Stonemouth (43 page)

‘Yeah, we were talking on Friday night, too, weren’t we?’

‘Well, yeah. Just…yeah.’

‘Tasha, you were saying something about how it wasn’t your fault, it wasn’t your fair hands that took those photos, you know?’

‘Yeah. That. Thought you’d forgotten?’

‘Well,
I almost did. I take it you were one of the kids who had the digital cameras, at Lauren McLaughley and Drew Linton’s wedding, would that be right?’

‘Well, yah, obviously. Listen.’

‘Uh-huh?’

‘I sort of spoke out of turn, you know? Didn’t mean to. I had, like, a couple of drinks? So, it’s not something—’

‘Well, I just wanted to ask—’

‘No, no, I don’t think I can—’

‘Well, look, could we perhaps meet up and—’

‘No. No, I don’t think that’s a good idea. Sorry. Look, I have to go now.’

‘Tasha, just wait a second, please. You said somebody put you up to it, that she could talk anybody into anything. That was Grier, wasn’t it? You gave the camera to Grier, or let her take it from you, is that right?’

‘Uh…Gotta go now, bye.’

‘Uh-huh,’ I say quietly to an unresponsive phone.

I think the sheer weight of my own culpability – entirely deserved and duly acknowledged – might have blinded me to just how useful an only slightly guilty conscience, or two, can be.

I rejoin Ellie at the bar. She appears to have Ferg in tow, which is just as well, as he’s listing.

‘Gilmour,’ he says, eyes widening when he sees me, ‘you’ll do. This demented harridan refuses to escort me off the premises for the purposes of smoking.’

‘You need escorting, Ferg?’ I ask.

‘Trifle unsteady. Nothing a fag, a puff and a stiffener won’t sort. Excuse my entendres. We’re all going off to Mike Mac’s for a dip. You coming? Going to take me outside? Answer the second question first, to quote dear old Groucho.’

‘Yeah, I’ll take you outside,’ I tell him, holding him by the elbow as El lets go his other arm. I look at Ellie as Ferg sorts his feet out. ‘Mike Mac’s? Really? A “dip”?’

Ellie shrugs
. She reaches up, undoes a couple of buttons on her blouse and pulls the material aside, revealing what must be the top of a light-blue swimming costume. ‘As it happens,’ she says, ‘I’ve come prepared.’

‘You were going beach swimming, weren’t you?’ I say, smiling at her.

‘Uh-huh.’ She redoes up one of the buttons. ‘Still might.’

‘Are you two quite finished
wittering
?’ Ferg says, breathing on me. ‘There’s a filter tip to be sucked on here.’

‘Come on,’ I tell him.

‘See you outside,’ El says. I nod.

‘I’m not really that drunk,’ Ferg confides as we pass through the lobby and he tries to work out which way up to hold the packet of Silk Cut so he can extract one. ‘But I’m definitely heading that way. I think I need some medicinal cocaine. That’ll sober me up.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Thanks,’ he says as we hit the open air and the hotel steps. Amazingly, there are no fellow puffers congregated. ‘Just prop me up here and I’ll wait while you score. Unless you’ve got some on you now, have you?
Have
you?’

‘No, Ferg.’

‘Well, just prop me up here and I’ll wait while you score. Oops.’

‘So you said.’ I pick up his lighter and give it back to him. He fumbles with it, drops it again.

‘What’s it?’ he says. ‘Gravity’s gone capricious again, fuck it.’

‘Let me,’ I tell him. I pull the fag out of his mouth, put it back in the right way round and put the flame to the end, shielding it from the breeze. ‘Ferg, you have to draw in air as I do this? Or it doesn’t work?’

‘Hmm? Oh, yes.’

Between us, finally, we get the cigarette lit and I stick the lighter into his breast pocket.

‘Well,’ he says, flapping one hand. ‘Don’t delay!’

‘Yeah, you’re going to be a lot of fun this evening,’ I mutter, and
leave him propped against one of the porch’s pillars while I go to get Ellie.

‘And it has to be
good
shit!’ I hear him yell after me as I walk off. ‘None of that fucking drain-cleaner shite that makes your nose bleed frothy blue, d’you hear? I’ll pay you later! Be a generous tip! I’m good for it! Ha ha ha ha ha!’

