by Iain Banks
‘Aye, aye,’ Murdo said, like he’d heard all this before, or it just didn’t matter. ‘But your da’s best pals wi Mike Mac, an that puts a different kind of complexion on it a bit, eh? I mean, like, who knows, eh? That might no be so bad. But on the other hand it might, so we’ll just have to see, eh?’
Maybe he thought I was looking confused at all this suddenly perceived complexity. ‘But never mind all that,’ he told me. ‘Just you remember: she’s oor sister. We look after our own in this family, okay?’
‘Okay, guys; of course.’
‘We don’t want to see her get hurt, like,’ Norrie said. The others looked at him.
‘Aye,’ Murdo said. ‘An she’s part of this family. An no cunt insults this family, understand?’
‘Of course I—’ I began.
‘You insult her or take the fuckin piss,’ Murdo said, ignoring me, ‘an you’re takin the piss oot of us too. You’re insultin oor da, right?’
‘Right!’ said Callum.
‘Don’t want to insult anybody, guys,’ I told them. I looked round at them all. ‘I respect Ellie. I respect the family. Want you to know that, guys. Okay?’ I nodded, sincerely. Like I say, I’d kind of anticipated a wee talk like this, so I’d rehearsed this series of short, easily understood sentences. All true, too, though a good advocate, barrister or whatever could argue that when I said I respected the family, what I actually meant was that I respected the abstract idea of the family, not the Murston clan in its current incarnation per se. Something like that.
‘Okay,’ Norrie said, looking almost mollified.
‘Make sure it stays that way, eh, Stewie?’ Callum said. He winked at me. Aye, fuck you, I thought, but smiled back.
‘Aye,’ Fraser muttered.
‘Okay,’ Murdo said, draining his can. ‘Team talk over. Time to get pished.’ He crushed the empty can in his hand. A tiny dribble of beer leaked out onto the upholstery.
‘No on the good seats!’ Fraser protested, rubbing the resulting micro stain with his fingers, making it worse. (Not leather, either; some sort of pinprick-pierced vinyl made to look like leather. A bit.)
As they all started opening the doors, Murdo nodded, indicating something just behind me. ‘Mind yer heid on the gun-rack as you get out, eh, Stu?’
‘No tryin to marry you,’ Murdo said, at the same party, in the hallway, just before Ellie and I were about to leave. He laid one heavy hand on my shoulder. Beery breath.
‘Sorry, Murdo?’ I said.
‘No tryin to say that’s you married as far as we’re concerned, like. You’ll be goin to uni, aye?’
‘Aye,’ Norrie said, suddenly at my other side. ‘A clever cunt.’
‘Glasgow,’ I said. I thought the better of trying to explain the difference between university and art school.
Murdo slapped me hard on the back. ‘There you are! There you are! Who knows, eh? Just sayin: don’t take the piss. That’s all.’ He slapped me on the back again. ‘Away ye go now; youse kids have fun.’
So we became an item. We became Stewart and Ellie, or Ellie and Stewie, or Stu and El. I think we were even Stullie or Stellie or something for a while, when we were all giving ourselves Branjelinastyle, two-for-one collective names. That didn’t stick, thankfully.
And at some point – maybe after a year, when we were still seeing each other and still staying faithful to each other, even though I was in Glasgow and she was in Aberdeen, and we were meeting new people all the time, and developing both within ourselves and as parts of quite different communities – I think we both realised this might indeed be something genuinely serious; something, maybe, for ever.
I’d fallen for a glance, smitten with her skin and her hair and the way she moved, but I’d come to love her for all the things that made her who she truly was, and those came from deeper inside, from her character, from her mind. That first, instinctive, surface-struck besotting had been absurd in its own way, but it had been accurate, it had been right. (I blurted this out to her once and she thought about it and said, yes, she felt the same way; she’d just thought I was cute and sort of brashly fun at first, but then discovered that – being generous – maybe there was a little more to me than that. She smiled, telling me this, and I briefly feigned being insulted, while actually happy and secure in the knowledge I was merely being teased.)
