Stonemouth

5

She drove me to the station. That night, that warm night when it all went sour, when the world collapsed around me, five years back; still, despite it all, it was her.

‘Is there anything I can say?’

‘Stewart, no. Just be quiet. It’s not far. Do you have everything?’

‘I don’t know. How can I know?’

‘Well, if you don’t, I’m sure your mum and—’

‘What are we doing?’ I shake my head. There is a hastily filled bag on my lap, one of those long bags with two handles my dad would call a grip. I clutch it to my chest. ‘What have I done? What the fuck—’

‘Stewart, stop. There’s no point.’

I look at her, tears in my eyes. ‘Doesn’t matter that there’s no point,’ I tell her. ‘Sometimes—’

Suddenly she stabs at my seat-belt release button, throwing the buckle past me, clunking loud off the door window. ‘Duck,’ she says urgently. ‘Right down.’

‘What?’ I say, but I’m already ducking, pressing my chest into the badly packed bag, then quickly pulling it out to the side, getting in the way of her hand as she grasps the gear lever, stuffing the bag into the footwell and ducking down further, my chest against my thighs, my chin on my knees. ‘It’s them, isn’t it?’ I wheeze. Something’s thrown over me — her jacket, I can tell, just from the smell of her perfume on it. The orange streetlight glow dims to almost nothing. I’m shaking. I can feel myself shaking.

‘Hnn,’ she says, and her voice is turned-away quiet, not-facing-me quiet, as her window whines down. The sound of outside comes in: traffic and engine and just that late-night urban rumble and buzz.

‘Whit you doin?’

‘You awright, hen?’ two male voices say almost at once.

Oh, Jesus, it’s them. Her brothers. They’re out looking for me. I could die here.

‘I’m fine. I’m just driving.’

‘How are ye no answerin yer phone?’

‘Where to though but?’

‘Just driving,’ she says, after a tiny pause, her voice deep, calming.

‘Have you seen that cunt?’ one of them says.

‘Norrie, fuck’s sake!’ The other one.

‘Well, fuckin hell!’ says the first one. It’s Norrie, obviously, and Murdo, I think. It doesn’t matter.

‘Anyway.’

‘… What?’

‘What’s that?’

‘That’s my jacket.’

‘… says it’s her jacket.’

‘And you two?’ she asks.

‘What?’

‘Eh?’

‘What are you doing?’

‘Told you! Lookin for that fuckin two-timing bastart.’

‘Aye, hen, you don’t want to know what we’re going to—’

‘Go home,’ she tells them.

‘Eh?’

‘Naw! You go home. You go back home to Mum an Da, where they’re waitin fur ye, worryin.’

‘Aye, worryin.’

‘I just want to drive around a bit, guys, okay? It’s just what I need to do right now. I’ll be fine. Everything’s cool.’

‘… Eh? Aye. Aye, right. Shift over, hen, I’ll drive—’

I hear a car door opening, then another, there’s a sharp clang and the Mini shakes; feels like one door hit another.

‘Aw, El! Come oan!’

‘Ye’ll chip the paint! Whit are ye doin?’

The Mini trembles again. ‘Stoap that! Will ye just—’

‘Go home. Tell Mum and Dad I’ll be back in an hour. Now just leave me, okay?’

The door shuts, the window whines, I’m thrown forward, then to the side, then back, all in a roar of engine and a brief screech of tyres. There’s a wild swerve and another chirp from the tyres as we shimmy down the road.

Maybe half a minute later the jacket’s pulled away. The lights overhead are strobing past.

‘Safe to surface,’ I hear her say. She sounds calm, even amused. I bring my head up in time to have it banged off the window as we make the turn into Station Road, fast. ‘Sorry,’ she says.

‘It’s okay.’

‘Put your belt on.’

‘We’re nearly there,’ I tell her, nodding at the road ahead as we accelerate between the lines of trees, darkness all around beyond the flickering proscenium formed by the Mini’s lights bracketing the trunks and the leaf-heavy boughs.

She just shrugs. She glances in the rear-view mirror, then frowns and looks back for longer. Suddenly she reaches out, turning off all the lights. The view of the great tall trees rushing past goes instantly, terrifyingly black. She takes her foot off the gas, lets the car slow on engine braking. We were doing motorway speeds up this narrow, tree-lined two-lane when she killed the lights. My mouth, already parched, goes drier still. I start fumbling for my seat belt, unable to tear my gaze away from the rushing darkness outside. Ellie’s a shadow now. I think I can see her leaning forward over the wheel, staring hard into the distance through the Mini’s close, upright screen, and glancing once, twice, into the rear-view.

Then I hear her release a breath. Her hand goes to the column stalk that controls the lights, but then she brings it back to hold the wheel again and the lights stay off. She looks to the side. ‘Moon,’ she says wryly. ‘Just enough.’ It’s almost as though she’s talking to herself, as though I’m not here, already gone. ‘Actually,’ she murmurs, ‘this is pretty cool.’

I look at her in the darkness as we make another turn. There’s more and more light as we approach the station, the faint silver of the moon outshone by the dim yellow-orange glow of a couple of sodium-vapour floods, all that’s left to illuminate the deserted station at this late hour.

‘You sure the train’ll stop?’

‘It’ll stop,’ she tells me. ‘Freight; big yellow pipes. Be near the back.’

My throat tries to close up. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I whisper.

At first I think she doesn’t hear me. Then, as we draw to a decorous, perfectly controlled stop by the station entrance, she glances at me and says, ‘I know.’

There’s a look in her eyes that says everything else besides and beyond that cursory ‘I know,’ and I can’t bear any of it.

She keeps looking at me. I don’t try to kiss her or hug her or even take her hand.

‘You could come with me,’ I blurt out, and for an instant too brief to measure this seems like a brainwave, like an inspiration of genius.

She gives a single small explosive laugh, the kind that surprises the person laughing even as it happens; it bursts from her mouth and she has to wipe her lips. She shakes her head, I see her jaw moving as though she’s chewing something, and then she says, quietly, ‘Just get out, Stewart.’

I open the door and climb out. ‘Thanks,’ I tell her.

‘Take care, Stewart,’ she says. She waits a moment, then nods. ‘You’ll need to close the door.’

I swing it gently shut. The car moves smartly away, whirls and sets off down the road back to town, still showing no lights. I watch it until it disappears, then I watch where I think it must be until the lights come back on, nearly a kilometre away, almost at the road junction.

I stand for a bit in the warm night, listening to the breeze in the tallest branches of the nearby trees and the low hoot-hoot of an owl a field or two away, until I hear the rumble of a train, way in the distance, coming closer.

6

In the circumstances, being up, about and back in the kitchen for a hearty if late breakfast at eleven o’clock and indulging in some perfectly bright and sociable chat with Mum — Dad is golfing — is something of a triumph. I feel better than I deserve; I know I’ve been drinking and I don’t think I’d be legal to drive, but otherwise I have so got away with the excesses of last night. One or two blank spots, certainly, but nothing threatening, no gut-cold feeling that what I don’t remember is somehow dangerous, something that I’m not remembering for good if ignoble reasons, but at the same time need to remember, because it’s always better to know the truth, no matter how grisly. An acceptable level of neurological damage, then, and about par for such evenings, as I recall.

No; I’m back, I’m safe — probably, provisionally — my old friends are still friends, things are relatively cool, I have a full belly, a good feeling and I have a head that needs only a bracing, recuperative walk somewhere scenic — and a couple of paracetamol — to feel entirely back to normal.

It’s barely noon as I stride out of our street and hit Glendrummy Road, heading east under the light, fresh, sun-struck haze. The cool mist moves pleasantly into my face, invigorating. I hear a bus just as I approach a stop, and — deciding it would be almost churlish to ignore this karmic nudge — take the number 3 down old routes towards the school and beyond. The bus goes through the centre of town, where a few shop-fronts have changed (there are a couple of Polish shops that weren’t there when I left) and there’s a trio of new-build blocks of flats. The bus drops me at the south end of the Promenade, just a car park away from the shining walls of the Lido, all Art Deco horizontals and thin lines of blue paint atop the pearly walls, like piping.

On the beach, with the sloped grey wall of the Promenade to my left, I walk north under the grey-pink striations of the slowly dissipating fog. The gulls wheel and mew overhead, the sand stretches into the haze a kilometre away or more, and apart from a few distant groups of fellow walkers, reduced to watercolour impressions by the mist and attended by the darting dots that are dogs, it’s as though I have the whole golden sweep of shore to myself.

I walk north, keeping to the firmest sands, waving to one or two groups of people when they wave to me, always too far away to really identify anybody. The mist is lifting and thinning all the time. From the dry look of the sand and the few very small pools, the tide is probably on its way back in (I check with an app on the phone; it is). I can hear but not see waves breaking on sandbanks a little further out.

The Prom to my left is long gone. It was followed first by the precisely aligned fences and neatly pointed walls of Olness Golf Club — I looked for the dark bulk of the Mearnside Hotel, up there in the trees on the whinned hill above the links, but its stony grandeur was lost, rubbed out by the mist — then by the serried trimness that is Ness Caravan Park. The statics are all pale green and magnolia and light brown with chrome strip highlights, their surfaces gleaming, their net curtains bright, the dainty little flower gardens surrounding each house-sized trailer all present and correct, disguising the dark gap beneath.

The last politely tended tendril of the caravan park has disappeared into the haze now, replaced by rough pasture and then rearing, unkempt dunes topped with scruffy tufts and mats of coarse grass, some necklaced with haphazardly slanted lines of stave-and-wire fences, all lapsed into picturesquely askew disrepair, falling flat as they angle down the pale slopes, submerging beneath the sand.

I’ve walked this beach when the wind has had just enough pace to pick up blond layers of dried sand from further up the slope, but not quite sufficient power to lift it fully into the air and into your eyes, so that great twining strands and twists of grains go coursing and unwinding round your feet, braiding over the darker, still-damp sand beneath with a whispering noise like the distant, retreated waves.

After about fifty minutes I see the first rust-eaten vehicle wreck. It lies swaddled in the sand halfway up the gully between a pair of tall dunes. I remember this one; it looks like it used to be an old van, with a ladder chassis. I’m sure there used to be one or two others, smaller, before you got to this one, but they may have rusted out completely by now save for the engine block, or been prettified away by the town council.

I get to the start of the trees and then the Brochty Burn after about an hour and a quarter. The burn’s more of a river here. It widens into its own little estuary, elements winding between slim grass-hummock islands, long, lozenge-shaped patches of thick brown mud and dozens of miniature grey wildernesses of paler mud strewn with stripped, sun-bleached driftwood and plastic debris.

We tried wading this stretch a few times when we were kids, because the next viable crossing was kilometres upstream, and it was the busy, bike-unfriendly main road we were all forbidden to use on our bikes. We never made it even halfway across the Brochty before we got stuck, utterly covered in mud, demoralised to the point we gave up and — even after highly necessary dips in the sea to remove the worst of the cloying mud — returned home still filthy to try to explain to exasperated parents how we’d lost our shoes. Once we even tried carrying our bikes across above our heads. Nearly drowned that time.

Vatton forest, on the far side of the burn — dark, mysterious — taunted us each time we turned tail and trudged our damp, squelching way home. You could get to the forest by car — we had all been there by car — but that meant being accompanied by parents, and anyway the forest was huge and you only ever got taken to the car park in the middle, civilised bit, where all the hiking and cycling tracks started and the picnic tables and toilets were, not to this distant, much wilder southern end.

But glory be, now there’s a bridge. I stand looking at it, and laugh. Yep, a smart, dark-green, tough-looking, little wooden bridge arching over the upstream end of the last deep pool before the start of the Brochty’s miniature estuary.

‘Now they put a feckin bridge in,’ I mutter to myself, still grinning, then feel foolish and look round to make sure there’s nobody around to overhear. Which there isn’t, of course.

I climb up the scraggy slope of sand and grass to the scoop of path that leads to the bridge. I use the phone to take a couple of photos from the middle of the bridge. Seaward, I can make out the flattened lines of waves, white creases just visible in the haze. I think about phoning home to say I’ll be a while yet, maybe ask for a lift from somewhere handy a bit further on — the forest car park, I guess — but there’s zero reception.

I look back the way I’ve come, along the restless sands.

That first night, I saw her by the light of a beach fire, a roaring pyre spindling the enveloping darkness while the white waves rose and fell along the margin of the shore and the stars wheeled like frozen spray. She’d just waded out of the shallows with a few others who’d been in for a midnight swim. Music pounded from an open soft-top Jeep as she laughed with one of her girlfriends. She wore a black one-piece swimsuit, coyly modest amongst bikinis and a couple of girls just in knickers. There were some very lookable-at breasts on display, but it was still Ellie that attracted the eye, the swimsuit, like part of the night, emphasising her long arms and legs, leaving her own curves more hinted at than shown.

She did that head-leaning-over thing again, the gesture I still had engraved on my memory from that hazy day at the Lido a couple of years earlier, the wet rope of her hair swinging out as she sent it this way and that. The way she did it, it just looked easy, natural, not self-conscious or coquettish.

A hand, in front of my face; fingers snapping once, twice.

‘And we’re back in the room,’ Ferg said. He pushed me between the shoulders to set me walking down the rest of the shallow slope of dune, following Josh MacAvett and Logan Peitersen, the other two guys we’d come with from town.

Josh was Mike MacAvett’s eldest son and the same age as me. We were friends as much through familial expectation as anything else; I was Mike Mac’s godson and Josh was Dad’s, and we’d been encouraged to play together from pre-primary days. We were never best mates — our interests were mostly too different — but we always got on well.

With fair, almost blond hair and a square jawline, Josh had always been a good-looking kid, and he’d become a positively handsome teenager (one rather amateurish tat on the back of his neck apart). When we were of an age to become interested in girls and I could persuade him to come out drinking or partying, I found myself reluctantly and unexpectedly playing the-good-looking-one’s-mate, and having to make do with my opposite number on the female side if we bumped into a pair of lassies.

Still, I met some really nice girls that way, girls with more than just good looks, and because Josh never seemed to stick with one girl for longer than a single night or a few days, and never seemed at all bothered when they got fed up waiting for a call or a text or an email or, well, anything, and threw themselves back into the Toun’s social whirl, once more unattached, they were, quite often, up for a bit of a dalliance with the guy they assumed was Josh’s best pal (that’d be me), possibly with the intention of hurting Josh somehow when he saw us chewing each other’s face off right in front of him. This never worked, and I could have told them so, but of course I didn’t; when you’re that age you tend to take whatever’s going.

Playing the field and treating them mean was all very well, but I wasn’t the only one to remind Josh there were only so many girls in Stonemouth and if he did want to nab a proper girlfriend he was making life difficult for himself.

So — or maybe just Anyway — he got himself a girlfriend. Which was fine, in principle.

Josh had driven us here in his RAV 4, with Ferg and Logan crammed into the back sitting on the cases of beer, Ferg complaining loudly about not being able to get his seat belt fastened properly and worrying about whiplash if we were rear-ended. (Much, frankly childish, sniggering at the mention of rear-ending.)

Back then you could just drive down onto the beach using the slipway at the end of the Promenade and head all the way up to the Brochty Burn. Then too many people started doing it, a lot of litter was left behind on the sands, there was even — dear God! — talk of young people taking drugs and having sex up there. Respectable older folk complained and the council locked off the slip. The RNLI have keys to the bollards if they want to access the beach from there and so do the council, obviously, but gone are those carefree days otherwise.

We could see the fire from about a kilometre out of town: a tiny wavering speck in the distance, almost lost in the darkness. By the time we drove up close enough to feel its heat, the only lights visible from Stonemouth were a couple of floods on the harbour wall and the sweeping beam of the lighthouse on the rocks beneath Stoun Point. We joined the party by the great fire to shouted hellos, cheers — cheers that increased when they saw how much beer we’d brought — and offers of pills and joints.

The swimmers wrapped themselves in towels and blankets, joining the others, maybe thirty or so, in the habitable zone a couple of metres out from the edge of the crackling, spitting fire. Any closer and you roasted; any further out and it started to get chilly. It was early August and it had been a perfect, hot day, but the clear sky was letting the day’s warmth beam away into space, there was a breeze blowing and, in the end, this was north-east Scotland, not southern California.

It was the last summer we’d all be together, between High School and the various gap years, universities, colleges and jobs we were all bound for. We were all eighteen, or close to it. People could drive, drink legally and even have sex with somebody younger than themselves without risking jail and a reputation as a paedo. Every class, every year — amongst those from the reasonably well off in the West, anyway — had a summer like that, I guess, but — doubtless again like them — we felt this was something both unique to us and yet somehow our natural right, our destiny. We’d even had a proper Prom night, the first year in school to have one of these as something officially sanctioned.

‘We just called it the school dance,’ Dad had said grumpily, when I’d bounced into the kitchen all happy with this exciting news, months earlier. I remember being slightly shocked; I’d heard of so many dads proving how old and boring they were by telling their kids things like ‘That’s not even music,’ and ‘You’re not going out dressed like that,’ and so on, but I’d always been proud that my dad was — by parent standards, so admittedly not a particularly high bar — quite cool. I mean, he even liked rap, and not just Eminem. We were still a couple of years away from the point when we really parted company culturally, when he just couldn’t see that Napoleon Dynamite was one of the funniest movies ever made.

In the end, no matter how cool he is, your dad is still your dad.

I handed the J back, coughing. ‘What is this, dried seagull shit?’

‘Oh, shut up and wait for the pills to kick in,’ Ferg told me, and lay back with his hands under his head, puffing towards the stars and trying to make a smoke ring.

I kept looking over at Ellie. She was sitting with Josh MacAvett.

They sat close, on towels, her hair still glistening darkly. Ellie and Josh were sort of going out. Only sort of; goss had it they weren’t actually doing it, probably because Ellie was holding off. She was widely believed still to be a virgin: an unusual, even eccentric choice for a pretty girl in our circle, never mind somebody with a credible claim to being the most ravishingly gorgeous young woman in town. But this was the girl Josh had asked out and actually stuck with, and without even asking me: teach me to worship from afar and not actually tell any of my pals I thought she might be The One, for fear of the inevitable scorn.

Ellie. Of all people. I mean, for fuck’s sake.

Josh was handsome in a Daniel Craig way (not that DC had become the new Bond at this point — it was Ferg who pointed out the similarity a couple of years later); it was gnawingly frustrating for me to see the two of them sitting close like that, laughing quietly together, especially as they looked made for each other. They’d been together all the summer so far and just looked relaxed and easy in each other’s company.

Fuck it, she was supposed to be mine! I’d hardly talked to her, barely touched her — a handshake, once; a brush of cheek against cheek at her birthday earlier that year, and a few formal hugs, the ones where you only sort of hug from the shoulders and exchange light pats on the back, so you’re lucky if you even feel any press of breast against your chest. (Still, I breathed in the exquisite smell of her each time, filling my lungs with her scent, keeping it in until I felt dizzy with the trapped force of it.)

This was when we were all supposed to be at our most free, wasn’t it? Between school and the rest of our lives. Everything was meant to be fluid, all sorts of experimentation was supposed to be indulged. I was young, smart, good-looking. I had green eyes before which women tended to melt. (Not claiming any moral superiority or anything here, just stating a fact.) I deserved at least a sporting chance to capture the girl, and now, this summer, ought to be my best shot, but I wasn’t being allowed; Ellie and Josh looked like a done deal.

I couldn’t believe life could be so unfair.

Even the adults were in on this and had opinions about it; Ellie and Josh were practically public property. I mean, Mum knew Josh; she taught him at school, but this was more than that; even my dad knew.

‘Aye, I’ve heard. Could be a good thing,’ he said, over the Sunday dinner table, after I’d mentioned something about the happy couple. Mum looked at Dad. He shrugged. ‘Dynastic marriage, kinda thing,’ he told her. Mum looked distinctly sceptical. ‘Two important families in the town,’ he went on defensively. ‘Nobody’s interest to have them at each other’s throats. Alliance like this, this generation getting… What?’

It looked like one of those frustrating moments when something passed between Mum and Dad that I still couldn’t read. Mum might have shaken her head, just very slightly. Dad made a tiny grunting noise. They changed the subject, swiftly.

