Free Stonemouth by Iain Banks Page A

prettified away by the town council.
    I get to the start of the trees and then the Brochty Burn after about an hour and a quarter. The burn’s more of a river here. It widens into its own little estuary, elements winding between slim grass-hummock islands, long, lozenge-shaped patches of thick brown mud and dozens of miniature grey wildernesses of paler mud strewn with stripped, sun-bleached driftwood and plastic debris.
    We tried wading this stretch a few times when we were kids, because the next viable crossing was kilometres upstream, and it was the busy, bike-unfriendly main road we were all forbidden to use on our bikes. We never made it even halfway across the Brochty before we got stuck, utterly covered in mud, demoralised to the point we gave up and – even after highly necessary dips in the sea to remove the worst of the cloying mud – returned home still filthy to try to explain to exasperated parents how we’d lost our shoes. Once we even tried carrying our bikes across above our heads. Nearly drowned that time.
    Vatton forest, on the far side of the burn – dark, mysterious –taunted us each time we turned tail and trudged our damp, squelching way home. You could get to the forest by car – we had all been there by car – but that meant being accompanied by parents, and anyway the forest was huge and you only ever got taken to the car park in the middle, civilised bit, where all the hiking and cycling tracks started and the picnic tables and toilets were, not to this distant, much wilder southern end.
    But glory be, now there’s a bridge. I stand looking at it, and laugh. Yep, a smart, dark-green, tough-looking, little wooden bridge arching over the upstream end of the last deep pool before the start of the Brochty’s miniature estuary.
    ‘
Now
they put a feckin bridge in,’ I mutter to myself, still grinning, then feel foolish and look round to make sure there’s nobody around to overhear. Which there isn’t, of course.
    I climb up the scraggy slope of sand and grass to the scoop of path that leads to the bridge. I use the phone to take a couple of photos from the middle of the bridge. Seaward, I can make out the flattened lines of waves, white creases just visible in the haze. I think about phoning home to say I’ll be a while yet, maybe ask for a lift from somewhere handy a bit further on – the forest car park, I guess – but there’s zero reception.
    I look back the way I’ve come, along the restless sands.
    That first night, I saw her by the light of a beach fire, a roaring pyre spindling the enveloping darkness while the white waves rose and fell along the margin of the shore and the stars wheeled like frozen spray. She’d just waded out of the shallows with a few others who’d been in for a midnight swim. Music pounded from an open soft-top Jeep as she laughed with one of her girlfriends. She wore a black one-piece swimsuit, coyly modest amongst bikinis and a couple of girls just in knickers. There were some very lookable-at breasts on display, but it was still Ellie that attracted the eye, the swimsuit, like part of the night, emphasising her long arms and legs, leaving her own curves more hinted at than shown.
    Shedid that head-leaning-over thing again, the gesture I still had engraved on my memory from that hazy day at the Lido a couple of years earlier, the wet rope of her hair swinging out as she sent it this way and that. The way she did it, it just looked easy, natural, not self-conscious or coquettish.
    A hand, in front of my face; fingers snapping once, twice.
    ‘And we’re back in the room,’ Ferg said. He pushed me between the shoulders to set me walking down the rest of the shallow slope of dune, following Josh MacAvett and Logan Peitersen, the other two guys we’d come with from town.
    Josh was Mike MacAvett’s eldest son and the same age as me. We were friends as much through familial expectation as anything else; I was Mike Mac’s godson and Josh was Dad’s, and