Stonemouth (32 page)

I remember thinking: We could get caught, somebody could walk in, Jel might tell somebody – she might tell Ellie – or Jel might even be doing this not because the chance suddenly presented itself and we both just sort of got carried away in the heat of the moment, but because she wanted this to happen, even set it up to happen this way, so she could tell Ellie, or so she could have something over me, something to make me feel guilty about, even if outright blackmail was unlikely.

Again, all of this had flitted through my mind in a couple of seconds or less, and I remember thinking, as a result of all this simming and mulling over and thinking through: Don’t care. If that’s the way it’s going to be, then let it be; bring it on. Sometimes you just have to abandon yourself to the immediate and even to somebody else’s superior karma or ability to manoeuvre, to plan.

I suspect we all sort of secretly think our lives are like these very long movies, with ourselves as the principal characters, obviously. Only very occasionally does it occur to any one of us that all these supporting actors, cameo turns, bit players and extras around us might actually be in some sense real, just as real as we are, and that they might think that the Big Movie is really all about
them
, not us; that each one of them has their own film unreeling inside their own head and we are just part of the supporting cast in their story.

Maybe that’s what we feel when we meet somebody we have to acknowledge is more famous or more charismatic or more important than we are ourselves. The trick is to know when to go with the other player’s plot line, when to abandon your own script – or your thoughts for what to improvise next – and adopt that of the cast
member who seems to have the ear or the pen or the keyboard of the writer/director.

The other trick is to know what sort of person you are. I know what I’m like; I tend to over-analyse things, but I know this and I have a sort of executive function that overrides all the earnest deliberation once it’s gone past a certain point. I see it as like a committee that sits in constant session, and sometimes you – as the one who’s going to have to make the final decision and live with the results – just have to go up to the meeting room where all the debating is going on and, from the outside, just quietly pull the door to, shutting away all the feverish talking while you get back to the controls and get calmly on with the actual doing. I control this so well I’ve even been accused of being a bit too impulsive on occasion, which is ironic if nothing else.

At the other end of this particular spectrum are the people who are wild, wilful and instinctive and just do whatever feels right at the time. Jails and cemeteries are full of them. The smart ones like that have the opposite of what I have; they have a sensible, Now-wait-a-minute, Have-you-thought-this-through? committee that can veto their more reckless urges. (For what it’s worth, I suspect Mike Mac is like me and Donald M is the opposite.)

Either way, some sort of balance makes the whole thing work, and evolution – both in the raw sense and in the way that society changes – gradually weeds out the behaviours that work least well.

Voices from the kitchen.

I walk in and Ellie’s there, sitting at the table with Mum and Dad, tea and biscuits all round.

Ellie smiles at me. It’s not a big smile, but it’s a smile.

‘Here he is!’ Mum says.

‘Aye-aye. Your phone off ?’ Dad asks.

‘Lost it. Got a new one,’ I tell him, nodding at Mum. I look at Ellie. Five years older. Face a little paler, maybe. Still beautiful, still …serene. A touch careworn now, perhaps, or just sad, but then that’s probably just me, seeing what I expect to see. Her hair’s a lot
shorter, worn down but only to her shoulders; still thick, lustrous, the colour of sand. ‘Hi, Ellie.’

‘Hello, Stewart. You’re looking well.’

Am I? Fuck.
‘Not as good as you.’

‘You are too kind,’ she says, dipping her head to one side. That smile again.

Mum clears her throat. ‘Well, we should maybe leave you two to talk.’ She looks at Dad, and they stand up. Ellie jumps up too. She’s wearing jeans and a thin grey fleece over a white tee.

‘That’s okay,’ she says to them. Then she looks at me. ‘Thought you might…want to come for a drive?’

‘You okay?’ Ellie asks as she turns the Mini out of Dabroch Drive.

‘Fine,’ I tell her. ‘You?’

‘Didn’t really mean generally, Stewart,’ she says. ‘I meant after Murdo and Norrie “had a wee word”, as they put it, earlier.’

‘Ah.’

