Stonemouth

10

‘Aye, but they still compete.’

‘I’m not saying the teams don’t compete, I’m simply seeking to contrast the cut-throat, evolutionary, highly competitive world of the European and particularly the English League system with the moribund, non-relegatory, survival-guaranteed world of US American so-called “Football”. Which is mostly handball, anyway. I think it’s instructive and ironic that the land of the free enterprise principle and unfettered Marketolatry has produced such stasis, while the decadent, communitarian Old World revels in such tooth-and-claw competition. It’s why people like the Glazers don’t get it. I don’t think they fully understand that if their team does badly enough it’ll end up relegated to a lower league and out of the big money.’ Ferg puts down his cards and slides a fiver into the centre of the table. ‘Talking of which; raise you five.’

‘You call that big money?’

‘No, just money. And I’m not calling you, I’m raising you.’

‘Okay. See you, then.’

‘Nines and fours.’

‘Jack high.’

‘Fuck. You bluffing bastard, Phelpie. I should have gone for bigger money.’

‘I’d have folded.’

‘You say that now,’ Ferg says, scooping the pot towards him.

Sunday, around noon: traditional time for the weekly poker game at Lee Bickwood’s. Lee has a big old converted sail loft near the old docks. Lines of Velux windows look out to east and west and — today — bead with rain as a smir rolls in off the sea, coating the glass. The beads grow slowly fat on the sloped glass, then get too heavy and run off suddenly, gathering speed as they sweep up smaller globules in a chaotic, zigzagging line down the glass. It all happens in silence; the rain is too soft to be heard through the double glazing.

Lee’s family ran the town’s main hardware store for over a century until Homebase and B&Q moved into their respective retail estates on the outskirts of town. Now most of the family lives in Marbella, and Lee has a couple of gift and gizmo shops here and in Aberdeen.

The Sunday poker game has been a fixture for the last ten years or so; Lee provides a running supply of rolls — bacon or black pudding, generally — cooked by his own fair hands during intervals. Lee is not a very good poker player, so getting out early and rattling the grill pan is a good way of seeming to stay with the game while actually ducking out at the first plausible opportunity. Whenever he does get a really good hand, one so good even he believes he can win with it, he stays in and bids big, fast. We tend to fold and he wins, but small. Occasionally somebody will stay with him, but he’s always telling the truth. I have never seen him exploit this pattern. Like I say: not a very good poker player. Lee had startlingly ginger hair when he was a year above us in school, though it’s going auburn now. He’s tall but getting a little pot-bellied, one of those guys who buys all the sports gear but rarely gets round to using it.

‘They can’t be that stupid,’ Phelpie says. ‘They’re fucking billionaire businessmen. They may be assholes but they’re not fuckwits.’

Phelpie prefers to be known as Ryan these days, but we still think of him as Phelpie, and, besides, calling him Ryan would confuse things, given that Phelpie works for Mike Mac, who has a son called Ryan. Ryan the son who was briefly married to Ellie, and who might, apparently, turn up here later. Not sure how I feel about this. Actually, yes I am, but I won’t be scared off just because the guy that wed my girl might show.

Lee agrees with Phelpie. ‘They’ll do the research, Ferg,’ he says. ‘They’ll know what they’re getting into. They’ll have people to do due diligence and such.’

‘Yeah,’ Phelpie says.

Phelpie looks bulkily fit and well fed these days, brown hair slicked back. He wears a blue Deep Blue IV fleece over a pink shirt. Jeans, but new ones, so he’s still the most formally dressed. The rest of us are in sweats, tees and old jeans. Trainers all round. Even Ferg has dressed down specifically for the occasion, though he has set off his open shirt with a cravat. This reminds me of old Joe Murston, and gets me thinking about the funeral tomorrow. The cravat has not gone uncommented upon, though Ferg merely accuses us of provincial small-mindedness, a concomitant lack of imagination and outright jealousy.

‘You mentioned the European and particularly the English League there, Ferg,’ Jim Torbet says. Jim’s a junior doctor at the hospital. Medium build but wirily buff; a rock climber. He’d probably be scaling a cliff today if the weather was better. He’s the only one of us wearing glasses. ‘What about dear old Scoatlund?’ He shifts to Glaswegian nasal to pronounce the last word.

Ferg snorts. ‘Barely worth bothering with,’ he tells us as he shuffles the cards. ‘A duopoly where it makes sense for the two big teams to buy up star players from their lesser opponents and then leave them sitting on the bench or playing for the reserves—’

‘Or on loan to an English team,’ Lee provides, because this is a familiar theme for Ferg, and we can all join in if we want to.

‘— just to make sure they won’t be playing against them is the worst of both worlds: insufficiently competitive and pathetically, defensively cynical at the same time. Personally I think the idea of the Old Firm joining the Premier League is brilliant; get them to fuck out of the small pond that is Scottish football.’

‘What if they get relegated?’ Lee asks.

‘Yeah,’ Jim says. ‘Torquay United might object to travelling all the way to Glasgow.’

‘Be like a European tie for them,’ I suggest. ‘They should be grateful.’

‘Or Taunton,’ says Phelpie.

‘Oh, it’s not going to happen,’ Ferg concedes, dealing the cards. ‘It’s like world peace: great idea but don’t hold your breath.’ He snaps the deck down onto the table, picks up his cards, glances at them and looks left to Phelpie, who is carefully studying his. ‘Phelpie?’

‘Hmm,’ says Phelpie. A couple of people sigh and put their cards back down.

‘In your own time, Phelpie,’ Lee breathes. Phelpie prefers not to be hurried.

Talk turns to what people were doing last night. Jim was working, but the other guys were out enjoying themselves, clubbing or in bars. Ferg was in Aberdeen at a not very good party; came back early. I am looked on with some sympathy for having had to endure an evening with the old folks. As no one can recall me having form in this — dereliction of the duty to party — the piss is not taken. I listen to what the others got up to, allowing a little for bravado and exaggeration.

This is so much like the old days. And, again, I have mixed feelings. In some ways it’s good and comfortable to be fitting straight back in like I’ve never been away, but, on the other hand, I’m getting this constrictive feeling as well. It’s the same places — like the bars and pubs on Friday night — the same people, the same conversations, the same arguments and the same attitudes. Five years away and not much seems to have changed. I can’t decide if this is good or bad.

After a long-feeling two minutes of deliberation, Phelpie goes a minimum pound. Actually there has been progress; on a majority vote round the table, Lee pulls out his Android phone and announces a one-minute maximum thinking-time limit. He leaves the phone on the table with the stopwatch function ready.

‘No fair,’ Phelpie says, though he’s grinning.

Phelpie usually takes for ever to decide on his bet, though I’ve seen him be quick and decisive enough when he really needs to be. When challenged on this studied glaciality he claims he’s just working through all the angles and probabilities, though none of us really believes him. On the other hand, as Ferg has pointed out (though only to me; not for public consumption), while Phelpie rarely wins big he never loses big, and he’s very good at restricting his losses. He plays like somebody who knows the difference between luck — which is basically mythical — and chance, which is reality. Phelpie knows when to fold, maybe better than any of the rest of us.

I end up going head-to-head with Ezzie Scarsen, a skinny, wee, shaven-headed guy I know only a little; a couple of years older than most of us. Works in the control room of the road bridge. He blinks a lot, which might or might not be a tell. I’ve got three tens and I think Ezzie’s an optimist; tends to over-bet.

There’s a sort of unofficial limit in these games, which has shifted from twenty to twenty-five pounds while I’ve been away. Just a fun game between pals, after all. We get to twenty quid apiece on top of the pot before he sees me. Ezzie has kings and queens.

‘Gracias,’ I say, scooping with both arms.

‘Aw, man,’ Ezzie says, sitting back.

I start shuffling.

‘Any jumpers this week, Ezzie?’ Lee asks.

Ezzie nods. ‘Just the one, a female, but no a fatality.’

‘That the lassie on Wednesday night?’ Jim asks.

‘Aye,’ Ezzie says. ‘One of the McGurk girls? Chantal. Youngest one, I think.’

There’s a round of shrugs, shakes and Nopes round the table as we agree she’s not on any of our personal databases, though we’ve all heard of the McGurk family; one of the larger tribes of the hereditary jobless from the Riggans estate.

‘You treat her?’ Lee asks Jim.

‘Been on Casualty all week,’ Jim says, with a nod.

‘Mazing how many people jump before the watter an hit the grun,’ Ezzie says, inspecting the interior of his wallet. ‘Even in daylight. At night, you’d unnerstan. Canny see where you’re headin. If you don’t know the bridge you can make a mistake like that. But daylight? You’d think they’d look.’ Ezzie shakes his head at such suicidal slackness. ‘We’ve had people get to just where the barriers start on the south approach and loup ower. You just land in the bushes; you’re lucky if you’re even scratched.’ He shakes his head. ‘Weird.’

‘I guess their minds are on other things,’ Ferg says, watching my hands carefully as I deal. No insult intended; he watches everybody’s hands carefully as they deal.

‘The lassie going to be okay?’ Lee asks Jim.

‘Not really supposed to say too much, Lee,’ Jim says. ‘But I think you could expect a full recovery. Be on crutches for a while, but I’d imagine she’ll be back dancing at Q&L’s again by the year end.’ Q&L’s is one of the town’s two clubs, in the old Astoria Ballroom.

‘Any idea why she jumped?’ Lee asks.

Jim looks at Lee as he lifts his cards, ‘And that’s us over the patient — doctor confidentiality line, right there,’ he says, smiling round at all of us.

‘Do you keep the tapes of people jumping?’ I ask Ezzie as the betting starts. ‘You know, from the CCTV?’

‘No tapes these days, Stu,’ Ezzie says. ‘All hard disk.’

Phelpie gets stopwatched.

‘You ever hand out copies to civilians?’ I ask.

‘Just the polis,’ Ezzie says, looking a little awkward. ‘Gie them a dongle if they ask for it. But we’re no even supposed to hand out copies to the families. How?’

I shrug. ‘Just heard something.’

‘D’you ever watch footage of old jumpers?’ Ferg asks. ‘When it’s a boring shift? Is there a collection of greatest hits?’

‘Canny really say,’ Ezzie mumbles, closely inspecting his cards.

‘Is there a going rate for copies, Ezzie?’ Lee asks.

‘No,’ Ezzie says. He looks up at us. ‘Come on, guys; no fair.’

Lee’s phone beeps. ‘Yes,’ Ferg says, ‘let’s get on with it. Phelpie, bid or fold.’

‘Pound,’ Phelpie says, sliding a coin decisively into the centre of the table.

Ferg sighs dramatically.

Ryan Mac arrives, nods at me with a sort of wary politeness — I like the wary more than the politeness — and sits in. El’s ex, though I’ll never be able to think of him that way. He’s slim and fair and slightly puppy-fatty, though in a cute way. Still very young-looking, and I can see Ferg eyeing him up. Phelpie takes a call from Mike Mac and has to go. Ryan gets up suddenly to have a word with Phelpie before he leaves and they stand at the far end of the loft’s main living area, by the stairs, talking quietly.

Meanwhile I’m in a head-to-head with Ezzie again, who definitely thinks he has a chance this time. Which he might, of course, though I’m looking at a full house of jacks and threes.

Lee is making more rolls. Ferg has gone to the loo.

Ezzie had three kings, and deflates when he sees my hand. I suspect that’s the last of his money. His wallet looks anorexic and working in the bridge control room can’t pay that well. I go to arm-sweep in all the money, then stop. I look at Dr Torbet and motion with my eyes.

‘Mm-hmm,’ Jim says. ‘Excuse me.’ He stands, goes to help Lee with the rolls.

I look Ezzie in the eyes, nod at the pile of money bracketed by my arms and say quietly, ‘Ezzie, this is all yours if you can tell me a bit more about some of that CCTV stuff.’

Ezzie looks alarmed. He glances round. ‘I canny sell you any of it,’ he tells me.

‘Just want to know if anybody’s ever got a private look, you know? Somebody not off the bridge?’

‘Aye, well, might have happened,’ Ezzie says, looking at the money.

‘Any footage ever disappeared, Ezzie?’

Ezzie looks up at me. Another not very good poker player. I can see in his eyes the answer’s yes. ‘Oh, now, not really for me … Canny really say, Stu.’

I lean over a little closer and lower my voice still further, though the industrial-looking extraction fan over the hob and grill is easily making enough noise to drown out our conversation. ‘What if somebody wanted to see the time Callum Murston took a dive?’

Now Ezzie looks positively frightened. ‘Think that was all wiped,’ he tells me quickly.

‘Wiped?’

‘Polis. They said to. Didn’t want it fallin into the wrong hands.’

‘Really?’ I ask. The wrong hands? What does that mean — the press?

‘Aye,’ Ezzie says, ‘like if somebody put it on YouTube or somethin? Mr M might get upset and things could kick off, ken?’ Ezzie glances round at where Ryan and Phelpie are standing, still deep in earnest discussion. He looks back at me. Ferg is pacing back from the stairs. ‘Ah was on holiday at the time, Stu,’ Ezzie tells me quickly. ‘That’s all I know. Onist.’

‘Ooh! Blood sausage!’ Ferg says, stopping by the kitchen island. ‘Better have one of those.’

I smile at Ezzie. ‘Fair enough,’ I tell him. I push the pile of money towards him and sit back.

‘How about you? Do you see Ellie often?’ I ask Ryan MacAvett.

Ryan shakes his head. ‘No, hardly ever,’ he says. ‘Seen her once or twice through the window of that drop-in centre on the High Street. Used to bump into her at the supermarket, but now she gets stuff delivered.’ He glances at me. ‘Thought of claiming I had a problem, you know? Like, being an addict? Just to be able to walk into the centre and get a chance to talk to her.’

‘Doubt that would have worked,’ I tell him.

‘Aye, me too,’ Ryan says, and drinks from his bottle of Bud.

The girl is a hard habit to give up, I think but don’t say.

We’re sitting sprawled on couches in another part of the loft while we take turns, two at a time, on a beta for the PS3 of MuddyFunster II, due to be the blockbuster Christmas release from the games house Ferg works for. It’s Grand Theft Auto with more ridiculous weapons and more slappable civilians, basically, and Ferg is brutally dismissive of it, having had little to do with the development and nothing with the concept.

‘It disrespects women, for one thing,’ he tells Lee when he asks why Ferg hates it so much.

‘That bothers you?’ Jim asks, mildly incredulous.

‘Mark my words,’ Ferg says, drawing himself up and narrowing his eyes. ‘Manners change in societies over time, gentlemen, and, as usual, I am ahead of the curve. Gallantry will be making a comeback.’

‘Gallantry?’ Lee splutters.

‘Yes. Perhaps even a sense of fair play, who knows?’

‘Wouldn’t hold your breath,’ Jim tells him.

‘… Is that a submarine surfacing in the river there?’ Lee says.

I stare over at him, but of course he’s talking about the game, not a stray Poseidon boat blundering into the Stoun like a confused techno-whale. An unfeasibly large sub is indeed surfacing in the Hudson, if that’s New York they’re playing in. Currently up are Lee and Jim, with Ferg standing looking over their shoulders. Bets have been placed on the outcome so there’s more than just pride and bragging rights at stake.

‘Don’t get me started on that fucking submarine!’ Ferg says vehemently.

Lee snorts. ‘That’s just bullshit, man.’

I’ve just had a shot on the new game and we all got to talking about how the violence in these games never quite measures up to the sort of messy horror real gangsters inflict on their victims. Turns out Dr Jim has heard a rumour.

‘I’m telling you,’ Jim says. ‘If you’re ever close enough to Fraser Murston, take a look at the tips of his left index finger and thumb. Scar tissue.’

‘Sure he wasn’t just trying to sandpaper off his prints or something?’ Ferg asks.

Jim shrugs. ‘Who’s sure about any of this stuff? Just telling you what I heard.’

‘He took out this guy’s balls and his eyes and … swapped them?’ Lee says, crossing his legs and screwing his eyes up in something like sympathy.

Jim nods. ‘And then superglued everything back up again. That’s how he got injured, pinching the guy’s scrotum closed with his fingers; left them in contact too long. Then he got it wrong trying to free himself and removed some of his own skin.’

‘That’d leave DNA evidence, would it no?’ Ezzie says.

‘Which is maybe why he used the welding torch on the guy as well,’ Jim agrees. ‘Anyway, this gangster from Govan might already have been dead from shock by then. Body’s under ten metres of backfilled rubble beneath the new spur on the bypass. So they say.’

Lee shakes his head. ‘Still sounds like shit.’

‘Good rumour to have going round about you, though,’ Ryan says. ‘If you want to keep people scared of you.’

‘You ever see these scarred fingers?’ Lee asks Ryan.

‘No. Wasn’t looking for it, though. Didn’t hear about any of this till after Ellie and me split up.’

‘Stu?’ Ferg says. ‘You ever seen this digital scar tissue?’

‘Yup.’

‘Heard that story?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Illuminating. Any further insights?’

‘El told me he did it taking a Pop-Tart out the toaster.’ Ferg looks relieved. ‘That’ll do. I prefer that explanation.’

Later Ryan and I are sitting back on the couch together while the others play or observe MuddyFunster II in all its beta version glory.

‘Listen, Ryan,’ I say quietly, because I haven’t actually said this yet and I’m probably supposed to, whether I really feel it or not, and in the end he seems like a decent enough guy. ‘Ah … I’m sorry about you and Ellie. Sorry it didn’t work out.’

Ryan shrugs, drinks, doesn’t look at me. ‘And I’m sorry about you and my sister,’ he says, turning and giving me an insincere smile.

Whoa. Didn’t see that one coming. Bit of a low shot, even if I do deserve it.

I breathe out in a sort of soundless whistle: all breath, no note.

‘Yeah,’ I say, after a moment. ‘Saw Jel yesterday. For whatever it’s worth, Ryan, I think we’re okay. Jel and me.’

‘Yeah, good for you,’ Ryan says with a small sneer, sighing and studying the top of the Bud bottle. ‘But you really fucked up a lot of people, you two.’

‘Like I say, Ryan, I’m sorry.’

Ryan shrugs. ‘Aye, well. If you see Ellie,’ he says, looking at me, ‘tell her I said hello.’

‘I don’t know that I will, though. Not to speak to.’

He gives a small, bitten-off laugh. ‘Nah, she’ll see you.’ He drains the bottle. ‘She might be teasing you, or waiting for you to — I don’t know: make the effort or something, but she’ll want to see you. Never fucking stopped talking about you.’ He jumps up, waggles the bottle. ‘Drink?’

I haven’t partaken yet, but it may be time. ‘Aye. Think I saw some Becks in the fridge. One of those.’

‘Bud no good enough for you, eh?’ Ryan says. Not too harshly, but still.

‘They make that shit from rice, man.’

Ryan shrugs. ‘All gets you drunk, just the same,’ he says. ‘Whatever works.’ He heads for the fridge.

True. And I’m happy enough to drink Kirin and other Japanese beers made from rice. So I’m a hypocrite and a beer snob. I look at Ryan as he opens the fridge door. And I’m guessing that you, young man, would always be too easily pleased to be good enough for Ellie.

Shocked at my own ignobility — and alarming self-honesty — I’m especially nice to him when he hands me my beer and sits back down again.

After turns wrecking large parts of Beijing, LA, Rio, London and Lagos — though we never do see that submarine again — Ryan and I are sitting pissed on the couch once more, agreeing that Ellie is a hell of a girl, and we’re both idiots to have let her slip through our fingers.

‘But you’re the bigger idiot,’ Ryan tells me, passing me a joint (one of Ferg’s; I can tell by the tightness, immaculate rolling technique and obsessive attention to detail). ‘I tried really hard to keep hold of her, Stu. You just threw her away.’

I take a good deep toke, to avoid having to respond to this. I shake my head once instead, that sort of quick one-two that more acknowledges than denies. I let some smoke leak down my nostrils.

‘You just threw her away,’ Ryan repeats, wagging his finger at me, in case I didn’t hear him the first time. ‘That was…that was idiotic, Stewart,’ he tells me. He taps himself on the chest. ‘I just …I just …’ Ryan is sort of staring into the middle distance and can’t decide what he he just. ‘I just…wasn’t up to keeping her, I guess,’ he concludes, and sounds sad, as though this has just occurred to him and it’s a terrible truth. He coughs, pulls himself up straighter. ‘D’you know a thing I heard?’

This sounds more promising. I’ve breathed out. The doobie has been handed on to a passing Ferg. ‘What?’ I ask.

‘Ellie had this thing, with this guy? Lecturer, at Aberdeen? Last year. Well, started year before that, ended last year. Or, like, maybe it ended earlier this year?’

At least I’m not being bombarded with irrelevant detail here. Smothered with irrelevant vagueness, maybe. ‘Really?’ I say.

‘Anyway, went on for a couple of years. This guy was older? He was, like, thirty, maybe even more. Seemingly happily married. Two kids, as well. Devoted father and all that shit? Apparently the wife had no idea. Anyway, last…earlier this year, whenever, this guy suddenly leaves his wife and kids, just walks out one day and he’s on Ellie’s doorstep at this flat she has in Aberdeen, but — and this is the point, Stu; this is the point,’ he tells me, tapping an index finger against my chest. ‘Ellie wouldn’t even let him in. Told him to go back to his wife. The thing, the affair ended right there. He never even got to touch her again.’ Ryan’s eyes are wide at this.

‘Jeez,’ I say.

Ryan nods enthusiastically. ‘He thought, this poor bastard thought he was making this enormous gesture, ultimate romantic … like, gesture? Walking out on his wife, his whole family, maybe throwing away his job, friends too and saying like, Hey, I’m yours, to Ellie; look what I’ve sacrificed for you!’ Ryan snaps his fingers in front of my eyes. ‘Cut him off dead. Just like that. Wasn’t what she wanted. Poor fuck had to check into a hotel. Wife started divorcing him but took him back eventually after … I don’t know; fuck knows how much begging. Even then only for the kids cos they missed him so much and it’s still separate rooms and he’s like, he’s fucked, man. I mean, not getting any, but he’s fucked, man, just fucked.’

