‘Ormiston’s Garage, I suppose.’ Not much point taking the bike home. I tried my phone again. Still broken.
‘Here,’ he said, handing me a big, slightly comical-looking mobile as we drove off. ‘You can give them a call.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. It was one of those ultra-basic mobiles made just for old people: big buttons, clearly marked. ‘Mind if I look in your numbers?’
‘Ye no know the number?’
‘No,’ I said. I didn’t want to add the of course not. Joe tutted, looked amused.
In the end I used directory enquiries.
The bike was a write-off and I wasn’t allowed a new one, not if I wanted to live at home for the next couple of years, before I’d be going to university.
I still had my old mountain bike so I sometimes took that to the nearest forests and hills, though my horizons had definitely shrunk. Joe would ring up some days and offer me a lift to the hills whenever he was heading that way himself. Usually I accepted. He wasn’t always going walking himself, just passing that way, and even when he was taking the dogs for a walk he always encouraged me to head off by myself and just be back at the car by an arranged time.
One day there was only one collie to walk, then, a few months later, none at all. I told him he ought to get new ones, but he said he’d owned too many by now. I didn’t understand, and told him so. He just shrugged and said, ‘Aye, well.’ This was, in retrospect, a lot better than telling me I would understand one day.
Mum and Dad got me a car – a hopelessly underpowered and terribly safe VW Polo – the day I turned seventeen. I passed my test when I was a month older and suddenly I had my freedom again. By then I knew Joe was Joe Murston, father of Donald, and I’d visited the family house on the hill to see him, rather than Callum. It felt more of a duty, to be honest, and the fact that I always stood a chance of bumping into Ellie when I went to see him was a long way from being an irrelevant part of the equation, but I always knew I’d miss him when he went.
I stand in the funeral parlour, looking at him. It’s quiet and cool in here and it smells of lilies: a too-sweet, cloying smell. Old man Murston lies, dressed in a dark, old-fashioned suit, in a flamboyant-looking open casket I suspect he’d have hated. I don’t think I ever saw him wear a tie before. One of those neck things, sometimes; a cravat. His plump face looks like it’s made from shiny plastic and his mouth is wrong: too tight and thin. His body, though still big, looks shrunken somehow, as if the air’s been let out of it.
I’m trying hard to remember some pearls of wisdom Joe might have imparted during our walks together, some deeply meaningful I-think-we’ve-all-learned-something-here-today revelation that I owe to him, but I’m failing.
Mostly we talked about nothing much, or about how it was in the old days: steam trains, having to pay the doctor in the time before the NHS, being able to walk across the river on the decks of trawlers, the war – he was on the farm throughout, producing food for the home front; I got the impression some fun had been had with Land Girls – and nature stuff. Joe taught me a lot of names for trees and birds and animals, but they were the old names, names already slipping from common use, and not really that much help. If a girl said, ‘Is that a cuckoo?’ and you said, ‘Naw, quine, yon’s a gowk,’ you’d generally be looked at aghast, like you were talking a foreign language. Which you kind of were.
Fankle. He taught me a few useful, or at least good words, like fankle. Fankle is more or less a straight synonym of tangle, but it sounds better somehow. Particularly as applied to a fishing line that’s got itself into a terrible, un-sort-outable mess, the level of shambles so extreme all you can really do is take a knife to it and throw it away. That’s a fankle. Applies to lives too, obviously, though the knife approach usually only makes things worse.
It’s just me and Grier in the gently lit back room of the funeral parlour. On the walls are serene paintings of sylvan landscapes, most bathed in the light of golden-red sunsets.
‘How did he die?’ I ask quietly.
‘Heart,’ Grier says.
She goes up to him and runs her fingers through the sandy, wispy hairs on his mostly bald head, patting them into a slightly different arrangement. She uses one finger to press down lightly on the tip of his nose, deforming it slightly before she releases the pressure and it goes back to the way it was.
‘What are you—’
‘Never touched a dead person before,’ she says.
She bends at the waist and quickly kisses him on the forehead. Her dark jacket makes that slidey noise again, quite loud in the insulated silence of the room. I wasn’t sure outdoor jackets were quite the right dress code for such a solemn visit but Grier had pointed out Joe had spent most of his life in baggy country clothes; it used to take weddings and funerals to get him into a suit. He wouldn’t have minded while he was alive, and he couldn’t mind now.
