Stonemouth

by Iain Banks

  She sighs, rubs her hands together, palms flat as she leans on the wall, looking out across the cropped and tended grass towards the sea.

  ‘I’m not sure what I feel about you,’ she tells me. The best I can put it is that I have these conflicting feelings. It’s not that I have to search for feelings about you, that they’re so minor or hidden I need to look hard to find them, it’s more that I have really…intrusive feelings about you, but they’re contradictory, they clash, and I can’t work out the balance of them. Not yet.’

  ‘So part of you still hates me?’ I try to make this sound helpful, air-clearing, rather than self-pitying, which I suppose it might be.

  She sighs heavily. ‘Hate might be too strong. After you’d gone I would wake up sometimes, crying, raging, wishing I’d let the boys get you that night, but that never lasted long: seconds, minutes, just long enough to think it through and know it wasn’t what I wanted at all.’ She’s still staring out towards the waves. ‘But I felt wronged, Stewart: humiliated, embarrassed, made to look a fool. We’d been shaping up to have this ideal, idealised life together, the envy of all who surveyed us, and suddenly it was all gone and I was just a stupid, betrayed girlie who should have known better, who should have known what men were like, or at least what you were like, and I was thrown back into my family again, or confronted with the choice of doing whatever it was I really wanted for myself, and, even there, I sort of no longer knew. Lost my confidence, lost my certainty. So I blamed you for all that.’ She shrugs, glances at me. ‘Not so much now; kind of accepting you just exposed something lacking in me, maybe. Guess it would have surfaced at some point anyway, even if we’d got married and been happy together initially.’

  ‘Yeah, but we were talking about having children by then. That might have changed everything.’

  ‘I suppose. You’d have had your career, I’d have had children to look after, or a balancing act to perform between them and whatever I’d decided I really wanted to do, and we’d have struggled on, not the first couple to tie their fractured lives together with kids.’

  We’re both staring out to sea now, leaning on the wall, elbows on the curved stone top, hands clasped. Jeez, this all sounds so depressing.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘But it might have been…great!’

  El laughs, standing straight and throwing her head back and laughing loud and strong the way I remember her laughing in the old days. She turns her back on the sea, folds her arms and sits against the wall. ‘And there you are, see?’ she says, smiling at me as I turn round too. ‘You say something like that and it feels like…like my heart does a double-take or something, I don’t know.’ She leans, looks down, inspects the path beneath our feet.

  I take a deep breath.

  ‘Look, I think part of me just wants to know you don’t hate me. Part of me just wants your forgiveness so I can feel I’m not that bad a person after all and then I fuck off back out of your life again so I can get on with my own life. That bit of me just wants the onwards-and-upwards stuff, wants to tie up loose ends, make whatever peace needs to be made and then forget about Stonemouth and families and even you – or at least, you-and-me, El and Stu. That element, that…faction wants to regard the first two decades of my life as a…a first stage, like a rocket? Something you need, but then have to discard, let fall away? But the more I think about it, the more that feels like an idiot bit, a childish part of me. And even the onwards-and-upwards shit isn’t looking so attractive these days.’

  El looks at me, raises her eyebrows.

  ‘Oh, I think about what I actually do,’ I tell her, ‘and Ferg’s right: I point lights at big buildings. I’m an exterior decorator fussing over the phallic substitutes of rich boys. I window dress the grotesque status symbols of a kleptocratic worldwide plutocracy, the undeserving elite of the far-too-impressed-with-themselves über rich. It’s exciting, it’s rewarding, it’s well paid and it takes me all over the world, and so long as I don’t actually think about it I have a great time.’

  ‘What,’ Ellie says, ‘and then you think about it?’

  ‘Then I think about it and I think, What the fuck would my young self think of this? I mean, my young self was several tenths an idiot, but at least I had ideals back then.’

  ‘Your young self would appreciate the glitz and the travel and lifting your head to stare up at a night sky fixed into place by a building you’d lit.’

