On Saturday evening, John, orders Cal to chain up the local playground swings for the Sabbath. John then confronts Cal about his long hair, demanding he cut it before the service the next morning, which will be led by the visiting Reverend Rose. When Cal refuses, an angry John rips Cal’s jeans and removes a poster of River Phoenix from the wall, laying it face down on the desk.

The next morning, John becomes enraged when Cal appears with his hair still long. He threatens Cal with a pair of large weaving shears. Cal says he will not go to church so John orders him to stay home and pray. After John and Ella leave, Cal defies his father and runs to the service. He arrives late and, as he tries to sit down, his Walkman falls from his pocket and shatters on the floor, disrupting the psalm.

After the service, John is humiliated by the pitying looks of his neighbors. In the car, he and Cal argue about Cal’s hair and his refusal to formally join the church. The argument escalates until John punches Cal repeatedly in the face. Ella throws herself between them to stop the attack. John shoves Cal out of the car and onto the roadside.

Bruised and bleeding, Cal washes his face in a rock pool. He has a flashback to being nine years old, when John tried to teach him to swim by dragging him into the sea and throwing him into the deep water.

Cal walks to the local shop run by Beady-Màirì, who stitches his split eyebrow and gives him hair dye, scissors, and razors on credit. At the slipway, a crew of young Glaswegian fishermen are stranded with a broken-down trawler. Flash, who suspects the sailors are drug runners, asks Cal to deal with them. Flash then offers Cal a job cleaning the inn’s toilets, not mentioning that Ella will, in fact, be paying his wage. In the bathroom, Cal reveals that he has swapped the brown dye for bleach, so his hair comes out brighter than ever. He cuts it into a ragged bob.

He returns home late and locks himself in his room. Ella slides a pancake under his door. The next morning, Cal comes down to breakfast with his hair bleached even brighter. Speaking to his father in Gaelic, Cal states that if John ever raises a hand to him again, he will leave and never return. John’s only response is “What have I raised?” (118) before he stands up and leaves the room.

In the days following the confrontation, Cal and John do not speak to each other. Cal spends his evenings working on the loom. While driving one day, he sees his old friend Doll Macdonald working on a car, along with Doll’s younger sister, Isla Macdonald. He does not stop to talk.

Cal begins his new cleaning job at the inn. Flash’s elderly father, Airchie Calder, insults him, making a cruel remark about Cal’s mother having run away. Later, Isla finds Cal on his break and scolds him for not visiting her family since his return. She tells him she will be leaving for Glasgow University at the end of September. She also confides that Doll lost three teeth in a boating accident and has since been spending his unemployment money on alcohol in a vicious cycle. Before leaving, Isla asks Cal to look out for her brother after she has left for university. Their conversation ends on a warm, friendly note.

Several weeks after the fight, John is in town and sees his estranged wife, Grace, in a shop. He leaves immediately without speaking to her. Later, he finds Cal kicking a football with Innes MacInnes. Seeing the full extent of the bruises on Cal’s face in the daylight, John is flooded with remorse.

He pulls Innes aside and tells him about seeing Grace. Innes reveals that he speaks to her regularly and confronts John about his unhealthy obsession, mentioning that people have seen John’s car parked for hours near Grace’s house. Enraged, John references the source of his deep shame: Grace left him for his own brother. Innes is unsympathetic, telling John his possessiveness has ruined him. He then delivers a sardonic parting remark—“Which is tidy, seeing she belongs to your brother” ()—as he walks away.

With three weeks until Isla departs for university, Cal settles into a monotonous routine of farm chores, weaving, and weekend work at the inn, while obsessively waiting for a reply to his lonely-hearts advertisement. His superstitious rituals around the post each morning only deepen his disappointment when no letter arrives. During this period, Cal’s weeks-long silent estrangement from his father breaks when Cal offers him tea in the shed. The two briefly reconnect over shared contempt for mainland protesters targeting the traditional guga harvest, with John closing the moment by encouraging Cal to pursue Isla romantically before she loses interest.

Then, near the end of September, a response from William finally arrives. Cal conceals it from his family by claiming it is from a college acquaintance named Wendy and adds that she is Chinese—a detail that puzzles John given the surname Tudhope. The suggestion that Wendy is Catholic, however, prompts John to drop his interest. Reading the letter in a remote hiding spot, Cal learns that William—also known as Billy—is a 27-year-old from Inverness who cares for his family, works at his uncle’s garage, and has had little success with the lonely-hearts column. Included is a family photograph. Cal becomes immediately drawn to Billy and, in an impulsive act combining longing and dark humor, sends back a doctored school portrait along with an obscene knitted model of his penis meant to amuse. He regrets the decision the moment the parcel leaves his hands.

The chapter closes when a parcel arrives from Billy containing a terse note of rejection written on the back of Cal’s own letter, ending Cal’s first real attempt at romantic connection in decisive failure.