‘Maybe he should have mentioned to Ellie about giving everything up for her, before he went ahead and did it.’

‘Fucking obviously he should have done that, man,’ Ryan says, waving his arms around, ‘but he thought he was being, like, romantic? Like it would be the best surprise ever? Fucking had that thrown back in his face, poor fuck.’ He pulls hard on his bottle of Bud.

‘Yeah, but you’re not blaming Ellie, are you?’ I ask. ‘It was the lecturer guy—’

‘No, but …’ Ryan shakes his head. ‘No. He was an idiot. Like you were an idiot.’ Ah, we’re back to that. Ryan jabs himself in the chest with his finger again. ‘Like I was an idiot to think I could keep her when all she wanted was …’ Ryan shakes his head, staring into the middle distance. ‘I don’t even know what she wanted,’ he says quietly. ‘To be married? Prove she could keep a guy, not have him …’ He slouches down, legs spread, head lowered as he inspects his beer bottle. ‘Be normal, or something,’ he says, voice close to a murmur, barely audible. Then he looks at me, suddenly looking lost and hopelessly vulnerable. ‘We were going to have a kid, did you know that?’ he asks me. Fuck, I think he’s going to start crying.

‘I heard,’ I tell him. ‘I’m really sorry about that. Seriously; don’t know how any part of that feels, but I’m really sorry. You didn’t deserve that. Neither of you did.’

Jeez, I’m welling up myself here. Some of it will be inebriation-inspired, temporary-best-buddy-in-the-world syndrome, but not all of it. Of course I feel sorry for the poor bastard. When I heard Ellie had been pregnant and then lost the child, I don’t think I spared Ryan a second thought; whether you’re a man or a woman, straight or gay, your first feeling is for the woman. But just because it might be the worst thing that’s ever happened to her doesn’t mean it can’t be the worst thing that’s ever happened to him, too.

Who knows what might have been different for Ryan if the child had been born? He and Ellie might still be together, one happy family. He might still have her, have the sort of life I guess he wanted, or that Ellie wanted and he was happy, grateful to be part of. Who knows?

‘Wasn’t meant to be,’ Ryan mumbles.

It sounds like a mantra, like something he’s learned to say, to convince himself or to reassure other people: oh, well, if it wasn’t meant to be, if the universe or God or something so decreed that it wasn’t part of the great officially approved master plan, that makes it all right somehow.

This sounds like complete shit to me, but then I’m not in Ryan’s position — thank fuck — trying to reconcile whatever shambolic beliefs I might hold with a simple twist of fate, just one more random outcome spat forth by a universe breezily incapable of caring.

‘Anyway,’ he says quietly. ‘She’s not seeing anyone. Fairly sure of that.’ He sighs. ‘Not that you can ever be sure of anything with Ellie.’ He has another drink, glances at me. ‘But I mean if you want to see her, there’s nobody in the way.’

I open my mouth to say, I’m still not sure she wants to see me, but Ryan concludes with, ‘Least of all me.’

He taps me on the knee with his bottle of Bud as he gets up. He goes to where the others are tearing up Sydney on the big plasma screen and announces he’d better be going. Goodbyes are exchanged.

I get a sort of half-wave, half-salute as he heads for the stairs.

11

When I leave, maybe half an hour later — it’s just gone four — the rain has stopped but the streets are still glistening under a hurried grey sky of small ragged clouds. I stick my earbuds in and put the iPhone’s tunes on shuffle. The earbuds are Ultimate Ears LEs: an Xmas present to myself last year. Expensive, but worth the improvement in sound, assuming you can afford to spend more on them than most people do on an MP3 player in the first place. The LEs are quite chunky. They’re sort of shiny blue, not white, and I use them with the grey, earplug-material, in-ear fixings. This provides really good sound insulation; you properly have to use your eyes when you cross a road.

It also means when somebody comes up behind you, you get no audible warning at all and so they can grab your arm out of your jacket pocket, push it so far up your back you have to go up on tiptoes because otherwise it feels like the bone’s going to break, and the two of them can bundle you into the back of a suddenly appeared Transit van and get the doors closed again before you’ve even had time to cry out.

Fuck, I think. This is really happening.

I’m face down on a grubby floor, dimly lit, staring at white-painted metal ridges scuffed to thin rust. I’ve seen this before recently but I can’t think where immediately. The van’s moving, engine roaring at first then settling. At least they’ve let go of my arm. I push down, start to rise, and what feels like a pair of boots on my back forces me back down again. I lie on my front, breathing hard, terrified. Sobering up fast here. I look to the side, where I can see the legs that are attached to the boots resting on my back.

‘Just you stay where you are,’ a voice says.

The boots come off my back and I can see the person who spoke. It’s Murdo Murston, on a bench seat along the side wall. He’s dressed in workman’s dungarees, sitting on a hi-vis jacket. I look round and Norrie is sitting on the bench on the other side, just taking off a hoodie. He’s wearing well-used dungarees too. Just the two Murstons in here. It’s one of the bigger Transits so there’s no way through to the cab, just a third wall of plywood. I’m guessing Fraser might be doing the driving. Given his reputation for unhinged violence, this may actually be a good sign.

‘Guys,’ I say, trying to sound reasonable. ‘What the fuck?’

‘Comfy there, Stewie?’ Murdo asks. Murdo hasn’t changed much; a little heavier maybe. Beard a bit thinner, darker, more sculpted and trimmed. Norrie now sports something between designer stubble and a thin beard; as he’s ginger it’s hard to gauge.

‘Aye, comfy?’ Norrie says, and I’m tapped hard on the side of my head with something solid. I look round again to see the business end of a baseball bat, just retreating. Norrie’s holding it one-handed, smiling.

‘Ouch?’ I say to him. I can still feel the place on the side of my head where he tapped me. On the other side, I can feel Murdo taking my phone out of my jacket pocket. Following the earbud wires. Well, that made that nice and easy. I turn my head again to look at Murdo, who’s detaching the earbud cables and inspecting the iPhone.

Murdo looks at Norrie. ‘You know how you take the batteries out of these?’ he asks.

‘Naw.’

The van’s swinging this way and that, not going especially fast. It stops, idling, every now and again before continuing. Just driving through the streets of the town, not doing anything further to attract any attention.

‘Guys, what’s going on?’ I ask. ‘I mean, for fuck’s sake! I saw Donald on Friday. I checked in with Powell first, on Friday, and I saw him again yesterday. They both said it was okay I stayed here till Tuesday morning so I can pay my respects to Joe.’

‘Uh-huh?’ Murdo says.

‘Aye, but ye didnae talk to us, did ye, Stewie?’ Norrie says. ‘Just cos Grandpa thought the sun shone oot yer arse, doesnae mean we all do.’ He looks over at Murdo. ‘Eh no?’

‘Ssh, Norrie,’ Murdo says. He reaches out one boot, taps me on the head. ‘You can sit up, Stewie. Slide back against that wall there.’ He nods.

I do what he says so I’m sitting with my back to the plywood wall, dusting my hands down — they’re shaking — taking out the earbud that remains lodged in my left ear and putting both into the pocket they took my phone from.

‘Guys, come on,’ I say. ‘There shouldn’t be a problem here. I’m back to pay my respects to Joe, that’s all.’

‘Wait a minute,’ Murdo mutters. ‘This button on the top. Turns them right off.’ He keeps the button down, waits for the slide-to-power-off screen to appear, then powers down the phone. He sticks it in the front pocket of his dungarees. He looks at me.

‘What you saying?’

‘I just want to pay my respects to Joe, that’s all I’m saying. That’s all I’m here to do. I’ll be gone by Tuesday.’ I look round the dim interior of the van. ‘What the fuck’s all this about?’

Oh fuck, what are they going to do to me? Being in the back of a van with these guys, them turning the phone off. This doesn’t look good. But I talked to their dad! He said it was okay for me to be here, just for a few days. Fuck, is there some sort of power struggle going on? Are the brothers starting to get impatient, disobeying orders, making their own decisions? What have I landed myself in? And what fucker has spoken to the Murston boys, dropped me in it? Ezzie, probably, though you never know.

The van’s going faster now; you can hear it in the engine note, in the sound of the tyres on the road and the air slipstreaming round its tall bulk. We slow a little, take a long, constant radius, maybe 270-degree corner.

Murdo looks at me. ‘See tomorrow?’ he says.

‘What?’ I say, voice cracking because my throat’s suddenly dry.

‘At the funeral, at the hotel afterwards?’

‘What, Murdo?’

‘Don’t want you talking to her.’

‘But, Murd,’ Norrie asks, though he’s silenced by a glance from his elder brother.

‘Ssh,’ Murdo says, before looking back at me. ‘Just leave her alone, right? Grandpa said he wanted you at the funeral — fuck knows why, but he said it, so fair enough. You get to go. But you just leave Ellie alone. Otherwise we’re going to be on you, understand, Stewart?’

Well, I’m relieved; sounds like I’m going to live, but on the other hand, is that all? What the fuck’s all this Stasi-style kidnap shit for, then? The fuckers could just have texted me.

‘Jeez, Murdo,’ I say. ‘She’s her own woman; what if she comes up to me?’

‘Then you’d better walk away,’ Murdo says. ‘Cos we’ll be watchin.’

‘Murdo, come on—’

‘You’re on fuckin dangerous ground, Stewie,’ Murdo tells me. He sounds reasonable, almost concerned. He has changed a bit; there’s less outright aggression, more gravitas. It goes to make a more studied kind of threat.

The van has felt like it’s been going up a straight, shallow slope for a while now. I can hear the sounds of other traffic. Then there’s pressure against my back as the van brakes smoothly and we slow to what feels like walking speed. Traffic continues to rip past, very close. We stop, then reverse, the van making a beep-beep-beep sound.

Oh fuck, I think I know where we are. A sudden bang-bang sounds from one of the van’s rear quarters, making me jump. A voice outside shouts, ‘Whoa!’ The traffic outside makes a tearing, ripping noise. Something heavy roars past, making the van shake. Is that a slight up-and-down bouncing motion I can feel?

The bridge. We’re on the fucking road bridge.

‘Dinnae fill yer kecks,’ Murdo tells me with a thin smile. I must look as terrified as I feel. ‘If this was for real it’d be dark and you’d be tied up like a gimp.’

Norrie opens the rear doors and there’s a rush of traffic noise. Outside where the sky ought to be there’s white and red stripes. ‘Come and take a wee look,’ Murdo says, and the three of us get out.

We’re on the road bridge all right, somewhere about the middle of the southbound carriageway. The van has backed up to a sort of tall tent structure erected over the roadway, red and white plastic over a metal frame. Whoever banged the side of the van and shouted at us to stop isn’t here now. Two sides and the roof of the tent are rippling in the breeze; the other side thuds and pulses each time a truck goes past.

A square of the road surface, maybe three-quarters of a metre to a side, has been lifted up and out; it sits, a quarter-metre thick, at an angle beyond the hole, lifting brackets still attached. Murdo takes a handful of my jacket at the shoulder. Norrie’s holding my shoulder and elbow on the other side. They march me to the hole.

Looking down, I can see the criss-crossing members of the girder work under the road surface. Straight down, though, there’s just air and then the grey waves, a fifty-metre fall away.

‘Jeez, Murdo,’ I say, trying to shrink back from the hole. There’s a wind from it, coming rushing up and out, cold and laced with rain or spray.

They aren’t going to throw me down there, are they? The line about not shitting my pants and it not being dark wasn’t just a way to get me to comply this far, was it? I guess I could still try to make a break, to run. They can’t force me down there, can they? It’s not wide enough to just push me; I could grab the sides.

‘Night is better,’ Murdo’s saying. ‘Mist or fog is best.’

I can’t take my eyes off the waves, far below, moving slowly, cresting and breaking.

‘Better yet, if there’s earlier video from the CCTV of the person on the bridge, specially in the same clothes,’ Murdo says.

Oh, fuck. They have that. I was on the bridge waiting for Powell, just a couple of days ago. Wearing this jacket, too.

‘You tear the tape off their mouths,’ Murdo says. ‘They think they’ll get to scream or shout then,’ he tells me, ‘but you just do this.’

His right fist comes whipping round and punches me in the belly. I’m not ready for it and it sends the breath whistling out of me as I double up, folding around the ball of pain in my guts. Murdo and Norrie let me collapse, falling to my knees right in front of the hole, the wind from it buffeting my face. They’re still holding my jacket.

‘Bit harder than that, actually,’ Murdo says thoughtfully. ‘And there’s this really cool knot you can do, with rope, like. You just drop them through and keep a hold of the end. They canny move much or do anythin for the first wee bit but then the slack runs out and the knots come loose and you’ve got all the rope and they’re fallin like they were never tied up in the first place.’

‘Ellie taught us that knot,’ Norrie says proudly.

‘Norrie,’ Murdo breathes.

‘No sayin she knew what for,’ Norrie grumbles. ‘Or,’ he says brightly, like he’s just remembered, ‘you can just whap them over the back of the heid.’

Norrie illustrates his point with a light blow to the back of my head. I hardly notice. I’m too busy wheezing some breath back into my lungs, still convinced Murdo’s ruptured my spleen or prolapsed my stomach or something.

‘Aye,’ Murdo says. ‘No with a bat, though,’ he points out. ‘Injury’s too distinctive.’

‘Aye. Traumatic-injury blunt-profile object match,’ Norrie says, stumbling over the words and patently relishing getting to display some garbled snippet from CSI or Bones or whatever the fuck.

‘Old-fashioned lead-shot cosh,’ Murdo’s saying, with what might be professional pride or just outright relish. ‘That knocks them out so you can bundle them through. Chances are the signs won’t show up suspicious among all the other injuries from hitting the watter.’

‘No complaints so far, eh, Murd, eh?’ Norrie says.

‘No too many,’ Murdo says, then his voice alters, coming closer as he bends down, his mouth beside my ear. ‘So just watch what you ask about Callum,’ he says quietly. ‘Okay, Stewie?’ He clacks the iPhone painfully against my nose and lets it drop, sending it tumbling away, a glistening black slab somersaulting towards the grey waves.

I lose sight of it before it hits and its splash is lost amongst the breaking crests. I hear myself groaning. There was stuff in there I hadn’t backed up.

I’m dragged back to my feet, bundled back in the van.

They throw me out in the southern viewing area car park — the place where I sat with Powell Imrie in his Range Rover two days ago — sending me flying into the whin bushes that form one edge of the coach bays.

I don’t really notice the scratches from the whin thorns; just before they kick open the doors, Murdo says, ‘You won’t forget what we said about Ellie, eh?’ and punches me hard in the balls, so it’s a good ten minutes before I care about anything besides the astounding, sickening, writhing gouts of pain heaving out of my groin and wrapping themselves round my guts and brain.

Christ, it’s like being a wee bairn again. I have to waddle, to give my poor assaulted nuts sufficient room to hang without causing further excruciating pain. The last time I walked wide-legged like this, I was barely out of nappies and I’d just wet my pants getting all excited about being given a new balloon or something.

I make my way, gingerly, to the bridge control office. There’s an entry-phone guarding the deserted foyer on the ground floor of the three-storey building, where the tourist information office used to be, back when we could still afford such extravagance. I press the button. With any luck I’ll know somebody on duty. Ask them to call a taxi. I don’t think I’m capable of walking all the way over the bridge and back into town.

No luck; it’s kind of hard to hear with all the traffic but eventually we establish that nobody in the control room knows me and I’m politely informed it’s not policy to phone for taxis for members of the public, sir. No, there is no public phone available any more. I’m advised there’ll be a bus destined for the town centre available from the bus stop on the far side of the old toll plaza, just behind me, in … twenty-five minutes. I should take the underpass.

‘Thanks a lot,’ I tell the anonymous voice. The ‘fucking’ is silent.

I waddle to and down the steps and then along the underpass beneath the carriageway to the sound of trucks pounding above my head — I swear the subsonics alone are making my balls ache — then struggle up the steps at the far side and along through the newly resumed rain to the flimsy perspex bus shelter.

I sit perched carefully on an angled metal-and-plastic rail no wider than my hand, there to stop anyone doing anything as decadent as falling asleep. The rain rattles on the roof. The wind picks up, blowing in under the walls of the shelter and chilling my feet and ankles. Still the place smells of pee.

You can see why people must be so keen to sleep here.

I should get home to Mum and Dad’s and just fuck off back to London now, today, without waiting for tomorrow and the funeral or the day after and my booked flight back to London.

Only I don’t know that I’d be able to sit down for the hour or so it would take to return the car to Dyce. I’m still in some pain just from the punch to my belly, never mind the tender, jangling ultra-sensitivity and continuing sensation of nausea I’m getting from my testes. I feel beaten as well as beaten up; defeated, humiliated, worn out. If I did feel I could drive, I think I would: back to the airport for the next available flight or all the way to London, just me and the car, drop it at City airport and let them work out the charges.

I don’t think I want to tell anybody what just happened. I’m ashamed I was so easily huckled into the van, so incapable of resisting or talking my way out of the situation. I’d love to think it couldn’t happen again or I’d be able to take some sort of revenge on Murdo and Norrie, but I’m not like them, I’m not naturally violent or trained in it.

And they do have a point. I was asking about Callum when I guess it’s none of my business — I was just interested after what Grier had said and Ezzie being there seemed like too good an opportunity to miss — and I did hurt their sister and make the whole family look stupid, disrespected, even if it was five years ago. By their standards, I was very much asking for a kicking. Arguably, I’m lucky I got off with a mere punching.

People only resent, and start to hate, gangsters when they do something that seems unfair, or that impacts on them personally unjustly. If there’s a general feeling that people are only ever getting what was coming to them, and if any violence is kept within the confines of people who have put themselves in play, even potentially put themselves in harm’s way, then nobody really minds too much.

The Murstons and Mike Mac’s people aren’t above the law; the cops just turn a blind eye where it’s felt that the two families are effectively doing police business — keeping the Toun running smoothly, preserving professional, commercial, middle-class values and generally maintaining Stonemouth as a safe place to raise your children and do business.

It means that Murdo and his brothers get stuck with parking fines and speeding tickets like anybody else, and Callum didn’t get off on a charge of assault after an altercation in a bar when he was twenty, plus Mike Mac had to tear down an extension to an extension when he was unexpectedly refused planning permission, but the whole drug-dealing business goes quietly on with barely a ripple of interference and apparently it’s possible for the Murstons to commit murder with relative impunity if they feel they have to, dropping people off the road bridge.

Mike and Donald throw the cops the occasional tiddler every now and again, just to keep the drug-crime clear-up figures looking plausible and encourage the rest of the troops to stay in line, but they themselves are in no danger, providing they don’t get too greedy, or too flamboyant, or too self-important, or think they can do anything they want. They know the limitations, work within them.

Anyway, the trivial is punished while the gross stuff sails through unchallenged, and when you look at it like that, the whole set-up seems perverse and just wrong.

So the trick is not to look at it like that.

I was wearing a jacket and tie. Practically a blazer. Jeez, I’d thought I wouldn’t have to get dressed up to this sort of deeply uncool level for over a week, on the day of the wedding itself. But here I was, in the clubhouse of Olness Golf Club, at the invitation of Mike MacAvett, though apparently entirely with the blessing — and, indeed, probably at the instigation — of Donald Murston.

I stood in the bar, looking out to the dunes, trying to see the sea. Above a line of bushes just in front of the windows, wee white balls sailed into the air and dropped again, as people on the practice greens tried out their chip shots and sand wedges. I was the proud holder of a degree in fine arts and the offer of a job with an interesting-sounding building-lighting company, based in London but very much international. More money than I’d expected to be earning at this stage.

I’d had to concede that my earlier dreams of being a Mackintosh/Warhol/Koons de nos jours might have been a little overambitious. I’d found stuff I especially loved doing and got brilliant grades for, and a lot of it seemed to revolve around the use of light on interior and exterior surfaces. My degree show had been a triumph, a lecturer who was a fan had made some phone calls and people from lighting consultancies had come to have a look. One lot in particular seemed to appreciate what I’d been doing. They took me for dinner and made me the offer that evening. In theory I was still thinking about it but I was going to say yes. I’d talked to Ellie and she was okay with moving to London, once she’d completed the fourth and final year of her inherently complicated course; it’d be a new challenge, a new era, and, besides, there were plenty of flights from City airport to Dyce.

In a little over a week I’d be a married man. It still seemed slightly unreal. Sometimes these days I felt like my own body double — being told to stand here, strike this pose, now walk over here — while the real me, the famous me, sat in his luxury trailer and waited for the call. Other times I felt like I was auditioning for a part in my own lifestory, which would start to take place after these slightly ramshackle, part-improvised rehearsals had been concluded and the producer/director finally pronounced himself happy.

The little white balls rose and fell above the line of bushes in the rosy early-evening light, like especially well-groomed sand hoppers.

That first night by the fire with Ellie seemed a very long time ago.

A group of guys at the bar laughed loudly, as though it was a competition. I hooked a finger into the gap between my neck and my shirt collar, working it a bit looser. I fucking hated ties. I hoped they wouldn’t expect me to wear a tie at work. I was going to wear a clip-on bow tie for the wedding next week. I’d been bought a kilty outfit in the clan tartan by Mum and Dad. The Murstons had been going to set us up in a house locally but were now talking about finding a flat in London for us, assuming I took this job.

I’d already had what had felt like a semi-formal meeting with Don, up at the house.

