Every Short Story by Alasdair Gray 1951-2012

EUSTACE

FOR THE TORY AND LABOUR CREATORS OF MODERN BRITAIN

EDINBURGH 2012

YOUR ROYAL MAJESTIES AND HIGHNESSES; your Holinesses, Eminences, Graces and Reverences; distinguished Prime Ministers, Presidents and Premiers of these our United Nations; my Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen! Never before in the history of Great Britain, and (here I repeat with peculiar emphasis) the history of Great Britain, have so many owed so much to one man, the modest individual at my side. Two weeks ago the whole population of our planet was threatened by the horror of an overwhelming social collapse. At the last moment his timely words and decisive action made that crisis seem less than the shadow of a cloud passing over a sunlit field. United in his genius we found the diplomatic skill of Knatchbull Hugeson, the hard smoothness of Scipio Todalini and the valorous marksmanship of Second Flight Lieutenant Wulfstan Tempest. I now call upon us all to drink a toast to our saviour and our friend, Eustace MacNulty.”

“Eustace MacNulty!” cry the vast assembly and the toast is drunk, followed by a storm of hand-clapping and foot-stamping. The guest of honour silences them by jumping up and saying eagerly, “Comrades, how can I follow that introduction with anything that will please or entertain you? It cannot be done. I am very ignorant! So ignorant that I have never before heard the names of the three national heroes just mentioned…”

These words provoke sympathetic laughter which is prolonged with many cries of “Hear! Hear!” when the Queen of England calls out, “Neither have I!”

“Worse still,” says the speaker desperately, “I cannot remember my own name, but it is certainly not Eustace MacNulty. And where are my trousers? Why am I naked? I have never appeared in public before without wearing at least a necktie.”

The speaker pauses, relieved to find he is clothed again and part of a queue in a familiar bank. At the counter he writes out a cheque to himself and places it in front of a teller who asks for proof of his identity.

“I have been coming to this bank for over thirty years,” the declares the customer, “and have never before been asked such a question. Surely the signature on my cheque proves my identity.”

Says the teller, “Not nowadays sir. We now need something to confirm it. Your driving license will do.”

“I have no driving licence. I have no car.”

“Then I need to see your passport or else two official documents addressed to you.”

“That is absurd! I do not normally walk about with such documents in my pockets. Do you? Does anyone?”

Someone behind him in the queue says, “Excuse me for butting in but perhaps I can help. I can vouch for this man. I know him well. Everyone should know him well because he is Scotland’s greatest living author, actor and architect. He is Eustace MacNulty.”

“ I am not! Not at all! This is my name — read it!” cries the writer of the cheque, holding it out for inspection. Then he notices that both his signature and the printed name beside it are Eustace MacNulty.

Again he finds himself naked, but in bed beside his quietly snoring wife. Switching on the bedside light he shakes her nearest shoulder until she opens her eyes and drowsily murmurs, “What’s wrong?”

“Margaret!” he pleads, “Margaret who am I? Please tell me my name.”

She says, “Shut up Eustace and let me sleep.”

“If you think I’m Eustace I must still be dreaming,” he whimpers.

“Then go on doing it,” she advises, turning her back to him.

WORKING WITH GIANTS

IN THAT WEEK WHEN ONE Scottish prime minister replaced another three people shared a table on an early morning train to London. A man and woman in the window seats were slightly younger than their companion reading The Financial Times. This so engrossed him that he gave no sign of hearing a word when, after nearly half an hour of silence, the younger man glimpsed machines digging a huge foundation pit and wondered aloud what the building would be.

“Probably another private hospital!” the woman across the table said bitterly.

“You disapprove of them?” he asked, smiling, and she replied with a torrent of words telling him, among other things, that she worked in a public hospital as a state-registered nurse. His sympathetic nods and murmured agreement encouraged her speech until it faltered, when he began supporting her main argument with so much detailed information about hospital funding that she asked if he too worked for the National Health Service.

“For nothing so useful,” he said with a sigh. “I’m afraid I only work with giants.”

She stared at him. He added apologetically, “I mean the big boys — the not very nice people in charge of British industry, or what remains of it.”

“Politicians?” she suggested.

“God no! Politicians thrive on T.V. and newspaper coverage and all the publicity they can get. Most folk in Britain don’t know the names of the big boys,”

“Why not?”

“Because they don’t read the…”

He nodded sideways to the paper in the hands of their companion. The nurse brooded on that till the man facing her said, “ You see, England is different from the USA. The Yanks know they’ve been ruled by billionaires for centuries. A lot of folk here won’t face the fact, hence the popularity of the Royal family.”

“So how do you work with your giants? What do they pay you to do?”

“They don’t pay me. I am usually paid (though not always) by companies or local politicians who want their support for some scheme or other. I’m what is called an entrepreneur — a middleman.”

“Why do they need you to ask for their support? Can the people who want support not just write or phone to ask for it?”

“They would get no useful answers that way. Business is too competitive nowadays. The giants avoid putting anything in writing, and phone calls can be bugged and recorded. Most are nowadays, I believe. Surveillance technology has made tremendous strides.”

“You make it sound very shady, very underhand.”

“It is. Getting a straight yes or no from a big man (I never meet more than one at a time) is almost impossible. If he smiles after I’ve explained my client’s proposition and says ‘That would be risky,’ the answer is probably no. If he frowns and says, “Of course it’s not for me to decide, but say they can try it if they think it will work,’ that probably means, Go ahead! Only if it goes pear-shaped will we leave you to the sharks.”

“Sharks?”

“Investigation committees, journalists, those kind of sharks.”

A loud speaker announced that the train was about to enter Euston station. The nurse said flatly, “And that’s how you earn your living?”

“Yes, quite a good living, I always please those I work with, but not always those I work for. It’s a balancing act.”

He laid a small card on the table in front of the nurse saying, “Sorry to cut our interesting conversation short. Phone me some time if you would like to continue it more privately. I must leave pretty smartly because I’m running late. Excuse me please.”

The last three words were to the reader of The Financial Times, who carefully folded and pocketed it, then stood to let the younger man out. The entrepreneur took down a briefcase then hurried along the corridor past others taking things from overhead racks.

The nurse and older man avoided jostling by staying seated for a while. She looked at the card before her without touching it, remembering that the eyes of the man facing her had a hint of sexual appraisal. The older man startled her by suddenly saying, “There is no doubt that our talkative friend knows a lot about our National Health Service, probably because he is one of those working to privatise it. But I doubt if he knows many of the giants he referred to. Believe me my dear, the really big men never trust blabbermouths.”

THE OFFER

A BIOLOGIST AND A LAWYER, he Swedish, she Korean, wait to meet the world’s most famous living architect. Both are in their sixties but the lawyer’s calm unlined face appears younger. Resting on a sofa she watches her colleague who stands before a window, staring gloomily down a long slope of villas among pines and many spires of those cypress trees which, to northern eyes, seem improbably tall and thin. The slope ends in a bright sea with sails of yachts near the shore, and on the high horizon the silhouette of an island that might be Monte Cristo.

The biologist looks at his wristwatch and sighs. The lawyer says, “The maestro always keeps visitors waiting.” “He, at least, should have grown out of playing childish games.”

Their accents show both learned English in the U.S.A. The lawyer says, “Yes, he is playful — tricks journalists into thinking him an alcoholic invalid and recluse who has retired from business. Three months ago he accepted a commission to design a village in Sri Lanka, and personally surveyed the site while carefully avoiding publicity. Surely you read that in the psychological profile they gave us?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Psychology is too recent a branch of medicine to be an exact science. Only the master’s achievements interest me. Everything he has done has been surprising, has shown the fertility of Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier with the humane humorous detail of Gaudi and Mackintosh. His work convinces me that my work may at last do humanity good.”

“Your work?” she asks, with slightly mocking emphasis.

“Mine and Schoenenbacher’s,” he says impatiently, “and Hong Fu’s and Glaister’s. Yes, I am a dwarf standing on the shoulder of giants. Tomorrow I hand in my resignation and retire as soon as possible to my son’s farm in Uppsala.”

After two or three minutes the lawyer says carefully, “I advise you to stay on the Foundation’s payroll as a consultant.”

He turns and looks at her, saying, “Otherwise, despite all the confidentiality clauses I have signed, our employers may regard me as a loose wheel?”

She nods. He asks, “Which might shorten my life?”

She does not answer. He sits beside her, murmuring, “Then mine will be the sudden, unexpected death that Julius Caesar wanted, and got. But my post-mortem will attribute it to natural causes.”

They sit a long time in silence, then a little girl looks in and tells them, “He can see you now.”

The lawyer lifts a briefcase. They follow the child through a corridor and arrive in a big sunlit room with glass walls and a glass ceiling. Some dark blue panes ensure the noonday sun does not dazzle them. A little old man in pyjamas and dressing gown reclines in an invalid chair with a leg-rest exposing his thin legs and plump paunch. From a silky cloud of white hair and beard two sharp eyes look out above a potato-like blob of nose. The line of his mouth is shown by the lower edge of a moustache he seems sucking with tipsy relish. Waving to a couple of chairs he cries in a shrill falsetto, “Welcome! Be seated! What a pleasure, what a privilege to be visited by such eminences.”

His fluent English has an Italian accent. The visitors sit. The child leans affectionately against the arm of the old man’s chair. Placing an arm round her shoulders he tells them, “Yes, I am a paedophile. I love my grandchildren. Fourteen of them visit me in rotation. All are clever but Minnie is one of the cleverest. Minnie, give these nice people what they want to drink, and bring me a hock and seltzer in memory of dear Oscar Wilde.”

He points to an adjacent drinks cabinet. The scientist wants nothing, the lawyer accepts a glass of sherry. Before sipping she says, “Maestro, I regret that our talk must not be overheard.”

“Run away and play Minnie,” says their host. “We are about to discuss indecencies.”

The little girl curtsies to him and the visitors, and leaves.

The architect sips from his glass before saying in a surprising baritone, “You have asked for this interview without giving a reason. Let me save you the embarrassment of explanations. Your names were unknown to me before this morning when Minnie consulted the Internet. I now know that, in your very different professions, you are both internationally renowned, and work for the powerful but discreet Endon Foundation. After World War number two Endon absorbed the Blenkiron Trust, and twenty years ago took over some functions of the United Nations World Health Organization. I am right?”

The lawyer murmurs agreement. The old man nods twice, says, “So your immediate bosses are a clique I call the global employers’ federation, which officially does not exist. I am still right?”

The lawyer, startled, looks at the biologist who cries, “O yes!”

Nodding twice again the architect says, “Years ago an American millionaire told the press that with the help of modern medicine he intended to live for ever. Is he a member of that clique?”

After a short silence the lawyer says, “No. He recently died of natural causes.”

“Poor fellow! But I assume others as rich or richer need not now die of natural causes. As an old Communist I think this a disaster. A few families (mostly American) command more wealth than the world’s governments combined. Will the world from now on be ruled by a clique of plutocrats who will never let themselves be replaced?”

“No!” says the lawyer and “Yes indeed!” shouts the scientist with what seems hysterical merriment.

“Yes indeed,” says the architect. “I now carry my deductions further. The alchemists’ dream of eternal life has often been explored in fiction. The struldbrugs in Gulliver’s Travels, Tennyson’s Tiresias, the foetal ape wearing the Order of the Garter in Huxley’s After Many a Summer are horrific portraits of people who cannot die. Shaw’s Back to Methuselah and Wyndham Lewis’s Trouble with Lichen describe jollier immortals. These hide their good luck from the majority who would also want eternal life — not possible on this over-peopled planet where most still die of malnutrition before maturity. So your ruling clique of billionaires, trillionaires, zillionaires must keep their happy state hidden, while sharing the privilege with scientists and supportive politicians who make it possible. You, my dear visitors, are members of this jolly club?”

The visitors look at each other. The architect says, “Ignore that embarrassing question. I continue. So many people now share this secret that it cannot stay a secret for ever. How can eternal life be made acceptable to a majority who will never have it? Obviously, by creating something like the Académie Française, wherein folk made popular by their achievements in entertainment, science and medicine are made physically immortal too. The masters of our universe will start by admitting Nobel Prize winners like me — ” (he taps his chest) “ — and you!” He points to the scientist who says, “I am resigning from that club.”

“I salute you,” cries the architect, sitting upright and raising his hand in a smart military salute. “Tell me why.” “For personal reasons that have nothing to do with the therapy. This will allow you, at least, many more centuries of good work. I am a Swedish Socialist who sees as clearly as you the evils of a self-perpetuating propertied class. I hope that a self-perpetuating academy of mankind’s intelligent servants will counteract it, as the Christian church sometimes counteracted feudal warlords. That will be a long, weary struggle of which I am already tired.”

The architect presses a switch that lowers his leg-rest, saying, “I must now furiously think in silence for a while. Excuse me.”

He springs up and paces round the big room with bowed head and hands clasped behind back.

The scientist strolls to the drinks cabinet, lifts a sherry bottle, silently offers to fill the lawyer’s half-empty glass. She refuses with a shake of the head. He fills a tumbler from a can of Pilsner lager and carries it to the longest window. This allows a larger view of the landscape he watched earlier, with tops of pines and cypresses visible through walls to left and right. The wall with the entrance door is a huge mirror reflecting the three window walls, so the room seems a magic carpet floating above the Italian Riviera. The architect halts before this mirror and examines his reflection like a zoologist studying a fascinating but repulsive beast. He asks, “Would this bloated belly of mine also be immortalized?”

Without turning the scientist says, “Eat less, exercise properly and you could be rid of it in a few months.”

“Oho! So your therapy involves no grafting? No healthy young man of my blood group will be kidnapped and murdered and have his good organs replace my decrepit ones?”

“Of course not!” cries the lawyer, standing and refilling her sherry glass. The scientist says, “The results of such therapy are too patchy to last. My therapy keeps restoring cells inherited at birth.”

“Good! I have never believed that our intelligence and memory exist mainly in the brain. Lucretius knew our spirits are distributed through every part of our body. An architect’s talent is gained by striding through lands and rooms while his eyes notice every kind of spatial limit, the nerves and muscles of arms and fingers learn skill in draughtsmanship. Like Leonardo I am ambidextrous, a fact I hid from my closest assistants, though not from my dearly beloved wives. I give you this secret in return for the dangerous secret you are offering me. If I understand rightly, I need not be rejuvenated? Need not forget the carefully, painfully learned experiences of a lifetime?”

“Not at once,” says the scientist, “but in an eternal future you will only make room for new discoveries by forgetting more and more of the past. I predict that after several millennia immortals will have forgotten their childhoods, first marriages and children and probably the planet where they were born. I want no such future, but am not an artist, far less one who builds good homes for people who are not rich and privileged. Perhaps Goethe was right. He said artists have recurring puberties that keep returning them to a younger state before they advance to a new one.”

“You compliment me,” says the architect, now standing beside the scientist and watching the island that might be Monte Cristo, “but Goethe was an old bore long before his death, when he had just managed to finish writing the end of Faust. Remember what Schiller said on reading the start of that play thirty years earlier — it would be wonderful to see if Faust would be corrupted or win free of the Devil he employed. Goethe went on to make Faust a heartless seducer, murderer, warlord, an evictor of peasants and piratical millionaire who thinks he is liberating mankind when his grave is being dug. So Goethe sends his soul up to a heaven ruled by a female from Dante’s Paradiso.”

Behind them a harsh voice cries, “I must interrupt this comradely swapping of cultural references. I reject the cynical reasons given by the maestro for our Foundation’s offer, but the offer exists. Does he accept it? Maestro, please sign this contract.”

She takes a sheaf of pages from her briefcase, goes to a map chest and spreads them on top saying, “Endon expects no payment for the therapy, which will be provided painlessly once a month by a doctor from the Foundation. All Endon requires in return is your complete silence about the matter.”

“Nor will it change your character at first,” says the scientist dryly, “though I think it will inevitably induce insane smugness toward all who have died or will die.”

The architect goes to the chest, takes a fountain pen from the pocket of his gown saying, “I do not want to know the exact terms of this shameless document, but I will obviously be safer if I sign it.”

“Sign each page separately and we will witness them,” says the lawyer.

The architect asks the scientist, “You have signed such a contract?”

“Yes, years ago. It commits the signatory to keeping the therapy secret, but allows freedom to refuse or discontinue it, as I am doing.”

“You have chosen rightly,” says the architect. “I will stay as I am.”

