Descent (19 page)

‘Aye, thanks. One mair before we hit the dance floor, or whitever.’

Calum did not look at all contrite about his confession. He looked pleased with himself. I left him checking his phone and idly scanning the room for people he knew, and returned from a somewhat dazed trip to the bar to find him talking to a guy about our age who’d dragged up a seat at the end of the table.

‘Ryan, Big Don,’ Calum said by way of introduction. ‘Ryan’s an old pal from school. Big Don – not tae be confused with Wee Don, his da – is a, uh …’

‘Grandson of a great-aunt,’ Big Don said, leaning across and shaking hands, imperilling but avoiding the drinks. His suit sleeves were pushed up to the elbows, his shirt sleeves weren’t. I vaguely wondered if this was what Sophie would call a thing. His accent was well-spoken Highland, but he looked enough like Calum for you to tell they were related.

‘Cousin,’ said Calum, simplifying matters. ‘We used tae play together on Wee Don’s farm up near Alness.’

‘Remember that time you got on the tractor, and—’

‘Oh, man, don’t remind me.’

And they were off, reminiscing about scrapes and adventures and catching up on names that came up. I let them get on with it, savouring the interplay of Don’s Highland and Calum’s Greenock accents, interjecting an occasional comment or laugh for politeness’ sake, thinking it was high time Calum and I went on our projected primeval prowl for food and female company, and people-watching while I waited. The older folks wandered out, younger people ambled in. I could see Calum and Don likewise keeping half an eye on the comings and goings while they talked. They certainly noticed the next arrival.

Two young lampshade ladies came in, evidently from the wedding party because besides the fact that they were wearing ball gowns – one white with a satin top and net skirts with big swirly flowers traced in white thread on the outer layer, the other similar but in reddish purple with gold embroidery – they had their hair piled up and pinned in place with silvery head-pieces. The girl in the white dress had a hanky-sized wisp of veil over the back of her heaped red hair. The other girl – black-haired, taller, looking a year or two older and a kilo or two plumper – was attractive, but the girl with the red hair and – I now noticed – green eyes, was drop-dead gorgeous. Both of them carried tall drinks in clinking glasses, and between that and clutching their handbags and piloting their voluminous skirts they had no attention to spare for us, though we had plenty for them. They sat down facing each other a couple of tables away, with much shifting of chairs and patting down and fluffing out, and began a quiet, intense conversation.

‘Windmills are dead in the water,’ Don was saying. ‘On-shore multi-storey fish farming, that’s the big thing now. I’m thinking of going for a diploma in it – you know, to get the practical side. Mind you, the name sounds a bit daft.’

‘The name?’ said Calum.

Don leaned forward and spoke from behind his hand, ‘Pisciculture!’

‘“Key-culture”?’ said Calum, like an echo.

‘No,
pisc
iculture.’

‘I heard yi the first time. I wis just taking the piss out ae it.’

Don looked puzzled for a moment, giving a convincing impression of the stereotypical slow-on-the-uptake teuchter, then joined the laughter.

‘Well, there you go,’ he said.

‘Take it on the chin, man,’ said Calum. ‘Any word can be made to sound funny.’

‘Space engineering can’t,’ said Don.

‘Spaceship, spaceship, spaceship,’ said Calum, sounding more slurred with each repetition, like Sean Connery. ‘Shee?’

‘Yesh,’ said Don. He turned to me. ‘What about yours?’

‘I’m looking for a gig writing about the sort of thing you guys want to actually do,’ I said. ‘Can’t think how to make it sound funny.’

‘Then again,’ said Calum, ‘it sounds pathetic enough on its ain. You used tae be aw right at maths and that. Then yi were intae philosophy in a big way. Now you’re talking about journalism. Where did it aw go wrang for you, Sinky?’

‘It didn’t go wrong,’ I said. ‘I just discovered where my real talents lay, and it wasn’t in rigorous logic. More in general handwaving and bullshitting.’

‘Aye,’ said Calum. ‘Come tae think of it, you were aywis good at that.’

This banter continued for a time. The two girls we’d noticed earlier got up and left the room, of necessity walking slowly. They had criss-cross ribbon tapes from the waist to between the shoulder blades, just coming undone beneath their bare shoulders and exposed necks. After they’d brushed one by one through the doorway, Calum and I turned to each other with that tongue-hanging-out face by which young gentlemen express discreet and respectful approbation of young ladies.