We were well past the what-are-your-intentions-young-man? stage. I was marrying his eldest daughter, the wedding was pretty much fully organised and everything was arranged. Mrs Murston had taken over almost from the start after our original idea of running off to Bermuda or Venice or somewhere — either just the two of us or with a very few close friends — had been dismissed as Not Good Enough. Ellie had put her foot down just once, regarding the dress. She wanted, and had had a friend design, something simple; Mrs M had wanted something that wouldn’t have been out of place on My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding. (Allegedly; I hadn’t been allowed to see the designs for either. Clearly, a few centuries back, some rule-obsessed, OCD nut-job had been allowed to dream up the absurd ‘traditions’ surrounding weddings, and the groom not seeing the dress was one of them.)

At one point during our chat Donald had asked me what I believed in. I was momentarily stumped. Did he mean religion-wise?

We were having a Church of Scotland wedding, though nobody involved seemed to be especially religious. Including the minister — we’d talked. ‘To be perfectly honest, Stewart,’ he’d told me, tented fingers supporting his bearded chin, ‘I see priests and ministers and so on primarily as social workers in fancy dress.’ And him wearing jeans and a jumper.

I think the potential for spectacle offered by the rather grand Abbey on Clyn Road had had a lot to do with the choice of venue, and Mrs M was treating the need for any sort of religious component within the service as being a sort of slightly annoying non-optional theme, like a rather elaborate dress code.

I hadn’t even been sure the Murstons were Prods at all. I’d known that, like most right-thinking people in the region, they were devout Press and Journalists — of course — but their religious affiliations had never seemed germane before.

‘Well, I’m not really religious,’ I’d told Donald. We were sipping single malts, just the two of us, at the well-stocked bar in what he called his rumpus room, part of the extensive cellar area beneath Hill House. ‘I suppose I believe in truth.’

‘Truth?’ Donald said, brows furrowing.

‘Not as an abstract entity,’ I’d told him. ‘More as something you have to seek out and face up to. Rationalism; science. You know.’

Donald had looked like he really didn’t know at all. ‘Have more whisky, son,’ he’d said, reaching for the bottle.

Now it was a few days later and I’d been summoned to the highly prestigious Olness Golf Club — home of a course worthy of being mentioned in the same veneratingly hushed breath as Carnoustie, Troon, Muirfield and even the hallowed Old Course — to Meet People.

‘Stewart! Here you are,’ Mike Mac said, coming up, pumping my hand and leading me back towards the dining room. ‘Didn’t realise you were here. Come on, come and meet people. Hope you brought a good appetite. You not got a drink yet? Dearie me. We’ll soon fix that.’

We were in a private dining room off the main one.

Fuck me, I was being introduced to the Chief Constable for the whole region, a brace of town councillors and local businessmen, and our MEP. I’d heard of these people, I’d seen them on TV. The Chief Constable looked entirely comfortable out of uniform.

I had no idea what I was doing there. They talked about holidays just past or planned, fishing quotas, trying to encourage planning applications from supermarkets other than Tesco, investments, fly-fishing beats, the next Ryder cup, Donald Trump, the placing of speed cameras and the latest travails of Aberdeen (the football club, not the city).

They all seemed like friends but not friends; there was a sort of polite wariness mixed in with the bonhomie, a reserve that accompanied all the urbane good-chappery. However, they were articulate, intelligent people, with that gloss of power it’s hard not to feel a little excited by. They were quite sure of themselves and they weren’t bad company, especially as we worked our way through the selection of specially chosen wines. Olness Golf Club had a sommelier! Who knew? (I was probably being terribly naive.)

Sitting in a sort of upmarket version of a snug bar afterwards, I got to talk to the Chief Constable, then our MEP, Alan Lounds. He was very smooth. The Chief Constable had been pretty smooth, but Alan the Member of the European Parliament was smoother still. Apart from anything else he had the sort of deep, resonant, perfectly modulated voice you could imagine women swooning over, the sort of voice you just wanted to listen to, having it poured over you, wallowing in it. A voice so seductive it scarcely mattered what he was actually saying with it.

Technically Alan was an Independent; mostly he voted with the centre left or centre right, depending. Independent politicians are something of a tradition up here; I think we resent the idea of the people we vote for having any loyalty to a party that might compromise their responsibility to us.

He and I got to talking, over some more single malts, forming our own little subcommittee slightly apart from the rest of the guys.

‘Quite a family you’re marrying into,’ Alan said (I’d been told to call him Alan. ‘Call me Alan,’ — that’s what he’d said).

‘Really just marrying the girl, to be honest, Alan.’

‘Hmm.’ Alan smiled and tipped his head just so. I got the impression I’d just said something perfectly charming but completely wrong. Alan was small-to-medium, but he carried himself tall. He was tanned, with dark, tightly curled hair, neatly trimmed. He had rugged good looks and eyes somewhere between seen-it-all and twinkly. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s a family that’s important to the town, to the region, even.’

‘I guess,’ I said. Important when you want to buy drugs, certainly, I thought about saying. I didn’t, obviously.

‘You haven’t any reservations, have you?’ he asked me.

‘Reservations?’

‘Well, we all know the reputation Donald and the family have,’ Alan said in his best we’re-all-men-of-the-world tones. ‘The … complicated relationship they have with the more … obvious forces of law and order.’

What? I cleared my throat to give myself time to double-check with my short-term memory what I thought I’d just heard. ‘You’re saying they’re part of the forces of law and order?’

‘Not officially, obviously,’ Alan said, smiling. He sighed. ‘Though, playing devil’s advocate, you might claim they help to keep the peace, so qualify in a sort of honorary capacity.’ He gestured with one hand. ‘Not the sort of analysis Sun readers would understand, but it has a certain internal logic to it, don’t you think?’

‘I suppose,’ I said. I might have looked slightly shocked, or just wary.

Alan sat forward, drawing me in towards him as we cradled our whisky glasses. ‘Does it … worry you, knowing the full range of the Murston clan’s business interests?’ he asked, still with a smile. He glanced over towards Mike Mac, who was deep in conversation with the Chief Constable. ‘Not to mention Mike, over there?’

‘Only a little,’ I said.

It was true I’d thought about what would happen if things changed and the Murstons were busted as a family. What would Ellie and I do if Donald and the boys were thrown into prison? How would Ellie be affected? She wouldn’t be implicated, would she? Could I be, just by association? If they bought us a flat, could we lose it? Frankly it didn’t worry me that much because I couldn’t see it happening. But you’d be stupid not to think about it.

Alan nodded, looked serious. ‘Well, I’m glad you say only a little. That’s … that’s very realistic, that’s very mature.’ He laughed. ‘Listen to me; that sounded patronising, didn’t it? Beg your pardon, Stewart. Guess I’m just relieved. Thing is, we live in a less than ideal world, do we not? In an ideal world maybe we’d have a more evidence-led, harm-reduction-based set of drug laws, but the brutal truth is that we don’t live in an ideal world; nothing like it. We have to do the best with what we’re faced with. As long as it remains political suicide to talk about legalisation, we’re all faced with trying to cope the best we can with our current laws, irrational though they may be, and also with the fact that people just like getting wasted, stoned, out of their heads one way or another, legal or not and whether we like it or not.’ He tapped his whisky glass with one manicured fingernail, grinning briefly before going back to serious mode. ‘One way or another we have to manage the problem. We need, in effect, to emplace our own harm-reduction programme in the absence of one agreed on internationally or even nationally. And that, frankly, is where Donald and Mike come in. Along with the local police, of course — we are all in this together. Forgive the cliché.’

‘You’re a politician,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it up to you guys to start changing things?’

Alan laughed indulgently. ‘Oh, I’m just a humble MEP. My hands are tied. In case you hadn’t noticed, my constituents choose me; I don’t choose them.’ He paused, smiled, as though waiting for the applause to die down. ‘I’d have to wait for a sea-change back here in dear old Blighty before I could join any consensus in Brussels. Sticking your head above the parapet on drugs just gets it blown off, then you’re no good to anyone.’

‘So we’re waiting for Rupert Murdoch’s heirs to take over, or Lord Rothermere’s, before it’s safe? Assuming they have a more rational set of views.’

Alan laughed quietly. ‘Well, if it was even that simple … The thing is, rationality is like probity, incorruptibility: awfully desirable in theory, but you’ll waste your life if you wait for it to become … the default, as it were. The kind of papers and attitudes we’re talking about might seem full of transparent nonsense to you and me, but they work; they sell, they’re popular, and when it comes to how people vote …’ He drew in a deep, dearie-me-type breath through his teeth. ‘Well, either the masses are as conservative and right-wing as they vote, if you see what I mean, or they’re terribly easily fooled and deserve what they get for being that gullible, frankly. Neither speaks very well of them, or us as a species, you could argue, but there we are, that’s what we’re faced with.’ He sipped from his drink. ‘Bankers’ bonuses all round, eh?’ He nodded as his gaze wandered round the others in the room. ‘I think you’ll find that same attitude, with a leaning towards the not-conservative-just-fools choice, is shared by pretty much everybody in this room. Doesn’t make us bad people, Stewart, just makes us smart and the rest not. But, yes, you obviously appreciate the problem.’

I leaned in a bit closer. So did he. ‘Yeah,’ I said quietly, ‘but it’s still all a load of shite, though, isn’t it?’

He smiled. ‘I’m afraid it is, Stewart,’ he said, and sighed. ‘I’m afraid it is.’ He inspected his glass. ‘We all start out as idealists. I certainly did. I hope I still am, deep down. But idealism meets the real world sooner or later, and then you just have to …’

‘Compromise.’

‘I hope you’re not one of those people who thinks that’s a dirty word,’ Alan said, with a forgiving, understanding expression. (I just smiled.) ‘Marriage is about compromising,’ he told me. ‘Families are about compromising, being anything other than a hermit is about compromising. Parliamentary democracy certainly is.’ He snorted. ‘Nothing but.’ He drained his glass. ‘You either learn to compromise or you resign yourself to shouting from the sidelines for the rest of your life.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘Or you arrange to become a dictator. There’s always that, I suppose.’ He shrugged. ‘Not a great set of choices, really, but that’s the price we pay for living together. And it’s that or solitude. Then you really do become a wanker. Another drink?’

12

A red Toyota estate swings into the bus stop, splashing to a halt right at the entrance. The person inside leans over, reaching to push open the passenger side door.

My idiot heart leaps as I think, Maybe it’s her! But it isn’t. It’s not Grier, either. It’s a guy I recognise from High School, I think.

‘Stewart, thought that was you! Want a lift?’

‘Yeah. Yeah, ah … Cheers.’

I get in and sit down, carefully. Not carefully enough, though; a spear of pain jerks from my groin to my brain, making my eyes water. However, the jolt seems to dislodge the memory of who the guy is. He’s Craig Jarvey, from the year below ours.

‘Thought that was you,’ he says again as we rejoin the northbound traffic. He’s plump, fresh-faced, with unruly blond hair. He’s suited and tied and there are what look like carpet sample books all over the back seat.

‘Thanks, Craig.’

‘Aye, I always looks to see if there’s somebody I know at that bus stop. Specially if it’s raining.’

‘You’re a gent.’

‘You okay?’

‘I’ve had better days.’ I grin a rather mirthless grin at his openly interested and concerned face. We’re on the bridge now and I can feel the bump of every expansion joint passing under the car’s wheels and up through the seat to my still excessively tender balls. ‘It’s complicated,’ I tell him. ‘You don’t want to know, trust me.’

‘Ah,’ he says, nodding.

We crest the bridge’s shallow summit. The red and white striped tent that was on the other carriageway is gone; the twin lanes of traffic thunder on by.

Lauren McLaughley and Drew Linton were getting married.

Lauren was one of Ellie’s best friends, another Academy girl. She got engaged to Drew about the same time Ellie got engaged to me and they’d both wanted a wedding the following summer. At one stage the two girls had talked about having a joint wedding, but both mothers had smiled the sort of polite but steely smile that made it abundantly clear that that proposal really wasn’t going to do, now, was it? So Lauren and Drew were getting married the week before Ellie and me, and having a two-part honeymoon — a castle hotel in the western Highlands and a designer boutique place in Santorini — so that they could attend our wedding too.

They got married in the Abbey. Lauren’s mum looked very proud, though Ellie’s mum looked the more triumphant, rather as if the whole thing — splendid though it no doubt was, in its own small way — was just a dress-rehearsal for her own daughter’s rather more impressive event in a week’s time.

The reception was in the Mearnside Hotel, Stonemouth’s grandest venue for nearly a century, a mini Gleneagles built on the whinny hill overlooking the fairways of Olness with views beyond its sheltering screen of trees to the dunes and the sea.

Now that I’ve been to a few English weddings where they seem to expect the bride and groom to leave the party before the fun really starts, I’m better able to appreciate how good a traditional, thorough-going Scottish wedding really is, for all concerned — though especially, of course, for the guests. At the time I just thought all weddings were like this.

I walked into the ballroom where the reception was being held: maybe twenty tables of ten places each in one half of the room, leaving the other half free for dancing. I didn’t doubt that if Ellie and I had been going to have two hundred guests, we’d now be looking at two-ten, minimum.

The ceilidh band was just setting up: moody-looking guys about my age in black kilts, dreads and chunky boots. They were called Caul of the Wild and were probably sore they hadn’t thought of Red Hot Chilli Pipers first. Later on there would be a disco but before that there’d be the sort of yee-hooch, swing-your-granny-by-the-toe stuff that’s required to accompany the kind of dancing they teach you at school in these parts, with bracing titles like Eightsome Reel, Dashing White Sergeant and Strip the Willow.

Full-on Scottish country dancing like this is a sight and a sound to behold, and not for the faint-hearted. Aside from a few gentle dances like the St Bernard’s Waltz — basically for the grans and grandads, so they can shuffle round the floor recalling past and limber glories while everybody else is at the bar — it’s all fairly demented stuff, with rugby-scrum-sized packs of drunken people whirling round the room in progressively more fragmented rabbles trying to remember what the hell happens next.

The Gay Gordons is effectively choreographed chaos and an Eightsome Reel is a deranged marathon requiring a PhD in dance. Two hundred and fifty-six bars of dashing, reversing, turning, skipping, pas-de-basing, jump-stepping, successively-partner-swapping-until-you-get-back-to-the-one-you-started-with music is common, but the Eightsome properly lasts for four hundred and sixty-four bars, and no matter how fit you are at the start it’s always awfully good to get to the end.

I felt a sharp tap-tap on the back of my head, just above my neck. This would be Grier: her traditional greeting for almost as long as I’d known her. I turned and there she was: seventeen and a Goth, head to foot in black.

‘You have to dance with me,’ she told me, sounding very serious and looking at me from under her jet-black fringe. She had glossy black fingernails, white make-up, kohl-black eyes. ‘You’d better not say no; I’m thinking of becoming a witch.’

‘No problem, Gree,’ I told her. I surveyed her black-crêpe, long-sleeved, polo-necked dress, black tights and black suede shoes. The heels were breathtakingly high. Thought she looked taller. ‘Like the gear,’ I told her. ‘Very ninja.’

‘I don’t want to be called Gree any more.’

‘Back to Grier?’

‘Yes. On pain of death!’ She waggled her black fingernails at me.

‘Fair enough.’ I looked round. ‘Where are you sitting?’

‘We have a table at the back of beyond, in the far wilderness, by the doors to the kitchen,’ Grier said, pointing.

‘Right. So.’ I frowned. ‘A witch? Seriously?’

She waggled her fingers in front of my face again. ‘I have powers, you know,’ she announced. I suspected her eyes had narrowed: hard to tell with the fringe. ‘Powers you know nothing of!’

‘Jings.’

‘Don’t mock me, puny man,’ she growled.

‘Okay … impressive teenager,’ I growled back, leaning forward and doing some magic-trick-distraction hand waving of my own.

‘A dance,’ she told me, eyes flashing. ‘Don’t forget.’ She stalked off, teetering on her high heels.

She missed my probably inappropriately sardonic salute of acquiescence.

At the welcome drinks tables, covered in glasses of whisky, bubbles and Tropicana, I met Ferg, resplendent in full kilty outfit. I wore dark-blue suede shoes, a perfectly serviceable pair of black M&S trousers, a so-dark-blue-it’s-black velvet jacket picked up for a pittance from a charity shop on Byres Road (worn ironically, obviously) and a cheeky red shirt with a bootlace tie.

‘Gilmour,’ Ferg said, ‘you look like the croupier on an Albanian cruise liner.’

‘Hilarious! Epic! Yeah. And you finally found a tartan to compliment your vacuity: Clan Thermos. Well done. Evening, Ferg.’

‘Anyway, enough. Who or what was that?’ he asked, going up on tiptoes to look back at where I’d just been.

‘That? That was Grier. Grier Murston. Going to be my sister-in-law in a week.’

‘She’s quite … severe,’ he said, drinking from the first of the two whiskies he’d picked up. ‘I think I quite like her.’

‘She’s still a kid, Ferg. Grier’s a late developer. Always has been.’

‘What? She’s not even legal?’

‘She’s seventeen. She’s legal but she’s probably best left alone.’

We were strolling towards the tables now. I looked round to make sure none of Grier’s brothers was overhearing Ferg talk like this about their kid sister.

‘Ooh, am I being warned off?’ Ferg asked.

‘Yes. Seriously, pick on somebody your own gender.’

‘Hmm. Probably. But I feel I need to keep my hand in. I say hand.’ He looked at me and shook his head. ‘Really. Did you get dressed in the dark again?’

‘Fuck off.’

‘Wait a minute; your parents are away, aren’t they? You got dressed by yourself! It all starts to make sense now.’

‘It’s their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary? They’re on a cruise in the Med.’

‘And are those blue suede shoes?’

‘They are indeed.’

‘Christ! I trust you’re thinking of something a little more formal for your own be-shackling next week.’

‘Full Highland hoo-ha. I shall be dressed like a shortbread tin.’

‘Can’t wait.’

‘You started that speech yet?’ Ferg was, slightly against my own better judgement, my Best Man.

He looked thoughtful. ‘I thought I’d just extemporise, do it as a sort of stand-up gig?’

‘Dear God, please say you’re joking.’

‘Holy piss up a rope, who’s that?’

‘Who?’

‘There, in the red.’

‘Where?’

‘There! Good grief, did you see her already and wank yourself blind?’

‘Ah. That’s Jel. Anjelica MacAvett?’

‘Ay, caramba,’ Ferg breathed, ‘I leave the place for three years to get a proper education and the bumpkins suddenly all turn luscious. Look at her! If I wasn’t bi already I swear I’d turn, just on the chance of getting nuts deep into that.’

‘Ever the romantic,’ I sighed.

Actually Jel was looking pretty fabulous; she wore a stunning red dress, high-necked but with a shoulder-to-shoulder window cut across the top of her breasts, and split from ankle to mid-thigh. Long red satin gloves stretching to above her elbows. Waist narrow enough to be wearing a corset. We were not the only guys looking at her as she stood by one of the tables, smiling as she talked to some white-haired oldies. Her hair was the colour of champagne, and as bubbly: a cascade suffused with ringlets.

‘Wasn’t she the dumpy bairn that used to jump on your lap and tell you she loved you? Usually at a crucial point in Doom, as I recall.’

‘I missed a few high scores that way.’

‘Fuck me,’ Ferg muttered. ‘You wouldn’t push her off and give her fifty pence to go away now.’

I looked round for Ellie, who’d stopped to talk to some old school pals as we’d entered the hotel foyer. El was as tall, elegant and cool in electric blue as Jel was small, curvaceous and, well, blisteringly sexy in red. No sign.

A small boy suddenly appeared in front of us clutching a camera in his chubby hands and pointing it vaguely towards Ferg and me. The flash went off and the boy scuttled away giggling. There had been a few blue-white flashes in other parts of the room over the last minute or so, most emanating from below table height.

‘Is there a knee-level identity parade later or what?’ Ferg asked, mystified.

‘I’d get used to it,’ I told him, dark spots dancing in front of my eyes. ‘Drew’s dad thought it would be a hoot to give all the small children cheap digi cameras, to keep the little scamps amused.’

Ferg appeared confused. ‘Drew? Who’s Drew?’

I looked at him. ‘The groom, Ferg?’

‘Oh.’ Ferg nodded, finished his second whisky. ‘That’s nice. So we’re going to have hip-high Toun bairns spatting about the place, letting off camera flashes all evening?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Cripes. Could be a long night.’

‘Wait till they show the results on the big screen,’ I said, nodding at the stage.

‘Dear Christ, have they no pity?’

‘Prepare yourself for a lot of photos of floor tiles and table legs. Oh, and corners.’

‘Corners?’

‘Kids love corners. Find them terribly photogenic. No idea why.’

‘Fuck.’ Ferg looked suitably appalled. ‘It’s the new slide carousel. Inhuman.’ He shook dramatically and sucked the last dregs of whisky from his glass. ‘This calls for a pint. Where’s the bar?’ He glanced round. ‘It is free, isn’t it?’

‘Hey, Stewart.’

I’d just finished my coffee after the meal. Ellie’s cup of tea lay where it had been left, untouched, just like her main course had been; she’d spent most of the meal dashing off to see people and was currently nowhere to be found. I’d done a little room-working myself, and Mike Mac had stopped by, sat and had a fairly phatic natter a few minutes earlier.

I turned round as a hand rested on my shoulder. ‘Jolie! Good to see you!’ I stood up and we hugged, only slightly awkwardly, given she was holding a wee girl in one arm. ‘And who’s this?’

‘This is Hannah,’ Jolie told me, smiling broadly.

‘Hello, Hannah,’ I said, though the bairn was shy and turned away, burying her face in Jolie’s shoulder-length brown hair.

‘Two next month,’ Jolie said.

