Big Boy Did It and Ran Away (46 page)

Someone she wanted to spend the night with. Ray had heard any number of stupid expressions in his life, but ahead of even ‘compassionate conservatism’, ‘better than sex’ reigned supreme as the all‐
time champion. Anyone who said something was better than sex couldn’t be doing it right. Nothing, he decided that night, was better than sex, and he had subsequently failed to encounter anything that dissuaded him.

As Rina took his hand and led him to her bedroom, even before they had done anything, it felt more exciting than playing onstage, more thrilling than breaking into the museum. And the sense of anticipation was so intense because he knew they were going to do something. He was playing with one of the big girls today, and he was a big boy now. Or at least would be, very soon.

Ray didn’t consider there to be anything remotely sexy or even charming about his virginity, which was why he had no intention of sharing the significance of its passing with the woman who was doing him the unparalleled honour of taking it. Nor did he want his overall inexperience to be conspicuous, as there was definitely nothing sexy or charming about a technically incompetent lover, whatever crap the problem pages spouted regarding enthusiasm being the most important thing. Ray had no shortage of that, as well as years of imaginings to prepare him, but a more valuable source of guidance had been the corner‐
shop back in Ayrshire, where throughout the early Eighties, requesting ‘something from under the counter’ got you sorted out with some highly educational Scandinavian materials, even in Betamax.

It was, without question, the greatest experience of his life to that date. Every kiss, every touch, every caress, every sensation surpassed even his most fevered early‐
teen imaginings, and the best part was that Rina seemed to be enjoying it more than a little too. By some miracle, he didn’t come immediately upon seeing her naked body, or at any of the other absurdly over‐
stimulating junctures along the way; though the time‐
honoured male mental‐
distraction technique did come to his rescue during Rina’s more vocal moments. For a lot of guys, this involved tasks such as listing album tracks in the correct order or alphabetising the names of football teams; Ray was probably the first to enhance his sexual longevity by trying to remember, in order, the names of all twenty levels of Manic Miner.

He knew it had served its purpose when Rina, apparently post‐
orgasm, pulled his head down closer to hers and whispered in his ear: ‘Let yourself go. I want to feel you come.’

Were ever any words sweeter?

Ray might have fumbled, bluffed and improvised his way through the rest, but for this part he knew exactly what to do, again thanks to those illicit and much maligned porno vids. As he felt the deliciously unavoidable moment rapidly approach, he quickly withdrew, whipped off the condom (untimely ripped from its long‐
term rest home/
grave in his wallet), then straddled Rina’s chest and ejaculated on to her face.

Even before the first warm jet was airborne, he already knew he was in the throes of disaster. There had been a look of confusion in her eyes as he pulled out and removed the johnny‐
bag, but it all happened too fast to abort takeoff.

‘What the hell are you doing?’

Ray felt the greatest moment of his life turn instantly into the worst, suddenly recognising this video‐
induced delusion as a flimsy edifice he really ought to have seen through. He remembered Dennis Potter’s anecdote about a Hollywood producer saying: ‘You know when you’re just about to come in a girl’s face, and the phone rings?’ and belatedly appreciated that Potter found the whole thing grotesque, not merely the fact that the Hollywood shark would answer the phone.

Time froze, which was just as well, as Ray’s heart had stopped beating.

Then Rina burst into laughter: helpless, convulsive laughter that shook the bed.

She reached for a hanky from a box near the headboard. Ray didn’t feel relief yet. He knew that sexual discretion was not always highly prized among students, particularly disappointed females, and envisaged the whole campus knowing the story by the end of the week.

‘I’m really sorry, I …’

‘Have you been with a lot of girls who are into that?’

‘No.’

‘So what made you think I was?’

Ray hung his head, nothing left to lie for. When he looked down, he could see Rina’s breasts, which reminded him that this wasn’t as bad a moment as he might have begun to think.

‘You’re the first one I’ve been with.’ He could feel tears forming, but didn’t want to wipe them away for fear that he would only draw attention to them.

‘No way,’ she said, still laughing. ‘No way that was your first time.’ Then she noticed the tears, which had begun to run down his cheeks. ‘Oh Christ, you’re not kidding, are you?’

