Stonemouth (26 page)

‘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?’

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.