I stroked the back of one of Hannah’s hands with a finger. The wee fist took an even tighter grip of her mum’s hair. ‘She’s gorgeous,’ I said. Hannah pressed her face deeper in towards Jolie’s neck. ‘Third one?’ I asked. ‘Or have there been more?’

‘Third,’ Jolie said, ‘and I think we’ll stop there. Three’s quite enough.’

Jolie McColl was my first girlfriend, the first girl I took on proper dates and had any sort of extended relationship with. Medium height and build, glossy, thickly heavy hair and a face that looked nice enough but plain only until she smiled, when rooms lit up.

I have to keep reminding myself ours was a relatively innocent relationship because although we never did have full-on sex there was a lot of everything else just short of it. Not for the want of me trying, begging and wheedling, mind, but Jolie was not to be moved; hands-down-pants and up-skirt mutual pleasuring was fine, and she was perfectly happy to go down on me, but her knickers might as well have been held on with superglue.

I suppose now it wouldn’t seem so terrible — we had a lot of fun together and a lot of this nine-tenths sex — but when you’re sixteen, bubbling with hormones and your friends are, allegedly, getting properly, penetratively and frequently laid all over the place, this not being allowed to Go All The Way seems to matter a hell of a lot.

Jolie’s attitude was that what we had was close enough to sex for it not really to matter. She wanted to stay a virgin, maybe until she was married and/or settled down and had kids. Only maybe, though; possibly she’d change her mind, so this restriction wasn’t necessarily for ever. What she wasn’t going to be was pressured or bullied into sex, by me or some of her so-called girlfriends.

I admired and respected her resolution absolutely, I just wished it didn’t affect me personally and drive me to bouts of such wild, so-near-and-yet-so-far frustration.

In the end my metaphorical cherry was popped when I had my one-night stand with Kat Naughton, on what had started out as just a lads-only drinking night. Arguably that would have relaxed me and I’d have been happy to give Jolie as long as she wanted to come round to the idea of us being proper lovers; however, somebody told her about me and Kat, and we had this big argument and split up.

We didn’t talk for about a year, then we did, then we became friends again. Not good friends, but more than just civil. She’d settled down a couple of years ago with a nice guy called Mark who worked on the rig-supply boats; last I’d heard they’d had two children, both boys. Now, there was Hannah as well. Jolie was a friend of Lauren, and Ellie and I had invited her and Mark to our wedding too.

‘How’s Mark?’ I asked.

‘Fine. Working this weekend. He’ll be here for you and Ellie’s.’ Jolie looked at Hannah, who was peeking at me through her mum’s hair. ‘Left the boys with Mum but thought I’d bring this one along to see her first wedding.’

‘I was just on my way to the bar. Get you anything?’

‘I’ll come along. G&T for me.’

‘Any tips?’

‘What for?’

‘A happy marriage.’

‘I’m not married?’

‘As good as, though, yeah?’

‘As good as,’ Jolie conceded.

We were sitting at her table. It was mostly deserted as people danced. She watched Hannah tentatively exploring the seats and sections of table close to where we sat. Hannah looked back at Jolie every now and again. I’d caught a glimpse of Ellie, dancing.

‘Let me think,’ Jolie said. ‘I know: don’t have children.’

‘Eh?’ I said.

‘Seriously.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Your decision, the two of you, obviously,’ Jolie said. ‘But, yes, that’s my advice.’

‘But you’ve got three!’

‘So I know what I’m talking about.’ Jolie waved at Hannah, who was holding onto a chair at another table a few metres away. Jolie looked back to me and gave a small laugh. She leaned forward and patted me on the hand. ‘And I love them all dearly,’ she said, in a sort of there-there-it’s-all-right voice, ‘and I wouldn’t be without them, and I love Mark too and he makes me feel loved and cherished and protected and all that, but if I could rewind the clock, had never had the kids, didn’t know them as people … No, I wouldn’t have any.’

‘Fuck!’ I breathed, then glanced guiltily at Hannah, though she was probably too far away to hear; the music was loud. ‘Beg your pardon.’ I leaned closer. ‘But why not?’

Jolie played with her empty G&T glass, revolving it on the white tablecloth. ‘Oh, just because they take over your life. They become your life. I sort of had plans? But, well.’

I felt shocked. Jolie had been a great snowboarder and her ambition had been to represent the UK at the Olympics, and she had wanted to be a doctor: specifically a cancer specialist, after watching her mum’s mum waste away. I wasn’t sure what to say.

‘Another G&T?’ I asked.

She smiled. ‘Why not?’

Heading for the bar, I caught a glimpse of electric blue, bright in the flash of a camera, and saw Ellie, polkaing wildly with a guy I half recognised. I waved, but she was too busy trying not to get her feet stood on.

When I came back from the bar, two couples had sat back down at the table, red-faced after the latest dance. Hannah was on Jolie’s lap. Hannah sniffed, as if she’d been crying.

‘Got a flash right in her face,’ Jolie told me.

‘Aw,’ I said to Hannah. She turned away a little, but then looked back. I got a wee smile. A tiny wee smile, and my heart melted. I looked back at her mum, frowning a lot and shaking my head.

‘Seriously seriously?’

Jolie laughed. Hannah gazed straight up at her mum’s chin.

‘Stewart,’ Jolie said, smiling, ‘I love them, they mean everything to me, I’m happy with Mark and this is my life now and I’ve accepted that, but you asked for a tip and that’s mine.’ She sighed. ‘Though, of course, you’re the man. As a tip, I suppose it’s not really directed at you.’ She looked down at Hannah, carefully smoothing her fine auburn hair. ‘Everybody says kids are what it’s all about, don’t they? But then that just means you have kids so they can have kids and then those kids can have kids too, and so on and so on ad infinitum, and you have to stop at some point and think, Hold on, shouldn’t some of it be about me, or, well, about any of the people from any of those generations? Shouldn’t we have something else apart from just being a link in this chain of procreation for the sake of it?’ She sighed again, arranged Hannah’s hair just so. ‘Not as though the human race is in any danger of dying out. And we have choice, now.’

‘No time machines, though.’

‘No, no time machines,’ she agreed. Her smile was still as beautiful as it had been.

‘Intending to pass this tip on to Hannah?’ I asked quietly.

Jolie shrugged. ‘Hope I have the courage to,’ she said. ‘Probably not the boys; they won’t take any notice of me anyway.’ Jolie smiled ruefully and lifted her child up to cuddle her again.

‘You two okay?’ said a concerned female voice, and I turned to find the stunning vision of curvaceous pulchritude that was Anjelica MacAvett, a vision in crimson at my side. A wave of her perfume rolled over me.

Jolie smiled. ‘We’re fine,’ she told Jel.

‘Can I borrow him?’ Jel asked. ‘It’s an Eightsome Reel; all hands report to the dance floor.’

‘He’s not mine to lend,’ Jolie said, hugging Hannah to her. ‘You can have him.’

‘Stop groaning,’ Jel said, using a finger to flick me on the ear. She was still wearing the long red satin gloves.

‘Not an Eightsome,’ I said, though I was already starting to get up out of my seat. ‘Do I have to?’

‘Thanks,’ Jel told Jolie, then to me, ‘Yes. Stop being such an old man. Get your ass out there.’

‘Me legs, me feet, me old war wound,’ I said in a weak, wavering voice. I was pushed hard in the small of the back, towards the dance floor.

Omens, portents. A fire alarm went off just after the Eightsome Reel finished. Everybody — standing at the bar, sitting at tables, trudging wearily off the dance floor — just looked at one another with that Oh, come on look, but then the staff started ushering everybody outside.

‘Aw, blinkin heck,’ I said — very restrainedly, I thought, ‘we’re not even going to get to sit down!’

‘Nearest fire exit’s behind us,’ one of the guys pointed out, so Jel and I and the other six of our Eightsome survivors group found ourselves shambling down a brightly lit service corridor. I was arm in arm with Jel, who was wincing with each step. She got me to stop briefly, leaning against me as she slipped her shoes off. We hobbled the rest of the way to the fire doors at the rear of the hotel.

‘Great, the bins,’ Jel said with a sigh, surveying the less than lovely backyard full of industrial-size refuse bins we’d emerged into. She put her shoes back on.

‘Chaps? Chapesses? Think the assembly area’s round the front of the hotel,’ our group know-it-all announced.

‘I’m sitting here,’ Jel announced, lowering herself delicately onto one of three red, sun-faded plastic chairs, which looked like they were there for when the smokers amongst the staff wanted a fag break.

I tried Ellie’s phone, but it wasn’t on or had no reception. Everybody else was wandering off towards the assembly area in the car park round the front.

‘Go, go,’ Jel said, when she saw me hesitating. ‘I’m fine. See you back in there.’

The best part of two hundred and fifty people were swirling about the car park. A lot of them had brought glasses and bottles outside with them. The evening was pleasantly warm, the air was clear out over the sands, and the water was dark blue with pink clouds piled just over the horizon. The party had just moved outside. It helped that it was so obviously a false alarm, with no smoke or flames visible coming from the hotel, so everybody was confident we’d be back inside again soon to continue the fun.

I moved around, said hellos, shook hands, high-fived, and air-kissed various cheeks as I meandered through the press of bodies. My blue-suede shoes attracted a few comments, almost all of them favourable. I got a beery one-arm hug from Murdo Murston, a nod from Donald and a smile from Mrs M.

‘Aye, we’ll make a Murston out of ye yet!’ Callum said, gripping me in a full-on bear-hug and trying to get my feet off the ground, but failing. He smelled of Morgan’s Spiced Rum and I could see hints of white powder in his patchy moustache. That was a surprise in itself; Donald was known to disapprove strongly of the boys partaking. ‘We’ll make a Murston out of ye yet!’ he said again, in case I hadn’t heard him the first time. Even so, he still liked this phrase so much he repeated it a few more times.

There had been a little light joshing over the last couple of months about it maybe making more sense for me to take Ellie’s surname rather than her to take mine, or — as we’d made quite clear — what would be happening: us keeping our own names and double-barrelling our surnames for any children. Probably. Light joshing in Murston terms involved what would look to most people like serious intimidatory bullying, but — with Ellie’s help — I’d stood up to it pretty well, I thought.

A big cheer went up from the crowd as Josh MacAvett arrived in a taxi, fresh off a plane from London; I stopped to say hi, then went on trying to find Ellie. I accepted a couple of sips of wine and beer from happy revellers, and a toke on a joint from Ferg, skulking with some other smokers by some interesting topiary near the top of the steps that led down to lower garden terraces.

Which was where I caught another glimpse of electric blue, and walked down and along a terrace and found Ellie in a clinch, basically, with the guy she’d been dancing with earlier. I recognised him now; he was the guy she’d gone out with before Josh MacAvett, the guy I’d always suspected had been her first lover, the guy who’d taken her virginity. Dean somebody. Dean Watts. That was him.

They were on a terrace one level further down, standing, his hands cupping her backside.

I think my mouth fell open. I stopped, stared. So far, they hadn’t seen me. The way they were standing, Ellie with her back to me, he was the one most likely to spot me. I just stood there, crossed my arms.

What the fuck, was all I could think. What the fuck?

It was weird; I felt sort of hollow, emptied out, all dredged of feeling. I felt I ought to feel shocked, horrified, angry and betrayed — I wanted to feel those things — but I didn’t. My main reaction just seemed to be: Oh.

And the aforementioned, What the fuck?

I could hear sirens in the distance.

A breeze brought their voices and a hint of Ellie’s perfume up to me. ‘No, listen, Dean, stop. No, no, just stop,’ I heard Ellie say as he tried to kiss her again. Dean was maybe my height: dark hair, pretty fit-looking. Kilty outfit, sporran currently to the side, where you put it to dance. Or if you’re hoping for a shag, I suppose. Ellie pushed him away. ‘That’s enough.’

‘Aw, come on. Old times’ sake, El,’ Dean said, pulling her back towards him. They’d turned a little by now so I wouldn’t be in his line of sight if he just raised his eyes.

‘No! I shouldn’t have let you kiss me, let alone — no! Come on, before somebody sees us.’

This should have been Dean’s cue to look about, maybe see me, but he only had eyes for Ellie. She did look good in that dress: hair still up, just a few wisps shaken loose by dancing.

‘That all you’re worried ab—’ he started to say.

‘No! No, it’s not! Just stop. Come on; let’s head back. It’s just a false alarm.’

‘Aw, El, come on, you know you—’

‘Will you just—’

‘Hon, you’re not even married yet; come on.’

‘This isn’t—’

Dean tried hard to bring her close enough to kiss again, pulling at her, making El bend back and push hard against him, protesting.

Finally she stamped on his right brogue with her heel, leaving him hopping and going ‘Ow!’ Then she slapped him on the cheek for good measure. I didn’t think people slapped like that any more, only in movies. Looked like a sting-y one. Good for you, lass, I thought. Ellie marched off for the nearest steps, leaving Dean to half sit, half fall onto a bench.

I pressed part-way into a handy bush but Ellie didn’t look right or left as she walked purposefully up the steps. I gave it a minute or so, feeling oddly complicit, even guilty. I smelled tobacco smoke and peeked out again; Dean was sitting smoking a fag and gazing — I was guessing ruefully — out to sea.

There. Nothing had really happened; just a blip. A trying, a testing, and Ellie had pretty much passed. At least as well as I’d have, in similar circumstances, I supposed. But it was over, and I’d been right not to react immediately. Hanging back, not being impetuous, had been the right thing to do. Maybe I really was starting to get mature after all. I could forget about this.

I went up the steps and found Ellie after a minute, talking to some mutual pals. ‘Here you are,’ I said, just as the fire brigade arrived.

There was some quite vocal female appreciation of the firemen, and some grumbling male resentment that the womenfolk were so easily distracted, but the boys in the yellow helmets were gone within ten minutes and we all filed back into the hotel, emergency over.

I thought I’d better check that Jel knew it was safe to come back in.

She was still in the plastic chair, talking to one of the hotel waitresses. Jel’s feet were still sore so I carried her back in.

‘This a fireman’s lift?’ she asked as I walked up the service corridor with her in my arms, one of her hands round my neck and her other carrying the stilettos.

‘No, more just your standard Hollywood guy-carrying-girl grip.’

‘Girl could get used to this,’ she told me, smiling conspiratorially. ‘Hope El realises what a lucky girl she is.’

‘Yup; so do I.’

I was about to kick open the door to the ballroom when I saw her looking at me. I hesitated. ‘What?’

She looked at me levelly for a moment or two. Her perfume filled the air.

Jel sighed. ‘Nothing,’ she told me. ‘You better put me down here. I can hobble the rest.’

‘Aye, next time we’re all here, probably be fur ma funeral. Ye’ll come fur that, eh?’

‘Joe, do you mind? Next time we’re all here is next week, for my wedding, mine and Ellie’s. You can’t kick the bucket until we’ve had two or three grandchildren for you. There’ll be dandling to be done. Sorry, but you’re just not allowed to keel over. Not for another ten or twenty years. Minimum. Nope; sorry, done deal. No negotiating.’

Joe, bless him, found this quite hilarious. He’d always been an easy audience. He sat chuckling silently and wiped at his rheumy old eyes with a white hanky. I’d sat down at the Murston family table, between dances. Mr Murston Senior had put on a bit of weight since we first bumped into each other in the hills, years earlier; he was positively rotund now, his face was puffy, he wobbled when he did the silent laughter thing, and tears seemed to leak from him at the slightest excuse, as though forced out by the sheer pressure of his bulk.

‘Aye, well, we’ll see,’ he told me, stuffing the hanky away. ‘But a buddy gets tired, ken?’

‘We all get tired, Joe.’

‘Aye, but there’s tired an there’s tired.’

‘Oh is there, now?’ I narrowed my eyes theatrically. ‘This had better be good wisdom here, Joe.’ I reached over and tapped him on the forearm. ‘You old geezers have a responsibility to provide us whippersnappers with choice stuff.’

‘Ach, get on wi ye!’ he wheezed, as his eyes started to fill and the hanky came out again.

The evening went on. Much drink was taken, much drunken dancing committed. The amount of camera flashing declined as power ran down both in camera batteries and small children, though not as much in either as one might have hoped. I spent a couple of intervals outside smoking with Ferg and his chums. Ellie and I danced in a Circassian Circle, then in a Flying Scotsman. Another Eightsome rounded off the ceilidh part of the evening but we sat that one out. More food was laid out, more drink taken. We danced to some pop, I danced with Lauren, the bride, with Grier — as instructed — and with a revived Jel. Grier insisted on consecutive dances, the second being a slow one during which she pressed herself hard against me.

‘I can feel your erection,’ she informed me, just before the song stopped.

I briefly considered denying what was, after all, the truth, and also not something I was particularly in control of. ‘I was thinking about Ellie,’ I told her.

‘Not Anjelica MacAvett?’ Grier said quietly, from beneath the black fringe.

‘No, not Anjelica MacAvett,’ I said, looking at the girl, disquieted.

‘I see a lot,’ Grier whispered into my ear.

‘I bet you do. But not Jel; El.’

‘El Jel, Jel El,’ Grier sing-songed.

‘Ellie,’ I said, firmly.

Grier nodded and pressed in against me again, as the last notes of the song faded. ‘And she’s thinking of Dean Watts.’ She stepped back, nodded. ‘Thanks, Stewart,’ she said, and skipped off.

My expression, I’m sure, must have been choice.

I was at the bar. Ellie was at a distant table going over old times with girlfriends from the Academy.

‘Real thing?’ Ferg asked quietly, suddenly at my side.

‘Que?’

‘Humpty Driscoll’s got a room and some very pure powder. More than the daft fuck knows what to do with, so a few of us are volunteering to help him out. Care to join?’

‘Fuck, yeah,’ I said, so we tramped off to the room Humpty had.

Humpty had always been the sort who needed to provide incentives for people to be his pals; once it had been sweeties and stolen fags. He was training to be a lawyer in London and his folks had moved to Australia so he’d got himself a room in the hotel. Jel was already there, hoovering a line as Ferg and I arrived. Her brother Josh was looking on with a knowing grin. Gina Hillis, Sandy McDade and Len Grady were there too, and Phelpie.

The coke was pretty good and I had a couple of very intense discussions about fuck knows what, one with Ferg and one with Jel.

We all went off to dance some energy away and, a few songs later, when Jel and I were still dancing, we saw Ferg and Josh heading for the main corridor from the ballroom to the foyer.

‘Think there’s more coke going?’ Jel asked, grabbing my arm.

‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘I don’t know …’ I could think of at least one other good reason Ferg and Josh were heading off somewhere together.

‘Let’s follow them!’ Jel said in a stage whisper, eyes big and bright.

This seemed like an extremely good idea, so we headed after them — I looked round for Ellie, but she’d disappeared again — however, we lost Ferg and Josh in the crowds of people in the corridor (a few lightweights were leaving. And it barely midnight).

We stood in front of the lifts, Jel pressing buttons seemingly at random. ‘Let’s go there anyway,’ she said. ‘It was 404, wasn’t it?’

I’d thought it was 505. Or possibly 555. ‘Umm,’ I said.

Jel nodded. ‘Let’s try it.’

‘You take the lift, I’ll take the stairs,’ I told her. This seemed like a splendid stratagem to ensure we didn’t miss anybody. And also to avoid it looking like Jel and I were proceeding in a bedroom-wards direction together.

‘Okay!’

I walked upstairs two at a time, dispensing a couple of jolly hellos to known faces en route and trying not to trip over small children.

I met Jel outside room 404, but it wasn’t right; no answer, and it and the corridor around it just didn’t look familiar either.

‘Fifth floor?’ I suggested. I was still feeling room 505.

Jel nodded. ‘Let’s try it.’

The fifth floor looked even less right. Parts weren’t even lit. ‘We’ve lost them,’ Jel said, dispirited. Then she perked up. ‘Emergency supplies!’ she said, and dug down her cleavage, feeling around inside her bra. I thought it would do no harm to observe this process closely. She produced a little paper wrap.

‘Brilliant, but I bet these are all locked,’ I said, testing the nearest door, then going to the next.

‘Keep trying,’ she said, followed almost immediately by, ‘Aha!’

It was a little ladies’ toilet: three cubicles and a shelf with three sinks opposite, modesty-panelled with a faded green floral curtain, all of it overlit from above with fluorescents and filled with a faint hissing noise like static.

The mottled green formica surface around the sinks wasn’t perfect for coke-cutting — too pale, for a start — but we made do. We chopped it with my credit card, rolled a twenty. Jel’s charlie wasn’t quite as good as Humpty’s had been — a bit more cut, though I wasn’t sufficiently expert to tell with what exactly, and the irony that her dad would have access to much better stuff wasn’t lost on us — still, it did the job.

I started telling Jel, in some detail, about my final-year project, which involved imagining famous buildings relit quite differently from conventional floodlighting (all done on computer, no physical models). By this time I’d been thinking seriously about what the job I’d been offered might involve, and had talked at length to some of the guys I might be working with, so I thought I had a pretty good handle on what was required, hence I talked about angles or ‘splayings’, the kind of technique you needed for lighting something A-shaped, like the Forth Bridge, for example. Wide-eyed, leaning in towards me with a look of enormous concentration on her face, Jel seemed rapt, absorbing all this as though she was thinking of taking up a career in creative lighting design herself.

I was making the point that you need to take account of prevailing weather and atmospheric conditions and, ideally, have a dynamic system in place capable of changing according to whether it was dusk, full night, or dawn, what stage the moon was at, whether the weather was clear or misty and how much light spill or contamination there might be from nearby floodlit buildings or other sources, when I sort of took another look at her expression.

‘Like, some — actually most — buildings in China need to be lit taking into account the fact they have this near-continual brown haze …’ I said, then kind of heard my own voice fade away.