He carefully signs every page to which his guests add their signatures, then he asks, “Am I to have a copy?”

“No.” says the lawyer, putting the sheaf into her briefcase. From a drawer in the chest the architect takes two cream-coloured papers with a small picture on each saying, “Thank you for this visit. Please accept a little gift as a souvenir. My latest hobby is the obsolete art of mezzotinting.”

He carries the prints to a desk, lifts a pencil, sees that the point is needle-sharp, then carefully writes small words after his signature in the lower margins. He slips each print into a black plastic envelope, lifts a drumstick and strokes a copper gong with the padded end, making a noise like the roar of a melodious lion. He hands each visitor an envelope and shakes their hand as the little girl enters.

“Minnie,” he says, “lead the fine lady and gentleman down to their car where a poor bored chauffeur has been languishing for nearly two hours. Goodbye my friends. This has been a pleasant meeting, productive of much thought. Tell your Foundation that I will keep their secret and stay as I am.”

The child leads the visitors to a lift with glass walls. It takes them down a glass-walled shaft to a yard where they enter an old-fashioned Rolls-Royce with a screen dividing passengers from driver. As it speeds to the nearest airport the scientist asks, “Are we still being recorded?”

“What do you mean?”

“Yesterday Endon invited me to have a discreet chip embedded in my neck so that all the maestro said, and (of course) all we said, would be recorded. I refused. You will have received the same invitation. I assume you accepted?”

She turns her head and looks at passing scenery. He sniggers and says, “That question may be taken as proof that I am a loose wheel. You might say you are sorry for my imminent demise, if that would not compromise you.”

She says sharply, “Your pessimism is absurd. Endon knows how trustworthy you are.”

He murmurs, “A safely ambiguous remark.”

A moment later he removes the print from the envelope he carries and studies it. The lawyer does the same with hers, then she says, “Talking of ambiguous remarks, was there no ambiguity in his, I will stay as I am?”

“None,” says the scientist. “Read this.”

He hands her his print. It shows the architect’s house at night, the sky above and surrounding pine trees in a variety of velvety blacks and greys, contrasting with bright rooms within the glass walls. The biggest room has a little self-portrait of the architect in his chair, shown from behind. The other rooms are crowded with nearly nude women wearing long black stockings, and men in evening dress with horned heads and scorpion tails growing from their bums. After the architect’s signature in the margin beneath is written in neat, forward-sloping letters the scientist’s name and the words, You have chosen rightly. Having read this the lawyer hands his print back with her own. After her name in the bottom margin the biologist reads, in meticulous backward-sloping letters, I accept Endon’s offer.

THE THIRD MISTER GLASGOW

MR MACBLEANEY, SLIGHTLY FUDDLED, came home by taxi after midnight. A young woman helped him out, helped him up four steps to the front door and, when he started fumbling with his keyring, removed it, unlocked the door, gave the keyring back and pushed him into the lobby. He stood for a moment trying to remember an invitation he had devised in the taxi — “Come in for a drink dear, surely you won’t leave an old man alone at this time of night?” — but before recalling these words he heard the front door shut firmly behind him, a distant car door slam and the taxi drive off. He sighed, trudged to the door of his apartment and fumbled in his pocket for the key until the lobby light went out. It had switched on automatically when the front door opened and was usually on long enough for him to unlock the door but now he could not see its keyhole. He trudged back in darkness to the front door, pressed the switch beside it and again there was light. With a pleased chuckle he noticed the apartment key on the ring in his left hand where the girl had placed it — silly of him to have forgotten it was there!

Back at the apartment door he carefully inserted the correct key, tried turning it left without success, then right without success, then jiggled it back and forward many times. For over a year this futile jiggling had lasted longer and longer each time he came home, always making him determined to do something about it, but when the lock yielded and door opened, the matter was no longer urgent. Tonight, after wrestling with the key for what seemed ten or fifteen minutes, Mr MacBleaney decided it would never turn: also his legs were tired. He sighed and leaned against the door, contemplating a rocking chair, the only furniture on the lobby’s chequered marble floor. His wife had loved that chair. Its emptiness by the fireside brought her so painfully to mind that he had shifted it to the lobby, and even now was shy of sitting on it. He sat on a low step of the staircase to the upper apartments, pondering.

The apartment key must be worn out by too frequent use, since the copy used once a week by his cleaners gave them no trouble. He seemed to remember his wife had given a spare copy to a neighbour, but that was twenty or thirty years ago. So many neighbours had since come and gone that now all were strangers whose faces he could not remember. Of course they certainly knew him — the third Mr Glasgow — but why should Mr Glasgow know them? As usual, MacBleaney avoided thinking about a difficulty by remembering his fame.

The first Mr Glasgow had been Jack House, a journalist who knew more about the city than anyone else — he had written books on it, The Square Mile of Murder, Heart of Glasgow and Pavement in the Sun. Jack had represented Scotland in Round Britain Quiz, a famous radio programme when there were only three British broadcasting channels, none of them commercial. Then had come the second Mr Glasgow — Cliff Hanley, another journalist. He wrote Dancing in the Streets and a song that was likely to be voted Scotland’s official national anthem by a large majority — Scotland the Brave! Or was it O Flooer of Scotland? Hanley’s catchphrase on a comedy programme, “Sausages is the boys!”, always raised a laugh — or had that been Jimmy Logan’s catchphrase? Anyway, House and Hanley were both nice men, unlike B … (MacBleaney’s mind recoiled from a name he did not wish to remember). Yes, House and Hanley had been nice friendly Mr Glasgows, he had cheerfully drunk and chatted with them several times during his three highly successful careers.

He had started as a footballer, and for two and a half years was Bully Wee Clyde’s mightiest outside-left, almost in the Charlie Tully league, though he said so himself. Clyde was not one of Scotland’s most famous clubs, but it was one of the most decent, unlike Rangers, whose followers were nearly all True Blue bigots — some of Celtic’s Emerald Greens were almost as bad. But early retirement was forced on Bully Wee MacBleaney by a torn ligament too many. A bad time followed when he nearly killed himself with the drink — no wonder his first wife walked out.

The shock of the divorce did him good. He quit drinking. Through Alcoholics Anonymous he met a television producer who needed an adviser for sport reports. MacBleaney turned out to be exactly the right man for Independent Scottish Television. He was soon, as a football commentator, almost as famous as Arthur Montford, though he said so himself. Being younger and handsomer than Montford he had appeared on television commercials and newspaper adverts promoting a brand of shaving cream. He took up golf as a hobby and met his second wife. Their marriage was a big news story with photographs in all the dailies. “Mr Glasgow Weds!” said the Daily Record, and “Golfing Gloria Hooks Scotland’s Most Eligible Bachelor”. This brought an angry postcard from his first wife asking how a divorced alcoholic could be an eligible bachelor. His career as a sports commentator had ended very strangely. For a short spell he had replaced Archie Macpherson in Scottish BBC, then he too had been replaced without learning exactly why. British broadcasting works in mysterious ways.

But by then he had appeared in Taggart, the epic Glasgow television detective serial. An episode had a crime during a football game between clubs called Glasgow Rovers and Saint Mungo United. For this he had both advised the writer (who knew nothing about football) and played himself — Rory MacBleaney — the famous sports commentator who helped Taggart solve the murder in the directors’ box of Hampden Park stadium. That episode had made television history, in Scotland if nowhere else. After that he had been given parts in several television films and one or two widely distributed London and Hollywood productions — small parts, admittedly, but when producers wanted the friendly sound of a good Scots voice they would often send for Rory MacBleaney, sometimes dubbing his voice onto a younger actor or a character in an animated cartoon. He had also been given a small important part in a film so horrible that, despite the low budget, every subsequent history of the cinema mentioned it. At the London showing a critic said to him …

Mr MacBleaney’s memories had been making him feel warm and happy, but now he felt the hard, cold step under his bum and felt tired of life because the critic had said, “You were quite good, but of course they only employed you because they couldn’t afford Billy Connolly.”

A storm of rage brought him to his feet, stamping up and down the lobby. Billy Connolly was better known than Rory MacBleaney for bad bad bad bad bad reasons. Connolly and his what — partner? second wife? — had been pally with Prince Charles and Diana before the royal divorce, what claim to fame was that? Connolly was not a bad comedian — not as good as Jimmy Logan, though still quite good — but he was not an actor! In his biggest film, Mrs Brown, he had played Queen Victoria’s Highland gillie with a Glasgow accent! It was the only accent he could do! The English and Americans didn’t mind because they think every Scottish accent is the same, but every Scot in the world knew Connolly’s voice was wrong in that part. Connolly must have known his voice was wrong! So he had only taken the part for the money and the fame. How could he stoop so low?

“I could have played John Brown!” said Mr MacBleaney aloud. “Yes, my normal accent too is Glaswegian, but I’m enough of an actor to sound like a teuchter from Drumnadrochit when I want to, yess inteet to gootness Donalt, whateffer. Shimerahaa mahay!”

A fit of coughing made him sit on the step again, no longer happy, because directly or indirectly Billy Connolly was responsible for everything that had gone wrong with Scotland — small shops replaced by supermarkets, local schools and hospitals amalgamated into big central ones, and nobody asked to recall the old ways and speak for elderly marginalised folk. Newspapers no longer phoned the third Mr Glasgow for soundbites on politics and showbusiness; no wonder he had started drinking again. Gloria had foreseen that. When they knew she was dying she had not gone out of her mind (as he had) but calmly discussed their finances with an accountant and lawyer, and made him sign forms so that his home and finances were secure no matter how stupidly he acted. O yes, she had loved him. He wept for a while then began to cheer up again.

The indoors smoking ban had been wonderful for him! At first he thought it would kill him because smoking had made him drink more slowly. It still did because now he went outside to smoke, standing and puffing on pavements with other nicotine addicts. This had given him a new lease of life. Being now a persecuted minority smokers shared a liberty, equality and fraternity unknown to those who skulked in pubs until closing time. He had new friends because of the ban — older folk who remembered him as a footballer, sports commentator, actor, also younger folk who enjoyed his tales of those times. One of these usually brought him home in a taxi, often a woman, though it was hard to remember which — most women under fifty seemed the same equally attractive young woman nowadays. None had stayed the night, yet he still had hopes.

The cold step again reminded him where he was, then a sudden memory made him stand joyfully up. Gloria, in case one of them got locked out, had put a copy of the apartment key on top of the door frame. Being about three inches taller than him she could easily reach it by standing on tiptoe. They had never needed to use that key so it must still be there. A low box or stool was all he needed to reach it, but the hour was far too late to rouse a neighbour and borrow one; he must use the rocking chair. He pushed it over the marble tiles until the hind rockers and chair-back together touched the door, but this left the seat at an angle impossible to stand upon. He turned it round and put the front against the door, but now the back and arms stopped him climbing onto it, so he placed it sideways against the door. Holding onto the doorknob, he managed to kneel on the seat, which still rocked a little. Standing upright was a delicate balancing act. He did it by keeping hold of the doorknob with one hand, grasping the chair-back with the other, and cautiously raising his left leg until the foot was flat on the seat. That done, with equal caution, he began straightening the leg, then gradually raising his body while letting go of the doorknob and reaching upward to –

While doing this something happened so suddenly that he neither understood nor remembered it afterward. For a time he seemed comfortably at home in bed, in a darkness suitable to someone who has wakened in the early hours of a winter morning, yet he seemed to hear people overhead discussing him, though their words made no sense. That did not worry him, and soon he was asleep for good.

THE MAGIC TERMINUS

MY LIFE HAS CONTAINED VERY LITTLE PAIN. Even in childhood the worst I endured was boredom. My parents wanted dull lives because their own had been too exciting. They had belonged to an unemployed industrial class and lived in a slum in fear of having their dole money cut and in equal fear of sectarian violence. My dad’s family were Protestant bigots, my mum’s equally bigoted Catholics, and joined in matrimony were equally disliked by most of their neighbours. World War 2 greatly improved things, bringing employment, fixed wages, regular meals at the price of some danger. Dad fought in North Africa, was injured by a fragment of shrapnel, then found a safer job in the army pay corps. Mum was directed into an underground explosive factory. When reunited after the war he started working in Clydebank for Singer Sewing Machines, she became a steady housewife. I was born when politicians of every party wanted Britain to be a Welfare State for everyone. Only those who had enjoyed great pre-war privileges found this boring, and young folk like me who had never known worse times. I matured before The Beatles were famous and being a teenager became exciting.

But the dull routines of home and school were made bearable by steady doses of art. There were two local cinemas within an easy walk from our home and half a dozen others a cheap tram ride away, so Mum and Dad and me saw three or four films a week — not unusual in these mainly pre-television days — and I saw more, being in the ABC Children’s Saturday Film Club. I recently reread The Moviegoer, a novel about a lawyer in New Orleans who says the greatest moments of his life were not his love affairs, but when Gary Cooper straps on his guns and goes out to face the villains in High Noon, or when a cat runs across a dark lane, rubs herself against someone, and a spot of light briefly shows the sinister, slightly babyish smile of Orson Welles in the part of Harry Lime. My own best moments were when a whirling black tornado sucks the grey wooden shack of Dorothy’s home up into the sky — when she sees through the window a cow bobbing past, two men rowing a canoe, a bicycle pedalled through the air by the nasty woman who stole Dorothy’s dog Toto — when that woman and bike transform into witch on broomstick before the house crashes down — when Dorothy opens the door, and steps out of the grey monochrome bedroom into the full Technicolor land of Oz. In the local public library I found other exciting adventure stories, sometimes horrific but always safer than games played in the school playground. I am not a coward but have always avoided pointless risks. My favourite books had magic openings through which children not unlike me found wonderlands like those Alice entered through a rabbit hole and looking glass. I read Masefield’s Midnight Folk and Box of Delights, also an Enid Blyton series about children finding secret passages into The Valley of Adventure, Castle of Adventure, Island of Adventure, Mountain of Adventure. I read several times Dan Billany’s The Magic Door about an unruly class of primary school children with a silly teacher, Mr Rocket. One of the class finds a bronze doorknocker that, banged on any wall, creates a door into the past through which they meet Julius Caesar, King Arthur and prehistoric monsters. I would have enjoyed The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe but it was published when I had outgrown childish stories.

Visiting the library had an advantage over seeing films with Mum and Dad, because on the way home together we always cheerily discussed what we had seen, but never referred to erotically suggestive episodes that nowadays would hardly bring a blush to the cheek of the most innocent child. But they greatly excited me in ways I could only enjoy remembering when completely alone, so visits to the library were often more satisfactory. Here I filled my head with exotic fantasies whose only hero was me, daydreams so engrossing that I sometimes woke from them to find I had walked home with no memory of crossing roads busy with traffic. I would have been knocked down had a part of my mind not been unconsciously guiding me by noticing the traffic and traffic signals. It is commonplace for habitual actions to free our minds by becoming automatic, but the extent of my subconscious guidance was unusual, and I found it could be enlarged. Mum told me I had annoyed her friends by not answering their greetings and acting as if they did not exist when I passed them in the street. I promised this would not happen again. It did not. I still returned from the library in a complete daydream, but now unconsciously smiled back and exchanged conventional greetings with her friends.

Ever since I have enjoyed more and more imaginative freedom by making more and more conduct automatic. This meant deliberately learning the fewest words and actions that satisfy employers, after which I could forget and perform them in perfect intellectual freedom because I was truly living elsewhere in daydreams I absolutely controlled. At first their geography was banal and escapist with ancient castles, Oriental cities, Pacific islands, Tarzan jungles and Sherwood forests peopled by ruthless kings, mad scientists, American crime bosses and women who wore very little clothing. Between rising in the morning and undressing for bed at night, the minutes when I noticed what others thought reality added up to less than an hour, and only happened when occasional accidents required me to show initiative. I easily passed school examinations, automatically absorbing and regurgitating formulas I was given. Students who failed had either bad memories or a habit of thinking for themselves.

