Stonemouth полностью

Except, thinking about it, the first of the two sounds like I’m making it all about me, again, and it’s all about my needs.

I look out the side window, shaking my head at my own distorted reflection and mouthing the word fuckwit.

We’ve cleared the town, heading west between the industrial and retail estates, the hills and mountains ahead.

Ellie doesn’t say anything for a bit, then nods and says, ‘Okay.’ She nods again. ‘Okay.’

‘Doesn’t mean I expect you to forgive me, either,’ I tell her, suddenly remembering another part of what I’ve been meaning to say to her for the last five years.

‘Hmm,’ Ellie says. ‘Well, there you are.’

Which is about as non-committal as you can get, I guess, and probably still more than I deserve.

‘Anyway, it’s good to see you again,’ I tell her.

‘And you,’ she says. She glances at me. ‘I wasn’t sure it would be, but it is. Not hurting as much as I thought it might. Barely at all, in fact. I suppose that means I’m over it. Over you.’

I don’t know what to say for a while, then I say, ‘Your dad said something about your mum putting in a good word for me, about letting me come back for the funeral.’

‘Did he? Did she?’ Ellie sounds surprised.

‘Yeah, I wondered if maybe you’d been behind that somehow?’

‘Huh,’ Ellie says, and is obviously thinking. ‘I think I said to both of them that it seemed wrong to keep you away if you wanted to come back, you know, to pay your last respects to Grandpa.’

‘Didn’t think it was your mum.’

‘Hmm.’

‘How’s she these days?’

‘Ha. As ever. Got a carpenter in the house at the moment, putting up extra shelves in her cuttings room.’

‘Her cuttings room?’

‘Where she keeps all the stuff she cuts out of House and Home and Posh Decorator or whatever they’re called. Got this whole room lined with volumes of tips, ideas, recipes, colour schemes and all that malarkey. Then when anything’s getting done to the house she ignores all of it and calls in an interior designer to do everything. Same with big meals. She collects all these cookbooks and cut-out recipes and goes on all these cooking tutorial weekends and weeklong courses, and then when there’s a big do at the house she has it all done by outside caterers. You’d swear she’s the busiest woman in the world but she rarely actually does anything. We’ve got a maid now.’

‘Maria. Met her briefly.’

‘She does all the cleaning and the laundry.’ Ellie shakes her head. ‘But, yeah, the cuttings room, where all the cuttings live. Well, go to die, really. Dad buys her a new pair of scissors as a joke every Christmas. Meanwhile she’s started lobbying for a sort of mini-extension to house a walk-in wardrobe — a walk-in chilled wardrobe — to keep her furs in tip-top condition. Dad’s telling her she doesn’t need it in this climate but I give it to the end of the year and he’ll cave. She’ll have it by next spring.’ Ellie blows what sounds like an exasperated breath.

‘What about you?’ I ask as we cross over the bypass, heading for a patch of light above the hills where the dipping sun is filtering through the thinning streams of cloud. ‘I heard you’re…helping people with addictions these days.’

‘Yeah, well, strictly speaking it’s the rest of my family that helps people with their addictions; I help them try to break them,’ she says, with a quick, entirely mirth-free grin. ‘And nobody knows where next year’s funding’s going to come from.’ She jerks her head back in an equally humourless laugh. ‘Suppose I could ask Don. Might even take it on; it’d be cover, good PR.’ She glances at me. ‘What about you? Still with the building lighting and all?’

‘Yep. Still based in London, though you’d struggle to tell that from my credit card receipts.’

‘Trotting that globe, huh?’

‘Fraid so. The company offsets, but we still take the flights in the first place.’

‘How’s business?’

‘It’s held up. Thank fuck for China and India, and all that oil money has to go somewhere: largely into the sky, as concrete, steel and light.’ I glance at her. I feel oddly nervous, almost fake, right at this instant. ‘They…made me a partner.’

She looks at me, smiling broadly. ‘They did? Congratulations! Well done, you!’ She looks back to the road, still smiling.

‘Well, just junior,’ I tell her. ‘Not equity. The responsibility without the access to the serious money.’

She nods. ‘Not a made man quite yet.’

This makes me laugh. ‘Well, yeah.’

‘Seeing anyone special?’

‘Hardly got the time. You?’

‘Mmm…Not really. Not since Ryan. Well, there was one guy, but that…So, no.’

We drive into the hills as the evening sky begins to clear and the clouds break up. We go via some of the ‘of’ places. There are — Ellie and I spotted long ago, when we first started going out — a lot of ‘of’ places round here: Brae of Burns, New Mains of Fitrie, Lyne of Glenskirrit, Hill of Par. I guess round here we just like our place names definite, pinned down.