Stonemouth (36 page)

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.

It’s another one of those diaphanous days, the Toun submerged in a glowing mist from dawn onwards. It’s supposed to lift later, according to the forecast, though the forecasting people are notoriously bad at getting the Toun’s weather right.

I’m up early, using the family computer in Dad’s office. It’s a Windows machine so it all feels a bit Fisher-Price after an Apple interface, but grit your teeth and it works, so I check gmail and do a bit of not very difficult detective work, looking for a photograph, then both send it to myself and print it out, A6, pocket size.

It’s one of those taken five years ago in the ladies’ toilet on the fifth floor of the Mearnside Hotel – the Mearnside Hotel and Spa, as the website politely insists we ought to call it now – the one that shows Anjelica’s red satin gloves raised, fists clenched, above the top of the middle cubicle door. I’ve never looked for this before, never seen it, or the others, showing legs and shoes and the base of a toilet bowl. I still don’t want to look at those, though I do, on the same anonymous Talc O Da Toun website, just to check. Jeez, I was still wearing Ys or jockeys back then; they’re very…stretched. Preposterously, just looking at this dimly lit, fuzzily focused, arguably rather sordid stuff brings back the memory of the night itself, and I start to get a hard-on.

Enough.
I put the computer to sleep and pocket the print in the jacket of the black Paul Smith suit hanging on the back of my bedroom door, then go down to breakfast.

Muesli, fruit, wholemeal toast and tea. ‘Dad?’ I ask.

‘Work,’ Mum tells me, downing her tea and standing. She’s still in jeans and tee, hair mussed. ‘He’ll join us at the crem – ah, the cemetery. I’ll have to dash off after – only got the morning. Right. Dashing for a shower.’

‘I’ll clear.’

‘Ta.’

‘D’you know,’ Dad says, as we stand in the crowd gathered round the graveside on Hulshiers Hill, ‘I’m nearly fifty and this is the first actual interment I’ve been to.’

I glance at Al, surprised. ‘Really?’ I think about this. ‘Suppose it’s cos old Joe was a farmer once; attached to the land, and all that.’

‘Maybe,’ Dad says. ‘Couple of guys in the work, near retirement age, and they were saying the same thing. Only ever been to the crem. Hardly ever see people buried these days.’

‘It’s a good crowd,’ Mum says, looking round.

She’s right; a couple of hundred at least, all clustered like a dark parliament of crows on the hillside, our mass punctuated by the mossy gravestones of those gone before. The Murston family are graveside, of course, with seats. We’re bottom of the B-list, maybe C-list in terms of proximity.

Must have been some delay back at the house or the funeral parlour because we were almost all here by the time the slow-moving cortège nosed its way between the cemetery gates at the bottom of the hill and came crunching up the pitted tarmac like a procession of giant black beetles.

I caught a glimpse of Mr and Mrs M – him looking grim, her with her mouth set tight – and watched the three brothers in case they were trying to lock eyes on me, but they just stood at the back of the hearse, sharing their dad’s grim expression, as the coffin was
unloaded. Then Murdo, Fraser, Norrie and their dad shouldered the big, gleaming casket along with two of the undertakers. Mrs M stayed tight-lipped as she followed the minister and the coffin up the path to the grave.

Mostly I watched Ellie and Grier. They walked together, looking straight ahead, beautiful in black, Ellie wearing a long skirt, a white blouse, a thin silk coat and flat shoes, Grier in a three-piece suit with a little pillbox hat and a spotted veil. Shiny heels brought her up to the same height as Ellie.

Old Joe, I didn’t doubt, would have thought they were both lovely.

The family got to the graveside and sat down, and I lost sight of the girls. I looked around, then spotted Ferg, further up the hill, passing a silvery hip flask to a tearful-looking, raven-haired girl next to him.

Ten minutes later and we’ve been through the recited, edited, rosified highlights of Joe’s life – him being part of Stonemouth’s premier crime family seems to have been spun out of existence – and now the minister’s blethering on about dust to dust and ashes to ashes, and Joe having the sure and certain knowledge of a totally spiffing life to come at the right hand of God or some such bollocks. I listen to this stuff and just get embarrassed. I mean, embarrassed for us as a species.

Life after death. I mean, really?

At the few funerals I’ve been to – like Al, I’ve only ever been to crematoria till now – I’ve always sort of tightened up when they start spouting all this shit and felt like I’m
so close
to just jumping up and shouting, ‘Oh, fuck off !’ or something equally guaranteed to ruin everybody’s day and make me even less popular. Honestly. I get the same thing at weddings when they start the same in-the-sight-of-God nonsense, though it’s not as strong, and the majority of weddings I’ve been to have been secular; they’re fine, they’re joyous. Only one secular funeral so far, and it was infinitely better than all this weak-minded, fantasy-and-superstition shite.

I
remember feeling just as clear-eyed about all this when I was still almost a kid – thirteen or fourteen – and sort of half assumed that you just got more gullible and religious or whatever as you got older, but if it’s happening to me I see no signs so far; quite the opposite. I think I was plain wrong there and the new explanation is I just lack the credulity gene.