Life since then has been the maintenance of intellectual freedom through work needing no intelligent initiative. I found less than might have been expected in the army, when boys of eighteen were conscripted for two years of National Service. Obeying military rule and orders came easily to me. I must have been robust in those days because I hardly noticed the square-bashing that afterwards left other squaddies exhausted and cursing. This made me unpopular because they thought my indifference to what they most resented was a display of social superiority. Word got about that my father was a senior army officer I had quarrelled with, and that after this spell in the ranks I would enrol for Sandhurst. I became victim of practical jokes too painful to ignore. They stopped after I had thrashed two of the worst bullies. After that I was unpopular but generally ignored, however the continual forced intimacy of barrack life was often hard to shut out. One day I was summoned to an interview with an officer who suggested I apply for an officers’ training course. I told him that giving orders would distract me far more than receiving them, and I would be as unwelcome in an officers’ mess as I was among privates because I did not want friends to distract me. “Distract you from what?” he asked. He obviously meant well and seemed intelligent, so I explained the scope of my imaginary worlds at that time — a cluster of planets combining ideas got from H.G. Wells’ First Men in the Moon and Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus, along with some of my own. He listened carefully then passed me to an army psychiatrist who discharged me as unfit for military service.

I then trained as an engineer, mistakenly thinking that those who design machines can also work mechanically. This was partly true at the lowest drawing-board level where the main distraction was office camaraderie. I managed to ignore that, achieving a smooth efficiency that soon led to promotion. In the headquarters of a firm making hydraulic engines I found myself discussing with three others the best design for a casing that must (1) be securely attached by screws and brackets that would not interfere with an interior motor, (2) be easily opened when the motor needed serviced, (3) be easily cleaned, (4) and look good. The discussion of how to satisfy all these requirements was so trivial, boring and endless that I muttered, “Use a tough transparent plastic bubble. Stick it on with polymonochloropolytetrafluroethyline adhesive. When necessary the operator can smash it off with a hammer and stick on a cheap replacement.”

I was joking so they laughed until the boss said, “Excellent! Our entire approach has been out of date. Your idea obviously needs refining but you are due for further promotion, my son.”

So I left that firm and went north to Aberdeen and the oil rigs. Another mistake. Safety is impossible on these structures if you don’t keep looking out for potential accidents. The only industrial jobs I found that paid steady wages for truly mindless toil were on assembly lines. The best was at a belt carrying chocolate biscuits out of a slot to where I tapped them with a little rod, changing their position so that they passed easily through another slot. A newer machine made that job redundant. For years I attached windscreen wipers in a car factory assembly line that eventually closed like every other productive Scottish business. And then I did what I should have done at first: trained as a teacher.

The subject I chose was Careers Guidance, for I thought my previous experience of several different jobs would be helpful. Wrong again. Everyone else on the course had entered straight from secondary school and were learning Careers Guidance without knowing any other career. But at last I have found the social haven I always wanted. It is a small office in a vast secondary school serving a fifth of Glasgow. Single pupils arrive at twenty-minute intervals throughout the day, each leaving at least five minutes before the next. I ask automatic questions provoking predictable answers that I record by ticking boxes in a standard form. The outcome is always one of seventeen suggestions because there are only seventeen courses possible for people leaving this school. My desk contains a small larder and electric kettle so I need not visit a staff room during tea-breaks and the lunch hour, so apart from the Headmaster and his secretary hardly anyone else in the staff here knows I exist. I will tell you a secret. There is a cupboard in this office to which only I have a key. I have cut down a mattress to exactly cover the floor, where I can now sleep comfortably curled in a foetal position. Since travel to and from the office became pointless I gave up my lodgings, got rid of everything but a few essentials, brought these here and have since never left. I have keys that let me leave and return once a week with essential shopping. The janitor suspects I am here at unauthorised times but pretends not to know because I tip him well. Nothing — not even hostile applicants for careers guidance — interfere with my work of preventing old-fashioned catastrophes.

Many years ago, sick of fictional fantasy, my imaginary worlds became wholly shaped by real history and biography. I now know enough to travel back in time and, using no magic or miracles but my knowledge of the future and some basic physical science, give a few key people enough knowledge to prevent disease and warfare. Using freak tempests and tampering with his compass I stopped Columbus crossing the Atlantic and brought him to the coast of China, which he had set out to find. Europe learned of America in the following century when I had prepared the Mexican and Aztec civilizations to resist conquest by acquainting them with firearms and domesticated horses and vaccines that immunized them against European diseases. The rulers, alas, continued using human sacrifice as a means of limiting their populations, but no Native Americans were exterminated by foreigners and African slaves were never brought to the New World. I am currently preventing the miseries of the British Industrial Revolution by helping James Watt’s son (a hitherto neglected historical figure who favoured the French Revolution) to develop clean hydro-electric power so efficiently that by 1850 coal furnaces, steam engines, gas lightings and black Satanic mills were banished from Britain. I have no time to say more about this, except that I am free to enter any room at any time in the past through any door I choose, and I am always welcomed as an entertaining and useful friend by many splendid people, mostly still famous nowadays.

But I must use great care to choose the right door when leaving any of these rooms in the past. I must summarise a short story by H.G. Wells to explain why. I read it when a child and it starts with a child, an unhappy little boy, an orphan lost in a dull London street. Here he finds a strange door admitting him to a sunlit garden where a lovely lady accompanied by tame leopards treats him wonderfully well, making him perfectly happy and at home. She then shows him an album with bright pictures of people who seem to be his parents with a baby which, as it grows older, becomes more like himself as he is now. She turns the pages until at last, fascinated, he sees the picture of himself in the street outside the magic door. She is reluctant to show him the next page but he insists, and when the page turns he is back outside in the street. That garden and woman become his most precious memory. He grows up into a man both rich and powerful, twice glimpsing the door again, but always in a wall he is passing on the way to a meeting that will advance his career or, if he does not arrive on time, completely damage it. Whenever he seeks the door after the meetings it cannot be found. He becomes a famous politician at the end of the 19th century when even these used the London Underground, and dies by stepping off a platform in front of a train for no known reason. The story suggests he thought he was stepping through the illusory door, and may have found his lovely garden and spiritual mother on the other side of death. Superstitious rot.

I always hated that end of a fascinating story. I did not want the garden to be an illusion. But when taking leave of a friend in the past nowadays — Jane Welsh Carlyle, William Blake, Charles II or Shakespeare — I usually find a door that is neither part of the room itself or the one by which I re-enter this office. It attracts me strangely though I know it leads to nothing, and when I go through I will go completely out like a candle flame.

MISOGYNIST

CHILDHOOD MAY CONTAIN everyone’s happiest times, though it is hard to live without looking forward to better. That must be why many poor souls believe in heaven. When nearly all British homes were heated by coal fires, I would sprawl on the hearthrug at my mother’s feet, warm and safe, playing with treasures from the Button Box while she knitted and read politely romantic stories in The People’s Friend. The Box was made of solid wood, about a foot square and nine inches high, with a hinged lid. It held buttons of all sizes and colours, beads from broken necklaces, earrings and brooches of what seemed rich jewels but were really coloured glass. There were also dominoes that must have come from grandparents or uncles who died before my birth, since nobody in our house played that game. Some were wooden and black apart from spots of many colours. The rest were pale bone or ivory with black spots, though smaller and more numerous — they went up to double nines instead of double sixes. I arranged the dominoes like the walls of a castle with a city round it where I was king. To mark my royalty Mum pinned to my jersey three medals from the Box, medals with vivid ribbons given to my father for no special action but being in the British army from 1914 to 1918. I then put the brightest jewels in my castle’s inmost rooms, and arranged the buttons in the streets outside, pretending they were admiring subjects and regiments of soldiers. Brass buttons were the officers, big coat buttons commanded enemy troops who, after battles, became prisoners in my dungeons or slaves in my factories. Amber and mother-of-pearl beads were princesses to be rescued, though after rescue I could not imagine what to do with them. These power games made me perfectly happy.

Late in the afternoon Mum would sigh, go to the kitchen and prepare the evening meal because Dad would soon arrive. I thought him a red-faced interruption with too loud a voice.

“Well!” he would say, entering and rubbing his hands. “How did things go today?”

Sometimes Mum mentioned a bit of gossip she had heard from a neighbour but usually she sighed and shrugged. Dad, looking down on my hearthrug, would say something like, “Well, General, what battles have you won today?”

I never answered. Over the evening meal Dad told us what he thought an amusing event from his work that day. He was a bookie when that profession was mostly illegal in Britain. Years later he and I became friends and I learned he had only told Mum the least interesting, most innocuous events that befell him. She disliked how he earned his money, though never complained of it. Dad was perhaps always slightly drunk when he came home, which added to Mum’s displeasure but made life easier for him. When in bed at night I heard sounds from the living room that were mostly television noises, but sometimes his mumbling voice produced sharp exclamatory notes from Mum. I once heard her yell, “I will not see a doctor!”, and another time, “I will not let you put me away!”

That was before I went to school, learned to please my teachers, make friends and play competitive games. Happy times became shorter but maybe more intense. Having no nostalgia for the old hearthrug game I found my mother’s company more and more embarrassing. Education made me a man like many others. I was in the last generation of smart exam-passers who, though children of common labourers, tradesmen, or shopkeepers like Margaret Thatcher, went to university without getting into debt. In the 1970s such graduates were sure of good jobs, so (if by nothing else) I pleased my mother by getting one in local government. Her death soon after was no surprise. She had obviously been sick for years.

On leaving the crematorium I saw Dad did not share the general relief most folk at once feel after a funeral. We went to a pub and had a drink together. This cheered him so little that I blurted, “Why did you love her, Dad?” — a coarse question prompted by recalling no sign that Mum had ever loved him. He understood me and said, “Your mother was once a lovely wee girl, and witty, with a very funny sharp tongue. Of course marriage changed her like it changes us all. When you were born she had what they call post-natal depression, but hers never went away. Her life might have been better if a doctor had seen her. Diabetes isn’t usually fatal nowadays, but doctors terrified her — she was afraid they would put her in hospital. She might have been happier if I had loved her less. Many women prefer the sort of men who don’t like them much. My own Dad was that sort. I hated him. Face the fact son: women cannot help being miserable most of the time. Decent husbands don’t complain. I’m no masochist, but I would rather be a hen-pecked wimp than a hen-pecking bully or a wife beater and — ” (he showed signs of cheering up) “ — my life has not been one long disappointment. I enjoy my job.”

Dad’s dismal home life may be why I postponed marriage till six weeks ago. Before that I was a serial monogamist with partners who tired of me after a year or two. When we started living together they soon complained that I no longer bought them meals in expensive restaurants, though all were wage-earners who never offered to buy such a meal for me. They were surprisingly proprietorial, making me buy new clothes because they said the ones I wore were unfashionable, but really (I think) because my older clothes reminded them of earlier partners. I submitted to this, but found it annoying because men do not need to be fashionable. They often became silent and dour because I had said or done something that I could not apologise for because I did not know what it was. If I begged to be told, they usually replied “There’s no point in talking to you,” and shrugged their shoulders, like Mum had done. Freud says all men are attracted by women like their mothers. My partners seemed nothing like my mum before they started living with me. They mostly left because they wanted children, for which I have no time. Their departure was generally welcome because they had turned into nags. I resolved never to marry until sure of better company, and meanwhile found satisfaction in a hobby that made me careful with my earnings, though the women called it meanness.

My work in local government brought me a sufficient wage, though I enjoyed it less than Dad enjoyed his. My department gave permission to demolish old properties and build new ones, delaying the process until applicants found discreet ways of bribing us. I intended to be honest at first, like the coal miner who the Labour Party made Lord Mayor of Manchester. He refused to take bribes and died in a common council house. In the 21st century local governments have legalized bribery by frankly saying that only those who pay extra money to the administration will have their business handled swiftly and efficiently. In my time civil servants were just starting to become property owners. Had I refused brown envelopes of banknotes I would have become an unpopular lad who thought himself superior to his colleagues, so would never have been promoted. I helped some poorer folk who could not bribe me, but my hobby needed the extra money. I was saving and searching for my ideal retirement home, a peaceful place in the country. A conversation had given this common British ambition an unusual twist.

A man seeking permission to make structural changes to his house invited me to discuss the matter over a meal in a posh restaurant, which suggested he had something to hide. The house had been the branch office of a bank, still had safety vaults in the basement, and he wanted planning permission to let a foreign firm convert these into deep-freezers — Swedish, Danish or American, I forget which. He wanted this done secretly because (he said) the cost of food is increasing faster than ordinary wages, so by laying in stocks of it now you will always save money in future. Yes, but why the secrecy? This came out as we relaxed with malt whiskies after an excellent dinner. A business acquaintance had recently flown him by private helicopter to a weekend in a remote country house. The house was protected by lethal security devices and a staff of well-paid servants with military training. The larders were stocked with enough frozen food to feed his host, guests and staff for a lifetime. My man said, “I’m not a millionaire but I want some of that security.”

He told me that the world is heading for disaster, and powerful folk will do nothing to stop that, because it would make them poorer. They know that money will slowly or suddenly lose value as rising oceans flood the land and more disasters reduce food supplies, so when famine hits the cities, mobs of looters will take over. Millionaires are preparing for this. I said, “It won’t happen in our lifetime!” He said, “Perhaps, but it will come sooner or later.”

I am no connoisseur of disaster movies but nodded and hid a smug little smile. I helped the man to get the refrigeration he wanted quietly installed, but knew that if starvation became general, nobody in a town could keep a steady, private food supply a secret from the neighbours.

I was sure civilization would not collapse before I did, but liked the idea of being self-sufficient as prices increased. I looked for a derelict building in an unfashionable district, large enough to be made comfortable but not conspicuous and at least a quarter-mile away from any other home, unless it was a farmhouse. It should have its own discreet source of energy in case electrical supply companies failed. Wind vanes are conspicuous, so water was the answer. At the start of the 20th century every community, large or small, had a mill to grind grain for flour. Robert Louis Stevenson (a great walker) said that leaving Scotland for England was leaving a land of mills powered by rushing streams for one of windmills clacking on hilltops. Imported grain put an end to all those mills, leaving Milton (from mill town) a frequent place name. I spent unhurried years searching for and listing old mill houses before discovering the right one in a wooded glen. A swift burn flowed past from a moor above, and (amazingly) a narrow steep country road ascended to it from the outskirts of the city where I lived and worked! In less than ten minutes a downhill bike ride could have brought me to a suburban shopping centre. Returning that way would have been nearly an hour-long slog, but by car only five minutes. This little road joined a motorway along which, on sunny weekends, thousands from the city drove miles to visit famous beauty spots, never guessing the quiet beauty so close to them. This was the place for me.

Gradually I had it re-roofed, made waterproof and rot-proof, had the inner walls plastered and painted. After linking it to the national grid I installed an undershot millwheel that, when connected to an electric turbine, could give all the light and central heating I might one day want. I brought my partners to see the place as I improved it, saying this would be my retirement home — an independent kingdom like those I had planned from the contents of the Button Box. They thought this an eccentric hobby, said they could never imagine living there, so I was womanless for two or three years before retirement. In that time I had the living rooms and bedrooms furnished with old-fashioned carpets and wallpapers, installed a modern kitchen and lavatory, filled big cupboards in the cellars with enough light bulbs, toiletries, shoes and other supplies to last if I lived to be a hundred. These stocks meant I would no longer be bothered by expenses or shortages, except in the matter of food. I did not start stocking my large deep-freezers with food because I was seeking a new, more agreeable woman partner than any I had hitherto known, and thought that (whoever she was) she might want a say in our choice of diet. I was sure that such a partner would not be hard to find if I gave the problem as much attention as the preparation of my final home.

Half a year before retirement, I saw that my secretary appeared to be holding back tears. This was surprising. Like earlier secretaries she had been so quietly efficient that I had seldom noticed her. As in most offices, females in mine were generally younger than the men, but for me work and sexual adventure were not connected — my female partners had all been met in pubs when I was slightly drunk. My reaction to my secretary’s grief was unusual. I said gently, “Man trouble, Miss Harper?”

She murmured, “Something like that.”

As easily as if I had drunk a couple of malts I said, “Come for a meal with me tonight. I’ll try to cheer you up without asking questions about your private life, or telling you about mine, which hardly exists. We can talk about films or music or books or childhood memories, but silence won’t embarrass me. What do you say?”

For a long moment she stared at me, obviously surprised, then nodded and said yes.

After agreeing on a restaurant and time to meet we completed our office work and separated as usual, but I was hopefully excited. Finding a woman I might marry in the office was like finding the house I had wanted so near the city where I lived. My partnerships with earlier women had started soon after we first bedded each other, as is frequent nowadays. I sensed that this love affair (if it became one) must advance more cautiously. At our meal that evening she left the talking to me, seeming quietly amused by what I said while maintaining a reserve I respected. As I paid the bill she thanked me in a short, sincere-sounding phrase. I said, “Shall we dine out again next week?”

