12

Ared Toyota estate swings into the bus stop, splashing to a halt right at the entrance. The person inside leans over, reaching to push open the passenger side door.

My idiot heart leaps as I think, Maybe it’s her! But it isn’t. It’s not Grier, either. It’s a guy I recognise from High School, I think.

‘Stewart, thought that was you! Want a lift?’

‘Yeah. Yeah, ah … Cheers.’

I get in and sit down, carefully. Not carefully enough, though; a spear of pain jerks from my groin to my brain, making my eyes water. However, the jolt seems to dislodge the memory of who the guy is. He’s Craig Jarvey, from the year below ours.

‘Thought that was you,’ he says again as we rejoin the northbound traffic. He’s plump, fresh-faced, with unruly blond hair. He’s suited and tied and there are what look like carpet sample books all over the back seat.

‘Thanks, Craig.’

‘Aye, I always looks to see if there’s somebody I know at that bus stop. Specially if it’s raining.’

‘You’re a gent.’

‘You okay?’

‘I’ve had better days.’ I grin a rather mirthless grin at his openly interested and concerned face. We’re on the bridge now and I can feel the bump of every expansion joint passing under the car’s wheels and up through the seat to my still excessively tender balls. ‘It’s complicated,’ I tell him. ‘You don’t want to know, trust me.’

‘Ah,’ he says, nodding.

We crest the bridge’s shallow summit. The red and white striped tent that was on the other carriageway is gone; the twin lanes of traffic thunder on by.

Lauren McLaughley and Drew Linton were getting married.

Lauren was one of Ellie’s best friends, another Academy girl. She got engaged to Drew about the same time Ellie got engaged to me and they’d both wanted a wedding the following summer. At one stage the two girls had talked about having a joint wedding, but both mothers had smiled the sort of polite but steely smile that made it abundantly clear that that proposal really wasn’t going to do, now, was it? So Lauren and Drew were getting married the week before Ellie and me, and having a two-part honeymoon – a castle hotel in the western Highlands and a designer boutique place in Santorini – so that they could attend our wedding too.

They got married in the Abbey. Lauren’s mum looked very proud, though Ellie’s mum looked the more triumphant, rather as if the whole thing – splendid though it no doubt was, in its own small way – was just a dress-rehearsal for her own daughter’s rather more impressive event in a week’s time.

The reception was in the Mearnside Hotel, Stonemouth’s grandest venue for nearly a century, a mini Gleneagles built on the whinny hill overlooking the fairways of Olness with views beyond its sheltering screen of trees to the dunes and the sea.

Now that I’ve been to a few English weddings where they seem to expect the bride and groom to leave the party before the fun really starts, I’m better able to appreciate how good a traditional, thorough-going Scottish wedding really is, for all concerned – though especially, of course, for the guests. At the time I just thought all weddings were like this.

I walked into the ballroom where the reception was being held: maybe twenty tables of ten places each in one half of the room, leaving the other half free for dancing. I didn’t doubt that if Ellie and I had been going to have two hundred guests, we’d now be looking at two-ten, minimum.

The ceilidh band was just setting up: moody-looking guys about my age in black kilts, dreads and chunky boots. They were called Caul of the Wild and were probably sore they hadn’t thought of Red Hot Chilli Pipers first. Later on there would be a disco but before that there’d be the sort of yee-hooch, swing-your-granny-by-the-toe stuff that’s required to accompany the kind of dancing they teach you at school in these parts, with bracing titles like Eightsome Reel, Dashing White Sergeant and Strip the Willow.

Full-on Scottish country dancing like this is a sight and a sound to behold, and not for the faint-hearted. Aside from a few gentle dances like the St Bernard’s Waltz – basically for the grans and grandads, so they can shuffle round the floor recalling past and limber glories while everybody else is at the bar – it’s all fairly demented stuff, with rugby-scrum-sized packs of drunken people whirling round the room in progressively more fragmented rabbles trying to remember what the hell happens next.

The Gay Gordons is effectively choreographed chaos and an Eightsome Reel is a deranged marathon requiring a PhD in dance. Two hundred and fifty-six bars of dashing, reversing, turning, skipping, pas-de-basing, jump-stepping, successively-partner-swapping-until-you-get-back-to-the-one-you-started-with music is common, but the Eightsome properly lasts for four hundred and sixty-four bars, and no matter how fit you are at the start it’s always awfully good to get to the end.

I felt a sharp tap-tap on the back of my head, just above my neck. This would be Grier: her traditional greeting for almost as long as I’d known her. I turned and there she was: seventeen and a Goth, head to foot in black.

‘You have to dance with me,’ she told me, sounding very serious and looking at me from under her jet-black fringe. She had glossy black fingernails, white make-up, kohl-black eyes. ‘You’d better not say no; I’m thinking of becoming a witch.’

‘No problem, Gree,’ I told her. I surveyed her black-crêpe, long-sleeved, polo-necked dress, black tights and black suede shoes. The heels were breathtakingly high. Thought she looked taller. ‘Like the gear,’ I told her. ‘Very ninja.’

‘I don’t want to be called Gree any more.’

‘Back to Grier?’

‘Yes. On pain of death!’ She waggled her black fingernails at me.

‘Fair enough.’ I looked round. ‘Where are you sitting?’

‘We have a table at the back of beyond, in the far wilderness, by the doors to the kitchen,’ Grier said, pointing.

