by Iain Banks
Dom was the biggest, bravest and most fighty of us, and so when he said we were coming with him we would naturally tend to do as we were told. However, I’d put on a significant growth spurt that summer and I’d beaten Dom in an impromptu wrestling match in his garden the day before, and while wrestling never had counted as a definitive skill when it came to settling seniority in a bunch of Stonemouth kids – not the way a proper fight did – it still meant something.
It was a fluid kind of time around then anyway; fights – whether in the playground or in parks or waste ground after school – were starting to go out of fashion, as some of us decided it was a rough and uncivilised way to decide who was top dog. A few radicals even suggested that the defining trait ought to be who had the best exam results, but that was obviously taking things too far so we’d sort of opted for whoever was most cool, and fighting was just starting to look a bit uncool. Anyway, I was the only one who didn’t go with the main squad towards the eleventh green, up on a slight rise to our left. I just jogged off for the shelter of the long rough and whin on the far side of the fairway, shaking my head. Dom looked like he was about to run after me and tackle me, but we already knew I was a faster runner than he was, so he stayed where he was. The rest stayed too.
‘You’re fuckin dead, Gilmour!’ Dom shouted after me.
‘Aw, Stu, dinnae. Come on.’ That was Al.
‘You’re such an only child, Stewart!’ Ferg yelled.
‘You’ll get the jail!’ (Wee Malky, confusingly.)
And so I was able to watch from the perfect cover of a little whin-covered hillock as the next group of golfers appeared over the rise just as Dom got his trousers down and started squatting over the hole. Al was holding the pin.
The four golfers stood open-mouthed for a moment, then yelled, abandoned their bags and charged. Worse, there was a pair of green keepers in a sort of wee, fat-tyred flatbed truck just behind and to one side of the group of golfers. The wee truck overtook the golfers before they made the green.
Dom was no problem; he was still trying to get his trousers back up, and fell on his face when he tried to run. The greenkeepers shot past him and raced after the rest of the gang. They’d made the elementary mistake of keeping together and running back the way we’d come, rather than splitting up, so while they made it as far as the gap in the whin and piled into it with the sort of alacrity rats up drainpipes could only dream of, the greenkeepers were right behind them. They caught Wee Malky by the ankles and dragged him straight back out again. The fastest of the pursuing golfers held the now howling Wee Malky while the two greenkeepers disappeared into the deer run; you could watch their progress by the line of shaking whin bushes. Two of the other golfers were sitting on a raging and shouting Dom, just off the green. One of them was skelping him across his still-naked bum with a golf glove. Tad fruitily, I thought. I saw Ferg and Al make it as far as the fence; the green-keepers caught them while they were frantically trying to climb it.
Wee Malky wriggled free and made a dash for the same gap in the whins he’d already been pulled out of, but fast – and desperate – though he was, his wee legs couldn’t outrun the long adult strides of the golfer who’d caught him; he was scooped off the grass and held firmly, wriggling and wailing, against the guy’s chest. I’ve thought back on that final, minor detail of the whole sorry adventure many times since then, and seem to remember that there was something in equal parts heroic and hopeless in Wee Malky’s stubborn refusal to accept he’d been caught, and in his attempt to get away a second time; something somehow life-affirming but ultimately tragic about his struggle to escape his fate.
But that’s probably just a kind of morbid sentimentality, the effect of knowing what would happen on the overgrown fringes of the Ancraime estate, in the sweaty height of high summer, a few years later. At the time, no matter what I like to think I remember, it probably meant nothing special at all.
I slipped away through the bracken, heading uphill for the trees and the meadow, careful to move with as little disturbance as possible, but I was never in any real danger. I heard distant yelling, adult and kid, but it was faint. There could be some blowback because of this – Dom in particular might want to exact some retribution for my abandoning ship – but I thought I’d been sensible and they’d been stupid and, what with my new-found semi-parity in the pecking order, it didn’t bother me too much. I’d got away, it was a fucking lovely day, and I might finally even get to see something more of the fabled Murston house.
Beyond the line of trees, the steep meadow led up into the fields and then the gardens of the house, though the building itself was still unseen, hidden by the undulations of the hill.
