6

In the circumstances, being up, about and back in the kitchen for a hearty if late breakfast at eleven o’clock and indulging in some perfectly bright and sociable chat with Mum – Dad is golfing – is something of a triumph. I feel better than I deserve; I know I’ve been drinking and I don’t think I’d be legal to drive, but otherwise I have so got away with the excesses of last night. One or two blank spots, certainly, but nothing threatening, no gut-cold feeling that what I don’t remember is somehow dangerous, something that I’m not remembering for good if ignoble reasons, but at the same time need to remember, because it’s always better to know the truth, no matter how grisly. An acceptable level of neurological damage, then, and about par for such evenings, as I recall.

No; I’m back, I’m safe – probably, provisionally – my old friends are still friends, things are relatively cool, I have a full belly, a good feeling and I have a head that needs only a bracing, recuperative walk somewhere scenic – and a couple of paracetamol – to feel entirely back to normal.

It’s barely noon as I stride out of our street and hit Glendrummy Road, heading east under the light, fresh, sun-struck haze. The cool mist moves pleasantly into my face, invigorating. I hear a bus just as I approach a stop, and – deciding it would be almost churlish to ignore this karmic nudge – take the number 3 down old routes towards the school and beyond. The bus goes through the centre of town, where a few shop-fronts have changed (there are a couple of Polish shops that weren’t there when I left) and there’s a trio of new-build blocks of flats. The bus drops me at the south end of the Promenade, just a car park away from the shining walls of the Lido, all Art Deco horizontals and thin lines of blue paint atop the pearly walls, like piping.

On the beach, with the sloped grey wall of the Promenade to my left, I walk north under the grey-pink striations of the slowly dissipating fog. The gulls wheel and mew overhead, the sand stretches into the haze a kilometre away or more, and apart from a few distant groups of fellow walkers, reduced to watercolour impressions by the mist and attended by the darting dots that are dogs, it’s as though I have the whole golden sweep of shore to myself.

I walk north, keeping to the firmest sands, waving to one or two groups of people when they wave to me, always too far away to really identify anybody. The mist is lifting and thinning all the time. From the dry look of the sand and the few very small pools, the tide is probably on its way back in (I check with an app on the phone; it is). I can hear but not see waves breaking on sandbanks a little further out.

The Prom to my left is long gone. It was followed first by the precisely aligned fences and neatly pointed walls of Olness Golf Club – I looked for the dark bulk of the Mearnside Hotel, up there in the trees on the whinned hill above the links, but its stony grandeur was lost, rubbed out by the mist – then by the serried trimness that is Ness Caravan Park. The statics are all pale green and magnolia and light brown with chrome strip highlights, their surfaces gleaming, their net curtains bright, the dainty little flower gardens surrounding each house-sized trailer all present and correct, disguising the dark gap beneath.

The last politely tended tendril of the caravan park has disappeared into the haze now, replaced by rough pasture and then rearing, unkempt dunes topped with scruffy tufts and mats of coarse grass, some necklaced with haphazardly slanted lines of stave-and-wire fences, all lapsed into picturesquely askew disrepair, falling flat as they angle down the pale slopes, submerging beneath the sand.

I’ve walked this beach when the wind has had just enough pace to pick up blond layers of dried sand from further up the slope, but not quite sufficient power to lift it fully into the air and into your eyes, so that great twining strands and twists of grains go coursing and unwinding round your feet, braiding over the darker, still-damp sand beneath with a whispering noise like the distant, retreated waves.

After about fifty minutes I see the first rust-eaten vehicle wreck. It lies swaddled in the sand halfway up the gully between a pair of tall dunes. I remember this one; it looks like it used to be an old van, with a ladder chassis. I’m sure there used to be one or two others, smaller, before you got to this one, but they may have rusted out completely by now save for the engine block, or been prettified away by the town council.

I get to the start of the trees and then the Brochty Burn after about an hour and a quarter. The burn’s more of a river here. It widens into its own little estuary, elements winding between slim grass-hummock islands, long, lozenge-shaped patches of thick brown mud and dozens of miniature grey wildernesses of paler mud strewn with stripped, sun-bleached driftwood and plastic debris.

We tried wading this stretch a few times when we were kids, because the next viable crossing was kilometres upstream, and it was the busy, bike-unfriendly main road we were all forbidden to use on our bikes. We never made it even halfway across the Brochty before we got stuck, utterly covered in mud, demoralised to the point we gave up and – even after highly necessary dips in the sea to remove the worst of the cloying mud – returned home still filthy to try to explain to exasperated parents how we’d lost our shoes. Once we even tried carrying our bikes across above our heads. Nearly drowned that time.

