Stonemouth

by Iain Banks

  ‘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.

  Ellie drives much like she always did, with the same easy grace she brings to most tasks: braking seldom and gently, swinging the car quickly, neatly, into curves on a single stuck-to line she rarely needs to amend, carrying plenty of speed through the open bends and feeding the power back in progressively. Actually maybe her driving’s a little m
ore erratic than it used to be, though that could be the road surfaces; they look more beaten up than I recall. Still, Ellie avoids the holes, factors those in, keeps everything smooth. We overtake a couple of tractors but then get stuck behind a slow driver in an old Kia, and stay there too long. This was always Ellie’s weakness as a driver: not quite aggressive enough. Naturally, she always thought that I was – to the same degree – not quite patient enough. I’m starting to think the truth lies somewhere in between, which definitely means I’m getting old.

  Seven or so years ago Ellie and I drove down the coast to Pyvie, on a whim at the end of the season. The weather had cooled after a hot summer and the leaves were scattering off the trees to lie like litter on the brown earth. It was another snatched weekend, both of us back from our respective universities, like a forty-eight-hour leave. We’d taken one of the Murston dogs with us, an old golden Lab called Tumsh, heavy with age but still up for a run along a beach or a rabbit chase into the undergrowth.

  We held hands, walked through drifts of leaves while Tumsh investigated interesting smells. We found the deserted tea room looking out over the beach with massed trees at either end, watching through the salt-streaked windows as the dog ran up and down the beach outside, barking at seagulls.

  The tea room was closing for the winter later that afternoon. The staff – already mostly taken up with cleaning everything and packing everything away – served us with a sort of cheery brusqueness, from a much reduced menu. Tea and yesterday’s baking, to the sound of catering clattering and voices impatient to be home.

  Later, near one end of the beach, along from the pitted tarmac expanse of the car park, we discovered the remains of a little narrow-gauge railway system that must have given rides to kids. The track was only about as wide as my hand, outstretched, and there were some bits just lying around, scattered and loose. Where the tracks were still anchored to the ground, they snaked along between bushes and miniature hills, and in one place there was a dip and a mound where something like a cross between a bridge and a tunnel let a little twisty path arch over the railway. A wooden shed at one end of the complex might once have held the trains and engines that had run here, but they were long gone and the shed was wrecked, doors missing, wooden roof bowed with rot or age or maybe from kids jumping up and down on it.

  I picked up one length of track, about as long as I was tall. It was very light, probably aluminium. I held it easily with one hand and could have broken it, it felt, using two. Tumsh tensed near by, front legs splayed, thinking the length of track was a stick I was about to throw.

  On the beach we found a thick length of rope, just three metres long but as thick as my arm, sturdy enough, it looked, to moor supertankers with. She and I made jokes about enormous plugs, about giant bits of soap. The wind whipped the water, uncombing my hair, and sending hers flying and lashing about her head and face until she tamed it with a woollen hat.

  We walked with hands in pockets, but arm in arm, uncoupling only to pick up a stick and throw it for the dog. Tumsh tore across the tarnished beach, sending sand arcing with each turn, stopping at the water if a stick went into the waves, when he’d stand there, panting, staring at the stick, then looking back at us, tongue lolling.

  Later we walked along a path by the side of the sea, near the abandoned miniature railway network, and, suddenly, there was a train: real, full size, charging down the coastline from Stonemouth, heading for Aberdeen and Edinburgh and then to who knew where – London probably, Penzance perhaps – roaring through the trees just above us, close enough for us to smell its diesel smoke and see the people – their faces pale, like ghosts’ faces – looking down at us.

  ‘Let’s wave,’ she said, and raised her hand, waving.

  I waved too. I think we both felt like children, then we felt foolish, because there was nobody waving back, and it is a sad thing to wave at a train and not have anybody bother to wave back at you, but then, in the last carriage before the rear engine unit and another blattering roar, there was a flurry of movement, and a wee face pressed up against the murky glass beneath a blur of childish arm and hand, waving.

  We went back to the tea room. It was closed, all the tables, seats and signs taken inside behind rolled-down shutters, the staff car park deserted.