She replied, “Why not?”

We parted on a handshake, which is how we separated after more dinner dates until one night I asked about her man trouble. She said briskly, “No trouble at all.”

“Has he come to heel?”

“He doesn’t exist,” she said, smiling.

I said, “You’re better without him — I’m sure he never deserved you.”

To change the subject I described at length the finding of my ideal home and the furnishing of it. She cried out, “I see! I see!” and giggled. I asked what amused her. She said, “I knew you must have some sort of private life, but this is the first time you’ve mentioned it.”

She asked me more questions until I said, “The topic interests you so I’d better drive you there to see it some weekend.”

Which I did, after going there earlier to prepare the place.

The day was bright and windy after a long spell of rain, so the burn was in spate, its gurgles mingling with the thrashing tree branches. The house surprised her. “But won’t it be awfully damp?” she asked. I took her inside where the central heating had made the air pleasantly warm with no hint of dampness. I showed her all over, from the upstairs bedrooms to the store cupboards and emergency generator in the cellars, though it was not yet linked to my water wheel. This most aroused her wonder and amusement.

She said, “You seem to have thought of everything, how funny!”

The table in the kitchen above was set for two people, with glasses and a good bottle of wine. I removed a cold, cooked chicken and salad from the fridge saying, “I try to think of everything.”

Being the driver I drank only one glass, which was all she wanted. As we sipped coffees afterward in the living room I said, “Would you like to live here?”

She stared at me. I added, “As a married woman. This is a proposal of marriage.”

After a pause she said, “I wouldn’t like travelling so far to work in the morning.”

I said, “You wouldn’t need to work. I am an old-fashioned sort who will thoroughly support the woman I marry.”

“Give me time to think about that. You’d better take me home now,” she said, and I did.

Would I have escaped what followed if I had tried to kiss her then? Perhaps, but her reserve made such an attempt seem wrong. I drove her to the house she shared with a younger married sister. This was on Saturday. On Monday in the office she agreed to marry me. I will not describe our preparations and the registry office wedding. Neither of us wanted a public ceremony, despite the Victorian quality of our engagement. She never said there must be no sexual intercourse before the honeymoon, but that is what I assumed, and was charmed by such unfashionable modesty. It was passed on a luxury liner cruising the Mediterranean, the first foreign holiday of my life. She had been on trips with friends to Paris, Rome and Barcelona, so I was surprised and slightly hurt that she stayed on board when I went ashore to see Venice, Athens, Istanbul and Cairo, also when she said hardly a word to most of the other passengers. Her social confidence in the office had not prepared me for her lack of it with our dining companions aboard ship. Most were English, and richer than us, and perhaps she felt they would despise her Scottish accent. Yet they obviously found mine entertaining — one of them called it “charming”. She made one friend, a younger, shyer girl travelling with a wealthy invalid granny. The granny spent most of the voyage commuting between her cabin and a deckchair. Our cabin had an ample double bed, but as a honeymoon the cruise left a lot to be desired. I hoped this was due to travel sickness, though her chilly remoteness was the only sign of it. But many couples have found their honeymoons less than ecstatic. I thought things might improve when we finally got home. “To travel hopefully is better than to arrive,” says R.L.S.

Early one morning the ship berthed in Liverpool and I drove us back to the house where we had never lived before. We arrived in the evening of a pleasant summer day with the sun still bright in the sky. Leaving the car at the front door we entered and I was pleased to find thermostats and a time-switch had kept the air at skin temperature. She sat down in the living room and, sounding tired, asked for a gin and tonic. I served her, took the car round and down to the basement garage, unloaded our luggage and unpacked it. Back in the living room I suggested we go to our lounge on the top floor. She said, “Leave me alone for a bit,” so I carried my own gin and tonic upstairs. The house is among trees, but their tops before the upper windows are pruned to allow a view of perhaps the widest valley in Scotland. I enjoyed it, sipping my drink until I thought she might have recovered a little from her tiredness. I found her sitting downstairs exactly as I had left her. I said softly, “There’s going to be a lovely sunset sky. Come upstairs and see it.”

She said, “I can’t hear you.”

I said the same thing more loudly. She said, “I still can’t hear you when you mumble like that.”

I said the same thing again loudly, so that she was bound to hear. She turned to me a face as rigid and pale as marble, and in a distinct, monotonous voice said, “As soon as you’ve got me trapped in this horrible lonely place of yours, you start yelling at me!”

Then she wept passionately, wretchedly, interminably, and I knew her antagonism was powered by a will as unyielding as my own, and perhaps stronger.

GOODBYE JIMMY

IN WHAT IS BOTH A STUDY AND LABORATORY our Headmaster is contemplating an array of crystalline forms when one of his deputies arrives from a distant province. This visit has been long expected, yet the Head nearly groans before turning enough to give the visitor a mildly welcoming smile and say, “Hullo Jimmy. What brings you here?”

He has the mandarin voice of a lowland Scot unlocalized working class, though not Englished by a university education. His employee answers in a slightly plebeian Dublin accent, “You know well why I’m here. You’ve stopped answering me emails.”

The Head says gently, “I know what they say.”

“What use is that if you’ve no advice to give?”

The Head sighs with a slight shrug of his shoulders.

“Is that meant to be some kind of answer?” demands Jimmy. “Are you giving my wee place up as a bad job?”

The Head contemplates his crystalline models again but cannot shut his ears to the cry, “Then I’m giving it up too! Abandoning that nest of graceless ignorant self-destructive creatures! Leaving it! Done with it!”

The outcry becomes wild sobs which slowly quieten and end.

After a pause the Head murmurs, “You can’t leave that job. You’ve nothing else to do.”

Then he suddenly adds loudly, “Unlike me!”, grinning so impishly for a moment that the younger, careworn man seems faced by a mischievous child. A moment later the Head’s old serene look returns, and to change the subject he says in a comradely way, “I have my own worries, you see.”

“Life on other planets?” asks the visitor dryly.

“Yep!”

“Any luck with it?”

“Nope. I’ve produced a lot of the usual microbes in submarine volcanic vents, but changes in the chemical environment keep wiping them out before they can even evolve into annelid worms. A planet supporting much life needs a lot of water and some chemical stability. You can’t get that without a near neighbour as big as Jupiter to hoover up the huge meteors, a satellite like your moon to grab most of the others. In this universe the chance of getting a planet like that are over a zillion squared to one against.”

“But you got one!” says the visitor intensely. “Why turn your back on it — the only world rich with all kinds of life? Some with the brain to grasp your intention and I am not taking about whales!”

“Calm down Jimmy,” says the Head kindly.

“I am perfectly calm and stop calling me Jimmy!”

“Do you prefer your earlier titles O’Lucifer? Son of the Morning? Prometheus, bringer of fire?”

The Head is joking. Jimmy says wistfully, “King of the Jews. Prince of Peace.”

The Head wags a forefinger, says, “Prince of Darkness! Loki! Kali! Mephistopheles!” — his Scots accent broadens for a moment — “Auld Nick! Well, in my time I’ve been called a lot of funny names too.”

“So why call me Jimmy?”

“It suits my accent.”

“Why sound like a Scot?”

The Head sighs, looks gloomy, at last says, “I still get messages from that world of yours, messages from desperate people who want help. They demand help! These impossible demands …”

He hesitates.

“They’re called prayers,” Jimmy tells him.

“You should stop them reaching me! These impossible demands … are mostly from mothers.”

“Mothers worry you,” says Jimmy accusingly. The Head strongly counter-attacks.

“I cannot break physical laws that keep this universe running! I cannot stop fire or fiery chemicals hurting babies and wee kids because their skin is burned off by homicidal idiots obeying orders! When I answer …” (he hesitates) “… prayers in a Scots accent they know I am not a loving father who will work miracles. They know they havnae a hope in hell.”

“Then why not sound American? Like Dubya?”

There is a globe of the world within reach. The Head touches a northern continent upon it, saying sadly, “Don’t depress me. I once had hopes of America.”

“Why not sound,” asks Jimmy brightly, “like a former Scottish Prime Minister? The war criminal who goes around claiming to be one of your greatest fans.”

The Head covers his face with his hands, muttering, “Please don’t sicken me. We supernaturals are only heard when we use other folk’s voices. You sound Irish because you like to be liked and (IRA apart) the southern Irish voice usually does sound friendly to people outside Ireland. But God the Father must sook up to naebody! Naebody!”

After a pause Jimmy says calmly, “Do you sound Scottish to me because I haven’t a hope in hell?”

“Yes!” says the Head looking straight at him. “But it won’t stop you saying what you’re here to say so say on, Macduff.”

Jimmy holds out a sheaf of printed papers saying, “Read these emails you ignored.”

“No. Bin them. I know what they say because I know everything. Everything.”

“But you won’t attend to everything so attend to these!”

The Head says patiently, “They say the world’s richest governments have the power to kill everything bigger than a cockroach, and are still buying even more destructive weapons to fight wars in any land that resists letting them take its natural resources. These governments still sometimes say their warfare defends democracy. They used to say it defended Christianity and free trade. All lies of course. What did you want me to do, O Prince of Peace? Intervene personally?”

“I do.”

“That never works. I gave Moses a few good rules everybody should observe — Don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t tell lies. Many mothers still teach that to their kids. But then came law makers with exceptions to my rules — You must kill when governments tell you to, and can steal from men, women and children when governments let you take their land, and must not tell truths when governments say truths are dangerous. Also adulteresses should be stoned to death. Had I said to Moses, This I command thee, do what the hell you like! human history would have been just as bloody.”

“Nobody thinks your law against killing applies to foreigners,” says Jimmy mournfully.

“You did your best to correct them about that, my …”

The Head hesitates. Jimmy looks hard at him until he goes on to say, “… my good man. Yes, you told them to love their neighbours as themselves and their enemies too. Don’t fight the people who oppress you, but refuse to kill, steal or lie for them.”

“Good words to spread,” says Jimmy sadly.

The Head starts to speak, hesitates again then says in an embarrassed way, “There is something I’ve wanted to ask. When you were … hanging there …”

“I was nailed,” says Jimmy flatly.

“Yes. And you told someone in the same state that he would go to heaven with you. Why?”

“He talked kindly to me,” says Jimmy shrugging and spreading his hands. “I wanted to be kind back. Should I have told him there is as little justice in heaven as on earth? My body was in such pain that I forgot it was temporary. I was delirious. Up to almost the very last minute I was mad enough to think you might save everyone who suffered unjustly, and save them … through me!”

He gives a desperate chuckle. The Head assumes the manner of a schoolteacher and says, “If I only existed to give eternal sweeties to good folk and eternal beltings to bad, goodness would be cheap. There would be no decency, no heroism in it. I love heroism and you were a hero. I am proud of what you told people and what you endured for telling them.”

“You didn’t need heroism to be crucified,” Jimmy tells him grimly, “the Romans did it to hundreds of thousands. From the start of history down to the present day millions of children, women and men have endured worse deaths for no reason at all — just because they were born in unlucky places.”

Says the Head consolingly, “Your words comforted many unlucky people, especially slaves and women.”

“O yes!” cries Jimmy. “And when my comforting words were made official by the Roman Empire and even policemen were christened, my Christians began murdering neighbours with different Gods and burning down their temples and synagogues. My Jesus was as big a flop as your Moses, which is why I want you to …”

“Suddenly!” the Head interrupts, snapping his fingers. “Suddenly, simultaneously appear on every television and computer screen on the planet announcing, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind, and your neighbour as your self or You! Will! Be! Ex! Ter! Min! Ated! They would treat me as a rogue virus Jimmy.”

“You don’t understand,” says Jimmy shaking his head. “I want you to exterminate all the brutes.”

“Say that again,” says the Head, surprised.

“Exterminate all the brutes. Now.”

The Head sighs, stares at his crystalline forms as if looking for help there, then mutters, “Michty me. Crivens. Jings Jimmy don’t be so damned biblical. I am not the genocidal lunatic described in Genesis. I never made a deluge that drowned everyone except a single family of each species. I did not burn Sodom and Gomorrah with fire and brimstone out of heaven.”

“But you wiped out most of the dinosaurs and the saltwater plankton. You smothered Pompeii and Herculaneum in volcanic ash.”

The Head says patiently, “A wholly stable planet is physically impossible. Even with Jupiter and the moon to shield it, an asteroid the size of Dundee is bound to hit the earth every thirteen million years or so. The dinosaurs lasted a lot longer than that. They had a fair innings. Six and a half million years will pass before the next meteoric disaster — plenty of time for folk to learn how to stop it. And it is not my fault when men build cities beside a volcano. Your job was to stop folk blaming me for things priests and insurance companies once called Acts of God — floods, earthquakes, plagues and epidemics caused by ignorance of safe cultivation and hygiene. And you cured that ignorance!”

“O yes!” says Jimmy bitterly, covering his face with his hands. “I encouraged Bacon and Galileo when ignorance seemed to be the main problem and good scientists were thought black magicians or heretics. And now natural science is triumphant.”

“Exactly,” says the Head, nodding. “Educated folk no longer blame you and me for everything bad. That is a definite step in the right direction. I refuse to wipe out life on earth because my agent there who should encourage it is tired of it.”

“But I love life on earth! I want you to save it by quickly destroying only one kind of brute — the most selfishly greedy kind. Get rid of men, please, before they destroy every other living thing.”

The Head smiles, says, “If mankind heard you now they really would think you …” (he holds out both hands with his fingers curved like claws) “… Bee! El! Zi! Bub!”

“You know what I’m talking about,” says Jimmy, again shaking the sheaf of printouts at him.

“Atmosphere overheating from diesel fumes,” says the Head, obviously bored. “Glaciers, icecaps melting, sea level rising. Forests felled, land impoverished. Pure water tables shrinking or polluted. Drought increasing where forty per cent of folk suffer malnutrition and billions will die of famine and thirst.”

“Primitive Christians were right,” says Jimmy passionately. “Scientists are black magicians. Nearly all of them work for corporations tearing up the fabric of earthly life with the help of governments they have bribed. Half the animals alive fifty years ago are now extinct. Frogs and sparrows are nearly extinct. The bumble bees are dying. Some conscience-stricken biologists are freezing the sperm of threatened creatures so that they can be brought back to life when the earth is governed sanely. Mankind will never govern it sanely.”

With a tolerant chuckle the Head says, “Aye, men have always been great wee extinguishers. Remember North America at the end of the last big ice age? A vast forest of deciduous trees with nothing dividing them but lakes and rivers and rocky mountains. It was the home of the biggest most peaceful vegetarians we ever achieved — titanic browsers, tree-sloths as big as elephants. The first men who entered that continent across the Bering Strait had never dreamed of so much each meat. Killing bears and woolly elephants in Eurasia was dangerous work, but men easily took over America. The tree-sloths couldn’t run away, couldn’t run at all, didn’t need to be trapped. Set fire to the trees and you had several roasted tree-sloths burned out of their pelts in a gravy of their own melted fat. The number of North American men expanded hugely — for two generations they were too busy eating to kill each other — they gorged themselves all the way down to Mexico!”

Seeing that Jimmy is staring at him in disgust he says, “Cheer up. That’s how the prairies came about, with room for herds and herds and herds of buffalo.”

“Which the white men slaughtered because the red men lived off them. But you know things are a lot worse now. Farmers are sowing genetically modified crops that die as soon as harvested, so they must buy new seed from companies that patented them, while plants folk used to feed on vanish for ever. Soon the only live creatures left on earth will be humans and the mutants they eat.”

In a sing-song voice, grinning, the Head says, “Remember the viruses, Jimmy! They too are busy wee mutaters. People are great breeding grounds for viruses, especially people eating battery-farmed meat and mutant vegetables.” With genuine regret he murmurs, “Croak croak. A pity about the frogs.”

“Are you fond of the Barrier Reef?” asks Jimmy, desperately.

“My greatest work of art, one thousand, two hundred and fifty miles long,” says the Head reminiscently. “A masterpiece of intricately intertwined fishes, plants, insects with the beautiful vivid colour variety of all the great pictures painted by Matisse and Dufy, and a refinement of detail greater than even Paul Klee achieved.” He shakes his head in wonder at the thought of his own genius.

“It’s dying,” says Jimmy. “It’ll all be gone in thirty years unless men die first.”

The Head shrugs his shoulders, says, “Nothing lasts for ever,” and turning, contemplates his crystals as if nothing else mattered.

