Stonemouth

by Iain Banks

  ‘You over-underpanted. The mark of a true gent.’

  ‘I thought you’d understand.’

  ‘So, why didn’t you?’

  ‘Why didn’t I what?’

  ‘Fuck her, fuckwit.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know! She was still … young, and still—’

  ‘She was legal at the wedding when you and Jel did the cubicle pogo; this would be two years later? Three?’

  ‘Yeah, but still sort of, you know, young? And still Ellie’s sister. And … it just didn’t feel right.’

  ‘Now you’ve lost me.’ Ferg sits back. ‘“It just didn’t feel right.”’ He stares into space, muttering this phrase as though trying it on for size. Beyond the now rain-dry windows, fleets of grey clouds drift across the town. ‘Nope. Never mind.’

  ‘Also …’ I begin, then wonder if I should say anything. Ellie told me this years ago but I honestly can’t remember if it was in confidence or not.

  ‘What?’ Ferg says quickly, sensing something.

  ‘Well, Grier kind of has form with … being in the wrong bed,’ I admit.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘When she was a kid – about eleven or something – there was a thunderstorm and apparently she crawled into Callum’s bed.’

  ‘Her brother Callum?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘He was our age, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yeah. If she was eleven, he’d have been fifteen. Yeah. Anyway, it was, you know, just…because she was frightened by the thunder, but, thing is, they were found together in bed the next morning by Mrs Murston and there was a bit of a…Well, it was accepted it had been innocent, but …’ My voice trails off.

  ‘Anyway,’ I say, resuming, ‘sore point with the family. Maybe I was thinking of that, subconsciously, or something.’

  Ferg is looking at me suspiciously and in a sense rightly so, because the whole truth involves a little more than I’ve just told him. I know this from what Ellie told me. Callum had apparently behaved inappropriately with one of his younger cousins earlier that year, so the discovery of Grier in his bed hadn’t been handled as calmly as it might have been, and both he and Grier – but especially Callum – had been left more traumatised by the family reaction than by what had – or more likely hadn’t – happened during the night.

  ‘Oh well,’ Ferg says. ‘So. Any punchline?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘To the Grier in your bed story. Any punchline?’

  ‘Not really; an awkward breakfast and she left early. Didn’t see her again till a day or two ago. Never heard of Brad again, either. Happily.’

  ‘Good. Cos—’

  ‘Seriously, Ferg, what does it mean when the breakfast, the whole morning, is more awkward because you didn’t fuck when you slept together compared to any of the times when you did?’

  Ferg regards me levelly for a moment or two. He shrugs. ‘Fucked if I know. Anyway. I’ve got one.’

  ‘You’ve got one what?’

  ‘A punchline.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘You betcha, sweet-cheeks.’

  ‘And? So?’

  ‘I fucked her that same night.’

  ‘What? Who?’

  ‘Grier and me; we did the dirty that same night you fornicated for the cameras with Jel in the Mearnside.’ He gives a sort of jabbing nod and sits back, drinking his pint.

  I just stare at him. Eventually I say, ‘You did what?’ Ferg shrugs. ‘Yeah. In Humpty’s room.’

  ‘In Humpty’s room?’

  ‘Most assuredly.’

  ‘He wasn’t, like, there or anything?’

  ‘Fuck off. Humpty? Of course not. Just me and Grier and all that black crêpe and kohl. And a certain degree of coked-up frenzy. Twice. Would have been more but Humpty was pawing at the door and starting to talk about going to get the manager and the pass key.’ Ferg looks at me, eyebrows raised, appraising. ‘Might even have been her first time, too. Didn’t like to ask. Certainly more enthusiasm than skill on her part.’ He lif ts his glass again before muttering, ‘Mind you, a lot of enthusiasm.’ He drinks, deeply, though I can see he’s still watching me from the corner of one eye.

  ‘You total cunt,’ I breathe.

