Stonemouth (9 page)

I look back the way I’ve come, along the restless sands.

That first night, I saw her by the light of a beach fire, a roaring pyre spindling the enveloping darkness while the white waves rose and fell along the margin of the shore and the stars wheeled like frozen spray. She’d just waded out of the shallows with a few others who’d been in for a midnight swim. Music pounded from an open soft-top Jeep as she laughed with one of her girlfriends. She wore a black one-piece swimsuit, coyly modest amongst bikinis and a couple of girls just in knickers. There were some very lookable-at breasts on display, but it was still Ellie that attracted the eye, the swimsuit, like part of the night, emphasising her long arms and legs, leaving her own curves more hinted at than shown.

She
did that head-leaning-over thing again, the gesture I still had engraved on my memory from that hazy day at the Lido a couple of years earlier, the wet rope of her hair swinging out as she sent it this way and that. The way she did it, it just looked easy, natural, not self-conscious or coquettish.

A hand, in front of my face; fingers snapping once, twice.

‘And we’re back in the room,’ Ferg said. He pushed me between the shoulders to set me walking down the rest of the shallow slope of dune, following Josh MacAvett and Logan Peitersen, the other two guys we’d come with from town.

Josh was Mike MacAvett’s eldest son and the same age as me. We were friends as much through familial expectation as anything else; I was Mike Mac’s godson and Josh was Dad’s, and we’d been encouraged to play together from pre-primary days. We were never best mates – our interests were mostly too different – but we always got on well.

With fair, almost blond hair and a square jawline, Josh had always been a good-looking kid, and he’d become a positively handsome teenager (one rather amateurish tat on the back of his neck apart). When we were of an age to become interested in girls and I could persuade him to come out drinking or partying, I found myself reluctantly and unexpectedly playing the-good-looking-one’s-mate, and having to make do with my opposite number on the female side if we bumped into a pair of lassies.

Still, I met some really nice girls that way, girls with more than just good looks, and because Josh never seemed to stick with one girl for longer than a single night or a few days, and never seemed at all bothered when they got fed up waiting for a call or a text or an email or, well, anything, and threw themselves back into the Toun’s social whirl, once more unattached, they were, quite often, up for a bit of a dalliance with the guy they assumed was Josh’s best pal (that’d be me), possibly with the intention of hurting Josh somehow when he saw us chewing each other’s face off right in front of him. This never worked, and I could have told them so, but
of course I didn’t; when you’re that age you tend to take whatever’s going.

Playing the field and treating them mean was all very well, but I wasn’t the only one to remind Josh there were only so many girls in Stonemouth and if he did want to nab a proper girlfriend he was making life difficult for himself.

So – or maybe just Anyway – he got himself a girlfriend. Which was fine, in principle.

Josh had driven us here in his RAV 4, with Ferg and Logan crammed into the back sitting on the cases of beer, Ferg complaining loudly about not being able to get his seat belt fastened properly and worrying about whiplash if we were rear-ended. (Much, frankly childish, sniggering at the mention of rear-ending.)

Back then you could just drive down onto the beach using the slipway at the end of the Promenade and head all the way up to the Brochty Burn. Then too many people started doing it, a lot of litter was left behind on the sands, there was even – dear God! – talk of young people taking drugs and having sex up there. Respectable older folk complained and the council locked off the slip. The RNLI have keys to the bollards if they want to access the beach from there and so do the council, obviously, but gone are those carefree days otherwise.

We could see the fire from about a kilometre out of town: a tiny wavering speck in the distance, almost lost in the darkness. By the time we drove up close enough to feel its heat, the only lights visible from Stonemouth were a couple of floods on the harbour wall and the sweeping beam of the lighthouse on the rocks beneath Stoun Point. We joined the party by the great fire to shouted hellos, cheers – cheers that increased when they saw how much beer we’d brought – and offers of pills and joints.

