The Exchange Year

For the first six weeks, Lucas counted the days. There were three hundred and twenty-four left when he arrived in Kirkhope, a town of four thousand people on the east coast of Scotland, and he crossed each one off a calendar he kept hidden in his desk drawer.

It wasn’t that anything terrible had happened. His host family, the Murrays, were kind. Mrs Murray made him porridge every morning, and Mr Murray tried hard to talk to him about football, although they supported very different teams. Their daughter, Isla, who was his age, was polite but distant, as if she had agreed to share the house but not her life.

The problem was everything else. The sky was grey for weeks at a time. It got dark at four o’clock in the afternoon. At school, the other students spoke so fast, with such a strong accent, that he understood perhaps half of what they said, and he felt too embarrassed to ask them to repeat it. In São Paulo, he had been funny and popular. Here, he was “the Brazilian boy”, and he spent most lunchtimes alone in the library, scrolling through photos of his friends at the beach.

He was homesick in a way he hadn’t known was possible. It felt like a physical pain, somewhere behind his ribs.

One evening in November, he heard music coming from Isla’s room — fast, bright music played on a violin. He found himself standing in the corridor, listening. When the music stopped, the door opened, and Isla looked at him in surprise.

“Sorry,” he said. “It was beautiful. I didn’t know you played.”

“It’s a fiddle, not a violin,” she said, but she was smiling for the first time. “Same instrument, different attitude. Do you play anything?”

He confessed that he played the guitar, quite well actually, but that he hadn’t brought one. The next day, Isla came home from school with an old acoustic guitar she had borrowed from her uncle. “There’s a ceilidh in December,” she said. “A dance. Our band needs a guitarist. Rehearsals are on Thursdays. Don’t be late.”

Lucas had no idea what a ceilidh was, but he went to the rehearsal. The band was five teenagers in a freezing church hall: Isla on fiddle, a boy called Fraser on accordion, two sisters who played drums and the tin whistle, and now Lucas. The tunes were unfamiliar, full of strange rhythms, and at first he felt awkward and slow. But music, he discovered, was a language he already spoke. By the third rehearsal, he was adding Brazilian chords to the old Scottish melodies, and Fraser was laughing and shouting, “Again! Do that again!”

Gradually, things changed. The band members started sitting with him at lunch. Fraser taught him the worst Scottish swear words. Lucas taught them to make brigadeiros, the chocolate sweets his grandmother made for every party, and they all agreed they were dangerous. He started to understand the accent, and then, to his own surprise, to copy bits of it.

The ceilidh was held in the town hall on the last Saturday before Christmas. It seemed as if the whole of Kirkhope was there, from small children to grandparents in their eighties. When the band started to play, everyone danced: wild, fast, spinning dances where you changed partners every few seconds and nobody cared if they made mistakes. Lucas played until his fingers hurt. At one point, between tunes, Mr Murray came up to the stage, red-faced and smiling, and shook his hand. “You’re one of us now, son,” he said.

That night, Lucas went to his desk, took out the calendar and looked at it for a long time. There were two hundred and twenty days left. For the first time, the number seemed too small.

He went home to Brazil the following summer, as planned. But every December, he flies back to Scotland for the Kirkhope ceilidh. It has become a small tradition: the band always saves the last tune of the night for him. They call it “the Brazilian reel”, and nobody in Kirkhope can dance to it without laughing.