Stonemouth

by Iain Banks

  She thrusts my jacket into my hands and leans her lovely head right down to mine. ‘Your taxi’s here!’ she yells.

  I stare at her, dumbfounded. I ordered a taxi?

  Then she and Ferg are helping me up and taking me downstairs and putting me in the back of a taxi and I’m saying hello to the driver because I know him from school, I think, and Ferg gets in beside me and Haley kisses me on the cheek and then we’re at Mum and Dad’s front door, and next thing I know I’m standing in the front hall and Ferg’s on the step outside and I’m saying, ‘Well, thanks for coming,’ and Ferg’s shaking his head and retreating and saying something about idiots before getting back into the waiting taxi and the front door closes and leaves me standing in the front hall in the darkness.

  Tea and bed, I think.

  I wake up with my head on the kitchen table, a full, cold mug of tea by my head, a small pool of drool on the table surface wetting my cheek and a grey dawn hazing the window panes.

  I head upstairs for more sleep in a room and bed still familiar even after five years away.

  Home.

  SATURDAY

  5

  She drove me to the station. That night, that warm night when it all went sour, when the world collapsed around me, five years back; still, despite it all, it was her.

  ‘Is there anything I can say?’

  ‘Stewart, no. Just be quiet. It’s not far. Do you have everything?’

  ‘I don’t know. How can I know?’

  ‘Well, if you don’t, I’m sure your mum and—’

  ‘What are we doing?’ I shake my head. There is a hastily filled bag on my lap, one of those long bags with two handles my dad would call a grip. I clutch it to my chest. ‘What have I done? What the fuck—’

  ‘Stewart, stop. There’s no point.’

  I look at her, tears in my eyes. ‘Doesn’t matter that there’s no point,’ I tell her. ‘Sometimes—’

  Suddenly she stabs at my seat-belt release button, throwing the buckle past me, clunking loud off the door window. ‘Duck,’ she says urgently. ‘Right down.’

  ‘What?’ I say, but I’m already ducking, pressing my chest into the badly packed bag, then quickly pulling it out to the side, getting in the way of her hand as she grasps the gear lever, stuffing the bag into the footwell and ducking down further, my chest against my thighs, my chin on my knees. ‘It’s them, isn’t it?’ I wheeze. Something’s thrown over me – her jacket, I can tell, just from the smell of her perfume on it. The orange streetlight glow dims to almost nothing. I’m shaking. I can feel myself shaking.

  ‘Hnn,’ she says, and her voice is turned-away quiet, not-facing-me quiet, as her window whines down. The sound of outside comes in: traffic and engine and just that late-night urban rumble and buzz.

  ‘Whit you doin?’

  ‘You awright, hen?’ two male voices say almost at once.

  Oh, Jesus, it’s them. Her brothers. They’re out looking for me. I could die here.

  ‘I’m fine. I’m just driving.’

  ‘How are ye no answerin yer phone?’

  ‘Where to though but?’

  ‘Just driving,’ she says, after a tiny pause, her voice deep, calming.

  ‘Have you seen that cunt?’ one of them says.

  ‘Norrie, fuck’s sake!’ The other one.

  ‘Well, fuckin hell!’ says the first one. It’s Norrie, obviously, and Murdo, I think. It doesn’t matter.

  ‘Anyway.’

  ‘… What?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘That’s my jacket.’

  ‘… says it’s her jacket.’

  ‘And you two?’ she asks.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Told you! Lookin for that fuckin two-timing bastart.’

  ‘Aye, hen, you don’t want to know what we’re going to—’

  ‘Go home,’ she tells them.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Naw! You go home. You go back home to Mum an Da, where they’re waitin fur ye, worryin.’

  ‘Aye, worryin.’

  ‘I just want to drive around a bit, guys, okay? It’s just what I need to do right now. I’ll be fine. Everything’s cool.’

  ‘… Eh? Aye. Aye, right. Shift over, hen, I’ll drive—’

  I hear a car door opening, then another, there’s a sharp clang and the Mini shakes; feels like one door hit another.

  ‘Aw, El! Come oan!’

