Love Over Scotland - Alexander Hanchett Smith [3]
She stood quite still, peering at the small print on the summer camp poster. There was something about an orientation weekend and insurance, and then a deposit would be necessary unless . . .
“Not a nice way to spend the summer,” a voice behind her said. “Hundreds of brats. No time off. Real torture.”
She turned round, affecting surprise. “Yes,” she said. “I wasn’t really thinking of doing it.”
“I had a friend who did it once,” said Wolf. “He ran away. He actually physically ran away to New York after two weeks.”
He looked at his watch and then nodded in the direction of the door at the end of the corridor. “Are you hungry?”
Pat was not, but said that she was. “Ravenous.”
“We could go up to the Elephant House,” Wolf said, glancing at his watch. “We could have coffee and a sandwich.”
They walked through George Square and across the wide space in front of the McEwan Hall. In one corner, their skateboards at their feet, a group of teenage boys huddled against A Picture in a Magazine
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the world, caps worn backwards, baggy, low-crotched trousers half-way down their flanks. Pat had wondered what these youths talked about and had concluded that they talked about nothing, because to talk was uncool. Perhaps Domenica could do field work outside the McEwan Hall – once she had finished with her Malacca Straits pirates – living with the skateboarders, in a little tent in the rhododendrons at the edge of the square, observing the socio-dynamics of the group, the leadership struggles, the badges of status. Would they accept her, she wondered?
Or would she be viewed with suspicion, as an unwanted visitor from the adult world, the world of speech?
She found out a little bit more about Wolf as they made their way to the Elephant House. As they crossed the road at Napier’s Health Food Shop, Wolf told her that his mother was an enthusiast of vitamins and homeopathic medicine. He had been fed on vitamins as a boy and had been taken to a homeopathic doctor, who gave him small doses of carefully-chosen poison. The whole family took Echinacea against colds, regularly, although they still got them.
“It keeps her happy,” he said. “You know how mothers are. And it’s cool by me if my mother’s unstressed. You know what I mean?”
Pat thought she did. “That’s cool,” she said. And then he told her that he came from Aberdeen. His father, he said, was in the oil business. He had a company which supplied valves for off-shore wells. They sold valves all over the world, and his father was often away in places like Houston and Brunei. He collected air miles which he gave to Wolf.
“I can go anywhere I want,” he said. “I could go to South America, if I wanted. Tomorrow. All on air miles.”
“I haven’t got any air miles,” said Pat.
“None at all?”
“No.”
Wolf shrugged. “No big deal,” he said. “You don’t really need them.”
“Do you think that Dr Fantouse has any air miles?” asked Pat suddenly.
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A Picture in a Magazine
They both laughed. “Definitely not,” said Wolf. “Poor guy. Bus miles maybe.”
Inside the Elephant House it was beginning to get busy, and they had to wait to be served. Wolf suggested that Pat should find a table while he ordered the coffee and the sandwiches. Pat, waiting for Wolf, paged through a glossy magazine which she found in a rack on the wall. It was one of those magazines which everyone affected to despise, but which equally everyone rather enjoyed – page after page of pictures of celebrities, lounging by the side of swimming pools, leaving expensive restaurants, arriving at parties. The locales, and the clothes, were redolent of luxury, even if luxury that was in very poor taste; and the people looked rather like waxworks – propped up, prompted into positions of movement, but made of wax. This was due to the fact that the photographers caked them with make-up, somebody had explained to her. That’s why they looked so artificial.
She turned a page, and stopped. There had been a party, somebody’s twenty-first, at Gleneagles. Elegant girls in glittering dresses were draped