  ‘Fuck you!’ Ferg laughs, putting his glass down. He glances round, sits forward again and lowers his voice a little. ‘I didn’t fucking rape the girl! She was legal and willing. Just cos you wanted to—’

  ‘I thought I fucking warned you off her?’

  ‘So I love a challenge! Forbidden fucking fruit, you moron.’

  ‘You use a condom?’

  ‘Of course I used a fucking condom! What sort of—’

  ‘Anyway, I thought you went off with Josh that night!’

  ‘So I sucked some cock as well! So fucking what?’

  I shake my head, look at him. ‘You total, total cunt.’

  Ferg sighs. ‘And you, my dear, darling boy, are just jealous.’ He shakes his head, then mutters, ‘At least now you know how it feels.’

  I shake my head. I really don’t know what to say.

  I look down at my new, rather rubbish and very temporary phone, which is sitting, unloved and mostly unwanted, in my hand. Whatever; I think its sorry, clunky ass is now set up, and it has at least some power. I press its stupid, insufficiently responsive screen.

  Ferg’s phone rings. His ringtone’s a male voice I don’t recognise going, ‘Answer the phone, ya fud.’ Ferg pulls out the phone, glances at the display and, looking at me, says, sharply, ‘Yes?’

  I look him in the eyes. ‘…Total…total…cunt.’

  It’s a damp, cloudy Sunday evening in what’s definitely beginning to feel like the start of autumn rather than the end of summer and I’m twenty-fucking-six but I’m still going back to my mum and dad’s for my tea. After being bullied and beaten up by the big boys, too. This is grim. I shouldn’t have come back.

  I look at people like Ryan and Anjelica and I think, Why didn’t you just leave? They didn’t have to stay after things went wrong here. Why not just fuck off, even if it’s just to Edinburgh or Glasgow, never mind London or anywhere else in the world?

  But I suppose Ryan stays in Stonemouth because this is where Ellie is and he still has some pathetic, forlorn hope that they might get back together again, so staying where he’s readily available just in case she does change her mind seems like the sensible thing to do. Poor fucking sap.

  And Jel…well, I guess what happened wasn’t that shameful; it is the twenty-first century and all that shit, and she was fucking a guy who wasn’t married, and it’s not as though she did a Paris Hilton; it was obvious what she and I were doing, but you didn’t get to see anything. You certainly didn’t get to see anything worth wanking over, which is kind of the definition of what porn’s actually about, I suppose.

  There was some familial consternation within the MacAvett household af terwards. I got to hear about that even before Jel came to stay for that awkward weekend at my flat in Stepney, though then she provided more details. It was the quiet, restrained sort of ticking off you’d expect from Mike and Sue: You’ve-let-us-down-you’ve-let-yourself-down-etc. Anyway she was nineteen, beautiful and popular and spending most of her time at university in Sheffield. Frankly the girl just wasn’t that bothered.

  The greater familial shame seemed to be – by acclaim – attached to the Murston clan.

  Apparently I’d been granted the status of an honorary Murston even before Ellie and I were due to be married, and my cheating on Ellie had been taken as an insult to the whole family. I suppose I couldn’t claim that I hadn’t been warned; that very first talking-to from the boys in Fraser’s new four-by-four while it sat in the Hill House garage had kind of set the tone.

  Would I have buggered off, left Stonemouth, if I hadn’t had to? Yes; I was all ready to. I had that job offer and I was going to accept it. I was London-bound regardless before I got run out of town.

  I turn the corner into Dabroch Drive and realise that I haven’t e
ven thought about my balls since I left the Formantine – they haven’t hurt at all. Also, there’s a green Mini parked outside Mum and Dad’s house, sitting just behind my little hired Ka. It’s Ellie’s.

