by Iain Banks
The front door has only just closed and I’m halfway up the garden path, heading back to the street, when I hear the door open again. It’s Jel, dressed now, in tight jeans and a scoop-necked T. She’s holding a translucent box.
‘Here,’ she says, thrusting a Lock-n-Lock container into my hands. ‘Mum baked this morning,’ she explains. ‘Scones.’
‘Thanks.’ The box feels heavy.
‘There’s a jar of home-made jam in there too. Strawberry.’
‘Ah.’
‘Enjoy.’
‘Thanks again.’ I hold the box up, shake it gently. ‘I’ll share with Mum and Dad.’
‘Should think so.’ She takes a quick breath, sticks her thumbs into the waistband of her jeans. ‘Think you will see Ellie?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe not. Or maybe just see her, at the funeral? But not get to talk to her.’
‘Right, yeah. I see.’ She looks down at the path, looks up again. ‘It wasn’t just my idea, Stu,’ she says. And I know that she’s talking about our disastrous fling five years back, the fuck that fucked everything up.
I nod. ‘I know.’
Of course I know. Mine as much as hers. She did kind of throw herself at me, but I was very happy to be the thrown-at, and accepted enthusiastically. I might even have been giving off signals myself, signals that I really needed one last quick fling before I got hitched. I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
But maybe I agreed a bit too quickly there, appeared too glib with that ‘I know’, because a frown tugs at Jel’s smooth, tanned brow and she looks about to say something else, but then seems to think the better of it, and just sighs and says, ‘Well, good to see you anyway.’ She takes a step backwards, towards the house. ‘Maybe see you later?’
‘You never know.’ I hold the box up. ‘Thanks again.’
‘Welcome.’ Then she turns and goes.
I walk down the street. I open one end of the container and stick my nose in, smelling flour both baked and not, and a faint hint of strawberries, a scent that always takes me back to the Ancraime estate just beyond the furthest reaches of the town, and a succession of summer days, half my life ago.
Malcolm Hendrey – Wee Malky – was just one of those kids. That’s what we felt at the time, what we’ve told ourselves since. He was the class numpty, the slow kid who got jokes last or not at all and who always needed help with answers. He was sort of stupid brave; if there was a frisbee, a stunt kite or an RC helicopter stuck up a tree, Wee Malky would happily shin up to the highest, thinnest, most delicate-looking branch to get it: places even I wouldn’t go, and I was always a good and pretty much fearless climber. I was proud of this and the guys tore me up about Wee Malky taking greater risks. I tried to save face by pointing out he was smaller and lighter than me, but, even so, they were right: he did go places I wouldn’t.
He’d also do pretty much anything you suggested – like shouting something out to a teacher or going up to an older kid and kicking them or letting down a car’s tyres – and then just grin stupidly when he was given detention or belted round the ear or chased down the street by some irate motorist, as though this wasn’t just hilariously funny for the kids who’d suggested the jape in the first place, but quietly amusing for him too.
Wee Malky really was small, always looking like he was in the wrong class, mixing with kids a year older than him, and he sort of carried himself smaller still, too, walking stooped and with his head down. He had dark-brown curly hair and swarthy skin; he’d been called various nicknames like Tinker or Gyppo throughout his school life but none had really stuck because they didn’t annoy him sufficiently; Wee Malky thought these were quite exotic terms, positively cool.
He was one of the poorer kids in our class, from the – to us at least – notorious Urbank Road on the Riggans estate, Stonemouth’s least salubrious address, the sink locale where the council put all the problem families. Wee Malky came from one of those families you needed a diagram and some draughting skills to describe properly; he lived with his mum and three half-brothers and two halfsisters, and, while the children didn’t quite all have different fathers, the details got fearsomely complicated after that, especially if you included all the children in other households with shared parentage.
The men in his mum’s life were subject to a high degree of churn, some staying a night, some a few weeks and some a few months, usually just long enough to get her pregnant before leaving. Though the way Wee Malky described it, it was more sort of drifting off again – just like they’d drifted in in the first place – rather than anything as directed and deliberate as actually ‘leaving’. Wee Malky loved his mum and thought all this stuff was just sort of romantically bohemian, rather than, as we did, pure skanky.