Vatton forest, on the far side of the burn – dark, mysterious – taunted us each time we turned tail and trudged our damp, squelching way home. You could get to the forest by car – we had all been there by car – but that meant being accompanied by parents, and anyway the forest was huge and you only ever got taken to the car park in the middle, civilised bit, where all the hiking and cycling tracks started and the picnic tables and toilets were, not to this distant, much wilder southern end.

But glory be, now there’s a bridge. I stand looking at it, and laugh. Yep, a smart, dark-green, tough-looking, little wooden bridge arching over the upstream end of the last deep pool before the start of the Brochty’s miniature estuary.

‘Now they put a feckin bridge in,’ I mutter to myself, still grinning, then feel foolish and look round to make sure there’s nobody around to overhear. Which there isn’t, of course.

I climb up the scraggy slope of sand and grass to the scoop of path that leads to the bridge. I use the phone to take a couple of photos from the middle of the bridge. Seaward, I can make out the flattened lines of waves, white creases just visible in the haze. I think about phoning home to say I’ll be a while yet, maybe ask for a lift from somewhere handy a bit further on – the forest car park, I guess – but there’s zero reception.

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?’

‘Meh,’ I said, waving one hand. ‘Yeah, but no. Definitely not.’

‘How do you know if you haven’t tried?’

‘Dude, I haven’t tried chlamydia, but I don’t want that either.’

Ferg placed one finger gently on my chest, just below the hollow of my neck. ‘I might be able to do you something of a favour, young Gilmour,’ he told me.

I looked down at the finger, still resting on my skin. ‘Ferg,’ I laughed, ‘are you hitting on me?’

‘No,’ he sighed. ‘But I do demand a kiss.’ He gazed into my eyes. ‘Just one. A token price, for the service about to be rendered.’

‘Ferg, you’re my best pal—’

‘More than Josh?’

‘More than Josh, probably, though don’t tell him, but yes. But I don’t want to kiss you.’

‘I know you don’t want to; I’m asking you to fucking pucker up and bear it, for your best friend, for somebody who’d love to be more than that but is reluctantly resigned to never being any more than that, and also to make me feel better. And to provide some small, trivial, purely symbolic payment for the favour to be conferred, as aforesaid.’

‘Drug coming on, is it?’

‘Yes. Please don’t change the subject. Kiss me.’

‘What is this favour?’

‘Can’t tell you. Might not work, might not happen. If it doesn’t you’ll never know. If it does you’ll thank me later. Don’t be a cunt, Stewart; kiss me. I swear it’ll lead to something better, or at least the chance of it. Take it.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘But no tongues.’

‘Of course tongues, you idiot,’ Ferg said, grasping me by the back of the neck and bringing our mouths together.

I did sort of open and there was some tongue action, but I was distracted, wondering if we could be seen from the fire. We both wore jeans and white or pale shirts, so we might be quite visible, even though we were a few minutes’ walk away. What if Ellie saw this? She’d never fancy me. Would she? Ferg and I were sort of side-on to the fire. I thought about manoeuvring us round so one of us had our back to the fire, making a smaller target, as it were. Ferg’s face was quite scratchy and his breath smelled of smoke. My mouth was a little dry, probably because of the pill, despite the amount of Ferg’s saliva that his poking, rolling, probing tongue seemed to be bringing with it. This actually wasn’t quite as gross as it might have been, but it was no turn-on either. Nice aftershave – Ferg always had good aftershave – but still that very scratchy sensation. I wondered why girls ever let boys kiss them.

Ferg pulled away with a sigh. He’d raised himself a little to sort of kiss down on me but now he came off his tiptoes, back to level ground. He shook his head and sighed again. ‘No, your heart really isn’t in it, is it, my love?’

‘Neither’s anything else,’ I said, wiping my mouth. ‘Sorry.’

Another sigh. ‘You can be such a lunk sometimes, Stewart.’

‘Sorry. But, dude, I did let you kiss me.’

‘Oh, let’s head back.’

Later, when we were mostly all pretty much blissed out and the fire was smaller, quieter, more orange and red rather than yellow, and the music had gone all old-school trancey and a few couples had drifted off to the nearest dunes holding hands and blankets, Ferg was talking to Ellie and Josh.

I talked to various people – only about half were left, and half of them looked fast asleep – then sort of drifted off to sleep myself for a short while, then woke up and saw that Ferg was still talking to Josh and Ellie.

I wandered off to the rough area of long dune grass where we’d all agreed to pee, came back, washed my hands in the diminishing, retreating surf and found the three of them laughing.

‘Come on,’ Ferg said to Josh, and they both rose. ‘It’s a challenge.’

‘Where to?’ Josh asked, holding one hand over his eyes as he looked down the beach in the darkness.

‘To wherever one of us can’t run any more and has to stop for breath, or gets a stitch or something.’

‘We could end up back in town!’ Josh laughed.