‘Right. So.’ I frowned. ‘A witch? Seriously?’

She waggled her fingers in front of my face again. ‘I have powers, you know,’ she announced. I suspected her eyes had narrowed: hard to tell with the fringe. ‘Powers you know nothing of!’

‘Jings.’

‘Don’t mock me, puny man,’ she growled.

‘Okay … impressive teenager,’ I growled back, leaning forward and doing some magic-trick-distraction hand waving of my own.

‘A dance,’ she told me, eyes flashing. ‘Don’t forget.’ She stalked off, teetering on her high heels.

She missed my probably inappropriately sardonic salute of acquiescence.

At the welcome drinks tables, covered in glasses of whisky, bubbles and Tropicana, I met Ferg, resplendent in full kilty outfit. I wore dark-blue suede shoes, a perfectly serviceable pair of black M&S trousers, a so-dark-blue-it’s-black velvet jacket picked up for a pittance from a charity shop on Byres Road (worn ironically, obviously) and a cheeky red shirt with a bootlace tie.

‘Gilmour,’ Ferg said, ‘you look like the croupier on an Albanian cruise liner.’

‘Hilarious! Epic! Yeah. And you finally found a tartan to compliment your vacuity: Clan Thermos. Well done. Evening, Ferg.’

‘Anyway, enough. Who or what was that?’ he asked, going up on tiptoes to look back at where I’d just been.

‘That? That was Grier. Grier Murston. Going to be my sister-in-law in a week.’

‘She’s quite … severe,’ he said, drinking from the first of the two whiskies he’d picked up. ‘I think I quite like her.’

‘She’s still a kid, Ferg. Grier’s a late developer. Always has been.’

‘What? She’s not even legal?’

‘She’s seventeen. She’s legal but she’s probably best left alone.’

We were strolling towards the tables now. I looked round to make sure none of Grier’s brothers was overhearing Ferg talk like this about their kid sister.

‘Ooh, am I being warned off?’ Ferg asked.

‘Yes. Seriously, pick on somebody your own gender.’

‘Hmm. Probably. But I feel I need to keep my hand in. I say hand.’ He looked at me and shook his head. ‘Really. Did you get dressed in the dark again?’

‘Fuck off.’

‘Wait a minute; your parents are away, aren’t they? You got dressed by yourself! It all starts to make sense now.’

‘It’s their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary? They’re on a cruise in the Med.’

‘And are those blue suede shoes?’

‘They are indeed.’

‘Christ! I trust you’re thinking of something a little more formal for your own be-shackling next week.’

‘Full Highland hoo-ha. I shall be dressed like a shortbread tin.’

‘Can’t wait.’

‘You started that speech yet?’ Ferg was, slightly against my own better judgement, my Best Man.

He looked thoughtful. ‘I thought I’d just extemporise, do it as a sort of stand-up gig?’

‘Dear God, please say you’re joking.’

‘Holy piss up a rope, who’s that?’

‘Who?’

‘There, in the red.’

‘Where?’

‘There! Good grief, did you see her already and wank yourself blind?’

‘Ah. That’s Jel. Anjelica MacAvett?’

‘Ay, caramba,’ Ferg breathed, ‘I leave the place for three years to get a proper education and the bumpkins suddenly all turn luscious. Look at her! If I wasn’t bi already I swear I’d turn, just on the chance of getting nuts deep into that.’

‘Ever the romantic,’ I sighed.

Actually Jel was looking pretty fabulous; she wore a stunning red dress, high-necked but with a shoulder-to-shoulder window cut across the top of her breasts, and split from ankle to mid-thigh. Long red satin gloves stretching to above her elbows. Waist narrow enough to be wearing a corset. We were not the only guys looking at her as she stood by one of the tables, smiling as she talked to some white-haired oldies. Her hair was the colour of champagne, and as bubbly: a cascade suffused with ringlets.

‘Wasn’t she the dumpy bairn that used to jump on your lap and tell you she loved you? Usually at a crucial point in Doom, as I recall.’

‘I missed a few high scores that way.’

‘Fuck me,’ Ferg muttered. ‘You wouldn’t push her off and give her fifty pence to go away now.’

I looked round for Ellie, who’d stopped to talk to some old school pals as we’d entered the hotel foyer. El was as tall, elegant and cool in electric blue as Jel was small, curvaceous and, well, blisteringly sexy in red. No sign.

A small boy suddenly appeared in front of us clutching a camera in his chubby hands and pointing it vaguely towards Ferg and me. The flash went off and the boy scuttled away giggling. There had been a few blue-white flashes in other parts of the room over the last minute or so, most emanating from below table height.

‘Is there a knee-level identity parade later or what?’ Ferg asked, mystified.

‘I’d get used to it,’ I told him, dark spots dancing in front of my eyes. ‘Drew’s dad thought it would be a hoot to give all the small children cheap digi cameras, to keep the little scamps amused.’

Ferg appeared confused. ‘Drew? Who’s Drew?’

I looked at him. ‘The groom, Ferg?’

‘Oh.’ Ferg nodded, finished his second whisky. ‘That’s nice. So we’re going to have hip-high Toun bairns spatting about the place, letting off camera flashes all evening?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Cripes. Could be a long night.’

‘Wait till they show the results on the big screen,’ I said, nodding at the stage.

‘Dear Christ, have they no pity?’

‘Prepare yourself for a lot of photos of floor tiles and table legs. Oh, and corners.’

