Stonemouth

Grier had looked at me like I’d suggested Sub-Optimus Prime, Mr P’s more rubbish but nicer brother, might fly into the room and grant us superpowers. I don’t believe in life after death or reincarnation or anything like that myself, but I’m still thinking about a lot of that stuff and there was a time when I was always prepared to defer to people who really seemed to have made up their minds about it. I was impressed by their certainty, even when it was obviously bollocks. Especially then; it seemed heroic, somehow. Maybe I’m starting to change, though, because increasingly it’s starting to look just stupid.

‘Think that’s our respects paid, yeah?’ Grier says. She dusts her hands. ‘I’m hungry.’

I watch her attacking an all-day breakfast in Bessel’s Café, a few doors down from the funeral parlour. ‘You don’t eat like a model.’

‘Thanks,’ she says. ‘Actually a lot of them eat like this? They just throw it up again five minutes later.’

She raises an index finger to me and waggles it. Fair enough; I’ve had at least one skinny girlfriend I suspected did that. I’m making do with a coffee and a rowie, the region’s own flattened, salty version of a morning roll, designed to keep for a week on a heaving trawler or something, allegedly.

‘You seen Ellie lately?’ I ask her.

‘Day or two ago,’ she says.

‘Where is she these days? Still in Aberdeen?’

‘Rarely. I think she keeps the flat there but she’s mostly living out at that old Karndine Castle place. The one they converted?’

‘Oh yeah.’

The place had still been a ruin when I’d left; an early-Victorian, nouveau-riche monstrosity ten kilometres out of town that was no more a castle than my mum and dad’s house. I’d heard they’d turned it into apartments.

‘She’s got a terribly posh attic,’ Grier tells me, drawing out ‘terribly’ with a sort of exaggerated English drawl. ‘She’s the princess in the tower now.’ A shrug. ‘Pretty much what she always wanted, I suppose.’ Grier sighs, looks away.

‘Is she okay?’

‘She’s fine, Stewart.’ She sounds exasperated now. ‘You can’t ask her yourself?’

I find myself patting the pocket with my phone in it. ‘She changed her number five years ago. Nobody I could get to talk to me would let me have her new one.’

‘Yeah, well, she’s changed it a couple of more times since,’ Grier says. ‘She tends to do that? Clears her life out like that after any …’

‘Trauma? Major event?’ I suggest.

Grier looks at me dubiously. ‘Something like that.’ She cuts a well-fried egg into pieces, stabs them all in turn and shoves the lot into her mouth, looking cross. ‘Kinda surprised she remembers to keep her own family in each new phone,’ she says, after swallowing. ‘You want her number? Only, you can’t say it was me gave it you.’

‘Think she’d talk to me?’

‘It’d be an unknown number.’

‘I mean, if she knew it was me.’

Grier looks thoughtful, shrugs. ‘Hmm,’ is all she’ll say as she gets serious with the rest of her breakfast.

‘She stopped talking to Callum?’

‘Pretty much. Absolute minimum, like “hello, goodbye” at family things. Defriended big time. Not that she Facebooks. El barely emails.’ Grier stirs her first coffee; I’m on my second.

Bessel’s bustles around us, still popular with Stonemouth’s more refined classes after ninety years. Tall mirrors and polished wooden wall panels with concealed lighting at the top look down on bright buggies, young families and old ladies wearing hats. Bessel’s was bought up by the MacAvetts a few years ago. I think. Unless it was the Murstons. Sometimes it feels like half the properties in town belong to the Murstons or Mike MacAvett. This happened almost accidentally at first, apparently, when Don Murston bought a wee shop on the High Street back in the seventies, so Mrs M could indulge her passion for black-velvet nail pictures and dolls of the world in national dress, and to give her something to do. Then, as more leases and freeholds came up in the Toun, Don realised property was relatively cheap, and a good investment. Mike Mac joined in.

‘But yeah,’ Grier says, ‘Ellie wouldn’t be in the same room as Callum for about a year.’

‘Why was that?’

‘He said something hurtful to her,’ Grier tells me. She’s keeping her voice quite low, though the general conversational hubbub, the clamour of clattering cutlery and the scraping of chair legs on the tiled floor makes it hard to hear anything distinct more than a side plate away.

‘That all? Fuck? Must have been a doozy.’

Grier tips her head. ‘You know all the stuff about Ellie?’ she asks quietly.

I think about this. ‘How would I know if I didn’t?’

Grier rolls her eyes and leans in closer over our tiny table, getting me to do the same. ‘I mean, marrying Ryan.’

‘Of course I knew about that.’ The blindingly obviously destined-to-fail marriage to Mike MacAvett’s younger son that only she and Ryan ever thought was a good idea, and maybe not even both of them.

‘The miscarriage?’

I nod slowly. ‘I heard a rumour.’

‘Then divorcing Ryan.’

‘Know of.’

‘Then going back to Aberdeen, to university?’