  ‘Ye’ll chip the paint! Whit are ye doin?’

  The Mini trembles again. ‘Stoap that! Will ye just—’

  ‘Go home. Tell Mum and Dad I’ll be back in an hour. Now just leave me, okay?’

  The door shuts, the window whines, I’m thrown forward, then to the side, then back, all in a roar of engine and a brief screech of tyres. There’s a wild swerve and another chirp from the tyres as we shimmy down the road.

  Maybe half a minute later the jacket’s pulled away. The lights overhead are strobing past.

  ‘Safe to surface,’ I hear her say. She sounds calm, even amused. I bring my head up in time to have it banged off the window as we make the turn into Station Road, fast. ‘Sorry,’ she says.

  ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘Put your belt on.’

  ‘We’re nearly there,’ I tell her, nodding at the road ahead as we accelerate between the lines of trees, darkness all around beyond the flickering proscenium formed by the Mini’s lights bracketing the trunks and the leaf-heavy boughs.

  She just shrugs. She glances in the rear-view mirror, then frowns and looks back for longer. Suddenly she reaches out, turning off all the lights. The view of the great tall trees rushing past goes instantly, terrifyingly black. She takes her foot off the gas, lets the car slow on engine braking. We were doing motorway speeds up this narrow, tree-lined two-lane when she killed the lights. My mouth, already parched, goes drier still. I start fumbling for my seat belt, unable to tear my gaze away from the rushing darkness outside. Ellie’s a shadow now. I think I can see her leaning forward over the wheel, staring hard into the distance through the Mini’s close, upright screen, and glancing once, twice, into the rear-view.

  Then I hear her release a breath. Her hand goes to the column stalk that controls the lights, but then she brings it back to hold the wheel again and the lights stay off. She looks to the side. ‘Moon,’ she says wryly. ‘Just enough.’ It’s almost as though she’s talking to herself, as though I’m not here, already gone. ‘Actually,’ she murmurs, ‘this is pretty cool.’

  I look at her in the darkness as we make another turn. There’s more and more light as we approach the station, the faint silver of the moon outshone by the dim yellow-orange glow of a couple of sodium-vapour floods, all that’s left to illuminate the deserted station at this late hour.

  ‘You sure the train’ll stop?’

  ‘It’ll stop,’ she tells me. ‘Freight; big yellow pipes. Be near the back.’

  My throat tries to close up. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I whisper.

  At first I think she doesn’t hear me. Then, as we draw to a decorous, perfectly controlled stop by the station entrance, she glances at me and says, ‘I know.’

  There’s a look in her eyes that says everything else besides and beyond that cursory ‘I know,’ and I can’t bear any of it.

  She keeps looking at me. I don’t try to kiss her or hug her or even take her hand.

  ‘You could come with me,’ I blurt out, and for an instant too brief to measure this seems like a brainwave, like an inspiration of genius.

  She gives a single small explosive laugh, the kind that surprises the person laughing even as it happens; it bursts from her mouth and she has to wipe her lips. She shakes her head, I see her jaw moving as though she’s chewing something, and then she says, quietly, ‘Just get out, Stewart.’

  I open the door and climb out. ‘Thanks,’ I tell her.

  ‘Take care, Stewart,’ she says. She waits a moment, then nods. ‘You’ll
need to close the door.’

  I swing it gently shut. The car moves smartly away, whirls and sets off down the road back to town, still showing no lights. I watch it until it disappears, then I watch where I think it must be until the lights come back on, nearly a kilometre away, almost at the road junction.

  I stand for a bit in the warm night, listening to the breeze in the tallest branches of the nearby trees and the low hoot-hoot of an owl a field or two away, until I hear the rumble of a train, way in the distance, coming closer.

  6

  In the circumstances, being up, about and back in the kitchen for a hearty if late breakfast at eleven o’clock and indulging in some perfectly bright and sociable chat with Mum – Dad is golfing – is something of a triumph. I feel better than I deserve; I know I’ve been drinking and I don’t think I’d be legal to drive, but otherwise I have so got away with the excesses of last night. One or two blank spots, certainly, but nothing threatening, no gut-cold feeling that what I don’t remember is somehow dangerous, something that I’m not remembering for good if ignoble reasons, but at the same time need to remember, because it’s always better to know the truth, no matter how grisly. An acceptable level of neurological damage, then, and about par for such evenings, as I recall.