Mike Mac’s place is less than ten minutes’ walk away, but it turns into a journey of nearly half an hour as Ellie and I escort Ferg there.

‘You’d be better off going home,’ I tell him as we approach the end of Olness Terrace and the turn that’ll take us – thankfully downhill – towards the MacAvetts’ house.

‘Don’t want to go home! I want to swim! And where’s my fucking coke?’

‘Don’t have any, Ferg.’

‘But I gave you the money!’

‘No you didn’t, Ferg.’

‘I gave him the money!’ Ferg says, turning to Ellie.

She shakes her head. ‘I don’t believe you did, Ferg.’

‘What? Are you mad, woman? Who you going to believe? This proven liar who betrayed you five years ago and left you standing at the altar or as good as, or me,
Ferg
?’ Ferg tears his right arm out of my grip and thumps himself on the chest. I pull his arm back.

Ellie glances over at me. ‘I’ll believe Stewart, Ferg.’

‘You’re mad!’ He looks at me. ‘She’s mad!’

‘Sure we can’t just take you home, Ferg?’ Ellie asks.

‘Certainly not! Are we there yet?’ We decide to ring Jel.

‘Is it okay if we bring Ferg?’ I ask her.

‘Is he sober?’ Jel sounds like she knows this is a purely rhetorical question.

‘I’m so glad you asked,’ I tell her. ‘He’s incredibly sober. Unbelievably sober.’ Ferg stumbles over a paving stone and I help support him. ‘Staggeringly sober.’

‘He’s
filthy drunk, isn’t he?’

‘Filthy hardly covers it.’

‘Well, okay, but he’s your responsibility.’

‘I was afraid you’d say that, but all right.’

Ferg’s practically asleep when we arrive. Jel greets us, all happy, smiling, pleased to see us. Well, pleased to see two-thirds of us. We leave Ferg snoring in the recovery position behind some potted palms on the floor of the old conservatory and join the party in the pool extension.

Ellie tracks sinuously back and forth through the waters of the MacAvett pool, looking as effortless as a dolphin, as though the ripples and waves around her are what power her, not the result of her effort. She uses the crawl in pools, mostly; in the sea, in anything other than a flat calm, she prefers sidestroke. Whatever stroke she employs, El inhabits it like she invented it herself.

Mrs Mac brings lots of tea and coffee and more food, in case we all haven’t gorged ourselves sufficiently up at the Mearnside. There are sandwiches on home-baked bread, home-made scones – plain, cheese and fruit – and home-made jams too. I try a little of everything. It’s all delicious.

I’m sitting, about midway along the long side of the pool, on a lounger under the palms. Above, rolled-back blinds reveal the glass roof covering the whole extension.

There are maybe twenty people here, all in their twenties, I’d guess, apart from one eighteen-year-old and Sue, who must be late forties at least and looks like she dyes her blonde hair, but is still trim. A few guys are drinking beers, a few women white wine or spritzers. I’m on my second pint of tap water, pacing myself earnestly and rehydrating. Mike Mac is in bed, having a snooze.

I’ve checked on Ferg once so far. Hasn’t moved. Snoring like a pig. I’m feeling a little dozy myself here in the humid, sunny warmth of the pool area. I’ve been watching Phelpie through half-shut eyes, watching the way he watches Jel when she’s swimming or just
walking around, sitting, talking. Does our Phelpie harbour certain feelings for the delightful Anjelica? I do believe he might. That’s sweet, I guess. Jel glances at Phelpie once or twice. Hard to tell if she’s appreciating this attention or bothered by it.

I shake myself properly awake, sitting up as straight as the lounger will allow. Ellie is doing double lengths underwater now, hyperventilating at the shallow end of the pool and then slipping under the surface, kicking away from the wall and swimming breaststroke along the bottom. The pale, wave-filtered light warps her slim form into fluid abstract shapes that seem to run like coloured mercury along the tiles beneath, her skin seeming gradually to darken under the increasing weight of water at the deep end.