The swimmers wrapped themselves in towels and blankets, joining the others, maybe thirty or so, in the habitable zone a couple of metres out from the edge of the crackling, spitting fire. Any closer and you roasted; any further out and it started to get chilly. It was
early August and it had been a perfect, hot day, but the clear sky was letting the day’s warmth beam away into space, there was a breeze blowing and, in the end, this was north-east Scotland, not southern California.

It was the last summer we’d all be together, between High School and the various gap years, universities, colleges and jobs we were all bound for. We were all eighteen, or close to it. People could drive, drink legally and even have sex with somebody younger than themselves without risking jail and a reputation as a paedo. Every class, every year – amongst those from the reasonably well off in the West, anyway – had a summer like that, I guess, but – doubtless again like them – we felt this was something both unique to us and yet somehow our natural right, our destiny. We’d even had a proper Prom night, the first year in school to have one of these as something officially sanctioned.

‘We just called it the school dance,’ Dad had said grumpily, when I’d bounced into the kitchen all happy with this exciting news, months earlier. I remember being slightly shocked; I’d heard of so many dads proving how old and boring they were by telling their kids things like ‘That’s not even music,’ and ‘You’re not going out dressed like that,’ and so on, but I’d always been proud that my dad was – by parent standards, so admittedly not a particularly high bar – quite cool. I mean, he even liked rap, and not just Eminem. We were still a couple of years away from the point when we really parted company culturally, when he just couldn’t see that
Napoleon Dynamite
was one of the funniest movies ever made.

In the end, no matter how cool he is, your dad is still your dad.

I handed the J back, coughing. ‘What is this, dried seagull shit?’

‘Oh, shut up and wait for the pills to kick in,’ Ferg told me, and lay back with his hands under his head, puffing towards the stars and trying to make a smoke ring.

I kept looking over at Ellie. She was sitting with Josh MacAvett.

They
sat close, on towels, her hair still glistening darkly. Ellie and Josh were sort of going out. Only sort of; goss had it they weren’t actually doing it, probably because Ellie was holding off. She was widely believed still to be a virgin: an unusual, even eccentric choice for a pretty girl in our circle, never mind somebody with a credible claim to being the most ravishingly gorgeous young woman in town. But this was the girl Josh had asked out and actually stuck with, and without even asking me: teach me to worship from afar and not actually tell any of my pals I thought she might be The One, for fear of the inevitable scorn.

Ellie. Of all people. I mean, for fuck’s sake.

Josh was handsome in a Daniel Craig way (not that DC had become the new Bond at this point – it was Ferg who pointed out the similarity a couple of years later); it was gnawingly frustrating for me to see the two of them sitting close like that, laughing quietly together, especially as they looked made for each other. They’d been together all the summer so far and just looked relaxed and easy in each other’s company.

Fuck it, she was supposed to be mine! I’d hardly talked to her, barely touched her – a handshake, once; a brush of cheek against cheek at her birthday earlier that year, and a few formal hugs, the ones where you only sort of hug from the shoulders and exchange light pats on the back, so you’re lucky if you even feel any press of breast against your chest. (Still, I breathed in the exquisite smell of her each time, filling my lungs with her scent, keeping it in until I felt dizzy with the trapped force of it.)

This was when we were all supposed to be at our most free, wasn’t it? Between school and the rest of our lives. Everything was meant to be fluid, all sorts of experimentation was supposed to be indulged. I was young, smart, good-looking. I had green eyes before which women tended to melt. (Not claiming any moral superiority or anything here, just stating a fact.) I deserved at least a sporting chance to capture the girl, and now, this summer, ought to be my best shot, but I wasn’t being allowed; Ellie and Josh looked like a done deal.

I
couldn’t believe life could be so unfair.

Even the adults were in on this and had opinions about it; Ellie and Josh were practically public property. I mean, Mum knew Josh; she taught him at school, but this was more than that; even my dad knew.

‘Aye, I’ve heard. Could be a good thing,’ he said, over the Sunday dinner table, after I’d mentioned something about the happy couple. Mum looked at Dad. He shrugged. ‘Dynastic marriage, kinda thing,’ he told her. Mum looked distinctly sceptical. ‘Two important families in the town,’ he went on defensively. ‘Nobody’s interest to have them at each other’s throats. Alliance like this, this generation getting… What?’

