Stonemouth

He was one of the poorer kids in our class, from the — to us at least — notorious Urbank Road on the Riggans estate, Stonemouth’s least salubrious address, the sink locale where the council put all the problem families. Wee Malky came from one of those families you needed a diagram and some draughting skills to describe properly; he lived with his mum and three half-brothers and two halfsisters, and, while the children didn’t quite all have different fathers, the details got fearsomely complicated after that, especially if you included all the children in other households with shared parentage.

The men in his mum’s life were subject to a high degree of churn, some staying a night, some a few weeks and some a few months, usually just long enough to get her pregnant before leaving. Though the way Wee Malky described it, it was more sort of drifting off again — just like they’d drifted in in the first place — rather than anything as directed and deliberate as actually ‘leaving’. Wee Malky loved his mum and thought all this stuff was just sort of romantically bohemian, rather than, as we did, pure skanky.

There was a husband — Wee Malky’s dad — but he was in Peterhead prison, where he’d been since shortly after Wee Malky was born. He sounded like a very angry man; he’d been on a road-repair crew with the council and killed a guy who was supposedly his best friend by knocking him half unconscious and stuffing him head-first into a big tub of molten tar on the back of the lorry.

He usually got about halfway through his sentence before he did something in prison that got him another two or three years added on. Wee Malky had a complicated relationship with his dad, even though he’d never met him outside of prison, and then only a half-dozen times; it was like he blamed him for abandoning his mum, but wanted to love him, too.

The only way to get Wee Malky really upset was to diss his dad. Callum Murston once asked Wee Malky if his mum had moved to Stonemouth to be handy for Peterhead and the prison and Wee Malky just went berserk; he flew at Callum like something out of a catapult and had to be prised off him. Callum was bigger and stronger but he’d been taken by surprise and just overwhelmed. Wee Malky was sobbing, gasping, quivering. I was one of the four kids it had taken to pull him off Callum and I’d never seen anybody so upset.

Callum was left bruised and with a badly bitten ear. He clearly wasn’t happy about getting attacked like that and, a couple of playtimes later, Wee Malky got marched round the back of the bike sheds and given a good kicking by Callum and his older brother Murdo. Some twisted form of honour appeared to have been satisfied with this, and nobody ever referred to the incident again, not in public anyway.

The Ancraime family were at the opposite end of the Stonemouth class spectrum: toffs with a big house and an estate that started on the outskirts of town — with a gatehouse and high stone walls and everything — and disappeared over the horizon, taking in woods, hills, lochs, forests, moors and mountains.

The original Ancraime fortune had come from now-exhausted coal mines that riddled the land and eventually ran out under the sea. A series of catastrophic mine floodings in the 1890s led to something close to ruin just as the Ancraimes were embarking on the most extravagant part of the house remodelling and estate landscaping. They sold off a lot of land; what they have now seems vast but it’s only a third of what they used to own. What the families of the drowned miners did to survive seems not to have been recorded.

Death duties nearly ruined the Ancraimes a second time but they’re rich again now; income from gas and oil pipelines crossing their estate, and from the deep-water terminal at Afness, keeps the coffers filled, and all that barren-looking, unproductive land climbing into the Cairngorms west of the house, which until now had only been good for stalking stags and shooting grouse, turns out to be ripe for wind farms. The studies have been done, the wind speeds measured and the land surveyed; there are a few local objectors, but really it’s just a matter of waiting for the planning proposals to go through the relevant council committees and getting the nod from the Secretary of State.

The family is understood to be quietly confident in this regard.

The Ancraimes had children within our age range — we were all about thirteen or fourteen at the time — but they went to private schools. The rest of us had any contact with the family only because Ancraime Senior had some sort of business dealings with the Murstons and the MacAvetts, and had invited both men to shoot and fish on his estate. Josh MacAvett had become friendly with Hugo Ancraime when Hugo was back from school one Easter, and when Hugo was home for the summer holidays that year a bunch of us hung out together, usually cycling out along the Loanstoun road to the Ancraime estate and exploring it.