‘Corners?’

‘Kids love corners. Find them terribly photogenic. No idea why.’

‘Fuck.’ Ferg looked suitably appalled. ‘It’s the new slide carousel. Inhuman.’ He shook dramatically and sucked the last dregs of whisky from his glass. ‘This calls for a pint. Where’s the bar?’ He glanced round. ‘It is free, isn’t it?’

‘Hey, Stewart.’

I’d just finished my coffee after the meal. Ellie’s cup of tea lay where it had been left, untouched, just like her main course had been; she’d spent most of the meal dashing off to see people and was currently nowhere to be found. I’d done a little room-working myself, and Mike Mac had stopped by, sat and had a fairly phatic natter a few minutes earlier.

I turned round as a hand rested on my shoulder. ‘Jolie! Good to see you!’ I stood up and we hugged, only slightly awkwardly, given she was holding a wee girl in one arm. ‘And who’s this?’

‘This is Hannah,’ Jolie told me, smiling broadly.

‘Hello, Hannah,’ I said, though the bairn was shy and turned away, burying her face in Jolie’s shoulder-length brown hair.

‘Two next month,’ Jolie said.

I stroked the back of one of Hannah’s hands with a finger. The wee fist took an even tighter grip of her mum’s hair. ‘She’s gorgeous,’ I said. Hannah pressed her face deeper in towards Jolie’s neck. ‘Third one?’ I asked. ‘Or have there been more?’

‘Third,’ Jolie said, ‘and I think we’ll stop there. Three’s quite enough.’

Jolie McColl was my first girlfriend, the first girl I took on proper dates and had any sort of extended relationship with. Medium height and build, glossy, thickly heavy hair and a face that looked nice enough but plain only until she smiled, when rooms lit up.

I have to keep reminding myself ours was a relatively innocent relationship because although we never did have full-on sex there was a lot of everything else just short of it. Not for the want of me trying, begging and wheedling, mind, but Jolie was not to be moved; hands-down-pants and up-skirt mutual pleasuring was fine, and she was perfectly happy to go down on me, but her knickers might as well have been held on with superglue.

I suppose now it wouldn’t seem so terrible – we had a lot of fun together and a lot of this nine-tenths sex – but when you’re sixteen, bubbling with hormones and your friends are, allegedly, getting properly, penetratively and frequently laid all over the place, this not being allowed to Go All The Way seems to matter a hell of a lot.

Jolie’s attitude was that what we had was close enough to sex for it not really to matter. She wanted to stay a virgin, maybe until she was married and/or settled down and had kids. Only maybe, though; possibly she’d change her mind, so this restriction wasn’t necessarily for ever. What she wasn’t going to be was pressured or bullied into sex, by me or some of her so-called girlfriends.

I admired and respected her resolution absolutely, I just wished it didn’t affect me personally and drive me to bouts of such wild, so-near-and-yet-so-far frustration.

In the end my metaphorical cherry was popped when I had my one-night stand with Kat Naughton, on what had started out as just a lads-only drinking night. Arguably that would have relaxed me and I’d have been happy to give Jolie as long as she wanted to come round to the idea of us being proper lovers; however, somebody told her about me and Kat, and we had this big argument and split up.

We didn’t talk for about a year, then we did, then we became friends again. Not good friends, but more than just civil. She’d settled down a couple of years ago with a nice guy called Mark who worked on the rig-supply boats; last I’d heard they’d had two children, both boys. Now, there was Hannah as well. Jolie was a friend of Lauren, and Ellie and I had invited her and Mark to our wedding too.

‘How’s Mark?’ I asked.

‘Fine. Working this weekend. He’ll be here for you and Ellie’s.’ Jolie looked at Hannah, who was peeking at me through her mum’s hair. ‘Left the boys with Mum but thought I’d bring this one along to see her first wedding.’

‘I was just on my way to the bar. Get you anything?’

‘I’ll come along. G&T for me.’

‘Any tips?’

‘What for?’

‘A happy marriage.’

‘I’m not married?’

‘As good as, though, yeah?’

‘As good as,’ Jolie conceded.

We were sitting at her table. It was mostly deserted as people danced. She watched Hannah tentatively exploring the seats and sections of table close to where we sat. Hannah looked back at Jolie every now and again. I’d caught a glimpse of Ellie, dancing.

‘Let me think,’ Jolie said. ‘I know: don’t have children.’

‘Eh?’ I said.

‘Seriously.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Your decision, the two of you, obviously,’ Jolie said. ‘But, yes, that’s my advice.’

‘But you’ve got three!’

‘So I know what I’m talking about.’ Jolie waved at Hannah, who was holding onto a chair at another table a few metres away. Jolie looked back to me and gave a small laugh. She leaned forward and patted me on the hand. ‘And I love them all dearly,’ she said, in a sort of there-there-it’s-all-right voice, ‘and I wouldn’t be without them, and I love Mark too and he makes me feel loved and cherished and protected and all that, but if I could rewind the clock, had never had the kids, didn’t know them as people … No, I wouldn’t have any.’

‘Fuck!’ I breathed, then glanced guiltily at Hannah, though she was probably too far away to hear; the music was loud. ‘Beg your pardon.’ I leaned closer. ‘But why not?’

Jolie played with her empty G&T glass, revolving it on the white tablecloth. ‘Oh, just because they take over your life. They become your life. I sort of had plans? But, well.’