‘Yeah, right,’ Ferg said. He took the packet of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, threw them and his phone to me as I approached. ‘Look after these. No peeking at my contacts.’ He looked like he was about to take something out of his back pocket too, but changed his mind.

‘Okay,’ I said, stopping and looking down at Ellie. She glanced up at me from her blanket with a sort of wary smile.

She was holding a white handkerchief. She let it go.

‘Go!’ she said, and the guys raced off. They disappeared beyond the fire’s dimmed glow in seconds. The first thin sliver of a new moon let you see where they were for about half a minute, but then they were gone, lost to the darkness somewhere between the ghostly creasings of the breaking waves and the sensed round bulk of the line of dunes.

It seemed like the obvious thing to do, so I sat down beside Ellie. ‘Okay?’ I asked, leaving it open whether this meant, Okay to sit down? or How are you?

‘Hey, Stewart,’ she said, making more room for me.

I put my hand over my eyes, the way Josh had, looked into the darkness. ‘Nope, disa—’ I started to say, as she said,

‘What are you shield—?’

We both stopped. ‘I was saying—’

‘Oh, I was just—’

I sighed. ‘Sorry. What … what were you saying?’

She looked amused. ‘I wondered what you were shielding your eyes from.’

‘Ah, yeah.’ I squinted up to the near-nothing moon. ‘Hardly moonlight. The fire. Your radiance?’

She looked at me. I shrugged. ‘You’re facing the fire.’ I told her. ‘I guess you must just have a high albedo.’

She looked startled, though there was just enough of a delay for me to think she was loved up, or on something. I was kind of coming down by this point.

‘I must have a high what?’ she said. ‘How would—?’

Shit. First we talk across each other, clumsy as children at their first dance, then I produce the most stilted, pathetic, over-the-top compliment known to teen-kind and then I come out with a technical term – a fucking technical term from astronomy, for the love of God. How to chat up a girl, Stewart. Oh – dear holy fuck – and now I’ve just realised she thought I said she must have a high libido. Oh for fucking fuck’s sake. Why wait for a girl to shoot you down in flames when you can do it so easily yourself? Don’t just shoot yourself in the foot, Stewart, wait until it’s lodged firmly in your mouth first.

‘Albedo,’ I told her. I had my eyes closed by now. I couldn’t bear to watch this. ‘It means—’ I paused for a moment. What did it mean again exactly? It referred to how much light an object reflects, I was fairly sure. The moon: it has quite a high albedo, so it looks white. The romantic moon. Oh, give up. What was the point?

‘Shininess, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Something like that?’ My eyes flicked open. She was gazing up, towards the moon. ‘Like … hmm.’ There was so little moon to see, you almost had to know where to look.

‘Yeah,’ I said.

I was as impressed with girls who knew this sort of shit as your average girl was unimpressed with guys who did. Brains as well as beauty. Oh, fuck; I’d already fallen in love with her peerless good looks, her flawless skin, her stunning figure and the bit between her legs and now I was falling for the bit between her ears as well. I was fucking doomed.

‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘I was just wondering when we’ll see them again.’ I nodded. ‘Josh and Ferg.’

She looked to where the guys had disappeared.

‘Could be a while,’ she said, smiling.

It was an odd smile; maybe a little sad, wistful, something like that. She glanced back down the beach again. She made a single, gentle gesture; just that thing that’s not quite a laugh, when your diaphragm contracts. It raised her head and shoulders briefly, then let them fall again. There might have been a soft noise like a ‘huh’, but it was so faint that – even though the only other noise was that of the distant waves breaking – I suspect I imagined rather than heard it. I hadn’t even noticed the music had stopped.

‘Could be quite a long while,’ she said, almost dreamily. Then she lay down on her side, one arm beneath her head. Her long fair hair was dry now, and spilled around her head and over the shadowed golden skin of her arm. She stretched, yawned: catlike, completely unselfconscious. Her eyes were half open.

‘Do you want me to …?’ I nodded to one side.

‘Do I want you to what?’ she asked quietly.

‘Go,’ I said. ‘Do you want me to go?’

Her eyes opened a little further, and I was regarded, studied. ‘Why,’ she murmured, ‘do you have somewhere else you have to be?’

I laughed quietly. ‘Not as such.’

‘Do you want to go?’

I shook my head. ‘No.’

‘Then don’t.’ Her eyes closed and she nestled down under her towel and blanket. ‘Keep me company,’ she said sleepily.

I opened my mouth to speak, then her eyes were open again and she said, ‘It’s all right; not trying to seduce you.’

‘Oh,’ I said, sighing heavily but still smiling. ‘That’s a pity.’

She tutted, shook her head a fraction. ‘You guys,’ she said, laughing lightly, closing her eyes. ‘Just stop it. Here,’ she said, lifting one corner of the blanket, her eyelids flickering as though trying and failing to open again. ‘Come and keep me warm. I’ll spoon against you.’

