Stonemouth полностью

My idiot heart leaps as I think, Maybe it’s her! But it isn’t. It’s not Grier, either. It’s a guy I recognise from High School, I think.

‘Stewart, thought that was you! Want a lift?’

‘Yeah. Yeah, ah … Cheers.’

I get in and sit down, carefully. Not carefully enough, though; a spear of pain jerks from my groin to my brain, making my eyes water. However, the jolt seems to dislodge the memory of who the guy is. He’s Craig Jarvey, from the year below ours.

‘Thought that was you,’ he says again as we rejoin the northbound traffic. He’s plump, fresh-faced, with unruly blond hair. He’s suited and tied and there are what look like carpet sample books all over the back seat.

‘Thanks, Craig.’

‘Aye, I always looks to see if there’s somebody I know at that bus stop. Specially if it’s raining.’

‘You’re a gent.’

‘You okay?’

‘I’ve had better days.’ I grin a rather mirthless grin at his openly interested and concerned face. We’re on the bridge now and I can feel the bump of every expansion joint passing under the car’s wheels and up through the seat to my still excessively tender balls. ‘It’s complicated,’ I tell him. ‘You don’t want to know, trust me.’

‘Ah,’ he says, nodding.

We crest the bridge’s shallow summit. The red and white striped tent that was on the other carriageway is gone; the twin lanes of traffic thunder on by.

Lauren McLaughley and Drew Linton were getting married.

Lauren was one of Ellie’s best friends, another Academy girl. She got engaged to Drew about the same time Ellie got engaged to me and they’d both wanted a wedding the following summer. At one stage the two girls had talked about having a joint wedding, but both mothers had smiled the sort of polite but steely smile that made it abundantly clear that that proposal really wasn’t going to do, now, was it? So Lauren and Drew were getting married the week before Ellie and me, and having a two-part honeymoon — a castle hotel in the western Highlands and a designer boutique place in Santorini — so that they could attend our wedding too.

They got married in the Abbey. Lauren’s mum looked very proud, though Ellie’s mum looked the more triumphant, rather as if the whole thing — splendid though it no doubt was, in its own small way — was just a dress-rehearsal for her own daughter’s rather more impressive event in a week’s time.

The reception was in the Mearnside Hotel, Stonemouth’s grandest venue for nearly a century, a mini Gleneagles built on the whinny hill overlooking the fairways of Olness with views beyond its sheltering screen of trees to the dunes and the sea.

Now that I’ve been to a few English weddings where they seem to expect the bride and groom to leave the party before the fun really starts, I’m better able to appreciate how good a traditional, thorough-going Scottish wedding really is, for all concerned — though especially, of course, for the guests. At the time I just thought all weddings were like this.

I walked into the ballroom where the reception was being held: maybe twenty tables of ten places each in one half of the room, leaving the other half free for dancing. I didn’t doubt that if Ellie and I had been going to have two hundred guests, we’d now be looking at two-ten, minimum.

The ceilidh band was just setting up: moody-looking guys about my age in black kilts, dreads and chunky boots. They were called Caul of the Wild and were probably sore they hadn’t thought of Red Hot Chilli Pipers first. Later on there would be a disco but before that there’d be the sort of yee-hooch, swing-your-granny-by-the-toe stuff that’s required to accompany the kind of dancing they teach you at school in these parts, with bracing titles like Eightsome Reel, Dashing White Sergeant and Strip the Willow.

Full-on Scottish country dancing like this is a sight and a sound to behold, and not for the faint-hearted. Aside from a few gentle dances like the St Bernard’s Waltz — basically for the grans and grandads, so they can shuffle round the floor recalling past and limber glories while everybody else is at the bar — it’s all fairly demented stuff, with rugby-scrum-sized packs of drunken people whirling round the room in progressively more fragmented rabbles trying to remember what the hell happens next.

The Gay Gordons is effectively choreographed chaos and an Eightsome Reel is a deranged marathon requiring a PhD in dance. Two hundred and fifty-six bars of dashing, reversing, turning, skipping, pas-de-basing, jump-stepping, successively-partner-swapping-until-you-get-back-to-the-one-you-started-with music is common, but the Eightsome properly lasts for four hundred and sixty-four bars, and no matter how fit you are at the start it’s always awfully good to get to the end.

I felt a sharp tap-tap on the back of my head, just above my neck. This would be Grier: her traditional greeting for almost as long as I’d known her. I turned and there she was: seventeen and a Goth, head to foot in black.