Jel was sitting on top of the sink surround, taking the weight off her feet, which brought her face up level with mine. She reached out with a gloved hand, put it to the nape of my neck, and said, ‘I really think you ought to kiss me.’

I took a deep breath, put my hands on her hips. ‘Well, ah,’ I said, decisively. Actually, I hadn’t really meant to put my hands on her hips, if I remember right; they just sort of appeared there. ‘I suppose,’ I said.

‘I know how you feel about me,’ she told me.

You do? I wanted to say. But I don’t know myself. I thought about this. So true on several levels.

Thing is, whatever part of my brain that deals with such matters has come up with a lot of excuses over the past five years for everything that happened over the next five or ten minutes: Hey, we were drunk, coked up at the same time, I’d seen Ellie snogging somebody else, and there is almost a tradition for people about to get married to have one last fling — but in the end it doesn’t matter, like it doesn’t matter who moved forward to whom, who opened their lips first, whose tongue first moved into the other’s mouth, or whether she shimmied her dress to let her legs wrap around me or I did, or whether she reached for my zip or I did.

She froze. ‘Did you hear a noise?’ She stared at the door to the corridor.

‘No,’ I said, then thought, Or had I? There were various sounds to be heard here, including that soft, continual wash of white noise coming from the nearby plumbing and the distant thudding base from the PA system in the ballroom, floors below.

Breathless, hearts pumping, we stared at each other from about a hand’s length away. ‘Into a cubicle!’ she said, nodding past me.

I picked her up, her legs round my waist, thudded into the middle cubicle as quietly as I could, stood there for a moment while she reached down, locking the door, then I sat down on the toilet seat. ‘We should have put the light out,’ I whispered.

‘Oh, fuck it,’ she breathed. We sat there for a moment, listening, but nothing more happened. We started kissing again.

‘Do we need to—’

She shook her head. ‘Pill. Risk it if you will.’

‘How about,’ I said, reaching up inside her dress with both hands. I felt stocking, warm flesh, a smooth thin garter belt.

She laughed roguishly, put her mouth against my neck and bit very gently. ‘Nope,’ she said, ‘went without. Pas de VPL.’

‘Fuck …’ I breathed.

We’d barely begun by the time she thought she heard a noise again; her mouth was hanging open and she was part supporting herself with one gloved hand splayed on each side wall of the cubicle. She stopped, stiffened, motioned silence.

I heard something too this time: what might have been the door to the corridor, opening, then closing.

We stayed as we were for what felt like a long time. I watched the angle of light that I could see beyond the bottom of the cubicle door, looking for any change. I could feel my heart beat, and hers, and sense the thud-thud-thud of the disco. The continual hiss of what sounded like a faulty cistern made it hard to be sure, but I didn’t think there were any suspicious sounds, either in the cubicles on either side or out in the main part of the loo.

She started doing that pelvic floor thing, squeezing me from inside, even while the rest of her body stayed perfectly still and poised. She was grinning down at me. Af ter maybe a minute there had been no further noise from outside and no change in the light.

‘Somebody looking in and leaving again,’ I whispered. ‘Another false alarm.’

Jel raised herself a little higher, then let go of the side walls, raising both gloved hands high over her head as she sank further down on to me, so tight and hot I nearly came there and then. ‘Fuck it,’ she said, ‘just fuck me.’

I stood, lifting her, producing a gasp, thudding her back against the door and the partition wall to the side, her right shoulder just avoiding the coat hook protruding from the door. I took her weight while she grasped my shoulders. A little later, with her legs wrapped tight around my waist, she raised her gloved arms straight and high above her head.

Half an hour later I was standing, trying hard not to grin my face off, talking to Ferg in the hotel foyer. He looked pretty happy too, though whether this was for similar reasons I hadn’t yet enquired. Part of me felt guilty, of course, but another part of me — a more influential part of my head-space, it has to be said — was already writing off the whole experience and doing its best to ignore both the strange, tight, balled feeling in my guts and the troublesome minority of my neurons, protesting loudly with stuff like, You just did what? How could you do that? How could you do that to Ellie?

It was — it had been, I was in the process of deciding — a line-drawing-under fling, a last and very much final hurrah that meant I had kissed goodbye to the delights of other women with a fine, decisive flourish: a bittersweet, never-again moment that would remain my secret and Jel’s for ever more. In the end, after all, I wasn’t yet married to Ellie, I hadn’t taken any vows in public, before any congregation or gathering of friends and family, and so technically no trust had been betrayed, no binding agreement breached.

And Ellie had had her little snog in the gardens, after all. There had probably been no more, either during this night or in the recent past, though of course there might have been the odd straying at university; there was a sort of tacit acknowledgement between us that a few things might have happened we’d rather the other one didn’t know about: nothing relationship-threatening — maybe in the end relationship-strengthening, getting stuff out of the system, tried, sampled, enjoyed but, having been enjoyed, found to be sufficient just in that one evaluation — but still things that were best confined to the memories in our own heads.

So that was all right then.

There was no warning, no hubbub or sort of raised general level of noise coming from the ballroom, just Ellie striding up to me, taking me by the arm.

‘El,’ I said. There was just the faintest of trembles inside me, like I thought there might be something wrong, but probably not; just a guilty conscience.

‘El, how are—’ Ferg started.

‘You need to get out, now,’ she told me, her voice flat. She looked at Ferg.‘Ferg, get the desk clerk to order a taxi for Dyce, name of Gilmour. Urgent. Find a way to let my brothers know about the booking.’

Ferg’s mouth clacked shut. Ellie gripped my upper arm hard. She had her blue sequinned purse in her other hand. ‘Come on,’ she said.

She made to move, as if she was going to drag me with her. I tried to stay standing where I was, wondering what the hell all the panic was about and unwilling to be manhandled — womanhandled — like this in front of friends.

‘El, what the—’

She put her mouth to my ear. ‘Come on!’ she hissed, shaking my arm. ‘My fucking family’s going to fucking kill you, you stupid fucker,’ she said through clenched teeth. ‘They know you fucked Jel. Everybody knows you fucked Jel. Now move!’

‘—cking cunt!’ somebody screamed from the direction of the ballroom. It sounded a lot like Murdo Murston. I caught a glimpse of Mike Mac’s face, ten metres away, just appearing between the ballroom doors. He looked pale, shocked. He saw me and his expression didn’t change.

I’d never heard Ellie swear so much, never. I couldn’t remember hearing her voice with this strange, flat, determined tone before, either. My feet seemed to start moving by themselves. Ferg went to the hotel desk. Ellie forced me towards the main hotel doors, pulling the Mini’s key out of her purse with her teeth as we exited through the depleted crowd of smokers by the doors into the harshly floodlit car park and the warm summer evening beyond.

‘Are, are you fit to drive?’ I asked, some autopilot bit of my brain attempting to take over.

‘Be quiet, Stewart,’ she told me. She pushed me. ‘Faster!’

We stopped at Mum and Dad’s so I could grab a bag. By this time my hands had started shaking and I could hardly hold onto anything I picked up. Two minutes after we left, according to what the neighbours were prepared to disclose to my mum and dad — if not the police — Donald, Callum and Fraser were hammering at the door. They broke in, took long enough to establish I wasn’t there and left again. About the same time, Murdo and Norrie had stopped their pick-up alongside El’s Mini in the middle of town, and very nearly found me.

A quarter of an hour after that I was lying, shivering — from delayed terror or sheer relief, I hadn’t yet sorted out my jangled feelings to tell — inside a big yellow oil pipe, one of three stacked on a long flatbed railway wagon, itself part of a train of twenty similar wagons all hauled by a distantly clattering diesel engine, picking up speed again as it headed on south through the waning warmth of the night.

They’d shown some of the photos the children had taken, on the big screen above the stage in the ballroom. Maybe about half the guests were still there and could be bothered to watch; there were a lot of shots of empty chairs, table legs, and — as predicted — corners, and Drew’s dad hadn’t really had time to weed out all the crap; he was just grabbing cameras at random and seeing what he could find.

A short sequence from one camera showed the inside of a toilet, taken from beneath the faded green cover hiding the plumbing under the sinks. They were photos showing one pair of dark-blue brogues and one pair of red high heels. From the colour balance and a certain lack of sharpness, you could tell no flash had been used, or maybe been available.

The last couple of shots were taken from outside a closed cubicle. The first showed, under the door, the man’s dark shoes on either side of the base of a pale toilet bowl, with his trousers fallen round them and a pair of white underpants stretched tightly across the bottom of his calves. A pair of red shoes were also visible — one on either side of the bowl, half obscured by the crumpled trousers, heels front to the camera — and, in the very last shot, a pair of red gloved hands could be seen, fisted, as though in triumph, and raised high enough into the air to appear above the cubicle itself.

13

Craig Jarvey drops me at my mum and dad’s, then the red Toyota splashes away through the puddles. The rain is slackening.

There’s no car in the driveway. Still, when I let myself in I try to walk normally, but the house is empty. My hand moves to where my phone should be, then drops. I head to my room, lie on my bed, but only for a few minutes. I get up and fetch my mum and dad’s cordless.

‘Hello?’

‘Jel, hi. It’s Stewart. You busy?’

‘… No. Getting ready to go out.’

‘Got a few minutes?’

‘To talk or meet up? Cos—’

‘Just to talk.’

‘Okay. What?’

‘Just … something you said, earlier. About not everything being your idea? I—’

‘Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that too and I, ah, I’m glad you phoned, actually, because I shouldn’t have said that? That sounded really, I mean, I wasn’t—’

I’d intended to ask her about that other odd remark, from the fateful night itself, about knowing how I felt about her, which has kind of only just resurfaced — certainly as flagged for any particular significance — maybe due to just thinking back properly to that night, finally, or because I’ve been puzzling over the thing she said earlier today about it not all being her idea or whatever, but she’s sounding really defensive now, like she’s trying to head off whatever it is I’m trying to find out about, and I just know there won’t be any point trying to take this further.

Making enquiries today, asking questions about stuff that just suddenly seemed intriguing, has already cost me my phone, a couple of extremely painful punches and a very scary trip to an open hatch in the middle of the bridge. I shouldn’t be too surprised with myself if I’m easily put off.

‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ I tell Jel, gently talking over her. ‘It’s nothing. I just—’

‘Well, you know—’

‘It’s no problem. Really. Forget I asked.’

‘Where … where are you anyway? That’s a Stonemouth number, but—’

‘My folks’. I lost my phone.’

‘Oh my God; you didn’t bet it, did you?’

‘What? No. Lost it walking home.’ I haven’t even thought about a cover story until now. Idiot. ‘Think it fell out of my jacket pocket,’ I tell her. ‘There’s…there’s a hole,’ I lie.

I try Al and Morven, to see where they’ve got to. Of course; they’re visiting Granny Gilmour in the old folks’ home in Aberdeen. It’s become something of a Sunday ritual over the last few years. I wasn’t invited because her early-onset dementia’s got so bad it might upset me not to be recognised. She already thinks Mum is one of her sisters and there are some days when she struggles to recall who Dad is.

I revise my phone-losing story to maybe having absent-mindedly put it into what was actually the space between the lining and the jacket’s outer layer rather than the pocket I thought I was putting it into, to avoid having to tear a hole in my jacket (because, knowing Mum, she’ll try to repair the tear). I have no idea whether this sounds convincing or contrived.

I lie back on the bed. Actually, my balls don’t feel quite so bad now. I carefully unzip and pull down, to take a look. No visible damage. I pull up my tee; no bruises on my belly either. I guess if I’d been ready for it, tensed, there might have been. I do myself back up again.

Antsy. I’m aware that I’m turning the cordless phone over and over in my hands, like something falling away…Tad vulnerable too, being honest. Feeling the need to be around people. You didn’t bet it, did you? Now why’s that phrase lodging like a half-swallowed fishbone in my short-term memory and refusing to get shuffled off to long-term storage or outright oblivion, where it belongs? How did …?

Oh, fuck it. I call Ferg. He was snoozing, but agrees to meet in the Formantine Lounge, in the old Station Hotel.

We sit in the first-floor lounge looking out over Union Street. It’s Sunday quiet, though there are still a few shops open. I’ve been to one myself: Bash and Balbir’s dad’s old place, buying a new phone. I’ve got it out the box and I’m RTFM-ing and setting it up as Ferg and I talk. He’s sipping a pint of IPA, I have a coffee.

No iPhone outlet in the centre of town? I’m appalled. The new phone’s touch screen is rubbish in comparison. I have so been spoiled. It’ll be the Apple Store on Regent Street for me as soon as I get back to London. Not much point buying one here anyway; still need to wait to get it back home to sync the fucker. (I didn’t bother bringing my laptop this weekend because, of course…I had my iPhone! Fuck.)

‘Oh, Jel tracked me down,’ I tell Ferg.

I’d found that I wanted to talk about That Night and its repercussions, its aftermath. I haven’t said anything about my excursion to the bridge with the Murston boys; Ferg thinks I wandered home, lost my moby en route and just chillaxed, between Lee’s loft and when I called him.

Ferg gives me his best seen-and-heard-it-all-before-but-keep-talking-anyway look: head back, eyebrows up, eyelids down. ‘She did?’

‘She did.’

‘This is in London, I take it?’

‘This is in London,’ I confirm. ‘Couple of years ago.’

‘And?’

‘Jel was there for a weekend. Going to a concert, seeing some friends, doing some cultural stuff. I was going to be around — I mean, we’d talked on the phone and email about meeting up when she was down in London before, but I was always away, to the point she thought I was trying to avoid her, which I wasn’t—’

‘Honestly?’

‘Yeah, honestly. No, really honestly,’ I tell him. ‘Stripping out the fact it happened in a toilet and it led to the single greatest catastrophe of my adult life—’

‘What’s so terrible about toilets?’ Ferg says indignantly. ‘Nice clean toilets are lovely.’ He looks almost dreamy and gazes round the near empty lounge — there’s only us, a young couple and one very old geezer, all widely dispersed, besides the barman sitting on a bar stool with a newspaper — and says, ‘I have some terribly fond memories.’

‘I bet you do, Ferg. Anyway, all that aside, it was actually great sex, and we only had the time to do it once — I mean — so of course I’d happily have seen her again and hopefully take up where we left off? But anyway; I’d already said she could stay at my place, but I was seeing this jewellery designer at the time and I might have forgotten to mention this to Jel? Or we — me and this girl — hadn’t been going out when I’d first said Jel could stay, like, a year earlier or whatever, and there was just…some awkwardness when Jel came to stay, because this other girl was there too, staying the weekend? That’s all.’

‘Awkwardness, like the delightful Anjelica had expected she’d be sharing your bed,’ Ferg suggests, ‘not the other girl?’

‘Well, I thought so at the time, so maybe. On the other hand, Jel never said so outright and it did occur to me later that maybe I was getting the signals wrong and I was just sort of big-upping myself, assuming she wanted to, you know, resume relations after our — as it turned out, incredibly public — hump in the Mearnside’s fifth-floor ladies’ toilet, trap two? You know: that thing a lot of guys do, assuming every girl secretly wants to leap into bed with them?’

Ferg appears mystified. ‘Really?’ Then he looks thoughtful.

‘Actually, yes; for most guys that would be laughable.’ He sits back, regards me. ‘You included, on a bad day.’

‘Thanks.’ I take up the little spoon, stir the sludge in the bottom of my coffee cup. I look at it for a moment or two, then let it drop, clattering, deciding to say something that I’ve wanted to say since I first clapped eyes on Ferg again. ‘Look, why did you never get in touch, Ferg? After I left the Toun, I mean? I heard nothing from you; just nothing. I mean, much as I hate to admit it, I actually missed your scabrous version of bonhomie and your hypercritical awareness of everybody else’s faults, both real and — probably most amusingly — imagined.’

Ferg glares at me. ‘Never mind that. Why did you never contact me?’

‘And we’re back to You Keep Changing Your Fucking Phone Number. Mine stayed the same.’

‘You changed your email.’

‘I started getting hate mail. I thought it wise.’

‘I have a policy: when people fuck off, it’s up to them to contact me, not the other way round. Bit like your policy of not sharing details of sexual encounters. Annoying, isn’t it? That said, I’ve always sort of half believed it’s not actually moral scruple, more early-onset geezer-hood forgetfulness.’

‘Do you, like, just not really like having friends, Ferg, is that it?’

‘How … specifically insulting an answer do you want here? There’s sort of a spread of options.’

‘Will I like any of them?’

‘Frankly, no. Though you’ll definitely hate some more than others.’

‘Doubtless.’

‘But anyway. What about Grier?’

‘What about Grier?’

‘What about the time Grier came to stay with you?’

‘Now that was just weird.’

‘Define.’

‘Well, something slightly similar, again a couple of years ago, when Grier was going to be in London and finally so was I at the same time and—’

‘This before or after Jel?’

‘Actually…Thinking about it? Maybe a year before. Probably.’ My hand starts moving to the pocket where my iPhone would be, to check my diary, but, of course …

‘Forgot to ask,’ Ferg says. ‘Did Jel ever visit again?’

‘No. And stopped enquiring.’

‘Pride hurt?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Anyway: Grier.’

‘Grier showed up with this guy: Brad. Weird, skeletal, long, bad — long greasy hair, dressed in about six layers even though it was summer, easily my age if not more, bottle of Jack in his pocket, fucking pharmacy of drugs in his other trenchcoat pocket — I mean, stuff I hadn’t even heard of — and this guy’s like some sort of about-to-be-big musician, allegedly, with a band called The Frets—’

‘Actually not a bad name for a guitar band.’ Ferg looks thoughtful. ‘Wait a minute, I think I’ve seen them …’

‘Yeah, but they weren’t a guitar band, and besides a quick Google would have revealed there were already several bands called The Frets. Anyway, so: I assume Grier and Brad are an item even though he wasn’t mentioned when Grier booked, as it were, and I show them the spare bedroom, only this is all wrong, because apparently they’re not together af ter all. More friends, I’m given to understand?’

Ferg’s eyes narrow. ‘So you do have a spare room?’

‘I did at the time. Didn’t I mention my plan to turn it into a gym?’

‘No. But never mind. What about Jewellery Girl?’

‘Not present, and neither was anybody else. I was unattached at the time.’

‘Okay. So.’ Ferg sits forward, looking interested. ‘Sleeping arrangements?’

‘Well, so I offer her the spare room and Brad the couch but he’s unable to sleep on the couch because it isn’t comfortable or—’

‘Don’t skip. What about the evening? Where did you go?’

‘Bar, local sushi, bar. All very convivial. Anyway, Brad appears in my room, announcing the couch isn’t the right shape or hasn’t been Feng Shuied properly or something, and besides ever since his mum left and his dad died — or the other way round — he can’t sleep alone and can he climb in with me?’

‘Hmm. Fresh.’

‘So I tell him to get to fuck.’

‘I should hope so,’ Ferg sounds affronted. ‘Bugger gay solidarity; if you’re going to have the temerity to reject me, you’d fucking better reject anybody else.’

‘Obviously your feelings were my first consideration, Ferg.’

‘Finally! Go on.’

‘So I start trying to get back to sleep but next thing there’s what can only be described as a ruckus from the spare room.’

‘Currently occupied by Grier’s sweet ass.’

‘Currently occupied by Grier. So the guy has tried the same thing with her?’

‘See? You cynic; maybe he was telling the truth all the time and just wanted somebody to cuddle up against, platonically?’

‘Grier, by this time, is throwing things at Brad.’

‘Soft things? Hard things?’

‘My things! A pillow, an alarm clock, also a lamp.’

‘On a scale of one to ten, with one representing a featherweight piece of Ikea frip with an unpronounceable name and ten an original leaded Tiffany requiring two hands just to lift, where would this lamp fall?’

‘It fell in my hall. Broke; tore the socket out of the wall, too.’

‘Hmm. Sounds like an eight or a nine. Hey, you could all have slept together, you and Grier either side of him. Might have been sweet.’

‘Yeah. Anyway, so we’re about to kick Brad out but then he breaks down and starts sobbing and talking about how he’s so sorry and he’s always been rejected, all his life, and did he mention it’s his birthday? Whatever; in the end we let him stay, but half an hour later when I’ve just fallen asleep again there’s all this noise, and the fucker has invited all his pals and what looks like every fucking random in the area to come back to mine for a party! They’re in the living room rolling up my Persian rug — I mean, not to dance or anything, to fucking nick — they’ve already emptied the drinks fridge and wine rack, and they’re tearing my designer Porsche kettle apart to make it into some sort of home-made crack bong or something.’

‘You called the rozzers?’

‘Fuck that; they were all English so I went into full-on, growling, menacing, Scottish bampot mode, Glasgow with a touch of Toun, and told them if they didn’t GTF I’d kick their arseholes so far up them they’d be able to rim themselves from the inside.’

‘High risk.’

‘Worked; cleared the place inside two minutes.’

‘And Grier?’

‘Shaken. Crying. She’d woken up to find a couple getting seriously jiggy practically on top of her. By the time she managed to wriggle out there had been, well, issue.’

‘Oh dear. Tissue issue?’

‘Yup. All over the duvet. And blood; we reckon the female half of the copulationary equation concerned had probably been having her delicate time of the lady month just then. Copiously.’

‘You see? What have I been telling you all these years? Girls are gross. Guys only leak if you pump them too hard.’

‘Thanks for that. So we cleared the place, tidied a little, double-locked the door—’

‘Brad was on the outside by this time?’

‘First one I personally kicked out.’

‘A little inhospitable, but there you are.’

‘And — weary as fuck, coming down off an incredible adrenalin high af ter facing down these twenty randoms, half guys, I tell Ellie—’

‘Ellie had turned up? Or was she one of—’

‘Grier. Grier, Grier, Grier; fuck off. I told Grier that she could have my bed and I’d take the couch, but she’s still, like, really upset and says, like, no more to it, honestly, nothing extra intended or expected or wanted … but can she sleep with me?’

