Harry draws in a breath, shocked at the depth of her loathing. — I’ve been suspended from the department. I’ve lost everything, but I’m never going to let him hurt you!
— Jim isn’t hurting me, you are! I’m telling you, if you approach me again, I’m making a formal complaint, through an attorney, and giving your department a copy of the tape, and Melanie rises, swinging her bag over her shoulder. — Now stay away from my family!
Harry pouts, his bottom lip involuntarily trembling, but then he turns away, facing two women who have been eavesdropping. — Ladies, he says in a slow, sardonic seethe of acknowledgement, before sipping at the latte. He looks forlornly at the lipstick mark around the rim of the other cup. It seems to belong to a ghost he has been chasing most of his life. Sure enough, by the time he turns back, Melanie has gone, vanished into the throng of shoppers. Harry can scarcely believe that she was ever sitting so close to him.
When Melanie returns home she finds Jim in the kitchen, making a sandwich. It is an elaborate, layered effort, involving lean turkey breast, avocado slices, tomatoes and Swiss cheese. Her husband’s ability to immerse himself so fully in the most mundane of tasks, as well as the most complex, never fails to amaze her. The still intensity he brings to everything. Through the window, she sees the girls playing in the yard with the new puppy, which is out of sight, but Melanie can hear its excited barking. Jim looks at up her, cracking a smile. It slides south as he quickly senses that something is wrong. — What’s up, honey?
She extends her arms and grips the countertop, leaning back to stretch the tension out of her. — Harry. I ran into him at the mall. I suspect he engineered it. He was apologetic and sensible at first, so I had a coffee with him at Starbucks. Then he started coming out with that same delusional bullshit about you killing those two guys on the beach! I threatened him with the tape and he backed off.
Jim hauls in a deep breath. — If this happens again we might have to take action. Get ourselves a lawyer and file a harassment suit against him.
— Jim, you’re a resident alien and a convicted felon. Melanie looks glumly at him. — The authorities don’t know a lot about that part of your life.
— Those two guys, I blew up their van…
— If all this comes out, you could be deported.
— To Scotland? Jim suddenly laughs. — Ah don’t know if I could handle the girls growing up talking like me!
— Jim…
Jim Francis steps forward, filling the space between him and Melanie, taking his wife in his arms. Over her shoulder he can see their daughters playing with Sauzee, the recently acquired French bulldog. — Shhh, it’s okay, he coos, as much to himself as to her. — We’ll sort it all out. Let’s just enjoy Christmas.
Christmas in the sun, Jim thinks, then considers Edinburgh and lets a phantom chill race up his spine.
3
TINDER IS THE NIGHT
Euan McCorkindale examines himself in the bathroom mirror. He prefers what he sees when he removes his glasses, this act sending his features into a satisfying blur. Fifty years. A half-century. Where had it all gone? He replaces the spectacles to contemplate an increasingly skull-like head, apexed by a silver buzz-cut bristle. Euan then looks down at his bare feet, pink plates on the heated black-tiled floor. It is what he does, in the same way others study their faces. How many pairs of feet has he seen in his life? Thousands. Perhaps even hundreds of thousands. Flat, twisted, broken, fractured, crushed, burned, scarred, pitted and infected. But not his own: those have lasted better than the rest of him.
Moving through from the en suite bathroom, Euan dresses quickly, nagged by a mild envy of his still-sleeping wife. Carlotta has the best part of a decade of youthful advantage on him and is handling middle age well. She bloated in her mid-thirties, and Euan was secretly looking forward to her gaining some of her mother’s upholstery; he likes women who tend towards the plump. But then a dedicated diet-and-gym regime seemed to make Carlotta go backwards in time: not only approximating her youthful self, but in some ways even surpassing it. She never had muscles like that when they first got together, and yoga has given her a suppleness and range of motion previously beyond her. Now Euan is experiencing the acute return of a withering sensation, which he hoped age would completely vanquish: that he’s massively punching above his weight in this relationship.
Euan, however, is a devoted husband and father who has spent his married life happily indulging his wife and son. This is especially the case around Christmas. He loves Carlotta’s Italian social extravagance and wouldn’t have wished his own austere background on anybody. A birthday that fell on Christmas Eve, in a Wee Free family – it was a recipe for privation and neglect. But Euan’s enjoyment of the festive period is generally ring-fenced around Carlotta and Ross. His bonhomie tends to dissipate when others are brought into the mix, and tomorrow he is expected to host Christmas dinner for her family. Carlotta’s mother Evita, her sister Louisa, Lou’s husband Gerry and kids: they are all fine. It’s her brother, Simon, who runs a dubious-sounding escort agency in London, whom he isn’t so sure about.
Thankfully, Ross and Simon’s son Ben seem to get on. It’s just as well. Simon has seldom been around the last two days. After arriving from London with the young man, he unceremoniously dumped poor Ben on them, and took off. It wasn’t on, really. No wonder Ben is such a quiet young chap.
He finds Ross down in the kitchen, still in his pyjamas and dressing gown, sat at the table, playing a game on his iPad. — Morning, son.
— Morning, Dad. Ross looks up, bottom lip protruding. No ‘Happy birthday’. Ah well. It’s obvious that his son has something on else his mind.
— Where’s Ben?
— Still asleep.
— Everything okay with you guys?
His son pulls a face Euan can’t interpret, and snaps his iPad shut. — Aye… it’s just that… Then Ross suddenly explodes, — I’m never gaunny get a girlfriend! I’ll be a virgin till I die!
Euan cringes. Oh God, he’s sharing a bedroom with Ben. He’s a nice lad, but he’s older and he’s still the son of Simon. — Has Ben been teasing you about girls?
— It’s no Ben. It’s everybody at school! They’ve all got girlfriends!
— Son, you’re fifteen. There’s still time.
Ross’s eyes at first widen in horror then narrow into slits, as he contemplates his father. It isn’t a comfortable expression for Euan to witness. It seems to say: you can either be a god or a joke depending on how you answer this next question. — How old were you when… the boy hesitates, — when you first done it with a girl?
Fuck. Euan feels something hard and blunt strike him inside. — I really don’t think that’s the sort of question you ask your father… he nervously offers. — Ross, look –
— How old?! his son commands, in real distress.
Euan regards Ross. The boy often seems the same tousle-headed little rogue of old. However, a certain ranginess and rash of spots, as well as a more sullen demeanour, testify to puberty’s ongoing assault, and therefore the inevitability of this conversation in some form. But Euan grimly assumed that today’s boys and girls would be watching extreme pornography online and hooking up on social media sites, doing despicable things to each other, then filming and posting the grotesque and humiliating results. He anticipated dealing with the psychological problems of post-capitalist abundance, yet here he is, confronted with traditional scarcity. He clears his throat. — Well, son, those were different times… How can he tell the boy that school sex was out of bounds in his village, as it would invariably have meant shagging a blood relative? (Not that this stopped some of them!) That he was twenty-two and at university by the time he enjoyed full congress with a woman? That Ross’s mother, Carlotta – then eighteen to his twenty-five and infinitely more experienced – was only his second lover? — I was fifteen, son. He opts to embellish an incident where he got the tit from a cousin’s visiting friend into an episode of penetrative, mind-blowing, no-holds-barred sex. This isn’t such a difficult step as this masturbatory bejewelling has taken place countless times in his imagination. — I remember it like yesterday, as it was around this time, a few days after my birthday, he says, pleased that he’s got in the reminder. — So don’t worry, you’re still a young chap. He ruffles the boy’s hair. — Time is on your side, trooper.