I felt shocked. Jolie had been a great snowboarder and her ambition had been to represent the UK at the Olympics, and she had wanted to be a doctor: specifically a cancer specialist, after watching her mum’s mum waste away. I wasn’t sure what to say.

‘Another G&T?’ I asked.

She smiled. ‘Why not?’

Heading for the bar, I caught a glimpse of electric blue, bright in the flash of a camera, and saw Ellie, polkaing wildly with a guy I half recognised. I waved, but she was too busy trying not to get her feet stood on.

When I came back from the bar, two couples had sat back down at the table, red-faced after the latest dance. Hannah was on Jolie’s lap. Hannah sniffed, as if she’d been crying.

‘Got a flash right in her face,’ Jolie told me.

‘Aw,’ I said to Hannah. She turned away a little, but then looked back. I got a wee smile. A tiny wee smile, and my heart melted. I looked back at her mum, frowning a lot and shaking my head. ‘Seriously seriously?’

Jolie laughed. Hannah gazed straight up at her mum’s chin.

‘Stewart,’ Jolie said, smiling, ‘I love them, they mean everything to me, I’m happy with Mark and this is my life now and I’ve accepted that, but you asked for a tip and that’s mine.’ She sighed. ‘Though, of course, you’re the man. As a tip, I suppose it’s not really directed at you.’ She looked down at Hannah, carefully smoothing her fine auburn hair. ‘Everybody says kids are what it’s all about, don’t they? But then that just means you have kids so they can have kids and then those kids can have kids too, and so on and so on ad infinitum, and you have to stop at some point and think, Hold on, shouldn’t some of it be about me, or, well, about any of the people from any of those generations? Shouldn’t we have something else apart from just being a link in this chain of procreation for the sake of it?’ She sighed again, arranged Hannah’s hair just so. ‘Not as though the human race is in any danger of dying out. And we have choice, now.’

‘No time machines, though.’

‘No, no time machines,’ she agreed. Her smile was still as beautiful as it had been.

‘Intending to pass this tip on to Hannah?’ I asked quietly.

Jolie shrugged. ‘Hope I have the courage to,’ she said. ‘Probably not the boys; they won’t take any notice of me anyway.’ Jolie smiled ruefully and lifted her child up to cuddle her again.

‘You two okay?’ said a concerned female voice, and I turned to find the stunning vision of curvaceous pulchritude that was Anjelica MacAvett, a vision in crimson at my side. A wave of her perfume rolled over me.

Jolie smiled. ‘We’re fine,’ she told Jel.

‘Can I borrow him?’ Jel asked. ‘It’s an Eightsome Reel; all hands report to the dance floor.’

‘He’s not mine to lend,’ Jolie said, hugging Hannah to her. ‘You can have him.’

‘Stop groaning,’ Jel said, using a finger to flick me on the ear. She was still wearing the long red satin gloves.

‘Not an Eightsome,’ I said, though I was already starting to get up out of my seat. ‘Do I have to?’

‘Thanks,’ Jel told Jolie, then to me, ‘Yes. Stop being such an old man. Get your ass out there.’

‘Me legs, me feet, me old war wound,’ I said in a weak, wavering voice. I was pushed hard in the small of the back, towards the dance floor.

Omens, portents. A fire alarm went off just after the Eightsome Reel finished. Everybody – standing at the bar, sitting at tables, trudging wearily off the dance floor – just looked at one another with that Oh, come on look, but then the staff started ushering everybody outside.

‘Aw, blinkin heck,’ I said – very restrainedly, I thought, ‘we’re not even going to get to sit down!’

‘Nearest fire exit’s behind us,’ one of the guys pointed out, so Jel and I and the other six of our Eightsome survivors group found ourselves shambling down a brightly lit service corridor. I was arm in arm with Jel, who was wincing with each step. She got me to stop briefly, leaning against me as she slipped her shoes off. We hobbled the rest of the way to the fire doors at the rear of the hotel.

‘Great, the bins,’ Jel said with a sigh, surveying the less than lovely backyard full of industrial-size refuse bins we’d emerged into. She put her shoes back on.

‘Chaps? Chapesses? Think the assembly area’s round the front of the hotel,’ our group know-it-all announced.

‘I’m sitting here,’ Jel announced, lowering herself delicately onto one of three red, sun-faded plastic chairs, which looked like they were there for when the smokers amongst the staff wanted a fag break.

I tried Ellie’s phone, but it wasn’t on or had no reception. Everybody else was wandering off towards the assembly area in the car park round the front.

‘Go, go,’ Jel said, when she saw me hesitating. ‘I’m fine. See you back in there.’

The best part of two hundred and fifty people were swirling about the car park. A lot of them had brought glasses and bottles outside with them. The evening was pleasantly warm, the air was clear out over the sands, and the water was dark blue with pink clouds piled just over the horizon. The party had just moved outside. It helped that it was so obviously a false alarm, with no smoke or flames visible coming from the hotel, so everybody was confident we’d be back inside again soon to continue the fun.

I moved around, said hellos, shook hands, high-fived, and air-kissed various cheeks as I meandered through the press of bodies. My blue-suede shoes attracted a few comments, almost all of them favourable. I got a beery one-arm hug from Murdo Murston, a nod from Donald and a smile from Mrs M.