“What use are you?” demands Jimmy suddenly. The Head, amused, smiles at him kindly but does not reply until the question is enlarged: “What do you do while failing to develop annelid worms in submarine volcanic vents?”

“I’m preparing a better universe.”

“Where?”

“Outside this one.”

“How can you make a universe outside this one?”

This brings out the Head’s schoolteacher side. Wagging a forefinger, with increasing enthusiasm he says, “If you subscribed to Scientific American you would know how other universes happen. Every universe is like a carpet with a gigantic draught blowing underneath, so in places it gets rippled up into peaks where energy and mass are so concentrated that BANG, a hole is blown in the fabric through which mass-energy pours, making another universe where physical laws can bend differently.”

“What makes that draught?” says Jimmy keenly.

“Would you think me a megalomaniac if I told you it was my breath?” asks the Head, slyly watching him sideways.

“Yes.”

“I have to use metaphors when describing universal processes,” says the Head impatiently. “If you don’t like breath-blown ripples call them … call them labour pains if you like, but the result could be a universe where planets are this shape.”

From a bench he lifts a variously coloured prism and hands it over. Jimmy looks at it then says unbelievingly, “A pyramidal planet?”

“You are wrong. A pyramid has five sides, with four isosceles triangles on a square base. This planetary model is a tetrahedron with only four triangular sides, four equal continents. Get the idea?”

“No.”

“Look at it closely. Four glacial polar regions at the apex of each continent. Water trickles down from these to form an ocean in the middle of each surface — four Mediterranean seas of roughly equal size where life will evolve, and when it takes to land around the shores it will find none large enough for an empire to grow. All the nations that occur will be small and coastal, like Scandinavia.”

Jimmy examines the prism closely then says, “I see some off-shore islands. The British Empire spread from an island.” “An island with a lot of coal and iron where James Watt devised the first commercial steam engine. In my new world fossil fuel deposits will be equally dispersed. No gold rushes! The machines people invent will have to be powered by wind and water and oil from plants that can be grown, harvested and replanted.”

Jimmy says, “The shape of this thing makes it gravitationally impossible.”

“Only in this universe!” cries the Head. “I am preparing a liquid universe where heavenly bodies will be gravitationally formed by crystallization! Imagine galaxies of tetrahedral planets revolving round octahedral suns! A universe — ” he ends by murmuring dreamily, “ — with no big bangs and collisions.”

“But how can a planet have seas in a universe full of liquid?”

“My universal fluid will be as light as air! In fact it will be air! I will make it air!”

Inspired by the idea he hurries to a blackboard with chemical formulae chalked on it, seizes a chalk and writes N-78. 1 %, then heavily underlines it saying, “When my heavenly bodies have crystallized, these chemical constituents must remain.”

He starts chalking down a new column of figures, muttering, “This universal … solution … will make flight between worlds easy. No need for people … to blast themselves … across light years of dreary sub-zero vacuum.”

He flings the chalk down and contemplates the formulae with something like smugness. Jimmy says, “But …”

“You are going to tell me, Mr Prometheus O’ Lucifer, that air is largely oxygen exhaled by vegetation, and how can I grow enough plants to fill a universe with it? But my next universe will start with a big splash instead of a big bang, and the initial chemistry will be wholly different.” He sits down, folds his arms and looks triumphant. Jimmy, not impressed, turns the tetrahedral model in his hands saying, “Okay Mister Sly-boots Clever-clogs, I was also going to ask about this planet’s angle of rotation.” He hands the model back, says, “It will have to perform intricate somersaults if one of your triangular continents is not to be in perpetual twilight.”

“That is certainly a problem,” says the Head agreeably, putting the model back on the bench. “I am working on it.”

“So how long will it take you to get this… airy new universe up and running?”

“I have eternity,” says the chief, smiling to himself.

“You will spend eternity dreaming up a Utopian universe while mankind destroys life on earth in a couple of generations?”

“That’s nonsense Jimmy!” says the Head consolingly. “Men cannot destroy all life on earth, only themselves and equally complex creatures. In which case insects will inherit the earth while vegetation recovers and then…” (he becomes enthusiastic) “… from the segmented worms you and I will evolve a wealth of new creatures with different organs and sensations and minds. I never repeat my mistakes. It was maybe a mistake to give big brains to mammals.”

“Why deny intelligence to creatures who suckle their young?”

“Freud thinks it makes them unhealthily dependent and unhealthily greedy. Why not try hatching big intelligences from eggs? Birds, in general, seem happier than people. Tropical birds are as colourful as the organisms in my Great Barrier Reef, and the world will become a very tropical planet when men have made it too hot to hold them.”

“But!” says Jimmy explosively. The Head swiftly interrupts him.

“You are about to say bird brains are too small for development because their necks are too thin, but owls have short thick necks and are notoriously brainy. One day you may fly up to me in the form of a dove with an eagle’s wingspan and find me a gigantic owl…” (he spreads his arms) “… with feathers as colourful as a parrot’s. Pretty polly!”

“And is that the most comforting message I can take back to the few on earth who listen to me? The few who care for the future of life there?”

The Head says mildly, “You recently asked me to exterminate the human race and now you want me to send it comforting messages.”

“Not comforting messages but useful messages. When I asked you to exterminate humanity I was trying to goad you into suggesting a new way of saving them.” (He sighs.) “But of course you knew that.”

“I did,” says the Head, nodding. “But the only ways humanity can save itself is by old things that come in threes.”

“Faith, hope and love,” says Jimmy glumly.

“Yes, but these can only work beside liberty, equality, fraternity.”

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” raves Jimmy. “What are you on about? I’ve been so mixed up with… post-modern people that I’ve forgotten.”

“Liberty is not having to obey other people because they are richer than you.”

“Equality?”

“Is what everybody enjoys with friends, or in nations where everyone knows they need each other.”

“Fraternity?”

“Brotherhood. The brotherhood of man.”

“Exclusively masculine?”

“A good point Jimmy. Call fraternity love also, the love that still makes your earth the centre of the present universe.”

“Don’t talk shite!” yells Jimmy. “My wee world is near the edge of an average galaxy among a million million galaxies! I helped Galileo destroy the Jewish notion that the whole shebang was made for them. How can my wee world be a universal centre?”

The Head says patiently, “Wherever somebody opens their eyes is the centre of the universe and your earth is still the place where a lot of that happens. I hoped mankind would take life to my other worlds. They have the technology.” (He shrugs.) “If they use it to destroy themselves we’ll start again with another species. To-wit-to-woo. Pretty Pol.”

Jimmy slumps down, looking defeated. Our Head rubs his hands together, goes to him briskly and claps him on the shoulders saying brightly, “Since we now see eye to eye I must waste no more of your valuable time. Tell folk the competitive exploitation of natural resources is a dead end. Nuclear power, used wisely, will give access to all the space, raw material and energy they need without fighting aliens for it. Less than five miles beneath the earth’s surface is heat that, rightly channelled, will drive their machines without poisonous emissions.”

Without appearing to use force he raises Jimmy and accompanies him to the exit saying, “Fossil fuels should be exclusively used as fertilizer, and housewives when shopping should use net bags instead of the plastic sort which add to the price of what they buy. Goodbye Jimmy.”

“Nobody with wealth and power will believe me if I say that! They know the damage they are doing to the planet but they’re still extending motorways! Making and selling cars! Nobody owning one will change to a bicycle! Nobody who can fly will go by boat! Owners of companies wrecking the ecosphere are buying self-sustaining bunkers where they and their like can survive when everyone else is poisoned!”

“They won’t survive,” says the Head, chuckling. “Only folk who want to save others too have a chance. Perhaps.” Now he certainly propels Jimmy to the exit, adding with what sounds like mischievous encouragement, “Workers of the world unite! Remind them of co-operative Socialism! Owen, William Morris, James Connolly!”

“I’ll be laughed at,” moans Jimmy.

“Then all laughter will become screams of hysterical despair. Send me all the emails you like but don’t come here again for a millennium or two. Goodbye son.”

“Son!” says Jimmy on the threshold. “I’m glad you… sometimes… admit I’m in the family.”

“Goodbye son,” says the Head, quietly for once, “and good luck.”

“Which is not something you need, Dad,” says Jimmy, and leaves.

The Head returns to contemplate the crystalline models and formulae on his blackboard, seeming almost despondent. He is sorry that it is so hard to show his love for those who love him most. The rest are not so demanding. And why does Jimmy think he needs no luck? Is it because, as Headmaster of all, there is supposed to be no greater power? He hums a little song to himself, “I’ll give me one-o. What is my one-o? One is one and all alone and ever more shall be so.”

After a pause he sadly says, “One is one and all alone and ever more shall be so.”

In the place where he sits another presence becomes apparent, one that stands so much higher than he that its voice seems from above, a gentle, female, slightly amused voice saying, “You silly wee man.” “Mother?” he asks wistfully.

VOICES IN THE DARK

THE DARKNESS IS SO COMPLETE that only steady continual snoring suggests this is a bedroom. Then come muffled clicks, a sliding sound, thumps of someone coming stealthily through a window. A narrow beam of light pierces the dark from what can be dimly seen as a slit between curtains. The beam swings from side to side until it fixes on the foot of a big bed where the snorer lies, then explores sideways to light on a bedside table with many bottles on it. The source of the beam comes through the curtains. It is a torch in the hand of a black thin figure who advances carefully to the bedside table, crouches on the floor, then switches on a table lamp among the bottles before turning off and pocketing the torch. The light now, though not great, shows the head of the snorer half sunk in plump pillows. It is old and mostly bald, with clumps of white hair behind the ears. This man is called Rudi. Behind him is an elaborately carved bed head with a large letter F surrounded by a laurel wreath both under a layer of cracked gold leaf. The rest of the room also suggests palatial splendour down on its luck. The croucher at the bedside wears black canvas shoes, pants, anorak, woollen hood with eye slits and holds a gun pointed at the sleeper’s head. With the other hand she pulls the hood off, and now is a tiny, haggard, desperate woman of any age between thirty and fifty. She listens carefully for sounds outside the room, but only those from the sleeper’s nose are audible, so at last she reaches over with her free hand and pinches the nostrils shut.

His mouth opens and he starts breathing through it noisily. She whispers fiercely, “Wake up!”

He does not. Releasing his nose she slaps him lightly on the cheek saying, “Wake up! Wake up!”

Even this has no effect. She slaps him much harder, says, “Waken you old fool!”

Not opening his eyes he mutters, “Um. Eh?”

“I have told you to waken.”

“Impossible,” he murmurs drowsily. “The sleeping pills I am given no longer work, it is true, but I reinforce them with alcohol. What time is it?”

“Three a.m.”

“Well, before midnight, on top of my pills, I consumed a bottle of 90 % proof absolute alcohol so you cannot possibly have wakened me at three a.m. Go away.”

She prods his head with the gun saying sternly, “Open your eyes. This hard thing pressing your ear is the barrel of a revolver.”

“Ouch,” Rudi grunts, then adds thoughtfully, “Yes, it feels like one, but dreams sometimes contain strong sensations. I once dreamed I was eating a buttered roll, the loveliest experience of my life, a memory of the birthday present my mother gave me when I was two or three. That was during the German occupation. Everyone except the Germans were hungry then, even though the Jews and Gypsies had gone. My mother…” (he sobs) “… my mother must have loved me a lot to have given me a whole buttered roll and not eaten half of it herself. Leave me alone.”

He turns away from the light, trying to bury his head in the pillow, but she slaps his cheek so hard that he cries, “Huh!”

“Was that not more real than the dream of your mother’s buttered roll?”

He says sulkily, “No. It was not.”

She slaps again much harder.

“Yes!” he says, sitting up a little. “Yes indeed, that would almost convince me that I’m awake if this house were not surrounded by guards and alarm systems and all kinds of clever devices installed by Americans, the best people in the world for such contraptions. My dear, I regret disappointing you but you must be a hallucination. Nobody real could penetrate the impregnable security fence protecting me from — ”

Loud knocking on the door is followed by a muffled voice saying, “Sir! Sir! Are you all right?”

Rudi sits up straight, showing he is unusually tall and unusually thin. He shouts, “Of course I’m all right! Can the President of Fredonia not enjoy a Shakespearean soliloquy and talk to himself without a God-damned bodyguard interfering? I have all the protection I need — in fact more than I want. Avaunt and quit my door. Vanish, abscond, absquatulate, begone. Shut up, pipe down, retreat and have a heart, as the Yanks say. Have peeety on your so-o-o-oul, as Dostoevsky would have said. Leave me in peace do you hear? Do you hear?”

The voice outside mutters, “Yes sir.”

“But I don’t want to hear you,” yells Rudi. “Eff off, as the English say!”

A little later he cries, “Have you gone?”, waits for half a minute, then chuckles and says, “Relax my dear. He’s gone.”

The visitor has been standing upright with legs apart, gun at arm’s length pointing at the door. She now pulls a chair to the bedside, sits down and tells him, “You’re a smart old bastard. You knew I’d have shot you if you’d called him in.”

Rudi sinks back on his pillows, sighs, says, “Why should you not shoot me? I’m useless. Useless to myself, useless to my nation, useless to the world.”

“But a tyrant to your people,” she coldly tells him.

“You do me too much honour, my dear. I drove that servile security guard away because I was enjoying our conversation about appearance and reality. Do you know that in Western Europe and the U.S.A. nowadays, postmodern philosophy teaches that all external realities are mere opinions, all different but all equally valid?”

“Decadent bourgeois obfuscation,” she says savagely. Delighted he cries out, “I love these old Marxist phrases! After the Russians drove out the Germans I became the most dedicated Communist medical student in Fredonia. My speeches denounced Capitalist Lackeys, Neo-Fascist Warmongers, Bourgeois Hyena Cannibals and even (God forgive me) Unproductive Social Elements Deserving Elimination. I hailed the coming day when the Revolution would be Complete and The State Would Wither Away. These stale phrases rang in my ears like trumpets in the ears of Crusaders galloping out to exterminate infidels. Please tell me your name.”

After a moment she says shortly, “You may call me Vera.” He begs softly, “Vera, join me in bed.”

Astonished she cries, “You dirty old sod.”

“Please don’t mistake me my dear. I’ve been completely impotent since the People’s Socialist Republic put electric currents through my testicles. The pressure of a friendly woman’s body can no longer excite me, but it would soothe me. Nobody has soothed me since my arrest by the old regime. Time for another drink. Have some too.”

She scornfully refuses. Rudi shrugs, grasps a bottle of vodka, fills a tumbler, sips, then says, “You must have a reason for breaking in. What is it, Vera?”

“I need to know why you betrayed us.”

“Betrayed who?”

“The people of Fredonia.”

He says mildly, “It is they who let me down — not the common people of course, who gained nothing from the collapse of the old regime but permission to say what they liked. But lawyers and businessmen, civil servants and local politicians, journalists and broadcasters seem happy with Grolsh in charge.”

“Grolsh? Who is Grolsh?”

The president stares at her, says, “The man who runs Fredonia.”

“Liar! The Mafia rules Fredonia.”

“It could not rule us without local help, Vera. Grolsh and the Sicilian Godfathers co-operate like lock and key. Like many sadists he is a good family man, and knows it is unwise to be a well-known public figure. He never let the old Party bosses promote him above the rank of privileged State Security thug, so when the Communist regime collapsed, only those he had personally tortured… people like me knew how vile he is and — and — and…” (he shudders) “…we hate recalling that.”

He tries to empty the glass down his throat, but his teeth chatter on the rim and half the drink spills on his pyjama jacket. Stretching a trembling hand to the nearest full bottle he begs in a whisper, “Please Vera. Please. Please.” She lays her gun on the table, lifts the bottle, sighs, takes the empty glass from his hand and pours in a small measure of vodka. Handing to him she says gloomily, “You should drink less.”

Her action does him good. He stops trembling, smiles at the glass in his hand, sips very little then says, “You care about politics so must belong to some little party or other. Which?”

“We call ourselves The Decembrists.”

“After the group who planned to assassinate the Russian Czar in 1825?”

She nods and explains, “We would have preferred a name recalling the great Soviet Revolutionaries of 1917, but their achievement went bad under Lenin, turned rotten under Stalin, collapsed under Gorbachev. So we chose the name of that earlier lot.”

“Who also failed.”

“Yes, but Pushkin nearly joined them and Tolstoy admired them.”

Chuckling he says, “So you broke in here to assassinate the Czar of Fredonia! You nearly succeeded. I might have died of a heart attack.”