There was a husband – Wee Malky’s dad – but he was in Peterhead prison, where he’d been since shortly after Wee Malky was born. He sounded like a very angry man; he’d been on a road-repair crew with the council and killed a guy who was supposedly his best friend by knocking him half unconscious and stuffing him head-first into a big tub of molten tar on the back of the lorry.
He usually got about halfway through his sentence before he did something in prison that got him another two or three years added on. Wee Malky had a complicated relationship with his dad, even though he’d never met him outside of prison, and then only a half-dozen times; it was like he blamed him for abandoning his mum, but wanted to love him, too.
The only way to get Wee Malky really upset was to diss his dad. Callum Murston once asked Wee Malky if his mum had moved to Stonemouth to be handy for Peterhead and the prison and Wee Malky just went berserk; he flew at Callum like something out of a catapult and had to be prised off him. Callum was bigger and stronger but he’d been taken by surprise and just overwhelmed. Wee Malky was sobbing, gasping, quivering. I was one of the four kids it had taken to pull him off Callum and I’d never seen anybody so upset.
Callum was left bruised and with a badly bitten ear. He clearly wasn’t happy about getting attacked like that and, a couple of playtimes later, Wee Malky got marched round the back of the bike sheds and given a good kicking by Callum and his older brother Murdo. Some twisted form of honour appeared to have been satisfied with this, and nobody ever referred to the incident again, not in public anyway.
The Ancraime family were at the opposite end of the Stonemouth class spectrum: toffs with a big house and an estate that started on the outskirts of town – with a gatehouse and high stone walls and everything – and disappeared over the horizon, taking in woods, hills, lochs, forests, moors and mountains.
The original Ancraime fortune had come from now-exhausted coal mines that riddled the land and eventually ran out under the sea. A series of catastrophic mine floodings in the 1890s led to something close to ruin just as the Ancraimes were embarking on the most extravagant part of the house remodelling and estate landscaping. They sold off a lot of land; what they have now seems vast but it’s only a third of what they used to own. What the families of the drowned miners did to survive seems not to have been recorded.
Death duties nearly ruined the Ancraimes a second time but they’re rich again now; income from gas and oil pipelines crossing their estate, and from the deep-water terminal at Afness, keeps the coffers filled, and all that barren-looking, unproductive land climbing into the Cairngorms west of the house, which until now had only been good for stalking stags and shooting grouse, turns out to be ripe for wind farms. The studies have been done, the wind speeds measured and the land surveyed; there are a few local objectors, but really it’s just a matter of waiting for the planning proposals to go through the relevant council committees and getting the nod from the Secretary of State.
The family is understood to be quietly confident in this regard.
The Ancraimes had children within our age range – we were all about thirteen or fourteen at the time – but they went to private schools. The rest of us had any contact with the family only because Ancraime Senior had some sort
of business dealings with the Murstons and the MacAvetts, and had invited both men to shoot and fish on his estate. Josh MacAvett had become friendly with Hugo Ancraime when Hugo was back from school one Easter, and when Hugo was home for the summer holidays that year a bunch of us hung out together, usually cycling out along the Loanstoun road to the Ancraime estate and exploring it.
Some of us had prior knowledge of the place, built up covertly over the years by climbing walls and sneaking around, trying to avoid gamekeepers and estate workers. At least one of the keepers was, allegedly, not above firing his shotgun at kids, so long as they weren’t so close he might actually kill them, and most of us who’d ventured onto the estate had been chased at some time, or at least yelled at and run off.
Nobody could prove they’d ever been fired at – nobody ever produced any shotgun pellets they’d had to dig out of their backside or anything – but we definitely knew people who’d been shot at and the whole Ancraime estate was basically forbidden territory. So it was quite cool to be there with permission and explore the place at our leisure.
