Stonemouth (21 page)

‘Aw, fuck,’ Callum said quietly.

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

‘You
fucking—’ Ferg began.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘George!’ Hugo screamed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘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.