“I did not want to kill you,” cries Vera, distressed. “I once loved you. You were my hero when I was a tiny girl.”

Seriously and sadly Rudi whispers, “O dear.”

She tells him, “You gave hope to so many of us with that speech you made in the seventies. My mother and father…”

“Don’t remind me,” he begs but she raises her voice: “My mother and father listened to you on the radio with tears wetting their faces. You said the People’s Republic of Fredonia would now take her own unique path to Democratic Socialism. All censorship was now abolished. Everywhere we would be allowed to say what we thought about everything.”

She leans so far forward that her hair falls down to hide her face and she puts a hand on the bed to support herself. He pats it gently, quietly singing in a cracked voice a line of their national anthem: “Hail, hail Fredonia, land of the free”, then switches to another song once popular with Socialists: “For all that, and all that, it’s coming yet for all that, that man to man the wide world o’er shall brothers be for all that.”

Vera sits up and says abruptly, “I am a woman.”

“In a true democracy, women count as men.”

“Then count me out.”

“Why?”

“You retracted everything you said in that great speech.” “I was an idiot then, Vera,” he mourns, “not a liar. I believed every word of that speech. Under Communism from time to time many leaders announced that the old rules were softening to let freedom in. Even Chairman Mao announced that a thousand flowers would be allowed to contend. Fools who acted on these announcements soon learned their mistake. I was a simpleton who believed what Khrushchev said about a thaw…”

“It was Brezhnev.”

“So it was. I was then the Commissar in charge of National Health, and at once ordered that every political dissenter who had been registered insane should be released from our lunatic asylums. I declared this over the radio as a reason for public rejoicing. An hour later I was strapped to an operating table with electric wires attached to parts of me that — that — that I will not embarrass an attractive young woman by mentioning.”

“You’ve already told me what parts.”

“I must be senile if I told you that, but yes, it happened. Two days later I announced that my previous speech had been the result of a mental breakdown, and that I was retiring from politics for the good of my health. That was certainly true. I remained under house arrest until the Soviet Union collapsed.”

“We all knew you had been coerced into taking back that announcement. And a man called Grolsh coerced you? And you handed power over to him when we elected you President?”

“Grolsh is not totally evil, Vera. He has more wives and children than he can support out of his private fortune, even with Mafia backing, so has not wholly dismantled our Welfare State. Single mothers still receive family benefits. Our health service is not wholly privatised. I am the doctor who mainly founded it in 1947. Surely some of it still functions, my little Decembrist?”

“Don’t change the subject!” cries Vera. “You were elected President in 1990 because you were the only politician who had tried to defend Democracy under the Communists. We still loved and trusted you then.”

“And rightly!” he cries, greatly excited. “I declared over the radio that Fredonia would become Europe’s first democratic Socialist nation. Shops and small businesses and collective farms would be given to the folk working them. Big state businesses would become co-operatives owned and managed by their employees. Water, mineral resources, energy, newspapers, education and, above all, justice would be maintained for the people’s benefit by the people working them with the support of their elected parliament. No wonder people cheered and cheered and cheered that speech.”

“Fraud. Hypocrite. Whited sepulchre,” says Vera. “Why did you go back on all that?”

“I never did. That is why they keep re-electing me.”

“You must know the election results are faked,” she states with huge contempt.

Sighing he says, “They must be, with old Grolsh in charge.”

“But why is he in charge? Why has nothing you promised to do happened? Everything in Fredonia now belongs to global corporations and the international Mafia. More and more young people nowadays are drug addicts and vandals. Disease, crime, deaths in police custody are always increasing. The streets are full of beggars and most of us are poorer than we were under the Communists.”

“True!” says Rudi nostalgically. “Under that regime there was widespread social equality for everyone who was not a Party member. It was equality of scarcity of course. Shoppers stood in queues for hours. Most folk had only four or five really satisfying meals per week. But we had no beggars and nobody starved because nobody was penniless. There was full employment because everyone without a productive job was paid by the state to spy on their neighbours.”

“Are you defending the regime that scorched your balls off?”

“No,” says Rudi, sighing.

“Then why has Fredonia got worse since you became our President?”

Rudi shakes his head in bewilderment and says, “I don’t know. I signed documents making it legal for plumbers to own their own shops and farmers to own their own fields, and in swarmed middle men — brokers — there is an unpronounceable French name for such people…”

“Entrepreneurs,” Vera tells him.

“These entry-pruners swarmed in and asset-stripped the whole nation. I kept announcing that this should not be happening, but that did not stop them and nobody else I knew tried to. A President’s speeches cannot change history when his lawyers, judges, civil servants with everyone else in his government and official opposition are being bribed by global companies while being openly paid out of the public purse. So I became what I am — a hollow figurehead, more useless than a scarecrow. Scarecrows at least keep predatory birds away from grain that is needed for bread. I am a sham, Vera. You are right to despise me, but…”

He is interrupted by music.

The opening chords of the Fredonian national anthem sound near, but muffled. Rudi says, “Excuse me a moment,” takes a phone from beneath his pillow, presses a button on it, says, “Yes?” and presses another button which makes the caller’s voice loud enough for Vera to hear. It says, “Rudi. Grolsh speaking.”

“Why?” asks Rudi.

“I want a word with you.”

“Say it.”

“I must say it to your face. Now. At once.”

“Why?”

“Rudi, there is a national emergency. Very serious. Very urgent.”

“Oho! Where exactly are you, Grolsh?”

“Outside your bedroom door.”

Vera, springing up, seizes her gun and again points it straight at the door. Rudi, amused, says, “At four in the morning? What a busy bee you are. But of course, that is the usual hour for security forces to grab a government’s political enemies. I hear that the British police now arrest asylum seekers at this hour.”

Grolsh says, “Please! I am not here to arrest you but please, we must now talk.”

“I will call you in when I have adjusted my clothing,” says Rudi merrily. Switching off the phone he tells Vera, “You can hide in bed with me or under it. I suggest in, on the far side.”

He pulls his long legs up to make a tent-like bulge under his duvet, then flings them back on the side opposite the bedside table. Vera frowns grimly for a moment, nods, goes round the bed and slips in with him. He covers her small body with the duvet without straightening his legs, then warbles in a loud sing-song, “Enter, Comrade Grolsh.”

The door is opened by someone who enters and closes it carefully behind him. He looks like any European or American businessman, in an expensive suit that does not fit him very well. He approaches the bed and, sitting in the chair where Vera sat, clasps his hands between his knees and stares gloomily at the floor. Rudi, pleased to see him like this, says, “Care for a drink?”

Grolsh nods.

“Then help yourself.”

Grolsh fills a tumbler near to the rim with vodka, swigs from it and says, “This building has been the President of Fredonia’s residence since the time of Looper Firefly in 1933. Even then this was the President’s bedroom. Did it never occur to you that State Security would have this room bugged?”

Rudi, chuckling, says, “Strange as it may seem, it never did.”

Grolsh, sighing, says, “I know that Vera Zazulich, leader of the Decembrist group, is somewhere near with a gun she will shortly point at my head.”

Vera, uncovering, sits up gun in hand as he predicted and tells him, “Yes, Comrade Grolsh, I have just learned that you are mainly responsible for the present state of Fredonia. If you call in your henchmen I will certainly put a bullet in your brain.”

Grolsh shrugs and says, “Had I feared that I would have sent them in before me. A sudden clean death by bullet is the least I fear nowadays.”

Laughing heartily, Rudi says, “The poor fellow must be in serious trouble, Vera. Who is after you, Grolsh? Will they attach electrodes to your genitals? Or work all over you with pliers and a blowtorch?”

“Don’t joke!” says Grolsh, wincing. “Yes, I am in trouble, and a deal with you two may be my only way out of it. And I promise both of you will benefit hugely by playing ball with me because Grolsh is a man of his word.”

“I am past playing ball games Grolsh, but go on! Go on! You are beginning to interest us. To your health Comrade!”

Rudi, stretching out, clinks his glass against that of Grolsh who glumly swigs from it, sighs and says, “I wish I had left Fredonia in 1989 but it was never easy to take currency out of a Communist nation. In the rest of the world any corrupt politician or businessman can open a big account in a Zurich bank, but left-wing regimes were notoriously stingy. Then came the Liberal Revolution that made you President, Rudi, and everything in Fredonia was for sale! I admit that went to my head. It was an intoxicating time. Never, in the history of Capitalism, has so much been sold to so few by so few. I sold land, factories, coal, tin and copper mines, power stations, reservoirs, schools, drugs, justice, everything. I lost count of what I sold and now alas, now it appears I sold some things more than once to different global companies.”

Again Grolsh sighs. Rudi says cheerfully, “But Grolsh is a man of his word! He must know some way to compensate two or three world-wide companies for buying the same mines and power stations.”

“It can be done,” says Grolsh nodding solemnly. “There is a way of doing it that will delight you Rudi, and you too, Vera Zazulich. The Liberal Revolution, my friends, has now obviously gone too far. It hugely enriched a new middle class at the expense of the workers and the poor, but a trade recession is starting to hurt professional people too, so it is time for everyone to enjoy a New Deal. And working together we three can achieve this by seizing the reins of government and forming a new political party — the New Dealers Party!”

“What will it do?” asks Rudi merrily.

“It will make you more than a mere figurehead. You will be able to keep some promises you made in your greatest speeches. You will at last achieve the Socialist Democracy you suffered by defending.”

“He remembers my sufferings Vera! How kind he is!” snarls Rudi with a venom Grolsh ignores, jubilantly urging Vera, “While you! — leader of the Decembrists! — will openly represent all those young idealists who still have faith in liberty, equality, fraternity. We will put you in charge of education, broadcasting, culture, fashion, anything you like. You can be home secretary and create a Ministry of Feminism. And at last I will emerge into the limelight and manage boring economic matters that no high-souled people ever understand — things like trade and finance.”

“And you think such an alliance will save your soul?” demands Vera scornfully.

“To hell with my soul!” cries Grolsh violently. “I fear for my body. I want to die painlessly of old age.”

Rudi asks, “And what will our splendid new government do?”

“We will give Fredonia back to the Fredonian people!”

“How?” cry Rudi and Vera simultaneously.

“We three left-wingers understand Marxist historical logic do we not?” says Grolsh with a strained enthusiasm he obviously hopes will infect them. “Thesis! Antithesis! Synthesis! The state Communism that collapsed in 1990 was our thesis. It provoked the state Capitalism that is also starting to crumble. Our New Deal will renew Fredonia by synthesising both systems.”

“Into Capitalist Communism?” asks Rudi, grinning, and “No! Communist Capitalism!” says Vera, also amused. Grolsh says, “Exactly, exactly, exactly! We will renationalise all industry and public services that do not profit the present owners.”

“Wonderful,” says Rudi, “so the Fredonian tax payers will compensate the global corporations for the mines and railways you sold them, including those who paid simultaneously for the same ones.”

“That must certainly happen,” Grolsh tells them solemnly. “Our new government will not last a week if it is distrusted by the International Monetary Fund.”

The other two laugh heartily. Vera says, “Rudi, give me that glass — I’ll have a drink after all.”

He hands it to her and fills another for himself.

“What is this big joke you laugh at?” asks Grolsh grumpily. “You,” says Rudi.

“We don’t believe in you,” says Vera and Rudi adds, “You have lurked so long in the shadows, Grolsh, that you have become one. You are no longer solid but a phantom — a ghost of a mirage of an illusion.”

“You are both terribly wrong!” cries Grolsh. “I still wield power, terrible power, and can prove it.”

“Do you mean that the outré harpooners still trust you?” says Rudi.

“Yes! Because I am one of them. Also, I have international contacts of immense strength and intelligence…”

Grolsh is interrupted by the first six chords of a famous national anthem.

Rudi and Vera, astonished, look around and see no source of the noise then notice Grolsh is cowering and that his face has gone very white. The chords are followed by an implacable voice saying: “This is the U.S.A. talking to European agent pee cue zero six nine otherwise known as Vladimir Grolsh. Agent Grolsh, you are in breach of the contract forbidding you to form new political alliances without previous C.I.A. clearance.” In feeble tones Grolsh cries, “I had no time to inform you of the useful alliance I have just proposed — I only conceived it half an hour ago — but I am delirious with joy that you know all about it now. Please congratulate the C.I.A. for wiring this room without my knowledge.” “We have not wired it. You are being addressed over a new satellite system which gives us total powers of surveillance and interference anywhere at any time. Ours is the only operating system of its kind in the world.”

“No quite the only operating system,” says a suave voice with a Sicilian accent. “This is the Cosa Nostra speaking. Under clause 312 of the C.I.A. and Mafia International War on Terror Treaty, Cosa Nostra agents only need clearance from us. Our Fredonian agent Grolsh received clearance from us twenty minutes ago.”

The room vibrates to the sudden boom of a heavily struck gong, and a new voice says, “But agent Grolsh has not received clearance from the Chinese Central Intelligence Agency!”

“And if I might be allowed to put in a word…” says an Oxbridge voice –

“You may not!” says the voice of America, but the Englishman continues pleasantly, “I realise the United Kingdom is a junior partner in our alliance, but the City of London is still the Western world’s biggest money-laundering centre, and we feel agent Grolsh is now a useful link between all of us, including the Muslims. Is that not true, Grolsh?”

“No deals with the enemy,” says America.

“Surely,” pleads Grolsh piteously, “surely in this free market world of ours a man may sell himself to everyone who can afford him? And the U.S.A., the Mafia, the U.K. and China are allies. You are not at war with each other!” The gong booms once more and China announces, “Every nation must be prepared for every eventuality.”

“You can say that again!” says America, so China says it again.

“You had better come back to Sorrento, Grolsh,” says the voice of Sicily.

“No way!” says America. “When Grolsh leaves the President’s bedroom he will be coshed, chloroformed, rolled in a carpet and sent for debriefing at Abu Ghraib.” Rudi, much amused by the conversation, has been quietly singing the Fredonian national anthem to himself, but a terrible wail from Grolsh silences him.

“Mercy, England! England, please have mercy! Surely your renowned sense of fair play will come to the aid of poor old Grolsh, your most faithful of Fredonian agents?” “Sorry Grolsh old bean. Our prime minister is Scotch and has just given permission for your extraordinary rendition through Prestwick airport.”

“Vera!” screams Grolsh. “You were going to put a bullet through my brain — pity me! Pity me and do it now.”

In a girlish way Vera smiles on him and pleasantly says, “No.”

“Then give the gun to me!” he begs, and she hands it over saying with a hint of apology, “There are no bullets in it.”

“Rudi!” he yells, weeping. “Sanctuary! Sanctuary!”

Rudi kindly raises the duvet on Grolsh’s side of the big bed. Grolsh grabs a vodka bottle, dives in and burrows as far down as he can while Rudi covers him up.

This little drama distracts all three from what the other voices are discussing, but that international squabble at last ends with the terrible boom of the Chinese gong.

MIDGIEBURGERS

STREETS OF BUNGALOWS are called suburban when part of cities, but exist in many much smaller British places. A wife sits in a bungalow beside an electric fire, knitting with the concentrated fury of one with no other outlet for her energies. A husband sits opposite, examining magazines received that morning with a bulky weekend newspaper. Discarding the one called Sport he leafs unhappily through Lifestyle, Homes, Travel, Arts and Entertainment, but every page seems to have colourful photographs of glamorous young people in richer, more exciting surroundings than his own. He leaves the magazines, goes to a window and looks out for signs of other life, but in the pale grey sky above the bungalows opposite not even a bird is visible. He says, “I can’t make out what the weather is like.”

“Where?” she demands.

“Outside.”

“Go and look.”

“No. I am insufficiently…” (he thinks for a while) “… motivated. You’re lucky.”

“Why?”

“You can knit. Shop. Do housework. Retirement has made me…” (he thinks for a while) “… an appendage. I should cultivate something.”

“What?”

“A hobby perhaps. Friends perhaps.”

“Friends are not cultivated,” she tells him. “They grow naturally, like weeds.”

“I bet I could cultivate one,” he says with sudden enthusiasm. “This is a free country. I can go into any pub, see someone interesting, walk straight up to them and say: Excuse me for butting in, but you look like a man of more than average intelligence and I need advice. Jim Barclay’s my name, tax avoidance expert, retired, and I’m looking for a hobby to cultivate.”

He falls silent for a while, then says, “If I was American it would sound much better: Howdy stranger. Jim Barclay’s the name, and tax avoidance is the game. What brings you to this neck of the woods?”