‘Pervs,’ said Don.

‘What?’ I said indignantly. ‘Leching, OK, I’ll cop to that, but not perving.’

‘They’re too young.’

‘A bride and a bridesmaid?’ I scoffed.

‘Yon wee lassie in the white’s not the
bride
,’ said Don, scornfully. ‘She’s a flower girl.’

‘So you know her?’ said Calum, sounding interested.

‘Naw,’ said Don. ‘But I know the bride, Cathy, and that’s not her, and I’ve seen both these lassies in the wedding photies.’ He gestured vaguely towards the ceiling, as if to indicate the cloud.

‘Speaking of lassies,’ I said.

‘Aye,’ said Calum, slamming down an empty pint glass. ‘Time for a wee wander.’

Don nodded and stood up, looming just like Calum. ‘Yes, the ceilidh dancing starts any time.’

‘Not quite what I was thinking of,’ I said. ‘But if duty calls, I will face my fate like a man.’

As we filed out of the room Calum picked up the glasses the girls had left and gave each one a judicious sniff.

‘Old enough to buy alcohol,’ he announced. ‘Hence, old enough to—’

‘Good point,’ I said, before he could elaborate.

‘Pervs,’ Don said.

Don bought us drinks at the bar and we made our way along a lobby to the main venue for the bash. It was a large room with tables around the sides, a stage at the far end with a ceilidh band, chandeliers overhead, and a clear space in the middle in which a few couples were dancing to fiddle music and a jaunty, jiggy folksong. Most of the guests were standing about chatting or sitting at the tables, talking and laughing and drinking or, in the cases of several of the older people, just gazing benignly at the proceedings or inward to their memories.

As we walked into the room I had a moment of disquiet, which I couldn’t quite place: a sense of something out of whack, out of proportion, a generalisation made below the level of conscious thought and struggling to the surface, like a word on the tip of the tongue. Only in the next few minutes, as Calum and I circulated a bit with Big Don as our human shield, did what was odd about the gathering click into place.

It was indeed a disproportion, a statistical anomaly: the men were on average taller, the women on average shorter, than the population mean. The sexual dimorphism extended to facial features: I kept seeing women with small, pretty faces and men with big ugly mugs, all lantern jaws and beetle brows. Like any such generalisation it had exceptions: we were introduced to Big Don’s father, a stocky barrel-chested farmer whose nickname of Wee Don was both ironic and apt, and I clocked that the young woman we’d seen moments earlier in the reddish ballgown, now twirling and skipping on the dance floor, was of normal height. But taking all that into account, it was if the yarn Calum had spun me long ago and had just denied were true, and I’d walked into a gathering of a crypto-Neanderthal clan, or at least of people with more than the usual European complement of relict hominid genes.

Calum had exaggerated the prevalence of lampshades – there were plenty of girls in look-at-me frocks and fuck-me shoes – but again, a statistical shift was evident; the look was indeed, as Sophie had said, becoming a thing. Normally I’d have found my gaze drawn to the mini-dressed lassies, but this time I had other things on my mind, starting with a heap of red hair and a pair of green eyes.

The only woman I could see in a white dress here was the bride – there was no mistaking the bride this time, she was definitely the one with the flower crown and the big flouncy white ball gown, like my granny’s in her mantelpiece wedding photo, with puff sleeves to the elbows and lace springing from every edge and seam. Two girls who looked about eight and five were also in white, or had been before they’d encountered the cakes and juice that had given enough of a sugar rush to set them racing around the dance floor and in and out of the room.

Then the woman I was looking for came through the door, chasing after the little girls, catching up and laughing with them. I could see that their outfits were miniatures of hers, down to tiny tiaras trailing tufts of white. She stooped to scoop up the smaller of the children to give her a mock finger-wagging reproof, shooed them both to a table where some adults caught them up, and went out again. I had to hold back from dashing after her.

The fiddlers stopped playing, and the singer stepped closer to the mike and announced that a buffet supper was now available in the next room. Making sure I was well ahead of Calum, I fell in with the throng. In a big bare room with a long table of hot and cold food in the centre and with chairs around all the walls, I found my red-haired, green-eyed, white-robed siren, Gabrielle.

