'He's his father's double, I know.'

'How old is he?'

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Two and a half. You can do the subtraction. Simon's wee legacy.'

Ray nodded, taking a moment to erase the notion that the Dark Man might be about to walk through the door and say 'Daddy's home'.

'Did you know, at the time, I mean, when . . .?'

Alison handed him a mug of black tea and placed milk and sugar on the table in matching earthenware.

'I had no idea. God, when I found out . . . Some irony, let me tell you. Simon didn't want kids, safe to say. I did, but I didn't think I'd ever be having his. In fact at that time I didn't think we'd be together much longer. Turned out I was right.'

Ray poured some milk and stirred his tea. 'Nobody plays silly-buggers quite like fate,' he said, feeling eminently qualified to comment.

'No kidding. Connor was conceived the very night before Simon died. I know that because it was the first time we'd had sex in months.'

Ray did his best not to spit the tea he was drinking, but his widening eyes betrayed his reaction to her sudden candour. Alison had a very serious look on her face; not defensive, but earnestly adult-to-adult. This was still a friendly cup of tea in the kitchen, but they weren't going to be discussing the weather or even their kids any more. Alison stared at the floor for a moment, slightly embarrassed.

'When you were here before, things were too hectic to really talk,' she said, looking up again. 'But I recall you said if I ever needed to speak to someone about Simon . . .'

Ray nodded, remembering. That was the part where he thought they'd made a connection.

'At the time I didn't really think about it. Wakes are a 314.

great time for platitudes; I garnered quite a collection. Emotionally and, as it turned out, hormonally, I was all over the place, and I thought you were just being polite. But once the dust had settled, I began to understand what you meant. And I think I would probably have called, except that once I found out I was pregnant, I had other things to concentrate on. Good things.' She smiled a little, then the seriousness returned. 'Simon wasn't a very nice person, was he?'

Ray said nothing.

'Don't worry, you don't have to tread eggshells. That was what you meant, though, wasn't it?'

He nodded, trying to look solemn rather than enthusiastic.

'You lived with him too, for a while. You knew him.'

'When we were young.'

'But that was what you meant.'

'It was nothing specific you said after the service, just an impression I got. I couldn't picture you clutching his photograph and crying yourself to sleep. I just thought. . . there might come a time when you needed to talk about him, warts and all.'

'He was a bastard,' she said flatly. 'That's what I'd have needed to talk about, if I hadn't been suddenly very distracted. And the reason I knew that was what you meant was that I remember being surprised when you told me your name. You were the last person I'd have expected to attend.'

'I didn't get a very good press, I take it.'

'I heard a lot about you, let's put it that way. And very little of it was good.'

'I can imagine.'

'But you still came.'

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'I didn't hate him. It all happened when we were too young and daft to know better. I wasn't going to rubber his death.'

'I did hate him. I do hate him. More and more, every day.'

Alison got up. Ray thought this was because the conversation had strayed into dangerous ground, but was wrong in assuming it heralded the end. She excused herself and disappeared for a few minutes, then returned to say she had asked Wendy's mum to look after Connor for a while. With the coast clear, they took their teas through to the living room and sat at either end of the settee. The TV was still on, with the sound muted: Neighbours, inexplicably still going after all these years. It had been cult viewing in his student days, having made the jump to post-modern-ironic-kitsch status after about two episodes.

Alison put her mug on the carpet, clearing a space among the discarded toys.

'After Simon died, I went through the usual rose-tinted remembrance at first. Hard not to, especially when everybody's saying sorry for your loss and telling you how great he was. Even when I thought about how unhappy I'd been, I was more inclined to remember the good times we'd shared. Then gradually I began to look back a bit more objectively and realised that they were simply good times we were both present at. We didn't share them. Simon never shared anything. You could be around him when he was having a good time, and you'd be having a good time too, but... oh, I don't know.'

'I do,' Ray assured her.

'A few weeks after he was gone, I remember trying to think of an occasion when Simon ever did anything for 316.

me, you know, that took him out of his way, or put his own needs second. I came up dry.'

Ray felt chilled by the remark. Div had said roughly the same thing a few months back, when they were talking about old times and he got fed up with Ray sticking up for Simon. 'Can you honestly tell me a time when that bastard did anything for anybody else, when he made any kind of sacrifice?'