And, it felt, other people had picked up on this sea-change, too. There were no more team talks from the Murston brothers and people seemed to assume that we’d be together next year – we got joint invitations to weddings nine or ten months in the future. I was invited to dinners at the Murston family house, and I was sort of obliquely informed, first by Dad, later by Mike Mac himself, that Ellie and I had his blessing too.
‘Aye,’ Mike MacAvett said, sipping a G&T at a party of Mum and Dad’s where I seemed to have been deemed drinks steward, ‘at one point we thought maybe Josh and Ellie …’ He shrugged, looked pleasantly bemused. ‘But no. Still looking for a lassie, that boy.’
Last I’d heard – from Ferg, naturally – Josh was in London looking for buff studs with interesting piercings and independently suspended disco muscles under spray-on T-shirts, but I didn’t like to say.
So Ellie and I had become a couple, in the eyes of those around us as well as in our own heads, and our match, our partnership, had started to be factored into webs of relationships that extended far beyond us, and deep into the clouded waters of Stonemouth’s surprisingly tightly controlled little society.
I don’t think either of us would have been human if we hadn’t come to resent this, at least a bit, and to chafe against it. Still, we had each other, about every second weekend or so, and for longer during the holidays, both abroad and back in the Toun.
I asked her to marry me in a fit of romantic enthusiasm on Valentine’s Day 2005. Until then we’d only talked about living together and whether we’d double-barrel our children’s names. Maybe because my mum and dad’s marriage had seemed pretty happy, while the Murston house had apparently always rung to screaming arguments and slamming doors, I’d generally been more pro-marriage than she had, at least in theory.
For a while in my mid-teens the very idea of marriage had seemed like the most stupidly old-fashioned thing in the world, a slightly embarrassing relic of days gone by and basically pretty pointless unless you were some sort of deeply religious eccentric who actually took all that God and Ten Commandments stuff seriously. It wasn’t so much that so many people in our class came from families where the parents hadn’t bothered to get married; it was more that so many came from families where they had bothered, but then split up and got married again. And again and again, in some cases, though I’d noticed the enthusiasm for marriage seemed to tail off in those who exposed themselves to it repeatedly. If you were the bright and breezy sort you’d put this down to them finally finding the right person after years of effort, but if you were the gloomy type you’d reckon they’d just given up trying.
Later, with the maturity that came with my late teens and hitting the big Two-Oh, getting engaged and married started to seem like a deeply romantic thing to do, an expression of hope and nailing-your-colours-to-the-mast defiance in the face of the expectations of a jaundiced and cynical world. Maybe there was an element of contrarianism, too; if everybody just assumed that of course there was no real point in getting married, then there were always going to be a few of us who’d think, Ha, well, I’ll show you!
To be absolutely honest, when I asked Ellie to marry me it was kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing and I expected her to say no. Never really occurred to me she might say anything else, not after all the times she’d told me how she’d grown up listening to her parents snipe and shout at each other, and hating that they felt tied, manacled to one another. I really just wanted to get the whole question of getting formally married out of the way so we could be sure where we stood, and I assumed that where we stood was that our love and commitment was so strong and so complete within itself that it di
dn’t need the dubious outside recognition provided by the state (and certainly not by the Church).
We were standing in the snow by the slow dark waters of the Urstan river at Bridge of Ay. There had been a lot of snow the night before and I’d suggested we borrow Donald’s Range Rover to go for a drive and just take in the snowy scenery, maybe find a village pub or an open-out-of-season hotel serving lunch. The way our various course commitments and so on had worked out, it was our first weekend together for nearly a month.
We’d been gazing upstream to the old bridge, a delicate-looking humpback construction in stone that described a near geometrically precise semicircle over the river. There was a deep pool just downstream from it, haloed with ice, the black, still waters at its centre reflecting the bridge with barely a ripple. Bathed in the cold white light of a calm winter’s day, the structure and its inverted image seemed to form an almost perfect circle.
