"You total bastard! You total utter and complete bastard! That's how you fucking do it! Bastard!"

Compensation and redemption; education, even. I'm in the dark hotel at the side of the black loch and it's close to midnight and I'm drunk but not stoned and so's Andy and his pal Howie and I'm sitting in the old ballroom on the lower ground floor, looking out over the waters to where grey ghostly moonlit mountains rise, tops glowing softly, capped with snow, and I'm playing computer games. In fact I'm playing Xerium, of all things, and blow me down, blow me up if I haven't just found out how to get over the Mountains of Zound at long, long last.

It's easy but sneaky; you ferry a dump of fuel, shielding, a nuke and a missile, load up on fuel and a nuke, fly out and up eight clicks, drop the nuke at the foot of the mountains, power-dive back down to base, load the shielding, fuel to the max with just one missile aboard (meanwhile the nuke explodes, shaking the ground; you don't want to be fueling at this point), then you climb like fuck, get to ceiling and then hover in the air above the rising mushroom cloud! The cloud comes up beneath you and carries you up with it over your normal ceiling. The shielding protects you — though you still need to do some fancy flying to stay stable within the radioactive thermals — then as the cloud dissipates you cut out and down, across the mountains — they look tiny! — swoop across the closed valley, loose the missile when the base's defence radar picks you up and use the last of your fuel to escape over the far side while the missile takes out the base. Simple!

"Bastard," I say, gliding the ship down to a fuel-dump and a gentle landing. I shake my head. "Riding the fucking mushroom cloud; never even occurred to me."

"You're not gung-ho enough," Andy tells me, refilling my whisky glass.

"Aye; you've got to be a real man to play this game," Howie says, winking and taking up his glass. He's a brawny Highland lad from one of the nearby villages, one of Andy's drinking partners. A bit rough and ready and with a highly incorrect attitude to women, but amusing, in a raw kind of way; a man's man.

"You have to be slightly crazy to play Xerium," Andy says, sitting back in his seat. "You have to be… just… crazy… enough."

"Aye," Howie says, draining his whisky glass. "No, no, thanks, Drew," he says as Andy goes to refill his dram too. "I'd better be away," he says, standing. "Can't be late for my last day with the Forestry. Nice to meet you," he says to me. "Maybe see you later." He shakes my hand; serious grip.

"Right," Andy says, standing too. "I'll see you out, Howie. Thanks for coming round."

"Not at all, not at all. Good to see you again."

"… wee going-away party tomorrow night?"

"Aye, why not?"

They wend off across the dully shining floor of the ballroom, heading approximately for the stairs.

I shake my head at the Amiga screen. "Riding the fucking mushroom cloud," I say to myself. Then I get up out of the creaking seat and stretch my legs, taking my glass over to the floor-to-ceiling windows which form one wall of the ballroom and look out over the gardens to the railway line and the shore of the loch. The clouds have shrunk to wisps and the moon stands somewhere overhead, filling the view with silver. A few lights burn further down the loch to the right, but the mass of mountains on the far side rises dark into the starry sky, grey becoming white at their snow-dusted summits.

The ballroom smells damp. It is illuminated only by the light shining from the stairwell and the desk lamp on the old trestle table which holds the computer. Torn, bleached-looking curtains hang at the sides of the six tall window bays. My breath smokes in front of me and mists on the cold glass. All the panes are dirty and some are cracked. A couple have been replaced with hardboard. In two of the window bays there are buckets to catch drips but one of them has overflowed and caused a puddle to form around it, discolouring and springing the parquet flooring, which looks burned in other places. Striped, faded wallpaper has unrolled down the walls in places to hang like giant shavings off a piece of planed wood.

The ballroom is scattered with cheap wooden chairs, tables, rolls of ancient, mouldy-smelling carpets, a couple of old motorbikes and lots of bits of motorbikes standing or lying on oil-stained sheets, and what looks and smells like an industrial-standard deep-fat frier with the associated hoods, filters, fan housing and ducting.

The hotel lies at the foot of a steep road which leads down through the trees from the main road. With the hill and the dark masses of the trees behind it to the south, the place doesn't get any sunlight in winter and not that much even in summer. The main road used to come here and the ferry took you over to the north side of the loch, but then they up-graded the way round the loch from a track to a road and the ferry stopped. The Inverness-Kyle railway still runs past and the train still halts if anyone requests it, but with the ferry gone and the road traffic diverted the place has gone to seed; there are a few houses, a craft shop, the railway platform, a wharf and an abandoned compound owned by Marconi, and the hotel.

That's it. There's a sign at the top of the road that's been there for years, ever since they opened the new road, and it says "Strome Ferry — no ferry', and that just says it all.

A door closes in the distance, somewhere overhead. I drink my whisky and look out at the inky loch. I don't think Andy ever meant to do anything with this place. Like the rest of his friends, I assumed he was going to run it, put money into it; develop it. We all imagined he had some secret new money-spinning idea and soon we'd all be amazed at what he'd done to the place, and coming here to marvel at the crowds he'd managed to attract… but I don't think he was ever looking for a site for some viable business venture; I think he was just looking for somewhere suited to his burned-out, fed-up, pissed-off mood.

"Right," Andy says in the background. He comes in from the stairwell and closes the double doors. "Fancy some narcotics?"

"Oh! You have some?"

"Yeah, well," Andy says, coming to stand near me and look out over the water. He's about my height but he's filled out a bit since he came here and he has a kind of stoop now which makes him look smaller and older than he is. He's wearing thick old cords worn smooth at the bum and knee but good-quality once, and what looks like a load of shirts and holey jumpers and cardigans. He's got a week's growth of beard which seems to be permanent, judging from the times I've seen him in the past. "Howie's like a lot of them up here," he says. "They like a drink but they have a weird attitude to anything else." He shrugs and takes a silver cigarette case from a pocket in one of his cardigans. "There are a few travellers live in the area; they're cool."

"Hey," I say, remembering. "Did the police call you?"

"Yeah," he says, opening the cigarette case to reveal a dozen or so neatly rolled spliffs. "Somebody called Flavell; asked about when I called you back the other night. I told him."

"Right. I think I'm supposed to go and report to the local polizei tomorrow."

"Yeah, yeah, it's a fucking police state," he says tiredly, offering the spliff case to me. "Anyway; fancy a blow, yeah?"

I shrug. "Well, I don't normally, you understand." I take one of the Js. "Thanks." I shiver. I'm wearing my jacket and my Drizabone but I still feel freezing. "But can we go somewhere warm?

Andy, the ice-boy, smiles.

We sit in the lounge off his bedroom, on the top floor of the hotel, smoking Js and drinking whisky. I know I'm going to suffer for this tomorrow — later today — but I don't care. I tell him about the whisky story and the chill-filtering and the colouring but he already seems to know it all. The lounge is moderately spacious and somewhere between shabby and cosy: scuffed velvet curtains, heavy old wooden furniture, lots of plump embroidered cushions, and — on a massive table in one corner — an ancient IBM PC; it has an external disk drive and a modem connected and the casing is sitting slightly askew. An Epson printer sits alongside.