‘What if Josh—?’

‘Ha!’ she said, quietly dismissive. ‘Wouldn’t worry about Josh.’ She sounded sleepy again. She flapped the blanket edge. ‘Come on; getting cold.’

It was probably as well her eyes were closed. My grin must have been splitting my face. I did as I’d been told and cuddled into her, under the blanket, my back against her front.

‘S’better,’ she said, on a sleepy sigh. Seconds later she was asleep, breathing rhythmically against me, her breasts a gentle pressure against my back, her arm over my waist. I had a raging erection, of course I did, which it would have been great to do something with, but, fuck it; no matter where this was going from this point on, this – right now, right here – would most assuredly do.

We woke up to a cool grey morning, and to what were probably meant to be knowing smiles, plus various yawns and stretches and a few hung-over groans.

The fire was a dead black circular scar on the empty expanse of sand, but the smell of frying bacon and the sound of sputtering eggs came from a smaller fire somebody had started near by. I’d rolled over. Ellie smiled at me.

‘Sleep okay?’ she asked, blowing some hair away from her eyes.

‘Never better,’ I lied. Now, my cock was about the only bit of me that wasn’t stiff.

‘Same here,’ she said, then sat up, flexing her arms and upper body. God, you could fall in lust with this girl’s shoulders, even before you lowered your sights a little. She glanced round at everybody else, then down at me. ‘People will talk, you know,’ she said, arching one eyebrow.

‘I should be so lucky,’ I told her. This made her laugh.

‘Thank you, Kylie.’ She moved one hand through the tawny mass of her hair, scratching idly. She raised her head, sniffing. She looked down at me again. ‘Hungry?’

‘You wouldn’t believe,’ I told her, after the tiniest of pauses, holding her gaze.

She closed one eye, regarding me suspiciously, then laughed. ‘Mm-hmm,’ she said, then unfolded herself upwards, standing. ‘Well …’ She pulled the towel around her like a skirt.

She held out one hand to me, to help me up.

Oh, you beauty, I thought.

‘I’m a fucking idiot,’ I breathed to myself when I saw Ferg and Josh coming back along the beach together. They weren’t quite holding hands, but something about the way they strolled along, either too casually or not quite casual enough, made it obvious. I’d only started to suspect when I noticed they weren’t there by the side of the fire when Ellie and I woke up.

I looked at Ellie, standing talking and laughing with one of her girlfriends by the only other four-wheel drive still left on the beach. Round her shoulders, she wore the blanket we’d slept in; there was cloud, and a chill wind off the grey sea.

I finished my eggs and bacon, wiped the plate and thanked Logan, who’d provided the breakfast. I went up to Ellie just as her pal moved off. ‘That’s the boys back,’ I told her.

She looked round, nodded. ‘So it is,’ she agreed. She held my gaze, smiled.

‘About you and Josh,’ I said, after a few moments.

‘What about me and Josh?’ she said.

‘There’s a party at Maddy Ferrie’s place tomorrow night.’

‘I know.’

‘You were … going?’

‘Yes.’

‘With Josh?’

‘He was going to pick me up.’ She looked over at him again. ‘That was the plan.’

‘Well, I wondered if I could take you? Could I pick you up? Instead?’

She nodded thoughtfully. ‘I suppose you could.’

‘D’you think that would be all right with Josh?’

She looked at Josh and Ferg as they approached. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think that would be fine with Josh.’

‘And would that be all right with you?’ I asked, starting to become unsure whether this laid-back approach of hers was studied coolness, druggy comedown or sheer indifference.

She seemed to think about it, then she raised herself up on tiptoes and put her hand gently on my cheek. She came forward and kissed me lightly on the other cheek. ‘That would be very all right with me.’

We stood smiling slyly at each other for what felt like half a minute before Ferg’s voice rang out. ‘Gilmour! I hope you haven’t crushed, smoked, given away or lost my fucking cigarettes, you unmitigated cur. Morning, darlings.’

The first time Ellie and I actually had sex was mildly disastrous: more awkward than my very first time, nearly three years earlier, with Kat Naughton; my first, all of nineteen at the time. Lovely girl. Married now with two kids; works in the council Planning Office. She was engaged and it was just a fling for her so it went no further but she always used to wave and say hi when our paths crossed subsequently. Anyway, that had been a breeze and a mutual laugh compared to my first fumblings with Ellie, in the dark, in my bed, one night while my parents were away.

She was tense and unsure and while she said no, she wasn’t a virgin, and there was no hint of a hymen, or blood, it was neither a joyous romping bonk-fest nor a sinuously graceful coupling of two bodies utterly meant for each other. My extensive research via the media of prose and film had led me to believe it would be one or the other. She was quiveringly tight and I came too quickly the first time, but we persevered, relaxed a bit and it got better. Still all a tad edgy, though, and in the morning she seemed almost downcast.

