Stonemouth

by Iain Banks

  ‘Uh-huh,’ I agree.

  ‘Aye, well, Mr M wanted me to check that was just for reasons of … cheapness, rather than what you might call signalling an intent to linger in the area after the funeral.’

  ‘The week was cheaper than Friday evening to Tuesday morning,’ I tell him. ‘That’s still when I’m leaving.’

  ‘Aye, aye, that’s what the manny I talked to at the hire company said you’d said,’ Powell says. He pats me on the shoulder. ‘If you did need to go earlier, though, you could, eh?’

  ‘Earlier?’

  ‘Monday evening, or afternoon, say.’

  ‘Why would that be, Powell?’

  ‘Not saying it’ll be necessary, just checking.’

  ‘Yeah, but why—’

  ‘Well, you know; the boys.’

  ‘The boys? You mean Murdo, Fraser, Norrie?’

  ‘Bit headstrong. Can be. That’s all.’

  I look at him. Powell can do quite a good blank stare. ‘Powell,’ I say slowly, ‘I checked in with Don. I—’

  ‘Aye, well, you didnae really cover yourself in glory there, either, from what I hear, but it’s more the boys …’

  ‘What do you mean? I thought we got on fine.’

  ‘I think Don thought about it and decided you’d been a bit, I don’t know: cheeky.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You probably shouldn’t have mentioned Ellie.’

  ‘Jesus, I just asked how she was.’

  ‘Aye, all the same.’

  ‘Powell, look, are you saying I should be worried here?’

  He shakes his head. ‘No, not really. Things are just a bit, you know, funny, with Joe being gone and you being back, and Grier being back. Things’ll settle down. Just a bit of restlessness in the undergrowth. It’ll pass. You can relax.’ He nods at the table behind me. ‘Just enjoy yourself.’

  I look at him. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. Sure.’ He pats me on the shoulder again. ‘Hunky McDory. See you later.’ He takes my right hand in his and – holding my right elbow firmly with his left hand – gives me an eye-wateringly firm handshake. I try to do the same back, but my merely average-fit grip is roundly outclassed.

  Then, with a final tap-tap on the elbow and a glance and a nod at everybody else round our two tables, he’s off.

  BB and me, and D-Cup and his three pals, finish our games quietly, and – for all the interaction we have – as though we’re playing on different continents. At the end of our game BB and I agree the fun’s gone out of the room a little and a pint somewhere else might be in order. We walk away from the table and I’m sort of expecting to hear a remark from D-Cup or his pals, but all there is is that bump, snick and rumble of balls, filling the uneasy silence.

  9

  The Deep Blue IV is a mega-trawler; its white superstructure seems to sit floating above the buildings and cranes of the inner harbour, dwarfing everything around it. Even before I climb as high as the bridge I can see the windows of my dad’s office in the Old Custom House on the other side of the harbour, but it’s the unaccustomed view of the building’s green, copper-sheathed roof that attracts the eye.

  The Deep Blue IV is only just able to fit into the old harbour; another half-metre across the beam, or drawing another twenty centimetres, and it’d have to share the New Docks with the rig supply boats and the Orkney–Shetland–Stavanger ferry. Deep Blue IV is due to head out in an hour or two, at the top of the tide, on another month-long mission to hoover untold tonnes of fish out of the North Atlantic and into its hangar-sized freezer holds.

  Mike MacAvett could probably just sit at home with a cigar in his hand and his feet up and watch the ship depart into the haze from the comfort of his armchair, but he obviously feels the need to be here on the bridge, to check everything’s going smoothly and to content himself all the supplies are on board, and the captain and crew are all happy and motivated men.

  The trawler crews are Mike’s main supply of muscle, his forces in reserve. Neither of his sons showed any interest in the family business, legal or otherwise, so he has one of my old school pals as – supposedly – chauffeur and home handyman, a couple of grizzled, ageing though still useful-looking guys in the docks office of the MacAvett Fishing Company, and he can call upon pretty much any of the trawlermen not actually at sea. Boats like the Deep Blue IV have two crews to let them fish almost continually, so there’s never a shortage of Mike’s guys in the Toun. It’s a looser structure than Don and his four – now three – bampot sons, and Mike worries more about informers and infiltration by SOCA or the SCDEA than Don does, but, even there, the local cops have proved useful.