  I take a breath to speak, then sort of trap it inside, look at her. ‘Yes,’ I say, after a moment. ‘Yes it would, he would, I would. But that’s…that’s like a drug rush. It comes, it goes, and then what? It doesn’t sustain.’ I sit back against the wall, like her. ‘And I think back to the last time I felt…connected with myself, all of a piece, and I think of you, I think of when we were together. And—’

  ‘Yeah, but maybe that’s just nostalgia,’ she suggests. ‘Maybe you just associate me with all that. And all that’s gone. All that had to go, one way or the other, because we all have to grow up. Even daft boys. Even you, Stewart.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I admit. ‘I don’t know. It’s all fankled, caught up in itself. Fucked if I can sort it out.’

  We both half stand, half sit there for a while. I know what she’s saying is right, but I know I’m right, too, and this feeling that everything I’ve been doing for the last five years has been somewhat beside the point isn’t going to go away.

  ‘What do you want of me, Stewart?’ she asks eventually, softly. ‘What is it you want to ask me? Or tell me?’

  I stare at the sand, dirt and pebble path beneath us. I take a deep breath and let it out. Oh well.

  ‘I’ll always love you, Ellie. Even if we never see each other again and I find somebody else, and I fall completely in love with her and she becomes the love of my life and we have kids and live happily together for the next sixty years, I’ll still always love you. But I can’t offer you any more than I did before, and I let you down then. I want you to have a great, brilliant, happy life and I don’t know that I’d trust myself to offer anything like that even if you were insane enough to trust me again.’

  I look up at her, half convinced she’s going to be smirking for some reason, half certain that she’ll be staring at me with a look of …I don’t know: disdain, horror, victory, contempt? Instead she just has that calm, steady, serene thing going, washing over me with that elegant, contemplative regard.

  ‘Hmm,’ she says, at last. ‘Sounds like neither of us really knows what the hell we think. What a sound basis for a relationship.’

  I try to read her expression, but I can’t tell if this is entirely sarcasm or not. ‘So,’ I say, clearing my throat. ‘I’ve kind of shown you mine here. How about you?’

  She smiles. ‘I’ve stopped hating you. And I never entirely stopped loving you, even though I probably should have.’ She looks away, back to the hotel. ‘And whether that’s enough for us to be even friends again, never mind anything else …’ She shakes her head. ‘I just don’t know.’ She glances at me. ‘Looks like we’re sort of back to square one again, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose,’ I agree. ‘But then square one for you…that means what?’

  She shrugs. ‘I don’t know: before we knew each other? I don’t know. Maybe when you started coming to the house, coming to see Grandpa.’

  I can’t help smiling. ‘I’d already fallen for you by then. At the Lido, years earlier. Hook, line and sinker, kid.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she says, smiling too. ‘You have told me that.’ She nods. ‘Hook, line and stinker.’

  ‘Stinker?’

  ‘A Grierism. From when she was a kid. Thought that was the phrase.’

  ‘Aha.’

  She looks at me, serious again. ‘I’ll always be part of this family, Stewart.’

  ‘I know.’

  There’s a pause, then she says, ‘The thing about Callum?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He might have been pushed,’ she says, her voice flat. I just look at her. El
shrugs. ‘And he might have deserved it.’

  I think about this. ‘Uh-huh. Okay. So who did the pushing?’

  ‘The boys. Don, possibly.’

  I can’t really take this in. ‘Hold on, wait a minute.’ I put one hand flat on my brow. ‘We are talking about your brother Callum, and the bridge, and your dad—’

  El nods once. ‘We are,’ she says calmly.

  ‘Then—’

  ‘First thing I thought when I heard Callum was dead was that Grier had actioned her plan about accusing him – or threatening to accuse him – of raping her that night in his bed when she was still a kid. But it had gone wrong because he reacted by jumping off the bridge.’ She shakes her head. ‘Unless that was what she wanted, of course, though that may be taking the principle of not putting anything past the girl a bit too far.’

  There’s a pause here, and I could say something, but I’m not going to.

