Andy shows me to my room, a floor down, at about four in the morning. It has a fan heater and an electric blanket on the single bed. Before I go to sleep I wonder about whether I should have said anything to him about Mr Archer and his phone calls and Ares. I came up here thinking I would; I assumed I'd need to offload on somebody, but somehow it never seemed to be the right time to introduce the subject.
Never mind. It feels good just to have had a talk.
As I drift off I have the start of the running-through-the-woods dream again but I get away from it and don't remember thing else.
The next day while Andy's still asleep I take (a) some painkillers and (b) the car into Kyle of Lochalsh to tell the local police I'm here.
Driving into the town I spot an Escort with a blue light or roof and pull up behind it. A sergeant appears from what a plate beside the door indicates is the dentist's and I go up to him and tell him my name and that I've been told to report my movement Detective Inspector McDunn. The gaunt, grey-haired sergeant fixes me with a studiously suspicious look and takes a note of my name and the time. I get the impression he thinks I'm a harmless crank. Anyway, he doesn't say much; maybe his mouth is still sore from his visit to the dentist's. I can't wait around to try and engage him in further conversation because my bowels suddenly decide they want to wake up too, and I have to make a dash for the nearest bar and the toilets.
God, I hate it when my shit smells of whisky.
Andy has a party that night, partly for me and partly because his pal Howie is leaving for a job on the rigs the following day. We go for a walk up into the hills in the afternoon; me puffing and panting and coughing after Andy as he strides quickly, easily up the rutted forest tracks. Back at the hotel, I help him clear up the lounge bar, which still bears the debris from Andy's last party a few months earlier. The bar is still stocked, though there is no draught beer, only cans. Andy seems to be assuming he'll be providing all the booze for the party, so I gather he's not quite as skint as I've heard.
Maybe a couple of dozen people show up for the party; about half locals — mostly men, though there's one married couple and a pair of single girls — and half travellers, New Age hippies from various scattered buses and vans parked in lay-bys and the highway equivalent of oxbows, where corners or short, twisty lengths of old roads have been replaced with more direct stretches.
In terms of people mixing, it's a party that at best emulsifies rather than combines; there's a hostility between some of the Highland lads (clean-shaven, short-haired) and the travellers (the opposite) that gets worse as everybody gets more drunk. I get the impression the indigenous locals know the travelling people keep disappearing to have some blow, and resent it. Andy seems not to notice, talking to everybody, regardless.
I do my best to mix as well. At first I get on best with the Highland laddies, matching them dram for dram and can for can, taking their cigarettes and suffering their remarks on the lines of "No I still smoke" when I offer them my Silk Cuts but gradually as we get drunker I start to feel uncomfortable with their attitude to the travellers and even more so to women, and Howie, the guy I met last night, talks about how he used to slap the wife around and now the bitch is in one of these fucking women's refuges and if he ever finds her he'll fucking kick seven kinds of shit out of her. The others suggest this isn't such a good idea but I get the impression they think this mainly because he'd only end up in prison.
I find myself gravitating towards the travellers.
At one point I see Andy standing staring out the windows of the lounge, towards the dark loch, his eyes wide.
"You all right?" I ask him.
He takes a moment to answer. "We're ten metres above mean sea-level here," he says, nodding out to the shore.
"You don't say." I light a cigarette.
"The deck on the QE2 on that level we called the Exocet Deck, because that's the height the missile rides at."
Ah, Falklands Lore. "Well," I say, peering out at the darkness and the far side of the loch, "unless you have an irate neighbour with particularly good contacts in the arms trade —»
"The only thing I ever have nightmares about," Andy says, his gaze still directed at the unseeable loch, his eyes still wide. "Isn't that ridiculous? Nightmares about being blown to fuck by a missile, ten years ago. I wasn't even on that deck; we were billeted two up from there…" He shrugs, drinks and turns to me, smiling. "You see your mum much?"
"Eh?" I say, confused at this sudden change in direction. "No, not recently. She's still in New Zealand. How about you? Been back to Strathspeld?"
He shakes his head and I get a shiver, remembering just that gesture of his, repeated and repeated so that it became like a nervous tic after a while, back in Strathspeld, after Clare's funeral in "89; a gesture of disbelief, refusal, non-acceptance.
"You should go," he tells me. "You should go and see them. They'd appreciate that."
"We'll see," I say. A gust of wind throws rain against the window and shakes the frame; it's loud and surprising and I flinch but he just turns slowly and looks out into the darkness with what could almost be contempt before laughing and putting an arm round my shoulder and suggesting we have another drink.
Later a storm breaks over the hotel; lightning flares above the mountains across the loch, and the windows rattle as the thunder booms. There's a power cut; the lights go out and we light candles and gas lamps and end up — a hard core of seven of us; Andy, me, Howie, another two local lads and a couple of the traveller boys — down in the snooker room where there's a beat-up looking table and a leak in the ceiling that turns the whole of the stained, green-baize surface into a millimetre-shallow marsh, water dripping from each pocket and dribbling down the bulky legs to the sopping carpet, and we play snooker by the light of the hissing gas lamps, having to hit the white ball really hard even for delicate shots because of the extra rolling resistance the water causes, and the balls make a zizzing, ripping noise as they race across the table and sometimes you can see spray curving up behind them and I'm feeling really drunk and a bit stoned from a couple of strong Js smoked out in the garden earlier with the travellers but I think this dimly lit water-hazard snooker is just hilarious and I'm laughing maniacally at it all and I put an arm round Andy's neck at one point and say, You know I love you, old buddy, and isn't friendship and love what's it's really all about? and why can't people just see that and just be nice to each other? except there are just so many complete bastards in the world, but Andy just shakes his head and I try to kiss him and he gently fends me off and steadies me against one wall and props me up with a snooker cue against my chest and I think this is really funny for some reason and laugh so much I fall over and have distinct problems getting up again and get carried to my room by Andy and one of the travellers and dumped on the bed and fall instantly asleep.
I dream of Strathspeld, and the long summers of my childhood passed in a trance of lazy pleasure, ending with that day, running through the woods (but I turn away from that memory, the way I've learned to over the years); I wander again through the woods and the small, hidden glens, along the shores of the ornamental lochan and the river and its loch and I'm standing near the old boathouse in that defeatingly bright sunlight, light dancing on water, and I see two figures, naked and thin and white in the grass beyond the reed beds, and as I watch them the light turns from gold to silver and then to white, and the trees seem to shrink in on themselves, leaves disappearing in the chill coruscations of that enveloping white blaze while the view all around me becomes brighter and darker at once and all is reduced to black and white; trees are bare and black, the ground smother-smoothed in white and the two young figures are gone, while one even smaller one — booted, gloved, coat-tails flying behind — runs laughing across the white level of the frozen loch.