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The ballroom smells damp. It is illuminated only by the light shining from the
stairwell and the desk lamp on the old trestle table which holds the computer.
Torn, bleached-looking curtains hang at the sides of the six tall window bays.
My breath smokes in front of me and mists on the cold glass. All the panes are
dirty and some are cracked. A couple have been replaced with hardboard. In two
of the window bays there are buckets to catch drips but one of them has
overflowed and caused a puddle to form around it, discolouring and springing
the parquet flooring, which looks burned in other places. Striped, faded
wallpaper has unrolled down the walls in places to hang like giant shavings
off a piece of planed wood.
The ballroom is scattered with cheap wooden chairs, tables, rolls of ancient,
mouldy-smelling carpets, a couple of old motorbikes and lots of bits of
motorbikes standing or lying on oil-stained sheets, and what looks and smells
like an industrial-standard deep-fat frier with the associated hoods, filters,
fan housing and ducting.
The hotel lies at the foot of a steep road which leads down through the trees
from the main road. With the hill and the dark masses of the trees behind it
to the south, the place doesn't get any sunlight in winter and not that much
even in summer. The main road used to come here and the ferry took you over to
the north side of the loch, but then they up-graded the way round the loch
from a track to a road and the ferry
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Complicity stopped. The Inverness-Kyle railway still runs past and the train
still halts if anyone requests it, but with the ferry gone and the road
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traffic diverted the place has gone to seed; there are a few houses, a craft
shop, the railway platform, a wharf and an abandoned compound owned by
Marconi, and the hotel.
That's it. There's a sign at the top of the road that's been there for years,
ever since they opened the new road, and it says 'Strome Ferry - no ferry',
and that just says it all.
A door closes in the distance, somewhere overhead. I drink my whisky and look
out at the inky loch. I
don't think Andy ever meant to do anything with this place. Like the rest of
his friends, I assumed he was going to run it, put money into it; develop it.
We all imagined he had some secret new money-spinning idea and soon we'd all
be amazed at what he'd done to the place, and coming here to marvel at the
crowds he'd managed to attract ... but I don't think he was ever looking for a
site for some viable business venture;
I think he was just looking for somewhere suited to his burned-out, fed-up,
pissed-off mood.
'Right,' Andy says in the background. He comes in from the stairwell and
closes the double doors. 'Fancy some narcotics?'
'Oh! You have some?'
'Yeah, well,' Andy says, coming to stand near me and look out over the water.
He's about my height but he's filled out a bit since he came here and he has a
kind of stoop now which makes him look smaller and older than he is. He's
wearing thick old cords worn smooth at the bum and knee but good-quality once,
and what looks like a load of shirts and holey jumpers and cardigans. He's got
a week's growth of beard which seems to be permanent, judging from the times
I've seen him in the past. 'Howie's like a lot of them up here,' he says.
'They like a drink but they have a weird attitude to anything else.' He shrugs
and takes a silver cigarette case from a pocket in one of his cardigans.
'There are a few travellers live in the area;
they're cool.'
'Hey,' I say, remembering. 'Did the police call you?'
'Yeah,' he says, opening the cigarette case to reveal a dozen or so neatly
rolled spliffs. 'Somebody called
Flavell; asked about when I called you back the other night. I told him.'
'Right. I think I'm supposed to go and report to the local polizei tomorrow.'
'Yeah, yeah, it's a fucking police state,' he says tiredly, offering the
spliff case to me. 'Anyway; fancy a blow, yeah?'
I shrug. 'Well, I don't normally, you understand.' I take one of the Js.
'Thanks.' I shiver. I'm wearing my jacket and my Drizabone but I still feel
freezing. 'But can we go somewhere warm
?'
Andy, the ice-boy, smiles.
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Complicity
*
We sit in the lounge off his bedroom, on the top floor of the hotel, smoking
Js and drinking whisky. I
know I'm going to suffer for this tomorrow - later today - but I don't care. I
tell him about the whisky story and the chill-filtering and the colouring but
he already seems to know it all. The lounge is moderately spacious and
somewhere between shabby and cosy: scuffed velvet curtains, heavy old wooden
furniture, lots of plump embroidered cushions, and - on a massive table in one
corner - an ancient IBM PC; it has an external disk drive and a modem
connected and the casing is sitting slightly askew. An Epson printer sits
alongside.
We're sitting round a real fire burning logs, and a fan heater's whining away
in the centre of the room's dark, threadbare carpet. I'm warm at last. Andy
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