Ray couldn't. He was about to offer Div the time Simon lent Ross twenty quid because there was a problem with his grant cheque, but then remembered how the story panned out. When Ross's money did finally come through, he and Simon kept missing each other for a few days, so the debt wasn't repaid. Simon, who was awfully fond of telling his friends how friends ought to behave, clearly believed Ross should have taken steps to remedy this sooner, and sent him an invoice through the post, thus transforming it from a minor embarrassment to something extremely ugly. The fact that Simon had owed Ross close to fifty quid for half the previous term was, in Simon's familiar justification, 'different'.

'He was an only child,' Ray said neutrally. 'And he had a minor problem with the Earth's orbit.'

'You mean he didn't buy the theory that it went round the sun?'

'Exactly.'

'We always forgave him, though, didn't we?'

'He was easy to forgive. It made for a bad habit.'

'That's what I kept asking myself, after . . . you know. Why did I keep forgiving him when he was always going to crap on me again? It was easy, though. He had charm to burn, and it was always tempting to put whatever he'd done behind him because his good side seemed such a 317.special place to be. It was the same at his work. Anybody else would have talked their way to a P45 years ago. Simon rubbed everybody up the wrong way, but never got the bullet. That's how he ended up in the marketing department.'

'He worked in marketing? I didn't know that.'

'Yeah. He was always sounding off about how useless the marketing department was, and one day he must have said it a little too loud. Instead of an apology, he was made to go and work there for a fortnight, a kind of "mile in my shoes" thing. Of course, when he got there . . .'

Everybody wanted to be his friend.'

'You got it. But the punchline was that it turned out he was right. Well, they weren't useless, but he was better at it than half the incumbents and he'd only just walked in the door.'

'He always knew the importance of image.'

'He looked bloody good, and he knew it, if that's what you're getting at. He was attractive, in every sense of the word. That was part of the problem. We're so much more forgiving of the beautiful people because we like having them around. They make the place brighter and more interesting.'

'Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned/By those that are not entirely beautiful,' Ray quoted.

'What's that?'

'Yeats. "A Prayer For My Daughter." His way of saying the same thing. The beautiful people get things a little too easy and they can be a wee bit cold as a result. Present company excepted.'

Alison gave a qualified-looking smile, not entirely comfortable with his remark. He hoped to fuck she didn't take it as a come-on.

318.

'I'll accept your compliment with good grace, but I would never categorise myself among the beautiful people. I know I'm not four foot nothing with a hump, but... you know what I mean. It's the desire to be, the knowingness that makes the difference. Simon seemed to have this constant alertness to how he was being perceived - ironically complemented by a complete lack of self-awareness.'

'Sounds like the ideal marketing executive then.'

Alison laughed, but there was sadness in it. In fact, everything she said hinted that she was skimming the surface of a far deeper bitterness than she was prepared to dip into. Simon, he guessed, had hurt her far more than he had hurt any of those who'd burned their fingers in those petty, self-absorbed adolescent days. To Ray, Div, Ross and everyone else back then, even though he seemed to loom so large in their lives, ultimately he was just a pain in the arse with a colossal ego.

Ray looked again at the TV. It had changed to the news, something Simon never watched. The Dark Man had to have been the university's least militant student, with absolutely no interest in politics, as though it was not only irrelevant, but somehow inapplicable in his case. He poured merciless scorn on Ray and Ross for taking part in student demo marches, whether they were about the Poll Tax, grant cuts, apartheid or whatever, and changed the subject at the first opportunity whenever such matters were being discussed. He liked to portray this as proof of his superior insight into the futility of their enthusiasms, but Ray suspected the truth was that Simon genuinely didn't give a fuck about anything until it was directly in his way.

They talked on, Ray telling Alison all about his student days, including the sorry tale of the deBacchle. Alison reciprocated with Simon's version of the same events, 319.

evidencing a talent for revisionism that would have won him a job on Pravda.

'Did Simon get involved with any music up here?' Ray asked.

'Yeah, that's how we met. I saw him playing in a band, at a place called The Sheiling. It was a popular hang-out for students and recently former students, if you know what I mean.'

'Aye.'

'I can't remember what the band were called. It was the kind of place you just turned up and watched whoever was playing, then there'd be an alternative club until the early hours. Oh no wait: Book of Dreams, that was their name. Post-Goth, pre Nine Inch Nails kind of stuff. They were pretty good, I thought. I said as much to him afterwards in the bar as an ice-breaker, then we got talking. And the rest is misery.'

'What about the band?'

"The usual. Musical differences. He kept falling out with the other members, especially the singer, Angus. Simon had successfully auditioned for them, because they were already a going concern. Their previous lead guitarist got a job in Texas.'

'The band?'