Her roll and kick at the pool wall comes so easy and fast, it’s as though she reflects off the tiles rather than has to do anything so inelegant as physically connect and push. Her image trembles along the pool bottom again, growing paler as the water shallows, then she slows just before the wall and resurfaces gently, breathing barely any harder. She smoothes her hair back over her forehead. She sniffs hard, turns and looks round, sees me, smiles.

She pulls a few more deep, deep breaths – breaths so full you can see her chest expand and her body rise up within the waves with the extra buoyancy – then she exhales, like a long, extended sigh and slips under the water again.

Jel comes and sits down on the lounger next to me, holding a glass of something pale and bubbly. From the shape, probably a spritzer. ‘How you doing?’ she asks, with a glance at the pool.

‘Oh, fine,’ I tell her. ‘I’m swimming through my thoughts here.’ She’s in loose jeans and a half-open blouse over her bikini top, her hair still wet-dark from an earlier plunge. I was offered a loan of trunks but declined.

‘And how are you and Ellie?’ she asks.

I shake my head. ‘Not entirely sure.’

Jel is silent for a few seconds. ‘You can see the way you look at
her,’ she says quietly, as though talking to her glass, before looking back up into my eyes.

‘Oh yeah?’

Jel’s smiling a small smile. She taps my forearm twice as she rises. ‘Best of luck.’

She goes off to talk to Phelpie and a couple of the others. I look after her for a moment, then turn back to watch Ellie.

She’s back under the water again, flowing along just above the glistening surface of the tiles on the pool bottom like something more liquid than the water itself.

A bunch of us head down to the beach, over the red sandstone wall at the bottom of the MacAvetts’ garden. There are a couple of steps on the garden side and a head-height, probably-about-time-it-was-replaced steel ladder down onto the sand on the other. The wall itself is smooth and solid on the garden side, pitted and half hollow on the face exposed to the spray and to a century of blown, scouring sand, leaving the pale mortar in skinny, granular ridges forming squared-off cells surrounding the striated scoops in the softer stone.

There’s Ellie and me, Phelpie, an awakened, groggy and still slightly grumpy Ferg, and Jel and Ryan. Ryan showed up from his own place in town ten minutes ago, maybe alerted to El’s presence in the family home by somebody because he looked sort of desperate and keen when he arrived, and not properly surprised when he saw Ellie.

She just smiled when she saw him, said hi. He’s tagging along now, keeping close to Jel and trying not to look at Ellie too much. Ellie’s in her swimsuit, skirted with one towel and holding another across her shoulders. Apparently the dip in the pool was all very well but it just gave her a taste for some sea swimming. The North Sea on an October evening with a stiff breeze blowing, crashing
rollers and sand everywhere. It’s the very start of October, and the weather is still mild – warm if you were being generous – but still.

That’s my girl. Well, that was my girl. Let’s not get carried away here.

The two lanky, loping shapes of the MacAvett wolfhounds – apparently they’re called Trinny and Tobago – are already well into the distance, chasing each other through shallows and barking at the waves.

‘With you shortly,’ I tell Ellie, then drop back from the rest as they walk along. When I’m far enough back I take out my phone and call Grier. It sounds like the phone’s about to ring out and I’m thinking, Well, I’m carrying El’s jacket, and her phone’s in there; I could cheat and call Grier on that and stand a better chance of her answering, but it would be a mean trick. Then she picks up.

‘Hello?’

‘Grier? It’s Stewart.’

‘Yeah? What?’

‘You got a moment?’

I hear her sigh. ‘Been wanting a moment all day, haven’t you?’

‘Pretty much.’

‘Okay. But tell me now: am I going to enjoy this?’

‘Probably not.’

‘Better keep it short then. Say your piece, Stu.’

‘Did you set it all up?’

‘Set what all up?’

‘Five years ago? The Mearnside? The kids-’n’-cameras idea. Telling Jel I was her biggest fan. Taking a camera off one of the children and making sure you got the right shot of me and Jel.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Just asking.’

‘Why the fuck would I do all that?’

‘I don’t know. Sheer devilment? Jealousy, maybe.’

‘Jealousy? Seriously;
are
you serious?’