Stonemouth (13 page)

I don’t know what else to do, so I smile, make a show of dusting myself down.

She waves. She puts the camera down, the long lens hanging by her side, and I think I hear her shout something. Jeez, is it her?

We start walking towards each other. My heart’s in my mouth. My knees feel weak. Fuck me, what next, am I going to fucking swoon? Just the adrenalin from the near-fall, I tell myself. Pull yourself together, Gilmour.

Definitely a girl. Walks a lot like Ellie: right height, or maybe a little smaller? Was she ever into photography? I don’t recall her being, but that means nothing; in five years Ellie could have been through a dozen new interests, all enthused over, almost mastered
– or mistressed – and then dropped for the next challenge. My mode, my expectations, change every few seconds, like the consistency of the sand beneath my feet: now firm, now quaking, uncertain. She’s wearing dark skinny trousers or even thick tights; big, bulky, darkred hiking jacket. A bunnet on her head like a dark beanie. But it’s getting warm now as the haze thins. Somebody who feels the cold? Pale face.

When I can make out her face, I’m briefly even more confused. It is and isn’t Ellie. If she’d just take that hat off, let me see her hair. Her hair was always spectacular, definitive. Though she might have cut it all off now, for all I know. She stops about fifteen metres away, holds up one hand to stop me and brings the camera up to focus. I stand, realising who she is as she manipulates the big grey lens. It’s one of those lenses that’s so big that when you put the whole caboodle on a tripod you attach the lens to the tripod mount with the camera hanging off it, not the other way round.

‘Hey there, stranger,’ she says.

The voice confirms. It’s Grier. She walks like Ellie and she has similar build to her big sister, though she’s a little less tall. I stand there in that flat wilderness of sand, giving her a closed-mouth smile, crossing my arms, hoping she can’t read my disappointment.

‘Cam on, larve, give us a smoyle,’ she says in a very fair approximation of a certain type of London accent.

I give her a smile. Are we okay? I honestly don’t know. I’ve seen Grier exactly once since the night I had to leave Stonemouth hidden inside a giant yellow oil pipe, riding a freight like some Midwestern hobo, and that one meeting was slightly weird. I’ve had a few also slightly odd emails and texts from her over the years – sparse, sporadic, funny but slightly mad – and I really don’t know where I am with her. The
Hey there, stranger
sounded amiable enough, but Grier was always a great mimic, always quoting lines from film and TV, and adopting different accents.

She takes her photograph – actually about half a dozen photographs, as the camera click-click-clicks quietly away, for over a second
– then puts the camera down, hanging from her right hand. ‘There,’ she says, in her normal voice. ‘Didn’t hurt, did it?’

She’s smiling. I grin properly, not for the camera. I swear her camera arm starts to jerk up towards me, then falls back almost before the motion begins. ‘How you doing, Grier?’

‘How
you
doin?’ she says in a drawled, Joey voice. She’s walking towards me, covering any awkwardness by checking the screen of the camera, then putting it down again and raising her face to mine as we meet for a big hug, jackets making slidey noises against each other.

I’m getting quite a powerful hug here. I remember how we used to mess around when I was going out with Ellie, and Grier was just a lanky teenager with pancaked-over acne and fierce-looking braces, and so I decide to risk it. I pull her tighter to me and lift her up off her feet – she yelps, just like she used to – and swing her round. I can feel her laughing and I can feel the light pressure of her breasts through the layers of clothing, and – not for the first time – wonder, if things had been different … But, there you are. Heavier than she used to be; I’m twirling a woman now, not a kid. I stop gradually and put her down before we both get too dizzy. She’s still laughing.

I have a sudden thought. ‘Fuck!’ I say, glancing up and down the beach and back towards the forest. ‘Your brothers aren’t here, are they?’

‘No. Just me,’ she says, looking at her camera again. She switches something, pinches a lens cover into place on the big grey lens and hoists the camera over her shoulder. ‘You just walking?’ she asks.