‘Aye, we’ll make a Murston out of ye yet!’ Callum said, gripping me in a full-on bear-hug and trying to get my feet off the ground, but failing. He smelled of Morgan’s Spiced Rum and I could see hints of white powder in his patchy moustache. That was a surprise in itself; Donald was known to disapprove strongly of the boys partaking. ‘We’ll make a Murston out of ye yet!’ he said again, in case I hadn’t heard him the first time. Even so, he still liked this phrase so much he repeated it a few more times.

There had been a little light joshing over the last couple of months about it maybe making more sense for me to take Ellie’s surname rather than her to take mine, or – as we’d made quite clear – what would be happening: us keeping our own names and double-barrelling our surnames for any children. Probably. Light joshing in Murston terms involved what would look to most people like serious intimidatory bullying, but – with Ellie’s help – I’d stood up to it pretty well, I thought.

A big cheer went up from the crowd as Josh MacAvett arrived in a taxi, fresh off a plane from London; I stopped to say hi, then went on trying to find Ellie. I accepted a couple of sips of wine and beer from happy revellers, and a toke on a joint from Ferg, skulking with some other smokers by some interesting topiary near the top of the steps that led down to lower garden terraces.

Which was where I caught another glimpse of electric blue, and walked down and along a terrace and found Ellie in a clinch, basically, with the guy she’d been dancing with earlier. I recognised him now; he was the guy she’d gone out with before Josh MacAvett, the guy I’d always suspected had been her first lover, the guy who’d taken her virginity. Dean somebody. Dean Watts. That was him.

They were on a terrace one level further down, standing, his hands cupping her backside.

I think my mouth fell open. I stopped, stared. So far, they hadn’t seen me. The way they were standing, Ellie with her back to me, he was the one most likely to spot me. I just stood there, crossed my arms.

What the fuck, was all I could think. What the fuck?

It was weird; I felt sort of hollow, emptied out, all dredged of feeling. I felt I ought to feel shocked, horrified, angry and betrayed – I wanted to feel those things – but I didn’t. My main reaction just seemed to be: Oh.

And the aforementioned, What the fuck?

I could hear sirens in the distance.

A breeze brought their voices and a hint of Ellie’s perfume up to me. ‘No, listen, Dean, stop. No, no, just stop,’ I heard Ellie say as he tried to kiss her again. Dean was maybe my height: dark hair, pretty fit-looking. Kilty outfit, sporran currently to the side, where you put it to dance. Or if you’re hoping for a shag, I suppose. Ellie pushed him away. ‘That’s enough.’

‘Aw, come on. Old times’ sake, El,’ Dean said, pulling her back towards him. They’d turned a little by now so I wouldn’t be in his line of sight if he just raised his eyes.

‘No! I shouldn’t have let you kiss me, let alone – no! Come on, before somebody sees us.’

This should have been Dean’s cue to look about, maybe see me, but he only had eyes for Ellie. She did look good in that dress: hair still up, just a few wisps shaken loose by dancing.

‘That all you’re worried ab—’ he started to say.

‘No! No, it’s not! Just stop. Come on; let’s head back. It’s just a false alarm.’

‘Aw, El, come on, you know you—’

‘Will you just—’

‘Hon, you’re not even married yet; come on.’

‘This isn’t—’

Dean tried hard to bring her close enough to kiss again, pulling at her, making El bend back and push hard against him, protesting.

Finally she stamped on his right brogue with her heel, leaving him hopping and going ‘Ow!’ Then she slapped him on the cheek for good measure. I didn’t think people slapped like that any more, only in movies. Looked like a sting-y one. Good for you, lass, I thought. Ellie marched off for the nearest steps, leaving Dean to half sit, half fall onto a bench.

I pressed part-way into a handy bush but Ellie didn’t look right or left as she walked purposefully up the steps. I gave it a minute or so, feeling oddly complicit, even guilty. I smelled tobacco smoke and peeked out again; Dean was sitting smoking a fag and gazing – I was guessing ruefully – out to sea.

There. Nothing had really happened; just a blip. A trying, a testing, and Ellie had pretty much passed. At least as well as I’d have, in similar circumstances, I supposed. But it was over, and I’d been right not to react immediately. Hanging back, not being impetuous, had been the right thing to do. Maybe I really was starting to get mature after all. I could forget about this.

I went up the steps and found Ellie after a minute, talking to some mutual pals. ‘Here you are,’ I said, just as the fire brigade arrived.

There was some quite vocal female appreciation of the firemen, and some grumbling male resentment that the womenfolk were so easily distracted, but the boys in the yellow helmets were gone within ten minutes and we all filed back into the hotel, emergency over.

I thought I’d better check that Jel knew it was safe to come back in.

She was still in the plastic chair, talking to one of the hotel waitresses. Jel’s feet were still sore so I carried her back in.

‘This a fireman’s lift?’ she asked as I walked up the service corridor with her in my arms, one of her hands round my neck and her other carrying the stilettos.

‘No, more just your standard Hollywood guy-carrying-girl grip.’

‘Girl could get used to this,’ she told me, smiling conspiratorially. ‘Hope El realises what a lucky girl she is.’

‘Yup; so do I.’

I was about to kick open the door to the ballroom when I saw her looking at me. I hesitated. ‘What?’

She looked at me levelly for a moment or two. Her perfume filled the air.

Jel sighed. ‘Nothing,’ she told me. ‘You better put me down here. I can hobble the rest.’

‘Aye, next time we’re all here, probably be fur ma funeral. Ye’ll come fur that, eh?’