I saw the girl riding the horse then; a brief, lithe vision on a blond horse at a half-trot, moving daintily across the sunlit higher field. The girl gave a little kick, the horse picked up speed and they jumped a small hedge, disappearing.
I’d caught only a glimpse of her, but she’d been beautiful: graceful, long legs and a serene face on a slender neck, her hair either short or gathered up under her riding hat.
It was Ellie, I think. When I mentioned this to her years later she wasn’t so sure, and said sometimes her friends came and rode her ponies – not horses, at the time – so she couldn’t be certain. But I’m sure it was her. Probably. I guess I’d heard of her by this time but I don’t think I’d seen her, even around town. Both the Murston girls were sent to the Stonemouth Girls’ Academy rather than have to rough it with their brothers in the High School, so this was quite possible. Anyway, seeing her there only added to the mystique of the half-hidden house on the hill and made me all the more determined finally to cop a glimpse of it close up.
So I climbed up a steep grass slope at the side of the meadow, crossed the field and a barbed-wire fence, then worked my way up through the tangle of whin, broom and bramble to the trees. I kept looking for the girl on the horse but I didn’t see her again.
I saw the house, at last, from halfway up a tree.
It was a little disappointing, frankly, after all the build-up I’d given it: just a big house with lots of garages and outhouses, not especially old, maybe sixties vintage, possibly originally a bungalow but with lots of big dormers and Veluxes and various bits added on: two conservatories and a substantial structure along one side of the house, which was all windows and blinds and white columns. Some of the blinds were raised to show there was a swimming pool inside. A couple of cars were parked outside a triple garage; a winding slope of drive led through a front garden of lawn and trimmed shrubs to two tall, ornate gateposts on the skyline, the black wroughtiron gates forming the only gap in a high stone wall.
I looked back to the house, and saw that a man in an upstairs room was watching me through a big pair of binoculars. I froze, then grinned, waved and got down out of the tree as smartly as I could. I ran down the hill, expecting to hear dogs yowling after me. I skirted the perimeter of the golf course, not daring to cross it, and got wet up to my knees crossing the Kinnis Burn before achieving the relative safety of the play park by the Meriston Road Recycling Centre. I took a long route home to help everything dry off and was back in time for tea.
At school the following morning the whole thing had been spun into a daring raid on a repressive bastion of adult privilege and Dom had merely been exposing his naked behind to the dozen or so men – who’d finally caught them after a long chase – to express his contempt for a prescriptive society and its piffling rules. The real story had leaked, of course, and was already being sniggered over throughout the school, but such was the public line.
The guys got off with a caution eventually, though Dom was singled out for the evil eye by the cop delivering the finger-wagging and told We’re On To You, Laddie.
‘Mr Murston says to see you now,’ a female voice says, and I follow the Asian girl through the house.
‘I’m Stewart,’ I tell her as the pop music gets gradually louder (Now Playing: Prince & the New Power Generation �
�� more early nineties stuff ). ‘And you are …?’ I ask her. (I’m opposed to all this nameless servant shit.)
‘Maria,’ the girl says, opening the door to the pool/fitness suite annexe with all the windows and blinds and white Greco-Roman columns. She’s gone before I can say Nice to meet you, and I’m confronted with Donnie Murston, the not yet greying head of the Murston clan, dressed in baggy shorts and a torn-sleeveless Massive Attack T-shirt. He’s stomping around on a giant mat with flashing coloured splodges all over it like some demented version of Twister, working out to what looks like some weird knock-off version of Dance Challenge, facing the biggest plasma screen I’ve ever seen and trying to follow the steps of a dancing pink dragon. The tiny wee man from Paisley Park is crooning something about how money don’t matter tonight while Mr M tries to synch his shapes. This must just be coincidence; I never had the Don down as an ironicist.
He glances at me. ‘Aye. It’s yourself, Stewart.’
Hard to argue with that. I nod, though he isn’t looking at me. ‘Evening, Mr M.’
‘Too feart to call me Donald these days, eh, Stewart?’