  ‘Anyway,’ she says, in a measured voice, almost tired-sounding voice. ‘As it turns out, Callum…Callum might have been in talks with one of the businesses from Glasgow, the same people who tried expanding into Stonemouth a few years ago, and were …sent homeward to think again,’ Ellie tells me, turning her upper body and looking at me. ‘Maybe. Only maybe, from what I’ve heard, and I’m sure I haven’t heard everything.’ She looks away, back up the slope to the hotel. ‘Seemingly there was some circumstantial evidence, stuff passed on by somebody helpful inside the local police. Connected Callum with one of the firms who thought they’d have a second try, taking over, up here.’ She crosses her arms, hugs herself. ‘The idea seems to have been that Dad and Murdo would be persuaded to retire and Callum would be left in charge, running a sort of franchise operation for the Glasgow boys. Callum was negotiating on that basis over that last year or so and only pulled out when he started to realise neither Don nor Murdo would go quietly and what he was really getting involved with was a deal that would mean killing his dad and his elder brother. At least. And him doing the setting up to make sure this happened. So he broke off the talks.’ Ellie shrugs. ‘Too late, though.’

  I’m staring at her. My mouth is open, and dry. I close it, swallow and say, ‘Fuck,’ which is about all I’m capable of.

  El shrugs. ‘Just rumour,’ she says. ‘Speculation. Stuff I’ve put together, a few drunken asides, guilty looks, one or two hints people have dropped…Including something Grandpa said, in hospital, a few days before he died.’

  I’m still not getting this. ‘But Don…he fucking doted on Callum. Didn’t he?’

  ‘Mm-hmm.’

  ‘I mean, it’s like he still does: keeping the pick-up and the portrait by the door …’

  ‘Hard to know what’s love and what’s…a cover.’

  ‘You still think he might have—’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Ellie says, looking down at the path of beaten earth beneath her feet.

  I blow out a breath, stare at the great stony façade of the hotel at the top of the tiers of steps and terraces. ‘So…Just…business?’

  She laughs. Not loud or long, but it’s still a laugh. Bitter sounding. ‘No, not that,’ she says with a sigh, turning and looking back into my eyes again. ‘Broken trust, Stewart. Betrayal, love scorned. That would easily be enough.’

  My turn to look down at the path.

  She waits for a few moments, then flicks me on my knee with the back of her hand. ‘But I could be wrong. It could all be wrong.’ She flexes, using her backside to push herself away from the wall. ‘Come on; well past time I had a proper drink.’

  I push away too. ‘Amen to that.’

  It’s as we’re walking back up to the hotel that I remember the cute girl with the short black hair who was sitting at the table I visited just before I went to the bar and Donald started talking to me, maybe twenty minutes ago. Maybe it’s all this talk of conspiracy and plotting, but I suddenly remember where that nagging feeling of…whatever it was, came from.

  Not from a quick fling or just a snog from ten or even five years ago – she really would have been far too young – but from a burst of confused conversation from just three nights past. I was very drunk and stoned but I recall she said something about it not being her fault, not these hands, not the famous photographs, and that ‘that girl’ could talk anybody into anything. That was why she was looking at me the way she was, when we were sitting round the table earlier. She must have seen that I’d forgotten about what she said to me at that back-to-whoever’s party on Friday night.

  Relief. She was relieved I’d forgotten.

  Except now I’ve remembered.

  Ellie and I walk back into the half-emptied room where people are still talking, milling, eating and drinking – though there are a lot more cups of tea and coffee around now than before – but the table where the cute girl was sitting has been abandoned and I can’t see her or her friends anywhere.

  There’s no seating plan to consult. I leave Ellie talking to an old Academy pal and tell her I won’t be long. There’s enough of a gossip quorum left in the room. Stonemouth being the size it is, it takes all of five minutes of just asking around to find out who the people at the table were and who the cute girl with the black hair is.

  I even get her phone number. I take another walk outside.

  ‘Tasha?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Stewart Gilmour. We were talking earlier?’

  ‘Oh. Yeah. Hello again. Thought you didn’t remember me.’

