Doug Johnstone - Smokeheads

‘If you don’t mind?’

Roddy handed over the bottle and sauntered out from behind the bar. ‘Just mucking about.’

‘So I see.’ She had a soft accent, a lilting rhythm to every word. She returned the bottle to the gantry, turned and spotted Adam.

‘Oh, hi there,’ she said, her smile switching back on. ‘Haven’t seen you for a while. Adam, right?’

‘Right,’ said Adam, feeling his cheeks flush a little. ‘Yeah, I don’t think you were working last time I was here.’

‘When was that?’ she said, leaning on the bar.

‘April, I think.’

Her eyes darkened a moment. ‘Yeah, took some time off around then. Needed a break.’ She refocused on the room. ‘You here for the weekend?’

Adam nodded.

‘And you’ve brought company this time, I see.’

‘Sorry about this idiot, we can’t take him anywhere.’

She waved it away. There was a moment’s awkward pause.

‘So, are you wanting to go on the tour? I mean, I know you know all about the place, but for the rest of them?’

‘Exactly,’ said Adam. ‘We’re doing a few distilleries while we’re here, I thought we’d start with the best.’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘Bet you say that to all the tour guides.’

Adam flushed again.

‘Next tour starts in ten minutes,’ she said, looking at her watch. ‘You can wait in the lounge, since you’re a Friend.’

‘Thanks.’

Adam led the others into a separate room with plush leather sofas and casks for tables. As they walked, Roddy nudged him in the ribs.

‘Well?’

‘What?’

‘Don’t be fucking coy,’ said Roddy. ‘All this time, you’ve had a woman stashed on Islay.’

‘Molly?’

‘Is that her name?’

‘I think so.’

Roddy laughed. ‘Fuck off, you know so. She remembers you, anyway.’

‘So?’

‘So? How many times have you met?’

‘I dunno, two or three. Maybe four.’

‘And when was the last time?’

‘Piss off with the interrogation, Roddy.’

‘When?’

‘The whisky festival they have here on the island, the year before last. Eighteen months ago, I suppose.’

‘A year and a half and she remembers your name? You are so in there.’

Adam sighed. ‘She’s a distillery tour guide, Roddy, she’s paid to be nice to visitors.’

‘I bet she doesn’t remember everyone’s name, though, does she? And she called you a friend.’

Adam smiled. ‘That’s Friend with a capital “F”. It’s a gimmick where you sign up online and get a square foot of peat bog or something. I only joined to get priority on new expressions.’

Roddy started singing. ‘Adam and Molly up a tree, F-U-C-K-I-N-G…’

‘Shut the hell up,’ said Adam, punching his arm and looking round. ‘She’ll hear you.’

‘You like her,’ said Roddy in a childish voice.

Adam rolled his eyes. ‘This isn’t primary school, Roddy. Besides, she’s married.’

‘How do you know?’

‘She mentioned her husband last time I met her.’

‘That means fuck all,’ said Roddy. ‘She’s probably just playing hard to get or warding off psychos. Midge is always telling guys she’s married to get them to back off. Anyway, eighteen months is a long time, a lot can happen in a year and a half.’

They were joined in the lounge by three bald, geeky guys dressed like Arctic explorers.

‘Swedes,’ whispered Luke as Roddy continued to goad Adam.

‘How can you tell?’ said Ethan, but Luke just shrugged.

Adam looked over at Molly behind the counter. He’d first met her a few years back when she’d given him the tour here, Adam lurking amongst Japanese and German visitors. She was friendly and liberal with the measures at the end of the tour, and he’d lingered and chatted after the others had gone. She knew her stuff, knew all about the history of whisky on the island and the chemistry of distillation, but more importantly she had a wide smile, shining eyes and a bottle of twenty-five-year-old in her hand.

Ever since then he’d looked out for her, his heart sagging a little if she wasn’t working. He hadn’t seen her on a couple of visits and had almost forgotten about her by the time he visited the whisky festival the year before last. When he spotted her at the Laphroaig stall she’d been as friendly and chatty as ever, but his heart sank again when she mentioned her husband.

Not that he thought for a minute he’d ever have a chance with her — she was younger than him, better looking and full of life and smiles. Why would she be interested in a cynical dramhead like him? And besides, she lived here on the island, several hours by road and ferry from Edinburgh. Anyway, he would never have the bottle to make a move on her, so it was entirely hypothetical. Then again, there was the big plan he had in his pocket. If Roddy went for it, Adam would be spending a whole lot more time on Islay, time he could use to get to know Molly better. He shook his head as he felt his heart race; he was getting way ahead of himself as usual.

Molly checked her watch and made her way to the lounge. She had a comfortable, sexy walk, a lack of self-consciousness that Adam envied. She grinned warmly at him then addressed the room.

‘This way for the tour, gentlemen,’ she said, holding open a large door.

Roddy slid up to Adam. ‘Spot that?’

‘What?’

Roddy made a goon face and pointed at a finger on his left hand. ‘No ring, Loverboy. She’s not wearing a fucking ring.’

Adam drifted through the tour in a haze. He knew the workings of the distillery inside out, and found himself staring at Molly’s left hand, gazing at her beautiful eyes and sneaking glances at the contours of her body.

Molly had the tour spiel polished and slick as sea glass. She led them round the malthouse where tonnes of green barley were steeped in water then laid out to germinate on the floor. They saw the kilns where the malted barley was smoked over a huge peat fire, each of them chucking a lump of the stuff in. The cloggy smell and fierce heat from the furnace were remarkable. At the mill they tasted the malt, little seeds that burst with smoky flavour in their mouths. Adam watched as Molly chewed along with the rest of them. They saw the grist mixed with water and turned to wort in the mash tun then combined with yeast in the washbacks. They all had a glug of the liquid, a warm, yeasty eight per cent beer that had the Swedes making surprised faces. Ethan got his phone out and snapped the rest of them necking the stuff.

Then the wash was fired into the stills, seven huge bulbous copper constructions with swan necks, surrounded by gangways and pipes in the large stillhouse. The double distillation made low wines in the wash still which were pumped into the spirit still then boiled off into the spirit safe, a Victorian brass box with levers where the stillman had to siphon off the drinkable middle cut between the foreshots and the feints.

Adam smiled as Molly rolled the terminology around her tongue. He loved the unique language of the whisky-maker, the depths of ancient knowledge about the craft that those words contained. Molly mentioned in passing that only nine people were employed in the actual whisky-making at Laphroaig, producing two million litres of pure spirit a year, a fact Adam found astonishing every time he heard it. How could such a hugely lucrative operation rely on just a few experienced souls?

From the stillhouse they visited the filling store to see new spirit pumped into casks, air-dried American oak, first-fill Maker’s Mark bourbon casks which lent the whisky its vanilla and caramel nuances. They each got a sip of new spirit, sixty-eight per cent by volume making their eyes water. It was raw and rough but discernibly Laphroaig already, even before maturation.