"That's your medal, Uncle Rory," Prentice told him. "For being a brilliant uncle."

Rory ruffled the boy's hair. Thanks, Prentice." He looked back at the car. Was it slowing?

"I used to worry about Darth Vader," Prentice confessed, putting his arm round Rory's waist and lifting his foot to massage it with one hand. "I'd lie under the covers and make the noise he makes when he's breathing, and then I'd stop, but sometimes it would go on after I'd stopped!" Prentice shook his head, and slapped one hand off his forehead. "Crazy, eh?"

Rory laughed, as the approaching car started to slow down. "Yeah, well, that's what stories do to you, sometimes. Your dad's always tried never to tell you lies, or stories that would scare you or make you superstitious, but —»

"Ha!" Prentice said, as the battered Cortina II drew to a stop just past them. "I remember he tried to tell us clouds came from the Steam Packet Hotel, in the town. That's what they were: packets of steam from the Steam Packet Hotel. Ha!"

Rory smiled as they walked towards the car, him supporting the limping boy. Rory looked away for a second, towards the beach, where the long Atlantic rollers crashed against the broad expanse of gold.

He sniffed the glass; the whisky was amber, and there wasn't much of it. The smell stung. He put it to his lips, hesitated, then knocked it back in one go. The drink made his lips and tongue tingle; his throat felt sore and the fumes went up his nose and down into his lungs. He tried very hard not to cough like he'd seen people cough in westerns when they tried whisky for the first time, and got away with just clearing his throat rather loudly (he looked round at the curtains, afraid somebody might have heard). His eyes and nose were watering, so he pulled his hanky from his trousers, blew his nose.

The whisky tasted horrible. And people drank this stuff for pleasure? He had hoped that by trying some whisky he'd understand adults a bit better; instead they made even less sense.

He was standing between the curtains and the windows of the ballroom of the Steam Packet Hotel, on the railway pier at Gallanach. Outside, the afternoon was wet and miserable-looking, and what little light there had been — watery and grey — was going now. Sheets of rain hauled in off the bay, blew around the steamers and ferries moored round the windswept quay, then collapsed upon the dark grey buildings of the town. The street lamps were already lit, and a few cars crawled through the rough-mirror streets with their lights on and their wipers flapping to and fro.

Music played behind Rory. He balanced the empty whisky glass on the window-sill and gave his nose a last wipe, pocketing his hanky. He supposed he'd better go back into the ballroom. Ballroom; he hated the word. He hated the music they were playing — Highland stuff, mostly — he hated being here in this dull, wet town, with these dull people listening to their dull music at their dull wedding. They should be playing the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, and they shouldn't be getting married in the first place — modern people didn't.

"Heeee-yooch!" a voice shouted, startlingly nearby, making Rory jump. The curtains bowed in a few yards away, almost touching the window-sill, the movement like a wave. Rory could hear the stamping, slapping feet move in time to the fiddles and accordions as they played a jig. People were clapping, shouting out. God, it was all so provincial.

Rory straightened his tie, and with his whisky still burning in his throat, and now his stomach too, he moved along to the gap in the curtains and slid through, back into the ballroom, where people sat drinking at long wooden tables and groups of dancers went whirling round in complicated, ever-changing patterns, all flowing dresses and clasping hands and big red sweaty faces and white shirts and ties and narrow trousers or — even worse — kilts.

Rory moved near the stage, behind the tables where Kenneth and Mary sat, talking to mum. Boring Hamish and the horse-resembling Antonia were on the floor, him in a kilt, her still in her white bridal gown, both dancing badly and out of time, but seemingly thoroughly enjoying themselves.

"Well," he heard his mum saying, "you two had better get a move on, or Hamish and Antonia will beat you to it." She laughed and drank from her glass. She wore a hat. Rory hated his mother in a hat. He thought she sounded drunk. Kenneth and Mary smiled uncertainly at each other.

"Well, mum," Kenneth said, sitting back, filling his pipe. "We have been practising."

"Kenneth!" his wife said quietly.

Mum shook her head. "Ah, don't mind me; plenty of time yet, I dare say." She looked into her empty glass. "I wouldn't be missing grandchildren so much, but… " She shrugged. There was an awkward silence between the three people then, while the music played and the dancers whooped and shouted and clapped and stamped. Rory saw his mother's shoulders move once, and she put her head down for a second, sniffed. She reached down for her handbag on the floor. Kenneth handed her his hanky. He put his arm round his mum's shoulders. Mary moved her seat closer, reached out and took one of the older woman's hands in hers.

"God, I miss that old devil," mum said, and blew her nose. Eyes bright with tears, she looked at Mary, and then saw Rory standing behind and to one side of them. "Rory," she said, trying to sound all right. We wondered where you were. Are you enjoying yourself, darling?"

Yes," he lied. He hated her calling him "darling'. He stayed where he was because he didn't want to get close enough for them to smell his breath. His mother smiled.

"Good lad. See if you can find your cousin Sheila; you said you'd ask her to dance, remember?"

"Yeah, all right," he said, turning away.

He didn't like boring cousin Sheila, either. She was about the only girl here who was his own age. It was horrible being this age when nobody else was; they were all either adults or children. He blamed his parents. Mostly he blamed his dad. If he'd looked after himself, not had a heart attack, he'd still be around. That was how thoughtless he'd been. Rory supposed it was the same thoughtlessness that had made dad and mum have him so much later than the rest of their children. People just didn't think, that was the trouble.

He didn't go looking for Sheila. He decided to go wandering. He would slip away. He had always liked slipping away from things. At parties he would just quietly leave when nobody was watching him, so that only much later would anybody wonder where he was. When he was out with a group of other kids, playing kick-the-can or soldiers, he would often sneak away, so that they would never find him, or think he had fallen down a hole or into a burn or a loch. It was a wonderful feeling, to disappear like that; it made him feel different and special. He gloried in the cunningness of it, the feeling of having outwitted the others, of knowing what they did not; that he was out and away and they were back there where he'd left them, ignorantly worrying where he was, searching; wondering.

He slunk out through the doors while they were clapping the band after finishing one of their noisy, interminable Highland dances.

It was cooler in the lobby. He drew himself upright and walked confidently through the bit of the lobby that gave onto the Cocktail Lounge, where ruddy-faced men stood panting and laughing, sleeves rolled up, ties loose, queuing for drinks or holding trays of them, laughing loudly in deep voices.

He went through another set of doors, down some steps, round a corner, and found the hotel's single small lift. He pulled both sets of gates open with an effort, entered, then closed them again. The lift was a little bigger than a phone box. He pressed the brass button for the top floor. The lift jerked into motion and set off, humming. The white-washed walls of the lift shaft moved smoothly downwards as the lift ascended. Stencilled letters painted inside the shaft said 1st Floor… 2nd Floor… God, he thought, Americans must think they're in the Stone Age when they come to stay in a place like this.