Hugo Ancraime was a lanky boy with fair hair, blue eyes, fine features and an English accent. That was how to wind Hugo up: accuse him of being English because he talked the way upper-class Scots who’ve been to private schools tend to, i.e. with no real trace of any Scottish accent, never mind a regional North-East or Stonemouth accent.
‘Fack off; my family’s been here for fourteen generations, you sods, and I can prove it. Bet none of you bastards can say that.’
‘Go on, Hu, call us oiks.’
‘Fack off.’
‘Say “fark orft” again.’
‘Fack off.’
And so on. It was mostly pretty good-natured; we were all deeply impressed that Hugo had this whole estate to play in, was allowed to fire a shotgun during shoots and had a dirt bike of his own and a quad bike he was allowed to use. We were never going to push somebody like that too far – he was too great an asset.
So there wasn’t too much talk about Hugo’s brother George, who was known to be a loony. He was the older brother, nearly twenty at this point but with a mental age stuck at about five. He stayed at home some of the time, though he had ‘episodes’ that meant he had to be carted off to some secure unit in Aberdeen and put on extra drugs before being allowed back home.
We saw him once at the start of that summer, being taken off somewhere for a day out, staring out of a window in the family’s old Bristol as it crunched down the gravel. He had a big, round, open-looking face under a mop of sandy hair; he smiled, waved, and some of us waved back.
Hugo had been given a load of paintball gear for his birthday that year: a dozen guns, sets of body armour and face masks and so on. More to the point, he had a whole estate to play with this stuff on, and people to play with. If we’d thought about it, we might have been flattered that he’d asked for such a communal present, one that made sense only now that he had all these new pals to play with, but we didn’t think about it.
There was some rule-changing imposed from above after a particularly messy game ended with the boathouse, the old stable block and even a few windows of the main house getting spattered with paintball dye, but that didn’t restrict us much. The estate manager – who might or might not have been the guy who’d been partial to firing at the retreating backs of trespassing children – was known to be displeased with the whole idea, but apparently he’d been overruled by Mr and Mrs Ancraime, who were tickled pink that their golden boy had new chums to have larks and scrapes with.
‘Now look,’ Hugo said one day after we’d all rocked up on our bikes, dumped them in the courtyard by the old smithy and congregated in the echoing, white-tiled back kitchen for home-made scones and fizzy drinks, ‘my brother’s supposed to be tagging along today. If anybody’s got a problem with that, well, tough.’
We all looked at each other, jaws working, lips covered in flour and fists round cans of Irn Bru, Coke and lemonade. None of us had any problem with this. At that point we were probably all still intent on getting as much fizz down our necks as possible so as to give ourselves a fighting chance in the pre-going-out-to-play burping competition, a rapidly established tradition as important to the day as making sure you had extra ammo with you if you were going paintballing.
‘Whatever, Hu,’ Ferg said, shrugging.
‘No probs,’ Josh MacAvett agreed.
‘Aye,’ Callum Murston said. Hugo looked relieved. ‘Good.’
The big house was an ancient Z-plan castle bundled in multiple later layers of stonework falling away from the almost hidden central tower like ranges of foothills. Local kid-lore had it that from above it looked like a swastika, though this wasn’t true; Bash and Balbir, the Shipik twins, went up with their dad in a helicopter as part of their birthday present and they’d said it didn’t look anything like a swastika. We were all quite disappointed.
The whole place was painted pale pink; we’d have been more impressed if we’d known the original recipe for the colour had involved copious amounts of pig’s blood.
We weren’t generally invited into the rest of the house, though I’d been a bit further in after cutting my knee and having Mrs Ancraime herself clean and dress it for me in the main hall. She was a sturdily well-built woman with unkempt brown hair and a quiet voice with soft traces of her native Skye in her accent. A pair of glossy-coated red setters came snuffling, noses high, briefly inquisitive, then skittered off again. The house was dark and gloomy, contrasting with the bright high-summer sunlight blasting down outside. I’d been impressed by the ancient shields, pikes, swords and maces decorating the walls between the stag heads and age-brown family portraits, but still; getting outside again with a bandaged knee had felt like escape.
