Stonemouth (6 page)

‘You’re in London? Why wasn’t I informed? I’m in London sometimes! Which bit? Is it one of the cool areas? Do you have a spare room?’

‘Stepney.’

Ferg looks briefly thoughtful. I use the interval to wave at a lady barperson. ‘Is that a cool area?’ he asks.

‘Would it matter, if I had a spare room?’

‘Possibly not. We should swap numbers.’

‘Call me; I’ve kept the same number.’

‘So, where do you go when you’re not in London?’

‘Everywhere. Cities, mostly. I’ve been to at least three cities in China with populations greater than the whole of Scotland, which I guarantee you’ve never—’

‘So you’re in oil.’

‘Ferg!’ I glare at his thin, fascinated-looking face. ‘I went to art school. You came through to visit me and practically swooned when I took you round the Mackintosh building. What the fuck would I be doing—’

‘Oh yes. I forgot. Still, stranger things happen.’ I shake my head. ‘Only to you, Ferg.’

There’s silence for a moment. I catch the lady barperson’s eyes again and smile. Jeez, she looks young. You can’t serve behind a bar if you’re too young to be served in front of it, can you? This is just starting to happen to me, a sign of my advancing years. She nods, holds up one finger. In a polite way, like, One moment, sir.

Ferg
says, ‘So what is it you do again?’

‘I light buildings.’

‘You’re a pyromaniac?’

‘Ha! Be still, my aching sides. No, I—’

‘I’m not the first to make that—’

‘Not quite.’

‘You should probably stop phrasing it like that then.’

‘I work for a consultancy; we design lighting for buildings. Usually buildings of some architectural distinction.’

‘So basically you do floodlighting. You’re a floodlighter.’

‘Yes, I’m a floodlighter,’ I sigh, as the girl comes over. I smile, say Hi, take my phone out and read off the drinks order.

‘Yes,’ Ferg says, sighing, ‘you would have an iPhone, wouldn’t you?’

‘Yes, I would. And a BlackBerry for—’

‘So, Stewart, you stick big lights round buildings and make sure they’re pointing sort of generally towards it. That’s your job. That’s what you do. This is your career.’

‘Well, obviously it’s not quite as complicated as you make it sound. What about you?’

Ferg jerks back as far as he can in the crush, bringing another scowl from the farmerish-looking guy behind him. ‘You’re offering to floodlight me?’

I find myself sighing, too. This has always happened when I’m around Ferg, like his mannerisms are contagious. Or he’s just always being annoying.

‘Do you have a job, Ferg?’

‘Of course! I’m a wildly talented games designer. You’ve probably played some of the games I’ve designed.’

‘Oh, I think we can all say that, Ferg,’ I tell him, archly, glancing back at the crowd of our friends in the raised area. He almost laughs, throwing his head back as though he’s about to, but then not. ‘How the fuck did you end up in games design?’ I ask him. ‘You told me games reached their peak with Asteroids.’

‘I
may have exaggerated.’

‘And I thought games were designed by huge teams these days anyway.’

‘They are, once you get past the individual genius, bolt-from-the-blue inspiration phase. I’ll leave you to guess—’

‘I see. And this means you’re based where?’

‘Dundee. Don’t laugh; it’s quite cool these days. Well, cold. Naturally I fantasise about the heady delights of the central belt – the dreaming spires of Edinburgh, the urban chic of downtown Glasgow – but at least it’s not here, the land that time forgot.’

He glances at the big farmer. Thankfully, the big farmer doesn’t seem to have heard. Ferg has got me into a couple of fights with remarks like that in places like this and most of his pals can tell the same story. Ferg himself rarely feels the need to stick around for the resulting fisticuffs, however. Probably reckons he’s done his job with the individual genius, bolt-from-the-blue inspiration phase. Anyway, Faintheart was one of many potential nicknames Ferg very nearly got stuck with.

‘Dundee it is for now,’ he concludes, sounding wistful. It’s …’ He looks away for a moment as the girl starts delivering our drinks.

‘Handy.’

‘How nice.’

‘And cheap,’ he tells me, eyes glittering. ‘I have a duplex. It’s huge. You should come visit. You can see Fife from most of the rooms, though you mustn’t let that put you off.’