  Things are running a little late so Mike phoned me to say come to the docks rather than the house. Partly, though, I think he still feels the need to impress people with the sheer scale of the new boat – the Deep Blue IV ’s only a couple of years old, and I haven’t seen it before – and remind them that this is where the money came from, this is what made him well off: fishing. He’s not just some number-two player on the shady side of life in Stonemouth; he’s a legitimate and highly successful businessman who came up the hard way, setting out to sea in tiny, deck-heaving, wave-pounded trawlers for the first twenty years of his working life, risking death and mutilation in one of the most dangerous working environments in the world.

  Anyway, it’s no sweat for me; always a nostalgic pleasure to visit the docks. My dad’s worked here since school and I always liked coming to soak up the smells and sounds and sights of the harbour. The walk from the centre of town – BB and I had our quiet pint in the Old Station Tavern – took less than ten minutes.

  ‘Stewart, Stewart, good to see you,’ Mike says when I finally climb to the vessel’s bridge. It’s bright and sunny up here, certainly sunnier than down on the quayside; you’re above most of the remaining mist, which is still settled over the town, the nearby industrial and housing estates and the more distant fields and low hills like a sort of glowing grey membrane. Perched above everything, blinking in the bright sunlight, the moodily lit darkness of Regal Tables already feels a long way away.

  Mike shakes my hand and I try not to wince; these guys all seem to have super-firm, ultra-manly handshakes and my hand is still feeling a bit bruised after Powell Imrie’s parting grasp.

  Mike MacAvett is a fairly short, stocky guy with a big bald head and very dark eyebrows. Early fifties. Always bustling, always very bright-eyed and overflowing with enthusiasms.

  ‘You’re looking great, looking great,’ he tells me. ‘Just let me get things sorted here and I’ll be with you asap. Make yourself at home. Have a look at some of the gizmos; or head down to the galley and get Jimmy to rustle you up something – you hungry?’

  ‘Good to see you, Mike. No, thanks; I’m good.’

  ‘Right, right. With you in a sec,’ he tells me and he’s off, across half the width of the very wide, gizmo-crammed bridge to talk to the captain. By common consent ‘It’s like the Starship Enterprise’ in here. That’s what everybody says, anyway. Actually, the bridge of the spaceship I’ve seen, stumbling over ancient episodes on obscure channels, has far fewer buttons and keyboards and screens, but there you are. Different series, maybe; I wouldn’t know.

  I wander along the bridge, trying to keep out of the way. Besides the captain there are a couple of other officer-class guys in neat blue fleeces with the Deep Blue IV’s logo embroidered on them, taking notes: one on a clipboard, one on an iPad, plus there are a couple of guys in yellow hi-vis jackets and pants stamping about talking into radios.

  I admire the view through the canted windows and try to look appreciatively at all the bewildering variety of screens and monitors and glitzy-looking clusters of what I’m guessing is comms gear. One screen looks like a sat-nav the size of a plasma screen. Another, square but with a circular display, is radar. On it I can see the shape of the town, the echoes of the tower blocks, church towers and steeples, and the road-bridge towers. Another pair of screens look like they’re l
inked into the ship’s engines. More screens show nothing much. They’ve got measurement scales that imply they’re sonar or depth gauges or whatever.

  The door is open to the outside at the far end of the bridge, so I step over the high sill and into the clear air. A young guy is squatting, touching up the paint on the white railings. He glances up. ‘Aye.’

  ‘Afternoon.’

  He looks up at me again, frowning. He has what you might most kindly term the nose of a pugilist. ‘You wi Customs and Excise?’ he asks, borderline aggressive.

  ‘No. Do I look like I am?’

  He shrugs and goes back to his painting. ‘Canny tell these days.’

  ‘Cheers,’ I say after a moment or two, and retreat back into the bridge. He just grunts.

  Mike Mac bustles me away five minutes later, down the various ladders and steps to the quayside and his Bentley. Ten minutes later we’re at the MacAvett house, a Scots Baronial stone pile at the far end of Marine Terrace with a commanding view of the Esplanade, the beach and sea. Technically it’s late Victorian but it’s been much fucked-about with. A crenellated wing in mismatched pale-sandstone houses a big pool a little larger than the Murstons’.