  Not long before we left, on the way back to the car, Ellie hid behind a tree while Tumsh was off chasing a squirrel. When the dog came back he could tell she ought to be there, but he couldn’t see her. He barked, looked all about, jumped with his front legs only, barked again. Ellie cried out, ‘Tumsh! Oh, Tumsh boy!’ from behind the tree, making the dog bark more wildly, then she came strolling round, and the dog ran to her. She went down on her haunches, took its big face in her hands, shaking him side to side, telling him what a fine and silly dog he was.

  The light started to go as great grey fleets of cloud rolled in off the sea, filling the sky, erasing any trace of sun and dragging, curled underneath them, light grey veils of rain, curved like tails.

  In the car on the way back we had to keep the windows down because Tumsh must have rolled in something horrible; the rain started, and the smell coming off Tumsh and the rain slanting in through the cracked windows and the grey-brown landscape outside made the journey seem long and not much fun.

  We were in a long queue of traffic stopped at some temporary traffic lights on the main road back north when Ellie said, ‘We should get away, somewhere.’ She looked at me. ‘You and me, Stewart. When we’ve both finished our courses. If we’re going to stay together. Will we stay together, do you think?’

  ‘Eh? Course we will. We’ll be together for ever. That’s the general idea, isn’t it? You and me? Together?’

  ‘Yes. Until we’re old.’

  ‘Only until we’re old?’ I said, pretending shock. ‘Like, we should split up when we’re sixty or ninety or something?’

  She smiled. ‘For ever.’ She held my arm. ‘But we should get away somewhere, don’t you think?’

  ‘Where to? What sort of place? How far away?’

  ‘I don’t know. Just somewhere else. Somewhere sunny, yeah? Sunny and hot. Just not here.’ She rested her head on my shoulder as I watched the lights far in the distance turn from red to green, probably too far ahead for us to make it through in this pulse of traffic. ‘Just…away,’ she said.

  We started to edge forward.

  So I’m sitting in Ellie’s Mini as we potter along behind the in-no-hurry Kia, remembering that day seven years ago, and how low I felt then for some reason. Maybe just the weather, maybe some combination of that and other trivial but still dispiriting details, like the dog stinking of decay, but maybe due to some premonition – through some brief internal glint of self-knowledge rather than anything superstitious – that what she and I had wasn’t going to last for ever after all: wouldn’t last sixty years or even six.

  I watch Ellie’s face as we drive in procession behind the slower car. I have missed such moments. I would always do this: just watch her in profile as she drove. I was always waiting for a moment when she looked less than beautiful, when she looked ordinary. Never found one.

  Grier, I noticed the other day as we walked from the blinged X5 to Bessel’s Café, can do stealth. On the street, she walked differently, held herself differently – her head down, her expression frowning a little, her gait sort of efficient but gauche, untidy – and basically attracted no attention. In the café she seemed to shake off this magic cloak of semi-invisibility and suddenly she was there, as obvious as a beautiful-actress-playing-plain in an ancient Hollywood movie taking off her glasses and shaking down her hair. Why, Miss Murston…That was when the majority of male eyes started turning in her direction.

  I’ve a friend – a close friend by London standards, just an acquaintance given the way I came to think of friends when I grew up here – who’s a fashion photographer and he says you can have a genuine supermodel turn up at the studio and you think she’s the cleaner at first, until she’s turned on whateve
r it is she has to turn on, the camera is pointing at her and she’s dressed in whatever she’s supposed to be dressed in, however barely. Then she looks no more like a cleaning lady than she does a laser printer. Kapow; lights on, burning.

  I guess Grier is like that; whatever beauty she has is dynamic, animated; a function, not a state.

  With Ellie, it’s not something she can turn off. I remember her being almost as beautiful when she’s asleep as she is fully awake; it’s there in the depth of her, in her bones, in her skin and hair.

  Eye of the beholder and all that. One of the truer clichés, I guess. I’m biased, but I think El’s only got more beautiful over the last five years. There’s a sort of substance to her looks now, maybe even a leavening of sadness or world-weary wisdom informing them; making her beauty seem earned at last, rather than just something she fell so casually heir to.

  Or not; I know I’m bringing my own knowledge and prejudices to this evaluation. Would I still think she looks so pensively exquisite if I didn’t know about the failed marriage, the miscarriage, the many things left undone, unfinished? Never mind the hurt I caused her.

  And – because I still know which one of the two I’d rather spend the rest of my days with – shouldn’t any rational comparison between El and Grier favour the one who has to work at being attractive, rather than the one who can’t help it?