I was slightly stunned when she said yes. There were hugs, there were tears. It was just as well Ellie’s chin was on my shoulder as we stood there wrapped in each other’s arms; I think my eyes stayed wide with surprise for a good minute or two. I remember thinking, Well, that didn’t go the way I thought it would. I was used to my unpremeditated ideas going pretty much as I expected them to, to the extent that I had time to think about them and form any sort of expectation of them at all in the moments – sometimes as little as a few seconds – between making the decision and finding out where it led.
Standing there in the snow-struck silence, beneath a shining, mother-of-pearl sky with Ellie hugging me so tight I almost had to fight for each cold breath, it occurred to me for the first time that maybe being so cavalierly spontaneous wasn’t always such an effortlessly brilliant idea after all. I suppose if I’d been a really smart person I’d have made sure this was the last time this occurred to me, too, but it wasn’t. I think I later convinced myself it was just a blip. And anyway, at the time, being hugged, being held so fiercely by this woman I knew I loved and wanted to be with for ever, it felt like this had been my best snap decision ever, and like I’d inadvertently rescued her from something I hadn’t even known was a threat, like I’d said exactly the right thing completely by accident.
‘Yes,’ she said, sniffing, still hugging me tight around the neck. ‘You sure?’ She pushed back, looked at me through teary eyes. ‘You sure?’ she repeated.
Well, I am now, I thought of saying, but didn’t.
‘Of course,’ I told her.
7
On the far side of the bridge over the Brochty Burn, before the mass of trees that is Vatton forest, there’s a choice of paths as various tramped ways – through the grass and between the broom and gorse bushes – all split and weave and come back together again; I choose one that rides a line of low dunes between the forest proper and the beach, a little undulating highway with views of sand, sea and trees.
I see the figure on the beach from maybe a kilometre away: just a single dark dot, walking slowly, obscured by drifting tendrils of mist, then suddenly glowing in a random shaft of sunlight, briefly radiant before the haze resumes. He or she is wandering along the near-flat beach, their route taking them generally towards anything anomalous: mostly the dark, sand-and wave-smoothed wrecks of trees lying half sunken in the great sable stretches of sand. They’re quite bundled up: wee thin legs and what looks like a heavy jacket. Female? Big kid? There’s something about the way they walk, though, that catches at me. I can’t explain it to myself at first, but I feel an emptiness in my belly, and my heart beats faster.
It might be her, I think. It could be her. She kind of walks like her. No long hair, unless they’re wearing a close-fitting hat. I’m still going up and down this gentle sine-wave of a path, taking the summit route along the line of miniature dunes. I screw my eyes up, trying to see the dark figure better. If I was my dad I’d have a pair of binoculars with me.
I wonder if the iPhone’s up to working like a telescope, and pull it out and try, but in the end the digital zoom is no better than what I can see already.
She’s almost level with me now, maybe a couple of hundred metres away. She’s squatting down in front of a twisted-looking lump of tree, and I can see just enough detail to realise from the way she’s positioned and the general shape of the blob she makes that she’s pointing a biggish camera at the washed-away trunk. She shifts, taking more photos from a variety of angles, all from a squatting position; for a couple she lies right down on the sand.
I’m so busy watching her – it’s definitely a girl, as definitely as you can tell the Bounty Hunter is a girl in the night-time scene in Jabba’s palace in Jedi – that I miss a step and half fall down the sea-face of one of the small dunes, ploughing through sand until my foot catches on some grass and I have to extemporise a jump down onto the sand to avoid going head over heels. Bit of a heavy landing, but nothing damaged. When I look back at the dark figure in the distance she’s standing again, facing me, I think. From the way her arms are set … she’s looking at me through her camera.
I don’t know what else to do, so I smile, make a show of dusting myself down.
She waves. She puts the camera down, the long lens hanging by her side, and I think I hear her shout something. Jeez, is it her?
We start walking towards each other. My heart’s in my mouth. My knees feel weak. Fuck me, what next, am I going to fucking swoon? Just the adrenalin from the near-fall, I tell myself. Pull yourself together, Gilmour.