Meanwhile: Marriage? I was thinking, horrified. Who the fuck said anything about fucking marriage?

And later, from the kitchen, I overheard Dad saying, ‘… Mike best pleased …’

Mum said, ‘Parents often don’t, especially dads. Trust me, hon; teachers… sometimes before the kid does themself.’

Dear God, Ellie was beautiful. Firelight on a beach under the stars will improve pretty much anybody’s looks, obviously, but even so, the girl was just startlingly beautiful: eye-wideningly beautiful; breath-sucked-out-of-you beautiful; the kind of beautiful that can make a grown artist weep because you know you will never, ever quite capture the full, boundless totality of it, that it will always lie beyond you, no matter how closely you look or how well you attempt to express it, in any medium known to humankind.

That sculpted, bounteous, quietly smiling face, those cheekbones, those wide dark eyes, and those lips; even her nostrils and ears, all those sweet dark curled spaces and perfectly scrolled and rounded edges of exquisitely smooth, honey-hued skin, turning inwards.

There were times when Ellie looked like some ethereal Scandinavian goddess, others — especially in certain lights, her tan skin against a pale background and her hair water-dark — when she took on something that had to be from her mother, who’d come from a Roma family: a startling, earthy, gypsy look. It was a bewildering, almost contradictory mix of appearances, sometimes flipping from one to another almost as instantly as in one of those perception tests where one second you see the outline of a vase, the next you’re looking at two faces in silhouette.

I felt I was about to start moaning or something, if I hadn’t inadvertently already, so I looked away.

Ferg was lying, gazing at me, an odd expression on his face. He turned his head languorously, taking in the handsome huddle that was Josh and Ellie, then looked back at me.

‘Jealous, Gilmour?’ he drawled.

‘Envious,’ I conceded.

He sighed, sat up, looked at the stub of J and flicked it into the fire. He jumped to his feet. ‘Restless,’ he said. He nodded his head to one side. ‘Walk with me, Stewart, why don’t you?’

I took another look at Ellie and Josh as their laughter sounded out round the fire, vanishing into the dark airs, then I got up too. ‘Might as well.’

We sauntered down the beach, keeping to the firm sand just up from where the waves were breaking. Ferg lit a cigarette, an American brand he got from a specialist tobacconist in Aberdeen. He sucked on the anorexically slim pale tube and blew the smoke out again immediately. He was almost the only one of us who smoked anything other than dope; he claimed it was because it just looked so good, and anyway he didn’t inhale.

When we were well into the darkness, beyond the glow of the fire, the thumping music a sequence of dull thuds behind us, he said, ‘Kind of cuntstruck with Ellie, are we?’

‘Well, I am,’ I admitted. ‘If you want to put it like that. I mean, like, so romantically.’

‘Yeah, well, we’re all cockstruck, cuntstruck or both,’ Ferg said tiredly, sounding like some archaic roué looking back on a now-spent life of outrageous debauchery, rather than a spotty-faced eighteen-year-old with the ink barely dry on his Sixth Year Studies certificate. That was all right, though; I felt that way myself sometimes. Ferg studied the end of his cigarette. ‘Pity about Josh, in a way, then, I suppose,’ he said.

‘Thing is,’ I said, ‘I like Josh. Can’t even wish him dead in a car crash or something. Especially as I’m liable to be in the same car,’ I added, having just thought this through.

‘Well, it’s been handy for both of them,’ Ferg said, sighing, looking out to sea.

‘What? What’s been handy for who?’

Ferg turned to me and we stopped. I could just about see his teeth as he smiled. ‘Have you ever thought you might be even slightly gay, Stewart?’

‘Meh,’ I said, waving one hand. ‘Yeah, but no. Definitely not.’

‘How do you know if you haven’t tried?’

‘Dude, I haven’t tried chlamydia, but I don’t want that either.’

Ferg placed one finger gently on my chest, just below the hollow of my neck. ‘I might be able to do you something of a favour, young Gilmour,’ he told me.

I looked down at the finger, still resting on my skin. ‘Ferg,’ I laughed, ‘are you hitting on me?’

‘No,’ he sighed. ‘But I do demand a kiss.’ He gazed into my eyes. ‘Just one. A token price, for the service about to be rendered.’

‘Ferg, you’re my best pal—’

‘More than Josh?’

‘More than Josh, probably, though don’t tell him, but yes. But I don’t want to kiss you.’

‘I know you don’t want to; I’m asking you to fucking pucker up and bear it, for your best friend, for somebody who’d love to be more than that but is reluctantly resigned to never being any more than that, and also to make me feel better. And to provide some small, trivial, purely symbolic payment for the favour to be conferred, as aforesaid.’

‘Drug coming on, is it?’

‘Yes. Please don’t change the subject. Kiss me.’

‘What is this favour?’

‘Can’t tell you. Might not work, might not happen. If it doesn’t you’ll never know. If it does you’ll thank me later. Don’t be a cunt, Stewart; kiss me. I swear it’ll lead to something better, or at least the chance of it. Take it.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘But no tongues.’

‘Of course tongues, you idiot,’ Ferg said, grasping me by the back of the neck and bringing our mouths together.

I did sort of open and there was some tongue action, but I was distracted, wondering if we could be seen from the fire. We both wore jeans and white or pale shirts, so we might be quite visible, even though we were a few minutes’ walk away. What if Ellie saw this? She’d never fancy me. Would she? Ferg and I were sort of side-on to the fire. I thought about manoeuvring us round so one of us had our back to the fire, making a smaller target, as it were. Ferg’s face was quite scratchy and his breath smelled of smoke. My mouth was a little dry, probably because of the pill, despite the amount of Ferg’s saliva that his poking, rolling, probing tongue seemed to be bringing with it. This actually wasn’t quite as gross as it might have been, but it was no turn-on either. Nice aftershave — Ferg always had good aftershave — but still that very scratchy sensation. I wondered why girls ever let boys kiss them.

Ferg pulled away with a sigh. He’d raised himself a little to sort of kiss down on me but now he came off his tiptoes, back to level ground. He shook his head and sighed again. ‘No, your heart really isn’t in it, is it, my love?’

‘Neither’s anything else,’ I said, wiping my mouth. ‘Sorry.’

Another sigh. ‘You can be such a lunk sometimes, Stewart.’

‘Sorry. But, dude, I did let you kiss me.’

‘Oh, let’s head back.’

Later, when we were mostly all pretty much blissed out and the fire was smaller, quieter, more orange and red rather than yellow, and the music had gone all old-school trancey and a few couples had drifted off to the nearest dunes holding hands and blankets, Ferg was talking to Ellie and Josh.

I talked to various people — only about half were left, and half of them looked fast asleep — then sort of drifted off to sleep myself for a short while, then woke up and saw that Ferg was still talking to Josh and Ellie.

I wandered off to the rough area of long dune grass where we’d all agreed to pee, came back, washed my hands in the diminishing, retreating surf and found the three of them laughing.

‘Come on,’ Ferg said to Josh, and they both rose. ‘It’s a challenge.’

‘Where to?’ Josh asked, holding one hand over his eyes as he looked down the beach in the darkness.

‘To wherever one of us can’t run any more and has to stop for breath, or gets a stitch or something.’

‘We could end up back in town!’ Josh laughed.

‘Yeah, right,’ Ferg said. He took the packet of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, threw them and his phone to me as I approached.

‘Look after these. No peeking at my contacts.’ He looked like he was about to take something out of his back pocket too, but changed his mind.

‘Okay,’ I said, stopping and looking down at Ellie. She glanced up at me from her blanket with a sort of wary smile.

She was holding a white handkerchief. She let it go.

‘Go!’ she said, and the guys raced off. They disappeared beyond the fire’s dimmed glow in seconds. The first thin sliver of a new moon let you see where they were for about half a minute, but then they were gone, lost to the darkness somewhere between the ghostly creasings of the breaking waves and the sensed round bulk of the line of dunes.

It seemed like the obvious thing to do, so I sat down beside Ellie.

‘Okay?’ I asked, leaving it open whether this meant, Okay to sit down? or How are you?

‘Hey, Stewart,’ she said, making more room for me.

I put my hand over my eyes, the way Josh had, looked into the darkness. ‘Nope, disa—’ I started to say, as she said,

‘What are you shield—?’

We both stopped. ‘I was saying—’

‘Oh, I was just—’

I sighed. ‘Sorry. What … what were you saying?’

She looked amused. ‘I wondered what you were shielding your eyes from.’

‘Ah, yeah.’ I squinted up to the near-nothing moon. ‘Hardly moonlight. The fire. Your radiance?’

She looked at me. I shrugged. ‘You’re facing the fire.’ I told her. ‘I guess you must just have a high albedo.’

She looked startled, though there was just enough of a delay for me to think she was loved up, or on something. I was kind of coming down by this point.

‘I must have a high what?’ she said. ‘How would—?’

Shit. First we talk across each other, clumsy as children at their first dance, then I produce the most stilted, pathetic, over-the-top compliment known to teen-kind and then I come out with a technical term — a fucking technical term from astronomy, for the love of God. How to chat up a girl, Stewart. Oh — dear holy fuck — and now I’ve just realised she thought I said she must have a high libido. Oh for fucking fuck’s sake. Why wait for a girl to shoot you down in flames when you can do it so easily yourself? Don’t just shoot yourself in the foot, Stewart, wait until it’s lodged firmly in your mouth first.

‘Albedo,’ I told her. I had my eyes closed by now. I couldn’t bear to watch this. ‘It means—’ I paused for a moment. What did it mean again exactly? It referred to how much light an object reflects, I was fairly sure. The moon: it has quite a high albedo, so it looks white. The romantic moon. Oh, give up. What was the point?

‘Shininess, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Something like that?’ My eyes flicked open. She was gazing up, towards the moon. ‘Like … hmm.’ There was so little moon to see, you almost had to know where to look.

‘Yeah,’ I said.

I was as impressed with girls who knew this sort of shit as your average girl was unimpressed with guys who did. Brains as well as beauty. Oh, fuck; I’d already fallen in love with her peerless good looks, her flawless skin, her stunning figure and the bit between her legs and now I was falling for the bit between her ears as well. I was fucking doomed.

‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘I was just wondering when we’ll see them again.’ I nodded. ‘Josh and Ferg.’

She looked to where the guys had disappeared.

‘Could be a while,’ she said, smiling.

It was an odd smile; maybe a little sad, wistful, something like that. She glanced back down the beach again. She made a single, gentle gesture; just that thing that’s not quite a laugh, when your diaphragm contracts. It raised her head and shoulders briefly, then let them fall again. There might have been a soft noise like a ‘huh’, but it was so faint that — even though the only other noise was that of the distant waves breaking — I suspect I imagined rather than heard it. I hadn’t even noticed the music had stopped.

‘Could be quite a long while,’ she said, almost dreamily. Then she lay down on her side, one arm beneath her head. Her long fair hair was dry now, and spilled around her head and over the shadowed golden skin of her arm. She stretched, yawned: catlike, completely unselfconscious. Her eyes were half open.

‘Do you want me to …?’ I nodded to one side.

‘Do I want you to what?’ she asked quietly.

‘Go,’ I said. ‘Do you want me to go?’

Her eyes opened a little further, and I was regarded, studied. ‘Why,’ she murmured, ‘do you have somewhere else you have to be?’

I laughed quietly. ‘Not as such.’

‘Do you want to go?’

I shook my head. ‘No.’

‘Then don’t.’ Her eyes closed and she nestled down under her towel and blanket. ‘Keep me company,’ she said sleepily.

I opened my mouth to speak, then her eyes were open again and she said, ‘It’s all right; not trying to seduce you.’

‘Oh,’ I said, sighing heavily but still smiling. ‘That’s a pity.’

She tutted, shook her head a fraction. ‘You guys,’ she said, laughing lightly, closing her eyes. ‘Just stop it. Here,’ she said, lifting one corner of the blanket, her eyelids flickering as though trying and failing to open again. ‘Come and keep me warm. I’ll spoon against you.’

‘What if Josh—?’

‘Ha!’ she said, quietly dismissive. ‘Wouldn’t worry about Josh.’ She sounded sleepy again. She flapped the blanket edge. ‘Come on; getting cold.’

It was probably as well her eyes were closed. My grin must have been splitting my face. I did as I’d been told and cuddled into her, under the blanket, my back against her front.

‘S’better,’ she said, on a sleepy sigh. Seconds later she was asleep, breathing rhythmically against me, her breasts a gentle pressure against my back, her arm over my waist. I had a raging erection, of course I did, which it would have been great to do something with, but, fuck it; no matter where this was going from this point on, this — right now, right here — would most assuredly do.

We woke up to a cool grey morning, and to what were probably meant to be knowing smiles, plus various yawns and stretches and a few hung-over groans.

The fire was a dead black circular scar on the empty expanse of sand, but the smell of frying bacon and the sound of sputtering eggs came from a smaller fire somebody had started near by. I’d rolled over. Ellie smiled at me.

‘Sleep okay?’ she asked, blowing some hair away from her eyes.

‘Never better,’ I lied. Now, my cock was about the only bit of me that wasn’t stiff.

‘Same here,’ she said, then sat up, flexing her arms and upper body. God, you could fall in lust with this girl’s shoulders, even before you lowered your sights a little. She glanced round at everybody else, then down at me. ‘People will talk, you know,’ she said, arching one eyebrow.

‘I should be so lucky,’ I told her. This made her laugh.

‘Thank you, Kylie.’ She moved one hand through the tawny mass of her hair, scratching idly. She raised her head, sniffing. She looked down at me again. ‘Hungry?’

‘You wouldn’t believe,’ I told her, after the tiniest of pauses, holding her gaze.

She closed one eye, regarding me suspiciously, then laughed. ‘Mm-hmm,’ she said, then unfolded herself upwards, standing. ‘Well …’ She pulled the towel around her like a skirt.

She held out one hand to me, to help me up.

Oh, you beauty, I thought.

‘I’m a fucking idiot,’ I breathed to myself when I saw Ferg and Josh coming back along the beach together. They weren’t quite holding hands, but something about the way they strolled along, either too casually or not quite casual enough, made it obvious. I’d only started to suspect when I noticed they weren’t there by the side of the fire when Ellie and I woke up.

I looked at Ellie, standing talking and laughing with one of her girlfriends by the only other four-wheel drive still left on the beach. Round her shoulders, she wore the blanket we’d slept in; there was cloud, and a chill wind off the grey sea.

I finished my eggs and bacon, wiped the plate and thanked Logan, who’d provided the breakfast. I went up to Ellie just as her pal moved off. ‘That’s the boys back,’ I told her.

She looked round, nodded. ‘So it is,’ she agreed. She held my gaze, smiled.

‘About you and Josh,’ I said, after a few moments.

‘What about me and Josh?’ she said.

‘There’s a party at Maddy Ferrie’s place tomorrow night.’

‘I know.’

‘You were … going?’

‘Yes.’

‘With Josh?’

‘He was going to pick me up.’ She looked over at him again. ‘That was the plan.’

‘Well, I wondered if I could take you? Could I pick you up? Instead?’

She nodded thoughtfully. ‘I suppose you could.’

‘D’you think that would be all right with Josh?’

She looked at Josh and Ferg as they approached. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think that would be fine with Josh.’

‘And would that be all right with you?’ I asked, starting to become unsure whether this laid-back approach of hers was studied coolness, druggy comedown or sheer indifference.

She seemed to think about it, then she raised herself up on tiptoes and put her hand gently on my cheek. She came forward and kissed me lightly on the other cheek. ‘That would be very all right with me.’

We stood smiling slyly at each other for what felt like half a minute before Ferg’s voice rang out. ‘Gilmour! I hope you haven’t crushed, smoked, given away or lost my fucking cigarettes, you unmitigated cur. Morning, darlings.’

The first time Ellie and I actually had sex was mildly disastrous: more awkward than my very first time, nearly three years earlier, with Kat Naughton; my first, all of nineteen at the time. Lovely girl.

Married now with two kids; works in the council Planning Office. She was engaged and it was just a fling for her so it went no further but she always used to wave and say hi when our paths crossed subsequently. Anyway, that had been a breeze and a mutual laugh compared to my first fumblings with Ellie, in the dark, in my bed, one night while my parents were away.

She was tense and unsure and while she said no, she wasn’t a virgin, and there was no hint of a hymen, or blood, it was neither a joyous romping bonk-fest nor a sinuously graceful coupling of two bodies utterly meant for each other. My extensive research via the media of prose and film had led me to believe it would be one or the other. She was quiveringly tight and I came too quickly the first time, but we persevered, relaxed a bit and it got better. Still all a tad edgy, though, and in the morning she seemed almost downcast.

‘You still want to keep seeing me?’ she asked over mugs of tea in bed, not looking me in the eyes.

‘Are you completely insane?’

(I wouldn’t say this now; you always say things like this attempting reverse psychology or whatever, but now I know how insecure and even neurotic women can be, and often the more beautiful and intelligent, the more insecure and neurotic they are. Beats me — positively unfair, in fact — but there you are.)

‘I kind of fell in love with you three years ago,’ I told her. ‘I’ve been dreaming, fantasising about you ever since. I’ve wanted you for ever, El. I’m just terrified you’ll get bored with me.’

‘Now who’s insane?’ she murmured, picking at the duvet cover, though she was smiling.

I told her about seeing her at the Lido that sun-hazy day during the summer of 2000, about how just that single head-to-the-side, hair-swinging-out gesture had captivated me utterly.

She snorted, then laughed. ‘I get water in my ears if I don’t do that,’ she told me. ‘It’s like walking around with my head underwater all day if I don’t.’

Ellie was crazily self-conscious about her looks; according to her, her entire body was just plain weird. I can’t even remember which breast she thought was bigger than the other; they were both OMG-I’m-going-to-faint beautiful and looked like a perfect matching pair to me, but to hear her talk one was a tennis ball and the other a crash helmet. There was a cute little crease across the end of one of her gorgeous light-brown nipples but as far as she was concerned it was the Grand Canyon.

We were a week’s worth of sex into our relationship before I got to go down on her, for goodness’ sake; she was convinced her body was a feast of freakishness below the waist.

‘But this is beautiful!’ I told her, the first time I was allowed to get down there in daylight and take a look. It was also the first time it occurred to me that this is why girls like frills and frilly things; they have their own frilliness, built in. ‘Seriously; beautiful.’

‘Oh, God!’ she said, slapping a hand over her eyes, patently mortified.

‘What?’

‘Engineering and Philosophy.’

‘I didn’t even know you could do that. Anywhere.’

Ellie looked thoughtful. ‘I think strings might have been pulled,’ she admitted. I looked at her. She shrugged. ‘Not directly Dad; John Ancraime.’

‘Honestly?’ I said. ‘Engineering and Philosophy? This isn’t a wind-up?’

A tiny frown puckered between her eyebrows. ‘Of course not.’

I whistled. ‘Best of luck with that.’ I wiped some spray off my face.

We were sailing; Ellie had a wee dinghy you could squeeze two people on to. We’d trailed it down from the house to the slip at the end of the Promenade and pushed the thing through light surf, wetsuited up. Dinghies were sort of weirdly old school, I reckoned; everybody else I knew who was aquatically sporty was into surfing, windsurfing, kite-surfing and jet-skis, but Ellie liked old-fashioned sailing, and admittedly it was something we could do together. This mostly meant getting cold and wet together, but it was, well, bracing.

‘Yeah, it’s a challenge,’ Ellie agreed. She had her hair up under a peaked cap, a few strands blowing loose. She looked great. She squinted at the breeze-swollen sail, then at the ruffled patterns the gusts of wind were pressing onto the waters all around us. ‘Going about,’ she announced.

We started bum-shuffling, hauling on some ropes and slackening off others.

Engineering and Philosophy. She was crazy. But, then, why not? Ellie always got what she wanted, always eased through life, accepting her familial, financial and intellectual advantages as her natural right. And if securing courses in the two subjects that most intrigued her at the time took some academic string-pulling via her dad and our local toffs, well, that was cool, even amusing.

