Stonemouth

‘And what have you brought, eh? Something flash, eh?’ he asks, going to the lounge windows to see what’s in the driveway, once things have settled down a bit and the tears and hugs are out of the way. Mum’s gone to clatter some tea and cakes out of the kitchen, still sniffing (it’s not as though they haven’t seen me since I left; they’ve been to London loads over the last five years and they stayed in my flat this summer when they were flying out to Orlando). ‘Oh,’ Dad says, when he sees the boring blue Ka. He looks at me. ‘You gone all green or something?’

‘Yeah,’ I tell him. ‘Thought I’d save the planet personally so you guys don’t have to.’

Actually I did think of hiring something bigger at the airport, something people would be impressed with as I swept into town, and I was all pumped to get a Mondeo at least, maybe even a Jag or something, but then I thought that might look a bit too flash in the circumstances. I’m not really rich yet, though I get to live like I’m rich, on expenses and with a mortgage on the flat in Stepney. Plus there’s that thing about flaunting it; people are still a bit old-fashioned that way up here, despite everything. Still a bit old-fashioned about a lot of things, frankly. Plus I had to think about what people like the Murstons might think if I looked like I was rubbing their noses in how I’d landed on my feet after getting run out of town. Mr M especially. Five years ago this would never have occurred to me, but I’m mature now.

Anyway, when I landed at Dyce this afternoon, the Ka is what I went for. Aberdeen looked even bigger from the air than I remembered, and you could see the line of the new bypass. Dyce was the usual cramped chaos, and very helicoptery.

Dad just makes that sort of huffing, snorting sound he does, which is his equivalent of ‘Aye, right.’ He’s a ginge, like me, though he’s a good bit shorter, sort of bulkier, and his eyes are brown, not green like mine. His hair’s gone darker and straighter over the years and he keeps it shorter than he used to. Beginning to lose it on top, but then what do you expect in your forties?

‘Ah well, you’ll save money on petrol, eh?’ he concedes, dropping himself into a chair. He looks me in the eye, glances at the door to the hall and drops his voice slightly. ‘You all right to come back, aye?’

‘Met with Powell Imrie. Already been to see Donald,’ I tell him. ‘Reckon I’ll get out of town alive.’

He still looks serious. ‘They were both okay?’

‘Powell was fine. Donald was a bit, well, like Donald. But okay.’

Dad nods. Another kitchen-ward glance, voice dropping a little again. ‘I told Mike you might be coming back for the funeral,’ he says quietly. ‘He’s been saying for a while it was probably okay. Said if there was any trouble to give him a call, eh? Or one of his boys.’ Mike MacAvett is the other Daddy in town. Though when Al — my dad — says ‘his boys’ he doesn’t mean either of Mike Mac’s sons. On the other hand, he doesn’t mean proper, full-on, tooled-up, Mafia-style gangsters, either. We’re not at that point here, not yet, anyway. All a bit more subtle and low-key than that. The Murstons and Mike Mac run their businesses with the minimum of fuss, and no guns. They have the weaponry, but they’ve broken it out only twice in the last fifteen years, as far as I know, when a couple of gangs from Aberdeen and Glasgow thought they might muscle their way in towards what they mistakenly thought looked like easy pickings amongst us hicks up here.

Didn’t work; faced with two long-entrenched and now armed concerns working in frankly startlingly close cooperation with the local cops, they quickly disappeared. Mostly they quickly disappeared straight back down the A90, the way they’d come, but there were strong, believable rumours that a couple went over the side of deepsea trawlers somewhere between the Hebrides and Iceland, or into a fishmeal plant, or beneath multiple layers of replaced rock in worked-out, open-cast coal mines, at least one of these unfortunates meeting their end after some very painful attention from Fraser Murston, who, allegedly, had turned out to be quite creative in the unpleasantness-inflicting department.

Anyway, if you’re talking rival families, the MacAvetts are the Vauxhall to the Murstons’ Ford. Or the Celtic to their Rangers or something … Though not in a religious way; I think they’re both Prods, technically. But you know what I mean.

I say, ‘Thanks, Al,’ though it doesn’t mean too much.