‘Maybe one day.’

‘You could bring some floodlights.’

‘Here,’ I tell him, handing him the first three pints. ‘Break the habit of a lifetime and make yourself useful.’ I nod at the glasses while he’s still on the inward breath of synthetic outrage. ‘Yours, BB’s and Mona’s. Try not to drink them all before they get to their rightful owners.’

Ferg’s eyes narrow as he takes the glasses in a triangle of fingers. He used to be notorious for taking sips from everybody’s drinks as
he carried them, ‘To stop them spilling.’ Sipper Ferguson was another nickname that very nearly became permanent.

‘You are a hard, embittered man, Stewart Gilmour.’

‘Ferg, you’d fist a skunk if you thought there was a drink in it.’ Ferg shakes his head as he walks carefully away. ‘Rude, as well.’

It’s a good night. Lot of chat, craic, whatever, lot of laughing. Good to be with the old gang again. We visit several bars. Ferg, an equal-opportunities predator, hits on three women and at least two guys, including, he later claims, the big burly farmer from The Head in Hand. Exchanged numbers and everything. Books and covers and all that shit.

We’re walking between bars near the docks when I catch a whiff of something sharp, like chlorine or whatever it is they put in swimming pools, and I’m right back, the first time I definitely saw Ellie, years and years ago.

It was one of those hot, hazy summers from my teens, the enveloping mist starting each day off soft and silky, everything sort of quiet and mysterious, the whole firth, the horizon-stretching beaches north and south, and the town itself submerged from above by the enfolding grey presence of the clouds, then the sun burning it all off by breakfast, leaving only long, low banks of mist skulking out to sea that rarely ventured back in towards land before evening, when the sun slid north and west across the long shadow of the hills, its trajectory almost matching the sloped profile of the land, so that it hung there, orange and huge, as though forever on the brink of setting.

We spent a lot of time at the Lido that summer. It was built on the striated rocks that extend to the north of the estuary mouth, its cream-white walls washed by the waves at high tide. It had one Olympic-sized pool, various shallow ponds for children to splash about in, a separate diving pool, a Turkish baths complex, a glass-walled solarium, a café and lots of deckchairs on wide terraces, gently sloped to make it easier to catch the sun.

It had
been built in the thirties, had its heyday then and in the fifties – it was closed for most of the Second World War – went to seed in the sixties, fell into disrepair in the seventies and eighties, was closed during the nineties and got refurbished with Millennium lottery money in 1999, opening in the spring of 2000. It became the cool new place to hang out, especially if you were too young to drink. Too young to drink without getting hassled all the time, anyway.

My first unambiguous memory of the girl was at the Lido, during one of those glorious, mist-discovered days: her, just out of the pool, taking off a bathing cap, her head tipped just so, releasing a long fawn fall of hair the colour of wet sand, swinging out.

Her swimming costume was one-piece, black; her legs looked like they’d stretch into different time zones when she lay down, and her face was just this vision of blissed serenity. I remember the distant keening of the gulls, and the shush of waves breaking outside against the Lido walls, and the smell of swimming pool. I remember the radiance of those long, honey-coloured limbs, glowing in the late golden-red of the afternoon sun.

Thinking back, she was as straight-up-and-down as a boy and had almost nothing up top apart from broad, swimmer’s shoulders, but there was enough there to hint at what was to come, to let you know this was a girl still about to become a young woman. She moved with the sort of grace that makes you think everybody else must be made out of Lego.

She saw me looking at her. She smiled. It wasn’t a big smile, and it certainly wasn’t a come-on smile, but it was the easiest, most natural one I’d ever seen.

I was fifteen. She was a year younger. She’d gone before I recovered the composure even to think of actually talking to her. I wouldn’t see her again for nearly a year, wouldn’t touch her or really talk to her for over another twelve months beyond that, and our first kiss was even further over the horizon, lost in the mists, but I knew then that we belonged together. I wanted her. More than that: I
wanted to be wanted by her. More than that, too: I needed her to be part of my life, the major part. I was that certain, just with that look, that smile.

