Free Stonemouth by Iain Banks Page B

we’d been encouraged to play together from pre-primary days. We were never best mates – our interests were mostly too different – but we always got on well.
    With fair, almost blond hair and a square jawline, Josh had always been a good-looking kid, and he’d become a positively handsome teenager (one rather amateurish tat on the back of his neck apart). When we were of an age to become interested in girls and I could persuade him to come out drinking or partying, I found myself reluctantly and unexpectedly playing the-good-looking-one’s-mate, and having to make do with my opposite number on the female side if we bumped into a pair of lassies.
    Still, I met some really nice girls that way, girls with more than just good looks, and because Josh never seemed to stick with one girl for longer than a single night or a few days, and never seemed at all bothered when they got fed up waiting for a call or a text or an email or, well, anything, and threw themselves back into the Toun’s social whirl, once more unattached, they were, quite often, up for a bit of a dalliance with the guy they assumed was Josh’s best pal (that’d be me), possibly with the intention of hurting Josh somehow when he saw us chewing each other’s face off right in front of him. This never worked, and I could have told them so, butof course I didn’t; when you’re that age you tend to take whatever’s going.
    Playing the field and treating them mean was all very well, but I wasn’t the only one to remind Josh there were only so many girls in Stonemouth and if he did want to nab a proper girlfriend he was making life difficult for himself.
    So – or maybe just Anyway – he got himself a girlfriend. Which was fine, in principle.
    Josh had driven us here in his RAV 4, with Ferg and Logan crammed into the back sitting on the cases of beer, Ferg complaining loudly about not being able to get his seat belt fastened properly and worrying about whiplash if we were rear-ended. (Much, frankly childish, sniggering at the mention of rear-ending.)
    Back then you could just drive down onto the beach using the slipway at the end of the Promenade and head all the way up to the Brochty Burn. Then too many people started doing it, a lot of litter was left behind on the sands, there was even – dear God! – talk of young people taking drugs and having sex up there. Respectable older folk complained and the council locked off the slip. The RNLI have keys to the bollards if they want to access the beach from there and so do the council, obviously, but gone are those carefree days otherwise.
    We could see the fire from about a kilometre out of town: a tiny wavering speck in the distance, almost lost in the darkness. By the time we drove up close enough to feel its heat, the only lights visible from Stonemouth were a couple of floods on the harbour wall and the sweeping beam of the lighthouse on the rocks beneath Stoun Point. We joined the party by the great fire to shouted hellos, cheers – cheers that increased when they saw how much beer we’d brought – and offers of pills and joints.
    The swimmers wrapped themselves in towels and blankets, joining the others, maybe thirty or so, in the habitable zone a couple of metres out from the edge of the crackling, spitting fire. Any closer and you roasted; any further out and it started to get chilly. It wasearly August and it had been a perfect, hot day, but the clear sky was letting the day’s warmth beam away into space, there was a breeze blowing and, in the end, this was north-east Scotland, not southern California.
    It was the last summer we’d all be together, between High School and the various gap years, universities, colleges and jobs we were all bound for. We were all eighteen, or close to it. People could drive, drink legally and even have sex with somebody younger than themselves without risking jail and a reputation as a paedo. Every class, every year – amongst those from the reasonably well off