‘They got drunk afterwards. Came back to the house. I’d just popped in to see Mum and Dad, and the boys were kind enough to tell me they’d been protecting my honour or something, and I needn’t worry about you “bothering” me tomorrow, at the funeral?’ She glances at me. ‘Didn’t dare say any of this in front of Don, mind you, but they seemed keen to tell me, or at least Norrie did, and they certainly looked pleased with themselves. Did they hurt you?’

‘Hurt at the time. No bruises. More annoyed they dropped my phone into the Stoun.’

As I’m talking, I’m feeling this annoying, humiliating need to cringe, to sink as low as I can in my seat as we drive through the streets of the town, to avoid being seen by any errantly roaming Murston brothers or their sidekicks, minions, vassals or whatever the fuck they are. Last time I was in this car, of course, I really was ducked right down, chest on my knees with Ellie’s coat on top to hide me, en route to the station and the relative safety of a big yellow pipe on a freight train. How shamefully Pavlovian. I force
myself to sit up straight instead. This would be the Fuck-it, or Sheep-as-a-lamb response. Still, I can’t help watching the people on the pavements and in other cars, looking for stares or double-takes. We pull up right beside the station shuttle bus at some traffic lights and I don’t look at it, just keep staring ahead.

‘Uh-huh,’ Ellie says. ‘Well, I apologise on behalf of my insane family. Obviously, it wasn’t done…you know, at my instigation.’

‘I’d guessed.’

She shakes her head, and I can see her frowning at the road ahead. ‘It’s like watching wolves or lion cubs grow up. They’re boisterous, play fighting, nearly cute, then one day,’ She shrugs. ‘They just turn and bite your throat out.’

That sends a slight chill through me. ‘Your brothers getting—’

‘Getting to be bigger arseholes than they were,’ she says. ‘Dad’s just about keeping them on the leash.’ She slings the car into gear as the lights change. ‘Oh, come on,’ she mutters at the car in front as it fails to move off promptly. Then it jerks, shifts.

There’s a pause. Eventually I take a breath and say, ‘I’m sorry too.’

‘You’re sorry?’ I can see that small frown again, creasing the skin above and between her eyes.

‘For cheating on you, Ellie.’

‘Oh, that. Ah.’

She concentrates on driving, eyes flicking about, taking her gaze from the view ahead to her mirrors, to the oversized instrument pod in the middle of the fascia and back to the street again as we negotiate the old main road out of Nisk.

‘El, I wrote you about a dozen letters saying how sorry I was and what a fool I’d been and how I was the biggest fucking idiot on the planet and how I wished you well and hoped you got over what I’d done and…well, a million other things, but I never sent any of them. A short letter seemed like I was…just fobbing you off with something, you know; formal? Like a kid forced to write a thank-you letter to an aunt or something? But the longer letters…
the longer any of them went on, the more whiney they got, the more they sounded like I was trying to make excuses for myself, like I was the one who deserved…sympathy, or…Not that…Anyway…anyway, I never did get the tone right, the words right. And in the end I thought you probably didn’t want to hear from me at all, so I stopped trying. And…well, it’s still, it’s become even more pointless…Well, not pointless, but …’ I take a big deep breath like I’m about to swim a long way underwater. ‘Well, I still need to say it even if you don’t need to hear it. I am sorry.’

Half a decade I’ve been thinking about and working on that speech, but it still comes out wrong: awkward, badly expressed, unbalanced somehow and not really what I intended to say at all. Like I was making it up as I went along.

Maybe the last two sentences aren’t too bad – all I needed to say, really.

Except, thinking about it, the first of the two sounds like I’m making it all about me, again, and it’s all about my needs.

I look out the side window, shaking my head at my own distorted reflection and mouthing the word
fuckwit
.

We’ve cleared the town, heading west between the industrial and retail estates, the hills and mountains ahead.

Ellie doesn’t say anything for a bit, then nods and says, ‘Okay.’ She nods again. ‘Okay.’

‘Doesn’t mean I expect you to forgive me, either,’ I tell her, suddenly remembering another part of what I’ve been meaning to say to her for the last five years.

‘Hmm,’ Ellie says. ‘Well, there you are.’

