“Right,” Ewan said. “This is non-negotiable.”
He was standing beside a stall that bore the hand-painted sign MICK’S MUNCHIE BOXES and was operated by a man roughly the size and shape of a whisky barrel, wearing a tartan apron and an expression of extreme professional pride. The stall was doing extraordinary business. The queue stretched past the memorial bench and curled around the Three Cranes tent.
“I’m not hungry.”
“That’s irrelevant. It’s the Brew-Fest. You eat a munchie box at the Brew-Fest. It’s the law.”
“Whose law?”
“Mine. And Mick’s. And the combined weight of every person in this park who would personally take offence if you walked past Mick’s stall withoutordering.” He turned to the man behind the counter. “Two, please, Mick. The full works.”
“Donner meat?”
“Obviously.”
The munchie boxes arrived in pizza boxes – the standard delivery system, as I was about to learn, for a meal that defied every other categorisation. Inside: chips, donner meat, onion rings, pakora, a portion of something that might have been a spring roll but had been deep-fried into a state of ambiguity, a tub of curry sauce, a tub of garlic sauce, and – inexplicably – a single piece of naan bread balanced on top like a flag of surrender.
We ate standing at a trestle table in a corner of the park where the beech trees provided unreliable shelter. The rain fell. Ewan ate the way he did everything else – totally, without apology. He dipped a chip in curry sauce, ate it, looked at me, and said: “You haven’t tried the ale yet.”
He produced two plastic cups of something amber and unpromising from the Firth 026 Foam stall. He raised his cup.
“To Cairndhu,” he said. With total sincerity. Without a trace of the performance that usually sat behind his warmth. He meant it. He loved this town, this festival, this terrible ale. He loved it the way you love a thing you stayed for when everyone else with options had left.
I drank. The ale was extraordinary in its badness – warm, flat, and tasting of something that could generously be described as “botanical” and more accurately described as “compost.”
“That,” I said, “is the worst drink I have ever tasted.”
“Isn’t it magnificent?”
I laughed. Full, genuine, surprised out of me by the earnestness and the rain and the munchie box and the ale and the total, ludicrous normality of standing at a trestle table in the drizzle eating deep-fried ambiguity with a man who managed criminal enterprises by day and attended beer festivals with sincere enthusiasm by afternoon.
Ewan looked at me. The grin was there – it was always there – but underneath it, just for a second, something else surfaced. The same look I’d seen in the car after St.Jude’s, the same raw, unperforming expression that belonged to the man underneath the mask. He looked at me like he’d just received something he didn’t know he’d been waiting for, and the receiving of it had cost him something, and he didn’t mind the cost.
I stopped laughing. Not because it wasn’t funny. Because the way he was looking at me wasn’t funny at all, and my body was doing something complicated in response that I wasn’t ready to examine at a beer festival in front of Mick’s Munchie Boxes.
He looked away. The grin reassembled. The moment closed.
“Another ale?” he said.
“I’d rather drink the Clyde.”
“That’s the spirit.”
I saw Duncan across the crowd at half past one.
He was standing near the memorial railings, wearing a clean jacket I didn’t recognise and anexpression I did – the too-bright, too-casual look of a man who was performing sobriety and performing being fine and performing having a nice time at the festival without any of the desperation that had been eating him alive for years. He saw me at the same moment. He waved. The wave was too eager. It had the energy of a man who wanted to prove he was somewhere, which meant someone had told him to be here.
Beside him, a man in a flat cap.
I looked at him and something stirred – a memory of weight, of stillness, of a three-second gaze in a dark casino. The flat cap was the same. The compact, barrel-dense build was the same. But the lighting here was different – daylight, outdoor, filtered through drizzle and festival noise – and the man I remembered from the Gilded Table had been a shadow in a far corner, half-lost in cigar smoke and chandelier glare. I couldn’t be certain. The shape of him was right. The way he stood – hands in pockets, back to the memorial wall, observing the crowd without interest, like he owned something here that nobody else could see – was right. But certainty was a different currency from recognition, and I’d learned enough about this town to know the difference mattered.
He held my gaze. Three seconds. The same duration. The same unhurried quality – the look of a man who assessed things from a distance and consumed them slowly.
Then he turned and walked away into the crowd, and the crowd swallowed him, and Duncan was left standing alone by the memorial railings with his wave uncompleted and his bright expression cracking at the edges.
I didn’t go to my father. I stood at the trestle table with my terrible ale and I watched him standing there and I thought about a man in a flat cap who knew exactly where to be and when, and the fact that my father was standing beside him the way a man stands beside someone who has something over him, and I felt the weight of it settle into my afternoon the way the drizzle had settled into my clothes – slowly, thoroughly, impossible to shake off.
Ewan appeared at my shoulder. His hand went to the small of my back. Light. Warm. Not steering this time – steadying. The touch of a man who had seen what I’d seen and was telling me, through his palm, that he had it. That he was there.