  As we move through the hall to the sweepingly grand conservatory we’re greeted by a couple of grey wolfhounds. Mike greets both dogs like he’s rubbing his hands dry on their snouts. I used to keep track of the MacAvett family wolfhounds and remember their names, but they’re short-lived animals and I don’t think I’ve met this pair before. Still, they sniff my hand appreciatively and get a sort of perfunctory pat each.

  We’re barely sat down – Mike is still running through the list of drinks we might have, though I’ve already said I’m fine – when his phone goes and then he’s frowning and saying, ‘Fuck. What do they want? Aye. Hold the fortress. Be right there.’ Then he’s bouncing up out of his La-Z-Boy again. ‘What a bastard, eh? Fucking officialdom. Got to get back to the boat. You just make yourself at home. Door wasn’t locked so somebody must be home. Try the kitchen; Sue might be around. Back soon.’

  I hear the front door close. I stand, looking out at the haze over the sea for a while, going back over the near-rumble at Regal Tables.

  Not good. Too close a thing.

  I’m guessing somebody at reception called Powell, perhaps as soon as they saw the other guys heading for the table beside ours. Maybe they called him as soon as they saw me; maybe they hadn’t heard Mr M was cool with me being back in town and so they were as surprised as D-Cup was with the way things went when Powell turned up. Anyway, too random a route to escape getting a kicking. I may already have used up my supply of luck for the weekend. I mean, I know it doesn’t really work that way, but all the same.

  ‘Stewart? Oh my God, is that you?’

  I turn round. Probably because hers was the last name Mike mentioned, and my brain can be a bit literal sometimes, I’m half expecting to see Sue, Mike’s wife, in the doorway, but instead it’s their daughter, Anjelica, in a long pink-towelling robe.

  ‘It is you! Hey, how are you, stranger?’

  Jel comes running up and pretty much throws herself at me, the robe flying open as she tears across the parquet and revealing a tiny pink bikini and lots of tanned skin. She’s small, plumply busty and her hair is sort of bubbly blonde, though it’s water-darkened now and plastered to her head and face. Jel’s a couple of years younger than me; told me she loved me when she was about ten and she was going to be my wife when we grew up. It became something of a running joke, though it ended up being not so funny.

  Jel pulls back, though still holding both my hands in hers. She looks me down, then up. ‘Lookin good, man,’ she tells me. ‘Keeping like you’re looking?’

  ‘Sure am. Looking pretty … pretty yourself.’

  She lets go of my hands, twirls this way and that, flapping the opened gown out. ‘Still like what you see, hah?’ She raises one eyebrow.

  I sit back on the window ledge, arms folded. ‘How are you, Jel?’

  ‘Oh, I’m fine,’ she says, throwing herself onto a couch. ‘Nice of you to come back. Old man Murston’s funeral?’

  ‘Yeah, just here for a few days. Back to London on Tuesday.’

  ‘So, you seeing anyone, in London?’

  ‘On and off. Mostly off. Feels like I only rarely touch ground some months.’

  ‘You seen herself yet?’

  ‘Ellie?’

  ‘Ellie.’ Jel looks quite serious now. She pulls her robe closed a little, then changes her mind, kicks it open again.

  ‘No. Not so far. Don’t know if I will.’

  ‘How about Ryan? You seen Ryan?’

  ‘No.’ I frown as I say this, trying to hint at Why the hell would I want to see Ryan? without actually saying so.

  ‘She really hurt him, you know.’

  Ellie and Ryan had been one of those obvious rebound relationships that everybody else pretty much knows is kind of doomed. Ellie’s whole thing with Ryan seemed to come out of nowhere, for everybody. It was almost like she’d designed it that way just to annoy people. When I heard, I had to think quite hard just to remember what Ryan even looked like, and I knew the MacAvetts fairly well. Ryan was only a year younger than Josh and me, but he’d been just one more boring younger brother of a pal, usually encountered staring slack-jawed at the TV or sitting tensed and muttering at the screen while cabled up to a PlayStation and slugging Red Bull.