Her face is smooth, flawless. Either no make-up at all, or stuff that’s so artfully applied I can’t see it. Her face is not so much like Ellie’s really, not now; Grier has a thinner, somehow sharper face, when you can see it. She always did have that thing of keeping her head down and looking at you from under her delicately carved brows. She always got called mischievous, too. I guess she still looks it, though there’s also a … a slyness there. Nothing mean, not
necessarily, but there’s definitely still a roguish side to the girl that you’d be risking ridicule or worse if you missed. Not a lass to be taken for granted. Just like her sister. And her dad. Like the whole family, in their own sometimes grievous ways.

And the girls definitely got all the looks. Ellie and I were always roughly in sync as we grew up and the changes that made a woman out of the long-limbed girl who first took my breath away just seemed natural, somehow, or at least unexceptional; all the girls in our class and those around us were pupating into these dazzling butterflies back then and Ellie was no different, even if she was the most exotic of them all. Grier was seventeen when I skipped town but still gangly, one of those rare girls who resists maturity instead of trying to adopt it when they’re still twelve. But blossomed now, though, for sure. You can tell, even within the bulky jacket; something of a looker.

There was a rumour a couple of years after I left that she’d become a model, which I just dismissed at the time, or thought had become garbled and really applied to Ellie – Ellie you could always believe would be a model or a film star or something – but looking at the kid sister now, it’s credible. Yeah, well, some lucky man, and all that.

‘Yeah, just walking,’ I tell her, ‘I left the town, just kept on going—’

‘Recent habits die hard,’ she says quietly, with a small affirmative nod, almost before I register what she’s said.

‘—and I suppose I’m sort of heading for the … the main forest car park. Call my folks for a lift if I can get reception.’

‘I’m parked there; I’ll give you a lift.’

‘Sure?’

‘Sure I’m sure,’ she says.
Sure I’m sure
: that’s a new one. Used to always be posi-
tive
-ly.

‘Fair enough.’

She slips her arm through mine like it’s the most natural thing in the world and we head diagonally back across the beach, northwest. She walks easily by my side, stride for stride. Her boots look
like riding boots, though from the trail of her footsteps we’re retracing, they have serious grips. She’s looking down at the sand, or the trail, seemingly intent.

‘Back for Grandpa Joe’s funeral, huh?’ she asks.

‘Yeah. Special dispensation from your old man.’

She’s silent for a bit. ‘That you done your time, you think?’

‘Doubt it. Saw your dad yesterday.’

‘Brave, foolish: delete as,’ she mutters, not looking at me.

‘He seemed quite happy I’d only be here till Tuesday.’

‘Tuesday,’ she repeats, still intent on the sand or her earlier tracks. A glance. ‘You well?’

‘Yup. You?’

‘Yup.’ I am being impersonated. She steals another glance. ‘Doing okay?’

‘Yup. Still lighting buildings. You?’

‘Still option D.’

‘Option D?’

‘There’s always an option D. Option D: all of the above?’

‘What’s the “all”?’

‘This and that. Stuff. Things.’ I feel her shrug.

‘Could you be a little more vague?’ I ask her, stealing one of Ferg’s lines from last night.

‘Certainly. How vague would you like?’

‘Actually, no; that was about right.’ I pull on her arm. ‘What are you doing these days? Or is it, like, classified?’

‘Sort of a photographer’s assistant, I guess,’ she says, sounding thoughtful. ‘Get in front of the lens now and again.’

‘So you
are
a model?’

She puts her head back and I can tell she’s rolling her eyes. ‘No,’ she says, extending the word the way a teacher dealing with a slightly dim pupil might. ‘Not as a career; just helping out when needed? You know: like in a porn shoot when the lead man’s not quite up to performing right then and they get the cameraman to do the money shot. That sort of thing.’

‘Whoa!
You’re doing that sort of—’

‘No,’ she says. ‘Not that sort of modelling. Though not for the want of offers. Or moral … what do you call them? Scruples?’

‘Scruples.’

‘Screw-pulls, focus pulls,’ she says, toying with the sounds. ‘I’m a trainee photographer; that sound better? And I’ve been in a few videos.’

‘Really?’