At school she had got used to being top of the class in whatever subjects she could be bothered to put any effort into, but she never really studied and consistently underperformed in exams. Her teachers despaired; she was a star pupil but still, somehow, a disappointment. She got A grades, but then was told she could do better. She developed a mindset that found learning rather fun but being tested on it just a hassle; she did better than almost anybody else but still people seemed dissatisfied with her. What was the matter with them?

Nevertheless, when the effort involved in ignoring this chorus of supposedly supportive criticism grew greater and more tedious than that associated with the studying required, she had finally pulled up her metaphorical socks and done pretty well in her last year. All the same, it had been a turbulent time for all concerned; Ellie had never really developed the skill of giving in gracefully.

Even now, when she had Oxbridge-level grades, she’d settled for Aberdeen because home was handily close and so many of her friends and the people she was already familiar with — in other words, people already in awe of her, people who required no fresh exertion — were going there. This meant that, as far as she was concerned, it had the best social scene.

Meanwhile I was going to become a great artist. But just doing the classical stuff — painting and sculpting — wasn’t going to be enough. I was going to draw up plans for buildings, create their interiors with colour and light, design their furniture, fabrics and fittings, and specify everything down to the last teaspoon, doorstop and fire extinguisher. And then I wanted to stage events and place my own art in the spaces I’d created. Plus I wanted to be head of a studio full of other visionary people dedicated to expressing my unstoppable torrent of creativity in other niche artistic media and more technically challenging forms requiring specialist knowledge that it wouldn’t be worth my fabulously valuable time to master (even then I had Ferg down as my go-to man for games design, an honour he seemed oddly casual about, as though he didn’t fully appreciate the accolade). Not to mention I anticipated overseeing an entire social and artistic scene based around some sort of astounding hybrid of club, studio, theatre, gallery, publishing house, virtual environment and image production facility, probably in New York or London initially, before I franchised the concept.

I wanted to be a cross between Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Jeff Koons and Andy Warhol, and make all three of them look a little second-rate, a tad wanting in ambition as well as talent. I was going to take the artistic world by storm; it didn’t know what was coming, but it — all of humanity, eventually, because I would make art matter again in a way it hadn’t for far too long — would thank me later.

Dad told me to get a grip. Mum said that all sounded fantastic, incredible, and art school would help me decide what I wanted to focus on (like she hadn’t been listening either), but Ellie listened to my dreams and told me there was probably not a single thing I couldn’t do if I put my mind to it. I think that was how she phrased it.

Naturally, I heard what I wanted to hear, as you do.

I got a talking-to. I’d known it was coming. It was Fraser and Norrie’s birthday, the first time I’d been invited to the family home as Ellie’s boyfriend, about a month after the beach party.

‘Come and see Fraser’s new wagon,’ I was told, so Murdo, Callum, Fraser and Norrie and I all trooped through the kitchen and utility and into the hangar-like triple garage to admire this horrendous but very shiny jacked-up piece of Americana. It was a Ford Grand-something-or-another, I think. Norrie’s birthday present was a speedboat he’d wreck against a harbour wall four months later. We were clutching drinks. I had a can of something soft because Ellie and I were going to another party later and it was my turn to drive. The guys all had cans of beer.

I’d already gathered that my choice of beverage had produced mixed feelings in the Murston lads:

‘No drinkin?’

‘Driving.’

‘Eh?’

‘Not just me; Ellie’ll be in the motor too.’

‘Aw. Right. Aye, okay then.’

‘Ya poff.’

(Fraser / me. With Norrie right at the end.)

‘Here, have a sit; feel the leather,’ Murdo said, opening one of the monster’s rear doors.

We all got in. I was sat in the middle in the back, surrounded by prime Murstonian beef. They closed all the doors and turned to me: Fraser and Callum in the back bracketing me, Murdo and Norrie in the front, glaring over the head restraints. The thing wasn’t even right-hand drive.

Fraser had been driving a chipped and winged Nissan GT-R until recently. He’d knocked down and killed a teenager two years earlier, on a slip road onto the bypass. He got off the careless driving charge — he’d been straight and just under the legal alcohol limit, while the kid he’d hit had been high as a kite — but then the victim’s family had started a civil suit against him. They were new to the area and weren’t to know any better. Some people expected the worst, even when the family lost the court case, but all Fraser did was have the GT-R fully repaired except for the big dent in the bonnet where the kid’s head had hit. He kept that car with its fatal impact crater in the metalwork as a sort of grisly souvenir for nearly two years, and claimed he drove down the street where the kid had lived — and her family still did — every day, just on principle.

‘Now then, Stewart,’ Murdo said.

He was the eldest, the spokesman and reputedly the smartest of the four. He had a short, well-kept beard, fair-haired. Callum had designer stubble and the two younger brothers, both redheads, were clean shaven. I wondered if there was some sort of hierarchy of age-related hirsuteness in the Murston family.

‘We thought we should let you know, the four of us, how we feel about our sister an that, eh?’ Murdo said, to a sort of mini Murston Mexican Wave of nods. ‘Callum here’s put in a good word for you,’ he told me. A good word? I thought. After me cultivating the numpty’s unrewarding friendship for almost the whole of High School? Thanks.

‘An Grandpa,’ Fraser said to Murdo. ‘Him too.’

Murdo nodded. ‘Aye, an Grandpa. He speaks well of you, an that’s all good as far as it goes, eh? But you need to know what she means to this family, aye?’

Murdo looked round at the others. They all nodded again. All four were wearing new jeans — with what looked suspiciously like ironed-in creases — and padded tartan shirts over different designer tees. The tartan shirts were pretty bulky. It was like being intimidated by a convention of Highland hotel sofas.

‘You better no be, like, f … havin fuckin sex wi her,’ Norrie said, frowning mightily at me.

‘Shut up, Norrie,’ Callum said.

Murdo sighed. ‘Get real, Norrie.’

‘Aye, gie yersel peace,’ Fraser chipped in.

Norrie dealt with this concerted disapproval by intensifying his frown.

‘Guys,’ I said, ‘I love the lassie; have for years. Last thing I want—’

‘Aye, aye,’ Murdo said, like he’d heard all this before, or it just didn’t matter. ‘But your da’s best pals wi Mike Mac, an that puts a different kind of complexion on it a bit, eh? I mean, like, who knows, eh? That might no be so bad. But on the other hand it might, so we’ll just have to see, eh?’

Maybe he thought I was looking confused at all this suddenly perceived complexity. ‘But never mind all that,’ he told me. ‘Just you remember: she’s oor sister. We look after our own in this family, okay?’

‘Okay, guys; of course.’

‘We don’t want to see her get hurt, like,’ Norrie said. The others looked at him.

‘Aye,’ Murdo said. ‘An she’s part of this family. An no cunt insults this family, understand?’

‘Of course I—’ I began.

‘You insult her or take the fuckin piss,’ Murdo said, ignoring me, ‘an you’re takin the piss oot of us too. You’re insultin oor da, right?’

‘Right!’ said Callum.

‘Don’t want to insult anybody, guys,’ I told them. I looked round at them all. ‘I respect Ellie. I respect the family. Want you to know that, guys. Okay?’ I nodded, sincerely. Like I say, I’d kind of anticipated a wee talk like this, so I’d rehearsed this series of short, easily understood sentences. All true, too, though a good advocate, barrister or whatever could argue that when I said I respected the family, what I actually meant was that I respected the abstract idea of the family, not the Murston clan in its current incarnation per se. Something like that.

‘Okay,’ Norrie said, looking almost mollified.

‘Make sure it stays that way, eh, Stewie?’ Callum said. He winked at me. Aye, fuck you, I thought, but smiled back.

‘Aye,’ Fraser muttered.

‘Okay,’ Murdo said, draining his can. ‘Team talk over. Time to get pished.’ He crushed the empty can in his hand. A tiny dribble of beer leaked out onto the upholstery.

‘No on the good seats!’ Fraser protested, rubbing the resulting micro stain with his fingers, making it worse. (Not leather, either; some sort of pinprick-pierced vinyl made to look like leather. A bit.)

As they all started opening the doors, Murdo nodded, indicating something just behind me. ‘Mind yer heid on the gun-rack as you get out, eh, Stu?’

‘No tryin to marry you,’ Murdo said, at the same party, in the hallway, just before Ellie and I were about to leave. He laid one heavy hand on my shoulder. Beery breath.

‘Sorry, Murdo?’ I said.

‘No tryin to say that’s you married as far as we’re concerned, like. You’ll be goin to uni, aye?’

‘Aye,’ Norrie said, suddenly at my other side. ‘A clever cunt.’

‘Glasgow,’ I said. I thought the better of trying to explain the difference between university and art school.

Murdo slapped me hard on the back. ‘There you are! There you are! Who knows, eh? Just sayin: don’t take the piss. That’s all.’ He slapped me on the back again. ‘Away ye go now; youse kids have fun.’

So we became an item. We became Stewart and Ellie, or Ellie and Stewie, or Stu and El. I think we were even Stullie or Stellie or something for a while, when we were all giving ourselves Branjelinastyle, two-for-one collective names. That didn’t stick, thankfully.

And at some point — maybe after a year, when we were still seeing each other and still staying faithful to each other, even though I was in Glasgow and she was in Aberdeen, and we were meeting new people all the time, and developing both within ourselves and as parts of quite different communities — I think we both realised this might indeed be something genuinely serious; something, maybe, for ever.

I’d fallen for a glance, smitten with her skin and her hair and the way she moved, but I’d come to love her for all the things that made her who she truly was, and those came from deeper inside, from her character, from her mind. That first, instinctive, surface-struck besotting had been absurd in its own way, but it had been accurate, it had been right. (I blurted this out to her once and she thought about it and said, yes, she felt the same way; she’d just thought I was cute and sort of brashly fun at first, but then discovered that — being generous — maybe there was a little more to me than that. She smiled, telling me this, and I briefly feigned being insulted, while actually happy and secure in the knowledge I was merely being teased.)

And, it felt, other people had picked up on this sea-change, too. There were no more team talks from the Murston brothers and people seemed to assume that we’d be together next year — we got joint invitations to weddings nine or ten months in the future. I was invited to dinners at the Murston family house, and I was sort of obliquely informed, first by Dad, later by Mike Mac himself, that Ellie and I had his blessing too.

‘Aye,’ Mike MacAvett said, sipping a G&T at a party of Mum and Dad’s where I seemed to have been deemed drinks steward, ‘at one point we thought maybe Josh and Ellie …’ He shrugged, looked pleasantly bemused. ‘But no. Still looking for a lassie, that boy.’

Last I’d heard — from Ferg, naturally — Josh was in London looking for buff studs with interesting piercings and independently suspended disco muscles under spray-on T-shirts, but I didn’t like to say.

So Ellie and I had become a couple, in the eyes of those around us as well as in our own heads, and our match, our partnership, had started to be factored into webs of relationships that extended far beyond us, and deep into the clouded waters of Stonemouth’s surprisingly tightly controlled little society.

I don’t think either of us would have been human if we hadn’t come to resent this, at least a bit, and to chafe against it. Still, we had each other, about every second weekend or so, and for longer during the holidays, both abroad and back in the Toun.

I asked her to marry me in a fit of romantic enthusiasm on Valentine’s Day 2005. Until then we’d only talked about living together and whether we’d double-barrel our children’s names. Maybe because my mum and dad’s marriage had seemed pretty happy, while the Murston house had apparently always rung to screaming arguments and slamming doors, I’d generally been more pro-marriage than she had, at least in theory.

For a while in my mid-teens the very idea of marriage had seemed like the most stupidly old-fashioned thing in the world, a slightly embarrassing relic of days gone by and basically pretty pointless unless you were some sort of deeply religious eccentric who actually took all that God and Ten Commandments stuff seriously. It wasn’t so much that so many people in our class came from families where the parents hadn’t bothered to get married; it was more that so many came from families where they had bothered, but then split up and got married again. And again and again, in some cases, though I’d noticed the enthusiasm for marriage seemed to tail off in those who exposed themselves to it repeatedly. If you were the bright and breezy sort you’d put this down to them finally finding the right person after years of effort, but if you were the gloomy type you’d reckon they’d just given up trying.

Later, with the maturity that came with my late teens and hitting the big Two-Oh, getting engaged and married started to seem like a deeply romantic thing to do, an expression of hope and nailing-your-colours-to-the-mast defiance in the face of the expectations of a jaundiced and cynical world. Maybe there was an element of contrarianism, too; if everybody just assumed that of course there was no real point in getting married, then there were always going to be a few of us who’d think, Ha, well, I’ll show you!

To be absolutely honest, when I asked Ellie to marry me it was kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing and I expected her to say no. Never really occurred to me she might say anything else, not after all the times she’d told me how she’d grown up listening to her parents snipe and shout at each other, and hating that they felt tied, manacled to one another. I really just wanted to get the whole question of getting formally married out of the way so we could be sure where we stood, and I assumed that where we stood was that our love and commitment was so strong and so complete within itself that it didn’t need the dubious outside recognition provided by the state (and certainly not by the Church).

We were standing in the snow by the slow dark waters of the Urstan river at Bridge of Ay. There had been a lot of snow the night before and I’d suggested we borrow Donald’s Range Rover to go for a drive and just take in the snowy scenery, maybe find a village pub or an open-out-of-season hotel serving lunch. The way our various course commitments and so on had worked out, it was our first weekend together for nearly a month.

We’d been gazing upstream to the old bridge, a delicate-looking humpback construction in stone that described a near geometrically precise semicircle over the river. There was a deep pool just downstream from it, haloed with ice, the black, still waters at its centre reflecting the bridge with barely a ripple. Bathed in the cold white light of a calm winter’s day, the structure and its inverted image seemed to form an almost perfect circle.

I was slightly stunned when she said yes. There were hugs, there were tears. It was just as well Ellie’s chin was on my shoulder as we stood there wrapped in each other’s arms; I think my eyes stayed wide with surprise for a good minute or two. I remember thinking, Well, that didn’t go the way I thought it would. I was used to my unpremeditated ideas going pretty much as I expected them to, to the extent that I had time to think about them and form any sort of expectation of them at all in the moments — sometimes as little as a few seconds — between making the decision and finding out where it led.

Standing there in the snow-struck silence, beneath a shining, mother-of-pearl sky with Ellie hugging me so tight I almost had to fight for each cold breath, it occurred to me for the first time that maybe being so cavalierly spontaneous wasn’t always such an effortlessly brilliant idea after all. I suppose if I’d been a really smart person I’d have made sure this was the last time this occurred to me, too, but it wasn’t. I think I later convinced myself it was just a blip. And anyway, at the time, being hugged, being held so fiercely by this woman I knew I loved and wanted to be with for ever, it felt like this had been my best snap decision ever, and like I’d inadvertently rescued her from something I hadn’t even known was a threat, like I’d said exactly the right thing completely by accident.

‘Yes,’ she said, sniffing, still hugging me tight around the neck. ‘You sure?’ She pushed back, looked at me through teary eyes. ‘You sure?’ she repeated.

Well, I am now, I thought of saying, but didn’t.

‘Of course,’ I told her.

7

On the far side of the bridge over the Brochty Burn, before the mass of trees that is Vatton forest, there’s a choice of paths as various tramped ways — through the grass and between the broom and gorse bushes — all split and weave and come back together again; I choose one that rides a line of low dunes between the forest proper and the beach, a little undulating highway with views of sand, sea and trees.

I see the figure on the beach from maybe a kilometre away: just a single dark dot, walking slowly, obscured by drifting tendrils of mist, then suddenly glowing in a random shaft of sunlight, briefly radiant before the haze resumes. He or she is wandering along the near-flat beach, their route taking them generally towards anything anomalous: mostly the dark, sand-and wave-smoothed wrecks of trees lying half sunken in the great sable stretches of sand. They’re quite bundled up: wee thin legs and what looks like a heavy jacket. Female? Big kid? There’s something about the way they walk, though, that catches at me. I can’t explain it to myself at first, but I feel an emptiness in my belly, and my heart beats faster.

It might be her, I think. It could be her. She kind of walks like her. No long hair, unless they’re wearing a close-fitting hat. I’m still going up and down this gentle sine-wave of a path, taking the summit route along the line of miniature dunes. I screw my eyes up, trying to see the dark figure better. If I was my dad I’d have a pair of binoculars with me.

I wonder if the iPhone’s up to working like a telescope, and pull it out and try, but in the end the digital zoom is no better than what I can see already.

She’s almost level with me now, maybe a couple of hundred metres away. She’s squatting down in front of a twisted-looking lump of tree, and I can see just enough detail to realise from the way she’s positioned and the general shape of the blob she makes that she’s pointing a biggish camera at the washed-away trunk. She shifts, taking more photos from a variety of angles, all from a squatting position; for a couple she lies right down on the sand.

I’m so busy watching her — it’s definitely a girl, as definitely as you can tell the Bounty Hunter is a girl in the night-time scene in Jabba’s palace in Jedi — that I miss a step and half fall down the sea-face of one of the small dunes, ploughing through sand until my foot catches on some grass and I have to extemporise a jump down onto the sand to avoid going head over heels. Bit of a heavy landing, but nothing damaged. When I look back at the dark figure in the distance she’s standing again, facing me, I think. From the way her arms are set … she’s looking at me through her camera.

I don’t know what else to do, so I smile, make a show of dusting myself down.

She waves. She puts the camera down, the long lens hanging by her side, and I think I hear her shout something. Jeez, is it her?

We start walking towards each other. My heart’s in my mouth. My knees feel weak. Fuck me, what next, am I going to fucking swoon? Just the adrenalin from the near-fall, I tell myself. Pull yourself together, Gilmour.

Definitely a girl. Walks a lot like Ellie: right height, or maybe a little smaller? Was she ever into photography? I don’t recall her being, but that means nothing; in five years Ellie could have been through a dozen new interests, all enthused over, almost mastered — or mistressed — and then dropped for the next challenge. My mode, my expectations, change every few seconds, like the consistency of the sand beneath my feet: now firm, now quaking, uncertain. She’s wearing dark skinny trousers or even thick tights; big, bulky, darkred hiking jacket. A bunnet on her head like a dark beanie. But it’s getting warm now as the haze thins. Somebody who feels the cold? Pale face.

When I can make out her face, I’m briefly even more confused. It is and isn’t Ellie. If she’d just take that hat off, let me see her hair. Her hair was always spectacular, definitive. Though she might have cut it all off now, for all I know. She stops about fifteen metres away, holds up one hand to stop me and brings the camera up to focus. I stand, realising who she is as she manipulates the big grey lens. It’s one of those lenses that’s so big that when you put the whole caboodle on a tripod you attach the lens to the tripod mount with the camera hanging off it, not the other way round.

‘Hey there, stranger,’ she says.

The voice confirms. It’s Grier. She walks like Ellie and she has similar build to her big sister, though she’s a little less tall. I stand there in that flat wilderness of sand, giving her a closed-mouth smile, crossing my arms, hoping she can’t read my disappointment.

‘Cam on, larve, give us a smoyle,’ she says in a very fair approximation of a certain type of London accent.

I give her a smile. Are we okay? I honestly don’t know. I’ve seen Grier exactly once since the night I had to leave Stonemouth hidden inside a giant yellow oil pipe, riding a freight like some Midwestern hobo, and that one meeting was slightly weird. I’ve had a few also slightly odd emails and texts from her over the years — sparse, sporadic, funny but slightly mad — and I really don’t know where I am with her. The Hey there, stranger sounded amiable enough, but Grier was always a great mimic, always quoting lines from film and TV, and adopting different accents.

She takes her photograph — actually about half a dozen photographs, as the camera click-click-clicks quietly away, for over a second — then puts the camera down, hanging from her right hand. ‘There,’ she says, in her normal voice. ‘Didn’t hurt, did it?’

She’s smiling. I grin properly, not for the camera. I swear her camera arm starts to jerk up towards me, then falls back almost before the motion begins. ‘How you doing, Grier?’

‘How you doin?’ she says in a drawled, Joey voice. She’s walking towards me, covering any awkwardness by checking the screen of the camera, then putting it down again and raising her face to mine as we meet for a big hug, jackets making slidey noises against each other.

