Stonemouth (29 page)

I took a deep breath, put my hands on her hips. ‘Well, ah,’ I said, decisively. Actually, I hadn’t really meant to put my hands on her hips, if I remember right; they just sort of appeared there. ‘I suppose,’ I said.

‘I know how you feel about me,’ she told me.

You do?
I wanted to say.
But I don’t know myself.
I thought about this. So true on several levels.

Thing is, whatever part of my brain that deals with such matters has come up with a lot of excuses over the past five years for everything that happened over the next five or ten minutes: Hey, we were drunk, coked up at the same time, I’d seen Ellie snogging somebody else, and there is almost a tradition for people about to get married to have one last fling – but in the end it doesn’t matter, like it doesn’t matter who moved forward to whom, who opened their lips first, whose tongue first moved into the other’s mouth, or whether she shimmied her dress to let her legs wrap around me or I did, or whether she reached for my zip or I did.

She froze. ‘Did you hear a noise?’ She stared at the door to the corridor.

‘No,’ I said, then thought, Or had I? There were various sounds to be heard here, including that soft, continual wash of white noise coming from the nearby plumbing and the distant thudding base from the PA system in the ballroom, floors below.

Breathless, hearts pumping, we stared at each other from about a hand’s length away. ‘Into a cubicle!’ she said, nodding past me.

I picked her up, her legs round my waist, thudded into the middle cubicle as quietly as I could, stood there for a moment while she reached down, locking the door, then I sat down on the toilet seat. ‘We should have put the light out,’ I whispered.

‘Oh, fuck it,’ she breathed. We sat there for a moment, listening, but nothing more happened. We started kissing again.

‘Do we need to—’

She
shook her head. ‘Pill. Risk it if you will.’

‘How about,’ I said, reaching up inside her dress with both hands. I felt stocking, warm flesh, a smooth thin garter belt.

She laughed roguishly, put her mouth against my neck and bit very gently. ‘Nope,’ she said, ‘went without. Pas de VPL.’

‘Fuck …’ I breathed.

We’d barely begun by the time she thought she heard a noise again; her mouth was hanging open and she was part supporting herself with one gloved hand splayed on each side wall of the cubicle. She stopped, stiffened, motioned silence.

I heard something too this time: what might have been the door to the corridor, opening, then closing.

We stayed as we were for what felt like a long time. I watched the angle of light that I could see beyond the bottom of the cubicle door, looking for any change. I could feel my heart beat, and hers, and sense the thud-thud-thud of the disco. The continual hiss of what sounded like a faulty cistern made it hard to be sure, but I didn’t think there were any suspicious sounds, either in the cubicles on either side or out in the main part of the loo.

She started doing that pelvic floor thing, squeezing me from inside, even while the rest of her body stayed perfectly still and poised. She was grinning down at me. Af ter maybe a minute there had been no further noise from outside and no change in the light.

‘Somebody looking in and leaving again,’ I whispered. ‘Another false alarm.’

Jel raised herself a little higher, then let go of the side walls, raising both gloved hands high over her head as she sank further down on to me, so tight and hot I nearly came there and then. ‘Fuck it,’ she said, ‘just
fuck
me.’

I stood, lifting her, producing a gasp, thudding her back against the door and the partition wall to the side, her right shoulder just avoiding the coat hook protruding from the door. I took her weight while she grasped my shoulders. A little later, with her legs wrapped
tight around my waist, she raised her gloved arms straight and high above her head.

Half an hour later I was standing, trying hard not to grin my face off, talking to Ferg in the hotel foyer. He looked pretty happy too, though whether this was for similar reasons I hadn’t yet enquired. Part of me felt guilty, of course, but another part of me – a more influential part of my head-space, it has to be said – was already writing off the whole experience and doing its best to ignore both the strange, tight, balled feeling in my guts and the troublesome minority of my neurons, protesting loudly with stuff like, You just did
what
? How could you
do
that? How could you do that to
Ellie
?

It was – it had been, I was in the process of deciding – a line-drawing-under fling, a last and very much final hurrah that meant I had kissed goodbye to the delights of other women with a fine, decisive flourish: a bittersweet, never-again moment that would remain my secret and Jel’s for ever more. In the end, after all, I wasn’t yet married to Ellie, I hadn’t taken any vows in public, before any congregation or gathering of friends and family, and so technically no trust had been betrayed, no binding agreement breached.

And Ellie had had her little snog in the gardens, after all. There had probably been no more, either during this night or in the recent past, though of course there might have been the odd straying at university; there was a sort of tacit acknowledgement between us that a few things might have happened we’d rather the other one didn’t know about: nothing relationship-threatening – maybe in the end relationship-strengthening, getting stuff out of the system, tried, sampled, enjoyed but, having been enjoyed, found to be sufficient just in that one evaluation – but still things that were best confined to the memories in our own heads.

So that was all right then.

There was no warning, no hubbub or sort of raised general level of noise coming from the ballroom, just Ellie striding up to me, taking me by the arm.

‘El,’
I said. There was just the faintest of trembles inside me, like I thought there might be something wrong, but probably not; just a guilty conscience.

‘El, how are—’ Ferg started.

‘You need to get out, now,’ she told me, her voice flat. She looked at Ferg.‘Ferg, get the desk clerk to order a taxi for Dyce, name of Gilmour. Urgent. Find a way to let my brothers know about the booking.’