‘So you did.’

‘So I did. I slept with her, but I didn’t fuck her. This is technically possible for people, Ferg, you’ll just have to take my word for it.’

‘I hear you,’ Ferg says. There’s a pause. ‘But did you really not fuck her?’

‘Really. Though there was some …’

‘Nocturnal digital wanderage? Oh-I-just-rolled-over-like-I-always-do embracingness, outright Come-on-let’s-just-fuck pleading-hoodicity?’

‘Kind of option D.’

‘Option D? All the above.’ Ferg nods knowingly. ‘Really? So you were all over her.’

‘No, it was like fucking role reversal, man. I was like some virtuous Victorian maiden fending off the squire’s unwelcome advances. At one point I got up and put on another pair of underpants. Like, on top of the first pair?’

‘You over-underpanted. The mark of a true gent.’

‘I thought you’d understand.’

‘So, why didn’t you?’

‘Why didn’t I what?’

‘Fuck her, fuckwit.’

‘Well, I don’t know! She was still … young, and still—’

‘She was legal at the wedding when you and Jel did the cubicle pogo; this would be two years later? Three?’

‘Yeah, but still sort of, you know, young? And still Ellie’s sister. And … it just didn’t feel right.’

‘Now you’ve lost me.’ Ferg sits back. ‘“It just didn’t feel right.”’ He stares into space, muttering this phrase as though trying it on for size. Beyond the now rain-dry windows, fleets of grey clouds drift across the town. ‘Nope. Never mind.’

‘Also …’ I begin, then wonder if I should say anything. Ellie told me this years ago but I honestly can’t remember if it was in confidence or not.

‘What?’ Ferg says quickly, sensing something.

‘Well, Grier kind of has form with … being in the wrong bed,’ I admit.

‘Go on.’

‘When she was a kid — about eleven or something — there was a thunderstorm and apparently she crawled into Callum’s bed.’

‘Her brother Callum?’

‘Yeah.’

‘He was our age, wasn’t he?’

‘Yeah. If she was eleven, he’d have been fifteen. Yeah. Anyway, it was, you know, just…because she was frightened by the thunder, but, thing is, they were found together in bed the next morning by Mrs Murston and there was a bit of a…Well, it was accepted it had been innocent, but …’ My voice trails off.

‘Anyway,’ I say, resuming, ‘sore point with the family. Maybe I was thinking of that, subconsciously, or something.’

Ferg is looking at me suspiciously and in a sense rightly so, because the whole truth involves a little more than I’ve just told him. I know this from what Ellie told me. Callum had apparently behaved inappropriately with one of his younger cousins earlier that year, so the discovery of Grier in his bed hadn’t been handled as calmly as it might have been, and both he and Grier — but especially Callum — had been left more traumatised by the family reaction than by what had — or more likely hadn’t — happened during the night.

‘Oh well,’ Ferg says. ‘So. Any punchline?’

‘What?’

‘To the Grier in your bed story. Any punchline?’

‘Not really; an awkward breakfast and she left early. Didn’t see her again till a day or two ago. Never heard of Brad again, either. Happily.’

‘Good. Cos—’

‘Seriously, Ferg, what does it mean when the breakfast, the whole morning, is more awkward because you didn’t fuck when you slept together compared to any of the times when you did?’

Ferg regards me levelly for a moment or two. He shrugs. ‘Fucked if I know. Anyway. I’ve got one.’

‘You’ve got one what?’

‘A punchline.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘You betcha, sweet-cheeks.’

‘And? So?’

‘I fucked her that same night.’

‘What? Who?’

‘Grier and me; we did the dirty that same night you fornicated for the cameras with Jel in the Mearnside.’ He gives a sort of jabbing nod and sits back, drinking his pint.

I just stare at him. Eventually I say, ‘You did what?’ Ferg shrugs. ‘Yeah. In Humpty’s room.’

‘In Humpty’s room?’

‘Most assuredly.’

‘He wasn’t, like, there or anything?’

‘Fuck off. Humpty? Of course not. Just me and Grier and all that black crêpe and kohl. And a certain degree of coked-up frenzy. Twice. Would have been more but Humpty was pawing at the door and starting to talk about going to get the manager and the pass key.’ Ferg looks at me, eyebrows raised, appraising. ‘Might even have been her first time, too. Didn’t like to ask. Certainly more enthusiasm than skill on her part.’ He lif ts his glass again before muttering, ‘Mind you, a lot of enthusiasm.’ He drinks, deeply, though I can see he’s still watching me from the corner of one eye.

‘You total cunt,’ I breathe.

‘Fuck you!’ Ferg laughs, putting his glass down. He glances round, sits forward again and lowers his voice a little. ‘I didn’t fucking rape the girl! She was legal and willing. Just cos you wanted to—’

‘I thought I fucking warned you off her?’

‘So I love a challenge! Forbidden fucking fruit, you moron.’

‘You use a condom?’

‘Of course I used a fucking condom! What sort of—’

‘Anyway, I thought you went off with Josh that night!’

‘So I sucked some cock as well! So fucking what?’

I shake my head, look at him. ‘You total, total cunt.’

Ferg sighs. ‘And you, my dear, darling boy, are just jealous.’ He shakes his head, then mutters, ‘At least now you know how it feels.’

I shake my head. I really don’t know what to say.

I look down at my new, rather rubbish and very temporary phone, which is sitting, unloved and mostly unwanted, in my hand. Whatever; I think its sorry, clunky ass is now set up, and it has at least some power. I press its stupid, insufficiently responsive screen.

Ferg’s phone rings. His ringtone’s a male voice I don’t recognise going, ‘Answer the phone, ya fud.’ Ferg pulls out the phone, glances at the display and, looking at me, says, sharply, ‘Yes?’

I look him in the eyes. ‘…Total…total…cunt.’

It’s a damp, cloudy Sunday evening in what’s definitely beginning to feel like the start of autumn rather than the end of summer and I’m twenty-fucking-six but I’m still going back to my mum and dad’s for my tea. After being bullied and beaten up by the big boys, too. This is grim. I shouldn’t have come back.

I look at people like Ryan and Anjelica and I think, Why didn’t you just leave? They didn’t have to stay after things went wrong here. Why not just fuck off, even if it’s just to Edinburgh or Glasgow, never mind London or anywhere else in the world?

But I suppose Ryan stays in Stonemouth because this is where Ellie is and he still has some pathetic, forlorn hope that they might get back together again, so staying where he’s readily available just in case she does change her mind seems like the sensible thing to do. Poor fucking sap.

And Jel…well, I guess what happened wasn’t that shameful; it is the twenty-first century and all that shit, and she was fucking a guy who wasn’t married, and it’s not as though she did a Paris Hilton; it was obvious what she and I were doing, but you didn’t get to see anything. You certainly didn’t get to see anything worth wanking over, which is kind of the definition of what porn’s actually about, I suppose.

There was some familial consternation within the MacAvett household af terwards. I got to hear about that even before Jel came to stay for that awkward weekend at my flat in Stepney, though then she provided more details. It was the quiet, restrained sort of ticking off you’d expect from Mike and Sue: You’ve-let-us-down-you’ve-let-yourself-down-etc. Anyway she was nineteen, beautiful and popular and spending most of her time at university in Sheffield. Frankly the girl just wasn’t that bothered.

The greater familial shame seemed to be — by acclaim — attached to the Murston clan.

Apparently I’d been granted the status of an honorary Murston even before Ellie and I were due to be married, and my cheating on Ellie had been taken as an insult to the whole family. I suppose I couldn’t claim that I hadn’t been warned; that very first talking-to from the boys in Fraser’s new four-by-four while it sat in the Hill House garage had kind of set the tone.

Would I have buggered off, left Stonemouth, if I hadn’t had to? Yes; I was all ready to. I had that job offer and I was going to accept it. I was London-bound regardless before I got run out of town.

I turn the corner into Dabroch Drive and realise that I haven’t even thought about my balls since I left the Formantine — they haven’t hurt at all. Also, there’s a green Mini parked outside Mum and Dad’s house, sitting just behind my little hired Ka. It’s Ellie’s.

Or at least it was Ellie’s. That was five years ago. The Murstons never keep a car longer than three years. She must have sold it; it must belong to somebody else. It’s just a coincidence, or I’m remembering the number plate wrong. She’ll have something else by now, bound to. (Dad’s Audi is sitting in the drive, so they’re back.) Yeah, it can’t be hers. No way. Probably not even somebody else come to see us either. There’s hardly any free spaces on the street and it’s just chance some random parked their car right outside our house even though they’re visiting somebody else.

Still, my legs are feeling a bit shaky as I reach the gate. I glance into the car, sitting right outside. Can’t see any distinguishing belongings or stuff that would mark the car as Ellie’s or not. Walking up the path, there’s nobody visible sitting in the front lounge.

I catch my reflection in the inner door of the porch, and run a hand through my hair, pull myself up as upright as I can. If I had a tie I’d straighten it.

Jeez, I really am thirteen again.

14

Still staring at my half-reflection in the inside door, in the semi-darkness of the front porch, still outside the house.

This is my place, my folks’ place. But that might be Ellie’s car there at the kerbside and if it is, then she might be in there and if she is in there, then…What was it her brothers were saying? Oh yes: Don’t fucking talk to her. And if she approaches you to talk to you, walk away. Or else.

But this is my territory. This is Al and Morven’s home. Mike Mac wouldn’t let anything happen here, would he? The time that Donald, Callum and Fraser broke in, looking for me, five years ago, words were exchanged regarding this breakdown in protocol, and — according to Dad and Mike Mac — Donald apologised. Even then they didn’t trash the place or take anything; they just wanted to find me if I was there and left immediately when they realised I wasn’t.

And, gathered round the wee hole in the middle of the bridge today, Murdo and Norrie only mentioned tomorrow, at the funeral and the hotel afterwards; that was when they were talking about, that was when I was supposed to keep well away from their sister, not now, not here in what is still sort of my own home. Only this is a kind of lawyerly point, the sort of detail or loophole that, in school, always appealed to the smart kids like me and Ferg, and meant — you rapidly discovered — nothing at all to the kids who thought with their fists. So I doubt the distinction would mean much to the Murston brothers if they found out.

Maybe I should just turn around, head back into town. Phone somebody. Drag Ferg out of his resumed snooze: whoever, whatever. Bar or café, or just go for a drive or a walk by myself; maybe phone Mum and Dad, and if El’s there tell them I don’t want to meet her — call me when she’s gone.

I stare at my reflection. All this has gone through my mind in a couple of seconds at most.

Listen to yourself, Gilmour. And look at yourself. This is the family home. This is still where you belong. Maybe more so than that pleasant but soulless designer apartment in Stepney. If she chooses to come here, that’s her business, not Murdo’s or Norrie’s or Donald’s or anybody else’s. You really going to let the Murston boys frighten you away from your own crib, your own people?

I shake my head at my reflection. Do I want to see Ellie? Part of me dreads this because I’ve realised, just over the last couple of days, how much I need to see her again.

All these years, this half a decade that I’ve spent making a new life for myself, trying to forget about Ellie and my idiocy with Jel, forgetting about the wedding that never was and trying to push out of my head everything I ever knew about my friends and Stonemouth and my life here, purposefully turning my back on it all to draw a line under it, to make starting again easier and so forge a Stewart Gilmour: 2.0, a newer, better me who’d never behave like a fool again …and in the end the simple act of coming back has made that decision itself look like my greatest, most prolonged act of stupidity.

Of course I want to see her again. She may still hate me, she may just want to slap me in the face and tell me I should never have come back, but — even if it’s that — I need to know.

I let myself in. As usual, when the storm-doors are open, that means people are home and the inner doors aren’t locked.

I pull in a breath to shout hi or hello or whatever, and I remember something about That Night that I’d half forgotten, a little detail that suddenly seems germane now. It was from when Anjelica and I were just starting to get serious, in that over-lit ladies’ toilet on the fifth floor of the Mearnside, at the point when either of us could have changed our minds and it not have been awkward, even hurtful.

I remember thinking: We could get caught, somebody could walk in, Jel might tell somebody — she might tell Ellie — or Jel might even be doing this not because the chance suddenly presented itself and we both just sort of got carried away in the heat of the moment, but because she wanted this to happen, even set it up to happen this way, so she could tell Ellie, or so she could have something over me, something to make me feel guilty about, even if outright blackmail was unlikely.

Again, all of this had flitted through my mind in a couple of seconds or less, and I remember thinking, as a result of all this simming and mulling over and thinking through: Don’t care. If that’s the way it’s going to be, then let it be; bring it on. Sometimes you just have to abandon yourself to the immediate and even to somebody else’s superior karma or ability to manoeuvre, to plan.

I suspect we all sort of secretly think our lives are like these very long movies, with ourselves as the principal characters, obviously. Only very occasionally does it occur to any one of us that all these supporting actors, cameo turns, bit players and extras around us might actually be in some sense real, just as real as we are, and that they might think that the Big Movie is really all about them, not us; that each one of them has their own film unreeling inside their own head and we are just part of the supporting cast in their story.

Maybe that’s what we feel when we meet somebody we have to acknowledge is more famous or more charismatic or more important than we are ourselves. The trick is to know when to go with the other player’s plot line, when to abandon your own script — or your thoughts for what to improvise next — and adopt that of the cast member who seems to have the ear or the pen or the keyboard of the writer/director.

The other trick is to know what sort of person you are. I know what I’m like; I tend to over-analyse things, but I know this and I have a sort of executive function that overrides all the earnest deliberation once it’s gone past a certain point. I see it as like a committee that sits in constant session, and sometimes you — as the one who’s going to have to make the final decision and live with the results — just have to go up to the meeting room where all the debating is going on and, from the outside, just quietly pull the door to, shutting away all the feverish talking while you get back to the controls and get calmly on with the actual doing. I control this so well I’ve even been accused of being a bit too impulsive on occasion, which is ironic if nothing else.

At the other end of this particular spectrum are the people who are wild, wilful and instinctive and just do whatever feels right at the time. Jails and cemeteries are full of them. The smart ones like that have the opposite of what I have; they have a sensible, Now-wait-a-minute, Have-you-thought-this-through? committee that can veto their more reckless urges. (For what it’s worth, I suspect Mike Mac is like me and Donald M is the opposite.)

Either way, some sort of balance makes the whole thing work, and evolution — both in the raw sense and in the way that society changes — gradually weeds out the behaviours that work least well.

Voices from the kitchen.

I walk in and Ellie’s there, sitting at the table with Mum and Dad, tea and biscuits all round.

Ellie smiles at me. It’s not a big smile, but it’s a smile.

‘Here he is!’ Mum says.

‘Aye-aye. Your phone off?’ Dad asks.

‘Lost it. Got a new one,’ I tell him, nodding at Mum. I look at Ellie. Five years older. Face a little paler, maybe. Still beautiful, still …serene. A touch careworn now, perhaps, or just sad, but then that’s probably just me, seeing what I expect to see. Her hair’s a lot shorter, worn down but only to her shoulders; still thick, lustrous, the colour of sand. ‘Hi, Ellie.’

‘Hello, Stewart. You’re looking well.’

Am I? Fuck. ‘Not as good as you.’

‘You are too kind,’ she says, dipping her head to one side. That smile again.

Mum clears her throat. ‘Well, we should maybe leave you two to talk.’ She looks at Dad, and they stand up. Ellie jumps up too. She’s wearing jeans and a thin grey fleece over a white tee.

‘That’s okay,’ she says to them. Then she looks at me. ‘Thought you might…want to come for a drive?’

‘You okay?’ Ellie asks as she turns the Mini out of Dabroch Drive.

‘Fine,’ I tell her. ‘You?’

‘Didn’t really mean generally, Stewart,’ she says. ‘I meant after Murdo and Norrie “had a wee word”, as they put it, earlier.’

‘Ah.’

‘They got drunk afterwards. Came back to the house. I’d just popped in to see Mum and Dad, and the boys were kind enough to tell me they’d been protecting my honour or something, and I needn’t worry about you “bothering” me tomorrow, at the funeral?’ She glances at me. ‘Didn’t dare say any of this in front of Don, mind you, but they seemed keen to tell me, or at least Norrie did, and they certainly looked pleased with themselves. Did they hurt you?’

‘Hurt at the time. No bruises. More annoyed they dropped my phone into the Stoun.’

As I’m talking, I’m feeling this annoying, humiliating need to cringe, to sink as low as I can in my seat as we drive through the streets of the town, to avoid being seen by any errantly roaming Murston brothers or their sidekicks, minions, vassals or whatever the fuck they are. Last time I was in this car, of course, I really was ducked right down, chest on my knees with Ellie’s coat on top to hide me, en route to the station and the relative safety of a big yellow pipe on a freight train. How shamefully Pavlovian. I force myself to sit up straight instead. This would be the Fuck-it, or Sheep-as-a-lamb response. Still, I can’t help watching the people on the pavements and in other cars, looking for stares or double-takes. We pull up right beside the station shuttle bus at some traffic lights and I don’t look at it, just keep staring ahead.

‘Uh-huh,’ Ellie says. ‘Well, I apologise on behalf of my insane family. Obviously, it wasn’t done…you know, at my instigation.’

‘I’d guessed.’

She shakes her head, and I can see her frowning at the road ahead. ‘It’s like watching wolves or lion cubs grow up. They’re boisterous, play fighting, nearly cute, then one day,’ She shrugs. ‘They just turn and bite your throat out.’

That sends a slight chill through me. ‘Your brothers getting—’

‘Getting to be bigger arseholes than they were,’ she says. ‘Dad’s just about keeping them on the leash.’ She slings the car into gear as the lights change. ‘Oh, come on,’ she mutters at the car in front as it fails to move off promptly. Then it jerks, shifts.

There’s a pause. Eventually I take a breath and say, ‘I’m sorry too.’

‘You’re sorry?’ I can see that small frown again, creasing the skin above and between her eyes.

‘For cheating on you, Ellie.’

‘Oh, that. Ah.’

She concentrates on driving, eyes flicking about, taking her gaze from the view ahead to her mirrors, to the oversized instrument pod in the middle of the fascia and back to the street again as we negotiate the old main road out of Nisk.

‘El, I wrote you about a dozen letters saying how sorry I was and what a fool I’d been and how I was the biggest fucking idiot on the planet and how I wished you well and hoped you got over what I’d done and…well, a million other things, but I never sent any of them. A short letter seemed like I was…just fobbing you off with something, you know; formal? Like a kid forced to write a thank-you letter to an aunt or something? But the longer letters… the longer any of them went on, the more whiney they got, the more they sounded like I was trying to make excuses for myself, like I was the one who deserved…sympathy, or…Not that…Anyway…anyway, I never did get the tone right, the words right. And in the end I thought you probably didn’t want to hear from me at all, so I stopped trying. And…well, it’s still, it’s become even more pointless…Well, not pointless, but …’ I take a big deep breath like I’m about to swim a long way underwater. ‘Well, I still need to say it even if you don’t need to hear it. I am sorry.’

Half a decade I’ve been thinking about and working on that speech, but it still comes out wrong: awkward, badly expressed, unbalanced somehow and not really what I intended to say at all. Like I was making it up as I went along.

Maybe the last two sentences aren’t too bad — all I needed to say, really.

Except, thinking about it, the first of the two sounds like I’m making it all about me, again, and it’s all about my needs.

I look out the side window, shaking my head at my own distorted reflection and mouthing the word fuckwit.

We’ve cleared the town, heading west between the industrial and retail estates, the hills and mountains ahead.

Ellie doesn’t say anything for a bit, then nods and says, ‘Okay.’ She nods again. ‘Okay.’

‘Doesn’t mean I expect you to forgive me, either,’ I tell her, suddenly remembering another part of what I’ve been meaning to say to her for the last five years.

‘Hmm,’ Ellie says. ‘Well, there you are.’

Which is about as non-committal as you can get, I guess, and probably still more than I deserve.

‘Anyway, it’s good to see you again,’ I tell her.

‘And you,’ she says. She glances at me. ‘I wasn’t sure it would be, but it is. Not hurting as much as I thought it might. Barely at all, in fact. I suppose that means I’m over it. Over you.’

I don’t know what to say for a while, then I say, ‘Your dad said something about your mum putting in a good word for me, about letting me come back for the funeral.’

‘Did he? Did she?’ Ellie sounds surprised.

‘Yeah, I wondered if maybe you’d been behind that somehow?’

‘Huh,’ Ellie says, and is obviously thinking. ‘I think I said to both of them that it seemed wrong to keep you away if you wanted to come back, you know, to pay your last respects to Grandpa.’

‘Didn’t think it was your mum.’

‘Hmm.’

‘How’s she these days?’

‘Ha. As ever. Got a carpenter in the house at the moment, putting up extra shelves in her cuttings room.’

‘Her cuttings room?’

‘Where she keeps all the stuff she cuts out of House and Home and Posh Decorator or whatever they’re called. Got this whole room lined with volumes of tips, ideas, recipes, colour schemes and all that malarkey. Then when anything’s getting done to the house she ignores all of it and calls in an interior designer to do everything. Same with big meals. She collects all these cookbooks and cut-out recipes and goes on all these cooking tutorial weekends and weeklong courses, and then when there’s a big do at the house she has it all done by outside caterers. You’d swear she’s the busiest woman in the world but she rarely actually does anything. We’ve got a maid now.’

‘Maria. Met her briefly.’

‘She does all the cleaning and the laundry.’ Ellie shakes her head. ‘But, yeah, the cuttings room, where all the cuttings live. Well, go to die, really. Dad buys her a new pair of scissors as a joke every Christmas. Meanwhile she’s started lobbying for a sort of mini-extension to house a walk-in wardrobe — a walk-in chilled wardrobe — to keep her furs in tip-top condition. Dad’s telling her she doesn’t need it in this climate but I give it to the end of the year and he’ll cave. She’ll have it by next spring.’ Ellie blows what sounds like an exasperated breath.