‘You don’t think he’s looking down on us?’ I’d asked.
Grier had looked at me like I’d suggested Sub-Optimus Prime, Mr P’s more rubbish but nicer brother, might fly into the room and grant us superpowers. I don’t believe in life after death or reincarnation or anything like that myself, but I’m still thinking about a lot of that stuff and there was a time when I was always prepared to defer to people who really seemed to have made up their minds about it. I was impressed by their certainty, even when it was obviously bollocks. Especially then; it seemed heroic, somehow. Maybe I’m starting to change, though, because increasingly it’s starting to look just stupid.
‘Think that’s our respects paid, yeah?’ Grier says. She dusts her hands. ‘I’m hungry.’
I watch her attacking an all-day breakfast in Bessel’s Café, a few doors down from the funeral parlour. ‘You don’t eat like a model.’
‘Thanks,’ she says. ‘Actually a lot of them eat like this? They just throw it up again five minutes later.’
She raises an index finger to me and waggles it. Fair enough; I’ve had at least one skinny girlfriend I suspected did that. I’m making do with a coffee and a rowie, the region’s own flattened, salty version of a morning roll, designed to keep for a week on a heaving trawler or something, allegedly.
‘You seen Ellie lately?’ I ask her.
‘Day or two ago,’ she says.
‘Where is she these days? Still in Aberdeen?’
‘Rarely. I think she keeps the flat there but she’s mostly living out at that old Karndine Castle place. The one they converted?’
‘Oh yeah.’
The place had still been a ruin when I’d left; an early-Victorian, nouveau-riche monstrosity ten kilometres out of town that was no more a castle than my mum and dad’s house. I’d heard they’d turned it into apartments.
‘She’s got a terribly posh attic,’ Grier tells me, drawing out ‘terribly’ with a sort of exaggerated English drawl. ‘She’s the princess in the tower now.’ A shrug. ‘Pretty much what she always wanted, I suppose.’ Grier sighs, looks away.
‘Is she okay?’
‘She’s fine, Stewart.’ She sounds exasperated now. ‘You can’t ask her yourself ?’
I find myself patting the pocket with my phone in it. ‘She changed her number five years ago. Nobody I could get to talk to me would let me have her new one.’
‘Yeah, well, she’s changed it a couple of more times since,’ Grier says. ‘She tends to do that? Clears her life out like that after any …’
‘Trauma? Major event?’ I suggest.
Grier looks at me dubiously. ‘Something like that.’ She cuts a well-fried egg into pieces, stabs them all in turn and shoves the lot into her mouth, looking cross. ‘Kinda surprised she remembers to keep her own family in each new phone,’ she says, after swallowing. ‘You want her number? Only, you can’t say it was me gave it you.’
‘Think she’d talk to me?’
‘It’d be an unknown number.’
‘I mean, if she knew it was me.’
Grier looks thoughtful, shrugs. ‘Hmm,’ is
all she’ll say as she gets serious with the rest of her breakfast.
‘She stopped talking to Callum?’
‘Pretty much. Absolute minimum, like “hello, goodbye” at family things. Defriended big time. Not that she Facebooks. El barely emails.’ Grier stirs her first coffee; I’m on my second.
Bessel’s bustles around us, still popular with Stonemouth’s more refined classes after ninety years. Tall mirrors and polished wooden wall panels with concealed lighting at the top look down on bright buggies, young families and old ladies wearing hats. Bessel’s was bought up by the MacAvetts a few years ago. I think. Unless it was the Murstons. Sometimes it feels like half the properties in town belong to the Murstons or Mike MacAvett. This happened almost accidentally at first, apparently, when Don Murston bought a wee shop on the High Street back in the seventies, so Mrs M could indulge her passion for black-velvet nail pictures and dolls of the world in national dress, and to give her something to do. Then, as more leases and freeholds came up in the Toun, Don realised property was relatively cheap, and a good investment. Mike Mac joined in.
‘But yeah,’ Grier says, ‘Ellie wouldn’t be in the same room as Callum for about a year.’
‘Why was that?’