  No; I’m back, I’m safe – probably, provisionally – my old friends are still friends, things are relatively cool, I have a full belly, a good feeling and I have a head that needs only a bracing, recuperative walk somewhere scenic – and a couple of paracetamol – to feel entirely back to normal.

  It’s barely noon as I stride out of our street and hit Glendrummy Road, heading east under the light, fresh, sun-struck haze. The cool mist moves pleasantly into my face, invigorating. I hear a bus just as I approach a stop, and – deciding it would be almost churlish to ignore this karmic nudge – take the number 3 down old routes towards the school and beyond. The bus goes through the centre of town, where a few shop-fronts have changed (there are a couple of Polish shops that weren’t there when I left) and there’s a trio of new-build blocks of flats. The bus drops me at the south end of the Promenade, just a car park away from the shining walls of the Lido, all Art Deco horizontals and thin lines of blue paint atop the pearly walls, like piping.

  On the beach, with the sloped grey wall of the Promenade to my left, I walk north under the grey-pink striations of the slowly dissipating fog. The gulls wheel and mew overhead, the sand stretches into the haze a kilometre away or more, and apart from a few distant groups of fellow walkers, reduced to watercolour impressions by the mist and attended by the darting dots that are dogs, it’s as though I have the whole golden sweep of shore to myself.

  I walk north, keeping to the firmest sands, waving to one or two groups of people when they wave to me, always too far away to really identify anybody. The mist is lifting and thinning all the time. From the dry look of the sand and the few very small pools, the tide is probably on its way back in (I check with an app on the phone; it is). I can hear but not see waves breaking on sandbanks a little further out.

  The Prom to my left is long gone. It was followed first by the precisely aligned fences and neatly pointed walls of Olness Golf Club – I looked for the dark bulk of the Mearnside Hotel, up there in the trees on the whinned hill above the links, but its stony grandeur was lost, rubbed out by the mist – then by the serried trimness that is Ness Caravan Park. The statics are all pale green and magnolia and light brown with chrome strip highlights, their surfaces gleaming, their net curtains bright, the dainty little flower gardens surrounding each house-sized trailer all present and correct, disguising the dark gap beneath.

  The last politely tended tendril of the caravan park has disappeared into the haze now, replaced by rough pasture and then rearing, unkempt dunes topped with scruffy tufts and mats of coarse grass, some necklaced with haphazardly slanted lines of stave-and-wire fences, all lapsed into picturesquely askew disrepair, falling flat as they angle down the pale slopes, submerging beneath the sand.

  I’ve walked this beach when the wind has had just enough pace to pick up blond layers of dried sand from further up the slope, but not quite sufficient power to lift it fully into the air and into your eyes, so that great twining strands and twists of grains go coursing and unwinding round your feet, braiding over the darker, still-damp sand beneath with a whispering noise like the distant, retreated waves.

  After about fifty minutes I see the first rust-eaten vehicle wreck. It lies swaddled in the sand halfway up the gully between a pair of tall dunes. I remember this one; it looks like it used to be an old van, with a ladder chassis. I’m sure there used to be one or two others, smaller, before you got to this one, but they may have rusted out completely by now save for the engine block, or been prettified away by the town council.

  I get to the start of the trees and then the Brochty Burn after about an hour and a quarter. The burn’s more of a river here. It widens into its own little estuary, elements winding between slim grass-hummock islands, long, lozenge-shaped patches of thick brown mud and dozens of miniature grey wildernesses of paler mud strewn with stripped, sun-bleached driftwood and plastic debris.