Ray shook his head.

‘Well don’t look so sad about it. I wasn’t that bad, was I?’

He smiled back, sheepishly.

‘Come here,’ she said, pulling his head down to rest on her chest.

‘I’m sorry, Rina, really, I—’

‘Don’t worry about it. Just don’t do it again. Well, not unless I ask you.’

At which they both laughed, and Ray knew it was going to be all right.

This was confirmed by them doing it (obviously not all of it) again after a few giggly minutes of billing and cooing, this time to the unlikely musical accompaniment of Adam and the Ants on Rina’s tape deck. This was, she explained, a bit of wish‐
fulfilment on her part, as Marco, Merrick, Terry Lee, Gary Tibbs and Yours Trulee had represented the zenith of stylised sexuality during her early Eighties pubescence, and she had youthfully imagined their music would be playing when she was grown‐
up enough to be finally doing it herself. Rina’s previous sexual partner, whose name she could at that point not bring herself to utter, had been vocally appalled at the suggestion, an over‐
reaction she suspected was down to a number of albums she’d spotted in a pile back at his parents’ house.

(Ray’s own fantasy first‐
time soundtrack had been The Ronettes’ heartbeat‐
booming Be My Baby. He’d have liked to be able to say that this was inspired by Mean Streets, but the truth was that he hadn’t seen it by that point, and the notion in fact came from watching Moonlighting, specifically the episode in which Maddy and David finally got it on.)

‘So you were my first too, in a certain way,’ Rina told him in a near whisper.

‘I like that,’ he replied, stroking her hair. ‘And I’m grateful old Adam isnae popular with the guys these days.’

‘He was only unpopular with one,’ she said, biting her lip in shy reaction to her oblique candour.

Ray held her that bit tighter. He was unsure what he was supposed or expected to find in the revelation, other than that she trusted him enough to make it, and that part knocked everything else into a cocked hat.

‘You didn’t have to tell me that, Rina. It’s none of my business.’

‘I wanted you to know, because I wish you’d been the first.’

‘Attempts to come in your face notwithstanding.’

‘Well, you were definitely the first to do that.’

They both laughed.

‘So are we going to be boyfriend‐
girlfriend?’ she asked.

‘I do hope so.’

‘Because if we are, you’ll have to stop calling me Rina. It’s a silly playground name that I’ve never been able to get rid of. My real name is Katrina.’

‘Katrina,’ Ray repeated.

‘But I’d prefer if you called me Kate.’

Angelique phoned her boss on her hands‐
free to let him know where she was headed and why. Understandably, he wasn’t recommending the entire Sunderland operation stand down on the basis of a suspicion that Ray was too gormless to have escaped the farmhouse through his own initiative. They had evidence, and it was incumbent upon them that they act on it, especially when it pointed to thirty thousand potential victims in a football stadium. Even Pinochet couldn’t match those numbers.

Crianfada was a blink‐
and‐
miss‐
it wee village: just a few houses, a sub post‐
office and a pub. The nearby water‐
sports centre was the only reason most people would even notice the name, but even the sailors, windsurfers and divers tended to bed down along the road at the larger tourist destination of Cromlarig. Ray suspected Angelique had indeed blinked and missed it when she skited through the place at speed, as though having forgotten that she was imminently about to run out of road.

‘First things first,’ she said. ‘I want a look at this bridge before we do anything else.’

They pulled up in front of a row of cones, beyond which two candy‐
striped barriers had been erected, just in case anybody had thought the ‘ROAD AHEAD CLOSED’ signs a hundred yards back were referring to some other thoroughfare. There were three guys in fluorescent yellow jackets and heavy black wellies standing next to the barriers, one of whom immediately set off towards them as they got out of the car, the unwelcoming look on his face suggesting they weren’t the first to require individual assurance that the situation was indeed as described on the signs.

Angelique held up her warrant card to save him the speech.

‘Who’s in charge?’ she asked.

‘Douglas is the engineer,’ he replied. ‘Come on through and I’ll get him. He’s down in the drink just now. And watch your step or you’ll find yourself in with him.’