‘Joe, do you mind? Next time we’re all here is next week, for my wedding, mine and Ellie’s. You can’t kick the bucket until we’ve had two or three grandchildren for you. There’ll be dandling to be done. Sorry, but you’re just not allowed to keel over. Not for another ten or twenty years. Minimum. Nope; sorry, done deal. No negotiating.’

Joe, bless him, found this quite hilarious. He’d always been an easy audience. He sat chuckling silently and wiped at his rheumy old eyes with a white hanky. I’d sat down at the Murston family table, between dances. Mr Murston Senior had put on a bit of weight since we first bumped into each other in the hills, years earlier; he was positively rotund now, his face was puffy, he wobbled when he did the silent laughter thing, and tears seemed to leak from him at the slightest excuse, as though forced out by the sheer pressure of his bulk.

‘Aye, well, we’ll see,’ he told me, stuffing the hanky away. ‘But a buddy gets tired, ken?’

‘We all get tired, Joe.’

‘Aye, but there’s tired an there’s tired.’

‘Oh is there, now?’ I narrowed my eyes theatrically. ‘This had better be good wisdom here, Joe.’ I reached over and tapped him on the forearm. ‘You old geezers have a responsibility to provide us whippersnappers with choice stuff.’

‘Ach, get on wi ye!’ he wheezed, as his eyes started to fill and the hanky came out again.

The evening went on. Much drink was taken, much drunken dancing committed. The amount of camera flashing declined as power ran down both in camera batteries and small children, though not as much in either as one might have hoped. I spent a couple of intervals outside smoking with Ferg and his chums. Ellie and I danced in a Circassian Circle, then in a Flying Scotsman. Another Eightsome rounded off the ceilidh part of the evening but we sat that one out. More food was laid out, more drink taken. We danced to some pop, I danced with Lauren, the bride, with Grier – as instructed – and with a revived Jel. Grier insisted on consecutive dances, the second being a slow one during which she pressed herself hard against me.

‘I can feel your erection,’ she informed me, just before the song stopped.

I briefly considered denying what was, after all, the truth, and also not something I was particularly in control of. ‘I was thinking about Ellie,’ I told her.

‘Not Anjelica MacAvett?’ Grier said quietly, from beneath the black fringe.

‘No, not Anjelica MacAvett,’ I said, looking at the girl, disquieted.

‘I see a lot,’ Grier whispered into my ear.

‘I bet you do. But not Jel; El.’

‘El Jel, Jel El,’ Grier sing-songed.

‘Ellie,’ I said, firmly.

Grier nodded and pressed in against me again, as the last notes of the song faded. ‘And she’s thinking of Dean Watts.’ She stepped back, nodded. ‘Thanks, Stewart,’ she said, and skipped off.

My expression, I’m sure, must have been choice.

I was at the bar. Ellie was at a distant table going over old times with girlfriends from the Academy.

‘Real thing?’ Ferg asked quietly, suddenly at my side.

‘Que?’

‘Humpty Driscoll’s got a room and some very pure powder. More than the daft fuck knows what to do with, so a few of us are volunteering to help him out. Care to join?’

‘Fuck, yeah,’ I said, so we tramped off to the room Humpty had.

Humpty had always been the sort who needed to provide incentives for people to be his pals; once it had been sweeties and stolen fags. He was training to be a lawyer in London and his folks had moved to Australia so he’d got himself a room in the hotel. Jel was already there, hoovering a line as Ferg and I arrived. Her brother Josh was looking on with a knowing grin. Gina Hillis, Sandy McDade and Len Grady were there too, and Phelpie.

The coke was pretty good and I had a couple of very intense discussions about fuck knows what, one with Ferg and one with Jel.

We all went off to dance some energy away and, a few songs later, when Jel and I were still dancing, we saw Ferg and Josh heading for the main corridor from the ballroom to the foyer.

‘Think there’s more coke going?’ Jel asked, grabbing my arm.

‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘I don’t know …’ I could think of at least one other good reason Ferg and Josh were heading off somewhere together.

‘Let’s follow them!’ Jel said in a stage whisper, eyes big and bright.

This seemed like an extremely good idea, so we headed after them – I looked round for Ellie, but she’d disappeared again – however, we lost Ferg and Josh in the crowds of people in the corridor (a few lightweights were leaving. And it barely midnight).

We stood in front of the lifts, Jel pressing buttons seemingly at random. ‘Let’s go there anyway,’ she said. ‘It was 404, wasn’t it?’

I’d thought it was 505. Or possibly 555. ‘Umm,’ I said.

Jel nodded. ‘Let’s try it.’

‘You take the lift, I’ll take the stairs,’ I told her. This seemed like a splendid stratagem to ensure we didn’t miss anybody. And also to avoid it looking like Jel and I were proceeding in a bedroom-wards direction together.

‘Okay!’

I walked upstairs two at a time, dispensing a couple of jolly hellos to known faces en route and trying not to trip over small children.

I met Jel outside room 404, but it wasn’t right; no answer, and it and the corridor around it just didn’t look familiar either.

‘Fifth floor?’ I suggested. I was still feeling room 505.

Jel nodded. ‘Let’s try it.’

The fifth floor looked even less right. Parts weren’t even lit. ‘We’ve lost them,’ Jel said, dispirited. Then she perked up. ‘Emergency supplies!’ she said, and dug down her cleavage, feeling around inside her bra. I thought it would do no harm to observe this process closely. She produced a little paper wrap.