  You might have thought this whole ludicrous dynastic-alliance-through-marriage thing would have been discredited by now, with Josh being Mr Gay Pride in London and me fucking his sister (in my defence, just the once, though admittedly I’ve yet to meet anybody who thinks that makes the slightest difference), but Ellie apparently thought Ryan was just the right chappie to make everything well, and presumably couldn’t wait to have Jel as a sister-in-law, too, so – over the raging objections of her father and the serious doubts of Mike and Mrs Mac, not to mention anybody and everybody else she might have consulted on the matter but didn’t – she and Ryan skipped off to Mauritius and got married on the beach outside their luxurious, five-star, villa-style hotel with a few distant friends and the sun going down.

  Lasted less than a year. The miscarriage may not have helped, though you never know; with some couples stuff like that draws them closer together. Either way, they never celebrated their first anniversary, which to people of my dad’s and Mr M’s and Mike Mac’s generation just feels like lack of application.

  I don’t know if anybody actually said, ‘I told you so,’ to Ellie, but even if it was never quite articulated, the air must have been thick with it.

  She took off, tried living in Boulder, Colorado, for a while, then San Francisco because she missed the sea, then came back to Stonemouth, homesick, within the year. Last I heard, she was working part-time for a charity with centres in Aberdeen, Stonemouth and Peterhead, for rehabilitating drug users. So at least the girl hasn’t lost her sense of humour.

  Hadn’t even occurred to me to wonder how Ryan might have been affected by all this. A mean part of me probably thought, Look, he got to have the best part of a year with my girl, the woman I’d always thought of as my soulmate, not to mention the prettiest girl in town; he’d already had a lot more than he probably deserved.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I say.

  ‘She really messes people up, that girl,’ Jel says.

  I look at her for a moment or two. ‘Yeah. Whereas you and I …’ But the only things I can think to say are hurtful and sort of pointlessly petty. I’ve learned, belatedly, not to say stuff like that just because I feel I need to say something, anything.

  I’ve never blamed Jel; I don’t think she meant to break me and Ellie up, that night; it was my choice, my stupidity, my fault. But Ellie was messed up first, before she did any messing up of her own. Ryan was just collateral damage from my idiocy. If he feels hurt he should blame me, not her. Jesus, I should probably add him to the already long list of people I might want to avoid over t
he rest of the weekend.

  ‘Yeah, you and me,’ Jel says, looking at me like she’s evaluating. ‘I suppose that’s about as short-term as it gets.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘You didn’t have to run away, you know.’ Jel sounds like she’s wanted to say this for a while.

  ‘Oh, I think you’ll find I did.’

  I still have nightmares about being trapped in a car at night while men armed with baseball bats prowl around outside, shaking the car as they stumble around, searching for me. In my dream the men are always blind, but they can smell me, know I’m there somewhere.

  ‘You could have stayed here,’ Jel says. Shades of petulance, unless I’m being oversensitive. ‘Dad would have protected you.’

  I’d have caused a fucking gang war, you maniac is what I want to say. ‘Didn’t feel that way at the time,’ I tell her. I shrug. ‘All in the past now anyway, Jel.’

  She stares at me for quite a few seconds, then says, ‘Yeah, except it isn’t, is it? Not if you have to fuck off back to London before Don lets his boys off the leash. Anyway.’ She lunges forward, stands, gathers her robe about her. ‘I’d better get dressed.’ She hurries to the door, then turns. ‘Sorry. How rude. Can I get you anything?’

  ‘No thanks.’ I smile. ‘I’m fine.’

  She nods slowly. ‘Yes. And no,’ she says, then she’s gone.

  Mike comes back. We chat. All is well, business is good, things are calm, he’s sorry my stay in Stonemouth can’t be longer, but, well, that’s just the way things are. Strong feelings involved. Unfortunate, but understandable. I saw Anjelica? (Yes; lovely as ever. Nice kid. Hmm, but only a 2.2 in Media Studies at Sheffield. Still, an internship with Sky.) Have I got a girl? (Not really – no time. He nods wisely.) Have I seen Josh lately? (No. That’s a shame, living in the same city. Yes but it’s a big city; more people than the whole of Scotland, and, anyway. But we leave it at that.) Oh, look, there she goes! (And I follow his nod and gaze and, fool that I am, I half expect to see Ellie walking along the beach outside, but it’s the Deep Blue IV of course, blue hull and white superstructure heading, shining, out to sea above a curled wake of grey, just starting to fade into the haze.)