Stonemouth

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?’