Stonemouth

‘No tryin to marry you,’ Murdo said, at the same party, in the hallway, just before Ellie and I were about to leave. He laid one heavy hand on my shoulder. Beery breath.

‘Sorry, Murdo?’ I said.

‘No tryin to say that’s you married as far as we’re concerned, like. You’ll be goin to uni, aye?’

‘Aye,’ Norrie said, suddenly at my other side. ‘A clever cunt.’

‘Glasgow,’ I said. I thought the better of trying to explain the difference between university and art school.

Murdo slapped me hard on the back. ‘There you are! There you are! Who knows, eh? Just sayin: don’t take the piss. That’s all.’ He slapped me on the back again. ‘Away ye go now; youse kids have fun.’

So we became an item. We became Stewart and Ellie, or Ellie and Stewie, or Stu and El. I think we were even Stullie or Stellie or something for a while, when we were all giving ourselves Branjelinastyle, two-for-one collective names. That didn’t stick, thankfully.

And at some point — maybe after a year, when we were still seeing each other and still staying faithful to each other, even though I was in Glasgow and she was in Aberdeen, and we were meeting new people all the time, and developing both within ourselves and as parts of quite different communities — I think we both realised this might indeed be something genuinely serious; something, maybe, for ever.

I’d fallen for a glance, smitten with her skin and her hair and the way she moved, but I’d come to love her for all the things that made her who she truly was, and those came from deeper inside, from her character, from her mind. That first, instinctive, surface-struck besotting had been absurd in its own way, but it had been accurate, it had been right. (I blurted this out to her once and she thought about it and said, yes, she felt the same way; she’d just thought I was cute and sort of brashly fun at first, but then discovered that — being generous — maybe there was a little more to me than that. She smiled, telling me this, and I briefly feigned being insulted, while actually happy and secure in the knowledge I was merely being teased.)

And, it felt, other people had picked up on this sea-change, too. There were no more team talks from the Murston brothers and people seemed to assume that we’d be together next year — we got joint invitations to weddings nine or ten months in the future. I was invited to dinners at the Murston family house, and I was sort of obliquely informed, first by Dad, later by Mike Mac himself, that Ellie and I had his blessing too.

‘Aye,’ Mike MacAvett said, sipping a G&T at a party of Mum and Dad’s where I seemed to have been deemed drinks steward, ‘at one point we thought maybe Josh and Ellie …’ He shrugged, looked pleasantly bemused. ‘But no. Still looking for a lassie, that boy.’

Last I’d heard — from Ferg, naturally — Josh was in London looking for buff studs with interesting piercings and independently suspended disco muscles under spray-on T-shirts, but I didn’t like to say.

So Ellie and I had become a couple, in the eyes of those around us as well as in our own heads, and our match, our partnership, had started to be factored into webs of relationships that extended far beyond us, and deep into the clouded waters of Stonemouth’s surprisingly tightly controlled little society.

I don’t think either of us would have been human if we hadn’t come to resent this, at least a bit, and to chafe against it. Still, we had each other, about every second weekend or so, and for longer during the holidays, both abroad and back in the Toun.

I asked her to marry me in a fit of romantic enthusiasm on Valentine’s Day 2005. Until then we’d only talked about living together and whether we’d double-barrel our children’s names. Maybe because my mum and dad’s marriage had seemed pretty happy, while the Murston house had apparently always rung to screaming arguments and slamming doors, I’d generally been more pro-marriage than she had, at least in theory.

For a while in my mid-teens the very idea of marriage had seemed like the most stupidly old-fashioned thing in the world, a slightly embarrassing relic of days gone by and basically pretty pointless unless you were some sort of deeply religious eccentric who actually took all that God and Ten Commandments stuff seriously. It wasn’t so much that so many people in our class came from families where the parents hadn’t bothered to get married; it was more that so many came from families where they had bothered, but then split up and got married again. And again and again, in some cases, though I’d noticed the enthusiasm for marriage seemed to tail off in those who exposed themselves to it repeatedly. If you were the bright and breezy sort you’d put this down to them finally finding the right person after years of effort, but if you were the gloomy type you’d reckon they’d just given up trying.