Five years ago I’d have been all defensive or denying after a remark like that, talking away and saying Certainly not, just been a while, not wanting to take anything for granted, you know… or gone the other way and said Hell, yeah, utterly terrified; you’d be able to hear my knees knocking if the music wasn’t so loud. Now I’m the wrong side of twenty-five – if only just – so I’m practically grizzled. Anyway I know when to shut up and say nothing. So that’s what I do. Mustn’t forget I’m here on sufferance, to bend the knee, kiss the ring, whatever. All the same, I smile a little, just to show I’m not that intimidated, if he looks at me.
After a little while, though, when he still doesn’t look at me or say anything, I say, ‘So how are you, Donald?’
He holds up one hand to me, wordlessly concentrating on his steps as the song comes to its end. When it stops he taps a small black circle in the corner of the mat, freezing the screen and pausing the next song before it can start. He turns to me, grabs a fluffy white towel from the back of a white leather recliner. ‘Bearing up, Stewart. We’ll all miss the old guy.’
‘Aye, well, I was sorry to hear. He had a—’
‘Still, we all have our time, don’t we?’ he says.
‘I suppose,’ I say.
Mr M nods, and inspects me, taking his time to look me down and up as he towels off round his face and neck. Mr M is fifty or so but in reasonable shape for a man of his age; I’m guessing he still swims in the pool and uses all the gym gear cluttering this end of the pool complex. He’s got the dark-sand hair of most of the Murstons, a pale complexion and big dark brown eyes (though not as big and brown as Ellie’s). Stubby nose, broken from his days as a boxer in the Youth Club. Full lips (though not as full as – well, you get the idea). Bit of a barrel chest: long back, short legs. He doesn’t look that menacing, but there you go; doesn’t wear a black hat, either.
The Murstons were poor farmers just two generations ago, then some arguably (depends who you talk to) shady deals with other farmers in the area made them not-so-poor farmers. Their real fortune came from timber first, then peat. Now they have a thriving road haulage business and an extensive regional property portfolio. The machine harvesting of peat in the great bogs that start twenty kilometres to the north-west still represent the family’s main business. In theory.
He nods, inspection finished. ‘Done all right for yourself, Stewart?’
‘I—’ I begin.
‘Or just putting on an act, eh, dressing up?’
The breath I was going to use to speak sort of collapses out of me, but I smile as tolerantly as I can. ‘I’m doing okay.’
‘What is it you do, anyway?’
‘Lighting.’
‘Lighting?’ He frowns. At this point, people usually ask whether I mean stage lighting, or selling table lamps in B&Q. Donald, however, just keeps frowning.
‘Buildings,’ I tell him. ‘Commercial, public; some industrial. Occasional private commission. Exteriors, mostly.’
‘Lighting,’ he says. He does not look especially impressed.
‘Aye, lighting.’ The look he’s giving me, I’m starting to get unimpressed with it myself.
His eyes narrow a little. ‘How’d art school lead to that?’
‘Pretty much directly,’ I tell him. ‘I was sort of headhunted, after my degree show.’
‘Uh-huh. Where you based?’
‘London. Well, in theory. I’m rarely there. It’s an international consultancy.’ He’s still just staring at me. I don’t know if that’s contempt in his eyes or indifference. Always found it difficult to read Donald. ‘Just been made a partner,’ I tell him. ‘The youngest.’ Still no reaction. ‘Youngest ever,’ I add. Not that the firm’s really old; it only goes back to the seventies.
‘Aye, very nice,’ he says, in that manner that implies that what he really means is, Well done getting away with it so far, ya chancer.
I grin. Partner. This happened just last week and it’s still sinking in. The only people I’ve told here in Stonemouth are my mum and dad, by phone the evening I heard, and I’ve sworn them to secrecy. Fucking partner. I thought I’d be ancient by the time that happened. Fucking cool for me. I grin again. ‘Keeps the wolf from the door, Donald.’