I’m getting quite a powerful hug here. I remember how we used to mess around when I was going out with Ellie, and Grier was just a lanky teenager with pancaked-over acne and fierce-looking braces, and so I decide to risk it. I pull her tighter to me and lift her up off her feet — she yelps, just like she used to — and swing her round. I can feel her laughing and I can feel the light pressure of her breasts through the layers of clothing, and — not for the first time — wonder, if things had been different … But, there you are. Heavier than she used to be; I’m twirling a woman now, not a kid. I stop gradually and put her down before we both get too dizzy. She’s still laughing.

I have a sudden thought. ‘Fuck!’ I say, glancing up and down the beach and back towards the forest. ‘Your brothers aren’t here, are they?’

‘No. Just me,’ she says, looking at her camera again. She switches something, pinches a lens cover into place on the big grey lens and hoists the camera over her shoulder. ‘You just walking?’ she asks.

Her face is smooth, flawless. Either no make-up at all, or stuff that’s so artfully applied I can’t see it. Her face is not so much like Ellie’s really, not now; Grier has a thinner, somehow sharper face, when you can see it. She always did have that thing of keeping her head down and looking at you from under her delicately carved brows. She always got called mischievous, too. I guess she still looks it, though there’s also a … a slyness there. Nothing mean, not necessarily, but there’s definitely still a roguish side to the girl that you’d be risking ridicule or worse if you missed. Not a lass to be taken for granted. Just like her sister. And her dad. Like the whole family, in their own sometimes grievous ways.

And the girls definitely got all the looks. Ellie and I were always roughly in sync as we grew up and the changes that made a woman out of the long-limbed girl who first took my breath away just seemed natural, somehow, or at least unexceptional; all the girls in our class and those around us were pupating into these dazzling butterflies back then and Ellie was no different, even if she was the most exotic of them all. Grier was seventeen when I skipped town but still gangly, one of those rare girls who resists maturity instead of trying to adopt it when they’re still twelve. But blossomed now, though, for sure. You can tell, even within the bulky jacket; something of a looker.

There was a rumour a couple of years after I left that she’d become a model, which I just dismissed at the time, or thought had become garbled and really applied to Ellie — Ellie you could always believe would be a model or a film star or something — but looking at the kid sister now, it’s credible. Yeah, well, some lucky man, and all that.

‘Yeah, just walking,’ I tell her, ‘I left the town, just kept on going—’

‘Recent habits die hard,’ she says quietly, with a small affirmative nod, almost before I register what she’s said.

‘—and I suppose I’m sort of heading for the … the main forest car park. Call my folks for a lift if I can get reception.’

‘I’m parked there; I’ll give you a lift.’

‘Sure?’

‘Sure I’m sure,’ she says. Sure I’m sure: that’s a new one. Used to always be posi-tive-ly.

‘Fair enough.’

She slips her arm through mine like it’s the most natural thing in the world and we head diagonally back across the beach, northwest. She walks easily by my side, stride for stride. Her boots look like riding boots, though from the trail of her footsteps we’re retracing, they have serious grips. She’s looking down at the sand, or the trail, seemingly intent.

‘Back for Grandpa Joe’s funeral, huh?’ she asks.

‘Yeah. Special dispensation from your old man.’

She’s silent for a bit. ‘That you done your time, you think?’

‘Doubt it. Saw your dad yesterday.’

‘Brave, foolish: delete as,’ she mutters, not looking at me.

‘He seemed quite happy I’d only be here till Tuesday.’

‘Tuesday,’ she repeats, still intent on the sand or her earlier tracks. A glance. ‘You well?’

‘Yup. You?’

‘Yup.’ I am being impersonated. She steals another glance. ‘Doing okay?’

‘Yup. Still lighting buildings. You?’

‘Still option D.’

‘Option D?’

‘There’s always an option D. Option D: all of the above?’

‘What’s the “all”?’

‘This and that. Stuff. Things.’ I feel her shrug.

‘Could you be a little more vague?’ I ask her, stealing one of Ferg’s lines from last night.

‘Certainly. How vague would you like?’

‘Actually, no; that was about right.’ I pull on her arm. ‘What are you doing these days? Or is it, like, classified?’

‘Sort of a photographer’s assistant, I guess,’ she says, sounding thoughtful. ‘Get in front of the lens now and again.’

‘So you are a model?’

She puts her head back and I can tell she’s rolling her eyes. ‘No,’ she says, extending the word the way a teacher dealing with a slightly dim pupil might. ‘Not as a career; just helping out when needed? You know: like in a porn shoot when the lead man’s not quite up to performing right then and they get the cameraman to do the money shot. That sort of thing.’

‘Whoa! You’re doing that sort of—’

‘No,’ she says. ‘Not that sort of modelling. Though not for the want of offers. Or moral … what do you call them? Scruples?’

‘Scruples.’

‘Screw-pulls, focus pulls,’ she says, toying with the sounds. ‘I’m a trainee photographer; that sound better? And I’ve been in a few videos.’

‘Really?’

‘Really. And not those sort of videos, either. Music, mostly. And I might be interested in films. Like, acting? Depends, though.’ She skips; unforced, just like a five-year-old. ‘Photography thing could work out, but the place to be really is running things: modelling agency, photo agency, casting agency. Thinking about an agency that bridges, like, all those?’ She glances at me again. ‘That’s long term. That’s where I’m aiming to be.’

‘Hey, good for you,’ I tell her, genuinely impressed.

She smiles a big, beautiful smile. Then she looks away. She does another little skip, but it seems lesser this time, half-hearted. She brings her camera round, one-handed, fiddles with it, lets it fall again. ‘You going to see Ellie?’

‘I suppose. Maybe. She’ll be at the funeral, won’t she? She is here?’ I ask, suddenly worried. ‘She’s not abroad or—’

‘She’s here.’

‘Well, we’ll both be at the funeral, I guess. Whether I’ll be allowed to speak to her—’

‘You’re both adults, you know,’ she informs me crisply.

I glance at her. Told off by the kid. Oh well, had to happen.

‘Yeah, but it’s not quite that simple, is it? There’s your dad.’

‘Yeah,’ she breathes. ‘There’s our dad.’ She goes quiet and we walk in silence for a while, the line of low dunes angling closer, the forest dark behind them. A few other people are visible, further north along the beach; dogs race and spring around them. ‘Do you hate him?’ she asks. ‘Dad; my dad, Donnie; do you hate him?’

I blow a breath out. ‘Hate? I don’t know. That’s a … That’s quite a big … I used to get on with him … I’m frightened of him,’ I admit to her. ‘Him and your brothers. I wish what happened hadn’t happened. I wish they didn’t hate me, that’s what I feel, I guess.’ I look at her but she’s not looking back. ‘We’ll never be friends, but I can see he’s got his… point of view. I did something that hurt Ellie and hurt the family, hurt him.’

‘I meant more about him being a gangster.’ She comes almost to a stop, pirouettes while still holding my arm and performs a sort of compact bow. ‘Or crime lord, if you prefer,’ she says primly, falling back into step.

I give a little whistle. The ‘G’ word is one that we tend not to use very much in the Toun. Technically it’s the truth, I suppose, but the way things get run in Stonemouth, between the Murston and the MacAvett families on two sides, and the cops on the other, means there isn’t much in the way of obvious gangster activity; not so as you’d notice, anyway. A pretty stable place, really. Enviably low knife crime, no shootings for years and while drugs are as easy to get here as they are anywhere, they’re better controlled than in most cities or big towns. Harder to buy shit here than almost anywhere else in Britain, if you’re a kid. Of course it means the cops are — again, technically — totally corrupt, but what the hey; peace comes at a price. The system is profoundly fucked up, but it works.

‘There are worse,’ I say, eventually. Though it sounds like a cop-out, in a strange way.

‘You ever hear of a man called Sean McKeddie Sungster?’ Grier asks suddenly.

‘Rings a bell,’ I tell her. ‘Can’t think—’

‘Paedophile. In Dartmoor or Brixham or—’

‘Brixton.’

‘Eh?’ she says, glancing at me. ‘Well, wherever. English prison.’

‘The kiddie-fiddler that lost an earlobe?’

‘Yeah. Everybody’s heard that story.’

‘Why, isn’t it true?’

‘It’s true, far as I know,’ Grier says. ‘Told he can’t ever come back here, not even for his mum or dad’s funeral or anything.’

‘Huh,’ I say. I’m not wanting to pursue any connections with my own case here.

‘And the whole town knows this story?’ she says. ‘And even the people that think Dad’s a disgusting repulsive crook and should be put away for life think that’s a good thing, that’s cool. He did the right thing.’

I shrug. ‘People will tend to think that,’ I offer, feeling lame. ‘I guess.’ (Lamer still.) ‘It’s their kids—’

‘Yeah, but even paedophiles have to live somewhere.’ Grier sounds grim. ‘When he gets out, now he’ll go somewhere nobody knows him at all.’

‘But there’s a register, and—’

She pulls her arm out from mine and steps ahead, turning to face me, her arms crossed as she keeps pace with me, walking backwards. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean.’ I hold my hands up. ‘Grier, I’m not.’

She shrugs, looks like she’s about to lift her camera again but then doesn’t. She smiles. God, that’s a pretty face. Then the smile’s gone again. She purses her lips, fiddles with the camera once more. She’s still walking backwards. ‘You want me to fix up a meeting between you and Ellie?’ she asks.

‘What are we? Mafia crime lords?’

She laughs. ‘Yeah, but do you?’

I shake my head. ‘I don’t know about that,’ I tell her. Of course I want to see Ellie, but involving Grier doesn’t seem like so great an idea.

‘I could,’ she tells me. ‘If you want me to.’

I nod, indicating behind her. ‘You’re really confident you’re not just about to fall over a tree trunk, or’ — I lean out to one side, looking around her — ‘a big orange buoy sitting in its own little pool of water?’

Grier is not fooled. ‘Yuss,’ she says, eyelids fluttering, ‘I am, amn’t I?’

I scrunch my face up slowly, knitting my brows, narrowing my eyes and stretching my mouth out tight to either side, as though afraid to watch what is about to happen, but she still doesn’t turn round.

We walk like this for a few more moments. ‘Don’t pretend you’ve memorised every bit of wrecked tree on this beach,’ I tell her.

She shrugs, grins, keeps walking backwards.

‘Seriously,’ I say, glancing round behind her again and using one hand to indicate she should head slightly to the right. ‘You could really hurt yourself if you fell over one of these big ones with the branches or the roots sticking out all over the place.’

She still looks unperturbed, but after a few more paces turns the camera on, takes off the lens cap, rests the lens on her shoulder, pointing behind, and clicks.

‘That’s cheating,’ I tell her as she brings the camera forward to look at the photo she’s just taken.

‘Yup,’ she says. She turns, swings forward, takes my arm again.

‘How is Ellie anyway?’

‘She is okay anyway,’ Grier tells me as we reach the forest car park. She walks up to a BMW X5 and plips it open.

‘This thing your dad’s?’ I ask. It’s a bit bling.

Grier shrugs. ‘Dunno. Family fleet car, kinda.’

Her camera goes into a custom bag with various other lenses and photo paraphernalia. My phone vibrated a minute ago to let me know it’s back online and has texts and missed calls. A text from Dad says ARRANGED YOU CAN GO SEE MIKE MAC THIS AFT. He isn’t really shouting; his texts always come like that. I suppose I’d better go; visiting Don without seeing Mike Mac probably breaks some protocols or something.

Grier takes off her hat, flings it into the back seat and ruffles her hair, which is short and fair and looks natural. I wonder when that happened. This is the first time in a decade I’ve seen her when her hair hasn’t been dyed, or styled to look like Ellie’s. She looks sort of boyish, but good.

Then she looks at me with one of those sudden pause-looks Grier’s been using since she was about thirteen. It’s the sort of look that makes you think, Did I say something wrong? or, Has she just thought of something really disturbing?

‘I’m going to see Grandpa,’ she tells me, ‘want to come?’

‘Um, where is he?’

‘Geddon’s,’ she says. ‘Lying in state.’

Geddon’s is the oldest funeral company in town. If I’d really thought about it, I’d have guessed his body would be there.

‘Yeah,’ I tell her. ‘Yeah, I’d — okay.’

We bounce and wobble over tree roots to the strip of tarmac through the forest that leads to the main road.

I met Joe when I was walking in the hills, before I got to know the rest of the adult Murstons, before I ever talked to Ellie beyond the odd, grunted, embarrassed hi when our paths crossed, infrequently.

Joe must have been in his seventies then; he was one of those thick-bodied men who’s obviously been fit and hard all his life, and who still has a sort of dense-looking frame even in old age. He was stiff with arthritis and he carried his barrel chest and sizeable belly before him like a backpack worn the wrong way round. He always had an old-fashioned wooden walking stick with him; mostly he used it to poke at interesting things he found lying on the ground, and to thrash at nettles. He said he’d fallen into a load of nettles when he’d been a bairn, and still held a grudge. I don’t know; he might have been joking.

Anyway, he liked to walk his pair of fat, slow, elderly Border collies up in the same hills and forest I tended to wander around in, though the collies kind of just plodded along behind him and never ran about or chased after things. Generally they looked as though they’d much rather be curled up on a rug in front of a fire or in a patch of sunlight in the house.

I was sixteen and I’d recently bought a moped, like just about every boy in my class who could afford to and hadn’t been forbidden by their parents. Scared myself on it a couple of times; never told Mum and Dad. Once I got over the novelty of whirling through the local wee roads and lanes, and making an expedition down the old coast road to Aberdeen, I used it mostly for heading for the hills and then going walking.

I liked hill walking because it got you away from everything and everybody and it was healthier than being on the bike. Other kids in my class were already getting gym memberships for birthdays and Xmas but I thought being out in the open air was less regimented, less controlled. Years later, in London, I held out for nearly two years before I joined a gym, and gave in then purely because it was almost the only way to stay fit without choking on traffic fumes.

I’d just struggled the hard, steep way up to the top of a wee hill in the forests above Easter Pilter when I first bumped into Joe in what must have been the summer of ’01; he’d come up the easy way and was sitting taking the sun with his back against the summit cairn, the two still-panting collies lying flopped round his feet. He wore baggy, worn corduroy trousers somewhere between dark green and brown and an even baggier green jumper with a hole in one elbow. The dogs looked up at me with milky eyes but didn’t raise their heads off their feet.

‘Mornin,’ the old guy said.

‘Aye,’ I said.

Usually I avoided other people in the hills, where I could, without making it obvious. As I had just got to the top of the steep grass-and-boulder slope, though, there was nowhere else to go, and anyway I needed to catch my breath. I stood facing away from him, looking at the view. Beyond the treed ridges and tumbled, grassy hills near by, Stonemouth was just visible to the east, the sea a blue-grey presence beyond.

‘Bonny, eh?’ the old guy said.

‘Aye,’ I said. Then I felt I was being too monosyllabic, like some rubbish teenager. ‘Yeah, it is bonny, isn’t it?’

‘You’re a Toun boy, aye?’ he asked.

I turned and looked at him. ‘Aye,’ I said.

‘Accent,’ he said, tapping a large, round and quite red nose. Not that I thought I’d looked surprised or anything.

‘Yourself?’ I asked.

‘Aye. Frae so fur back ah doot yir faither wiz burn.’

From so far back he doubted my father had been born. Joe certainly talked like an old geezer, though, as I learned, he only really put it on like that when he was playing up to some image of age or parochialism he wanted to poke fun at.

I sort of laughed.

‘Ye no stoapin?’ he asked.

‘Um, no,’ I said. He didn’t look like a weirdo or a paedophile or anything, and even if he was I’d be able to outrun him, but I just felt uncomfortable. ‘Well, better be going,’ I said.

Joe nodded. ‘Wouldne want tae keep ye,’ he said. ‘Mind how ye go, now.’

‘Aye. Nice to meet you,’ I said. Though this wasn’t really true. I walked off, the easy way. I felt vaguely annoyed with myself, though I wasn’t sure why. Awkward meeting.

As I started to head home, I took a forest track a bit too fast on my moped, whacked the sump or something and the bike bled a trickle of oil onto the narrow single-track back to the main road. I found out about the wee trickle of oil when I took a corner — not going fast at all — and the rear wheel just seemed to go out from under the bike. I skidded, tipped onto the tarmac and was scraped across the surface, with the bike pirouetting alongside, until I hit the grass and pine-needle verge and came to a stop. The bike lay ticking beside me, bleeding oil.

I got up, shaking a bit. Ripped my good jeans. Torn my right boot above the ankle. Ripped the stuffing out of my parka. Helmet looked a bit scraped. No blood or broken bones, though. I went for my phone but it had been in a pocket ripped open by my slide along the road. I found it on the grass, but the screen was dead and it wasn’t even powering up.

I was still wondering what to do and how exactly to break this to my mum and dad when an ancient blue Volvo estate came humming along the road. It drew to a stop and it was the same old guy. The two collies, slightly livelier now, were standing panting in the rear, looking at me through their cloudy eyes, moderately interested. The old guy leaned over, wound the window down.

‘Ye have a spill, son, aye?’

‘Aye.’

He shooed the collies to one side and helped me manhandle the bike into the back of the estate. Actually I helped him; he was stronger than me. The collies didn’t appreciate sharing their space with the now dry-sumped bike, but settled down when they realised a few whines and some hangdog looks weren’t going to change matters. The old guy offered his hand as we were about to leave.

‘Joe,’ he said, as we shook.

‘Stewart.’

‘Fine Scoatish name. Whereaboots in the Toun ye wantin?’

‘Ormiston’s Garage, I suppose.’ Not much point taking the bike home. I tried my phone again. Still broken.

‘Here,’ he said, handing me a big, slightly comical-looking mobile as we drove off. ‘You can give them a call.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. It was one of those ultra-basic mobiles made just for old people: big buttons, clearly marked. ‘Mind if I look in your numbers?’

‘Ye no know the number?’

‘No,’ I said. I didn’t want to add the of course not. Joe tutted, looked amused.

In the end I used directory enquiries.

The bike was a write-off and I wasn’t allowed a new one, not if I wanted to live at home for the next couple of years, before I’d be going to university.

I still had my old mountain bike so I sometimes took that to the nearest forests and hills, though my horizons had definitely shrunk. Joe would ring up some days and offer me a lift to the hills whenever he was heading that way himself. Usually I accepted. He wasn’t always going walking himself, just passing that way, and even when he was taking the dogs for a walk he always encouraged me to head off by myself and just be back at the car by an arranged time.

One day there was only one collie to walk, then, a few months later, none at all. I told him he ought to get new ones, but he said he’d owned too many by now. I didn’t understand, and told him so. He just shrugged and said, ‘Aye, well.’ This was, in retrospect, a lot better than telling me I would understand one day.

Mum and Dad got me a car — a hopelessly underpowered and terribly safe VW Polo — the day I turned seventeen. I passed my test when I was a month older and suddenly I had my freedom again. By then I knew Joe was Joe Murston, father of Donald, and I’d visited the family house on the hill to see him, rather than Callum. It felt more of a duty, to be honest, and the fact that I always stood a chance of bumping into Ellie when I went to see him was a long way from being an irrelevant part of the equation, but I always knew I’d miss him when he went.

I stand in the funeral parlour, looking at him. It’s quiet and cool in here and it smells of lilies: a too-sweet, cloying smell. Old man Murston lies, dressed in a dark, old-fashioned suit, in a flamboyant-looking open casket I suspect he’d have hated. I don’t think I ever saw him wear a tie before. One of those neck things, sometimes; a cravat. His plump face looks like it’s made from shiny plastic and his mouth is wrong: too tight and thin. His body, though still big, looks shrunken somehow, as if the air’s been let out of it.

I’m trying hard to remember some pearls of wisdom Joe might have imparted during our walks together, some deeply meaningful I-think-we’ve-all-learned-something-here-today revelation that I owe to him, but I’m failing.

