15

It’s another one of those diaphanous days, the Toun submerged in a glowing mist from dawn onwards. It’s supposed to lift later, according to the forecast, though the forecasting people are notoriously bad at getting the Toun’s weather right.

I’m up early, using the family computer in Dad’s office. It’s a Windows machine so it all feels a bit Fisher-Price after an Apple interface, but grit your teeth and it works, so I check gmail and do a bit of not very difficult detective work, looking for a photograph, then both send it to myself and print it out, A6, pocket size.

It’s one of those taken five years ago in the ladies’ toilet on the fifth floor of the Mearnside Hotel – the Mearnside Hotel and Spa, as the website politely insists we ought to call it now – the one that shows Anjelica’s red satin gloves raised, fists clenched, above the top of the middle cubicle door. I’ve never looked for this before, never seen it, or the others, showing legs and shoes and the base of a toilet bowl. I still don’t want to look at those, though I do, on the same anonymous Talc O Da Toun website, just to check. Jeez, I was still wearing Ys or jockeys back then; they’re very … stretched. Preposterously, just looking at this dimly lit, fuzzily focused, arguably rather sordid stuff brings back the memory of the night itself, and I start to get a hard-on.

Enough. I put the computer to sleep and pocket the print in the jacket of the black Paul Smith suit hanging on the back of my bedroom door, then go down to breakfast.

Muesli, fruit, wholemeal toast and tea. ‘Dad?’ I ask.

‘Work,’ Mum tells me, downing her tea and standing. She’s still in jeans and tee, hair mussed. ‘He’ll join us at the crem – ah, the cemetery. I’ll have to dash off after – only got the morning. Right. Dashing for a shower.’

‘I’ll clear.’

‘Ta.’

‘D’you know,’ Dad says, as we stand in the crowd gathered round the graveside on Hulshiers Hill, ‘I’m nearly fifty and this is the first actual interment I’ve been to.’

I glance at Al, surprised. ‘Really?’ I think about this. ‘Suppose it’s cos old Joe was a farmer once; attached to the land, and all that.’

‘Maybe,’ Dad says. ‘Couple of guys in the work, near retirement age, and they were saying the same thing. Only ever been to the crem. Hardly ever see people buried these days.’

‘It’s a good crowd,’ Mum says, looking round.

She’s right; a couple of hundred at least, all clustered like a dark parliament of crows on the hillside, our mass punctuated by the mossy gravestones of those gone before. The Murston family are graveside, of course, with seats. We’re bottom of the B-list, maybe C-list in terms of proximity.

Must have been some delay back at the house or the funeral parlour because we were almost all here by the time the slow-moving cortège nosed its way between the cemetery gates at the bottom of the hill and came crunching up the pitted tarmac like a procession of giant black beetles.

I caught a glimpse of Mr and Mrs M – him looking grim, her with her mouth set tight – and watched the three brothers in case they were trying to lock eyes on me, but they just stood at the back of the hearse, sharing their dad’s grim expression, as the coffin was unloaded. Then Murdo, Fraser, Norrie and their dad shouldered the big, gleaming casket along with two of the undertakers. Mrs M stayed tight-lipped as she followed the minister and the coffin up the path to the grave.

Mostly I watched Ellie and Grier. They walked together, looking straight ahead, beautiful in black, Ellie wearing a long skirt, a white blouse, a thin silk coat and flat shoes, Grier in a three-piece suit with a little pillbox hat and a spotted veil. Shiny heels brought her up to the same height as Ellie.

Old Joe, I didn’t doubt, would have thought they were both lovely.

The family got to the graveside and sat down, and I lost sight of the girls. I looked around, then spotted Ferg, further up the hill, passing a silvery hip flask to a tearful-looking, raven-haired girl next to him.

Ten minutes later and we’ve been through the recited, edited, rosified highlights of Joe’s life – him being part of Stonemouth’s premier crime family seems to have been spun out of existence – and now the minister’s blethering on about dust to dust and ashes to ashes, and Joe having the sure and certain knowledge of a totally spiffing life to come at the right hand of God or some such bollocks. I listen to this stuff and just get embarrassed. I mean, embarrassed for us as a species.

Life after death. I mean, really?

At the few funerals I’ve been to – like Al, I’ve only ever been to crematoria till now – I’ve always sort of tightened up when they start spouting all this shit and felt like I’m so close to just jumping up and shouting, ‘Oh, fuck off!’ or something equally guaranteed to ruin everybody’s day and make me even less popular. Honestly. I get the same thing at weddings when they start the same in-the-sight-of-God nonsense, though it’s not as strong, and the majority of weddings I’ve been to have been secular; they’re fine, they’re joyous. Only one secular funeral so far, and it was infinitely better than all this weak-minded, fantasy-and-superstition shite.

I remember feeling just as clear-eyed about all this when I was still almost a kid – thirteen or fourteen – and sort of half assumed that you just got more gullible and religious or whatever as you got older, but if it’s happening to me I see no signs so far; quite the opposite. I think I was plain wrong there and the new explanation is I just lack the credulity gene.

I still have a vague feeling that there might be more to existence than can be experienced with our surface senses, so technically I guess I’m an agnostic, but nothing’s more guaranteed to bring out my inner atheist than listening to the witterings of a holy man who thinks all the answers are already there in some book, whether it was written millennia ago or last week.

However, lesson over. The Murstons have stood up again and I can see Ellie once more. Could I really have gone through with our own wedding ceremony, the whole religious performance, in a church and everything? Now I’m kind of stunned I even contemplated it, but at the time I remember thinking that, precisely because the religious side of it was meaningless, it was okay to go along with it. And if there was any sacrifice of principles involved, I was making that sacrifice for Ellie, and to keep her family sweet; not because I was frightened of them or anything, but to convince them that I was a man of substance and moral fibre, that I did indeed love their daughter, I took my responsibilities seriously and I could be relied upon to do the right thing.

Obviously my minutes-long dalliance in a loo with the lovely Jel slightly worked against the wholesome image I was trying to project.

Jel’s here too, with Josh and Mike and Sue. Mrs Mac actually seems to be crying. Anjelica appears plain and severe, in a very dark grey suit with a knee-length skirt. She catches me looking at her and gives me the smallest of smiles. I nod back and we glance away again, pretending to listen to what the witch doctor’s gibbering on about now.

I think I catch the sparse, hollow sound of the first handfuls of earth hitting the coffin lid. It’s the most genuinely affecting part of the whole ceremony. Perhaps the only one, apart from just the sight of two generations of Murston hard men shouldering the burden of a third.

The family troop back down to the ancient Daimlers and stretch Fords and Volvos, and the rest of us disperse amongst the gravestones to find our own highly scattered cars and minibuses, while the sky above us teases out its cloudy wisps from gold to streaked and filmy blue, as a light breeze picks up off the sea.