So – or maybe just Anyway – he got himself a girlfriend. Which was fine, in principle.
Josh had driven us here in his RAV 4, with Ferg and Logan crammed into the back sitting on the cases of beer, Ferg complaining loudly about not being able to get his seat belt fastened properly and worrying about whiplash if we were rear-ended. (Much, frankly childish, sniggering at the mention of rear-ending.)
Back then you could just drive down onto the beach using the slipway at the end of the Promenade and head all the way up to the Brochty Burn. Then too many people started doing it, a lot of litter was left behind on the sands, there was even – dear God! – talk of young people taking drugs and having sex up there. Respectable older folk complained and the council locked off the slip. The RNLI have keys to the bollards if they want to access the beach from there and so do the council, obviously, but gone are those carefree days otherwise.
We could see the fire from about a kilometre out of town: a tiny wavering speck in the distance, almost lost in the darkness. By the time we drove up close enough to feel its heat, the only lights visible from Stonemouth were a couple of floods on the harbour wall and the sweeping beam of the lighthouse on the rocks beneath Stoun Point. We joined the party by the great fire to shouted hellos, cheers – cheers that increased when they saw how much beer we’d brought – and offers of pills and joints.
The swimmers wrapped themselves in towels and blankets, joining the others, maybe thirty or so, in the habitable zone a couple of metres out from the edge of the crackling, spitting fire. Any closer and you roasted; any further out and it started to get chilly. It was early August and it had been a perfect, hot day, but the clear sky was letting the day’s warmth beam away into space, there was a breeze blowing and, in the end, this was north-east Scotland, not southern California.
It was the last summer we’d all be together, between High School and the various gap years, universities, colleges and jobs we were all bound for. We were all eighteen, or close to it. People could drive, drink legally and even have sex with somebody younger than themselves without risking jail and a reputation as a paedo. Every class, every year – amongst those from the reasonably well off in the West, anyway – had a summer like that, I guess, but – doubtless again like them – we felt this was something both unique to us and yet somehow our natural right, our destiny. We’d even had a proper Prom night, the first year in school to have one of these as something officially sanctioned.
‘We just called it the school dance,’ Dad had said grumpily, when I’d bounced into the kitchen all happy with this exciting news, months earlier. I remember being slightly shocked; I’d heard of so many dads proving how old and boring they were by telling their kids things like ‘That’s not even music,’ and ‘You’re not going out dressed like that,’ and so on, but I’d always been proud that my dad was – by parent standards, so admittedly not a particularly high bar – quite cool. I mean, he even liked rap, and not just Eminem. We were still a couple of years away from the point when we really parted company culturally, when he just couldn’t see that Napoleon Dynamite was one of the funniest movies ever made.
In the end, no matter how cool he is, your dad is still your dad.
I handed the J back, coughing. ‘What is this, dried seagull shit?’
‘Oh, shut up and wait for the pills to kick in,’ Ferg told me, and lay back with his hands under his head, puffing towards the stars and trying to make a smoke ring.
I kept looking over at Ellie. She was sitting with Josh MacAvett.
They sat close, on towels, her hair still glistening darkly. Ellie and Josh were sort of going out. Only sort of; goss had it they weren’t actually doing it, probably because Ellie was holding off. She was widely believed still to be a virgin: an unusual, even eccentric choice for a pretty girl in our circle, never mind somebody with a credible claim to being the most ravishingly gorgeous young woman in town. But this was the girl Josh had asked out and actually stuck with, and without even asking me: teach me to worship from afar and not actually tell any of my pals I thought she might be The One, for fear of the inevitable scorn.
Ellie. Of all people. I mean, for fuck’s sake.
Josh was handsome in a Daniel Craig way (not that DC had become the new Bond at this point – it was Ferg who pointed out the similarity a couple of years later); it was gnawingly frustrating for me to see the two of them sitting close like that, laughing quietly together, especially as they looked made for each other. They’d been together all the summer so far and just looked relaxed and easy in each other’s company.