Mostly we talked about nothing much, or about how it was in the old days: steam trains, having to pay the doctor in the time before the NHS, being able to walk across the river on the decks of trawlers, the war — he was on the farm throughout, producing food for the home front; I got the impression some fun had been had with Land Girls — and nature stuff. Joe taught me a lot of names for trees and birds and animals, but they were the old names, names already slipping from common use, and not really that much help. If a girl said, ‘Is that a cuckoo?’ and you said, ‘Naw, quine, yon’s a gowk,’ you’d generally be looked at aghast, like you were talking a foreign language. Which you kind of were.

Fankle. He taught me a few useful, or at least good words, like fankle. Fankle is more or less a straight synonym of tangle, but it sounds better somehow. Particularly as applied to a fishing line that’s got itself into a terrible, un-sort-outable mess, the level of shambles so extreme all you can really do is take a knife to it and throw it away. That’s a fankle. Applies to lives too, obviously, though the knife approach usually only makes things worse.

It’s just me and Grier in the gently lit back room of the funeral parlour. On the walls are serene paintings of sylvan landscapes, most bathed in the light of golden-red sunsets.

‘How did he die?’ I ask quietly.

‘Heart,’ Grier says.

She goes up to him and runs her fingers through the sandy, wispy hairs on his mostly bald head, patting them into a slightly different arrangement. She uses one finger to press down lightly on the tip of his nose, deforming it slightly before she releases the pressure and it goes back to the way it was.

‘What are you—’

‘Never touched a dead person before,’ she says.

She bends at the waist and quickly kisses him on the forehead. Her dark jacket makes that slidey noise again, quite loud in the insulated silence of the room. I wasn’t sure outdoor jackets were quite the right dress code for such a solemn visit but Grier had pointed out Joe had spent most of his life in baggy country clothes; it used to take weddings and funerals to get him into a suit. He wouldn’t have minded while he was alive, and he couldn’t mind now.

‘You don’t think he’s looking down on us?’ I’d asked.

Grier had looked at me like I’d suggested Sub-Optimus Prime, Mr P’s more rubbish but nicer brother, might fly into the room and grant us superpowers. I don’t believe in life after death or reincarnation or anything like that myself, but I’m still thinking about a lot of that stuff and there was a time when I was always prepared to defer to people who really seemed to have made up their minds about it. I was impressed by their certainty, even when it was obviously bollocks. Especially then; it seemed heroic, somehow. Maybe I’m starting to change, though, because increasingly it’s starting to look just stupid.

‘Think that’s our respects paid, yeah?’ Grier says. She dusts her hands. ‘I’m hungry.’

I watch her attacking an all-day breakfast in Bessel’s Café, a few doors down from the funeral parlour. ‘You don’t eat like a model.’

‘Thanks,’ she says. ‘Actually a lot of them eat like this? They just throw it up again five minutes later.’

She raises an index finger to me and waggles it. Fair enough; I’ve had at least one skinny girlfriend I suspected did that. I’m making do with a coffee and a rowie, the region’s own flattened, salty version of a morning roll, designed to keep for a week on a heaving trawler or something, allegedly.

‘You seen Ellie lately?’ I ask her.

‘Day or two ago,’ she says.

‘Where is she these days? Still in Aberdeen?’

‘Rarely. I think she keeps the flat there but she’s mostly living out at that old Karndine Castle place. The one they converted?’

‘Oh yeah.’

The place had still been a ruin when I’d left; an early-Victorian, nouveau-riche monstrosity ten kilometres out of town that was no more a castle than my mum and dad’s house. I’d heard they’d turned it into apartments.

‘She’s got a terribly posh attic,’ Grier tells me, drawing out ‘terribly’ with a sort of exaggerated English drawl. ‘She’s the princess in the tower now.’ A shrug. ‘Pretty much what she always wanted, I suppose.’ Grier sighs, looks away.

‘Is she okay?’

‘She’s fine, Stewart.’ She sounds exasperated now. ‘You can’t ask her yourself?’

I find myself patting the pocket with my phone in it. ‘She changed her number five years ago. Nobody I could get to talk to me would let me have her new one.’

‘Yeah, well, she’s changed it a couple of more times since,’ Grier says. ‘She tends to do that? Clears her life out like that after any …’

‘Trauma? Major event?’ I suggest.

Grier looks at me dubiously. ‘Something like that.’ She cuts a well-fried egg into pieces, stabs them all in turn and shoves the lot into her mouth, looking cross. ‘Kinda surprised she remembers to keep her own family in each new phone,’ she says, after swallowing. ‘You want her number? Only, you can’t say it was me gave it you.’

‘Think she’d talk to me?’

‘It’d be an unknown number.’

‘I mean, if she knew it was me.’

Grier looks thoughtful, shrugs. ‘Hmm,’ is all she’ll say as she gets serious with the rest of her breakfast.

‘She stopped talking to Callum?’

‘Pretty much. Absolute minimum, like “hello, goodbye” at family things. Defriended big time. Not that she Facebooks. El barely emails.’ Grier stirs her first coffee; I’m on my second.

Bessel’s bustles around us, still popular with Stonemouth’s more refined classes after ninety years. Tall mirrors and polished wooden wall panels with concealed lighting at the top look down on bright buggies, young families and old ladies wearing hats. Bessel’s was bought up by the MacAvetts a few years ago. I think. Unless it was the Murstons. Sometimes it feels like half the properties in town belong to the Murstons or Mike MacAvett. This happened almost accidentally at first, apparently, when Don Murston bought a wee shop on the High Street back in the seventies, so Mrs M could indulge her passion for black-velvet nail pictures and dolls of the world in national dress, and to give her something to do. Then, as more leases and freeholds came up in the Toun, Don realised property was relatively cheap, and a good investment. Mike Mac joined in.

‘But yeah,’ Grier says, ‘Ellie wouldn’t be in the same room as Callum for about a year.’

‘Why was that?’

‘He said something hurtful to her,’ Grier tells me. She’s keeping her voice quite low, though the general conversational hubbub, the clamour of clattering cutlery and the scraping of chair legs on the tiled floor makes it hard to hear anything distinct more than a side plate away.

‘That all? Fuck? Must have been a doozy.’

Grier tips her head. ‘You know all the stuff about Ellie?’ she asks quietly.

I think about this. ‘How would I know if I didn’t?’

Grier rolls her eyes and leans in closer over our tiny table, getting me to do the same. ‘I mean, marrying Ryan.’

‘Of course I knew about that.’ The blindingly obviously destined-to-fail marriage to Mike MacAvett’s younger son that only she and Ryan ever thought was a good idea, and maybe not even both of them.

‘The miscarriage?’

I nod slowly. ‘I heard a rumour.’

‘Then divorcing Ryan.’

‘Know of.’

‘Then going back to Aberdeen, to university?’

‘I heard she could still have gone to Oxford.’

‘Yeah, well, we all heard that,’ Grier says. ‘But, leaving at the end of second year?’

‘Oh.’

‘Didn’t graduate. Again. Started a different course; gave that up too.’

‘Didn’t know that.’

Grier sits further forward, her nose only ten centimetres from mine. ‘Big family gathering at the house? Murdo and Fi’s daughter, Courtney, her christening party? Callum was drunk; Ellie was holding the baby at the time, making all the usual cooing noises you have to make.’ Grier stops, nods as though she’s just told me something conclusive, sits back, looks round, then lowers her head to mine again. ‘You really can’t tell anyone I told you this?’

‘Promise.’

‘People were talking about the kid’s future, how it’d cost a fortune if she had to go to university. Then somebody mentioned Ellie, like, in this context? And Callum said, Yeah, well, Ellie never could finish anything she started.’

It takes me a second. Then I take a breath in suddenly. ‘Shit, you mean, like, the baby she lost, not just the … the degree and not graduating?’

Grier hoists one fair eyebrow. ‘Middle name Sherlock. But, yeah; that was what Ellie thought he meant. She was … kind of upset.’

‘You think he did mean it that way, though?’

‘Hard to know with Callum,’ Grier says, thoughtfully. ‘He was stupid enough to say it without realising how she’d take it, but, yeah, he was vicious enough towards her sometimes. Might have thought it through first and meant it.’ She taps the foam from her coffee spoon and raises the cup to her lips. ‘And he was impressed enough with himself, after a few drinks anyway, to think he was being incredibly witty.’

‘Fuck,’ I breathe.

Grier drains her cup. Her little pink tongue flickers, removing foam from her lips. ‘El stormed out. Callum was even more upset,’

Grier says, then looks meditatively towards the high ceiling. ‘Or pretended to be.’ She shrugs. ‘Anyway, Ellie wouldn’t talk to him for a year; wouldn’t even visit the house if she knew he was there or going to turn up.’ Grier stirs the foam in her cup with one finger, sucks the finger. She nods. ‘There you go: that was one of the times she changed her phone.’

‘Jesus,’ I say, lost for anything beyond expressions of shock.

‘Well, that was Callum,’ Grier says, studying her coffee spoon.

‘Mostly he always found it hard to articulate what he felt? But on the rare occasions he did, it was usually something really hurtful.’ She smiles at me.

‘Ahm,’ I say, as she keeps looking at me. ‘Still, I was … I was sorry to hear he …’

‘Fell or was pushed off the bridge?’ she provides.

I must be staring at her. She flaps one hand. ‘Nah; he jumped.’ She sits back. ‘But if you’re telling the truth about being sorry to hear about it, you’re part of a small minority.’ She tips her head. ‘Close your mouth and stop looking so shocked, Stewart. Jesus, have you forgotten what my surname is?’ Without moving her head she flicks her gaze from side to side, sits a little closer and says, ‘How many people in this place have been stealing glances at me, knowing whose daughter I am?’

I clear my throat. ‘It’s mostly men,’ I tell her. Though she’s right. ‘And the reason they’re looking at you has got nothing to do with your father.’

She just laughs.

I remember the preserved four-wheel drive, the giant portrait in the hall of the Murston family home. ‘Your dad misses Callum,’ I tell her.

‘That’s compensation, or a guilty conscience,’ Grier says, quietly. There’s a pause. She shrugs. ‘They fought a lot, just before he hurdled the railings.’

‘Shit,’ I say, because I have no idea what else might cover all the implications here.

‘Oh, he doted on the boy.’ Grier sighs. ‘That’s the way it is in our family. All or nothing. Ellie got all the looks, Murdo got all the … expectation, ruthlessness? Fraser got all the viciousness. Well, most of it. Norrie got all the stuff that was left. Resentment, mostly. And Callum got all the forgiveness. The more stupid things he did, the more Don forgave him.’ Another shrug. ‘Actually Ellie got all the smarts as well. Just maybe not all the application. Think Don still feels she’d be the best one to succeed him, if she could be bothered, which she’s not.’ Grier shifts in her seat. ‘Can we talk about something else besides my … clan now? I’m bored.’

‘What did you get?’

‘What did I get?’

‘What did you get all of?’

‘All the boredom,’ she says, in a flat voice, eyelids hooded. ‘I just said.’

‘I think you got all the modesty,’ I tell her, grinning at her. ‘All the self-deprecation.’

‘Years of indoctrination,’ she says dismissively. ‘I’ve been groomed for failure. Don keeps the tape of Callum jumping, did you know that?’

‘What?’

‘From the bridge CCTV, night Cal took the plunge. Plays it back when he’s drunk and — what’s that word? Maudlin.’

‘Fuck. That is deeply weird.’

‘Not saying he gets off on it, Stu. Just plays it.’

‘Still a bit weird.’

‘Yeah, well,’ Grier says, before switching to a cutesy little-girl voice: ‘Gotta love my fambly.’ Her voice goes back to normal as she mutters, ‘Kind of compulsory.’ She picks up the bill, frowns at it. ‘You paying or me?’

‘So. Some icing on the cake?’ she asks as we walk back to the car.

‘What?’

‘Coke?’ she says, tapping the side of her nose. Grier hasn’t put her arm through mine since we’ve been in town, I notice. That would be a bit strange, I guess. ‘Can’t invite you to the house, but there’s a great place up by Stoun Point. Down a lane. Room for only one car. You can park looking out to sea and the whin’s so close people can’t even squeeze past.’

‘Ah,’ I say, tempted. I know the spot, above Yarlscliff; Ellie and I took my wee car up there a few times. ‘Hmm. Better not,’ I tell her. Wouldn’t do to visit Mike Mac off one’s tits. And then, that place Grier’s talking about: it’s kind of hallowed turf. Kind of hallowed turf for me and Ellie the way it’s kind of hallowed turf for half the people in Stonemouth between seventeen and thirty, but all the same. It’d be weird going there with Grier for anything illicit.

An ignoble part of my brain has always had this slightly unscrupulous idea that boils down to If not Ellie, Grier would do, but another, sensible, part of me knows this would be insane. Probably unwelcome (though possibly not) and certainly even more likely to risk further upsetting the already fairly upset Murston clan. Also, Grier’s just dangerous, somehow. She’d be nitro in a cement mixer if her dad was a sandal-wearing social worker, never mind the region’s principal crime lord.

‘Your loss,’ she tells me. ‘It’s good shit.’

‘Some other time.’

‘Might not be such good shit, then,’ she says briskly. ‘Opportunities pass.’

We’re in the Central Car Park, where the old railway station used to be. She stops, comes right up to me and jabs me in the chest with one finger. ‘Again, no gossiping, yeah? Swore to Dad I’d never do drugs.’ She grins widely. ‘Hilariously hypocritical, eh?’

‘Hilarious,’ I agree.

My phone goes and I let her get into the car while I answer. It’s Mike Mac, telling me he’s busy through to five; see me then? So I’ve got time to kill this afternoon. Another karmic nudge? Maybe I ought to go do a few lines with Grier. She’s watching me through the glass, tapping her fingers theatrically on the steering wheel. The engine’s already running.

I look through those earlier texts. One from BB suggesting a game of snooker at Regal Tables, just a couple of minutes’ walk away on the High Street. I hold a wait-a-moment finger up to Grier, who raises then drops her shoulders dramatically, and throws herself back in her seat. I call BB.

‘Stu?’

‘You at the Regal?’

‘Aye. Playing with maself here, man; it’s shite. You comin, like?’

‘There in five.’

‘Pint?’

‘Just the auto-e for me.’

‘Shagger Landy it is.’

I open the X5’s passenger door. ‘Stuff to do,’ I tell Grier. ‘Laters?’

‘Funeral, if not before,’ Grier says, looking unimpressed. ‘Call.’

8

Regal Tables, Stonemouth’s premier snooker and American Pool venue for over thirty years, occupies an old cinema on the High Street. BB — a generously upholstered latter-day Goth with multiple piercings to ears and nose — is cradling a pint and looking pensive by a set-up snooker table when I arrive. We decide a full-size snooker table looks too daunting at this time on a Saturday afternoon and arrange to play pool instead.

‘Sup yersel, then, Stewart?’ BB asks.

I’m sure we went through all the catching-up stuff last night but we go through it again now. I’m doing okay. BB is unemployed after losing his job with the council Parks Department, back living with his parents.

‘No easy bein a Goth in the Parks Department,’ he tells me at one point, sadly.

‘Really?’

‘You’re outside a lot. Hard to avoid a tan.’

‘Aye, I suppose.’

There are about twenty tables in the place, only about a quarter of them lit and occupied: little oases of light in the sea of darkness that is the giant hall. BB and I are just starting our second game when I see a group of four guys come in and stand at the distant pool of light that is the reception bar, and look towards us. They collect their box of balls and saunter over. Two are big, heavy-set guys, one is kind of normal and the other one’s wee and nervy-looking. I get a bad feeling about them pretty much instantly. They take the table next to ours. Looking around, no other two groups of players are on adjacent tables, or need to be.

‘Best table, eh?’ the wee one says, glancing round. Must have seen me looking.

‘Aye,’ I say.

The four guys alongside us are playing two against two. The first time it’s my turn to play at the same time as the wee guy on the other table, we both want to use the aisle between the tables at once. There should be enough room, but he takes up a lot of space squatting down, sighting over the top of the cushion and closing one eye. He’s thin but hard-looking, and hollow-cheeked enough to be embarking upon, or recovering from, a recreational substance dependency regime. Straggly thin black hair he probably cuts himself — certainly nobody in their right mind would pay good money for that look — and a shell suit that looks like it’s made from white bin liner. Couple of gold sovs on his right hand. Even by Stonemouth standards, this is almost comically old school.

I stand and wait for him to finish, but he’s tsking and tutting and shaking his head and keeps standing up and looking like he’s about to take his shot but then changing his mind and squatting down again, closing one eye and sighing.

I just have this feeling that he’s waiting for me to try to take my shot so that he can claim I’ve got in his way or jostled his elbow or something, so I decide waiting patiently is the wisest course. After about five minutes of this shite I sigh, and pull my phone out to check the time.

‘Aye? What?’ the wee guy says suddenly, all edge and aggression. He’s staring at me.

I look at him. ‘Excuse me?’ I say, with a sort of formal smile. Oh, shit; I already don’t like the way this is going.

‘Whit the fuck?’ the wee guy says shrilly, as though when I said ‘Excuse me?’ he somehow heard, ‘Fuck your junky whore of a mother with a rusty fire extinguisher, you clit-nosed cuntface.’

I spread my hands wide, still holding my cue by the thin end. ‘Sorry, what?’ I say.

He swaggers towards me, wee eyes screwed up. ‘You takin the fuckin piss?’ He sticks his face in mine, making me back off out of head-butt range.

‘Not doin anything, pal,’ I tell him.

Some old set of responses from my teenage years has kicked in. The wee guy obviously wants a fight or at least the threat of one with some ultra-humbling backing down on our part — if we’re very lucky — and BB and I are outnumbered two-to-one. I know BB’s no good in a fight anyway; I’ve seen him still trying to reason with people while he’s lying on the ground with kicks raining in. I haven’t seen a single face I know in the place apart from BB’s since we came in here, the exits are all past Wee Guy and his mates, and the enemy do look kind of rumpus-ready: schemey, and with fight skills not confined to Grand Theft Auto.

‘No wantin any trouble,’ BB says in a sort of muted rumble.

The wee guy shoots him a look. ‘You fuckin stay oot a this, ya big emo cunt.’

‘Aw,’ BB says, frowning. ‘No need fur—’

‘Shut it!’ the wee guy rasps, sounding almost hysterical.

‘Look,’ I begin, trying to sound reasonable. ‘My phone vibrated, that’s all.’ I take it half out of my pocket but the wee guy grabs it away from me before I can stop him. ‘Hi, wait—’ I say.

‘Naw it fuckin didnae!’ he says, and throws it across the pool table towards one of his pals. It clatters, bounces, nearly falls into a middle pocket. The wee guy is gripping his cue near the narrow end now, like he’s ready to use it like a club. His other fist grasps the white ball. He sees me glance towards the reception bar, where nobody seems to be noticing the situation building here. ‘Fuckin look at me when I’m talkin to ye, ya cunt,’ he tells me. He glances over too, waves at a distant face that is finally looking our way. ‘Okay, Toammie?’ he shouts at the guy, who waves back. ‘Just sortin oot a wee problem here; nae problem, ma man.’ Then he’s in my face again with a tight wee grin, like he’s cut us off from any help.

‘Look,’ I tell him, ‘we’re just here like yourselves, to have a quiet game of pool.’

‘Naw yer naw! Naw yer fuckin naw!’ the wee guy says, getting a bit too close again. He’s got spittle on his lips like he’s working himself into a state here and I think some flecks have already hit my face but I’m not prepared to wipe them off because I’m pretty sure that’ll just give him something else to get even more upset about. He stabs me hard in the chest with one finger. ‘You are just here to fuckin try and take the piss out me, is that whit ye fuckin think?’

‘Oh, don’t be daft,’ I begin, and instantly know this is a serious mistake.

The wee guy’s voice goes up another octave. ‘You fuckin callin me fuckin daft, ya fuckin—’

‘He fuckin called you daft, D-Cup!’ one of his big mates says.

(D-Cup? I’m thinking, and even as my guts are going cold and starting to churn and there’s a bad, tight feeling in my chest and my mouth is going dry, I still think, Wouldn’t it be fascinating to know how this particular scrawny wee runt got nicknamed that. Unless it was Teacup … But Teacup would be a shit street name. It was definitely D-Cup.)