‘What about you?’ I ask as we cross over the bypass, heading for a patch of light above the hills where the dipping sun is filtering through the thinning streams of cloud. ‘I heard you’re…helping people with addictions these days.’

‘Yeah, well, strictly speaking it’s the rest of my family that helps people with their addictions; I help them try to break them,’ she says, with a quick, entirely mirth-free grin. ‘And nobody knows where next year’s funding’s going to come from.’ She jerks her head back in an equally humourless laugh. ‘Suppose I could ask Don. Might even take it on; it’d be cover, good PR.’ She glances at me. ‘What about you? Still with the building lighting and all?’

‘Yep. Still based in London, though you’d struggle to tell that from my credit card receipts.’

‘Trotting that globe, huh?’

‘Fraid so. The company offsets, but we still take the flights in the first place.’

‘How’s business?’

‘It’s held up. Thank fuck for China and India, and all that oil money has to go somewhere: largely into the sky, as concrete, steel and light.’ I glance at her. I feel oddly nervous, almost fake, right at this instant. ‘They…made me a partner.’

She looks at me, smiling broadly. ‘They did? Congratulations! Well done, you!’ She looks back to the road, still smiling.

‘Well, just junior,’ I tell her. ‘Not equity. The responsibility without the access to the serious money.’

She nods. ‘Not a made man quite yet.’

This makes me laugh. ‘Well, yeah.’

‘Seeing anyone special?’

‘Hardly got the time. You?’

‘Mmm…Not really. Not since Ryan. Well, there was one guy, but that…So, no.’

We drive into the hills as the evening sky begins to clear and the clouds break up. We go via some of the ‘of’ places. There are — Ellie and I spotted long ago, when we first started going out — a lot of ‘of’ places round here: Brae of Burns, New Mains of Fitrie, Lyne of Glenskirrit, Hill of Par. I guess round here we just like our place names definite, pinned down.

Ellie drives much like she always did, with the same easy grace she brings to most tasks: braking seldom and gently, swinging the car quickly, neatly, into curves on a single stuck-to line she rarely needs to amend, carrying plenty of speed through the open bends and feeding the power back in progressively. Actually maybe her driving’s a little more erratic than it used to be, though that could be the road surfaces; they look more beaten up than I recall. Still, Ellie avoids the holes, factors those in, keeps everything smooth. We overtake a couple of tractors but then get stuck behind a slow driver in an old Kia, and stay there too long. This was always Ellie’s weakness as a driver: not quite aggressive enough. Naturally, she always thought that I was — to the same degree — not quite patient enough. I’m starting to think the truth lies somewhere in between, which definitely means I’m getting old.

Seven or so years ago Ellie and I drove down the coast to Pyvie, on a whim at the end of the season. The weather had cooled after a hot summer and the leaves were scattering off the trees to lie like litter on the brown earth. It was another snatched weekend, both of us back from our respective universities, like a forty-eight-hour leave. We’d taken one of the Murston dogs with us, an old golden Lab called Tumsh, heavy with age but still up for a run along a beach or a rabbit chase into the undergrowth.

We held hands, walked through drifts of leaves while Tumsh investigated interesting smells. We found the deserted tea room looking out over the beach with massed trees at either end, watching through the salt-streaked windows as the dog ran up and down the beach outside, barking at seagulls.

The tea room was closing for the winter later that afternoon. The staff — already mostly taken up with cleaning everything and packing everything away — served us with a sort of cheery brusqueness, from a much reduced menu. Tea and yesterday’s baking, to the sound of catering clattering and voices impatient to be home.

Later, near one end of the beach, along from the pitted tarmac expanse of the car park, we discovered the remains of a little narrow-gauge railway system that must have given rides to kids. The track was only about as wide as my hand, outstretched, and there were some bits just lying around, scattered and loose. Where the tracks were still anchored to the ground, they snaked along between bushes and miniature hills, and in one place there was a dip and a mound where something like a cross between a bridge and a tunnel let a little twisty path arch over the railway. A wooden shed at one end of the complex might once have held the trains and engines that had run here, but they were long gone and the shed was wrecked, doors missing, wooden roof bowed with rot or age or maybe from kids jumping up and down on it.

I picked up one length of track, about as long as I was tall. It was very light, probably aluminium. I held it easily with one hand and could have broken it, it felt, using two. Tumsh tensed near by, front legs splayed, thinking the length of track was a stick I was about to throw.

On the beach we found a thick length of rope, just three metres long but as thick as my arm, sturdy enough, it looked, to moor supertankers with. She and I made jokes about enormous plugs, about giant bits of soap. The wind whipped the water, uncombing my hair, and sending hers flying and lashing about her head and face until she tamed it with a woollen hat.

We walked with hands in pockets, but arm in arm, uncoupling only to pick up a stick and throw it for the dog. Tumsh tore across the tarnished beach, sending sand arcing with each turn, stopping at the water if a stick went into the waves, when he’d stand there, panting, staring at the stick, then looking back at us, tongue lolling.

Later we walked along a path by the side of the sea, near the abandoned miniature railway network, and, suddenly, there was a train: real, full size, charging down the coastline from Stonemouth, heading for Aberdeen and Edinburgh and then to who knew where — London probably, Penzance perhaps — roaring through the trees just above us, close enough for us to smell its diesel smoke and see the people — their faces pale, like ghosts’ faces — looking down at us.

‘Let’s wave,’ she said, and raised her hand, waving.

I waved too. I think we both felt like children, then we felt foolish, because there was nobody waving back, and it is a sad thing to wave at a train and not have anybody bother to wave back at you, but then, in the last carriage before the rear engine unit and another blattering roar, there was a flurry of movement, and a wee face pressed up against the murky glass beneath a blur of childish arm and hand, waving.

We went back to the tea room. It was closed, all the tables, seats and signs taken inside behind rolled-down shutters, the staff car park deserted.

Not long before we left, on the way back to the car, Ellie hid behind a tree while Tumsh was off chasing a squirrel. When the dog came back he could tell she ought to be there, but he couldn’t see her. He barked, looked all about, jumped with his front legs only, barked again. Ellie cried out, ‘Tumsh! Oh, Tumsh boy!’ from behind the tree, making the dog bark more wildly, then she came strolling round, and the dog ran to her. She went down on her haunches, took its big face in her hands, shaking him side to side, telling him what a fine and silly dog he was.

The light started to go as great grey fleets of cloud rolled in off the sea, filling the sky, erasing any trace of sun and dragging, curled underneath them, light grey veils of rain, curved like tails.

In the car on the way back we had to keep the windows down because Tumsh must have rolled in something horrible; the rain started, and the smell coming off Tumsh and the rain slanting in through the cracked windows and the grey-brown landscape outside made the journey seem long and not much fun.

We were in a long queue of traffic stopped at some temporary traffic lights on the main road back north when Ellie said, ‘We should get away, somewhere.’ She looked at me. ‘You and me, Stewart. When we’ve both finished our courses. If we’re going to stay together. Will we stay together, do you think?’

‘Eh? Course we will. We’ll be together for ever. That’s the general idea, isn’t it? You and me? Together?’

‘Yes. Until we’re old.’

‘Only until we’re old?’ I said, pretending shock. ‘Like, we should split up when we’re sixty or ninety or something?’

She smiled. ‘For ever.’ She held my arm. ‘But we should get away somewhere, don’t you think?’

‘Where to? What sort of place? How far away?’

‘I don’t know. Just somewhere else. Somewhere sunny, yeah? Sunny and hot. Just not here.’ She rested her head on my shoulder as I watched the lights far in the distance turn from red to green, probably too far ahead for us to make it through in this pulse of traffic. ‘Just…away,’ she said.

We started to edge forward.

So I’m sitting in Ellie’s Mini as we potter along behind the in-no-hurry Kia, remembering that day seven years ago, and how low I felt then for some reason. Maybe just the weather, maybe some combination of that and other trivial but still dispiriting details, like the dog stinking of decay, but maybe due to some premonition — through some brief internal glint of self-knowledge rather than anything superstitious — that what she and I had wasn’t going to last for ever after all: wouldn’t last sixty years or even six.

I watch Ellie’s face as we drive in procession behind the slower car. I have missed such moments. I would always do this: just watch her in profile as she drove. I was always waiting for a moment when she looked less than beautiful, when she looked ordinary. Never found one.

Grier, I noticed the other day as we walked from the blinged X5 to Bessel’s Café, can do stealth. On the street, she walked differently, held herself differently — her head down, her expression frowning a little, her gait sort of efficient but gauche, untidy — and basically attracted no attention. In the café she seemed to shake off this magic cloak of semi-invisibility and suddenly she was there, as obvious as a beautiful-actress-playing-plain in an ancient Hollywood movie taking off her glasses and shaking down her hair. Why, Miss Murston…That was when the majority of male eyes started turning in her direction.

I’ve a friend — a close friend by London standards, just an acquaintance given the way I came to think of friends when I grew up here — who’s a fashion photographer and he says you can have a genuine supermodel turn up at the studio and you think she’s the cleaner at first, until she’s turned on whatever it is she has to turn on, the camera is pointing at her and she’s dressed in whatever she’s supposed to be dressed in, however barely. Then she looks no more like a cleaning lady than she does a laser printer. Kapow; lights on, burning.

I guess Grier is like that; whatever beauty she has is dynamic, animated; a function, not a state.

With Ellie, it’s not something she can turn off. I remember her being almost as beautiful when she’s asleep as she is fully awake; it’s there in the depth of her, in her bones, in her skin and hair.

Eye of the beholder and all that. One of the truer clichés, I guess. I’m biased, but I think El’s only got more beautiful over the last five years. There’s a sort of substance to her looks now, maybe even a leavening of sadness or world-weary wisdom informing them; making her beauty seem earned at last, rather than just something she fell so casually heir to.

Or not; I know I’m bringing my own knowledge and prejudices to this evaluation. Would I still think she looks so pensively exquisite if I didn’t know about the failed marriage, the miscarriage, the many things left undone, unfinished? Never mind the hurt I caused her.

And — because I still know which one of the two I’d rather spend the rest of my days with — shouldn’t any rational comparison between El and Grier favour the one who has to work at being attractive, rather than the one who can’t help it?

We finally whistle past the Kia on a long, dipping straight. It’s a simple, safe, even elegant bit of overtaking, but the wee old guy driving — hunched down, staring forward with an expression of pinched, peering concentration and gripping the steering wheel like a lifebelt in a storm — still flashes his lights at us.

‘And you, sir,’ I murmur, looking in the side mirror.

‘Oh, now,’ Ellie says. ‘Probably just trying to wash his windscreen.’ Then I hear her take a breath. ‘Listen,’ she says.

Here we go. ‘Listening,’ I say, turning in my seat and crossing my arms.

‘I don’t want you to—’ Ellie starts. She sighs. ‘I don’t want you to …’ Her voice trails off. She shakes her head, puffs her cheeks and blows air out, making the kind of noise I associate with exasperated Parisian taxi drivers. She looks at me. I’m looking at her. ‘It is…over,’ she says, turning her attention back to the road. She spares me only occasional glances after this.

‘You mean you and me?’ I ask.

‘Yeah. I’m not…It’s all in the past now, yeah? All done with. Water under the bridge, soap under the wedding ring and all that. That’s how you feel? I mean, it is, isn’t it?’

Fuck. ‘What sort of idiot would I be to feel any other way?’ She’s silent for a while, then she says, ‘Okay, but I need a real answer.’

Fuck and double fuck. ‘Okay. I still…In some ways my feelings haven’t changed. Towards you, I mean. I…I mean I — sorry,’ I say, having to clear my throat. ‘Do you have any water in…?’

‘Here.’ She passes me an opened half-litre bottle of mineral water without looking at me. ‘Not what it says on the label, mind; best Toun watter fra tha tap back hame.’

‘Thanks.’ I drink, taking my time.

‘You were saying,’ she says.

I hand her the bottle back. ‘I don’t expect anything from you, Ellie. I mean, not even forgiveness. I’m certainly not back…I’m not here expecting you to, you know, umm, fall into my arms or anything. Ahm…Too much has happened, we’ve been apart too long, and in the end…well, I did what I did. But I’m still, as our American cousins would say…I still have feelings for you.’ My mouth has gone dry again and I have to clear my throat once more. ‘For whatever that’s worth.’ I take a deep breath. ‘And if it’s worth nothing, then that’s fair enough. I accept that. But I…I just don’t want to lie to you.’

She nods thoughtfully, drives calmly.

‘You asked, so I’m telling you,’ I tell her. But by this point I start to realise I’m talking just to fill the silence, and so I shut up.

‘Okay,’ she says. There’s a pause. ‘Okay.’

There’s a long silence af ter this, but it is — I think — companionable.

‘So,’ I find myself saying eventually, ‘did you come to find me at Al and Morven’s…because the boys roughed me up?’

She looks thoughtful, still concentrating on the road ahead. ‘I suppose I did. They’d made me angry, made me want to get back at them. Told them I was coming over to your mum and dad’s, just to talk to you. Or I’d make a point of seeing you at the funeral tomorrow, and Donald would know all about it if they even thought of threatening you again. So…stupid.’ She shakes her head. ‘And then bragging to me about it.’

‘Unintended consequences.’

She snorts. ‘At least with Murdo and Norrie you know it is unintended. Nothing as sophisticated as reverse psychology ever clouded their motivations. If Grier did something like that, the first thing you’d think would be, What’s she really up to?’

‘Seriously? She’s that Machiavellian?’

‘Oh, you’ve no idea.’ Ellie sucks in a breath. ‘Remember that thing about Grier creeping into Callum’s bed when she was just a kid?’

‘Umm,’ I say. ‘…Yeah.’

The ‘umm’ was a kind of lie, and so was the pause before ‘yeah’: artificial hesitations while I pretended to delve down into my memory. In reality, of course, I remembered instantly because I was talking about this just an hour or two ago, with Ferg. I feel like a complete shit for even this tiny deception.

‘Well, we all kind of accepted nothing happened,’ Ellie says. ‘But a few years later Grier actually talked about having something over Callum, about having power over him. It was the first time — and last time — we ever got drunk together, left alone in the house when she was still under age. She talked about changing her story and claiming that she’d repressed the memory of Callum raping her or sexually assaulting her that night; telling Callum that she’d pull this stunt if he didn’t do something she wanted him to do.’

‘Fuck me.’ I’m staring at Ellie. ‘What? What did she want him to do?’

‘Nothing. She didn’t have anything she wanted him to do. It was just a…a plan. Something to be held in reserve.’ Ellie shakes her head. ‘And she actually ran this past me, to check this was cool. And to show me how clever she was, of course. Little bitch.’

‘You didn’t think it was cool.’

‘I thought it was fucking obscene. I told her if she ever tried anything like that I’d tell Mum, Dad, everybody about what she’d just said.’ Ellie shakes her head again. ‘She was drunk as a skunk and slurring her words, and she’d never been drunk in her life before, far as I know, anyway — threw up spectacularly later — but you could see her change tack almost instantly, even that far gone. Just flicked into this other mode, all jokey and faking laughter and saying, Jeez, I hadn’t been taking her seriously there, had I? Surely not! Oh, what a laugh.’ Ellie looks at me with a basilisk face. ‘But, trust me, she’d meant every fucking word.’ She looks back at the road. ‘Next day, post-hangover? Claimed she couldn’t remember a thing. And never made that mistake again; I’ve never seen her that drunk or anything like it, and she’s never shared a confidence with me since, either.’ Ellie does that sort of single side-nod thing and makes a clicking noise with her mouth. ‘Kid learns her lessons fast. I’ll give her that.’

I shake my head. ‘Your family never ceases to amaze.’

‘But can you see why I hope Dad never retires?’ Ellie says. ‘Never gives up the business? The illegal part, anyway; the haulage, property and building side runs itself: just hire decent managers. The illegal stuff…it doesn’t work that way. Can you imagine the boys running it, seriously? Even Murdo. He’s the smartest of the three, but…by God, that’s a relative compliment.’ She smiles. ‘In more senses, obviously.’

‘Obviously.’

She takes a breath like she’s about to say something, then doesn’t, but digs her mobile out of her fleece pocket, switches it off with some deliberation and puts it back.

‘Mind switching your phone off?’ she asks.

‘I really am not having much luck with phones around you guys, am I?’ I say, shaking my head but taking the rubbish temporary phone out.

‘Fully off,’ she tells me. ‘Actually, battery out is best.’

‘Don’t know why I bother,’ I say, taking the battery out.

Meanwhile Ellie’s fiddling with the Mini’s information screen, menuing down to the comms set-up and turning Bluetooth off. I want to ask her whether she might be acting a bit paranoid and we’re going a little overboard here, but I can’t think how to put it without it sounding snide or hurtful.

And — and this kind of astounds me too — there’s just a trace of fear jangling inside me. Because how do I know Ellie isn’t somehow back in the familial fold, despite everything? Could I be getting set up here? Could she have changed that much over the last five years? She wouldn’t be going to deliver me into the hands of her insane brothers, would she? I can’t believe she’d do that — and anyway, even if she did wish me harm she surely wouldn’t have picked me up from under the noses of my mum and dad, would she? No, I’m being crazy. She’s Ellie. She wouldn’t, couldn’t. Still, there’s that tiny, nagging sense of danger tingling in my guts.

‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Also, I kind of need your word on this, Stewart. I mean seriously, properly.’

‘It’ll go no further, if that’s what you—’

‘Well, it can’t. That’s why—’

‘It’s yours.’

‘Word?’

‘Yup. My word on it.’

She shoots me a frowning look, like she’s really having to think about this. ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘You never were a blabber, were you?’

No I wasn’t. Still not. Good with secrets, me. ‘My tongue I could control,’ I agree wearily. ‘My cock, it turned out—’

‘Oh, just…just stop now, okay?’ she says. ‘Honestly. We’re through all that.’

‘I’m sorry, I guess—’

‘Doesn’t lessen what you—’

‘Yeah, sounds like I’m trivialising…Anyway.’

‘Yeah. Anyway.’ She shakes her head. ‘Okay, here it is: Dad — Don — has actually suggested maybe I should take over.’ She looks at me long enough for a mid-straight correction to be required. She shakes her head again. ‘Seriously. The whole business. Everything. In fact, particularly the illegal side.’

‘Fuck.’

Ellie nods. ‘My first thought too.’

‘Jeez, you’re not even thinking of—’

‘Stewart, are you remembering what I do these days?’

‘Oh, yeah: drug counselling, rehab, whatever. Hmm. Some people would think that’d be great…cover.’

‘Yeah, I guess some people would,’ she agrees, eyes narrowing briefly. ‘So, no, not really. I mean, for about an hour after I got over the initial shock, I thought about how I could take over, run the business down, wean everybody off the hard stuff, blah-blah-blah, but…That’s never going to happen. For one thing, I don’t know that Murdo, Fraser and Norrie would have it: taking orders from me, I mean. And even if they did and you tried the whole running-down-the-illegal-side idea — and got them to agree to that, which is probably the least likely…proposition in any of this — and you got Mike Mac onside to do the same thing at the same time — which is probably less unlikely — you’d find demand being met by somebody else, somebody more ruthless, more profit driven. It’d be seen as a sign of weakness, too; you’d be taken over, sidelined at best, more likely found in a ditch one morning with a couple of bullets in your head.’

‘Fucking hell, El.’

‘Like I say: Murdo and the boys would want to keep going anyway, so it’d be kind of academic. What could I do? Murder my three remaining brothers so I have a clear run at a scheme that isn’t going to work anyway? Kill Mum first to spare her the grief? So of course I’m saying no. But Don’s even more unreconstructed than the boys are; can you imagine how little faith he must have in them as the heirs to the family firm if he’s seriously contemplating turning everything over to me?’ She blows her breath out again. ‘Thing is, I think Dad’s worried Murdo’s getting impatient, wanting him to stand aside, take a back seat; leave him, Fraser and Norrie to run things.’ She shakes her head. ‘Stewart, my family has as good as run this town for nearly a quarter of a century and in a bizarre kind of way we can be proud of how we’ve done, but in the end…it’s still based on nothing more than the threat of violence and the market for drugs. For all his faults it’s been Dad who’s held it all together and exercised the restraint required, but there’s no…no rightful authority, no democratic control, no oversight or checks and balances, no…It’s all…There’s no legitimacy. Violence and a market just mean…nothing. And I can’t see Murdo or the twins acting with any restraint at all, not once it’s all theirs. They think they’re ambitious and they talk about expansion and they use phrases like “grow the market”, but …’ She shakes her head again, lapses into silence.

Shit, what the hell am I supposed to say?

‘Maybe the law’ll change before it comes to any of that,’ I suggest. ‘Maybe it’ll all get legalised and you can turn legit, or just go back to running the property and transport businesses.’

Ellie shakes her head. ‘Maybe. Who knows. Maybe it’ll turn out our politicians aren’t all cowards or on the take.’

‘Aye, well, put like that, I wouldn’t hold your breath.’

She shrugs. ‘Things change, though. People are taking fewer drugs. Dad makes as much money through fake fags these days as he does from the properly banned stuff. Not sure any of us saw that coming, though we should have.’

‘Really?’

‘Ha! A packet of fags costs a pound fifty to make and six-fifty to buy, legit. You could charge half-price and still coin it in, not that Dad or Mike Mac are that generous, or stupid; it’d be like opening a discount warehouse for crims across Scotland.’

‘I had no idea.’

She nods. ‘Half the fags in the Toun — even more of the loose tobacco — never trouble Customs and Excise with the bother of collecting the revenue. It’d be a hundred per cent if the cops could live with it, but at that level even the doziest journo’s going to scratch their heads and think, Wait a minute …’

I do the cheeks-full, breath-blowing-out thing too.