Definitely a girl. Walks a lot like Ellie: right height, or maybe a little smaller? Was she ever into photography? I don’t recall her being, but that means nothing; in five years Ellie could have been through a dozen new interests, all enthused over, almost mastered – or mistressed – and then dropped for the next challenge. My mode, my expectations, change every few seconds, like the consistency of the sand beneath my feet: now firm, now quaking, uncertain. She’s wearing dark skinny trousers or even thick tights; big, bulky, darkred hiking jacket. A bunnet on her head like a dark beanie. But it’s getting warm now as the haze thins. Somebody who feels the cold? Pale face.
When I can make out her face, I’m briefly even more confused. It is and isn’t Ellie. If she’d just take that hat off, let me see her hair. Her hair was always spectacular, definitive. Though she might have cut it all off now, for all I know. She stops about fifteen metres away, holds up one hand to stop me and brings the camera up to focus. I stand, realising who she is as she manipulates the big grey lens. It’s one of those lenses that’s so big that when you put the whole caboodle on a tripod you attach the lens to the tripod mount with the camera hanging off it, not the other way round.
‘Hey there, stranger,’ she says.
The voice confirms. It’s Grier. She walks like Ellie and she has similar build to her big sister, though she’s a little less tall. I stand there in that flat wilderness of sand, giving her a closed-mouth smile, crossing my arms, hoping she can’t read my disappointment.
‘Cam on, larve, give us a smoyle,’ she says in a very fair approximation of a certain type of London accent.
I give her a smile. Are we okay? I honestly don’t know. I’ve seen Grier exactly once since the night I had to leave Stonemouth hidden inside a giant yellow oil pipe, riding a freight like some Midwestern hobo, and that one meeting was slightly weird. I’ve had a few also slightly odd emails and texts from her over the years – sparse, sporadic, funny but slightly mad – and I really don’t know where I am with her. The Hey there, stranger sounded amiable enough, but Grier was always a great mimic, always quoting lines from film and TV, and adopting different accents.
She takes her photograph – actually about half a dozen photographs, as the camera click-click-clicks quietly away, for over a second – then puts the camera down, hanging from her right hand. ‘There,’ she says, in her normal voice. ‘Didn’t hurt, did it?’
She’s smiling. I grin properly, not for the camera. I swear her camera arm starts to jerk up towards me, then falls
back almost before the motion begins. ‘How you doing, Grier?’
‘How you doin?’ she says in a drawled, Joey voice. She’s walking towards me, covering any awkwardness by checking the screen of the camera, then putting it down again and raising her face to mine as we meet for a big hug, jackets making slidey noises against each other.
I’m getting quite a powerful hug here. I remember how we used to mess around when I was going out with Ellie, and Grier was just a lanky teenager with pancaked-over acne and fierce-looking braces, and so I decide to risk it. I pull her tighter to me and lift her up off her feet – she yelps, just like she used to – and swing her round. I can feel her laughing and I can feel the light pressure of her breasts through the layers of clothing, and – not for the first time – wonder, if things had been different … But, there you are. Heavier than she used to be; I’m twirling a woman now, not a kid. I stop gradually and put her down before we both get too dizzy. She’s still laughing.
I have a sudden thought. ‘Fuck!’ I say, glancing up and down the beach and back towards the forest. ‘Your brothers aren’t here, are they?’
‘No. Just me,’ she says, looking at her camera again. She switches something, pinches a lens cover into place on the big grey lens and hoists the camera over her shoulder. ‘You just walking?’ she asks.
Her face is smooth, flawless. Either no make-up at all, or stuff that’s so artfully applied I can’t see it. Her face is not so much like Ellie’s really, not now; Grier has a thinner, somehow sharper face, when you can see it. She always did have that thing of keeping her head down and looking at you from under her delicately carved brows. She always got called mischievous, too. I guess she still looks it, though there’s also a … a slyness there. Nothing mean, not necessarily, but there’s definitely still a roguish side to the girl that you’d be risking ridicule or worse if you missed. Not a lass to be taken for granted. Just like her sister. And her dad. Like the whole family, in their own sometimes grievous ways.