Later, thinking about all that wall-mounted weaponry, I’d suggested to Hugo we could try taking some of the swords and pikes and stuff and use them to restage battles or something. Hugo had looked pained and said maybe that wouldn’t be such a good idea. Anyway, they were almost all too well secured to the walls; you’d need a hacksaw.
The paintball gear was kept in an outhouse cluttered with all the rusting farm equipment of yesteryear. We were introduced to George, who proved to be big and heavy-looking, with a shy smile.
‘Now, boys, this is George,’ his mother told us, leading him by the hand. Mrs Ancraime was dressed up very posh. ‘I hope you’ll take good care of him and play nicely. Do you promise?’
We all agreed that we did. ‘Don’t you worry, missus,’ Wee Malky said.
‘You can depend upon us, ma’am,’ Ferg told her.
‘How-ja do?’ George asked us each in turn, seemingly not really expecting an answer. He was probably small for his age but he still towered over each of us, especially Wee Malky, obviously. His voice was adult-deep, booming in his big chest. He shook our hands. His hands were massive but his grip was gentle. He wore comedically wide khaki shorts and a worn brown tweed jacket over a farmer’s shirt.
‘Thank you, boys,’ Mrs A said. ‘Have fun.’ Then she wafted out.
‘Right,’ Hugo said, rubbing his hands. ‘Teams.’
‘But I would like a gun,’ George said sadly to Hugo when he was told he could tag along with Hugo’s team but only to carry extra ammunition.
‘Sorry, George,’ Hugo told him.
‘Oh,’ George said, and sounded like he was about to burst into tears.
‘But you can carry all this stuff !’ Hugo told him, loading him up with mesh bags full of paintballs.
‘Ah-ha,’ George said quietly, lifting them like they weren’t there and looking better pleased.
‘He’s like Mongo,’ Phelpie said. Our team was hunkered down in a hollow on the side of a wee overgrown glen, waiting for Hugo and his lot to show on a path below. ‘Ah’m callin him Mongo.’
‘Well, just don’t,’ Ferg told him.
‘Naw, dinnae,’ Wee Malky agreed.
‘Who the fuck’s Mongo anyway?’ Fraser Murston asked.
/> ‘From Blazin Saddles?’ Phelpie said. Ryan Phelps was another slightly daft, borderline nutter kid in the Dom Lennot style.
‘What the fuck’s Blazin fuckin Saddles?’ Fraser Murston said; at the time Fraser was the acceptable face of the Murston clan, being more outgoing than his shy twin, Norrie, and a little less aggressive – or at least younger and less sure of himself – than his year-older brother Callum, who was on Hugo’s side in this afternoon’s first skirmish. The brothers’ respective placings on the aggressiveness ladder were, it is fair to say, set to change in the future.
‘It’s a fillum!’
‘Zit in black an fuckin white, aye?’
‘Naw!’
‘Do not call him Mongo,’ Ferg said.
‘Stu, you callin the big guy Mongo?’ Wee Malky asked.
‘No. I agree with Ferg.’ I looked at Phelpie. ‘Don’t call him Mongo.’
‘But he needs a name an he’s a fuckin monster. That boy is pure Mongo.’
‘Yes, but you might upset him,’ Ferg explained, obviously exasperated. ‘Worse than that, you might upset Hugo.’
‘Ah, fuck him,’ Phelpie said.
Ferg and I exchanged looks. Of the dozen or so kids involved, we two seemed to be the most aware that this new venue for fun was entirely at Hugo’s disposal. Not letting nutters come along who’d spoil it for everybody had already been talked about.
‘Hugo’s allowed to use a shotgun,’ Wee Malky said, looking solemnly at Phelpie, who might have said something more, but then Fraser spotted the enemy force, sneakily using the hillside rather than the road, and we had to redeploy quickly.
The sun was still high over the hills as the afternoon started to draw to a close and we set up for the last game of the day. A complicated arrangement of scoring across the various skirmishes and the different team combinations had resulted in Wee Malky coming out last, so he had to be the prey.