  We tried wading this stretch a few times when we were kids, because the next viable crossing was kilometres upstream, and it was the busy, bike-unfriendly main road we were all forbidden to use on our bikes. We never made it even halfway across the Brochty before we got stuck, utterly covered in mud, demoralised to the point we gave up and – even after highly necessary dips in the sea to remove the worst of the cloying mud – returned home still filthy to try to explain to exasperated parents how we’d lost our shoes. Once we even tried carrying our bikes across above our heads. Nearly drowned that time.

  Vatton forest, on the far side of the burn – dark, mysterious – taunted us each time we turned tail and trudged our damp, squelching way home. You could get to the forest by car – we had all been there by car – but that meant being accompanied by parents, and anyway the forest was huge and you only ever got taken to the car park in the middle, civilised bit, where all the hiking and cycling tracks started and the picnic tables and toilets were, not to this distant, much wilder southern end.

  But glory be, now there’s a bridge. I stand looking at it, and laugh. Yep, a smart, dark-green, tough-looking, little wooden bridge arching over the upstream end of the last deep pool before the start of the Brochty’s miniature estuary.

  ‘Now they put a feckin bridge in,’ I mutter to myself, still grinning, then feel foolish and look round to make sure there’s nobody around to overhear. Which there isn’t, of course.

  I climb up the scraggy slope of sand and grass to the scoop of path that leads to the bridge. I use the phone to take a couple of photos from the middle of the bridge. Seaward, I can make out the flattened lines of waves, white creases just visible in the haze. I think about phoning home to say I’ll be a while yet, maybe ask for a lift from somewhere handy a bit further on – the forest car park, I guess – but there’s zero reception.

  I look back the way I’ve come, along the restless sands.

  That first night, I saw her by the light of a beach fire, a roaring pyre spindling the enveloping darkness while the white waves rose and fell along the margin of the shore and the stars wheeled like frozen spray. She’d just waded out of the shallows with a few others who’d been in for a midnight swim. Music pounded from an open soft-top Jeep as she laughed with one of her girlfriends. She wore a black one-piece swimsuit, coyly modest amongst bikinis and a couple of girls just in knickers. There were some very lookable-at breasts on display, but it was still Ellie that attracted the eye, the swimsuit, like part of the night, emphasising her long arms and legs, leaving her own curves more hinted at than shown.

  She did that head-leaning-over thing again, the gesture I still had engraved on my memory from that hazy day at the Lido a couple of years earlier, the wet rope of her hair swinging out as she sent it this way and that. The way she did it, it just looked easy, natural, not sel
f-conscious or coquettish.

  A hand, in front of my face; fingers snapping once, twice.

  ‘And we’re back in the room,’ Ferg said. He pushed me between the shoulders to set me walking down the rest of the shallow slope of dune, following Josh MacAvett and Logan Peitersen, the other two guys we’d come with from town.

  Josh was Mike MacAvett’s eldest son and the same age as me. We were friends as much through familial expectation as anything else; I was Mike Mac’s godson and Josh was Dad’s, and we’d been encouraged to play together from pre-primary days. We were never best mates – our interests were mostly too different – but we always got on well.

  With fair, almost blond hair and a square jawline, Josh had always been a good-looking kid, and he’d become a positively handsome teenager (one rather amateurish tat on the back of his neck apart). When we were of an age to become interested in girls and I could persuade him to come out drinking or partying, I found myself reluctantly and unexpectedly playing the-good-looking-one’s-mate, and having to make do with my opposite number on the female side if we bumped into a pair of lassies.

  Still, I met some really nice girls that way, girls with more than just good looks, and because Josh never seemed to stick with one girl for longer than a single night or a few days, and never seemed at all bothered when they got fed up waiting for a call or a text or an email or, well, anything, and threw themselves back into the Toun’s social whirl, once more unattached, they were, quite often, up for a bit of a dalliance with the guy they assumed was Josh’s best pal (that’d be me), possibly with the intention of hurting Josh somehow when he saw us chewing each other’s face off right in front of him. This never worked, and I could have told them so, but of course I didn’t; when you’re that age you tend to take whatever’s going.

  Playing the field and treating them mean was all very well, but I wasn’t the only one to remind Josh there were only so many girls in Stonemouth and if he did want to nab a proper girlfriend he was making life difficult for himself.