‘You still want to keep seeing me?’ she asked over mugs of tea in bed, not looking me in the eyes.

‘Are you completely insane?’

(I wouldn’t say this now; you always say things like this attempting reverse psychology or whatever, but now I know how insecure and even neurotic women can be, and often the more beautiful and intelligent, the more insecure and neurotic they are. Beats me – positively unfair, in fact – but there you are.)

‘I kind of fell in love with you three years ago,’ I told her. ‘I’ve been dreaming, fantasising about you ever since. I’ve wanted you for ever, El. I’m just terrified you’ll get bored with me.’

‘Now who’s insane?’ she murmured, picking at the duvet cover, though she was smiling.

I told her about seeing her at the Lido that sun-hazy day during the summer of 2000, about how just that single head-to-the-side, hair-swinging-out gesture had captivated me utterly.

She snorted, then laughed. ‘I get water in my ears if I don’t do that,’ she told me. ‘It’s like walking around with my head underwater all day if I don’t.’

Ellie was crazily self-conscious about her looks; according to her, her entire body was just plain weird. I can’t even remember which breast she thought was bigger than the other; they were both OMG-I’m-going-to-faint beautiful and looked like a perfect matching pair to me, but to hear her talk one was a tennis ball and the other a crash helmet. There was a cute little crease across the end of one of her gorgeous light-brown nipples but as far as she was concerned it was the Grand Canyon.

We were a week’s worth of sex into our relationship before I got to go down on her, for goodness’ sake; she was convinced her body was a feast of freakishness below the waist.

‘But this is beautiful!’ I told her, the first time I was allowed to get down there in daylight and take a look. It was also the first time it occurred to me that this is why girls like frills and frilly things; they have their own frilliness, built in. ‘Seriously; beautiful.’

‘Oh, God!’ she said, slapping a hand over her eyes, patently mortified.

‘What?’

‘Engineering and Philosophy.’

‘I didn’t even know you could do that. Anywhere.’

Ellie looked thoughtful. ‘I think strings might have been pulled,’ she admitted. I looked at her. She shrugged. ‘Not directly Dad; John Ancraime.’

‘Honestly?’ I said. ‘Engineering and Philosophy? This isn’t a wind-up?’

A tiny frown puckered between her eyebrows. ‘Of course not.’

I whistled. ‘Best of luck with that.’ I wiped some spray off my face.

We were sailing; Ellie had a wee dinghy you could squeeze two people on to. We’d trailed it down from the house to the slip at the end of the Promenade and pushed the thing through light surf, wetsuited up. Dinghies were sort of weirdly old school, I reckoned; everybody else I knew who was aquatically sporty was into surfing, windsurfing, kite-surfing and jet-skis, but Ellie liked old-fashioned sailing, and admittedly it was something we could do together. This mostly meant getting cold and wet together, but it was, well, bracing.

‘Yeah, it’s a challenge,’ Ellie agreed. She had her hair up under a peaked cap, a few strands blowing loose. She looked great. She squinted at the breeze-swollen sail, then at the ruffled patterns the gusts of wind were pressing onto the waters all around us. ‘Going about,’ she announced.

We started bum-shuffling, hauling on some ropes and slackening off others.

Engineering and Philosophy. She was crazy. But, then, why not? Ellie always got what she wanted, always eased through life, accepting her familial, financial and intellectual advantages as her natural right. And if securing courses in the two subjects that most intrigued her at the time took some academic string-pulling via her dad and our local toffs, well, that was cool, even amusing.

At school she had got used to being top of the class in whatever subjects she could be bothered to put any effort into, but she never really studied and consistently underperformed in exams. Her teachers despaired; she was a star pupil but still, somehow, a disappointment. She got A grades, but then was told she could do better. She developed a mindset that found learning rather fun but being tested on it just a hassle; she did better than almost anybody else but still people seemed dissatisfied with her. What was the matter with them?

Nevertheless, when the effort involved in ignoring this chorus of supposedly supportive criticism grew greater and more tedious than that associated with the studying required, she had finally pulled up her metaphorical socks and done pretty well in her last year. All the same, it had been a turbulent time for all concerned; Ellie had never really developed the skill of giving in gracefully.

Even now, when she had Oxbridge-level grades, she’d settled for Aberdeen because home was handily close and so many of her friends and the people she was already familiar with – in other words, people already in awe of her, people who required no fresh exertion – were going there. This meant that, as far as she was concerned, it had the best social scene.

