It took him an hour and a half to walk from Fitzrovia to Kensington, the last of the Ecstasy wearing off as he passed the Victoria & Albert Museum. He arrived at Xavier’s house in Onslow Square just after seven o’clock. Xavier had made it home from Mud Club and was asleep in his clothes upstairs. His mother had bought him a black leather jacket almost identical to the one worn by George Michael on the cover of Faith. Xavier, who was sprawled on his bed in artfully-torn, stonewashed Levi 501s and a white T-shirt, had left it on the back of a chair. Kite went through the pockets, borrowed sixty pounds from Xavier’s wallet, took a shower, ate a breakfast cooked by the Bonnards’ Filipina maid and set off for Euston. As soon as the train had pulled out of the station he fell asleep in his seat, waking only once during the five-hour journey to Glasgow to buy a bacon roll and a much-needed bottle of water.
The first anomaly of that unusual Easter weekend occurred on the coastal train to Stranraer. Kite had boarded the service at Glasgow Central, having called his mother from a phone box to tell her that he would be home by nine.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ she asked, the sound of a second telephone ringing in the office beside her. Fifteen years in hospitality had softened her accent, but a trace of the East End was always detectable, especially when she lost her temper.
‘It’s OK, Mum,’ Kite replied, feeling oddly numb as he cupped his hand over the receiver to smother the noise of the station. ‘I had to go to a birthday—’
‘It is not OK, Lachlan. You promised me you’d be back last night and I had no way of contacting you. I didn’t even know where you were staying—’
‘I always stay with Xav—’
‘I’ve got thirty guests in the hotel, another twenty for dinner tonight. Mario turned out to be a bloody thief, so there’s nobody here to take orders in the restaurant. I’m simultaneously trying to run the bar, ferry food from the kitchen to the restaurant, turn down the beds upstairs and keep a bloody smile on my face for the guests.’
‘I’m sorry, I’ll be back—’
‘Just get here.’
Cheryl had hung up before her son had a chance to ask if someone might collect him from the station in Stranraer. Shortly afterwards, having sunk a hangover-busting can of Irn Bru and bought a copy of the NME at John Menzies, he boarded the service to Ayr.
It was a damp March evening on the west coast and the smell of the sea seeped through the train, telling Kite that he was home. He sat in an almost-empty carriage towards the back of the train, ticking off the towns through rain-streaked windows: Kilwinning, Irvine, Troon, Prestwick. These were the places of his childhood: grey, lifeless settlements a million miles from the dreaming spires of Alford and the wild child hedonism of Mud Club, Crazy Larry’s and 151 on Kings Road. Kite didn’t know much about ship-building on the Clyde or the coal industry in Ayrshire, but he knew that whole communities had been eviscerated by a decade of Thatcherism, two generations of men left without work or purpose. It may have been his hangover – too little sleep and the after-slump of Ecstasy – but at that moment he felt a raw sense of separation from the country of his birth. It was as if he had left Scotland in 1984 as one sort of person and was returning, for the final time, as quite another. In London, surrounded by girls and Pimm’s and parties, Kite and his friends tried to emulate the deracinated, coke-addled hipsters in Bright Lights, Big City and Less Than Zero; rolling towards Killantringan on an empty British Rail train defaced by litter and graffiti, he did not know who he was or what he was meant to be. The dutiful son to a demanding mother? The secret posh boy pretending to be a ‘normal’ Scottish teenager? He wondered if all of the privilege he had witnessed at Alford – the country houses, the Bentleys parked by chauffeurs on the fourth of June, the skiing holidays in Verbier and Val d’Isère – would become commonplace to him, a day-to-day feature of his adult life. Or perhaps Alford would prove to be just a blip and Kite would return to the world of catering and hospitality, graduating from Edinburgh University in four years’ time to help his mother with whatever venture she took on after selling Killantringan.
The trouble started in Ayr where Kite had to change trains. He was obliged to wait on the platform for the service south to Stranraer. A group of three local youths in their early twenties were ragging around in the waiting room, smoking Embassy cigarettes and sharing a half-bottle of Smirnoff. They were wearing tracksuits and trainers and quickly clocked Kite – with his foppish public school haircut and collared shirt – for an outsider. The tallest of them, the ringleader, had a wraparound tattoo on his wrist which spread all the way up to his armpit. He flashed Kite a vicious stare and pointed at his bag.
‘What’s in there, big man?’ he called out from the waiting room.
Kite wasn’t afraid of him but knew that if it came to a fight, he was outnumbered.
‘Kittens,’ he said, immediately finding his old Scottish accent so that ‘kittens’ sounded like ‘cuttens’.
‘What’s that? You making a joke, pal? You making fun of me and my boys?’
Kite shook his head slowly, felt his heart thump and said: ‘Nah. Don’t worry.’
‘You’re a funny man? Is that it? Telling me you got kittens in yer bag when you don’t?’
Kite wondered why the hell he had said something so stupid.
‘Relax,’ he said. ‘We’re all waiting for the same train. I thought