“Woods don’t have necks,” she tells him.

“Not around here, anyway,” he says, sighing. Returning to the fireside he sits down again and at random opens a magazine at a page advertising an expensive gown. This looks like bunches of glittering rags not quite covering a glamorous, charmingly worried young woman in what seems the boiler room of an obsolete factory. He studies her wistfully for a while, then the doorbell rings.

“Somebody’s arrived! Somebody’s arrived!” he says exultantly, striding from the room, opening the front door and crying, “My God, it’s you!”

“Yes, it’s me,” says someone modestly.

“Come in, come in, come in!” Jim says, ushering the visitor through and closing doors behind him. “Linda, this is old… old… old…”

He snaps his fingers to encourage memory.

“Bill,” says the newcomer pleasantly. He is the same age and professional type as his host, and adds, “I was driving north on business, saw I was near here and thought I’d call in.”

“So you did! Linda, Bill and I were great pals when we worked for the old P.I.S.Q.S.”

“You’re wrong,” says Bill pleasantly. “It was for the old S.H.I.Q.T.”

“Are you sure?” asks Jim, surprised.

“Absolutely.”

“Anyway, it was one of those hell-holes and you saved my life, I remember that clearly enough.”

“It was my job,” says Bill with a modest shrug. “I was in charge of security.”

“Indeed you were, thank goodness,” cries Jim. “This calls for a celebration. Have a seat.”

“Only if you’re having one yourself.”

“Impossible. I’m too excited. But you must have one.”

So Bill sits.

“Tea or coffee, Bill?” asks Linda, who has risen hopefully to her feet.

“Neither. Sorry,” says Bill with a touch of regret, “my doctor won’t let me.”

Linda sits sadly down and carries on knitting. Her husband walks up and down, smacks his hands together, repeats, “This calls for a celebration. Orange juice? Beer? Gin? Vodka? Whisky? Drambuie? Tia Maria? Sherry? Port? Chateau Mouton Rothschild du Pape? I’m afraid we’re out of champagne.”

“Sorry,” says Bill, “I’m a health freak. I only drink water, and stopped at a pub for a couple of pints ten minutes ago.”

“O,” says his host, sitting down and wondering what else to say.

And at last asks, “Care to talk about being a health freak? I mean, you might manage to convert us.”

“No no,” says Bill, “you’d find the topic too bloody boring.”

“Ha ha ha, you’re right there!” says Jim, then adds in an apologetic, quieter tone, “Sorry I can’t ask you what make of car you drive, and tell you about mine and all the trouble

I have with it. Linda finds the topic too bloody boring.”

“Ha ha, she’s right there!” says Bill. This leads to another long silence broken by both men saying simultaneously, “What are you doing these days?” after which both laugh until Bill says, “You first!”

“No, you!”

“You! I insist.”

“Well, as a matter of fact I’ve…” says Jim, but is interrupted by the first bars of Do You Ken John Peel? on a xylophone. With a murmured apology Bill takes a phone from his pocket, says to it, “Well?” and after listening for a moment tells it, “Listen, bitch, and listen good. There were no witnesses to that promise you allege I made, pills are cheap so your bastard is not my concern. If you must whine, try whining to my lawyer. He’ll land you in Cornton Vale jail without your feet touching the ground and women commit suicide to escape from that place. So get out of my life!”

Pocketing the phone he says, “As a matter of fact you’ve what?”

“Taken early retirement.”

“But you used to be such a live wire.”

“Yes, but the firm made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

“The swine,” says Bill sympathetically.

With a shrug Jim tells him, “Business is business,” then, struck by an idea, asks, “Have you noticed that every ten years since 1975 the number of millionaires in Britain has doubled?”

Bill nods. Jim asks, “Have you never wanted to be one?”

Bill says, “I am one.”

Not quite catching this Jim says, “It’s done by cashing in on the market whether it’s going up, down or sideways. Jack Rotter of the Porridge Union is coming to everyone’s neck of the woods next week so why not book a talk with him on rotporridge @ slash dot crash dot wallop yahoo dot com and get tips straight from the horse’s mouth? All terms and conditions apply.”

His wife, exasperated, looks up from her needles and says, “He’s already told you he’s a millionaire.”

“Did you?” Jim asks Bill, who smiles and nods.

“Dear me,” says Jim, “that ought to teach me something.” Linda says, “It should teach you to listen as much as you talk.”

Not quite hearing her Jim murmurs, “Yes it really ought to teach me something,” then sighs and adds, “But I wish they hadn’t pushed me out of tax avoidance.”

“I seem to remember you were damned good at it,” says his friend.

“I was, but even accountants don’t know everything.”

“Maybe some don’t, but mine at least is trustworthy.”

“You may be living in a fool’s paradise,” Jim points out, “because last year I was running to the seaside when the door of a parked car opened and smacked me into the middle of the road. I was left with nine broken ribs and a fractured pelvis.”

“Tough!” says Bill. Jim answers smugly, “Not at all. I got straight on to J.C. Pooter who will get me a cool million in compensation and a holiday in the Bahamas.”

Bill says, “J.C. Pooter is certainly your knight in shining armour,” so approvingly that Jim cheerfully asks, “What are you doing these days?”

“As a matter of fact I’m…” (Do You Ken John Peel? is heard) “… Excuse me,” says Bill, bringing out his phone.

After listening for a while he says, “They’re rioting? We knew they would… They’ve invaded the plant? We knew that would happen too. I hope they burn it down so the owners can claim insurance… You’re trapped on the roof? Phone the police to airlift you off.” To Jim and Linda who have been frankly listening he adds, “Sorry about that. I was saying?”

“What you are doing these days,” says Linda.

“I’m a troubleshooter.”

“You shoot troublemakers?” asks Jim, awestruck.

“No no no,” says Bill, chuckling. “I never pull a trigger. I tell other people to do that.”

“Which must take courage,” says Jim, admiringly. His friend, with a touch of regret says, “Not much. Hardly anyone gets killed. They usually see reason when confronted with the wee black holes at the end of Kalashnikovs.”

“Does Russia still make these?”

“I’m not sure, but nowadays they can be picked up anywhere for a song.”

“A song! That reminds me,” cries Jim, “which of the following statements is untrue. Stoats are animals with almost human fingernails. For two centuries the Austro-Hungarian official language was Chinese. You can afford an Assassin Javelin Jeep with leather upholstery, an inbuilt recording studio and all the trimmings. The Madagascar royal flag is an inverted hippo.”

“Er… the inverted hippo?”

Jim says triumphantly, “They’re all true! The most horribly abused single-parent pauper can now afford an Assassin Javelin Jeep thanks to an easy credit deal which lets anybody sell their children into domestic slavery.”

“Do all terms and conditions apply?” asks Bill.

“Of course!” is the glad reply. “The best jeep in the world is now within everybody’s reach, but I’d just like to put in another word for the Porridge Union…”

Linda has gradually stopped knitting and now flings down her needles and in a cold monotonous voice says, “Hell. Hell. Help.”

Their guest stares questioningly at her husband who murmurs, “I think she feels excluded from… from…”

“From our discourse?” whispers Bill. “Yes, my wife sometimes feels that when a friend calls, so I know what to do about it.” He coughs in an introductory way then says genially, “Here comes a very personal question Linda, but have you enjoyed the wonderful sensation of Gloria Vampa’s new make-up remover?”

“I don’t use make-up,” she tells him stonily.

“Then maybe it’s time you started! The surveillance society is here to stay, so why not wow the police watching you on closed circuit television cameras by looking like a new woman every day? And Maxine Hererra can make that easy.”

“Maxine Herrera of New York?” cries Jim.

“Yes,” says Bill, “Maxine Hererra of New York’s heart-shaped love-box has a new lipstick giving you the choice of sixty-nine distinctly glamorous shades and ninety-six luscious flavours, and the cost is only…”

Linda says desperately, “Fuck cosmetic advertising.”

Jim suggests, “Try something else.”

After a thoughtful pause Bill says, “Money, Linda! Money. You know, the former Federal Reserve Chairman tells us through the prism of the current situation we cannot turn a blind eye to the explosion of sub-prime mortgages, and the rapid growth of complex credit derivatives.”

“Can’t we?” asks Jim, astonished. “Imagine that Linda! What does it mean?”

“It means that history has never dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted low-risk premiums, and the regulators will have to rely on counter-party surveillance to do the heavy lifting.”

Through gritted teeth she says, “Monetary jargon and cosmetic jargon are equally disgusting.”

Bill asks Jim, “Do you think she might join in if we discuss music?”

“Try it,” says Jim glumly, so Bill announces that his favourite radio station is Classic FM. To explain why he says, “You cannot beat Classic FM for really smooth, relaxing music sponsored by the British Savings Bank which is currently celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of premium bonds…” He falls silent because Linda is writhing in torment. Jim says, “Try health.”

“You know there’s nothing very clever about living with a hernia,” says Bill gallantly, and Jim chimes in, “But operations used to be painful, took months, were often worse than useless.”

“No more!” says Bill triumphantly. “And about time! Nowadays you can walk into the Universal Hernia Centre and walk out twenty minutes later with a brand new, state-of-the-art hernia and a life-long permanent kidney guarantee, and it won’t cost you a — ”

Linda screams. Jim clutches his hair. Bill, inspired, shouts, “I’ve got it! Science! Pure science. E equals MC squared. Poor Albert Einstein.”

“Yes,” says Jim, grinning with relief. “He never could get his head around quantum physics. God doesn’t play dice, he said.”

Bill, chuckling, says, “Remember what Max Planck told him: Don’t tell God not to play games.”

“Was that not Niels Bohr?” asks Linda, who has resumed knitting.

“One or tother,” says Jim. “Einstein never understood that a unified field equation would only be possible in a steady-state universe that would be undistinguishable from an infinite Parmenidean solid.”

“Schopenhauer showed how impossible that was.”

“He did! He did! He did!” says Jim, and the two men are laughing happily when interrupted by Do You Ken John Peel?. With an apologetic shrug Bill tells the phone, “Hello?… Okay… Okay, the demonstrators have you spread-eagled naked and facedown on a tabletop with a funnel stuck up your arse. And?… They are going to pour melted lead down it unless?…” (his voice registers incredulity) “… Unless the government promises to nationalise their factory and reopen it? Why should the government do that?… You’re Gordon Brown’s nephew? What’s that got to do with it? Family loyalty is as dead as Socialism and the brotherhood of man. You’ve got yourself into a mess and there’s nothing I can do to help.” He switches off the phone and asks, “You were saying?”

“Schopenhauer showed how the definition of will as effect, not cause, depended on consciousness itself — a reductio ad absurdum that would reduce the Gods themselves to helpless laughter. No wonder Nietzsche and Wagner loved Schopenhauer. I think Bruckner did too. In a peaceful wood, on a summer afternoon, one’s mood is exactly conveyed by the almost inaudible vibration that opens his fourth symphony.”

Bill nods, says, “Yes, the unity of art and science, hand and eye, is predicated by the past which is our only inevitability. did you know that Phoebe Traquair — evening star of the arts and crafts movement — married a marine palaeontologist who specialised in the asymmetry of flatfish?”

Flinging down her knitting again Linda announces, “I can take no more of this pretentious shit,” and folds her arms to prove it. Jim jumps to his feet points an angry forefinger and tells her, “O yes it’s easy to sit at one side knitting and nagging, nagging and knitting. I hate pretentious shit as you do but I loathe something else even more — that ghastly, brain-destroying silence in which people sit uselessly hating each other. Well, I give up. I’m tired of being the friendly host. I’m leaving Bill entirely to you.”

Jim walks to the window and looks out, hands in pockets. Bill, not at all embarrassed, looks at Linda who smiles pleasantly back, sit beside him on the sofa and asks, “What brings you to this neck of the woods, Bill?”

He slaps his knee and says, “Ah, now you’ve got me really started. From now on you won’t get a word in edgeways. I’ve been sent north by the S.L.I.C.Q.E. because — ”

“Exactly what is the S.L.I.C.Q.E.?”

“Scottish Lice and Insect Corporate Quango Enterprises, which want me to — ”

“Insects are disgusting,” she tells him firmly.

“They are, they are, but from an industrial point of view midges — ”

“The female flesh fly Sarcophoga Carraris,” she says more firmly still, “lays young larvae in the fresh or decomposing flesh of almost any animal. Or in manure!”

“I know,” says Bill patiently, “but why does a salmon as big as this…” (he spreads his hands wide apart) “… leap out of a river to swallow a wee toaty midge as big as this?” and he not quite touches the tip of his thumb with the tip of the index finger.

And at that moment his phone plays Do You Ken John Peel?.

“Excuse me,” says Bill bringing it out, but Linda grasps the wrist of the hand holding the phone and says firmly, “No gentleman should let a telephone interrupt a conversation with a lady. Switch that off.”

Jim turns from the window and stares, amazed by an aspect of his wife new to him. Do You Ken John Peel? rings out again. Bill is too gentlemanly to wrench his wrist from Linda’s grasp by force but the sound drives him frantic.

“I must answer it!” he cries. “If it’s my boss I’ll be sacked if I don’t answer! I have to be on call day and night! Day and night!”

“Is it your boss?” she demands. “Won’t the phone tell you?”

“I don’t know!” he exclaims. “Nowadays anyone who is computer literate can hack into my phone and make it say they’re my boss. I’m bombarded by calls from an ex-employee I picked up in a Thailand children’s brothel. I chucked her out a fortnight ago and now she rings me almost hourly! My life is a nightmare!”

The phone plays Do You Ken John Peel as he begs through tears, “Please let me answer. I’m drinking myself to death.” “With water?” she asks scornfully.

“Water can kill faster than alcohol. Please, please Linda — release me.”

“Only if you switch it off, Bill. It’s probably only strikers who want you to hear your colleague screaming while they pour molten lead into his bum.”

“All right,” says Bill, is released, and switches off the phone muttering, “I only pray to God that you’re right.”

“My my, Bill, what a full life you have!” says Jim, coming over and sitting down with them again. “Tell me, why do great big salmon leap out of rivers to swallow toaty wee midges?”

“Because of their adrenalin!” Bill triumphantly explains. “Every wee midge is a molecule of pure protein fuelled by an atom of adrenalin. That’s why midges are able to stot up and down all day above rivers, lochs, cesspools, stanks and puddles in your back garden.”

Linda tells them stonily, “Cephenorima Auribarbos is a rather flat parasitic fly whose shape and claws allow it to move quickly, crab-wise, across the soft hairy surfaces of ponies and suck their blood. The female gives birth to full-grown larvae, which at once pupate.”

“Very true, Linda,” says Bill, “but what would you have if all the midges infesting the Highlands and Islands were squeezed together into one huge dripping block?”

“What would she have?” asks Jim, fascinated.

“She would have a lump half the size of Ben Lomond and containing enough adrenalin to start a Scottish subsidiary of International Pharmaceuticals, while leaving another half mountain of protein to be sliced and marketed locally as midgieburgers. The working class cannot afford to buy fish suppers nowadays; Scottish beef and venison are for export only, so midgieburgers are going to become Britain’s fastest new food — our economy will depend upon it. And Scotland is in luck. Global warming is turning the Western Isles into the new Caribbean, so S.L.I.C.Q.E. is using lottery funds to shunt pension-less old age pensioners, and the unemployed, and the disabled, and criminals doing community service, into Highland and Island nudist camps where they do nothing but sunbathe and let S.L.I.C.Q.E. cull the midges they attract.”

“Five of Scotland’s worst social problems solved at a stroke. Wonderful!” says Jim, awestruck. Linda, unimpressed, tells them grimly, “The deer botfly, Calliphora Vomitaria — ”

“Sorry dear, but I have to interrupt,” Jim tells her. “Bill is a troubleshooter. Exactly what trouble are you here to shoot, Bill?”

“The midges are not biting.”

“Why?” asks Jim.

“Nudists are using midge repellents.”

“Calliphora Vomitaria — ” begins Linda but her husband talks over her. “I’m sorry dear, but this really is important. You must know, Bill, that International Pharmaceuticals who want the midges also make the repellent sprays. They can make the sprays sold in Scotland ineffective by weakening the contents!”

“They’ve done that,” says Bill, “but local chemists have stockpiled enough of the old effective stuff to repel midges for the next ten years.”