‘Brilliant, but I bet these are all locked,’ I said, testing the nearest door, then going to the next.

‘Keep trying,’ she said, followed almost immediately by, ‘Aha!’

It was a little ladies’ toilet: three cubicles and a shelf with three sinks opposite, modesty-panelled with a faded green floral curtain, all of it overlit from above with fluorescents and filled with a faint hissing noise like static.

The mottled green formica surface around the sinks wasn’t perfect for coke-cutting – too pale, for a start – but we made do. We chopped it with my credit card, rolled a twenty. Jel’s charlie wasn’t quite as good as Humpty’s had been – a bit more cut, though I wasn’t sufficiently expert to tell with what exactly, and the irony that her dad would have access to much better stuff wasn’t lost on us – still, it did the job.

I started telling Jel, in some detail, about my final-year project, which involved imagining famous buildings relit quite differently from conventional floodlighting (all done on computer, no physical models). By this time I’d been thinking seriously about what the job I’d been offered might involve, and had talked at length to some of the guys I might be working with, so I thought I had a pretty good handle on what was required, hence I talked about angles or ‘splayings’, the kind of technique you needed for lighting something A-shaped, like the Forth Bridge, for example. Wide-eyed, leaning in towards me with a look of enormous concentration on her face, Jel seemed rapt, absorbing all this as though she was thinking of taking up a career in creative lighting design herself.

I was making the point that you need to take account of prevailing weather and atmospheric conditions and, ideally, have a dynamic system in place capable of changing according to whether it was dusk, full night, or dawn, what stage the moon was at, whether the weather was clear or misty and how much light spill or contamination there might be from nearby floodlit buildings or other sources, when I sort of took another look at her expression.

‘Like, some – actually most – buildings in China need to be lit taking into account the fact they have this near-continual brown haze …’ I said, then kind of heard my own voice fade away.

Jel was sitting on top of the sink surround, taking the weight off her feet, which brought her face up level with mine. She reached out with a gloved hand, put it to the nape of my neck, and said, ‘I really think you ought to kiss me.’

I took a deep breath, put my hands on her hips. ‘Well, ah,’ I said, decisively. Actually, I hadn’t really meant to put my hands on her hips, if I remember right; they just sort of appeared there. ‘I suppose,’ I said.

‘I know how you feel about me,’ she told me.

You do? I wanted to say. But I don’t know myself. I thought about this. So true on several levels.

Thing is, whatever part of my brain that deals with such matters has come up with a lot of excuses over the past five years for everything that happened over the next five or ten minutes: Hey, we were drunk, coked up at the same time, I’d seen Ellie snogging somebody else, and there is almost a tradition for people about to get married to have one last fling – but in the end it doesn’t matter, like it doesn’t matter who moved forward to whom, who opened their lips first, whose tongue first moved into the other’s mouth, or whether she shimmied her dress to let her legs wrap around me or I did, or whether she reached for my zip or I did.

She froze. ‘Did you hear a noise?’ She stared at the door to the corridor.

‘No,’ I said, then thought, Or had I? There were various sounds to be heard here, including that soft, continual wash of white noise coming from the nearby plumbing and the distant thudding base from the PA system in the ballroom, floors below.

Breathless, hearts pumping, we stared at each other from about a hand’s length away. ‘Into a cubicle!’ she said, nodding past me.

I picked her up, her legs round my waist, thudded into the middle cubicle as quietly as I could, stood there for a moment while she reached down, locking the door, then I sat down on the toilet seat. ‘We should have put the light out,’ I whispered.

‘Oh, fuck it,’ she breathed. We sat there for a moment, listening, but nothing more happened. We started kissing again.

‘Do we need to—’

She shook her head. ‘Pill. Risk it if you will.’

‘How about,’ I said, reaching up inside her dress with both hands. I felt stocking, warm flesh, a smooth thin garter belt.

She laughed roguishly, put her mouth against my neck and bit very gently. ‘Nope,’ she said, ‘went without. Pas de VPL.’

‘Fuck …’ I breathed.

We’d barely begun by the time she thought she heard a noise again; her mouth was hanging open and she was part supporting herself with one gloved hand splayed on each side wall of the cubicle. She stopped, stiffened, motioned silence.

I heard something too this time: what might have been the door to the corridor, opening, then closing.

We stayed as we were for what felt like a long time. I watched the angle of light that I could see beyond the bottom of the cubicle door, looking for any change. I could feel my heart beat, and hers, and sense the thud-thud-thud of the disco. The continual hiss of what sounded like a faulty cistern made it hard to be sure, but I didn’t think there were any suspicious sounds, either in the cubicles on either side or out in the main part of the loo.

She started doing that pelvic floor thing, squeezing me from inside, even while the rest of her body stayed perfectly still and poised. She was grinning down at me. After maybe a minute there had been no further noise from outside and no change in the light.

‘Somebody looking in and leaving again,’ I whispered. ‘Another false alarm.’

Jel raised herself a little higher, then let go of the side walls, raising both gloved hands high over her head as she sank further down on to me, so tight and hot I nearly came there and then. ‘Fuck it,’ she said, ‘just fuck me.’

I stood, lifting her, producing a gasp, thudding her back against the door and the partition wall to the side, her right shoulder just avoiding the coat hook protruding from the door. I took her weight while she grasped my shoulders. A little later, with her legs wrapped tight around my waist, she raised her gloved arms straight and high above her head.

