‘Lost it. Got a new one,’ I tell him, nodding at Mum. I look at Ellie. Five years older. Face a little paler, maybe. Still beautiful, still …serene. A touch careworn now, perhaps, or just sad, but then that’s probably just me, seeing what I expect to see. Her hair’s a lot shorter, worn down but only to her shoulders; still thick, lustrous, the colour of sand. ‘Hi, Ellie.’
‘Hello, Stewart. You’re looking well.’
‘You are too kind,’ she says, dipping her head to one side. That smile again.
Mum clears her throat. ‘Well, we should maybe leave you two to talk.’ She looks at Dad, and they stand up. Ellie jumps up too. She’s wearing jeans and a thin grey fleece over a white tee.
‘That’s okay,’ she says to them. Then she looks at me. ‘Thought you might…want to come for a drive?’
‘You okay?’ Ellie asks as she turns the Mini out of Dabroch Drive.
‘Fine,’ I tell her. ‘You?’
‘Didn’t really mean generally, Stewart,’ she says. ‘I meant after Murdo and Norrie “had a wee word”, as they put it, earlier.’
‘Ah.’
‘They got drunk afterwards. Came back to the house. I’d just popped in to see Mum and Dad, and the boys were kind enough to tell me they’d been protecting my honour or something, and I needn’t worry about you “bothering” me tomorrow, at the funeral?’ She glances at me. ‘Didn’t dare say any of this in front of Don, mind you, but they seemed keen to tell me, or at least Norrie did, and they certainly looked pleased with themselves. Did they hurt you?’
‘Hurt at the time. No bruises. More annoyed they dropped my phone into the Stoun.’
As I’m talking, I’m feeling this annoying, humiliating need to cringe, to sink as low as I can in my seat as we drive through the streets of the town, to avoid being seen by any errantly roaming Murston brothers or their sidekicks, minions, vassals or whatever the fuck they are. Last time I was in this car, of course, I really was ducked right down, chest on my knees with Ellie’s coat on top to hide me, en route to the station and the relative safety of a big yellow pipe on a freight train. How shamefully Pavlovian. I force myself to sit up straight instead. This would be the Fuck-it, or Sheep-as-a-lamb response. Still, I can’t help watching the people on the pavements and in other cars, looking for stares or double-takes. We pull up right beside the station shuttle bus at some traffic lights and I don’t look at it, just keep staring ahead.
‘Uh-huh,’ Ellie says. ‘Well, I apologise on behalf of my insane family. Obviously, it wasn’t done…you know, at my instigation.’
‘I’d guessed.’
She shakes her head, and I can see her frowning at the road ahead. ‘It’s like watching wolves or lion cubs grow up. They’re boisterous, play fighting, nearly cute, then one day,’ She shrugs. ‘They just turn and bite your throat out.’
That sends a slight chill through me. ‘Your brothers getting—’
‘Getting to be bigger arseholes than they were,’ she says. ‘Dad’s just about keeping them on the leash.’ She slings the car into gear as the lights change. ‘Oh, come on,’ she mutters at the car in front as it fails to move off promptly. Then it jerks, shifts.
There’s a pause. Eventually I take a breath and say, ‘I’m sorry too.’
‘You’re sorry?’ I can see that small frown again, creasing the skin above and between her eyes.
‘For cheating on you, Ellie.’
‘Oh, that. Ah.’
She concentrates on driving, eyes flicking about, taking her gaze from the view ahead to her mirrors, to the oversized instrument pod in the middle of the fascia and back to the street again as we negotiate the old main road out of Nisk.
‘El, I wrote you about a dozen letters saying how sorry I was and what a fool I’d been and how I was the biggest fucking idiot on the planet and how I wished you well and hoped you got over what I’d done and…well, a million other things, but I never sent any of them. A short letter seemed like I was…just fobbing you off with something, you know; formal? Like a kid forced to write a thank-you letter to an aunt or something? But the longer letters… the longer any of them went on, the more whiney they got, the more they sounded like I was trying to make excuses for myself, like I was the one who deserved…sympathy, or…Not that…Anyway…anyway, I never did get the tone right, the words right. And in the end I thought you probably didn’t want to hear from me at all, so I stopped trying. And…well, it’s still, it’s become even more pointless…Well, not pointless, but …’ I take a big deep breath like I’m about to swim a long way underwater. ‘Well, I still need to say it even if you don’t need to hear it. I am sorry.’
Half a decade I’ve been thinking about and working on that speech, but it still comes out wrong: awkward, badly expressed, unbalanced somehow and not really what I intended to say at all. Like I was making it up as I went along.
Maybe the last two sentences aren’t too bad — all I needed to say, really.