Meanwhile I was going to become a great artist. But just doing the classical stuff – painting and sculpting – wasn’t going to be enough. I was going to draw up plans for buildings, create their interiors with colour and light, design their furniture, fabrics and fittings, and specify everything down to the last teaspoon, doorstop and fire extinguisher. And then I wanted to stage events and place my own art in the spaces I’d created. Plus I wanted to be head of a studio full of other visionary people dedicated to expressing my unstoppable torrent of creativity in other niche artistic media and more technically challenging forms requiring specialist knowledge that it wouldn’t be worth my fabulously valuable time to master (even then I had Ferg down as my go-to man for games design, an honour he seemed oddly casual about, as though he didn’t fully appreciate the accolade). Not to mention I anticipated overseeing an entire social and artistic scene based around some sort of astounding hybrid of club, studio, theatre, gallery, publishing house, virtual environment and image production facility, probably in New York or London initially, before I franchised the concept.

I wanted to be a cross between Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Jeff Koons and Andy Warhol, and make all three of them look a little second-rate, a tad wanting in ambition as well as talent. I was going to take the artistic world by storm; it didn’t know what was coming, but it – all of humanity, eventually, because I would make art matter again in a way it hadn’t for far too long – would thank me later.

Dad told me to get a grip. Mum said that all sounded fantastic, incredible, and art school would help me decide what I wanted to focus on (like she hadn’t been listening either), but Ellie listened to my dreams and told me there was probably not a single thing I couldn’t do if I put my mind to it. I think that was how she phrased it.

Naturally, I heard what I wanted to hear, as you do.

*   *   *  

I got a talking-to. I’d known it was coming. It was Fraser and Norrie’s birthday, the first time I’d been invited to the family home as Ellie’s boyfriend, about a month after the beach party.

‘Come and see Fraser’s new wagon,’ I was told, so Murdo, Callum, Fraser and Norrie and I all trooped through the kitchen and utility and into the hangar-like triple garage to admire this horrendous but very shiny jacked-up piece of Americana. It was a Ford Grandsomething-or-another, I think. Norrie’s birthday present was a speedboat he’d wreck against a harbour wall four months later. We were clutching drinks. I had a can of something soft because Ellie and I were going to another party later and it was my turn to drive. The guys all had cans of beer.

I’d already gathered that my choice of beverage had produced mixed feelings in the Murston lads:

‘No drinkin?’

‘Driving.’

‘Eh?’

‘Not just me; Ellie’ll be in the motor too.’

‘Aw. Right. Aye, okay then.’

‘Ya poff.’

(Fraser / me. With Norrie right at the end.)

‘Here, have a sit; feel the leather,’ Murdo said, opening one of the monster’s rear doors.

We all got in. I was sat in the middle in the back, surrounded by prime Murstonian beef. They closed all the doors and turned to me: Fraser and Callum in the back bracketing me, Murdo and Norrie in the front, glaring over the head restraints. The thing wasn’t even right-hand drive.

Fraser had been driving a chipped and winged Nissan GT-R until recently. He’d knocked down and killed a teenager two years earlier, on a slip road onto the bypass. He got off the careless driving charge – he’d been straight and just under the legal alcohol limit, while the kid he’d hit had been high as a kite – but then the victim’s family had started a civil suit against him. They were new to the area and weren’t to know any better. Some people expected the worst, even when the family lost the court case, but all Fraser did was have the GT-R fully repaired except for the big dent in the bonnet where the kid’s head had hit. He kept that car with its fatal impact crater in the metalwork as a sort of grisly souvenir for nearly two years, and claimed he drove down the street where the kid had lived – and her family still did – every day, just on principle.

‘Now then, Stewart,’ Murdo said.

He was the eldest, the spokesman and reputedly the smartest of the four. He had a short, well-kept beard, fair-haired. Callum had designer stubble and the two younger brothers, both redheads, were clean shaven. I wondered if there was some sort of hierarchy of age-related hirsuteness in the Murston family.

‘We thought we should let you know, the four of us, how we feel about our sister an that, eh?’ Murdo said, to a sort of mini Murston Mexican Wave of nods. ‘Callum here’s put in a good word for you,’ he told me. A good word? I thought. After me cultivating the numpty’s unrewarding friendship for almost the whole of High School? Thanks.

‘An Grandpa,’ Fraser said to Murdo. ‘Him too.’

Murdo nodded. ‘Aye, an Grandpa. He speaks well of you, an that’s all good as far as it goes, eh? But you need to know what she means to this family, aye?’

Murdo looked round at the others. They all nodded again. All four were wearing new jeans – with what looked suspiciously like ironed-in creases – and padded tartan shirts over different designer tees. The tartan shirts were pretty bulky. It was like being intimidated by a convention of Highland hotel sofas.

‘You better no be, like, f … havin fuckin sex wi her,’ Norrie said, frowning mightily at me.

‘Shut up, Norrie,’ Callum said.

Murdo sighed. ‘Get real, Norrie.’

