Don took Grier aside. At first she denied everything and suggested it might be some sort of underworld message from a business associate of Donald’s. Ellie heard that the resulting explosion of rage from her dad made Grier wet her pants; Donald didn’t hit her — he’d always skelped the children’s bums but stopped hitting the girls after they passed the age of about nine or ten — but Grier seemingly thought he was about to. She admitted it had been her.
Donald took the money for the re-laying of the lawn out of her allowance and told her she was getting away lightly. If she ever did anything that upset her mother like that again, she’d find her inheritance so reduced she’d struggle to buy a rocking horse.
‘Aye, she’s some kid,’ I said when Ellie first told me all this.
‘She’s frightening,’ Ellie said. ‘Fourteen-year-olds just don’t usually think that far ahead.’
‘Or use a combination of a
‘We should be so lucky,’ Ellie told me. ‘Just pray she doesn’t go into politics.’
‘Grier said something weird the other day,’ I tell Ellie. ‘In the café, after we met on the beach?’
‘What?’
I tell her about Grier hinting Callum might have been pushed, rather than have jumped.
Ellie is silent for a disturbingly long time. I can’t read her expression at all. Eventually, in a flat voice, she says, ‘Well…there have been…Stuff’s been talked about. About Callum.’
‘Uh-huh?’
She shakes her head. ‘Let’s talk about something else.’
‘Okay.’
Only neither of us seems to be able to think of anything else to talk about, so we drive on in silence for some minutes.
Ellie turns the Mini onto a little single track road that leads up through some trees to — according to a sign — Tunleet Reservoir. I vaguely remember this, from when I was exploring on my moped. The Mini works its way up the twisting, deteriorating road, crosses a cattle grid, then crunches its way over the gravel of an otherwise deserted car park in front of a boarded-up stone waterworks building at the foot of a grassy reservoir wall, just sliding into shadow.
Ellie makes a little noise of approval. ‘Looks like we’ve got the place to ourselves.’
We have indeed. It feels almost disloyal to Ellie, but I experience a tiny frisson of relief. I was — despite everything — part expecting to find a collection of Rangies and oversize pick-ups parked here, and the Murston boys standing looking mean and tap-tapping the thick end of baseball bats into their meaty palms.
Ellie and I walk up the grassy slope back into the sunlight and along the stone summit of the dam wall to a metal bridge over the overflow at the eastern edge. Beyond, the reservoir stretches out to the south-west. The whole place can’t help reminding me of the smaller dam and reservoir on the Ancraime estate where Wee Malky died, though this loch’s much bigger and in higher, more open country, like something exposed, peeled back and offered to an evening sky of ragged clouds and glimpses of a watery-looking sun.
We walk along a path to a small promontory about the size of two tennis courts laid end to end, jutting out into the sun-bright, chopping water. At the end, on a slight rise, there’s a wooden bird hide: seven-eighths of an octagon with slits roughly at eye height cut into the undressed wooden logs. Low platforms underneath are probably for kids to stand on so they can see out too.
There are a couple of sturdy backless benches in the middle of the space. We spend a little while looking through the slits at a few ducks and coots and a family of six swans cruising by, white feathers ruffled like the water, then we sit on the benches, under a sky still clearing of cloud.
A skein of geese flies overhead. The birds start swapping position as they fly above us and the faint sound of honking — half comic, half plaintive — sinks down through the breeze to us. Ellie sits back, feet up on the chunky beams of the bench. She hugs her knees.
‘Do you ever feel like you’re just waiting to die?’ she asks, not looking at me.
‘Umm…not really, no,’ I tell her. But I’m thinking, Fuck me, this is a bit heavy.
‘No? Sometimes I feel like that,’ she says, ‘Sometimes I feel like I’ve seen it all before, been everywhere, done everything, experienced everything, and you start to think, What else is there except more of the same, only maybe worse?’ She looks at me. ‘Yes? No? Anything like that? Or just me?’
‘Well, something like that, so not just you. Not so sure about the wanting to die bit. Though I suppose some people—’
