We didn't go to Duncairn much even when we were there if you know what I mean. Sometimes we'd meet up at lunchtime and go for a wander down to the docks and the ferry terminal, but mostly we hung about the common room or smoked at the back of the toilet block. We hardly ever went in the evenings. It was too far to bother. Mostly we just stayed around Dounby, mucking about.

Most folk who visit Dounby stand about at the harbour looking daft for a couple of minutes as if they've suddenly realised there's nowhere else to go. They click off a few snaps, jump back in the car and drive slowly up the hill, gawping left and right at the wee houses. They're all thinkng the same thing. You can almost see their lips moving. But when you live here you know there's nothing quaint about it. It's really six separate communities stuck together: The oldest part is the houses around the Harbour that are mostly crumbling to bits. Then there's several rows of tiny damp houses facing each other on the flat bit known as the New Ground. On the other side of the harbour is the Seatown; terraces of a hundred or so whitewashed houses that stretch out to the beach. It used to be dead old and manky but some of the houses have been bought by outsiders and are rented out to holidaymakers. Artists and various posers of one sort or another, mostly English, whom you never really meet. You can tell their places by the netting and old lobster creels outside which have been tarted up as decoration. The houses are so close together that if somebody farts in bed all the people in the street can smell it. There are handrails built into the house walls so you can walk up and down the passageways when it's icy. Some of the houses at the far end are just shacks with tin roofs. Breeks lived with his stepmother in one of those. Above the Seatown and the Harbour is the Braeheid that has a few terraces and lots of shops, some B & Bs and the two hotels. Above that is the Council Houses where I live and above that, climbing up over the cliffs, is the Bungalows: posh detached houses, some holiday homes and chalets. That's where Mrs Pritchard's house is, at the end, off by itself. And further along the cliff, one tosser who lives there, an old admiral or something, flies a huge Union Jack off a pole. That pisses everybody off -- you can see the thing for miles and Hecky often talks about burning it down. But anyway, I live in the council estate and Alan lives across the street.

Alan's father, Hecky, works on the Summer Star, an old rust-bucket with third-hand radar and the kind of equipment that only just scrapes through each year's inspection. Hecky seemed to take a perverse pleasure in that. It tied up at Gardyne. No big boats worked out of Dounby, no boats at all except a couple of crabbers and a charter boat for the line fishing and day trips. There were some pleasure craft, yachts and the like, tied up at the harbour and a lot more that were for sale or had been left to rust or were undergoing some pretence of repair. There was even the hulk of a thirty-four-foot trawler, Lucky Dog, sunk at her berth, which had been there as long as I can remember. You could see the fish going in and out of her on sunny days. But with new crises in fishing, Hecky considered himself lucky to get one trip a month though it might last up to two weeks and take them deep into Arctic waters, if it was one of those huge purse-seine netters. In the summer he signed on.