‘Aye, gie yersel peace,’ Fraser chipped in.

Norrie dealt with this concerted disapproval by intensifying his frown.

‘Guys,’ I said, ‘I love the lassie; have for years. Last thing I want—’

‘Aye, aye,’ Murdo said, like he’d heard all this before, or it just didn’t matter. ‘But your da’s best pals wi Mike Mac, an that puts a different kind of complexion on it a bit, eh? I mean, like, who knows, eh? That might no be so bad. But on the other hand it might, so we’ll just have to see, eh?’

Maybe he thought I was looking confused at all this suddenly perceived complexity. ‘But never mind all that,’ he told me. ‘Just you remember: she’s oor sister. We look after our own in this family, okay?’

‘Okay, guys; of course.’

‘We don’t want to see her get hurt, like,’ Norrie said. The others looked at him.

‘Aye,’ Murdo said. ‘An she’s part of this family. An no cunt insults this family, understand?’

‘Of course I—’ I began.

‘You insult her or take the fuckin piss,’ Murdo said, ignoring me, ‘an you’re takin the piss oot of us too. You’re insultin oor da, right?’

‘Right!’ said Callum.

‘Don’t want to insult anybody, guys,’ I told them. I looked round at them all. ‘I respect Ellie. I respect the family. Want you to know that, guys. Okay?’ I nodded, sincerely. Like I say, I’d kind of anticipated a wee talk like this, so I’d rehearsed this series of short, easily understood sentences. All true, too, though a good advocate, barrister or whatever could argue that when I said I respected the family, what I actually meant was that I respected the abstract idea of the family, not the Murston clan in its current incarnation per se. Something like that.

‘Okay,’ Norrie said, looking almost mollified.

‘Make sure it stays that way, eh, Stewie?’ Callum said. He winked at me. Aye, fuck you, I thought, but smiled back.

‘Aye,’ Fraser muttered.

‘Okay,’ Murdo said, draining his can. ‘Team talk over. Time to get pished.’ He crushed the empty can in his hand. A tiny dribble of beer leaked out onto the upholstery.

‘No on the good seats!’ Fraser protested, rubbing the resulting micro stain with his fingers, making it worse. (Not leather, either; some sort of pinprick-pierced vinyl made to look like leather. A bit.)

As they all started opening the doors, Murdo nodded, indicating something just behind me. ‘Mind yer heid on the gun-rack as you get out, eh, Stu?’

‘No tryin to marry you,’ Murdo said, at the same party, in the hallway, just before Ellie and I were about to leave. He laid one heavy hand on my shoulder. Beery breath.

‘Sorry, Murdo?’ I said.

‘No tryin to say that’s you married as far as we’re concerned, like. You’ll be goin to uni, aye?’

‘Aye,’ Norrie said, suddenly at my other side. ‘A clever cunt.’

‘Glasgow,’ I said. I thought the better of trying to explain the difference between university and art school.

Murdo slapped me hard on the back. ‘There you are! There you are! Who knows, eh? Just sayin: don’t take the piss. That’s all.’ He slapped me on the back again. ‘Away ye go now; youse kids have fun.’

So we became an item. We became Stewart and Ellie, or Ellie and Stewie, or Stu and El. I think we were even Stullie or Stellie or something for a while, when we were all giving ourselves Branjelinastyle, two-for-one collective names. That didn’t stick, thankfully.

And at some point – maybe after a year, when we were still seeing each other and still staying faithful to each other, even though I was in Glasgow and she was in Aberdeen, and we were meeting new people all the time, and developing both within ourselves and as parts of quite different communities – I think we both realised this might indeed be something genuinely serious; something, maybe, for ever.

I’d fallen for a glance, smitten with her skin and her hair and the way she moved, but I’d come to love her for all the things that made her who she truly was, and those came from deeper inside, from her character, from her mind. That first, instinctive, surface-struck besotting had been absurd in its own way, but it had been accurate, it had been right. (I blurted this out to her once and she thought about it and said, yes, she felt the same way; she’d just thought I was cute and sort of brashly fun at first, but then discovered that – being generous – maybe there was a little more to me than that. She smiled, telling me this, and I briefly feigned being insulted, while actually happy and secure in the knowledge I was merely being teased.)

And, it felt, other people had picked up on this sea-change, too. There were no more team talks from the Murston brothers and people seemed to assume that we’d be together next year – we got joint invitations to weddings nine or ten months in the future. I was invited to dinners at the Murston family house, and I was sort of obliquely informed, first by Dad, later by Mike Mac himself, that Ellie and I had his blessing too.

‘Aye,’ Mike MacAvett said, sipping a G&T at a party of Mum and Dad’s where I seemed to have been deemed drinks steward, ‘at one point we thought maybe Josh and Ellie …’ He shrugged, looked pleasantly bemused. ‘But no. Still looking for a lassie, that boy.’

