Stonemouth (18 page)

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

‘Afternoon.’

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

‘No. Do I look like I am?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not good. Too close a thing.

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

‘Stewart? Oh my
God
, is that you?’

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

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

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

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

‘Sure am. Looking pretty … pretty yourself.’

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

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

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

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

‘So, you seeing anyone, in London?’

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

‘You seen herself yet?’

‘Ellie?’

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

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

‘How about Ryan? You seen Ryan?’

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

‘She really hurt him, you know.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I say.

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

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

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

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

‘I suppose.’

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

‘Oh, I think you’ll find I did.’

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

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

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

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

‘No thanks.’ I smile. ‘I’m fine.’

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

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

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

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

‘Thanks.’ The box feels heavy.

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

‘Ah.’

‘Enjoy.’

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

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

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

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

I nod. ‘I know.’

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

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

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

‘Welcome.’ Then she turns and goes.

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

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

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