Half an hour later I was standing, trying hard not to grin my face off, talking to Ferg in the hotel foyer. He looked pretty happy too, though whether this was for similar reasons I hadn’t yet enquired. Part of me felt guilty, of course, but another part of me – a more influential part of my head-space, it has to be said – was already writing off the whole experience and doing its best to ignore both the strange, tight, balled feeling in my guts and the troublesome minority of my neurons, protesting loudly with stuff like, You just did what? How could you do that? How could you do that to Ellie?

It was – it had been, I was in the process of deciding – a linedrawing-under fling, a last and very much final hurrah that meant I had kissed goodbye to the delights of other women with a fine, decisive flourish: a bittersweet, never-again moment that would remain my secret and Jel’s for ever more. In the end, after all, I wasn’t yet married to Ellie, I hadn’t taken any vows in public, before any congregation or gathering of friends and family, and so technically no trust had been betrayed, no binding agreement breached.

And Ellie had had her little snog in the gardens, after all. There had probably been no more, either during this night or in the recent past, though of course there might have been the odd straying at university; there was a sort of tacit acknowledgement between us that a few things might have happened we’d rather the other one didn’t know about: nothing relationship-threatening – maybe in the end relationship-strengthening, getting stuff out of the system, tried, sampled, enjoyed but, having been enjoyed, found to be sufficient just in that one evaluation – but still things that were best confined to the memories in our own heads.

So that was all right then.

There was no warning, no hubbub or sort of raised general level of noise coming from the ballroom, just Ellie striding up to me, taking me by the arm.

‘El,’ I said. There was just the faintest of trembles inside me, like I thought there might be something wrong, but probably not; just a guilty conscience.

‘El, how are—’ Ferg started.

‘You need to get out, now,’ she told me, her voice flat. She looked at Ferg. ‘Ferg, get the desk clerk to order a taxi for Dyce, name of Gilmour. Urgent. Find a way to let my brothers know about the booking.’

Ferg’s mouth clacked shut. Ellie gripped my upper arm hard. She had her blue sequinned purse in her other hand. ‘Come on,’ she said.

She made to move, as if she was going to drag me with her. I tried to stay standing where I was, wondering what the hell all the panic was about and unwilling to be manhandled – womanhandled – like this in front of friends.

‘El, what the—’

She put her mouth to my ear. ‘Come on!’ she hissed, shaking my arm. ‘My fucking family’s going to fucking kill you, you stupid fucker,’ she said through clenched teeth. ‘They know you fucked Jel. Everybody knows you fucked Jel. Now move!’

‘—cking cunt!’ somebody screamed from the direction of the ballroom. It sounded a lot like Murdo Murston. I caught a glimpse of Mike Mac’s face, ten metres away, just appearing between the ballroom doors. He looked pale, shocked. He saw me and his expression didn’t change.

I’d never heard Ellie swear so much, never. I couldn’t remember hearing her voice with this strange, flat, determined tone before, either. My feet seemed to start moving by themselves. Ferg went to the hotel desk. Ellie forced me towards the main hotel doors, pulling the Mini’s key out of her purse with her teeth as we exited through the depleted crowd of smokers by the doors into the harshly floodlit car park and the warm summer evening beyond.

‘Are, are you fit to drive?’ I asked, some autopilot bit of my brain attempting to take over.

‘Be quiet, Stewart,’ she told me. She pushed me. ‘Faster!’

*   *   *  

We stopped at Mum and Dad’s so I could grab a bag. By this time my hands had started shaking and I could hardly hold onto anything I picked up. Two minutes after we left, according to what the neighbours were prepared to disclose to my mum and dad – if not the police – Donald, Callum and Fraser were hammering at the door. They broke in, took long enough to establish I wasn’t there and left again. About the same time, Murdo and Norrie had stopped their pick-up alongside El’s Mini in the middle of town, and very nearly found me.

A quarter of an hour after that I was lying, shivering – from delayed terror or sheer relief, I hadn’t yet sorted out my jangled feelings to tell – inside a big yellow oil pipe, one of three stacked on a long flatbed railway wagon, itself part of a train of twenty similar wagons all hauled by a distantly clattering diesel engine, picking up speed again as it headed on south through the waning warmth of the night.

They’d shown some of the photos the children had taken, on the big screen above the stage in the ballroom. Maybe about half the guests were still there and could be bothered to watch; there were a lot of shots of empty chairs, table legs, and – as predicted – corners, and Drew’s dad hadn’t really had time to weed out all the crap; he was just grabbing cameras at random and seeing what he could find.

A short sequence from one camera showed the inside of a toilet, taken from beneath the faded green cover hiding the plumbing under the sinks. They were photos showing one pair of dark-blue brogues and one pair of red high heels. From the colour balance and a certain lack of sharpness, you could tell no flash had been used, or maybe been available.

The last couple of shots were taken from outside a closed cubicle. The first showed, under the door, the man’s dark shoes on either side of the base of a pale toilet bowl, with his trousers fallen round them and a pair of white underpants stretched tightly across the bottom of his calves. A pair of red shoes were also visible – one on either side of the bowl, half obscured by the crumpled trousers, heels front to the camera – and, in the very last shot, a pair of red gloved hands could be seen, fisted, as though in triumph, and raised high enough into the air to appear above the cubicle itself.