Fuck it, she was supposed to be mine! I’d hardly talked to her, barely touched her – a handshake, once; a brush of cheek against cheek at her birthday earlier that year, and a few formal hugs, the ones where you only sort of hug from the shoulders and exchange light pats on the back, so you’re lucky if you even feel any press of breast against your chest. (Still, I breathed in the exquisite smell of her each time, filling my lungs with her scent, keeping it in until I felt dizzy with the trapped force of it.)
This was when we were all supposed to be at our most free, wasn’t it? Between school and the rest of our lives. Everything was meant to be fluid, all sorts of experimentation was supposed to be indulged. I was young, smart, good-looking. I had green eyes before which women tended to melt. (Not claiming any moral superiority or anything here, just stating a fact.) I deserved at least a sporting chance to capture the girl, and now, this summer, ought to be my best shot, but I wasn’t being allowed; Ellie and Josh looked like a done deal.
I couldn’t believe life could be so unfair.
Even the adults were in on this and had opinions about it; Ellie and Josh were practically public property. I mean, Mum knew Josh; she taught him at school, but this was more than that; even my dad knew.
‘Aye, I’ve heard. Could be a good thing,’ he said, over the Sunday dinner table, after I’d mentioned something about the happy couple. Mum looked at Dad. He shrugged. ‘Dynastic marriage, kinda thing,’ he told her. Mum looked distinctly sceptical. ‘Two important families in the town,’ he went on defensively. ‘Nobody’s interest to have them at each other’s throats. Alliance like this, this generation getting… What?’
It looked like one of those frustrating moments when something passed between Mum and Dad that I still couldn’t read. Mum might have shaken her head, just very slightly. Dad made a tiny grunting noise. They changed the subject, swiftly.
Meanwhile: Marriage? I was thinking, horrified. Who the fuck said anything about fucking marriage?
And later, from the kitchen, I overheard Dad saying, ‘… Mike best pleased …’
Mum said, ‘Parents often don’t, especially dads. Trust me, hon; teachers… sometimes before the kid does themself.’
Dear God, Ellie was beautiful. Firelight on a beach under the stars will improve pretty much anybody’s looks, obviously, but even so, the girl was just startlingly beautiful: eye-wideningly beautiful; breath-sucked-out-of-you beautiful; the kind of beautiful that can make a grown artist weep because you know you will never, ever quite capture the full, boundless totality of it, that it will always lie beyond you, no matter how closely you look or how well you attempt to express it, in any medium known to humankind.
That sculpted, bounteous, quietly smiling face, those cheekbones, those wide dark eyes, and those lips; even her nostrils and ears, all those sweet dark curled spaces and perfectly scrolled and rounded edges of exquisitely smooth, honey-hued skin, turning inwards.
There were times when Ellie looked like some ethereal Scandinavian goddess, others – especially in certain lights, her tan skin against a pale background and her hair water-dark – when she took on something that had to be from her mother, who’d come from a Roma family: a startling, earthy, gypsy look. It was a bewildering, almost contradictory mix of appearances, sometimes flipping from one to another almost as instantly as in one of those perception tests where one second you see the outline of a vase, the next yo
u’re looking at two faces in silhouette.
I felt I was about to start moaning or something, if I hadn’t inadvertently already, so I looked away.
Ferg was lying, gazing at me, an odd expression on his face. He turned his head languorously, taking in the handsome huddle that was Josh and Ellie, then looked back at me.
‘Jealous, Gilmour?’ he drawled.
‘Envious,’ I conceded.
He sighed, sat up, looked at the stub of J and flicked it into the fire. He jumped to his feet. ‘Restless,’ he said. He nodded his head to one side. ‘Walk with me, Stewart, why don’t you?’
I took another look at Ellie and Josh as their laughter sounded out round the fire, vanishing into the dark airs, then I got up too. ‘Might as well.’
We sauntered down the beach, keeping to the firm sand just up from where the waves were breaking. Ferg lit a cigarette, an American brand he got from a specialist tobacconist in Aberdeen. He sucked on the anorexically slim pale tube and blew the smoke out again immediately. He was almost the only one of us who smoked anything other than dope; he claimed it was because it just looked so good, and anyway he didn’t inhale.