Ferg’s mouth clacked shut. Ellie gripped my upper arm hard. She had her blue sequinned purse in her other hand. ‘Come on,’ she said.

She made to move, as if she was going to drag me with her. I tried to stay standing where I was, wondering what the hell all the panic was about and unwilling to be manhandled – womanhandled – like this in front of friends.

‘El, what the—’

She put her mouth to my ear. ‘Come
on
!’ she hissed, shaking my arm. ‘My fucking family’s going to fucking kill you, you stupid fucker,’ she said through clenched teeth. ‘They know you fucked Jel.
Everybody
knows you fucked Jel. Now
move
!’

‘—cking
cunt
!’ somebody screamed from the direction of the ballroom. It sounded a lot like Murdo Murston. I caught a glimpse of Mike Mac’s face, ten metres away, just appearing between the ballroom doors. He looked pale, shocked. He saw me and his expression didn’t change.

I’d never heard Ellie swear so much, never. I couldn’t remember hearing her voice with this strange, flat, determined tone before, either. My feet seemed to start moving by themselves. Ferg went to the hotel desk. Ellie forced me towards the main hotel doors, pulling the Mini’s key out of her purse with her teeth as we exited through the depleted crowd of smokers by the doors into the harshly floodlit car park and the warm summer evening beyond.

‘Are, are you fit to drive?’ I asked, some autopilot bit of my brain attempting to take over.

‘Be quiet, Stewart,’ she told me. She pushed me. ‘
Faster!
’

We
stopped at Mum and Dad’s so I could grab a bag. By this time my hands had started shaking and I could hardly hold onto anything I picked up. Two minutes after we left, according to what the neighbours were prepared to disclose to my mum and dad – if not the police – Donald, Callum and Fraser were hammering at the door. They broke in, took long enough to establish I wasn’t there and left again. About the same time, Murdo and Norrie had stopped their pick-up alongside El’s Mini in the middle of town, and very nearly found me.

A quarter of an hour after that I was lying, shivering – from delayed terror or sheer relief, I hadn’t yet sorted out my jangled feelings to tell – inside a big yellow oil pipe, one of three stacked on a long flatbed railway wagon, itself part of a train of twenty similar wagons all hauled by a distantly clattering diesel engine, picking up speed again as it headed on south through the waning warmth of the night.

They’d shown some of the photos the children had taken, on the big screen above the stage in the ballroom. Maybe about half the guests were still there and could be bothered to watch; there were a lot of shots of empty chairs, table legs, and – as predicted – corners, and Drew’s dad hadn’t really had time to weed out all the crap; he was just grabbing cameras at random and seeing what he could find.

A short sequence from one camera showed the inside of a toilet, taken from beneath the faded green cover hiding the plumbing under the sinks. They were photos showing one pair of dark-blue brogues and one pair of red high heels. From the colour balance and a certain lack of sharpness, you could tell no flash had been used, or maybe been available.

The last couple of shots were taken from outside a closed cubicle. The first showed, under the door, the man’s dark shoes on either side of the base of a pale toilet bowl, with his trousers fallen round them and a pair of white underpants stretched tightly across the
bottom of his calves. A pair of red shoes were also visible – one on either side of the bowl, half obscured by the crumpled trousers, heels front to the camera – and, in the very last shot, a pair of red gloved hands could be seen, fisted, as though in triumph, and raised high enough into the air to appear above the cubicle itself.

Craig Jarvey drops me at my mum and dad’s, then the red Toyota splashes away through the puddles. The rain is slackening.

There’s no car in the driveway. Still, when I let myself in I try to walk normally, but the house is empty. My hand moves to where my phone should be, then drops. I head to my room, lie on my bed, but only for a few minutes. I get up and fetch my mum and dad’s cordless.

‘Hello?’

‘Jel, hi. It’s Stewart. You busy?’

‘… No. Getting ready to go out.’

‘Got a few minutes?’

‘To talk or meet up? Cos—’

‘Just to talk.’

‘Okay. What?’

‘Just … something you said, earlier. About not everything being your idea? I—’

‘Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that too and I, ah, I’m glad you phoned, actually, because I shouldn’t have said that? That sounded really, I mean, I wasn’t—’

I’d intended to ask her about that other odd remark, from the
fateful night itself, about knowing how I felt about her, which has kind of only just resurfaced – certainly as flagged for any particular significance – maybe due to just thinking back properly to that night, finally, or because I’ve been puzzling over the thing she said earlier today about it not all being her idea or whatever, but she’s sounding really defensive now, like she’s trying to head off whatever it is I’m trying to find out about, and I just know there won’t be any point trying to take this further.

Making enquiries today, asking questions about stuff that just suddenly seemed intriguing, has already cost me my phone, a couple of extremely painful punches and a very scary trip to an open hatch in the middle of the bridge. I shouldn’t be too surprised with myself if I’m easily put off.

‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ I tell Jel, gently talking over her. ‘It’s nothing. I just—’

‘Well, you know—’

‘It’s no problem. Really. Forget I asked.’

‘Where … where are you anyway? That’s a Stonemouth number, but—’

‘My folks’. I lost my phone.’

‘Oh my God; you didn’t
bet
it, did you?’

‘What? No. Lost it walking home.’ I haven’t even thought about a cover story until now. Idiot. ‘Think it fell out of my jacket pocket,’ I tell her. ‘There’s…there’s a hole,’ I lie.