'No, the state. This is oil town, remember. Simon, being Simon, wanted a bigger say in what they were doing.'

'Don't tell me: he had a better name for them too. Something pertaining to Euripides.'

'Bang on. Eventually, they got fed up and punted him. It really was a shame. Musically, he fitted in great. They sounded damn good and he was a big part of that, but he didn't want to be part, he wanted to be all. Ironically, the band did change their name soon after, because they 320.

thought Book of Dreams didn't sound dark and scary enough. They became Chambers of Torment.'

'No way. As in . . .? Angus was Angus McGheoch?'

'The same.'

'God. I saw them at the Barrowlands two years ago. Sellout tour. I guess their subsequent fortunes didn't go down well with Simon?'

'What? You mean getting himself thrown off an express train to success, acclaim and rock notoriety? No, Simon wasn't bitter.'

'So did he chuck it after that?'

'Effectively, yes, but not in spirit. He kept talking about what he was planning, and a few times he thought he'd found sufficiently like-minded recruits, but. . .'

'They disappointed him.'

'Yeah. Well, sometimes. But mainly the problem was that he'd rather sit around drinking and talking than actually doing anything about it.'

'Him and a million other thwarted dreamers. It helps put off accepting the inevitable.'

'After which, unfortunately, the thwarted dreamer becomes a grumpy old git, ranting in front of Top of the Pops. There came a time when he forgot there was a difference between being an iconoclast and just being a miserable bastard.'

'I can't imagine living round here helped much either,' Ray suggested.

'You mean the Burbs, or Aberdeen? Doesn't matter, I suppose: he hated both. But Aberdeen especially. With a passion.'

'I can picture him in full rant. Usually very entertaining, if you didn't have an emotional attachment to the target.'

'Entertaining for a while, anyway. I mean, I'm from 321.

Edinburgh and I've been here since I was a student, so I'm the last person who needs to be informed of Aberdeen's shortcomings. It isn't the warmest or most picturesque place in the world, I know. The locals tend to be a bit reserved compared to other places you could mention, but you get used to that and it's not actually the locals that are the problem. It's that half the population don't want to be here. Have a look down this street: you'll see For Sale signs outside one house in four. People come here because this is where the oil biz is centred, but it's not exactly Manhattan and it's probably a few hundred miles from their roots, their friends and families. As soon as they can get work elsewhere, they're off, so it doesn't make for a cosy sense of community.'

'But you still like it, presumably?'

'Connor was born here, and this is a nice neighbourhood to bring him up in. Low crime, lots of countryside, terrible accent, but nothing I can do about that.' She smiled. 'I feel settled. I like my job, I like my house, and I've got a lot of friends here. Plus, I'm a great believer that what you find in places is what you bring to them. People bring resentment because they've been uprooted, so it's no wonder they don't find it very welcoming. Simon brought all manner of bitterness with him, and it became easy for him to blame everything he didn't like about his life simply on being here.'

'He didn't have his heart set on an oil industry career, as far as I can remember.'

'No. But what he really resented was that it wasn't a matter of choice. You know his dad died shortly before his finals.'

'Yeah. I was very sad to hear it. I met his old man a few times. Lovely bloke, his mum too. They worshipped the ground he walked on.'

322.

"They spoiled him rotten, more like it. His mum told me she'd had four miscarriages before she carried him to term, and she was in her late thirties by then, so he was extremely precious to them. I don't think Simon ever fully adjusted to the fact that his "most privileged" status didn't extend beyond the family home.'

'Tell me about it,' Ray said, thinking of his flat-sharing days. Everybody could be difficult to live with, especially under the added pressures of student life, but some of Simon's domestic conduct bordered on the pathological. Never mind an absolute and binding refusal to lift a dishcloth or spring for a pint of milk, he used to do things that gave the impression his flatmates didn't exist; or at least didn't count. Other people's towels, for instance, provided a handy and varied supply of floormats for standing on when he got out of the bath. If he brought a girl home and decided his own bedsheets were a bit whiffy, he'd just lead her into someone else's, provided they were fresher and their owner wasn't home yet. And, least forgivable in an all-male adolescent household, if he ran out of blank tapes, he'd just record over whatever compilation cassette had been left in the kitchen's communal boombox. Asking for an explanation or a justification was merely an exercise in Beckett-esque futility.

'Why did you use my towel to mop up the floor?'

'Because it was wet.'

'Why did you take that girl into my bed?'

'You weren't using it.'

Better to find a nice solid wall and bang your head against it.