‘Really. And not those sort of videos, either. Music, mostly. And I might be interested in films. Like, acting? Depends, though.’ She skips; unforced, just like a five-year-old. ‘Photography thing could work out, but the place to be really is running things: modelling agency, photo agency, casting agency. Thinking about an agency that bridges, like, all those?’ She glances at me again. ‘That’s long term. That’s where I’m aiming to be.’

‘Hey, good for you,’ I tell her, genuinely impressed.

She smiles a big, beautiful smile. Then she looks away. She does another little skip, but it seems lesser this time, half-hearted. She brings her camera round, one-handed, fiddles with it, lets it fall again. ‘You going to see Ellie?’

‘I suppose. Maybe. She’ll be at the funeral, won’t she? She is
here
?’ I ask, suddenly worried. ‘She’s not abroad or—’

‘She’s here.’

‘Well, we’ll both be at the funeral, I guess. Whether I’ll be allowed to speak to her—’

‘You’re both adults, you know,’ she informs me crisply.

I glance at her. Told off by the kid. Oh well, had to happen.

‘Yeah, but it’s not quite that simple, is it? There’s your dad.’

‘Yeah,’ she breathes. ‘There’s our dad.’ She goes quiet and we walk in silence for a while, the line of low dunes angling closer, the forest dark behind them. A few other people are visible, further north along the beach; dogs race and spring around them. ‘Do you hate him?’ she asks. ‘Dad; my dad, Donnie; do you hate him?’

I blow a breath out. ‘Hate? I don’t know. That’s a … That’s quite
a big … I used to get on with him … I’m frightened of him,’ I admit to her. ‘Him and your brothers. I wish what happened hadn’t happened. I wish
they
didn’t hate
me
, that’s what I feel, I guess.’ I look at her but she’s not looking back. ‘We’ll never be friends, but I can see he’s got his… point of view. I did something that hurt Ellie and hurt the family, hurt him.’

‘I meant more about him being a gangster.’ She comes almost to a stop, pirouettes while still holding my arm and performs a sort of compact bow. ‘Or crime lord, if you prefer,’ she says primly, falling back into step.

I give a little whistle. The ‘G’ word is one that we tend not to use very much in the Toun. Technically it’s the truth, I suppose, but the way things get run in Stonemouth, between the Murston and the MacAvett families on two sides, and the cops on the other, means there isn’t much in the way of obvious gangster activity; not so as you’d notice, anyway. A pretty stable place, really. Enviably low knife crime, no shootings for years and while drugs are as easy to get here as they are anywhere, they’re better controlled than in most cities or big towns. Harder to buy shit here than almost anywhere else in Britain, if you’re a kid. Of course it means the cops are – again, technically – totally corrupt, but what the hey; peace comes at a price. The system is profoundly fucked up, but it works.

‘There are worse,’ I say, eventually. Though it sounds like a cop-out, in a strange way.

‘You ever hear of a man called Sean McKeddie Sungster?’ Grier asks suddenly.

‘Rings a bell,’ I tell her. ‘Can’t think—’

‘Paedophile. In Dartmoor or Brixham or—’

‘Brixton.’

‘Eh?’ she says, glancing at me. ‘Well, wherever. English prison.’

‘The kiddie-fiddler that lost an earlobe?’

‘Yeah. Everybody’s heard that story.’

‘Why, isn’t it true?’

‘It’s
true, far as I know,’ Grier says. ‘Told he can’t
ever
come back here, not even for his mum or dad’s funeral or anything.’

‘Huh,’ I say. I’m not wanting to pursue any connections with my own case here.

‘And the whole town knows this story?’ she says. ‘And even the people that think Dad’s a disgusting repulsive crook and should be put away for life think that’s a good thing, that’s cool. He did the right thing.’

I shrug. ‘People will tend to think that,’ I offer, feeling lame. ‘I guess.’ (Lamer still.) ‘It’s their kids—’

‘Yeah, but even paedophiles have to live somewhere.’ Grier sounds grim. ‘When he gets out, now he’ll go somewhere nobody knows him at all.’

‘But there’s a register, and—’

She pulls her arm out from mine and steps ahead, turning to face me, her arms crossed as she keeps pace with me, walking backwards. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean.’ I hold my hands up. ‘Grier, I’m not.’