But his voice has really gone up now, and he’s staring, wide-eyed and spitting, as he rants in a way that suddenly has no hint of the synthetic or fake about it, and beneath all the aggression and the flash-hate I can see something hurt and pathetic and raging, and I just know that this poor, fucked-up wee numpty has probably been called daft and stupid and useless and educationally subnormal or whatever by every adult he’s ever known and probably all his mates too.

Good nerve to hit, Stewart. There probably wasn’t a cool way out of this from the start; there definitely isn’t now.

‘Ya fuckin shitehead dick,’ he’s screaming at me. ‘Ya fuckin cunt, who you fuckin callin—’

‘Aye, callt you daft, so he did,’ the other heavy-set guy says, like the signal’s only just reached whatever he uses for a brain, or he thinks his wee pal might have forgotten in the meantime. No sense in even trying to appeal to them. These guys look like they have one consolation vocational qualification between them but they’re exactly the sort of wit-free stumpies who turn out to have all their brains in their fists and feet and whichever bit of your average ned’s central nervous system that handles fighting in general and kicking the living shit out of much cleverer people in particular.

BB’s useless, I haven’t even been near a fight in nearly ten years, the staff here would appear to be pals of D-Cup and his chums, and I now don’t even have my phone, which has been picked up by Pool Hall Heavy-set Guy Number 2 and is being pawed at like he’s never seen an iPhone before.

‘Look, I talked with Don Murston just yes—’

‘Ah don’t fuckin care who ye fuckin talked to! You fuckin talk to me like—’

‘I’m not—’ I begin.

‘Don’t fuckin interrupt me!’ D-Cup screams.

This time spittle definitely hits me on the cheek. Loud voice for a wee guy. I think I hear an echo. There’s silence in the place for a moment. Not a fucking sound. Then there’s a murmur of distant conversation, and the sound of a ball being hit, all of it almost too casual; the sound of people showing they’re not intimidated by other people being intimidated.

This isn’t supposed to happen, I want to wail. Mr M said it was okay for me to be here. The word’s supposed to have gone out, for fuck’s sake. Except this little shite, this diminutive wannabe-sub-gangsta probably only knows very vaguely that I’ve been on the receiving end of Murston ire and thinks he’ll gain kudos for vicariously upholding Mr M’s honour and pre-empting the punishment that he’s quite sure is doubtlessly and rightfully coming my way in any case.

Then there’s a hint of movement in the darkness to one side of me and suddenly I’m the wide-eyed one, trying to see from the corner of my eye — without letting my gaze stray a millimetre from D-Cup’s eyes — what’s happening, worrying that one of his mates is trying to outflank me or something, but the three of them are still standing where they were, very still.

‘Problem here, ladies?’

The flicker of movement resolves into Powell Imrie, appearing as though out of a fucking trapdoor, right beside me and D-Cup. Ah: that might have been the real reason the place went so quiet. A slightly hysterical — and, in the current situation, arguably unhelpful — part of me suddenly thinks that being Powell Imrie must be a bit like being the Queen: she thinks everywhere smells of new paint and he thinks the world is mostly composed of a respectful, terrified silence as people wait to hear the sound of bones getting crunched. Powell is dressed like he was yesterday afternoon, in jeans and a padded shirt, earbuds dangling from his breast pocket again.

D-Cup registers who it is, there’s a single nanosecond flicker of probably heavily conditioned panic, then he’s instantly back into well-lookee-boys-what-have-we-here? mode.

‘Aye, Mr Imrie,’ he says, voice a little slower and more controlled, now that the heavy weaponry’s arrived, ‘this cunt is being a cunt, that’s whit the fuckin problem is.’

There’s the briefest pause here, before Powell says smoothly, quite quietly, addressing only D-Cup: ‘That really what you think the problem is here?’

D-Cup freezes, staring from me to Powell and back again.

Powell looks down at his own chest, notices the earbuds hanging from his breast pocket and gently taps them back inside with one finger, until they disappear. It’s delicately done, but it absolutely has the look of preparing for battle. He looks at me and smiles. ‘Hello again, Stewart,’ he says pleasantly. ‘You all right?’

‘I’m fine, Powell,’ I tell him.

D-Cup reboots himself and looks first at my face and then up to Powell’s. He seems confused for a moment, then he starts to register what the situation actually is. His already rather wan face goes appreciably paler, quite quickly. You rarely see that happen in real life. I was once on a ledge twenty storeys up on a sixty-storey hotel in Dubai with a couple of Pakistani fitters when a piece of staging — three tonnes of metal, free-falling — came whistling down with about half a second’s warning and just snicked one of the fitter’s hands clean off at the wrist as it zipped past. That guy went grey no faster than D-Cup’s whitey overtook him just there.

‘Ah, like, ah, ah, Ah wisnae—’ D-Cup begins, flustered now.

‘That not your moby, Stewart?’ Powell says quietly, nodding at my phone, which has found its way back onto the surface of the table.

‘Yup,’ I say.

Powell nods, and the first heavy-set guy quickly grabs the phone and looks about to chuck it across the table to me, but then suddenly appreciates the wisdom of coming round and presenting it to me himself, with a glance at Powell. I nod, breathe on the screen and polish it on my shirt. Meanwhile Powell’s picked up a red ball from their table and is bouncing it up and down in his big, meaty palm.

D-Cup is wittering now, a sheen of sweat on his face. ‘Aye, naw, naw, yer fine, aye, naw, aye.’ He’s saying this to me, though with frequent how’m-I-doin-here-big-man? glances at Powell. ‘Naw, nae problem. Nae danger. Naw, aye. Aye, nae problem, naw.’

Powell’s voice razors through this. ‘D-Cup, isn’t it?’ he says.

D-Cup gulps. ‘Aye, aye, aye, that’s me, aye.’

‘Can I show you a wee trick, D-Cup?’

‘Eh? What—’

Powell moves a few millimetres closer to D-Cup, towering over him. ‘Put your hand down on the table.’

There’s a lot of white in D-Cup’s eyes now. ‘Aw, shit, Powell, Mr Imrie, please—’

Powell’s voice is honey-smooth. ‘Just put your hand down. On the table. Flat.’

‘Mr Im—’ one of the two heavy-set guys says.

‘Shush now,’ Powell tells him. He spares each of the rest of us a very brief but very pointed look, then he’s back devoting all his attention to D-Cup, smiling at him. He takes the wee guy’s right wrist and places his hand flat on the baize for him. ‘Fingers together,’ he murmurs. He slides the gold sovs off D-Cup’s fingers and leaves them lying on the baize. D-Cup is swallowing a lot and sweating now too, staring at his right hand as though he’s never really seen it before.

‘M— m— m—’ he says.

Powell comes up close to him and lowers his head fractionally, mouth almost touching D-Cup’s nose. ‘Now close your eyes.’

D-Cup’s eyes go even wider. ‘What?’

‘No your fucking ears, son; your eyes. Close your eyes.’

Powell brings his left hand up to D-Cup’s face, index and middle finger extended and moving towards the wee guy’s eyes. D-Cup shrinks back and starts to move his hand off the table; Powell’s right hand flicks down without him looking and traps D-Cup’s flat again with a slapping noise. By now there isn’t an eye in the place not watching what’s going on. The quiet snick of ball hitting ball, the rumble of balls sliding down the channels inside the tables and the mutter of conversation have all died away.

D-Cup shuts his eyes. His eyelids tremble like butterfly wings as they close. I suspect D-Cup wants to whimper at this point but doesn’t dare. I don’t want to watch any of this, but there’s so much tension in the room, you just feel that standing still, saying nothing, and also not conspicuously looking away, is very much the safest, least attention-attracting thing to do.

When D-Cup’s hand is flat on the table without Powell holding it there, and D-Cup’s eyes are as tightly closed as they’re likely to get — quivering, under sweaty, jerky brows — Powell hooks his left leg behind D-Cup’s knees without touching him, then pushes him quickly on the chest with his free hand.

D-Cup yelps and starts backwards, falling over as he encounters the leg Powell has curled behind him. He falls flailing to the floor and lands with a thump and a strangled scream. He doesn’t bounce back up again immediately but it doesn’t look like he’s hurt himself either.

The whole hand-on-the-table thing was just distraction. Powell’s all grins now, visibly relaxing and winding down. He rolls the ball he was holding along the table. The tension in the room is evaporating. Powell looks round at the wee guy’s pals, then spares me and BB a glance too.

‘Good trick, eh?’ he says to nobody in particular. There is a rather too loud chorus of agreement from us all that it’s just the fabbiest fucker of a trick any of us has ever seen, ever, probably.

I’m still standing very still, half waiting for Powell to stamp forward suddenly and plant a size twelve hard on D-Cup’s nuts, because I’ve seen Powell do this before: seem to defuse a situation, make light of it somehow, then deliver a single, wince-inducing blow to somewhere sensitive just when people — especially the designated miscreant — thinks it’s all sweetness and light again. I wait, but this doesn’t happen. So I start to relax too. Instead, from the floor, D-Cup’s thin wee voice says, ‘Can I open my eyes noo, Mr Imrie?’

Powell laughs, and so we all do. Again, like it’s just the funniest thing we’ve ever heard anywhere anywhen.

‘Aye, fit like yersell, son,’ Powell says, and D-Cup gets shakily to his feet, grinning uncertainly and already, from his expression and body language, starting to look like he knew that was going to happen all the time and he was just playing along. Even so, his fingers are shaking so much he can’t get his sovs back on, so he quickly stuffs the rings in a pocket of his shellies. Powell picks up the red ball he was playing with earlier and lobs it, slow and underhand, to one of the heavy-set guys, who catches it.

Powell smiles at D-Cup. ‘Aye, all fun and games, but: that happens again and you’re gettin hurt, okay?’

D-Cup swallows, suddenly serious again. ‘Aye, Mr Imrie,’ he says.

Powell swings away from the table. ‘There you are,’ he announces quietly, again to nobody in particular. ‘Man agreein to his own kickin.’ He sort of broadcasts a smile to let us know it’s all right to laugh, or at least grin at this. The last elements of tension seem to drain away. I can hear and see people going back to their own games round distant tables.

Powell comes up to me, puts an arm round my shoulder and we walk off a few steps, his head close to mine. ‘Had a wee word with your car hire company, Stewart,’ he says quietly. ‘Hired the car for a week, that right?’

‘Uh-huh,’ I agree.

‘Aye, well, Mr M wanted me to check that was just for reasons of … cheapness, rather than what you might call signalling an intent to linger in the area after the funeral.’

‘The week was cheaper than Friday evening to Tuesday morning,’ I tell him. ‘That’s still when I’m leaving.’

‘Aye, aye, that’s what the manny I talked to at the hire company said you’d said,’ Powell says. He pats me on the shoulder. ‘If you did need to go earlier, though, you could, eh?’

‘Earlier?’

‘Monday evening, or afternoon, say.’

‘Why would that be, Powell?’

‘Not saying it’ll be necessary, just checking.’

‘Yeah, but why—’

‘Well, you know; the boys.’

‘The boys? You mean Murdo, Fraser, Norrie?’

‘Bit headstrong. Can be. That’s all.’

I look at him. Powell can do quite a good blank stare. ‘Powell,’ I say slowly, ‘I checked in with Don. I—’

‘Aye, well, you didnae really cover yourself in glory there, either, from what I hear, but it’s more the boys …’

‘What do you mean? I thought we got on fine.’

‘I think Don thought about it and decided you’d been a bit, I don’t know: cheeky.’

‘What?’

‘You probably shouldn’t have mentioned Ellie.’

‘Jesus, I just asked how she was.’

‘Aye, all the same.’

‘Powell, look, are you saying I should be worried here?’

He shakes his head. ‘No, not really. Things are just a bit, you know, funny, with Joe being gone and you being back, and Grier being back. Things’ll settle down. Just a bit of restlessness in the undergrowth. It’ll pass. You can relax.’ He nods at the table behind me. ‘Just enjoy yourself.’

I look at him. ‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. Sure.’ He pats me on the shoulder again. ‘Hunky McDory. See you later.’ He takes my right hand in his and — holding my right elbow firmly with his left hand — gives me an eye-wateringly firm handshake. I try to do the same back, but my merely average-fit grip is roundly outclassed.

Then, with a final tap-tap on the elbow and a glance and a nod at everybody else round our two tables, he’s off.

BB and me, and D-Cup and his three pals, finish our games quietly, and — for all the interaction we have — as though we’re playing on different continents. At the end of our game BB and I agree the fun’s gone out of the room a little and a pint somewhere else might be in order. We walk away from the table and I’m sort of expecting to hear a remark from D-Cup or his pals, but all there is is that bump, snick and rumble of balls, filling the uneasy silence.

9

The Deep Blue IV is a mega-trawler; its white superstructure seems to sit floating above the buildings and cranes of the inner harbour, dwarfing everything around it. Even before I climb as high as the bridge I can see the windows of my dad’s office in the Old Custom House on the other side of the harbour, but it’s the unaccustomed view of the building’s green, copper-sheathed roof that attracts the eye.

The Deep Blue IV is only just able to fit into the old harbour; another half-metre across the beam, or drawing another twenty centimetres, and it’d have to share the New Docks with the rig supply boats and the Orkney — Shetland — Stavanger ferry. Deep Blue IV is due to head out in an hour or two, at the top of the tide, on another month-long mission to hoover untold tonnes of fish out of the North Atlantic and into its hangar-sized freezer holds.

Mike MacAvett could probably just sit at home with a cigar in his hand and his feet up and watch the ship depart into the haze from the comfort of his armchair, but he obviously feels the need to be here on the bridge, to check everything’s going smoothly and to content himself all the supplies are on board, and the captain and crew are all happy and motivated men.

The trawler crews are Mike’s main supply of muscle, his forces in reserve. Neither of his sons showed any interest in the family business, legal or otherwise, so he has one of my old school pals as — supposedly — chauffeur and home handyman, a couple of grizzled, ageing though still useful-looking guys in the docks office of the MacAvett Fishing Company, and he can call upon pretty much any of the trawlermen not actually at sea. Boats like the Deep Blue IV have two crews to let them fish almost continually, so there’s never a shortage of Mike’s guys in the Toun. It’s a looser structure than Don and his four — now three — bampot sons, and Mike worries more about informers and infiltration by SOCA or the SCDEA than Don does, but, even there, the local cops have proved useful.

Things are running a little late so Mike phoned me to say come to the docks rather than the house. Partly, though, I think he still feels the need to impress people with the sheer scale of the new boat — the Deep Blue IV ’s only a couple of years old, and I haven’t seen it before — and remind them that this is where the money came from, this is what made him well off: fishing. He’s not just some number-two player on the shady side of life in Stonemouth; he’s a legitimate and highly successful businessman who came up the hard way, setting out to sea in tiny, deck-heaving, wave-pounded trawlers for the first twenty years of his working life, risking death and mutilation in one of the most dangerous working environments in the world.

Anyway, it’s no sweat for me; always a nostalgic pleasure to visit the docks. My dad’s worked here since school and I always liked coming to soak up the smells and sounds and sights of the harbour. The walk from the centre of town — BB and I had our quiet pint in the Old Station Tavern — took less than ten minutes.

‘Stewart, Stewart, good to see you,’ Mike says when I finally climb to the vessel’s bridge. It’s bright and sunny up here, certainly sunnier than down on the quayside; you’re above most of the remaining mist, which is still settled over the town, the nearby industrial and housing estates and the more distant fields and low hills like a sort of glowing grey membrane. Perched above everything, blinking in the bright sunlight, the moodily lit darkness of Regal Tables already feels a long way away.

Mike shakes my hand and I try not to wince; these guys all seem to have super-firm, ultra-manly handshakes and my hand is still feeling a bit bruised after Powell Imrie’s parting grasp.

Mike MacAvett is a fairly short, stocky guy with a big bald head and very dark eyebrows. Early fifties. Always bustling, always very bright-eyed and overflowing with enthusiasms.

‘You’re looking great, looking great,’ he tells me. ‘Just let me get things sorted here and I’ll be with you asap. Make yourself at home. Have a look at some of the gizmos; or head down to the galley and get Jimmy to rustle you up something — you hungry?’

‘Good to see you, Mike. No, thanks; I’m good.’

‘Right, right. With you in a sec,’ he tells me and he’s off, across half the width of the very wide, gizmo-crammed bridge to talk to the captain. By common consent ‘It’s like the Starship Enterprise’ in here. That’s what everybody says, anyway. Actually, the bridge of the spaceship I’ve seen, stumbling over ancient episodes on obscure channels, has far fewer buttons and keyboards and screens, but there you are. Different series, maybe; I wouldn’t know.

I wander along the bridge, trying to keep out of the way. Besides the captain there are a couple of other officer-class guys in neat blue fleeces with the Deep Blue IV’s logo embroidered on them, taking notes: one on a clipboard, one on an iPad, plus there are a couple of guys in yellow hi-vis jackets and pants stamping about talking into radios.

I admire the view through the canted windows and try to look appreciatively at all the bewildering variety of screens and monitors and glitzy-looking clusters of what I’m guessing is comms gear. One screen looks like a sat-nav the size of a plasma screen. Another, square but with a circular display, is radar. On it I can see the shape of the town, the echoes of the tower blocks, church towers and steeples, and the road-bridge towers. Another pair of screens look like they’re linked into the ship’s engines. More screens show nothing much. They’ve got measurement scales that imply they’re sonar or depth gauges or whatever.

The door is open to the outside at the far end of the bridge, so I step over the high sill and into the clear air. A young guy is squatting, touching up the paint on the white railings. He glances up. ‘Aye.’

‘Afternoon.’

He looks up at me again, frowning. He has what you might most kindly term the nose of a pugilist. ‘You wi Customs and Excise?’ he asks, borderline aggressive.

‘No. Do I look like I am?’

He shrugs and goes back to his painting. ‘Canny tell these days.’

‘Cheers,’ I say after a moment or two, and retreat back into the bridge. He just grunts.

Mike Mac bustles me away five minutes later, down the various ladders and steps to the quayside and his Bentley. Ten minutes later we’re at the MacAvett house, a Scots Baronial stone pile at the far end of Marine Terrace with a commanding view of the Esplanade, the beach and sea. Technically it’s late Victorian but it’s been much fucked-about with. A crenellated wing in mismatched pale-sandstone houses a big pool a little larger than the Murstons’.

As we move through the hall to the sweepingly grand conservatory we’re greeted by a couple of grey wolfhounds. Mike greets both dogs like he’s rubbing his hands dry on their snouts. I used to keep track of the MacAvett family wolfhounds and remember their names, but they’re short-lived animals and I don’t think I’ve met this pair before. Still, they sniff my hand appreciatively and get a sort of perfunctory pat each.

We’re barely sat down — Mike is still running through the list of drinks we might have, though I’ve already said I’m fine — when his phone goes and then he’s frowning and saying, ‘Fuck. What do they want? Aye. Hold the fortress. Be right there.’ Then he’s bouncing up out of his La-Z-Boy again. ‘What a bastard, eh? Fucking officialdom. Got to get back to the boat. You just make yourself at home. Door wasn’t locked so somebody must be home. Try the kitchen; Sue might be around. Back soon.’

I hear the front door close. I stand, looking out at the haze over the sea for a while, going back over the near-rumble at Regal Tables.

Not good. Too close a thing.

I’m guessing somebody at reception called Powell, perhaps as soon as they saw the other guys heading for the table beside ours. Maybe they called him as soon as they saw me; maybe they hadn’t heard Mr M was cool with me being back in town and so they were as surprised as D-Cup was with the way things went when Powell turned up. Anyway, too random a route to escape getting a kicking. I may already have used up my supply of luck for the weekend. I mean, I know it doesn’t really work that way, but all the same.

‘Stewart? Oh my God, is that you?’

I turn round. Probably because hers was the last name Mike mentioned, and my brain can be a bit literal sometimes, I’m half expecting to see Sue, Mike’s wife, in the doorway, but instead it’s their daughter, Anjelica, in a long pink-towelling robe.

‘It is you! Hey, how are you, stranger?’