They were led through the barriers, beyond which the road simply disappeared as though a bite had been taken out of it, leaving jagged teeth‐
marks in the tarmac. Across the gap, the two‐
lane blacktop continued on towards Dubh Ardrain and Cromlarig with the undisturbed innocence of a calmly retreating shoplifter.

The engineer emerged from below, helped up from a ladder by one of the wellingtoned fraternity. Angelique introduced herself while Ray tried not to look like a spare tool.

‘I’m fairly baffled at this stage,’ he heard the engineer telling her. ‘If there was widespread fatigue in the structure, I’d have expected it to come down when a heavy vehicle passed over it; an oil truck maybe. But there was nobody around. It passed inspection a year ago, and now it just appears to have spontaneously collapsed.’

‘And what could have caused that?’

‘Hard to tell. I’ll know more when I can get some of the materials analysed. The problem is, a lot of the debris has already been washed further out into the loch.’

‘Is sabotage a possibility?’

‘Until I know more, anything’s a possibility. Sabotage, aye, that’s a possibility. I’m not sure it’s a plausibility, though. Who would want to demolish the road to Cromlarig?’

‘How aboot the Blairlethen shinty team?’ asked one of the welly brothers. ‘They always get skelped when they go there.’

Angelique said her thank‐
yous and they headed back to the car.

‘You think it looks like Simon’s work?’ Ray asked as they pulled away.

‘Did it look like subsidence to you?’

‘More like Godzilla had popped by for a nibble.’

‘My thoughts as well. How are your sea legs?’

‘I can just about handle a pedalo. Or the rowin’ boats at Rouken Glen.’

‘You’ll be fine. We’ve got to get a closer look at this place.’

‘Out of interest, just what are you plannin’ if we get a closer look and we find something?’

‘Depends what we find, but my prediction would be to stand back and call in the cavalry.’

‘And how are the cavalry going to get there?’

‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.’

‘There is no bridge, remember? That’s my point.’

The watersports centre was on the near side of Crianfada, a low wooden building with a large car park and a concreted slipway. There were half a dozen sail dinghies lined up on the shore, alongside four jet‐
skis and a rack of windsurf boards. Ray could see a couple of windsurfers in the water right then, out beyond the two moored motorboats that were bobbing at the edge of the loch in front of the building. Angelique had a worryingly long look at one of the power launches, then proceeded into the reception area, where a sandy‐
haired teenage girl hailed them both from behind her desk with a smile.

Ray hung back as Angelique did the talking, taking a stroll around the reception area’s centrepiece: a scale three‐
dimensional model of Loch Fada and Glen Crom, from Blairlethen at one end to Cromlarig at the other. Dubh Ardrain power station was marked out on the glass of the display case, though there was little to represent it on the model unless you already knew the significance of the sprawling corrie loch and the dam holding it back.

There was a rack of tourist leaflets next to a bench against the window, advertising the usual highland and island attractions, including a tour of Dubh Ardrain. At the end of the bench was a pile of copies of the local newspaper, a flimsy free‐
sheet covering a radius of at least a hundred miles but a population of only a few thousand. Having yesterday stared with alienated detachment at the irrelevant headlines in the national press, he could hardly think of anything less pertinent to his current predicament.

But he was wrong to a near‐
absolute degree.

‘GAMES HOMECOMING FOR SCOTS LEADER’ said the front‐
page headline.

‘NEW First Minister Andrew MacDonald will be on home ground as the guest of honour at this year’s Cromlarig Highland Games. In twenty‐
four years as the area’s MP and more recently MSP, Andrew has never missed the annual event, but this will be the first time he has attended since his election as First Minister in March, and the red carpet will be rolling out to meet him.

The trappings of his new office mean that Andrew will be arriving from Edinburgh by helicopter, a far cry from those days in the Seventies when his Hillman Hunter was a familiar site around the glens …’

Ray checked the date on the paper, which stated only ‘September’, the free‐
sheet being a monthly publication. The travel bulletin replayed in his head.

‘If you’re planning to attend today’s Highland Games, you’d better get your skates on.’

‘Angelique,’ he called, lifting a copy and placing it face‐
up on the model display case. ‘I think you should see this.’ Angelique excused herself and turned away from the desk.