk scarf. Room was made for her next to the window on the side facing the horses. A man—fatherly, red-faced, slightly drunk—spread a page of the Dundee Courier across the seat, explaining that the windows of coaches could never be made to shut securely and he feared the leather was somewhat damp. Lacroix thanked him, nodded to the woman who was to be Emily’s neighbour, then climbed up the back of the coach to his own place on the roof. There were two others up there. One man was tying on his hat with a ribbon; the other had the look of a poor poet, a man uselessly exulted and who would perhaps, at some point, begin to babble about the moon.

Ten minutes later, the axle declared safe, a horn was blown, and a minute after that they were rattling through the streets of Glasgow, the outside passengers returning the waves of small boys, old men and the city’s population of inebriates and gentle idiots for whom a common coach was a masterpiece of human excitement.