Jel comes running up and pretty much throws herself at me, the robe flying open as she tears across the parquet and revealing a tiny pink bikini and lots of tanned skin. She’s small, plumply busty and her hair is sort of bubbly blonde, though it’s water-darkened now and plastered to her head and face. Jel’s a couple of years younger than me; told me she loved me when she was about ten and she was going to be my wife when we grew up. It became something of a running joke, though it ended up being not so funny.

Jel pulls back, though still holding both my hands in hers. She looks me down, then up. ‘Lookin good, man,’ she tells me. ‘Keeping like you’re looking?’

‘Sure am. Looking pretty … pretty yourself.’

She lets go of my hands, twirls this way and that, flapping the opened gown out. ‘Still like what you see, hah?’ She raises one eyebrow.

I sit back on the window ledge, arms folded. ‘How are you, Jel?’

‘Oh, I’m fine,’ she says, throwing herself onto a couch. ‘Nice of you to come back. Old man Murston’s funeral?’

‘Yeah, just here for a few days. Back to London on Tuesday.’

‘So, you seeing anyone, in London?’

‘On and off. Mostly off. Feels like I only rarely touch ground some months.’

‘You seen herself yet?’

‘Ellie?’

‘Ellie.’ Jel looks quite serious now. She pulls her robe closed a little, then changes her mind, kicks it open again.

‘No. Not so far. Don’t know if I will.’

‘How about Ryan? You seen Ryan?’

‘No.’ I frown as I say this, trying to hint at Why the hell would I want to see Ryan? without actually saying so.

‘She really hurt him, you know.’

Ellie and Ryan had been one of those obvious rebound relationships that everybody else pretty much knows is kind of doomed. Ellie’s whole thing with Ryan seemed to come out of nowhere, for everybody. It was almost like she’d designed it that way just to annoy people. When I heard, I had to think quite hard just to remember what Ryan even looked like, and I knew the MacAvetts fairly well. Ryan was only a year younger than Josh and me, but he’d been just one more boring younger brother of a pal, usually encountered staring slack-jawed at the TV or sitting tensed and muttering at the screen while cabled up to a PlayStation and slugging Red Bull.

You might have thought this whole ludicrous dynastic-alliance-through-marriage thing would have been discredited by now, with Josh being Mr Gay Pride in London and me fucking his sister (in my defence, just the once, though admittedly I’ve yet to meet anybody who thinks that makes the slightest difference), but Ellie apparently thought Ryan was just the right chappie to make everything well, and presumably couldn’t wait to have Jel as a sister-in-law, too, so — over the raging objections of her father and the serious doubts of Mike and Mrs Mac, not to mention anybody and everybody else she might have consulted on the matter but didn’t — she and Ryan skipped off to Mauritius and got married on the beach outside their luxurious, five-star, villa-style hotel with a few distant friends and the sun going down.

Lasted less than a year. The miscarriage may not have helped, though you never know; with some couples stuff like that draws them closer together. Either way, they never celebrated their first anniversary, which to people of my dad’s and Mr M’s and Mike Mac’s generation just feels like lack of application.

I don’t know if anybody actually said, ‘I told you so,’ to Ellie, but even if it was never quite articulated, the air must have been thick with it.

She took off, tried living in Boulder, Colorado, for a while, then San Francisco because she missed the sea, then came back to Stonemouth, homesick, within the year. Last I heard, she was working part-time for a charity with centres in Aberdeen, Stonemouth and Peterhead, for rehabilitating drug users. So at least the girl hasn’t lost her sense of humour.

Hadn’t even occurred to me to wonder how Ryan might have been affected by all this. A mean part of me probably thought, Look, he got to have the best part of a year with my girl, the woman I’d always thought of as my soulmate, not to mention the prettiest girl in town; he’d already had a lot more than he probably deserved.

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I say.

‘She really messes people up, that girl,’ Jel says.

I look at her for a moment or two. ‘Yeah. Whereas you and I …’ But the only things I can think to say are hurtful and sort of pointlessly petty. I’ve learned, belatedly, not to say stuff like that just because I feel I need to say something, anything.

I’ve never blamed Jel; I don’t think she meant to break me and Ellie up, that night; it was my choice, my stupidity, my fault. But Ellie was messed up first, before she did any messing up of her own. Ryan was just collateral damage from my idiocy. If he feels hurt he should blame me, not her. Jesus, I should probably add him to the already long list of people I might want to avoid over the rest of the weekend.

‘Yeah, you and me,’ Jel says, looking at me like she’s evaluating. ‘I suppose that’s about as short-term as it gets.’

‘I suppose.’

‘You didn’t have to run away, you know.’ Jel sounds like she’s wanted to say this for a while.

‘Oh, I think you’ll find I did.’

I still have nightmares about being trapped in a car at night while men armed with baseball bats prowl around outside, shaking the car as they stumble around, searching for me. In my dream the men are always blind, but they can smell me, know I’m there somewhere.

‘You could have stayed here,’ Jel says. Shades of petulance, unless I’m being oversensitive. ‘Dad would have protected you.’

I’d have caused a fucking gang war, you maniac is what I want to say. ‘Didn’t feel that way at the time,’ I tell her. I shrug. ‘All in the past now anyway, Jel.’

She stares at me for quite a few seconds, then says, ‘Yeah, except it isn’t, is it? Not if you have to fuck off back to London before Don lets his boys off the leash. Anyway.’ She lunges forward, stands, gathers her robe about her. ‘I’d better get dressed.’ She hurries to the door, then turns. ‘Sorry. How rude. Can I get you anything?’

‘No thanks.’ I smile. ‘I’m fine.’

She nods slowly. ‘Yes. And no,’ she says, then she’s gone.

Mike comes back. We chat. All is well, business is good, things are calm, he’s sorry my stay in Stonemouth can’t be longer, but, well, that’s just the way things are. Strong feelings involved. Unfortunate, but understandable. I saw Anjelica? (Yes; lovely as ever. Nice kid. Hmm, but only a 2.2 in Media Studies at Sheffield. Still, an internship with Sky.) Have I got a girl? (Not really — no time. He nods wisely.) Have I seen Josh lately? (No. That’s a shame, living in the same city. Yes but it’s a big city; more people than the whole of Scotland, and, anyway. But we leave it at that.) Oh, look, there she goes! (And I follow his nod and gaze and, fool that I am, I half expect to see Ellie walking along the beach outside, but it’s the Deep Blue IV of course, blue hull and white superstructure heading, shining, out to sea above a curled wake of grey, just starting to fade into the haze.)

The front door has only just closed and I’m halfway up the garden path, heading back to the street, when I hear the door open again. It’s Jel, dressed now, in tight jeans and a scoop-necked T. She’s holding a translucent box.

‘Here,’ she says, thrusting a Lock-n-Lock container into my hands. ‘Mum baked this morning,’ she explains. ‘Scones.’

‘Thanks.’ The box feels heavy.

‘There’s a jar of home-made jam in there too. Strawberry.’

‘Ah.’

‘Enjoy.’

‘Thanks again.’ I hold the box up, shake it gently. ‘I’ll share with Mum and Dad.’

‘Should think so.’ She takes a quick breath, sticks her thumbs into the waistband of her jeans. ‘Think you will see Ellie?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe not. Or maybe just see her, at the funeral? But not get to talk to her.’

‘Right, yeah. I see.’ She looks down at the path, looks up again. ‘It wasn’t just my idea, Stu,’ she says. And I know that she’s talking about our disastrous fling five years back, the fuck that fucked everything up.

I nod. ‘I know.’

Of course I know. Mine as much as hers. She did kind of throw herself at me, but I was very happy to be the thrown-at, and accepted enthusiastically. I might even have been giving off signals myself, signals that I really needed one last quick fling before I got hitched. I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

But maybe I agreed a bit too quickly there, appeared too glib with that ‘I know’, because a frown tugs at Jel’s smooth, tanned brow and she looks about to say something else, but then seems to think the better of it, and just sighs and says, ‘Well, good to see you anyway.’ She takes a step backwards, towards the house. ‘Maybe see you later?’

‘You never know.’ I hold the box up. ‘Thanks again.’

‘Welcome.’ Then she turns and goes.

I walk down the street. I open one end of the container and stick my nose in, smelling flour both baked and not, and a faint hint of strawberries, a scent that always takes me back to the Ancraime estate just beyond the furthest reaches of the town, and a succession of summer days, half my life ago.

Malcolm Hendrey — Wee Malky — was just one of those kids. That’s what we felt at the time, what we’ve told ourselves since. He was the class numpty, the slow kid who got jokes last or not at all and who always needed help with answers. He was sort of stupid brave; if there was a frisbee, a stunt kite or an RC helicopter stuck up a tree, Wee Malky would happily shin up to the highest, thinnest, most delicate-looking branch to get it: places even I wouldn’t go, and I was always a good and pretty much fearless climber. I was proud of this and the guys tore me up about Wee Malky taking greater risks. I tried to save face by pointing out he was smaller and lighter than me, but, even so, they were right: he did go places I wouldn’t.

He’d also do pretty much anything you suggested — like shouting something out to a teacher or going up to an older kid and kicking them or letting down a car’s tyres — and then just grin stupidly when he was given detention or belted round the ear or chased down the street by some irate motorist, as though this wasn’t just hilariously funny for the kids who’d suggested the jape in the first place, but quietly amusing for him too.

Wee Malky really was small, always looking like he was in the wrong class, mixing with kids a year older than him, and he sort of carried himself smaller still, too, walking stooped and with his head down. He had dark-brown curly hair and swarthy skin; he’d been called various nicknames like Tinker or Gyppo throughout his school life but none had really stuck because they didn’t annoy him sufficiently; Wee Malky thought these were quite exotic terms, positively cool.

He was one of the poorer kids in our class, from the — to us at least — notorious Urbank Road on the Riggans estate, Stonemouth’s least salubrious address, the sink locale where the council put all the problem families. Wee Malky came from one of those families you needed a diagram and some draughting skills to describe properly; he lived with his mum and three half-brothers and two halfsisters, and, while the children didn’t quite all have different fathers, the details got fearsomely complicated after that, especially if you included all the children in other households with shared parentage.

The men in his mum’s life were subject to a high degree of churn, some staying a night, some a few weeks and some a few months, usually just long enough to get her pregnant before leaving. Though the way Wee Malky described it, it was more sort of drifting off again — just like they’d drifted in in the first place — rather than anything as directed and deliberate as actually ‘leaving’. Wee Malky loved his mum and thought all this stuff was just sort of romantically bohemian, rather than, as we did, pure skanky.

There was a husband — Wee Malky’s dad — but he was in Peterhead prison, where he’d been since shortly after Wee Malky was born. He sounded like a very angry man; he’d been on a road-repair crew with the council and killed a guy who was supposedly his best friend by knocking him half unconscious and stuffing him head-first into a big tub of molten tar on the back of the lorry.

He usually got about halfway through his sentence before he did something in prison that got him another two or three years added on. Wee Malky had a complicated relationship with his dad, even though he’d never met him outside of prison, and then only a half-dozen times; it was like he blamed him for abandoning his mum, but wanted to love him, too.

The only way to get Wee Malky really upset was to diss his dad. Callum Murston once asked Wee Malky if his mum had moved to Stonemouth to be handy for Peterhead and the prison and Wee Malky just went berserk; he flew at Callum like something out of a catapult and had to be prised off him. Callum was bigger and stronger but he’d been taken by surprise and just overwhelmed. Wee Malky was sobbing, gasping, quivering. I was one of the four kids it had taken to pull him off Callum and I’d never seen anybody so upset.

Callum was left bruised and with a badly bitten ear. He clearly wasn’t happy about getting attacked like that and, a couple of playtimes later, Wee Malky got marched round the back of the bike sheds and given a good kicking by Callum and his older brother Murdo. Some twisted form of honour appeared to have been satisfied with this, and nobody ever referred to the incident again, not in public anyway.

The Ancraime family were at the opposite end of the Stonemouth class spectrum: toffs with a big house and an estate that started on the outskirts of town — with a gatehouse and high stone walls and everything — and disappeared over the horizon, taking in woods, hills, lochs, forests, moors and mountains.

The original Ancraime fortune had come from now-exhausted coal mines that riddled the land and eventually ran out under the sea. A series of catastrophic mine floodings in the 1890s led to something close to ruin just as the Ancraimes were embarking on the most extravagant part of the house remodelling and estate landscaping. They sold off a lot of land; what they have now seems vast but it’s only a third of what they used to own. What the families of the drowned miners did to survive seems not to have been recorded.

Death duties nearly ruined the Ancraimes a second time but they’re rich again now; income from gas and oil pipelines crossing their estate, and from the deep-water terminal at Afness, keeps the coffers filled, and all that barren-looking, unproductive land climbing into the Cairngorms west of the house, which until now had only been good for stalking stags and shooting grouse, turns out to be ripe for wind farms. The studies have been done, the wind speeds measured and the land surveyed; there are a few local objectors, but really it’s just a matter of waiting for the planning proposals to go through the relevant council committees and getting the nod from the Secretary of State.

The family is understood to be quietly confident in this regard.

The Ancraimes had children within our age range — we were all about thirteen or fourteen at the time — but they went to private schools. The rest of us had any contact with the family only because Ancraime Senior had some sort of business dealings with the Murstons and the MacAvetts, and had invited both men to shoot and fish on his estate. Josh MacAvett had become friendly with Hugo Ancraime when Hugo was back from school one Easter, and when Hugo was home for the summer holidays that year a bunch of us hung out together, usually cycling out along the Loanstoun road to the Ancraime estate and exploring it.

Some of us had prior knowledge of the place, built up covertly over the years by climbing walls and sneaking around, trying to avoid gamekeepers and estate workers. At least one of the keepers was, allegedly, not above firing his shotgun at kids, so long as they weren’t so close he might actually kill them, and most of us who’d ventured onto the estate had been chased at some time, or at least yelled at and run off.

Nobody could prove they’d ever been fired at — nobody ever produced any shotgun pellets they’d had to dig out of their backside or anything — but we definitely knew people who’d been shot at and the whole Ancraime estate was basically forbidden territory. So it was quite cool to be there with permission and explore the place at our leisure.

Hugo Ancraime was a lanky boy with fair hair, blue eyes, fine features and an English accent. That was how to wind Hugo up: accuse him of being English because he talked the way upper-class Scots who’ve been to private schools tend to, i.e. with no real trace of any Scottish accent, never mind a regional North-East or Stonemouth accent.

‘Fack off; my family’s been here for fourteen generations, you sods, and I can prove it. Bet none of you bastards can say that.’

‘Go on, Hu, call us oiks.’

‘Fack off.’

‘Say “fark orft” again.’

‘Fack off.’

And so on. It was mostly pretty good-natured; we were all deeply impressed that Hugo had this whole estate to play in, was allowed to fire a shotgun during shoots and had a dirt bike of his own and a quad bike he was allowed to use. We were never going to push somebody like that too far — he was too great an asset.

So there wasn’t too much talk about Hugo’s brother George, who was known to be a loony. He was the older brother, nearly twenty at this point but with a mental age stuck at about five. He stayed at home some of the time, though he had ‘episodes’ that meant he had to be carted off to some secure unit in Aberdeen and put on extra drugs before being allowed back home.

We saw him once at the start of that summer, being taken off somewhere for a day out, staring out of a window in the family’s old Bristol as it crunched down the gravel. He had a big, round, open-looking face under a mop of sandy hair; he smiled, waved, and some of us waved back.

Hugo had been given a load of paintball gear for his birthday that year: a dozen guns, sets of body armour and face masks and so on. More to the point, he had a whole estate to play with this stuff on, and people to play with. If we’d thought about it, we might have been flattered that he’d asked for such a communal present, one that made sense only now that he had all these new pals to play with, but we didn’t think about it.

There was some rule-changing imposed from above after a particularly messy game ended with the boathouse, the old stable block and even a few windows of the main house getting spattered with paintball dye, but that didn’t restrict us much. The estate manager — who might or might not have been the guy who’d been partial to firing at the retreating backs of trespassing children — was known to be displeased with the whole idea, but apparently he’d been overruled by Mr and Mrs Ancraime, who were tickled pink that their golden boy had new chums to have larks and scrapes with.

‘Now look,’ Hugo said one day after we’d all rocked up on our bikes, dumped them in the courtyard by the old smithy and congregated in the echoing, white-tiled back kitchen for home-made scones and fizzy drinks, ‘my brother’s supposed to be tagging along today. If anybody’s got a problem with that, well, tough.’

We all looked at each other, jaws working, lips covered in flour and fists round cans of Irn Bru, Coke and lemonade. None of us had any problem with this. At that point we were probably all still intent on getting as much fizz down our necks as possible so as to give ourselves a fighting chance in the pre-going-out-to-play burping competition, a rapidly established tradition as important to the day as making sure you had extra ammo with you if you were going paintballing.

‘Whatever, Hu,’ Ferg said, shrugging.

‘No probs,’ Josh MacAvett agreed.

‘Aye,’ Callum Murston said. Hugo looked relieved. ‘Good.’

The big house was an ancient Z-plan castle bundled in multiple later layers of stonework falling away from the almost hidden central tower like ranges of foothills. Local kid-lore had it that from above it looked like a swastika, though this wasn’t true; Bash and Balbir, the Shipik twins, went up with their dad in a helicopter as part of their birthday present and they’d said it didn’t look anything like a swastika. We were all quite disappointed.

The whole place was painted pale pink; we’d have been more impressed if we’d known the original recipe for the colour had involved copious amounts of pig’s blood.

We weren’t generally invited into the rest of the house, though I’d been a bit further in after cutting my knee and having Mrs Ancraime herself clean and dress it for me in the main hall. She was a sturdily well-built woman with unkempt brown hair and a quiet voice with soft traces of her native Skye in her accent. A pair of glossy-coated red setters came snuffling, noses high, briefly inquisitive, then skittered off again. The house was dark and gloomy, contrasting with the bright high-summer sunlight blasting down outside. I’d been impressed by the ancient shields, pikes, swords and maces decorating the walls between the stag heads and age-brown family portraits, but still; getting outside again with a bandaged knee had felt like escape.

Later, thinking about all that wall-mounted weaponry, I’d suggested to Hugo we could try taking some of the swords and pikes and stuff and use them to restage battles or something. Hugo had looked pained and said maybe that wouldn’t be such a good idea. Anyway, they were almost all too well secured to the walls; you’d need a hacksaw.

The paintball gear was kept in an outhouse cluttered with all the rusting farm equipment of yesteryear. We were introduced to George, who proved to be big and heavy-looking, with a shy smile.

‘Now, boys, this is George,’ his mother told us, leading him by the hand. Mrs Ancraime was dressed up very posh. ‘I hope you’ll take good care of him and play nicely. Do you promise?’

We all agreed that we did. ‘Don’t you worry, missus,’ Wee Malky said.

‘You can depend upon us, ma’am,’ Ferg told her.

‘How-ja do?’ George asked us each in turn, seemingly not really expecting an answer. He was probably small for his age but he still towered over each of us, especially Wee Malky, obviously. His voice was adult-deep, booming in his big chest. He shook our hands. His hands were massive but his grip was gentle. He wore comedically wide khaki shorts and a worn brown tweed jacket over a farmer’s shirt.

‘Thank you, boys,’ Mrs A said. ‘Have fun.’ Then she wafted out.

‘Right,’ Hugo said, rubbing his hands. ‘Teams.’

‘But I would like a gun,’ George said sadly to Hugo when he was told he could tag along with Hugo’s team but only to carry extra ammunition.

‘Sorry, George,’ Hugo told him.

‘Oh,’ George said, and sounded like he was about to burst into tears.

‘But you can carry all this stuff!’ Hugo told him, loading him up with mesh bags full of paintballs.

‘Ah-ha,’ George said quietly, lifting them like they weren’t there and looking better pleased.

‘He’s like Mongo,’ Phelpie said. Our team was hunkered down in a hollow on the side of a wee overgrown glen, waiting for Hugo and his lot to show on a path below. ‘Ah’m callin him Mongo.’

‘Well, just don’t,’ Ferg told him.

‘Naw, dinnae,’ Wee Malky agreed.

‘Who the fuck’s Mongo anyway?’ Fraser Murston asked.