Which is about as non-committal as you can get, I guess, and probably still more than I deserve.

‘Anyway, it’s good to see you again,’ I tell her.

‘And you,’ she says. She glances at me. ‘I wasn’t sure it would be, but it is. Not hurting as much as I thought it might. Barely at all, in fact. I suppose that means I’m over it. Over you.’

I don’t know what to say for a while, then I say, ‘Your dad said
something about your mum putting in a good word for me, about letting me come back for the funeral.’

‘Did he? Did
she
?’ Ellie sounds surprised.

‘Yeah, I wondered if maybe you’d been behind that somehow?’

‘Huh,’ Ellie says, and is obviously thinking. ‘I think I said to both of them that it seemed wrong to keep you away if you wanted to come back, you know, to pay your last respects to Grandpa.’

‘Didn’t think it was your mum.’

‘Hmm.’

‘How’s she these days?’

‘Ha. As ever. Got a carpenter in the house at the moment, putting up extra shelves in her cuttings room.’

‘Her cuttings room?’

‘Where she keeps all the stuff she cuts out of
House and Home
and
Posh Decorator
or whatever they’re called. Got this whole room lined with volumes of tips, ideas, recipes, colour schemes and all that malarkey. Then when anything’s getting done to the house she ignores all of it and calls in an interior designer to do everything. Same with big meals. She collects all these cookbooks and cut-out recipes and goes on all these cooking tutorial weekends and weeklong courses, and then when there’s a big do at the house she has it all done by outside caterers. You’d swear she’s the busiest woman in the world but she rarely actually does anything. We’ve got a maid now.’

‘Maria. Met her briefly.’

‘She does all the cleaning and the laundry.’ Ellie shakes her head. ‘But, yeah, the cuttings room, where all the cuttings live. Well, go to die, really. Dad buys her a new pair of scissors as a joke every Christmas. Meanwhile she’s started lobbying for a sort of mini-extension to house a walk-in wardrobe – a walk-in chilled wardrobe – to keep her furs in tip-top condition. Dad’s telling her she doesn’t need it in this climate but I give it to the end of the year and he’ll cave. She’ll have it by next spring.’ Ellie blows what sounds like an exasperated breath.

‘What
about you?’ I ask as we cross over the bypass, heading for a patch of light above the hills where the dipping sun is filtering through the thinning streams of cloud. ‘I heard you’re…helping people with addictions these days.’

‘Yeah, well, strictly speaking it’s the rest of my family that helps people with their addictions; I help them try to break them,’ she says, with a quick, entirely mirth-free grin. ‘And nobody knows where next year’s funding’s going to come from.’ She jerks her head back in an equally humourless laugh. ‘Suppose I could ask Don. Might even take it on; it’d be cover, good PR.’ She glances at me. ‘What about you? Still with the building lighting and all?’

‘Yep. Still based in London, though you’d struggle to tell that from my credit card receipts.’

‘Trotting that globe, huh?’

‘Fraid so. The company offsets, but we still take the flights in the first place.’

‘How’s business?’

‘It’s held up. Thank fuck for China and India, and all that oil money has to go somewhere: largely into the sky, as concrete, steel and light.’ I glance at her. I feel oddly nervous, almost fake, right at this instant. ‘They…made me a partner.’

She looks at me, smiling broadly. ‘They did? Congratulations! Well done, you!’ She looks back to the road, still smiling.

‘Well, just junior,’ I tell her. ‘Not equity. The responsibility without the access to the serious money.’

She nods. ‘Not a made man quite yet.’

This makes me laugh. ‘Well, yeah.’

‘Seeing anyone special?’

‘Hardly got the time. You?’

‘Mmm…Not really. Not since Ryan. Well, there was one guy, but that…So, no.’

We drive into the hills as the evening sky begins to clear and the clouds break up. We go via some of the ‘of’ places. There are – Ellie and I spotted long ago, when we first started going out – a lot of
‘of’ places round here: Brae of Burns, New Mains of Fitrie, Lyne of Glenskirrit, Hill of Par. I guess round here we just like our place names definite, pinned down.