We didn’t get off to a flying start. She was ahead of me in the queue shuffling sideways along the serving table, and had gone to sit down by the time I had piled my plate. I still had a half-finished pint so I didn’t bother picking up a glass of wine. I turned and looked for her, trying not to be too blatant. She was sitting at the wall right behind me. The chairs were filling up fast but there was a vacant one on either side of her. Layers of her skirt overlapped both seats.

‘Mind if I sit down?’

She looked up from negotiating a plate and a chicken goujon, chewed and swallowed.

‘No, go ahead.’

She put the nibble back on the plate, dabbed her fingers and lips on a paper napkin, transferred a glass of white wine from the chair I was hovering over to the one on her left, and swept a swathe of soft net thigh-ward.

‘Thanks,’ I said, sitting down.

She nodded and ‘mmh-mmh’ed, looking straight ahead. I put my glass on the floor between my feet and got stuck into a drumstick, while looking around as if for people I knew, and stealing the odd sideways glance. The girl seemed about my age, or at most a year or two younger. She was definitely in the small and pretty category of my relict hominid classification. In profile she had a slight but definite brow-ridge, and I’d noticed that her neat little nose spread wide at the nostrils, as if the flesh there were millimetres thicker than normal. Both features were almost undetectable, and irrelevant in the context of her bright green eyes and wide red lips. As she leaned slightly back and forth to eat or sip I glimpsed her bare shoulders and the fluffy hair of her nape.

Beyond her appearance I knew nothing about her, but I’d already fallen for her. That Calum was interested in her too only added to her attraction. His taunt that ‘all’s fair in lust and counter-insurgency’ was still making my ears burn, as was the pang that, thorough stupidity or blindness, I’d missed out twice or thrice in getting off with Sophie.

As I put down the gnawed chicken femur and stooped for my drink I noticed that my plate had a plastic clip on the side for holding a wine-glass stem. The girl’s plate didn’t.

‘Um,’ I said, taking the clip off and holding it towards her, ‘would this be useful?’

She cast me an impatient look, as if I’d just interrupted some complicated mental arithmetic. With a tight smile and a brusque nod she took the clip and fitted her glass to it.

‘Hmm, that’s better,’ she acknowledged, once more looking straight ahead.

‘My name’s Ryan,’ I said. ‘I don’t know anyone here but Calum and his cousin Big Don.’

‘Calum?’ She looked at me with wary interest.

‘Calum Williamson,’ I added. ‘To be honest he wasn’t invited but he knows the family and he sort of dragged me along.’

‘Ah, yes, the Williamsons,’ she said, sounding slightly above them. Her accent was from one of the sandstone parts of Edinburgh. ‘You’re not related to them then?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Are you?’

‘Oh, very distant cousins, I suppose.’ She flapped a hand. ‘You know how it is.’

‘Yes,’ I said, though I didn’t. ‘What’s your name, by the way?’

‘Gabrielle Stewart,’ she said. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

She didn’t look it, exactly, but nor was she quite as chilly as she had been.

‘Likewise,’ I said, hoping my smile didn’t come across as a leer. At this point I wasn’t sure what to say. One obvious next move would be to ask her what she did (thus settling the age question in the relevant aspect so tactfully raised by Big Don). Another would be to drop her a compliment. But that might seem obvious and crass. I swithered a moment, then said, ‘Uh, that’s a very nice dress.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, returning her attention to the finger food.

‘When I saw you earlier I thought you were the bride,’ I said, in a tone intended to convey both how easy a mistake this was and wry amusement at myself for making it.

She shot me a sharp look. ‘You saw me earlier?’

‘Uh, yes, I was having a drink in one of the side rooms with Calum and Don, and you came in with, uh, one of the bridesmaids I think.’

‘And you thought I was the bride?’ She sounded almost indignant.

‘That was before I’d seen Cathy, obviously,’ I said.

‘Nothing obvious about it,’ she said.

‘Well, yes,’ I said, floundering. I essayed a self-deprecating laugh and added, ‘Don said you were a flower girl.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ she said, throwing an exasperated exhalation after her words.

‘Sorry, I didn’t—’

‘No, it’s not you,’ she said, as if I were so far beneath her notice it was a mere impertinence of me to think myself the cause of her annoyance. ‘I just knew this would happen.’

‘What?’

She turned to me and spoke in a low voice. ‘Cathy wanted me in white to match the wee flower girls. I said it’s not the done thing and she just kept dredging up royal weddings. I never expected even guys would find it funny.’