‘From Blazin Saddles?’ Phelpie said. Ryan Phelps was another slightly daft, borderline nutter kid in the Dom Lennot style.

‘What the fuck’s Blazin fuckin Saddles?’ Fraser Murston said; at the time Fraser was the acceptable face of the Murston clan, being more outgoing than his shy twin, Norrie, and a little less aggressive — or at least younger and less sure of himself — than his year-older brother Callum, who was on Hugo’s side in this afternoon’s first skirmish. The brothers’ respective placings on the aggressiveness ladder were, it is fair to say, set to change in the future.

‘It’s a fillum!’

‘Zit in black an fuckin white, aye?’

‘Naw!’

‘Do not call him Mongo,’ Ferg said.

‘Stu, you callin the big guy Mongo?’ Wee Malky asked.

‘No. I agree with Ferg.’ I looked at Phelpie. ‘Don’t call him Mongo.’

‘But he needs a name an he’s a fuckin monster. That boy is pure Mongo.’

‘Yes, but you might upset him,’ Ferg explained, obviously exasperated. ‘Worse than that, you might upset Hugo.’

‘Ah, fuck him,’ Phelpie said.

Ferg and I exchanged looks. Of the dozen or so kids involved, we two seemed to be the most aware that this new venue for fun was entirely at Hugo’s disposal. Not letting nutters come along who’d spoil it for everybody had already been talked about.

‘Hugo’s allowed to use a shotgun,’ Wee Malky said, looking solemnly at Phelpie, who might have said something more, but then Fraser spotted the enemy force, sneakily using the hillside rather than the road, and we had to redeploy quickly.

The sun was still high over the hills as the afternoon started to draw to a close and we set up for the last game of the day. A complicated arrangement of scoring across the various skirmishes and the different team combinations had resulted in Wee Malky coming out last, so he had to be the prey.

Basically he got a two-minute start and then we all chased him. If he lasted for half an hour or got back to his bike without getting splatted again, he’d won. If he managed to splat any of us, we started the next day’s play a point down, but he had only one paintball for each of us, and we were allowed Noisy Death, meaning we could yell out when we were shot, which meant everybody else would know where we were, so if you were the prey, just slinging your gun over your back and running like fuck was generally agreed to be the best course and never mind trying to splat anybody back. There were more rules about not being able to cross the great lawn or the herb garden to keep it all interesting, but that was the gist of it.

We were quite far into the depths of the garden by this point, up near the arboretum (whatever that was — we had no idea at the time, though there were a lot of funny-looking trees around) with acres of parkland, the overgrown glen, the ornamental lake and the old walled garden between us and the house and the courtyard with our bikes in it. Opinion was divided whether this favoured us or Wee Malky.

Wee Malky disappeared into the darkness of an overgrown path, going mostly in the wrong direction, and Ferg and I counted down on my phone and his watch.

‘That’s a weird fu—’ Callum Murston began, then remembered you weren’t supposed to swear in front of George, in case he parroted the same language. ‘What sort of weird fu— what way’s that to go?’ he asked, pointing at where Malky had taken off into the undergrowth.

‘Could be quite a good choice, actually,’ Hugo said thoughtfully.

‘Aw, could it, ectually,’ Callum said.

George’s deep voice rumbled into action. ‘May I have a gun too, this time, please?’ He was the least paint-spattered of us, though even he’d taken a couple of stray hits — partly due to his sheer size, you had to suspect.

‘No, George!’ Hugo told him.

‘Oh.’

‘Zat no two minutes yet?’ Callum asked, annoyed.

‘Still fifty seconds to go,’ Ferg said.

I made a mm-hmm noise in agreement.

‘Aw, come oan!’ Callum said, slapping his gun. ‘That must be two minutes now!’

‘Forty-five seconds to go,’ Ferg said crisply.

‘Fu—’ Callum began, then just roared, ‘Ahm off!’

‘Ah wondered what the funny smell was!’ Phelpie yelled, as Callum stormed off, ducking under the hanging leaves and disappearing into the darkness of the path.

‘The rest of us might actually choose to adhere to the rules,’ Ferg said tightly, taking Phelpie by the collar. Phelpie shrugged him off but he stayed with the rest of us until the two minutes was up.

‘Right,’ Hugo said, when there was under half a minute to go, ‘there are at least half a dozen different ways young Malcolm can take back to the house, starting from that path.’ Hugo was in the officer cadet force at school and naturally tended to assume command. I think he regarded Ferg and me as his trusty yeoman lieutenants, though frankly we thought of ourselves more as ascetic commissars keeping a steely eye on the efficient but politically suspect toff. ‘He could even go as high as the top reservoir and still get back round to the house.’ Hugo clapped his brother on the shoulder. ‘I propose that George and I take the least demanding, lower route, to cut off his approach via the north side of the lake.’

‘Loch,’ Phelpie said.

‘Whatever,’ Hugo replied.

Ferg concentrated on his watch, lifting one finger.

‘Go,’ I said, and pocketed my phone.

Callum lost Wee Malky and blundered off into a bog, getting very annoyed. Most of the rest of us set off up the same path, taking different trails and tracks off it as it progressed, while Hugo and George and Phelpie took the most direct route back to the house. There was an offside rule about just lying in wait for the prey, but — appropriately — nobody entirely understood it. This party of three was halfway back to the house when they heard a lot of shouting uphill and assumed that Wee Malky had been spotted. Hugo left George in Phelpie’s charge and climbed a handy tree to take a look. When he got back down George had gone.

‘You were supposed to look after him!’ Hugo roared at Phelpie.

‘Aye, so? I told him no to go! What else could I dae, man? He’s a fuckin monster!’

At this, Hugo stepped forward and raised a hand and Phelpie thought a proper fight was about to kick off, but Hugo seemed to get a grip and just asked which way George had gone.

The stories diverge at this point. Later we reckoned Hugo was telling the truth and Phelpie sent him in the wrong direction deliberately, just to fuck with him, though Phelpie’s never admitted this.

All the shouting they’d heard involved a false alarm; some of us had spotted the mud-smeared Callum and mistaken him for Wee Malky. When we did see him, finally, it was a good quarter of an hour later, and there had been some mobile phoning to coordinate the hunt — supposedly banned, and not easy with the patchy reception on the estate, but sort of tolerated when somebody was proving particularly elusive, and also technically more effective where we were by now, high up on the wooded hillside that looked down on the main gardens.

‘There he is!’ Josh yelled.

About half the chasing pack had got together at the north side of the upper reservoir, near the furthest western extent of the house gardens before they gave out on to the rest of the estate and the grouse moors and plantation forests beyond. The upper reservoir was there to feed the ornamental lake and other water features below; it was a simple, slim, delta shape, a dammed miniature glen surrounded by woods with a grass-covered dam wall forming its eastern limit and a long, steeply sloped, stone-lined overflow at the far, south edge.

Josh had spotted Wee Malky running along the top of the dam wall, sprinting like a hare for the far side, where the overflow was.

A few of us had been up here already, before we’d been allowed in legally. The overflow had no bridge over it; if you wanted to cross it you’d have to walk along the submerged top lip of the thing: about seven metres of round-topped, weed-slicked stone under an amount of overflowing water that varied according to season and recent weather. There was deep, brown-black peaty water to one side — and reputedly some sort of undertow that meant you’d never surface again if you fell in — and that steep, twenty-metre-long slope of slimy-surfaced overflow on the other, pitched at about thirty-five or forty degrees and with stumpy stone pillars at the foot you wouldn’t want to encounter at the sort of speeds implied if you started sliding down from the top.

Callum claimed he had made this perilous crossing, as did a few older boys, but nobody we trusted had witnessed anybody doing it. Wee Malky was making straight for this scary, bravery-testing obstacle and the track on the far side, ignoring the steep grass slope of the dam wall dropping away to his left. There was a track at its foot that led back to the house, but that one constituted good going; he’d be overtaken by a faster runner. The way up the far side of the shallow stream that ran from the bottom of the overflow was covered with brambles and nettles, and looked almost impassable. If he crossed the overflow and we didn’t follow him, we’d lose him.

We were twenty-five minutes into the chase by this point, even not allowing for Callum’s early start, plus we were out of paintball range — a high, lucky shot might just hit Wee Malky, but it wouldn’t splat — so Malky crossing the overflow without pursuit would mean he’d win, we’d lose.

We all started yelling, and raced along the shore track after him, hoping to put him off just with the sheer amount of noise we were making. Hugo appeared, running from the other direction, joining us at the top of the dam summit.

‘Anybody seen George?’ he asked breathlessly. I don’t think many of us heard him; nobody answered, just streamed past him, turning along the top of the dam. Hugo jogged after us. ‘Look, have any of you seen—’

Wee Malky was at the overflow. We saw him step down carefully onto the round-topped, water-covered stones. The waves spilling over the top came up to his ankles. He started walking along, arms outstretched, the flowing water splashing out around his trainers. He wasn’t taking it slowly, either; he knew he needed to get to the other side fast and be in cover to get back out of paintball range.

He was halfway across and our sprint after him was starting to tell on our legs when somebody at the front of the pack suddenly pulled up, coming to a stop and causing somebody else behind to slam into him, making them both stumble and producing a mini pile-up behind them. They were looking down at the foot of the overflow.

‘Look,’ Hugo said, jogging up from behind, ‘have any of you guys seen …’

‘…George?’ somebody said.

Wee Malky had stopped in the centre of the overflow. We were coming to a straggled halt on the top of the dam.

Down at the bottom of the grassy slope, stepping down the halfmetre into the concrete channel and then wading upstream to the foot of the overflow slope, was George, holding, in both hands, a sword almost as big as he was.

‘Where’d that fucking come from?’ Phelpie breathed beside me. My throat didn’t seem to be working properly. ‘House,’ I managed to say, gulping, remembering the circles and fans of weapons arrayed across its walls.

The blade glittered in the sunlight and looked sharp as a newly broken bottle. Wee Malky was stock-still and staring down at George. George looked up at Wee Malky, making a threatening gesture with the big sword. George was still smiling, but that didn’t feel like it meant much beside the naked reality of that shining metal edge. George looked up towards us, held the heavy sword one-handed, and gave us a thumbs-up sign.

We had all come to a near-complete stop now, strung out in a line across the top of the dam, a few of us still stepping forward a little, to see properly. Hugo was shouting, ‘George! George! Just stay there; put the sword down, old son! Look, I’m coming down!’

George held up one hand to his ear. He was right at the foot of the overflow now, where the water zipped down and sprayed up against the stone stumps and — now — against George’s feet and bare calves, also darkening his khaki shorts. Maybe the water splashing all around him and fountaining up past his waist meant he couldn’t hear.

I looked at Wee Malky as Hugo started gingerly down the steep grass slope of the dam. Wee Malky looked petrified. He’d been running hard with all the desperation of having been pursued by a baying pack for nearly half an hour on a hot summer day, so he was drenched in sweat, his shirt sticking to him, his curly hair darkened to black and plastered against his skin. His eyes were wide as he looked at me. His head turned and he stared back down at George. He wobbled as he did this, arms waving wildly before he steadied again.

Nobody followed Hugo down the grassy dam. I suppose that sword — suddenly so adult compared to our play guns — had sent a chill through all of us. Everything felt very still, as though the air had coagulated around us.

I held one hand flat up to Wee Malky, patting the air, mouthing him to remain motionless, but he was still staring at George, who was continuing to waggle the sword. If it had just been a stick he was holding, it would have looked comical. Callum Murston came up and stood beside me, covered in drying mud, breathing hard and wiping snot from his nose.

Hugo was moving slowly down the dam wall. He had one hand on the grassy surface, helping him descend without going arse over tit, and the other held out to his brother, as though petting him, stroking him from a distance while he kept talking to him, telling him to put the sword down, that it was okay, that the game was over and it was time to go back to the house for drinks and cakes, and to put the sword back.

While we were all watching this, Callum raised his gun and fired, hitting Wee Malky in the head with a yellow splash of paint.

Wee Malky yelped and fell, splashing into the water on the overflow side, one arm reaching out to try to grasp the round stones at the summit, but failing. He started sliding down the slipway, arms flailing as he tried to stop or slow himself.

‘Aw, fuck,’ Callum said quietly.

‘What the—’ I started to say to Callum.

‘You fucking—’ Ferg began.

‘Ah, fuck youse,’ Callum breathed. He took a lungful of air and bent towards the distant figure of George, who was watching Wee Malky slide helplessly towards him and waving his sword enthusiastically. George was still smiling, though not so much. He shifted his feet, widened his stance. Wee Malky started screaming, high and faint and ragged, like he couldn’t get his breath.

‘It’s over!’ Callum roared down at George. ‘That’s the boy deid! Ah shot him! Put the fuckin blade down, ya big Mongo cunt, ye!’

Halfway down the steep grass slope and giving the tricky descent his full attention, Hugo hadn’t seen Wee Malky fall and start to slide down the slipway, but he must have realised what had happened. He gave up on his tentative, safety-first, no-sudden-movements approach and stood up to start running down the grass, taking only a couple of steps before one of his feet went out from under him and he started falling, limbs flailing even more wildly than Wee Malky’s.

‘Hi! Ahm talkin to you! You fuckin listening, ya moron?’ Callum was yelling at George, who just smiled back and waved the sword.

In some ways, the worst thing — the thing that plagued my nightmares for years — was watching Wee Malky trying everything to save himself. It hadn’t been his fault he’d fallen in the first place and now he did all he could to stop himself falling further; within a second or two you could see him trying to use his hands and fingernails as claws to scrape through the layer of weed into the stone beneath, then, when that did almost nothing to slow him, he tried to grab at the lengths of weeds, to use them like ropes he could hold on to. He even wrestled for a moment with his paintball gun, attempting to use it like an ice axe, but there was nothing on it the right shape and sharpness to bite through the weed, and hold.

Usually with something like this — though in the past, of course, it had always been something less than this, something sickening only at the time, like the rope on a tree swing breaking or somebody going over a bike’s handlebars — you could comfort yourself that, had it been you, you’d have tried something else, been more resourceful or just quicker-thinking, so that what had hurt your friend wouldn’t have happened to you.

Even at the time, though, and for all those years of nightmares afterwards, nightmares that still resurface for me about once or twice a year, I knew I’d have been just as helpless as Wee Malky, my fate as hopelessly out of my hands.

Hugo landed heavily at the foot of the grass slope, but bounced back up, only to fall over again immediately as his broken ankle flopped out from under him. It looked horrible, like his foot was held on to his leg only by his sock. Phelpie, a couple of metres away from me, went white. Hugo shouted in pain, then yelled at George as he got back up and started hopping towards his brother.

I looked at Ferg. ‘We should—’ I said, and started forward towards the top of the slope. Ferg didn’t say anything, just grabbed me by the upper arm with a strength I wouldn’t have known he had. So we stood, in that terrible frozen moment, the air grown thick around us, the edge of the sword like a crease down all our lives, a flickering hinge that would divide our histories into the times before and after this instant.

Wee Malky sounded hoarse with fear as he raced down towards the slipway foot. George stood there, the sword raised above his head. In the last moments, Wee Malky gave up trying to stop his slide and brought his gun up, aiming at George and trying to fire, but the gun wouldn’t work.

‘George!’ Hugo screamed.

‘Give it up ya—’ Callum screamed too, and started firing at George. A couple of us joined in and landed a couple of shots; none burst, just bouncing off George and plopping into the water.

Wee Malky was the last one to scream as he came careening down the slipway and slammed into one of the stone stumps with a thudding noise we could hear from the top of the dam, an impact worse than the one we’d all felt when Hugo had landed at the bottom of the slope. Wee Malky’s voice cut off and he sort of draped round the stone pillar, a step away from George, who turned and brought the sword down from high above his head, whacking into Wee Malky’s body, making it jerk. George paused, straightened, raised the sword high again.

About half of us looked away at this point. Phelpie fainted, crumpling onto the grass, and another two or three of us had to sit down. Hugo had fallen again and was forced to drag himself the last metre to the side of the overflow channel. He looked on despairingly as his brother landed the final couple of blows; they fell with dull thuds we all saw and felt rather than heard.

The water around George and heading away downstream was flooding with red now. What was left of Wee Malky looked like a pile of sodden rags wrapped round the base of the little stone pillar, his body shaken and pummelled by the tearing, scooping water, but otherwise unmoving.

George laid the sword down carefully on top of the pillar, smiled a great beaming smile — first at Hugo, then round at all the rest of us — and raised both his clenched fists high above his head in triumph.

The pathologist’s report said Wee Malky had been knocked unconscious by the blow against the stone pillar at the foot of the overflow channel. He had been killed by multiple blows to the body and head by a long, sharp-bladed instrument, and died of either blood loss or major head trauma; both had occurred within such a short interval it was impossible to say and, anyway, made no practical difference.

We never saw George again; he went back into a secure unit and stayed there until he died a couple of years back. We barely saw Hugo again, either; he spent his time at school, on holidays abroad and behind the once again closed-to-us walls of the estate. The ankle healed fine; he’s run marathons since. He studied medicine at Edinburgh and as of last year he’s a cosmetic surgeon in Los Angeles. They love that accent. Trust it, too. Though of course everybody thinks he’s English. Apparently he’s given up trying to persuade them otherwise.

One day, of course, the whole Ancraime estate — and the family’s various properties elsewhere — will be his, but his dad’s just twenty years older than he is and in robust good health, so in the meantime Hugo thought he’d get independently independently wealthy, if you see what I mean.

People blamed Callum, partly, though he always swore he had been trying to think ahead and had shot Wee Malky purely so that George would accept that the game was over, and put down the sword. Those of us who knew Callum well thought this was plausible but unlikely. He’d never shown that sort of psychological acuity before and only arguably did afterwards. Still, Callum made it very clear he deeply resented any hint of an accusation that he’d done anything other than try to help, and try to help quite ingeniously, too, and over the ensuing years, if you listened to the way Callum told it, you might have thought the principal victim of the whole episode had been him.

Only Ferg and I really blamed Phelpie too, a bit. He must have seen George head off in the direction of the house but then told Hugo he’d gone in the opposite direction, uphill. He even changed his story; at first he claimed he’d sent Hugo in the right direction and Hugo must have got lost, then, after a week, when he must have worked out how preposterous that idea was, he said, no, actually he’d pointed towards the house but Hugo had raced off in the other direction because he must have assumed Phelpie was trying to trick him.

Anyway. This was all too much blame, too much detail, for most people, and in the end none of it would bring Wee Malky back or, for that matter, make George more or less culpable for a crime he still didn’t really understand he’d committed.

Phelpie works for Mike MacAvett now; he’s the chauffeur and home handyman, officially, but more Mike’s bagman and bodyguard, where needed.

We all got counselling. We pretty much all scorned it at the time, but it certainly seemed to help. I hate to think how bad my nightmares might have stayed without it.

Though, between us, Ferg and I did think of a way Wee Malky might have escaped, after all: as you were sliding down the slipway you’d have to give up on spreadeagling and trying to stop or slow yourself, and instead make yourself as narrow as possible and somehow steer yourself so that you sped between two of the stumpy stone pillars at the bottom. Take your chances that George would have missed you with his sword as you shot past him and that you’d get far enough away down the channel beyond on sheer momentum, so that by the time you got to your feet and started running, you’d have a chance of escaping.

Unlikely as it sounded even to us, we found this thought consoling, though somehow it never got incorporated into the nightmares. Their substance never really changed; they just became slowly less real, more faded, further away and less frequent.

Sue MacAvett’s scones, as donated by Jel, were gently reheated, and judged very good by Mum, Dad and myself. The jam, too.

I spent the evening with my parents; they wanted to congratulate me properly for joining the partnership. Mum drove us out to the Turrie Inn, near Roadside of Durrens on the Loanstoun road. Fine meal, fine wine. Place was busy on the strength of the chef’s word-of-mouth reputation, some magazine features and rumours of a Michelin star next year, maybe. Mum and Dad seemed happy and relaxed and glad to see me, and I had an almost surprisingly good time.

Quietly pissed, but feeling like a child again, I watched through the side window of the Audi as a waning moon like a paring from God’s big toenail flickered between the black trunks of sentry trees ridging lines of distant hills.