When we were well into the darkness, beyond the glow of the fire, the thumping music a sequence of dull thuds behind us, he said, ‘Kind of cuntstruck with Ellie, are we?’
‘Well, I am,’ I admitted. ‘If you want to put it like that. I mean, like, so romantically.’
‘Yeah, well, we’re all cockstruck, cuntstruck or both,’ Ferg said tiredly, sounding like some archaic roué looking back on a now-spent life of outrageous debauchery, rather than a spotty-faced eighteen-year-old with the ink barely dry on his Sixth Year Studies certificate. That was all right, though; I felt that way myself sometimes. Ferg studied the end of his cigarette. ‘Pity about Josh, in a way, then, I suppose,’ he said.
‘Thing is,’ I said, ‘I like Josh. Can’t even wish him dead in a car crash or something. Especially as I’m liable to be in the same car,’ I added, having just thought this through.
‘Well, it’s been handy for both of them,’ Ferg said, sighing, looking out to sea.
‘What? What’s been handy for who?’
Ferg turned to me and we stopped. I could just about see his teeth as he smiled. ‘Have you ever thought you might be even slightly gay, Stewart?’
‘Meh,’ I said, waving one hand. ‘Yeah, but no. Definitely not.’
‘How do you know if you haven’t tried?’
‘Dude, I haven’t tried chlamydia, but I don’t want that either.’
Ferg placed one finger gently on my chest, just below the hollow of my neck. ‘I might be able to do you something of a favour, young Gilmour,’ he told me.
I looked down at the finger, still resting on my skin. ‘Ferg,’ I laughed, ‘are you hitting on me?’
‘No,’ he sighed. ‘But I do demand a kiss.’ He gazed into my eyes. ‘Just one. A token price, for the service about to be rendered.’
‘Ferg, you’re my best pal—’
‘More than Josh?’
‘More than Josh, probably, though don’t tell him, but yes. But I don’t want to kiss you.’
‘I know you don’t want to; I’m asking you to fucking pucker up and bear it, for your best friend, for somebody who’d love to be more than that but is reluctantly resigned to never being any more than that, and also to make me feel better. And to provide some small, trivial, purely symbolic payment for the favour to be conferred, as aforesaid.’
‘Drug coming on, is it?’
‘Yes. Please don’t change the subject. Kiss me.’
‘What is this favour?’
‘Can’t tell you. Might not work, might not happen. If it doesn’t you’ll never know. If it does you’ll thank me later. Don’t be a cunt, Stewart; kiss me. I swear it’ll lead to something better, or at least the chance of it. Take it.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘But no tongues.’
‘Of course tongues, you idiot,’ Ferg said, grasping me by the back of the neck and bringing our mouths together.
I did sort of open and there was some tongue action, but I was distracted, wondering if we could be seen from the fire. We both wore jeans and white or pale shirts, so we might be quite visible, even though we were a few minutes’ walk away. What if Ellie saw this? She’d never fancy me. Would she? Ferg and I were sort of side-on to the fire. I thought about manoeuvring us round so one of us had our back to the fire, making a smaller target, as it were. Ferg’s face was quite scratchy and his breath smelled of smoke. My mouth was a little dry, probably because of the pill, despite the amount of Ferg’s saliva that his poking, rolling, probing tongue seemed to be bringing with it. This actually wasn’t quite as gross as it might have been, but it was no turn-on either. Nice aftershave – Ferg always had good aftershave – but still that very scratchy sensation. I wondered why girls ever let boys kiss them.
Ferg pulled away with a sigh. He’d raised himself a little to sort of kiss down on me but now he came off his tiptoes, back to level ground. He shook his head and sighed again. ‘No, your heart really isn’t in it, is it, my love?’
‘Neither’s anything else,’ I said, wiping my mouth. ‘Sorry.’
Another sigh. ‘You can be such a lunk sometimes, Stewart.’
‘Sorry. But, dude, I did let you kiss me.’
‘Oh, let’s head back.’