It seems crazy now. It seemed crazy then – you can’t decide you’ve found your life’s desire, your sole soulmate on the strength of a glance, on the swing of some hair, whether you’re fifteen or fifty – but when something like that hits, you don’t have much choice. I was barely more than a kid and scarcely able to think straight enough to know something like that, but I
felt
it: the impulsive, cast-in-iron, decision-making part of my being presented this as a stone-cold unshakeable certainty, valid in perpetuity from this point on, before, it felt, my rational, conscious mind could get a chance to think on it or even comment; every part of me apart from my brain got together and told the grey-pink hemispherical bits that this was just the way it was.

I didn’t even say anything to my friends, though some said they saw a change in me from then on. Hindsight, maybe. Maybe not.

Hindsight. What we all wouldn’t give …

Yeah, well.

‘Weird, isn’t it? All these years flying in and out of Dyce on family holidays and such, and I never made the connection with throwing dice, and dicing with death, and shit like that. It was always just where you flew from if you lived up here on the cold shoulder of Scotland. Wonder if the name gives nervous flyers the cold sweats?’

‘Well done, Stewart, you’ve discovered homonyms.’

‘
Homonymphs
?’

Ferg looks at me, suspicious but uncertain. I flap one hand against his shoulder. ‘Ha ha, just kidding.’

We’re in The Howf now, our other regular drinking hole from the old days, closer to the docks and the rough end of town. The Howf has kept the same name for nearly half a century, so it can be done. It had a garden – who knew? – or at least a sloped bit of yard at the back, which they started to use for anything other than
barrel storage only when the smoking ban came in. Decking, garden furniture, an only slightly leaky perspex roof. The sit-ooterie, it’s called. High stone walls all round, not overlooked by any what-you-might-call inhabited windows. Became the favoured toking spot for Stonemouth’s stoners the evening it opened; busy tonight.

Slaves to tradition, Ferg and I are in a corner, sitting on those wobbly, white-plastic, one-piece chairs you see in back gardens and downmarket resorts throughout the world. We’re passing a J back and forth, occasionally jostled from behind by the people swirling around us on the decking, all chatting and laughing and shouting. Our drinks – my barely begun bottle of Staropramen, his half-downed pint of snakebite and what remains of a large voddy – are perched on the wooden railing in front of us. On the ground on the far side of the railing, beneath orange floods caped with haar, ten or so people are bobbing around silently, earbudded up to the same remote source of music. Looks weird.

One of the girls who’s bopping glances up at me and smiles. It’s lovely Haley, who I was talking to earlier, on the walk from the last pub to here. Wee sister of Tiger Eunson. With an even wee-er sister called Britney, not yet of an age. Tiger is really Drew and called Tiger not because of anything to do with golf but because of some bizarre, bowel-related experiment involving Guinness, years ago, when we all first started drinking. Never worked. The experiment, I mean. He’s in work, a butcher in one of the Toun’s besieging ring of Tescos.

Anyway, I
thought
we were getting on really well, me and Haley. That smile from the girl confirms it. Typical. And me meaning to stay pure and devoted to Ellie this weekend, because I’m still hoping we’ll bump into each other, Ellie and me, and if and when that does happen, then who knows? Because it’s still unfinished between us, I don’t care what anybody else thinks or tries to enforce. Even she might think it’s all done, tied off, in the past, but how does she really know that? I’d just need to talk to her, to let her know how I still feel …

No, I’m kidding myself, I know I am. Of course it’s over. Finally,
for ever. Almost certainly. But still there’s this feeling, if nothing else, that it needs to be laid to rest properly, otherwise it’ll be like one of those Japanese ghost story things, dead but undead, wandering the earth and disturbing respectable folks until it gets the burial it’s always needed. Yeah, something like that. So, sweet though that smile from the young and delectable Haley is, I can’t really follow through (I’m probably too drunk anyway, or firmly set on the course of getting that way) because that’s where I made my mistake the last time, that’s how I got distracted and everything fell apart. I’m not letting that happen again. Still, I smile back; no harm in that. And you always need a Plan B. Or Plans B through Z. I start humming something from
The Defamation of Strickland Banks
.