Stonemouth

I was fifteen. She was a year younger. She’d gone before I recovered the composure even to think of actually talking to her. I wouldn’t see her again for nearly a year, wouldn’t touch her or really talk to her for over another twelve months beyond that, and our first kiss was even further over the horizon, lost in the mists, but I knew then that we belonged together. I wanted her. More than that: I wanted to be wanted by her. More than that, too: I needed her to be part of my life, the major part. I was that certain, just with that look, that smile.

It seems crazy now. It seemed crazy then — you can’t decide you’ve found your life’s desire, your sole soulmate on the strength of a glance, on the swing of some hair, whether you’re fifteen or fifty — but when something like that hits, you don’t have much choice. I was barely more than a kid and scarcely able to think straight enough to know something like that, but I felt it: the impulsive, cast-in-iron, decision-making part of my being presented this as a stone-cold unshakeable certainty, valid in perpetuity from this point on, before, it felt, my rational, conscious mind could get a chance to think on it or even comment; every part of me apart from my brain got together and told the grey-pink hemispherical bits that this was just the way it was.

I didn’t even say anything to my friends, though some said they saw a change in me from then on. Hindsight, maybe. Maybe not.

Hindsight. What we all wouldn’t give …

Yeah, well.

‘Weird, isn’t it? All these years flying in and out of Dyce on family holidays and such, and I never made the connection with throwing dice, and dicing with death, and shit like that. It was always just where you flew from if you lived up here on the cold shoulder of Scotland. Wonder if the name gives nervous flyers the cold sweats?’

‘Well done, Stewart, you’ve discovered homonyms.’

‘Homonymphs?’

Ferg looks at me, suspicious but uncertain. I flap one hand against his shoulder. ‘Ha ha, just kidding.’

We’re in The Howf now, our other regular drinking hole from the old days, closer to the docks and the rough end of town. The Howf has kept the same name for nearly half a century, so it can be done. It had a garden — who knew? — or at least a sloped bit of yard at the back, which they started to use for anything other than barrel storage only when the smoking ban came in. Decking, garden furniture, an only slightly leaky perspex roof. The sit-ooterie, it’s called. High stone walls all round, not overlooked by any what-you-might-call inhabited windows. Became the favoured toking spot for Stonemouth’s stoners the evening it opened; busy tonight.

Slaves to tradition, Ferg and I are in a corner, sitting on those wobbly, white-plastic, one-piece chairs you see in back gardens and downmarket resorts throughout the world. We’re passing a J back and forth, occasionally jostled from behind by the people swirling around us on the decking, all chatting and laughing and shouting. Our drinks — my barely begun bottle of Staropramen, his half-downed pint of snakebite and what remains of a large voddy — are perched on the wooden railing in front of us. On the ground on the far side of the railing, beneath orange floods caped with haar, ten or so people are bobbing around silently, earbudded up to the same remote source of music. Looks weird.

One of the girls who’s bopping glances up at me and smiles. It’s lovely Haley, who I was talking to earlier, on the walk from the last pub to here. Wee sister of Tiger Eunson. With an even wee-er sister called Britney, not yet of an age. Tiger is really Drew and called Tiger not because of anything to do with golf but because of some bizarre, bowel-related experiment involving Guinness, years ago, when we all first started drinking. Never worked. The experiment, I mean. He’s in work, a butcher in one of the Toun’s besieging ring of Tescos.

Anyway, I thought we were getting on really well, me and Haley. That smile from the girl confirms it. Typical. And me meaning to stay pure and devoted to Ellie this weekend, because I’m still hoping we’ll bump into each other, Ellie and me, and if and when that does happen, then who knows? Because it’s still unfinished between us, I don’t care what anybody else thinks or tries to enforce. Even she might think it’s all done, tied off, in the past, but how does she really know that? I’d just need to talk to her, to let her know how I still feel …