Later, when we were mostly all pretty much blissed out and the fire was smaller, quieter, more orange and red rather than yellow, and the music had gone all old-school trancey and a few couples had drifted off to the nearest dunes holding hands and blankets, Ferg was talking to Ellie and Josh.
I talked to various people – only about half were left, and half of them looked fast asleep – then sort of drifted off to sleep myself for a short while, then woke up and saw that Ferg was still talking to Josh and Ellie.
I wandered off to the rough area of long dune grass where we’d all agreed to pee, came back, washed my hands in the diminishing, retreating surf and found the three of them laughing.
‘Come on,’ Ferg said to Josh, and they both rose. ‘It’s a challenge.’
‘Where to?’ Josh asked, holding one hand over his eyes as he looked down the beach in the darkness.
‘To wherever one of us can’t run any more and has to stop for breath, or gets a stitch or something.’
‘We could end up back in town!’ Josh laughed.
‘Yeah, right,’ Ferg said. He took the packet of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, threw them and his phone to me as I approached.
‘Look after these. No peeking at my contacts.’ He looked like he was about to take something out of his back pocket too, but changed his mind.
‘Okay,’ I said, stopping and looking down at Ellie. She glanced up at me from her blanket with a sort of wary smile.
She was holding a white handkerchief. She let it go.
‘Go!’ she said, and the guys raced off. They disappeared beyond the fire’s dimmed glow in seconds. The first thin sliver of a new moon let you see where they were for about half a minute, but then they were gone, lost to the darkness somewhere between the ghostly creasings of the breaking waves and the sensed round bulk of the line of dunes.
It seemed like the obvious thing to do, so I sat down beside Ellie.
‘Okay?’ I asked, leaving it open whether this meant, Okay to sit down? or How are you?
‘Hey, Stewart,’ she said, making more room for me.
I put my hand over my eyes, the way Josh had, looked into the darkness. ‘Nope, disa—’ I started to say, as she said,
‘What are you shield—?’
We both stopped. ‘I was saying—’
‘Oh, I was just—’
I sighed. ‘Sorry. What … what were you saying?’
She looked amused. ‘I wondered what you were shielding your eyes from.’
‘Ah, yeah.’ I squinted up to the near-nothing moon. ‘Hardly moonlight. The fire. Your radiance?’
She
looked at me. I shrugged. ‘You’re facing the fire.’ I told her. ‘I guess you must just have a high albedo.’
She looked startled, though there was just enough of a delay for me to think she was loved up, or on something. I was kind of coming down by this point.
‘I must have a high what?’ she said. ‘How would—?’
Shit. First we talk across each other, clumsy as children at their first dance, then I produce the most stilted, pathetic, over-the-top compliment known to teen-kind and then I come out with a technical term – a fucking technical term from astronomy, for the love of God. How to chat up a girl, Stewart. Oh – dear holy fuck – and now I’ve just realised she thought I said she must have a high libido. Oh for fucking fuck’s sake. Why wait for a girl to shoot you down in flames when you can do it so easily yourself ? Don’t just shoot yourself in the foot, Stewart, wait until it’s lodged firmly in your mouth first.
‘Albedo,’ I told her. I had my eyes closed by now. I couldn’t bear to watch this. ‘It means—’ I paused for a moment. What did it mean again exactly? It referred to how much light an object reflects, I was fairly sure. The moon: it has quite a high albedo, so it looks white. The romantic moon. Oh, give up. What was the point?
‘Shininess, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Something like that?’ My eyes flicked open. She was gazing up, towards the moon. ‘Like … hmm.’ There was so little moon to see, you almost had to know where to look.
‘Yeah,’ I said.
I was as impressed with girls who knew this sort of shit as your average girl was unimpressed with guys who did. Brains as well as beauty. Oh, fuck; I’d already fallen in love with her peerless good looks, her flawless skin, her stunning figure and the bit between her legs and now I was falling for the bit between her ears as well. I was fucking doomed.
‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘I was just wondering when we’ll see them again.’ I nodded. ‘Josh and Ferg.’
She looked to where the guys had disappeared.
‘Could be a while,’ she said, smiling.