the book when I was thirteen, and again four years later, when I understood it better. It was hard to be objective - still is - but I think it is a good book; gauche and naive in places, but startling; vivacious. He went with his eyes open, and, not having taken a camera, just tried to record everything on the pages of those cheap exercise books, straining to make it real for himself, as though he could not believe he had seen and heard and experienced what he had until it was fixed somewhere other than in his stunned brain, and so he could describe walking towards the Taj Mahal - ho-hum, thinks the reader, immediately in the realm of the tacky postcard - and still give you a wholly fresh impression of the exact scale and actual presence of that white tomb; delicate but powerful, compact and yet boundlessly imposing.
Epic grace. With those two words he encapsulated it, and you knew exactly what he meant.
And so our Rory became famous, at that moment on the very lip of the escarpment of his fame, the rosy cliffs forever at his back as he wandered on.
Ash squatted down, resting on her heels. She tore a piece of grass from the mound, ran it through her fingers. ‘And I’d come here when my daddy-paddy was beating the living shit out of my mum, and sometimes us too.’ She looked up at me. ‘Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, Prentice.’
I hunkered down too, shaking my head as much to clear it as to deny. ‘Well, not exactly, but I knew it wasn’t all sweetness and light, chez Watt.’
‘Fuckin right it wasn’t,’ Ash said, and sounded bitter. The blade of grass ran through her fingers, was turned round, passed through again. She looked up, shrugged. ‘Anyway, sometimes I came out here just because the house smelled of chip-fat or the telly was too loud, just to remind myself there was more to the world than 47 Bruce Street and endless arguments about fag money and which one of us got a new pair of shoes.’
‘Aye, well,’ I said, at a loss really to know what to say. Maybe I get uncomfortable being reminded there are worse backgrounds than coming from a family of mostly amiable over-achievers.
‘Anyway,’ she said again. ‘They’re levelling the lot tomorrow.’ Ash looked back over her shoulder. I followed her gaze. ‘That’s what all that plant’s for.’
I remembered the Triffid jokes we used to make about Heavy Plant Crossing, and only then saw the dim outlines of a couple of bulldozers and a JCB, a little way off down the piece of waste ground.
‘Aw, shit,’ I said, eloquently.
‘An exclusive marina development with attractive fishing-village-style one- and two-bedroom flats with dedicated moorings, double garages and free membership of the private health club,’ Ash said, in a Kelvinside accent.
‘Fffuck,’ I shook my head.
‘What the hell,’ Ashley said, rising. ‘I suppose the Glasgow middle classes have to go somewhere after they’ve braved the treacherous waters of the Crinan canal.’ She gave her hands one final dust. ‘Hope they’re happy there.’
We turned to leave the mound, me and the Ash, then I grabbed her arm. ‘Hi.’ She turned to me. ‘Berlin,’ I said. ‘The jacuzzi; I just remembered.’
‘Oh yeah.’ She started walking down the slope, back to the weeds, the junk and the ankle-high remains of old brick walls. I followed her. ‘I was in Frankfurt,’ she said. ‘Seeing this friend from college? We heard things were happening in Berlin so we hitched and trained it; met up with ... Well, it’s a long story, but I ended up in this fancy hotel, in the swimming pool; and had a big whirl-pool bath in a wee sort of island at one end, and this drunken English guy was trying hard to chat me up, and making fun of my accent and -’
‘Cheeky basturt,’ I said as we got to the main road.
We waited while a couple of cars sped north out of town.
‘That’s what I thought,’ Ashley nodded, as we crossed the road. ‘Anyway, when I told him where I came from he started saying he knew the place well and he’d been shooting here, and fishing, and knew the laird and -’
‘Do we have a laird? I didn’t know. Perhaps he meant Uncle Fergus.’
‘Maybe, though when I asked him that he got cagey and said no ... but the point is he was acting all mysterious about something, and he’d already