He glances at the big farmer. Thankfully, the big farmer doesn’t seem to have heard. Ferg has got me into a couple of fights with remarks like that in places like this and most of his pals can tell the same story. Ferg himself rarely feels the need to stick around for the resulting fisticuffs, however. Probably reckons he’s done his job with the individual genius, bolt-from-the-blue inspiration phase. Anyway, Faintheart was one of many potential nicknames Ferg very nearly got stuck with.
‘Dundee it is for now,’ he concludes, sounding wistful. It’s …’ He looks away for a moment as the girl starts delivering our drinks.
‘Handy.’
‘How nice.’
‘And cheap,’ he tells me, eyes glittering. ‘I have a duplex. It’s huge. You should come visit. You can see Fife from most of the rooms, though you mustn’t let that put you off.’
‘Maybe one day.’
‘You could bring some floodlights.’
‘Here,’ I tell him, handing him the first three pints. ‘Break the habit of a lifetime and make yourself useful.’ I nod at the glasses while he’s still on the inward breath of synthetic outrage. ‘Yours, BB’s and Mona’s. Try not to drink them all before they get to their rightful owners.’
Ferg’s eyes narrow as he takes the glasses in a triangle of fingers. He used to be notorious for taking sips from everybody’s drinks as he carried them, ‘To stop them spilling.’ Sipper Ferguson was another nickname that very nearly became permanent.
‘You are a hard, embittered man, Stewart Gilmour.’
‘Ferg, you’d fist a skunk if you thought there was a drink in it.’ Ferg shakes his head as he walks carefully away. ‘Rude, as well.’
It’s a good night. Lot of chat, craic, whatever, lot of laughing. Good to be with the old gang again. We visit several bars. Ferg, an equal-opportunities predator, hits on three women and at least two guys, including, he later claims, the big burly farmer from The Head in Hand. Exchanged numbers and everything. Books and covers and all that shit.
We’re walking between bars near the docks when I catch a whiff of something sharp, like chlorine or whatever it is they put in swimming pools, and I’m right back, the first time I definitely saw Ellie, years and years ago.
It was one of those hot, hazy summers from my teens, the enveloping mist starting each day off soft and silky, everything sort of quiet and mysterious, the whole firth, the horizon-stretching beaches north and south, and the town itself submerged from above by the enfolding grey presence of the clouds, then the sun burning it all off by breakfast, leaving only long, low banks of mist skulking out to sea that rarely ventured back in towards land before evening, when the sun slid north and west across the long shadow of the hills, its trajectory almost matching the sloped profile of the land, so that it hung there, orange and huge, as though forever on the brink of setting.
We spent a lot of time at the Lido that summer. It was built on the striated rocks that extend to the north of the estuary mouth, its cream-white walls washed by the waves at high tide. It had one Olympic-sized pool, various shallow ponds for children to splash about in, a separate diving pool, a Turkish baths complex, a glass-walled solarium, a café and lots of deckchairs on wide terraces, gently sloped to make it easier to catch the sun.
It had been built in the thirties, had its heyday then and in the fifties — it was closed for most of the Second World War — went to seed in the sixties, fell into disrepair in the seventies and eighties, was closed during the nineties and got refurbished with Millennium lottery money in 1999, opening in the spring of 2000. It became the cool new place to hang out, especially if you were too young to drink. Too young to drink without getting hassled all the time, anyway.
My first unambiguous memory of the girl was at the Lido, during one of those glorious, mist-discovered days: her, just out of the pool, taking off a bathing cap, her head tipped just so, releasing a long fawn fall of hair the colour of wet sand, swinging out.
Her swimming costume was one-piece, black; her legs looked like they’d stretch into different time zones when she lay down, and her face was just this vision of blissed serenity. I remember the distant keening of the gulls, and the shush of waves breaking outside against the Lido walls, and the smell of swimming pool. I remember the radiance of those long, honey-coloured limbs, glowing in the late golden-red of the afternoon sun.
Thinking back, she was as straight-up-and-down as a boy and had almost nothing up top apart from broad, swimmer’s shoulders, but there was enough there to hint at what was to come, to let you know this was a girl still about to become a young woman. She moved with the sort of grace that makes you think everybody else must be made out of Lego.
She saw me looking at her. She smiled. It wasn’t a big smile, and it certainly wasn’t a come-on smile, but it was the easiest, most natural one I’d ever seen.
