Stonemouth

Some of us had prior knowledge of the place, built up covertly over the years by climbing walls and sneaking around, trying to avoid gamekeepers and estate workers. At least one of the keepers was, allegedly, not above firing his shotgun at kids, so long as they weren’t so close he might actually kill them, and most of us who’d ventured onto the estate had been chased at some time, or at least yelled at and run off.

Nobody could prove they’d ever been fired at — nobody ever produced any shotgun pellets they’d had to dig out of their backside or anything — but we definitely knew people who’d been shot at and the whole Ancraime estate was basically forbidden territory. So it was quite cool to be there with permission and explore the place at our leisure.

Hugo Ancraime was a lanky boy with fair hair, blue eyes, fine features and an English accent. That was how to wind Hugo up: accuse him of being English because he talked the way upper-class Scots who’ve been to private schools tend to, i.e. with no real trace of any Scottish accent, never mind a regional North-East or Stonemouth accent.

‘Fack off; my family’s been here for fourteen generations, you sods, and I can prove it. Bet none of you bastards can say that.’

‘Go on, Hu, call us oiks.’

‘Fack off.’

‘Say “fark orft” again.’

‘Fack off.’

And so on. It was mostly pretty good-natured; we were all deeply impressed that Hugo had this whole estate to play in, was allowed to fire a shotgun during shoots and had a dirt bike of his own and a quad bike he was allowed to use. We were never going to push somebody like that too far — he was too great an asset.

So there wasn’t too much talk about Hugo’s brother George, who was known to be a loony. He was the older brother, nearly twenty at this point but with a mental age stuck at about five. He stayed at home some of the time, though he had ‘episodes’ that meant he had to be carted off to some secure unit in Aberdeen and put on extra drugs before being allowed back home.

We saw him once at the start of that summer, being taken off somewhere for a day out, staring out of a window in the family’s old Bristol as it crunched down the gravel. He had a big, round, open-looking face under a mop of sandy hair; he smiled, waved, and some of us waved back.

Hugo had been given a load of paintball gear for his birthday that year: a dozen guns, sets of body armour and face masks and so on. More to the point, he had a whole estate to play with this stuff on, and people to play with. If we’d thought about it, we might have been flattered that he’d asked for such a communal present, one that made sense only now that he had all these new pals to play with, but we didn’t think about it.

There was some rule-changing imposed from above after a particularly messy game ended with the boathouse, the old stable block and even a few windows of the main house getting spattered with paintball dye, but that didn’t restrict us much. The estate manager — who might or might not have been the guy who’d been partial to firing at the retreating backs of trespassing children — was known to be displeased with the whole idea, but apparently he’d been overruled by Mr and Mrs Ancraime, who were tickled pink that their golden boy had new chums to have larks and scrapes with.

‘Now look,’ Hugo said one day after we’d all rocked up on our bikes, dumped them in the courtyard by the old smithy and congregated in the echoing, white-tiled back kitchen for home-made scones and fizzy drinks, ‘my brother’s supposed to be tagging along today. If anybody’s got a problem with that, well, tough.’

We all looked at each other, jaws working, lips covered in flour and fists round cans of Irn Bru, Coke and lemonade. None of us had any problem with this. At that point we were probably all still intent on getting as much fizz down our necks as possible so as to give ourselves a fighting chance in the pre-going-out-to-play burping competition, a rapidly established tradition as important to the day as making sure you had extra ammo with you if you were going paintballing.

‘Whatever, Hu,’ Ferg said, shrugging.

‘No probs,’ Josh MacAvett agreed.

‘Aye,’ Callum Murston said. Hugo looked relieved. ‘Good.’

The big house was an ancient Z-plan castle bundled in multiple later layers of stonework falling away from the almost hidden central tower like ranges of foothills. Local kid-lore had it that from above it looked like a swastika, though this wasn’t true; Bash and Balbir, the Shipik twins, went up with their dad in a helicopter as part of their birthday present and they’d said it didn’t look anything like a swastika. We were all quite disappointed.

The whole place was painted pale pink; we’d have been more impressed if we’d known the original recipe for the colour had involved copious amounts of pig’s blood.