‘He said something hurtful to her,’ Grier tells me. She’s keeping her voice quite low, though the general conversational hubbub, the clamour of clattering cutlery and the scraping of chair legs on the tiled floor makes it hard to hear anything distinct more than a side plate away.
‘That all? Fuck? Must have been a doozy.’
Grier tips her head. ‘You know all the stuff about Ellie?’ she asks quietly.
I think about this. ‘How would I know if I didn’t?’
Grier rolls her eyes and leans in closer over our tiny table, getting me to do the same. ‘I mean, marrying Ryan.’
‘Of course I knew about that.’ The blindingly obviously destined-to-fail marriage to Mike MacAvett’s younger son that only she and Ryan ever thought was a good idea, and maybe not even both of them.
‘The miscarriage?’
I nod slowly. ‘I heard a rumour.’
‘Then divorcing Ryan.’
‘Know of.’
‘Then going back to Aberdeen, to university?’
‘I heard she could still have gone to Oxford.’
‘Yeah, well, we all heard that,’ Grier says. ‘But, leaving at the end of second year?’
‘Oh.’
‘Didn’t graduate. Again. Started a different course; gave that up too.’
‘Didn’t know that.’
Grier sits further forward, her nose only ten centimetres from mine. ‘Big family gathering at the house? Murdo and Fi’s daughter, Courtney, her christening party? Callum was drunk; Ellie was holding the baby at the time, making all the usual cooing noises you have to make.’ Grier stops, nods as though she’s just told me something conclusive, sits back, looks round, then lowers her head to mine again. ‘You really can’t tell anyone I told you this?’
‘Promise.’
‘People were talking about the kid’s future, how it’d cost a fortune if she had to go to university. Then somebody mentioned Ellie, like, in this context? And Callum said, Yeah, well, Ellie never could finish anything she started.’
It takes me a second. Then I take a breath in suddenly. ‘Shit, you mean, like, the baby she lost, not just the … the degree and not graduating?’
Grier hoists one fair eyebrow. ‘Middle name Sherlock. But, yeah; that was what Ellie thought he meant. She was … kind of upset.’
‘You think he did mean it that way, though?’
‘Hard to know with Callum,’ Grier says, thoughtfully. ‘He was stupid enough to say it without realising how she’d take it, but, yeah, he was vicious enough towards her sometimes. Might have thought it through first and meant it.’ She taps the foam from her coffee spoon and raises the cup to her lips. ‘And he was impressed enough with himself, after a few drinks anyway, to think he was being incredibly witty.’
‘Fuck,’ I breathe.
Grier drains her cup. Her little pink tongue flickers, removing foam from her lips. ‘El stormed out. Callum was even more upset,’
Grier says, then looks meditatively towards the high ceiling. ‘Or pretended to be.’ She shrugs. ‘Anyway, Ellie wouldn’t talk to him for a year; wouldn’t even visit the house if she knew he was there or going to turn up.’ Grier stirs the foam in her cup with one finger, sucks the finger. She nods. ‘There you go: that was one of the times she changed her phone.’
‘Jesus,’ I say, lost for anything beyond expressions of shock.
‘Well, that was Callum,’ Grier says, studying her coffee spoon.
‘Mostly he always found it hard to articulate what he felt? But on the rare occasions he did, it was usually something really hurtful.’ She smiles at me.
‘Ahm,’ I say, as she keeps looking at me. ‘Still, I was … I was sorry to hear he …’
‘Fell or was pushed off the bridge?’ she provides.
I must be staring at her. She flaps one hand. ‘Nah; he jumped.’ She sits back. ‘But if you’re telling the truth about being sorry to hear about it, you’re part of a small minority.’ She tips her head. ‘Close your mouth and stop looking so shocked, Stewart. Jesus, have you forgotten what my surname is?’ Without moving her head she flicks her gaze from side to side, sits a little closer and says, ‘How many people in this place have been stealing glances at me, knowing whose daughter I am?’
I clear my throat. ‘It’s mostly men,’ I tell her. Though she’s right. ‘And the reason they’re looking at you has got nothing to do with your father.’
She just laughs.
I remember the preserved four-wheel drive, the giant portrait in the hall of the Murston family home. ‘Your dad misses Callum,’ I tell her.