  ‘Yeah, we were talking on Friday night, too, weren’t we?’

  ‘Well, yeah. Just…yeah.’

  ‘Tasha, you were saying something about how it wasn’t your fault, it wasn’t your fair hands that took those photos, you know?’

  ‘Yeah. That. Thought you’d forgotten?’

  ‘Well, I almost did. I take it you were one of the kids who had the digital cameras, at Lauren McLaughley and Drew Linton’s wedding, would that be right?’

  ‘Well, yah, obviously. Listen.’

  ‘Uh-huh?’

  ‘I sort of spoke out of turn, you know? Didn’t mean to. I had, like, a couple of drinks? So, it’s not something—’

  ‘Well, I just wanted to ask—’

  ‘No, no, I don’t think I can—’

  ‘Well, look, could we perhaps meet up and—’

  ‘No. No, I don’t think that’s a good idea. Sorry. Look, I have to go now.’

  ‘Tasha, just wait a second, please. You said somebody put you up to it, that she could talk anybody into anything. That was Grier, wasn’t it? You gave the camera to Grier, or let her take it from you, is that right?’

  ‘Uh…Gotta go now, bye.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ I say quietly to an unresponsive phone.

  I think the sheer weight of my own culpability – entirely deserved and duly acknowledged – might have blinded me to just how useful an only slightly guilty conscience, or two, can be.

  I rejoin Ellie at the bar. She appears to have Ferg in tow, which is just as well, as he’s listing.

  ‘Gilmour,’ he says, eyes widening when he sees me, ‘you’ll do. This demented harridan refuses to escort me off the premises for the purposes of smoking.’

  ‘You need escorting, Ferg?’ I ask.

  ‘Trifle unsteady. Nothing a fag, a puff and a stiffener won’t sort. Excuse my entendres. We’re all going off to Mike Mac’s for a dip. You coming? Going to take me outside? Answer the second question first, to quote dear old Groucho.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll take you outside,’ I tell him, holding him by the elbow as El lets go his other arm. I look at Ellie as Ferg sorts his feet out. ‘Mike Mac’s? Really? A “dip”?’

  Ellie shrugs. She reaches up, undoes a couple of buttons on her blouse and pulls the material aside, revealing what must be the top of a light-blue swimming costume. ‘As it happens,’ she says, ‘I’ve come prepared.’

  ‘You were going beach swimming, weren’t you?’ I say, smiling at her.

  ‘Uh-huh.’ She redoes up one of the buttons. ‘S
till might.’

  ‘Are you two quite finished wittering?’ Ferg says, breathing on me. ‘There’s a filter tip to be sucked on here.’

  ‘Come on,’ I tell him.

  ‘See you outside,’ El says. I nod.

  ‘I’m not really that drunk,’ Ferg confides as we pass through the lobby and he tries to work out which way up to hold the packet of Silk Cut so he can extract one. ‘But I’m definitely heading that way. I think I need some medicinal cocaine. That’ll sober me up.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he says as we hit the open air and the hotel steps. Amazingly, there are no fellow puffers congregated. ‘Just prop me up here and I’ll wait while you score. Unless you’ve got some on you now, have you? Have you?’

  ‘No, Ferg.’

  ‘Well, just prop me up here and I’ll wait while you score. Oops.’

  ‘So you said.’ I pick up his lighter and give it back to him. He fumbles with it, drops it again.

  ‘What’s it?’ he says. ‘Gravity’s gone capricious again, fuck it.’

  ‘Let me,’ I tell him. I pull the fag out of his mouth, put it back in the right way round and put the flame to the end, shielding it from the breeze. ‘Ferg, you have to draw in air as I do this? Or it doesn’t work?’

  ‘Hmm? Oh, yes.’

  Between us, finally, we get the cigarette lit and I stick the lighter into his breast pocket.

  ‘Well,’ he says, flapping one hand. ‘Don’t delay!’

  ‘Yeah, you’re going to be a lot of fun this evening,’ I mutter, and leave him propped against one of the porch’s pillars while I go to get Ellie.