He nods again, sucking his lips in. ‘I think I prefer “Mr M”,’ he tells me. I want to say that he smiles, but really he’s just revealing his teeth. He’s had his Hollywoodised, too. Only slightly frightening. ‘If that’s all right with you,’ he continues, throwing the towel back onto the recliner and crossing his arms. ‘Let’s not pretend everything’s hunky fuckin dory, eh? Or you’re still always welcome in this house, eh, Stewart? Not after what you did,’ he says.
Shit. That turned nasty bewilderingly quickly. I take a deep breath. ‘For whatever it’s worth, Mr M, I’m sorry,’ I tell him.
‘Uh-huh. Well, I’ll tell you straight, son: if it was up to me you still wouldn’t be back here. Be another five years, maybe more, before I’d be happy you showing your face around here.’
What would it be worth to tell him Fuck You; this is my home town too and I’ll come back any time I fucking want?
I’d be lucky to make it out of town alive. Well, a slight exaggeration, I suppose; I’d be lucky to make it out of town with a working pair of kneecaps, or hands that would ever play the violin again (not that I can now, but you know what I mean). Anyway, the sad thing is that he does have a point.
I don’t say anything, just look down a little, staring at the giant beetle on his T-shirt, and nod thoughtfully. I could say I’m sorry again, but I’ve already said it once. Wouldn’t want to devalue the sentiment.
‘You’ve Mrs M to thank for bein here,’ he tells me. ‘Put in a good word for you. Think yourself lucky I listen to her and no the boys.’
The tiniest frisson of hope – excitement, even – runs through me. Mrs Murston never really gave a damn about me either way, but she’s butter in her eldest daughter’s hands, so more likely the appeal for clemency came from Ellie, not Mrs M herself. It’s worth hoping so, anyway.
‘How is Ellie?’
Donald puts his head back, his expression cold. ‘How is Ellie?’ he repeats. I’ve got a quite different feeling running through my guts now. That repeating-what-the-other-person’s-just-said thing is not a good sign with Mr M. Fuck, why did I ask that?
‘She’s none of your fucking business, that’s how she is,’ he says. His voice is a grinding monotone, like two heavy plates of glass sliding over each other. He glances at the double doors leading back into the rest of the house. ‘Don’t let me keep you.’
I look down at the floor, nod. Even less point saying any further Sorries, now. ‘Thanks for seeing me, Mr M,’ I mumble, and turn, walk.
As I draw level with the glazed ceramic cheetahs, he says, ‘Just here for the weekend.’ He says it like that; if there’s a question mark
in there, I’m not hearing it.
‘Due to leave Tuesday morning,’ I tell him.
His eyes narrow just a fraction more. ‘All right,’ he says. ‘Good.’ He turns and stamps on the corner of the dancing mat like he’s squashing an insect the size of a locust. The paused dragon on the plasma jerks into life.
I leave to the strains of early Take That. I don’t see Maria. By the side of the front door there’s a big photo of the late Callum, framed in black. I didn’t notice it on the way in. Callum – big-boned, prominent jaw and brow, with a shaved-sides haircut uncomfortably close to a mullet and wearing a padded check shirt that looks like it’s been ironed – stares out at me with a sort of leery scowl.
I let myself out.
Somewhere in the house, a tiny-sounding dog is barking hysterically.
3
It’s only ten minutes from Hill House to my mum and dad’s. I like driving the wee Ka, even though it does seem a bit small now; I passed my test in one of these all those years ago and it’s sort of nostalgic.
I say all those years; it’s eight going on nine, but while that feels like half my proper conscious life – you’re not fully formed when you’re a kid, are you? – it’s starting to feel like not all that long really. Maybe this is because I spend a lot of time around older people. Secretaries and office juniors aside, the other guys in the firm are all senior to me. Anyway, it’s funny how your perspective changes as you age.
There are some frankly embarrassing tears from my mum when I get to my parents’ place, and a fairly long hug from my dad. I am heartily congratulated on my promotion to partner level, though I make clear it’s just junior partner level, not equity. My folks – Al and Morven – live in Nisk, just outside the old town, in a granite semi somewhere between modest and comfortably off, on a leafy street largely the territory of Mercs and BMWs. Dad always used to drive a Saab – for the engineering, apparently – but these days he’s an Audi man.