‘That’s compensation, or a guilty conscience,’ Grier says, quietly. There’s a pause. She shrugs. ‘They fought a lot, just before he hurdled the railings.’
‘Shit,’ I say, because I have no idea what else might cover all the implications here.
‘Oh, he doted on the boy.’ Grier sighs. ‘That’s the way it is in our family. All or nothing. Ellie got all the looks, Murdo got all the … expectation, ruthlessness? Fraser got all the viciousness. Well, most of it. Norrie got all the stuff that was left. Resentment, mostly. And Callum got all the forgiveness. The more stupid things he did, the more Don forgave him.’ Another shrug. ‘Actually Ellie got all the smarts as well. Just maybe not all the application. Think Don still feels she’d be the best one to succeed him, if she could be bothered, which she’s not.’ Grier shifts in her seat. ‘Can we talk about something else besides my … clan now? I’m bored.’
‘What did you get?’
‘What did I get?’
‘What did you get all of ?’
‘All the boredom,’ she says, in a flat voice, eyelids hooded. ‘I just said.’
‘I think you got all the modesty,’ I tell her, grinning at her. ‘All the self-deprecation.’
‘Years of indoctrination,’ she says dismissively. ‘I’ve been groomed for failure. Don keeps the tape of Callum jumping, did you know that?’
‘What?’
‘From the bridge CCTV, night Cal took the plunge. Plays it back when he’s drunk and – what’s that word? Maudlin.’
‘Fuck. That is deeply weird.’
‘Not saying he gets off on it, Stu. Just plays it.’
‘Still a bit weird.’
‘Yeah, well,’ Grier says, before switching to a cutesy little-girl voice: ‘Gotta love my fambly.’ Her voice goes back to normal as she mutters, ‘Kind of compulsory.’ She picks up the bill, frowns at it. ‘You paying or me?’
‘So. Some icing on the cake?’ she asks as we walk back to the car.
‘What?’
‘Coke?’ she says, tapping the side of her nose. Grier hasn’t put her arm through mine since we’ve been in town, I notice. That would be a bit strange, I guess. ?
??Can’t invite you to the house, but there’s a great place up by Stoun Point. Down a lane. Room for only one car. You can park looking out to sea and the whin’s so close people can’t even squeeze past.’
‘Ah,’ I say, tempted. I know the spot, above Yarlscliff; Ellie and I took my wee car up there a few times. ‘Hmm. Better not,’ I tell her. Wouldn’t do to visit Mike Mac off one’s tits. And then, that place Grier’s talking about: it’s kind of hallowed turf. Kind of hallowed turf for me and Ellie the way it’s kind of hallowed turf for half the people in Stonemouth between seventeen and thirty, but all the same. It’d be weird going there with Grier for anything illicit.
An ignoble part of my brain has always had this slightly unscrupulous idea that boils down to If not Ellie, Grier would do, but another, sensible, part of me knows this would be insane. Probably unwelcome (though possibly not) and certainly even more likely to risk further upsetting the already fairly upset Murston clan. Also, Grier’s just dangerous, somehow. She’d be nitro in a cement mixer if her dad was a sandal-wearing social worker, never mind the region’s principal crime lord.
‘Your loss,’ she tells me. ‘It’s good shit.’
‘Some other time.’
‘Might not be such good shit, then,’ she says briskly. ‘Opportunities pass.’
We’re in the Central Car Park, where the old railway station used to be. She stops, comes right up to me and jabs me in the chest with one finger. ‘Again, no gossiping, yeah? Swore to Dad I’d never do drugs.’ She grins widely. ‘Hilariously hypocritical, eh?’
‘Hilarious,’ I agree.
My phone goes and I let her get into the car while I answer. It’s Mike Mac, telling me he’s busy through to five; see me then? So I’ve got time to kill this afternoon. Another karmic nudge? Maybe I ought to go do a few lines with Grier. She’s watching me through the glass, tapping her fingers theatrically on the steering wheel. The engine’s already running.
I look through those earlier texts. One from BB suggesting a game of snooker at Regal Tables, just a couple of minutes’ walk away on the High Street. I hold a wait-a-moment finger up to Grier, who raises then drops her shoulders dramatically, and throws herself back in her seat. I call BB.