Last I’d heard – from Ferg, naturally – Josh was in London looking for buff studs with interesting piercings and independently suspended disco muscles under spray-on T-shirts, but I didn’t like to say.

So Ellie and I had become a couple, in the eyes of those around us as well as in our own heads, and our match, our partnership, had started to be factored into webs of relationships that extended far beyond us, and deep into the clouded waters of Stonemouth’s surprisingly tightly controlled little society.

I don’t think either of us would have been human if we hadn’t come to resent this, at least a bit, and to chafe against it. Still, we had each other, about every second weekend or so, and for longer during the holidays, both abroad and back in the Toun.

I asked her to marry me in a fit of romantic enthusiasm on Valentine’s Day 2005. Until then we’d only talked about living together and whether we’d double-barrel our children’s names. Maybe because my mum and dad’s marriage had seemed pretty happy, while the Murston house had apparently always rung to screaming arguments and slamming doors, I’d generally been more pro-marriage than she had, at least in theory.

For a while in my mid-teens the very idea of marriage had seemed like the most stupidly old-fashioned thing in the world, a slightly embarrassing relic of days gone by and basically pretty pointless unless you were some sort of deeply religious eccentric who actually took all that God and Ten Commandments stuff seriously. It wasn’t so much that so many people in our class came from families where the parents hadn’t bothered to get married; it was more that so many came from families where they had bothered, but then split up and got married again. And again and again, in some cases, though I’d noticed the enthusiasm for marriage seemed to tail off in those who exposed themselves to it repeatedly. If you were the bright and breezy sort you’d put this down to them finally finding the right person after years of effort, but if you were the gloomy type you’d reckon they’d just given up trying.

Later, with the maturity that came with my late teens and hitting the big Two-Oh, getting engaged and married started to seem like a deeply romantic thing to do, an expression of hope and nailingyour-colours-to-the-mast defiance in the face of the expectations of a jaundiced and cynical world. Maybe there was an element of contrarianism, too; if everybody just assumed that of course there was no real point in getting married, then there were always going to be a few of us who’d think, Ha, well, I’ll show you!

To be absolutely honest, when I asked Ellie to marry me it was kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing and I expected her to say no. Never really occurred to me she might say anything else, not after all the times she’d told me how she’d grown up listening to her parents snipe and shout at each other, and hating that they felt tied, manacled to one another. I really just wanted to get the whole question of getting formally married out of the way so we could be sure where we stood, and I assumed that where we stood was that our love and commitment was so strong and so complete within itself that it didn’t need the dubious outside recognition provided by the state (and certainly not by the Church).

We were standing in the snow by the slow dark waters of the Urstan river at Bridge of Ay. There had been a lot of snow the night before and I’d suggested we borrow Donald’s Range Rover to go for a drive and just take in the snowy scenery, maybe find a village pub or an open-out-of-season hotel serving lunch. The way our various course commitments and so on had worked out, it was our first weekend together for nearly a month.

We’d been gazing upstream to the old bridge, a delicate-looking humpback construction in stone that described a near geometrically precise semicircle over the river. There was a deep pool just downstream from it, haloed with ice, the black, still waters at its centre reflecting the bridge with barely a ripple. Bathed in the cold white light of a calm winter’s day, the structure and its inverted image seemed to form an almost perfect circle.

I was slightly stunned when she said yes. There were hugs, there were tears. It was just as well Ellie’s chin was on my shoulder as we stood there wrapped in each other’s arms; I think my eyes stayed wide with surprise for a good minute or two. I remember thinking, Well, that didn’t go the way I thought it would. I was used to my unpremeditated ideas going pretty much as I expected them to, to the extent that I had time to think about them and form any sort of expectation of them at all in the moments – sometimes as little as a few seconds – between making the decision and finding out where it led.

Standing there in the snow-struck silence, beneath a shining, mother-of-pearl sky with Ellie hugging me so tight I almost had to fight for each cold breath, it occurred to me for the first time that maybe being so cavalierly spontaneous wasn’t always such an effortlessly brilliant idea after all. I suppose if I’d been a really smart person I’d have made sure this was the last time this occurred to me, too, but it wasn’t. I think I later convinced myself it was just a blip. And anyway, at the time, being hugged, being held so fiercely by this woman I knew I loved and wanted to be with for ever, it felt like this had been my best snap decision ever, and like I’d inadvertently rescued her from something I hadn’t even known was a threat, like I’d said exactly the right thing completely by accident.

‘Yes,’ she said, sniffing, still hugging me tight around the neck. ‘You sure?’ She pushed back, looked at me through teary eyes. ‘You sure?’ she repeated.

Well, I am now, I thought of saying, but didn’t.

‘Of course,’ I told her.