After a while I say, ‘Course, there’s always Grier.’ I look for a reaction but El’s just staring ahead. ‘She might be up for it.’

‘Careful,’ El says, ‘for you tread upon my nightmares.’

I can’t help laughing. ‘She wouldn’t.’ I think about it. ‘Would she?’

El smiles. ‘No, she wouldn’t. And the boys certainly wouldn’t take orders from her. Plus, knowing Grier, this would be too small beer for her anyway. Too local, too limited, too…legacy-ridden. Mostly, though, too not all her own work.’

‘Do you two not get on at all, then?’

‘We get on fine,’ El says, almost indignant. ‘When we meet up.’ She shrugs. ‘We just take some care to make sure we don’t meet up too often.’

A hare darts across the road five metres in front of us and we do the first part of an emergency stop, tyres chirping, then the hare’s gone, missed by a half-metre or so — I catch a glimpse of it in the side mirror, leaping into the heather — and we’re accelerating smartly away again.

‘Fairly easy these days anyway,’ El says. ‘She’s never home. Posing naked on some tropical beach, as a rule. Which is what she’s supposed to be doing at the moment, of course. We did miss that hare, didn’t we?’

‘We did.’

‘Yeah. Good. Didn’t feel a bump.’

‘“Supposed to be”?’

‘Aye, left some shoot in Montserrat or somewhere, just walked out and flew home on no notice, left them short-handed or shorttitted or whatever the phrase is. We’ve had the agency on the phone at the house — much to parental consternation — and something called a Creative Director, and even a lawyer, issuing threats. Very unprofessional of the girl.’

‘You mean, like, just to be here this weekend?’

‘Yup. Never thought she and old Joe were even that close.’ Ellie clicks her mouth again. ‘Grier Shows Familial Emotion shock. Who knew?’ She flicks a glance at me. ‘Assuming that really is her reason. Like I say, with Grier, given it’s the stated one, almost certainly not. Made off with one of their cameras, too, and some incredibly expensive lens, apparently.’

‘Yeah, I bumped into her on the beach at Vatton forest yesterday. She had a camera with a big lens there. Went to see Joe, lying in Geddon’s, then had a coffee.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Ellie sounds like even this chance meeting might have been deeply suspicious, though I can’t see how.

‘So, what?’ I ask her. ‘Grier just upped and left as soon as she heard Joe was dead?’

‘Nope. Day or so after.’

‘Aha.’

‘Yeah. Ah-fucking-ha, as you might say, Stewart.’

When Grier was fourteen she really wanted a horse but her dad wouldn’t buy her one. Ponies had been good enough for Ellie but then she’d kind of outgrown that phase and, besides, Grier wasn’t good with pets. She’d had various animals over the years and each time she’d doted on them for the first few weeks or months and then slowly lost interest.

Dogs especially; she’d play with them and take them for walks when they were still puppies and the weather was good, but then as they aged and the year turned wetter she’d find excuses, and other people in the family, usually Ellie, would have to take them for walks, or they’d just be left free to run around the garden. One Dalmatian, given the freedom of the Hill House grounds after Grier had found the animal too clingy and a bit stupid, had jumped over the wall into the path of a refuse truck and died messily. Grier had been less than distraught and suggested that the way was now clear to get a Samoyed, or maybe a Newfoundland. That kind of solidified Don’s attitude towards the subject of Grier and pets.

Still, she really wanted a horse; perhaps — Ellie reckoned when she told me this story — just because Ellie had only ever had ponies. Don usually indulged Grier in pretty much everything, but there was a feeling that, gradually, over the years, she’d made him look a bit more foolish each time she cajoled and convinced him that this time would be different and she could be trusted with a new pet, and now Don had finally decided enough was enough. There would be no horse.

Grier sulked mightily. There was some heroic door slamming. Don retaliated by having all the house doors fitted with those overhead hydraulic closing gizmos that close doors automatically and softly.

Grier took up golf, which, if it was a reaction to not being allowed a horse, probably wasn’t one that anybody would have anticipated. As was the case with most sports and hobbies that Grier could be bothered to pursue beyond any initially frustrating phase, she proved to be a natural, and got really good at it, about as good as it’s possible to get in the course of a year. She was quickly invited to join the regional youth team but turned them down. She abandoned the game completely and gave away the expensive set of clubs Don had bought her. She’d learned all she needed to know and she’d take the game up again when she was old and couldn’t do proper exercise. Don had taken the game up himself some years earlier and was struggling to get his handicap below twenty-five. How he felt about this casual, cavalier mastering — jeez, she learned so fast it was more like downloading — and abrupt dismissal was not recorded.

Anyway, the following spring, the main lawn of Hill House — the one visible from the lounge and the conservatory, the one that visitors to the house could see as soon as they came down the drive — suddenly erupted into flower, from bulbs somebody had dug into the grass the year before. The flowers made up a picture of a severed horse’s head, maybe five or six metres from the tip of its nose to the ragged bloody neck; red tulips stood in for the blood.

It wasn’t a particularly good portrait of a severed horse’s head, and it never really got a chance to bloom fully, but it was shocking enough. Mrs M nearly had a fit. The whole lawn was razed, ploughed and re-sown within a couple of days.

Don took Grier aside. At first she denied everything and suggested it might be some sort of underworld message from a business associate of Donald’s. Ellie heard that the resulting explosion of rage from her dad made Grier wet her pants; Donald didn’t hit her — he’d always skelped the children’s bums but stopped hitting the girls after they passed the age of about nine or ten — but Grier seemingly thought he was about to. She admitted it had been her.

Donald took the money for the re-laying of the lawn out of her allowance and told her she was getting away lightly. If she ever did anything that upset her mother like that again, she’d find her inheritance so reduced she’d struggle to buy a rocking horse.

‘Aye, she’s some kid,’ I said when Ellie first told me all this.

‘She’s frightening,’ Ellie said. ‘Fourteen-year-olds just don’t usually think that far ahead.’

‘Or use a combination of a Godfather reference and guerrilla horticulture in an elaborate and basically pointless form of revenge,’ I said. ‘I bet she’d make a great conceptual artist.’

‘We should be so lucky,’ Ellie told me. ‘Just pray she doesn’t go into politics.’

‘Grier said something weird the other day,’ I tell Ellie. ‘In the café, after we met on the beach?’

‘What?’

I tell her about Grier hinting Callum might have been pushed, rather than have jumped.

Ellie is silent for a disturbingly long time. I can’t read her expression at all. Eventually, in a flat voice, she says, ‘Well…there have been…Stuff’s been talked about. About Callum.’

‘Uh-huh?’

She shakes her head. ‘Let’s talk about something else.’

‘Okay.’

Only neither of us seems to be able to think of anything else to talk about, so we drive on in silence for some minutes.

Ellie turns the Mini onto a little single track road that leads up through some trees to — according to a sign — Tunleet Reservoir. I vaguely remember this, from when I was exploring on my moped. The Mini works its way up the twisting, deteriorating road, crosses a cattle grid, then crunches its way over the gravel of an otherwise deserted car park in front of a boarded-up stone waterworks building at the foot of a grassy reservoir wall, just sliding into shadow.

Ellie makes a little noise of approval. ‘Looks like we’ve got the place to ourselves.’

We have indeed. It feels almost disloyal to Ellie, but I experience a tiny frisson of relief. I was — despite everything — part expecting to find a collection of Rangies and oversize pick-ups parked here, and the Murston boys standing looking mean and tap-tapping the thick end of baseball bats into their meaty palms.

Ellie and I walk up the grassy slope back into the sunlight and along the stone summit of the dam wall to a metal bridge over the overflow at the eastern edge. Beyond, the reservoir stretches out to the south-west. The whole place can’t help reminding me of the smaller dam and reservoir on the Ancraime estate where Wee Malky died, though this loch’s much bigger and in higher, more open country, like something exposed, peeled back and offered to an evening sky of ragged clouds and glimpses of a watery-looking sun.

We walk along a path to a small promontory about the size of two tennis courts laid end to end, jutting out into the sun-bright, chopping water. At the end, on a slight rise, there’s a wooden bird hide: seven-eighths of an octagon with slits roughly at eye height cut into the undressed wooden logs. Low platforms underneath are probably for kids to stand on so they can see out too.

There are a couple of sturdy backless benches in the middle of the space. We spend a little while looking through the slits at a few ducks and coots and a family of six swans cruising by, white feathers ruffled like the water, then we sit on the benches, under a sky still clearing of cloud.

A skein of geese flies overhead. The birds start swapping position as they fly above us and the faint sound of honking — half comic, half plaintive — sinks down through the breeze to us. Ellie sits back, feet up on the chunky beams of the bench. She hugs her knees.

‘Do you ever feel like you’re just waiting to die?’ she asks, not looking at me.

‘Umm…not really, no,’ I tell her. But I’m thinking, Fuck me, this is a bit heavy.

‘No? Sometimes I feel like that,’ she says, ‘Sometimes I feel like I’ve seen it all before, been everywhere, done everything, experienced everything, and you start to think, What else is there except more of the same, only maybe worse?’ She looks at me. ‘Yes? No? Anything like that? Or just me?’

‘Well, something like that, so not just you. Not so sure about the wanting to die bit. Though I suppose some people—’

‘Not wanting to die,’ she says. ‘Just…waiting for it to happen, when it does. Like you’re already anticipating the end.’ Her face scrunches up. ‘Do you know how long we’re expected to live? I mean, our generation? We could live to a hundred, easy. A hundred!’ She shakes her head, hair flung about her, then settling deftly. ‘I feel I’ve lived a whole life already, Stewart, at twenty-five. I look at kids half my age, or even just ten years younger and I just feel so…so distant from them. Was I that annoying, that precocious, that stupidly sure of myself, that shallow when I was their age?’ She shakes her head. ‘But that life expectancy means another three lives on top of this one. More, in a way, because you don’t have to go through half of each one being a kid.’ A shrug. ‘Except more decrepit in the last one or two, towards the end. Incontinence, dementia, deafness, arthritis. Back to being as helpless as a child.’

I nod. ‘Always good to have something to look forward to. Though we might have really good replacement stuff by then. And robots, to look after us, if our — if people won’t.’

‘Yeah, but something’ll get us in the end.’

‘Probably cancer. Unless the robots turn on us, obviously. Personally I’m hoping to die in my eighties, relatively young and still vigorous, when the father of the sixteen-year-old twins I’m in bed with bursts in and puts a laser bolt through my head.’

‘But do you see what I mean? Sometimes I feel like I just want to keep my head down, never get beaten up or raped, never become a refugee or a war widow, never starve or have to bury my own children…If I ever…But, just get out of this life without being hurt any more…And that’ll feel like victory, like getting away with it? Do you understand? I mean, not that I’ve been badly hurt, not really—’

‘Yeah, well. Not for the want of me—’

‘No. I mean not compared to women who have been raped or tortured or watched their loved ones shot in front of them. Not compared to somebody who’s been beaten up every night or been burned with acid or had their ears and nose cut off for leaving a violent husband. Compared to that, what you did to me was nothing.’ She looks at me. It’s a challenging look more than a forgiving one, so I choose not to say anything. ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ she says. ‘It was still stupid, selfish, petty, unbearably insulting at the time, but …’

‘But you still took me to the station.’

She snorts. ‘Ha! You could say that was just me being selfish, as ever. I didn’t want to see them kill you or maim you, or even know that they had. Didn’t want that on my conscience. I wanted to prove I was bigger than you.’

‘Well, I’m still grateful,’ I tell her. ‘You’ll never know how—’

‘Oh, it didn’t end there,’ she tells me. ‘I had to fight — I mean, shout and scream and threaten all sorts of grisly stuff, things I never thought I’d hear myself say…All to stop them sending somebody to London to do something horrible to you, or getting one of their underworld pals down there to take the job on, for a price or just as a favour.’

‘Jesus. I had no idea.’

And I really didn’t. Sure, when I moved down to London I kept my door locked and used the security camera when the bell went, and I didn’t walk down any dark alleys if I could avoid it, just in case a Murston brother came calling to administer a well-deserved beating, but apparently almost everybody in London does this risk-limitation stuff as a matter of course anyway.

‘Good,’ she says. ‘I’m glad you had no idea.’

I leave it a few moments, then ask, ‘Why did you do it?’

‘What, spirit you away? Protect you?’

‘Yeah. There must have been part of you wanted the boys to give me a good kicking, right then.’

She shakes her head. ‘No,’ she says. ‘No, there wasn’t. Not right then. I was in shock for all of about five seconds, then I just had this sudden, very…very cold, in a way, very adult feeling that, Well, that was that all over, there’d be no wedding, you and I were finished, I was on my own again, but, like, what could I do to keep the damage to a minimum? What was the best course of action? For me and everybody else? And getting you away as fast as possible seemed really obvious, just what needed to be done, for everybody’s good, not just yours. Even arranging a false trail, getting somebody — Ferg as it turned out — to order a taxi to the airport in your name just popped right into my head, right there. So that’s what I did.’

She looks at me with a strange expression, one I’m not sure I can read at all.

‘You want to know the truth?’ she says, her voice very languid, cool and poised. ‘I’ve rarely — maybe never — felt so alive, so in control, so good about myself, as I did that night.’

She looks away, sighs.

‘Didn’t last, of course. Cried myself to sleep for a week, raged and screamed at you, wished I had been more…vengeful. Used to fantasise, used to obsess about us meeting again and me walking up to you and slapping you so hard your teeth rattled. Put my reaction on the night down to shock, some misguided sense of loyalty to you or a residual need to protect you because I still loved you, or…Found an old shirt of yours, in my wardrobe,’ she says. ‘Still smelled of you.’ Another shake of the head. ‘Tore it, ripped it until it was practically confetti, until it looked like it had been through a shredder — and been out in the rain, because I was crying, howling so much — and while I was doing that, I really did wish you’d still been inside it, really did want you to have been the thing, the one that got torn to scraps and ribbons.’

She doesn’t look at me, just shakes her head, staring at the timber of the hide’s walls.

‘But I got through it. Things sorted themselves out. Things always do. We de-organised the wedding, I got on with my life, started going out again, meeting people. In the Toun and Aberdeen, and just chose not to hear the whispers and the murmurs, sympathetic or otherwise.’ She looks down, runs her hand along the worn smoothness of the bench. ‘Met Ryan. Well; started to see him as a man, not a boy? And so began another exciting adventure.’ She smiles at me. Ellie wears a watch. She checks it now. ‘Thought my stomach was trying to tell me something.’ She looks at me. ‘You hungry?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Want to come to mine for something to eat? It’ll just be pasta or stir-fry or something. You picked up any special dietary requirements while you’ve been in London?’

‘Thanks, I’d love to. And no; still omnivorous.’

At the same moment, though, I lose any appetite I had, as my belly contorts itself with another little tremor of fear. Or anticipation. I honestly don’t know myself.

We stand up. ‘This isn’t, you know, “coffee”,’ she tells me with a small smile. ‘You know that old thing?’

I manage a smile too. ‘From more innocent days.’

‘Just a meal, then I’ll take you back to your folks’.’

‘I know. Appreciated.’

‘Come on then.’

Going down the dark, grass slope, under skies turning orange and pink with the start of sunset, she slides her arm through mine. ‘Want to drive?’

‘Okay.’

‘No heroics? Nothing lairy?’

‘Promise.’

‘Deal.’ She hands me the Mini’s key.

So I drive us back to the converted mansion called Karndine Castle. I take it slow. It’s still not the smoothest of drives but that’s not my fault; the roads really are much more worn, rutted and potholed than I remember and there’s a lot of little jinks and sudden steering adjustments required. Respect to the girl; I hadn’t realised, earlier, how good a job Ellie was doing avoiding all this shit. I’m glad I’m not sixteen right now; this stuff’s bad enough in a car but potentially lethal if you’re riding a motorbike.

At the castle we climb a couple of grand, creaking old staircases — largely ruined by the fire doors and walls required for multiple occupation — and go on up a further curving flight to her apartment in a big, square, airy tower with three-sixty views over parkland, fields, forests and hills. No lurking Murston brothers leap from the shadows and pull me screaming down to some torture cellar. My insides relax a little and suddenly I’m hungry again.

She goes to the loo. I’m told to put some music on, make myself at home. What to choose? Be too trite to select something we both loved.

She was always a bit more into old Motown and R&B in general than I was. I go for R&B just as a genre and set it to play from the top, then quickly have to skip as the first track up is Amy Winehouse and ‘Rehab’. Given El’s day job that might sound contrived. Not to mention morbid. Next album. Angie Stone; nope, don’t know. Next: 75 Soul Classics; that’ll do. Archie Bell and the Drells with ‘Tighten Up’. Never heard of it. Also, I have absolutely no idea what the fuck a drell is meant to be.

Skip, skip. Aretha Franklin and ‘Think’. Finally.

I take a look about as the music starts to play. The furnishings are tasteful but sparse and there’s a careless, almost slapdash feel about the place, like she still hasn’t settled in yet or even entirely unpacked, though she’s been here over a year.

El reappears, minus fleece, with an open shirt, light blue, worn loose over her tee. ‘You can help if you like,’ she says.

‘Love to.’

The kitchen’s big; double-aspect to the south and the east. I sit at the breakfast bar as she sets a pan boiling for noodles and heats a wok for a stir-fry. I help her chop the veg, to be topped up by pre-prepared stuff from the freezer. We drink chilled green tea.

We eat in the kitchen, just nattering about old times and old friends, laughing now and again, as the monstrous shadow of the building is thrown longer and longer across the sheep-dotted parkland to the south-east. We clear up together and I am able to display my newly, London-acquired ability to stack a dishwasher. Mum would be so proud.

She puts the lights on later, and the kitchen glitters.

‘I better take you back,’ she says, after some very good espresso from a neat little machine. I have a much more impressive device back at the flat in Stepney — all gleamy red and chrome, with confusing dials, and more handles and levers than a person can operate at one time — which does no better.

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Thanks for all this.’

‘That’s okay,’ she tells me. She shrugs. ‘Sorry there’s no invitation to stay.’

‘Don’t be sorry. And don’t be daft. Are you crazy? Just all this has been more than I deserve. You’ve been very…forgiving.’

‘Yeah, well. If only that was the worst of my faults.’

‘Oh, just stop it.’

She looks at me through narrowed eyes. ‘You would if I did, though, wouldn’t you?’

‘What, invite me to stay the night?’

‘Mm-hmm.’

‘Course I would,’ I tell her. I don’t think she’s actually going to, so I don’t bother telling her my nuts are quite possibly out of action — if I’ve any sense — for a day or two. ‘If that’s what you really wanted.’

‘I’m still not,’ she says, eyes flashing. ‘But, well …’

We’re both standing, maybe a metre apart, by the work surface. She looks down, picks with a thumbnail at something non-existent there, shakes her head. ‘I don’t know whether to feel flattered or just think, Men …’ She looks up at me. ‘I mean, I’m still not, but …’ She balls her hand into a fist on the work surface, and looks me in the eye. ‘That time Grier came to stay at your place, in London.’

‘Uh-huh?’

Ellie’s eyes narrow. ‘Anything happen?’

‘It was like the first night you and I slept together.’

She turns her head a fraction. ‘On the beach?’

‘Just sleep.’

‘She told me your hands were all over her.’

‘Is that what she told you?’

‘True, or not?’

‘Like you said, I’m not a blabber.’

‘Oh, yes, your famous policy: no kissing and telling.’

‘Yeah. Though I’m starting to think it’s just contrarianism on my part, not morality, because it’s what all the other guys do.’

‘And girls, as a rule.’

‘And girls. So, I just want to be different. And retain an air of mystery, obviously.’

She smiles slowly. ‘I’d still like to know. And you do sort of owe me, Stewart.’

‘Yeah,’ I breathe. ‘Guess I do.’ I spread my hands. ‘Anyway, I’ve already told Ferg. The loophole being, there wasn’t any kissing to tell about.’ El’s eyebrows go up at this point like she wants to protest at my double standards or something, but I talk on quickly. ‘It was the other way round: Grier was all over me. I mean not, nastily…Just, like, Oh, come on, and then, Okay, suit yourself…But …Well, there you go. We parted…a little awkwardly. I mean, still friends, or whatever we’d been to start with…but awkwardly. Didn’t see her again until this weekend.’

‘Huh,’ Ellie says. ‘Thought you’d want the complete set of Murston girls.’

I just suck in breath through pursed lips and frown at her.

Ellie picks up her jacket from the back of the bar stool. ‘Oh well. Thought so.’ She nods at my jacket, draped over another seat back. ‘Get your coat, love; you’ve pushed.’

I just smile, pick the jacket up, and we tramp creakingly back down through the wood-panelled excesses of the castle that never was.

She drives me back through a starry night, the Mini’s headlights piercing the fragrant late-summer darkness of the parkland around the old building, pulling us through to the stuttering streams of red and white lights marking the main road back into town.

Ferg rings my new phone just before we get to Dabroch Drive, wondering if I fancy a pint later, but I say no: long day, bit tired.

‘Bit fucking old, lightweight,’ Ferg tells me.

‘Whatever.’

‘See you at the funeral.’

‘See you then.’

We pull up outside Mum and Dad’s. Ellie leans over quickly and kisses me on the cheek. ‘Tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow.’

I watch the Mini’s lights disappear round the corner, and touch my cheek where she kissed me.

‘Still more than you deserve,’ I murmur to myself.

I take a look round, checking for lurking Murston brothers or their vehicles, and keek through the hedge to check there’s nobody lying in wait there, then safely negotiate the path to the door, a cup of tea, some pleasant, inconsequential talk with Al and Morven, and bed.