Stonemouth (47 page)

‘Somewhere warm,’ she said, and reached out, stroking my chest, my shoulder. ‘Warm and sunny. Then…maybe.’

‘Only
maybe
?’

She was silent for a long time, still stroking, kneading my shoulder. Then she said, ‘Still sorting my feelings out. I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be sorry.’

And there we’ve kind of left it, over these last few days of recovery and stonewalling journalists and lots of quiet, sympathetic conversations with people and interviews with matter-of-fact police and a visit to a trauma counsellor.

We’ve been to the MacAvetts’, taken tea with Mike and Sue and with Jel, who is still quiet, closed off, hardly speaking. Needs the
counselling, I guess. Ryan wasn’t there when we went. Still, it was all a bit awkward, and when Ellie and I left we drove up to Vatton and the forest car park and walked through the trees out onto the wide, stump-punctuated beach there, in a smir of rain carried on a damp, warm, westerly breeze. We both still enjoy walking on a big, wide-open beach. Not that traumatised, then.

Which is just as well, if we’re going to end up somewhere warm and sunny, I guess. I want to ask her again: are we okay? Will she come and live with me? Fuck, I’d come and live with her
here
, even though this is the last place on earth I want to live, for all its steely coastal beauty and sylvan rolling hills. But I don’t. I don’t ask her again, not while she thinks things through and decides how she feels.

We stay together, sleep together each night, catching up on five years of make-up sex.

Then it’s the night before I have to head south, then it’s that morning, and then she drives me to the station.

‘Few more people around this time,’ I say, hoisting my bag up onto my shoulder.

We walk across the car park towards the main entrance. There are little groups of people, cars and taxis turning up, and people just off the shuttle bus are still sorting out themselves and their baggage.

‘Yeah, and you didn’t need a ticket, either,’ she says.

We enter the station, the information screens and ticket barriers discordant notes amongst the crenellated mid-Victorian fussiness. I take my ticket through the turnstile. Ellie gets through the manned gate with just a smile and we join the scattered, straggled crowd on the platform beneath its curved roof of iron-framed glass, waiting for the eleven-fifteen. A few faces turn towards us.

I choose my spot on the stretch where the first-class carriages will stop, put my bag down.

‘Well,’ she says, standing looking sort of compressed, her heels together, hugging herself, her head down as though she’s staring at
my bag. The weather’s turned chillier though the day is bright. She’s in boots, jeans, a blouse and fleece. She glances up and down the platform, perhaps seeing the couple of small groups of people staring at us or just furtively snatching glances then muttering something to the people they’re with. Then she looks up at me and smiles. ‘Still hate goodbyes?’

‘Doesn’t everybody?’

A quick, tight smile. ‘I suppose. I’ll just go. That okay?’

‘Yeah, I suppose.’

‘Okay. Call me from Edinburgh. See you soon.’

‘Okay,’ I tell her.

It’s an awkward goodbye kiss. We both sort of go the same way at the same time, then she almost trips over my bag, then we even seem to get our arms tangled, reaching the wrong way at the wrong time, too high, too low.

Finally, like useless teenagers, we manage a hug and and a slightly rushed kiss. She squeezes me on the arms with both hands, then turns and walks away.

I watch her go, not seeing anybody else. She strides up the platform, neatly swinging between people and groups of people, her limp almost gone now, and I think, That was a shit goodbye. We can do better than that. I lift up my bag, shoulder it again and start up the platform after her.

The train appears, coming round the tree-lined curve a couple of hundred metres away to the north: banked, slow, segmented, insectile. I see her glance in its direction, then look down again, keep on walking, arms folded.

She’s almost at the entrance into the main building and I’m about five metres behind her when I see her stop. Her shoulders drop a fraction and she seems to look away to one side, then – as if making up her mind about something – she appears to nod to herself. She straightens, becomes centimetres taller, uncrosses her arms and turns round. She takes one stride back the way she’s just come. Then she sees me, and smiles.

She
holds both hands out to me. I put my bag down again and take them.

‘Yes? What?’ she says.

‘A proper kiss.’

She laughs. ‘Yeah, that one didn’t really take, did it?’

We kiss properly; slowly and deeply, my hands round her waist, hers round my neck. I think I hear somebody whistle. The platform rumbles beneath us as the front engine unit of the train noses into the station. I feel her laughing. She breaks off, says, ‘Ground’s moving.’

I take a breath, then catch it. I was about to blurt out,
Come with me
. But that was an idiotic thing to say five years ago, and still a mildly stupid, over-impulsive thing to say now.

She reads my hesitation. ‘What?’ she says, with just a hint of a frown, her gaze flickering over my eyes.

I shake my head. ‘I was going to say – and this isn’t a way of still suggesting it – but I was about to say, Jump on the train. Come to—’

She shakes her head, though she’s still smiling. ‘No.’

‘Yeah, I know. Wasn’t actually going to—’

‘I’ve stuff to do; driving to Peterhead to see Mum—’

‘I know, I know. I realised before I said it, it’s—’

‘It’s a romantic thought, but no.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘But, otherwise, yes. That’s what I was coming back to say. I’ve…I realise I’ve decided. I don’t need another night to sleep on it. Let’s get together. You and me. Let’s give it a go. Okay?’

‘Very okay.’ We kiss again as the train pulls screeching and squealing to a stop; a kiss that goes on until the train doors start slamming shut again. ‘Fucking brilliant okay,’ I tell her breathlessly. I can feel myself grinning from ear to ear. ‘You sure?’

‘Not entirely,’ she admits, with a quick shake of her head.

‘Still need to be convinced?’

‘I guess.’

‘I’ll do my best.’

‘Please do.’

‘See
you very soon,’ I tell her.

‘Good.’

I lift up my bag again, pull her to me by the small of her back – there’s a tiny yelp – plant a smacker of a kiss on the girl, then let her go, turn and swing onto the train.

A few minutes later, the train crosses the Stoun on the old grey granite bridge. From here – though you’re just ten metres or so above the river, right where it starts to widen for the basin and the estuary – there’s a wide, clear, open view between the remnants of the tree-bare water-meadows, the marshes and the salt flats towards the docks and the harbour. Past those is the town itself, with its grey-brown clutter of buildings, spires and towers, edged by the bright flat plain of water with its tarnish marks of cloud shadows and ruffled fields of wind shear, and beyond that the road bridge, rising grey and tall and shimmering in the east, astride a silver glimpse of sea.

Iain Banks
sprang to public notice with the publication of his first novel,
The Wasp Factory
, in 1984. Since then he has gained enormous popular and critical acclaim with further works of both fiction and science fiction, all of which are available in paperback from either Abacus or Orbit. His novel
The Crow Road
was a number one bestseller and was adapted for television.
The Times
has acclaimed Iain Banks as ‘the most imaginative British novelist of his generation’.