It looked like one of those frustrating moments when something passed between Mum and Dad that I still couldn’t read. Mum might have shaken her head, just very slightly. Dad made a tiny grunting noise. They changed the subject, swiftly.

Meanwhile:
Marriage?
I was thinking, horrified. Who the fuck said anything about fucking
marriage?

And later, from the kitchen, I overheard Dad saying, ‘… Mike best pleased …’

Mum said, ‘Parents often don’t, especially dads. Trust me, hon; teachers… sometimes before the kid does themself.’

Dear God, Ellie was beautiful. Firelight on a beach under the stars will improve pretty much anybody’s looks, obviously, but even so, the girl was just startlingly beautiful: eye-wideningly beautiful; breath-sucked-out-of-you beautiful; the kind of beautiful that can make a grown artist weep because you know you will never, ever quite capture the full, boundless totality of it, that it will always lie beyond you, no matter how closely you look or how well you attempt to express it, in any medium known to humankind.

That sculpted, bounteous, quietly smiling face, those cheekbones, those wide dark eyes, and those lips; even her nostrils and ears, all those sweet dark curled spaces and perfectly scrolled and
rounded edges of exquisitely smooth, honey-hued skin, turning inwards.

There were times when Ellie looked like some ethereal Scandinavian goddess, others – especially in certain lights, her tan skin against a pale background and her hair water-dark – when she took on something that had to be from her mother, who’d come from a Roma family: a startling, earthy, gypsy look. It was a bewildering, almost contradictory mix of appearances, sometimes flipping from one to another almost as instantly as in one of those perception tests where one second you see the outline of a vase, the next you’re looking at two faces in silhouette.

I felt I was about to start moaning or something, if I hadn’t inadvertently already, so I looked away.

Ferg was lying, gazing at me, an odd expression on his face. He turned his head languorously, taking in the handsome huddle that was Josh and Ellie, then looked back at me.

‘Jealous, Gilmour?’ he drawled.

‘Envious,’ I conceded.

He sighed, sat up, looked at the stub of J and flicked it into the fire. He jumped to his feet. ‘Restless,’ he said. He nodded his head to one side. ‘Walk with me, Stewart, why don’t you?’

I took another look at Ellie and Josh as their laughter sounded out round the fire, vanishing into the dark airs, then I got up too. ‘Might as well.’

We sauntered down the beach, keeping to the firm sand just up from where the waves were breaking. Ferg lit a cigarette, an American brand he got from a specialist tobacconist in Aberdeen. He sucked on the anorexically slim pale tube and blew the smoke out again immediately. He was almost the only one of us who smoked anything other than dope; he claimed it was because it just looked so good, and anyway he didn’t inhale.

When we were well into the darkness, beyond the glow of the fire, the thumping music a sequence of dull thuds behind us, he said, ‘Kind of cuntstruck with Ellie, are we?’

‘Well,
I am,’ I admitted. ‘If you want to put it like that. I mean, like, so romantically.’

‘Yeah, well, we’re all cockstruck, cuntstruck or both,’ Ferg said tiredly, sounding like some archaic roué looking back on a now-spent life of outrageous debauchery, rather than a spotty-faced eighteen-year-old with the ink barely dry on his Sixth Year Studies certificate. That was all right, though; I felt that way myself sometimes. Ferg studied the end of his cigarette. ‘Pity about Josh, in a way, then, I suppose,’ he said.

‘Thing is,’ I said, ‘I like Josh. Can’t even wish him dead in a car crash or something. Especially as I’m liable to be in the same car,’ I added, having just thought this through.

‘Well, it’s been handy for both of them,’ Ferg said, sighing, looking out to sea.

‘What? What’s been handy for who?’

Ferg turned to me and we stopped. I could just about see his teeth as he smiled. ‘Have you ever thought you might be even slightly gay, Stewart?’