Stonemouth

‘Yeah, well,’ Grier says, before switching to a cutesy little-girl voice: ‘Gotta love my fambly.’ Her voice goes back to normal as she mutters, ‘Kind of compulsory.’ She picks up the bill, frowns at it. ‘You paying or me?’

‘So. Some icing on the cake?’ she asks as we walk back to the car.

‘What?’

‘Coke?’ she says, tapping the side of her nose. Grier hasn’t put her arm through mine since we’ve been in town, I notice. That would be a bit strange, I guess. ‘Can’t invite you to the house, but there’s a great place up by Stoun Point. Down a lane. Room for only one car. You can park looking out to sea and the whin’s so close people can’t even squeeze past.’

‘Ah,’ I say, tempted. I know the spot, above Yarlscliff; Ellie and I took my wee car up there a few times. ‘Hmm. Better not,’ I tell her. Wouldn’t do to visit Mike Mac off one’s tits. And then, that place Grier’s talking about: it’s kind of hallowed turf. Kind of hallowed turf for me and Ellie the way it’s kind of hallowed turf for half the people in Stonemouth between seventeen and thirty, but all the same. It’d be weird going there with Grier for anything illicit.

An ignoble part of my brain has always had this slightly unscrupulous idea that boils down to If not Ellie, Grier would do, but another, sensible, part of me knows this would be insane. Probably unwelcome (though possibly not) and certainly even more likely to risk further upsetting the already fairly upset Murston clan. Also, Grier’s just dangerous, somehow. She’d be nitro in a cement mixer if her dad was a sandal-wearing social worker, never mind the region’s principal crime lord.

‘Your loss,’ she tells me. ‘It’s good shit.’

‘Some other time.’

‘Might not be such good shit, then,’ she says briskly. ‘Opportunities pass.’

We’re in the Central Car Park, where the old railway station used to be. She stops, comes right up to me and jabs me in the chest with one finger. ‘Again, no gossiping, yeah? Swore to Dad I’d never do drugs.’ She grins widely. ‘Hilariously hypocritical, eh?’

‘Hilarious,’ I agree.

My phone goes and I let her get into the car while I answer. It’s Mike Mac, telling me he’s busy through to five; see me then? So I’ve got time to kill this afternoon. Another karmic nudge? Maybe I ought to go do a few lines with Grier. She’s watching me through the glass, tapping her fingers theatrically on the steering wheel. The engine’s already running.

I look through those earlier texts. One from BB suggesting a game of snooker at Regal Tables, just a couple of minutes’ walk away on the High Street. I hold a wait-a-moment finger up to Grier, who raises then drops her shoulders dramatically, and throws herself back in her seat. I call BB.

‘Stu?’

‘You at the Regal?’

‘Aye. Playing with maself here, man; it’s shite. You comin, like?’

‘There in five.’

‘Pint?’

‘Just the auto-e for me.’

‘Shagger Landy it is.’

I open the X5’s passenger door. ‘Stuff to do,’ I tell Grier. ‘Laters?’

‘Funeral, if not before,’ Grier says, looking unimpressed. ‘Call.’

8

Regal Tables, Stonemouth’s premier snooker and American Pool venue for over thirty years, occupies an old cinema on the High Street. BB — a generously upholstered latter-day Goth with multiple piercings to ears and nose — is cradling a pint and looking pensive by a set-up snooker table when I arrive. We decide a full-size snooker table looks too daunting at this time on a Saturday afternoon and arrange to play pool instead.

‘Sup yersel, then, Stewart?’ BB asks.

I’m sure we went through all the catching-up stuff last night but we go through it again now. I’m doing okay. BB is unemployed after losing his job with the council Parks Department, back living with his parents.

‘No easy bein a Goth in the Parks Department,’ he tells me at one point, sadly.

‘Really?’

‘You’re outside a lot. Hard to avoid a tan.’

‘Aye, I suppose.’

There are about twenty tables in the place, only about a quarter of them lit and occupied: little oases of light in the sea of darkness that is the giant hall. BB and I are just starting our second game when I see a group of four guys come in and stand at the distant pool of light that is the reception bar, and look towards us. They collect their box of balls and saunter over. Two are big, heavy-set guys, one is kind of normal and the other one’s wee and nervy-looking. I get a bad feeling about them pretty much instantly. They take the table next to ours. Looking around, no other two groups of players are on adjacent tables, or need to be.

‘Best table, eh?’ the wee one says, glancing round. Must have seen me looking.

‘Aye,’ I say.