  Or at least it was Ellie’s. That was five years ago. The Murstons never keep a car longer than three years. She must have sold it; it must belong to somebody else. It’s just a coincidence, or I’m remembering the number plate wrong. She’ll have something else by now, bound to. (Dad’s Audi is sitting in the drive, so they’re back.) Yeah, it can’t be hers. No way. Probably not even somebody else come to see us either. There’s hardly any free spaces on the street and it’s just chance some random parked their car right outside our house even though they’re visiting somebody else.

  Still, my legs are feeling a bit shaky as I reach the gate. I glance into the car, sitting right outside. Can’t see any distinguishing belongings or stuff that would mark the car as Ellie’s or not. Walking up the path, there’s nobody visible sitting in the front lounge.

  I catch my reflection in the inner door of the porch, and run a hand through my hair, pull myself up as upright as I can. If I had a tie I’d straighten it.

  Jeez, I really am thirteen again.

  14

  Still staring at my half-reflection in the inside door, in the semi-darkness of the front porch, still outside the house.

  This is my place, my folks’ place. But that might be Ellie’s car there at the kerbside and if it is, then she might be in there and if she is in there, then…What was it her brothers were saying? Oh yes: Don’t fucking talk to her. And if she approaches you to talk to you, walk away. Or else.

  But this is my territory. This is Al and Morven’s home. Mike Mac wouldn’t let anything happen here, would he? The time that Donald, Callum and Fraser broke in, looking for me, five years ago, words were exchanged regarding this breakdown in protocol, and – according to Dad and Mike Mac – Donald apologised. Even then they didn’t trash the place or take anything; they just wanted to find me if I was there and left immediately when they realised I wasn’t.

  And, gathered round the wee hole in the middle of the bridge today, Murdo and Norrie only mentioned tomorrow, at the funeral and the hotel afterwards; that was when they were talking about, that was when I was supposed to keep well away from their sister, not now, not here in what is still sort of my own home. Only this is a kind of lawyerly point, the sort of detail or loophole that, in school, always appealed to the smart kids like me and Ferg, and meant – you rapidly discovered – nothing at all to the kids who thought with their fists. So I doubt the distinction would mean much to the Murston brothers if they found out.

  Maybe I should just turn around, head back into town. Phone somebody. Drag Ferg out of his resumed snooze: whoever, whatever. Bar or café, or just go for a drive or a walk by myself; maybe phone Mum and Dad, and if El’s there tell them I don’t want to meet her – call me when she’s gone.

  I stare at my reflection. All this has gone through my mind in a couple of seconds at most.

  Listen to yourself, Gilmour. And look at yourself. This is the family home. This is still where you belong. Maybe more so than that pleasant but soulless designer apartment in Stepney. If she chooses to come here, that’s her business, not Murdo’s or Norrie’s or Donald’s or anybody else’s. You really going to let the Murston boys frighten you away from your own crib, your own people?

  I shake my head at my reflection. Do I want to see Ellie? Part of me dreads this because I’ve realised, just over the last couple of days, how much I need to see her again.

  All these years, this half a decade that I’ve spent making a new life for myself, trying to forget about Ellie and my idiocy with Jel, forgetting about the wedding that never was and trying to push out of my head everything I ever knew about my friends and Stonemouth and my life here, purposefully turning my back on it all to draw a line under it, to make starting again easier and so forge a Stewart Gilmour: 2.0, a newer, better me who’d never behave like a fool again …and in the end the simple act of coming back has made that decision itself look like my greatest, most prolonged act of stupidity.

  Of course I want to see her again. She may still hate me, she may just want to slap me in the face and tell me I should never have come back, but – even if it’s that – I need to know.

  I let myself in. As usual, when the storm-doors are open, that means people are home and the inner doors aren’t locked.

  I pull in a breath to shout hi or hello or whatever, and I remember something about That Night that I’d half forgotten, a little detail that suddenly seems germane now. It was from when Anjelica and I were just starting to get serious, in that over-lit ladies’ toilet on the fifth floor of the Mearnside, at the point when either of us could have changed our minds and it not have been awkward, even hurtful.

  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 r
ound.

  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.