I went downstairs for a pee, and came back to a good-natured but confused argument. "What do you mean, no it doesn't?" Verity said from her sleeping-bagged cubby-hole.

"I mean, what is sound?" Lewis said. "The definition is; what we hear. So if there's nobody there to hear it…»

"Sounds a bit anthro-thingy to me," Helen Urvill said, from the card table.

"But how can it fall without making a sound?" Verity protested. "That's crazy."

I leaned over to Darren, who was sitting looking amused. "We talking trees falling in forests?" I asked. He nodded.

"You're not listening — " Lewis told Verity.

"Maybe you're not making a sound."

"Shut up, Prentice," Lewis said, without bothering to look at me. "What I'm saying is, What is a sound? If you define it as —»

"Yeah," interrupted Verity. "But if the tree hits the ground that must make the air move. I've stood near a tree when it's felled; you feel the ground shake. Doesn't the ground shake either, when there's nobody there? The air has to move; there must be… movement, in the air; its molecules, I mean…»

"Compression waves," I provided, nodding to Verity, and thinking about Darren's wave-powered organ-pipe coast sculptures.

"Yeah; producing compression waves," Verity said, with an acknowledging wave at me (oh, my heart leapt!). "Which birds and animals and insects can hear —»

"Ah!" Lewis said. "Supposing there aren't —»

Well, it got silly after that, dissolving into the polemical equivalent of white noise, but I liked the robustly common-sensical line Verity was taking. And when she was talking, of course, I got to stare at her without anybody thinking it odd. It was wonderful. I was falling in love with her. Beauty and brains. Wow!

More sounds, more spliffs, more star-gazing. Lewis did his impression of a radio being tuned through various wavelengths; fingers at his lips to produce the impressively authentic between-stations noises, then suddenly putting on silly voices to impersonate a news reader, compere, quiz contestant, singer…»

rrrrsssshhhh… reports that the London chapter of the Zoroastrians have fire-bombed the offices of the Sun newspaper for blasphemy… zzzoooowwwaaanngggg… athangyou, athangyou, laze an ge'men, andenow, please put your hands together for the Siamese Twins… rrrraaasshhhwwwaaaassshhhaaa… uh, can you eat it, Bob? Ah, no, you can't. I'm afraid the answer is; a Pot Nooddle… bllbllbllbl… Hey hey, we're the junkies!… zpt!"

And so on. We laughed, we drank more coffee, and we smoked.

The gear was black and powerful like the night; the hollow aluminium skull of the observatory tracked the "scope's single eye slowly over the rolling web of stars, or — hand-cranked — swivelled the universe about our one fixed point. Soon my head was spinning, too. The music machine played away — far away — and when I started to understand the lyrics of a Cocteau Twins song, I knew I was wrecked. The stars shone on in mysterious galactic harmonies, constellations like symphonies of ancient, trembling light; Lewis told weird and creepy stories and bizarrely apposite jokes, and the twins — hunkered over the little card-table in their quilted jackets, their night-black hair straight and shining and framing their broad-boned beautiful faces — looked like proud Mongolian princesses, calmly contemplating creation from the nbbed dome of some fume-filled yurt, midnight-pitched on the endless rolling Asian steppe.

Verity Walker — professed sceptic though she was — read my palm, her touch like warm velvet, her voice like the spoken ocean and in her eyes each iris like a blue-white sun stationed a billion light years off. She told me I'd be sad and I'd be happy and I'd be bad and I'd be good, and I believed all of it and why not, and she told me the last part in Clanger, the tin-whistle pretend language from one of the children's programmes we'd all watched as youngsters, and she was trying to keep a straight face, and Lew and Dar and Di and Hel were snorting with laughter and even I was grinning, but I'd been singing happily along to the Cocteau Twins" other-worldly words for the past hour, and I knew exactly what she said even though she might not have known herself, and fell completely in love with her iris-blue eyes and her wheat-crop hair and her peat-dark voice and the peach-skin fuzz of infinitesimally fine hairs on her creamy skin.

"What was all that stuff about Pontius Pilate, anyway?" Ash said.

«Aw…» I waved my hand. "Too complicated."

Ash and I stood on a low little mound overlooking what had been the Slate Mine wharf, at the north-west limit of Gallanach where the Kilmartin Burn flows out of the hills, meanders without conviction, then widens to form part of Gallanach Bay before finally decanting into the deeper waters of Inner Loch Crinan. Here was where the docks had been, when the settlement had exported first coal then slate then sand and glass, before the railway arrived and a subtle Victorian form of gentrification had set in the shape of the railway pier, the Steam Packet Hotel and the clutch of sea-facing villas (only the fishing fleet had remained constant, sporadically crowded amongst its inner harbour in the stony lap of the old town, swelling, dying, burgeoning again, then falling away once more, shrinking like the holes in its nets).

Ashley had dragged me out here, now in the wee small hours of what had become a clear night with the stars steady and sharp in the grip of this November darkness, after the Jacobite Bar and after we'd trooped (victorious at pool, by the way) back to Lizzie and Droid's flat via McGreedy's (actually McCreadie's Fast Food Emporium), and after consuming our fish/pie/black pudding suppers and after a cup of tea and a J or two, and after we'd got back to the Watt family home in the Rowanfield council estate only to discover that Mrs Watt was still up, watching all-night TV (does Casey Casen never sit down in that chair?), and made us more tea, and after a last wee numbrero sombrero in Dean's room.

"I'm going for a walk, guys, okay?" Ash had announced, coming back from the toilet, cistern flushing somewhere in the background, pulling her coat back on.

I'd suddenly got paranoid that I had over-stayed my welcome and — in some dopey, drunken excess of stupidity — missed lots of hints. I looked at my watch, handed the remains of the J to Dean. "Aye, I'd better be off too."

"I wasn't trying to get rid of you," Ash said, as she closed the front door after us. I'd said goodbye to Mrs Watt; Ash had said she would be back in quarter of an hour or so.

"Shit. I thought maybe I was being thick-skinned," I said as we walked the short path to a wee garden gate in the low hedge.

"That'll be the day, Prentice," Ash laughed.

"You really going to walk at this time of night?" I looked up; the night was clear now, and colder. I pulled on my gloves. My breath was the only cloud.

"Nostalgia," Ash said, stopping on the pavement. "Last visit to somewhere I used to go a lot when I was a wean."

"Wow, really? How far is it? Can I come?" I have a fascination with places people think powerful or important. If I hadn't been still fairly drunk I'd have been a lot more subtle about asking to accompany Ash, but, well, there you are.

Happily, she just laughed quietly, turned on her heel and said, "Aye; come on; isn't far."

So here we stood, on the wee mound only five minutes from the Watt house, down Bruce Street, through a snicket, across the Oban road and over the weedy waste ground where the dock buildings stood, long ago.

The dock-side was maybe ten metres away; the skeletal remains of a crane stood lop-sided a little way along the cancered tarmac, its foundations betrayed by rotten wooden piling splaying out from the side of the wharf like broken black bones. Mud glistened in the moonlight. The sea was a taste, and a distant glittering that all but disappeared if you looked at it straight. Ash seemed lost in thought, staring away to the west. I shivered, un-studded the wide lapels of the fake biker's jacket and pulled the zip up to my right shoulder so that my chin was encased.