Linda, trying again, says, “Calliphora Vom — ” but Jim almost angrily says, “I told you this is important Linda. Listen Bill: the pharmaceutical companies must tell local chemists that the repellents that they’ve stockpiled may induce cancer because they’ve been insufficiently tested, so will replace them with completely safe stuff free of charge.”

Bill, shaking his head, says, “Too dangerous. If that lie turns out to be true, the pharmaceuticals will have no defence if people start suing them.”

“So what can they do?”

“S.L.I.C.Q.E. have called in T.I.Q.T.S. who — ”

“What,” shouts Linda, “is T?I?Q?T?S?”

“My firm: Troubleshooter International Quick Termination Service,” says Bill, modestly, and Jim asks, fascinated, “What will you do?”

In a low voice Bill asks if he can keep a secret. Jim quietly explains that he was once a Boys Brigade captain, so never clypes. He is then told something in a voice so low that Linda cannot hear a word, and resumes knitting.

Jim is strangely affected by what he hears. Admiration contends with horror as he asks, “You can do that nowadays?”

Bill nods.

“But when Communist governments did such things everyone thought… I mean, in Britain, Europe and the U.S.A. most people thought… I mean, even the cheapest newspapers said that kind of thing was… er… wrong. Bad. Dirty. I think we even had laws against it.”

Bill tells him happily, “We’re living in a new age, Max.”

Gently correcting him, Jim says, “Jim.”

“I’m sorry?” says Bill, puzzled.

Treating the matter as a joke they will share Jim says, “I am not Max. I’m your old friend Jim Barclay.”

Bill, thunderstruck, says, “You’re… not Max Fenstersturmer?”

“No. I’m Jim Barclay, whose life you once saved.”

Bill jumps up, cries, “Is this not sixteen Conniston Place, Strathnaver?”

“It is sixteen Denniston Place, Strathinver.”

Bill responds in a new and strangely American-sounding voice: “No wonder nothing you’ve said to me has made sense. O but you’ve been very very smart. I have to admire how you screwed what you did out of me.”

Jim, slightly disturbed, stands up saying, “It’s you who made the first mistake. I simply answered you as politely and agreeably as possible.”

“But you didn’t go out of your way to correct me, did you? Exactly who are you working for?” Bill asks on a note of naked menace, after which the quiet dignity of Jim’s reply sounds unusually British: “I am not working at all. I am a tax avoidance accountant who took early retirement. My hobby is cultivating friendship and you are suddenly making it very, very difficult.”

“They all make feeble excuses of that kind. I will now tell you what I came north to tell Fenstersturmer and you’d better believe it. If you’re working for one of the other sides, come clean and we’ll do a deal, because we can always do a deal with the other sides. But if you’re a loose cannon you haven’t a hope in hell. Get this. Everything you’ve heard, everything you know, everything you think comes under The Official Secrets Act, and if you breathe one word of it to a living soul you can kiss your ass goodbye. And if they come for me first I’ll make sure that we both go down the chute together.”

“Calliphora Vomitaria,” announces Linda, “commonly called the deer botfly, deposits larvae in the nostrils of young deer. The larvae live in the nasal or throat passages, attached by their mouth hooks and living on the secretions of the host. When full-fed they are passed out with the deer’s droppings and pupate on the soil.”

During this Bill strides to the door, opens it and tells Jim, “Remember this, Fensterbacher! The crocodiles at the bottom of that chute have needle-sharp teeth and take years to make a meal of a man!”

Do You Ken John Peel? summons him from his pocket as he rushes out from the house, slamming the front door behind him.

Jim looks at Linda, perhaps hoping for an adequate comment. She sighs, shrugs her shoulders and resumes knitting, so he wanders around the room with hands in pockets murmuring, “Well well well,” at intervals in slightly different tones of voice. At last he says, “I enjoyed his company before he turned nasty… I wonder if he was all he cracked himself up to be… I’ll know for sure if chemists’ stockrooms start exploding. Linda! Should I phone the police and warn them about that?”

She says, “He was the police — a special branch of it.”

“Not a troubleshooter for a private corporation?”

“That too. The police are half-privatised now, like most of the government,” and she sadly adds, “I wish you were him.”

“Why?”

“He and I nearly had a conversation before you butted in — almost the first intelligent talk I’ve had with a man since we married. Before that you sometimes talked to me. Never since. Not nowadays.”

“Not now, no,” he says absentmindedly going to the window and looking out. She stops knitting, looks at his back and says softly, “What if we — both you and me — were always listening — I mean really listening to the silence. Would we hear, — really hear and heed — the importance of waiting, — really waiting — for the right moment — to begin the song?”

There is a long silence, then without turning he asks if she said something. She says, “A poem I remembered.”

He says, “For a moment I thought you were talking to me.” She resumes knitting. He resumes wondering about the state of the weather outside, and sometimes (as a result of his conversation with Bill) also worrying idly about the state of Britain.

WHISKY AND WATER

A PUBLIC HOUSE has been expensively refurnished and redecorated by owners who hope it will now attract a richer class of client, but while other pubs in the district are crowded as usual, this has only one customer. He sits at the bar, slowly sipping whisky while talking, though not conversing, with the barmaid. He wants a female audience to punctuate his monologue with agreeable sounds, and the barmaid does this easily while looking through a fashion magazine. Her most frequent sound is “mhm”, a Scottish word of agreement which can be said without opening the mouth. The regular customer asks, “You know my brother the artist?” “Mhm.”

“He is more than an artist now. He is now chief arts administrator for the whole of North Lanarkshire. He has shagged nearly every woman in North Lanarkshire. Has he shagged you?”

“No.”

“Where do you live when you’re at home?”

“West Dumbartonshire.”

“That explains it. He is also a property genius. He collects property like some folk collect postage stamps. You know the tenement at the corner of Boghead Road and Sheriff Irvine Smith Street? That’s his.”

“A prime site,” says the barmaid, turning a page.

“Yes, a prime site. He has stuffed every room from floor to ceiling with old earthenware sinks, cisterns and lavatory pans.”

“I’ve seen them through the oriel windows.”

“You’ll never see them again. Yesterday he had the windows white-washed on the inside to deter burglars. Modern bathroom fixtures are mostly plastic. My brother thinks rich folk (not billionaires with gold-plated bathrooms but slightly poorer rich people) will soon want antique earthenware plumbing. When that kind of retro design hits the colour supplements he will unload his Irvine Smith treasury and make a killing, as we say in the Stock Exchange.”

“Good.”

“Do you know what, in my opinion, is life’s best thing?”

She does not answer because an old man wearing a long coat and flat cap has entered and stands gazing round in dazed way. The barmaid asks if he is looking for someone. He says, “Whaur are the muriels?”

She tells him she knows nobody called Muriel.

“Ye’ve goat me wrang, misses,” he says. “Am talkin aboot big wa’ pentins, same as Michelangelo pentit a’ owr the Pope’s private chapel.”

“This is a respectable pub in a respectable neighbourhood,” says the other customer sternly. “Don’t drag religion into it.”

“What would you like to drink sir?” asks the barmaid kindly.

“A wee goldie, please miss. But whaur did the muriels go? Did Kelvingrove Art Gallery grab them?”

“When did you ever see a mural painting in this place?” asks the regular customer with contempt.

“At the time of the Upper Clyde work-in. A wiz a fitter in the yards and a shop steward. Jimmy Reid led us up this wie tae a protest meetin ootside the B.B.C.”

“The B.B.C. building is south of the river,” says the barmaid placing a small whisky on the bar. “Twenty pounds please.”

“Twenty pounds for a wee goldie!” cries the old man, dismayed. He sadly lays down two ten-pound nickel coins, then sips his drink murmuring, “A great man, Jimmy Reid. Him and me wiz oot thegether in the 1950s apprentice strike. A great man for the Working Class and for Culture. That is why he broat me in here. ‘This pub is whit every Scots pub should be,’ says Jimmy, ‘a livin centre of local community culture. Here the Scottish intelligentsia mingle with ane anither and with the common workin man. Hugh MacDiarmid! Jack House! The Wee MacGreegor! Wullie Joss of the MacFlannels! Duncan Macrae who appeared in Our Man In Havana alang wi’ Alec Guinness and Noel Coward! And James Bridie, the Scottish George Bernard Shaw — Bridie who wrote that great London West End success, Bunty Pulls the Strings! And if they’re no actually here today when we drap in, ye can still see them pentit on the wa’s as large as life’ and so they were. Aye, so they were. Mhm, so they were.”

“Do you know how absurd you are being?” demands the regular customer.

The old man stares at him,

“Absurd and also obnoxious!” says his critic. “It is offensive to have a list of forgotten has-beens recited over us. Since the Upper Clyde work-in fiasco this pub has been completely renovated umpteen times by more managements than you’ve had decent breakfasts. You can bet your bottom dollar that soon after you saw them those old mural panels were chucked into a skip and taken straight to Dawsholm incinerator.”

“Even the muriel of the novelists? Barke, Blake, Gaitens and Guy McCrone who wrote No Mean City?”

With sadistic relish his tormenter says, “They were the first to go.”

The old man, stupefied, puts his empty glass on the counter and wanders out.

His departure seems to free the regular customer of a burden.

“As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted,” he tells the barmaid briskly, “do you know what the best thing in life is?”

“No.”

“The kind of frank and friendly talk I am having with you.”

“Thanks.”

“Outside this pub I find it almost impossible to have a civilized conversation. Last night I was served in the Grosvenor Hotel lounge by a young chap, a very tight-lipped, taciturn, depressed chap. To cheer him up I told him about the wife leaving me, about the bills I had to pay and goldfish I had to feed. Do you know what he turned round and said to me?”

“What?”

“He said, My friend, have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal saviour?”

“And had you?” said the barmaid, studying the astrology page.

“Had I what?”

“Accepted Christ as your personal saviour.”

“For God’s sake!” he cries. “Is every pub in this city staffed by religious fanatics? I refuse to tolerate fanaticism, fundamentalism or any form of bigotry. Every Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, Hindu or Quaker bigot should be hung, drawn, quartered, cut down while still living, buried up to the neck in the ground and stoned to death regardless of race, religion, nationality, political creed or — ”

Someone breenges in saying “Amen! Hear hear! Good thinking! I’m with you all the way on that!”

The stranger looks like a younger, happier version of the man he interrupts. He lays a wad of notes on the bar crying, “Drinks all round! For me, a large malt of the month. For you miss, whatever you like. For my pal here, whatever he likes.”

“I don’t drink at work,” says the barmaid, pouring the malt for him.

“No more for me thanks,” says the regular customer, quickly taking a newspaper from his pocket, holding it up and appearing to read closely. In one swig the stranger empties his glass, slams it back on the counter and tells the barmaid, “Another. And keep them coming until that’s used up.”

He points to his money on the bar then asks the regular customer what he thinks of the weather.

“I don’t discuss politics,” is the short reply from behind the newspaper.

“O come come come!” says the stranger cheerily. “You used to be mad about climate change. You were a pal of Harvey Drambogie.”

“I have never in my life known a man called Harvey Drambogie.”

“But you shared a flat with him when you were students together. That flat was a hotbed of Greenpeace and climate control freaks.”

From behind the newsprint barrier a voice says distinctly, “As a student I once shared a flat with a lot of folk whose faces and names I cannot now remember and do not want to remember. Someone called Harvey was maybe one of them, maybe not. Even then I was staunchly unpolitical and am even more so now — a Tory, in other words.”

“You can’t possibly have always been so antisocial!” says the stranger, chuckling. “And Utopian politics were an innocent hobby in those days. There was no harm in you and Drambogie making pirate radio broadcasts, telling us the government should be throwing up dykes.” “You are mixing me up with someone else.”

There is a long silence in which the stranger quickly drinks several large whiskies before saying coldly, “It is clearly time to remove my velvet glove and give you a touch of the iron hand. Look at this. Know what it means?”

He holds out a card in a transparent plastic envelope. The regular customer glances at it, sighs, says, “Yes,” and gloomily lays down the newspaper.

“Let me spell it out in detail. This card gives me power to arrest whoever gets on my tits and hold them indefinitely for questioning, without their family and friends being informed, and without access to legal advice.”

“But I’ve done nothing. I’m innocent.”

“You cannot touch pitch without being defiled,” says the stranger implacably.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Do you deny that your brother has impregnated half the women in North Lanarkshire? And filled his Sheriff Irvine Smith Street flat with illicit unregistered earthenware plumbing? And white-washed the windows from inside without local community planning permission?”

“Why should that make me a criminal?”

“Because you cannot touch pitch without being defiled.”

This conversation so interests the barmaid that she has laid aside her magazine. The regular customer cowers under the policeman’s accusing glare, and begs humbly, “Don’t arrest me please. Yes, Harvey Drambogie once inveigled me into voting for the Greens before I knew they were terrorists, but I’ve never voted since. I promise not to see my brother again as long as I live, and I’m very sorry I was so stand-offish when you first spoke to me. I admit that my manners to you then were deplorable so please, please, please accept my humble apologies and let bygones be bygones.”

The policeman drinks the last whisky his wad has purchased and murmurs, “You’re beginning to sound sincere.”

His former cheerful manner suddenly returns. He extends a hand saying, “Apology accepted. Shake, pal.”

They shake hands heartily, then the policeman says, “You will now prove your sincerity by handing over your wallet.”

It is handed to him. He looks inside, removes a banker’s card, hands the wallet back saying, “Without your personal identification number this card is useless. So?” “Zero zero nine zero.”

“Not a number I’ll forget,” says the policeman, going to the door. Before leaving he looks back and with a mischievous smile asks, “Would you like to know what will happen to you if you’ve lied to me?”

“Please don’t tell me,” the regular customer whispers. “I wouldn’t dare lie to you.”

“Wise man. See you around. Goodbye miss.”

The door closes and the regular customer says gloomily, “That’s the third banker’s card a plain clothes cop has pinched from me this year.”

“I’m surprised you’ve any money left,” says the barmaid. “I’ve taken precautions. I have several bank accounts with small token sums in them and only carry one card at a time. My real savings are in a waterproof condom gaffer-taped to the inside of the U-bend behind my lavatory pan.”

“Not much room in a condom.”

“If I say that condom contains items to the value of nearly half a hundred million pounds, will you believe me?”

“No.”

“It does. When I saw how galloping inflation was devaluing the currency I converted my capital into diamonds, pearls and a few well-cut multi-faceted amethysts, for which I have a weakness.”

“I like a good amethyst too.”

“Well you’re not getting any of mine!” he yells in sudden parsimonious frenzy. “Don’t expect it! I am not an idiot! Whit is mine is ma ain ye bitch, and whit’s ma ain is nain o’ yourn — ”

The regression of his speech to a primitive level of dialect is abruptly cut short.

A tall dark brown man has entered wearing the traditional dress of ancient Gaelic warriors: rawhide pampooties on his feet, a tartan plaid upheld by a broad leather belt, a tweed waistcoat with voluminous linen sleeves. On his head is a white turban with a moorhen’s tail feathers sticking up from a cairngorm brooch. There is a targe on his left arm, his right hand grasps a basket-hilted claymore which he lays carefully on the bar counter before saying in a soft, clear, Western Isles accent, “If you please, mistress, a small celebratory Inverarity.”

He is paid no particular attention by the barmaid serving him. The regular customer has resumed reading his newspaper, as it is nowadays safer to ignore eccentricity. The Gael seems hurt by their neglect of his appearance. Having paid for his whisky he rotates the glass without tasting, then asks loudly, “Have none here heard the news?”

Without looking up from his paper the regular customer says, “You can save your breath if you want to tell us the Broomielaw embankments have burst and rising water is turning Glasgow into a cluster of islands. We knew that was bound to happen years ago.”

“Indeed yes, it is happening, but that is not the great news.”

The Gael lifts the whisky glass high above his turban, cries, “The Prince has landed — slanjay vawr,” empties the glass down his throat and flings it to smash in a corner, so that no inferior toast may again be drunk from it. The barmaid looks annoyed. The regular customer says, “Exactly what Prince are you on about?”

“Prince Charles Windsor Xavier Sobieski Stuart the Tenth, our Once and Future King.”

Says the barmaid, “I have more to worry about than politics these days.”

In exasperation the regular customer flings his paper down and demands, “Exactly where did you dredge up that Prince?”

With a lilt in his voice the Gael says, “Charlie has been with us all his life, but kept from his rightful inheritance by treacherous politicians and a bad old mother wrongly called Elizabeth the Second of Britain. The first monarch of all Britain was Jamie Stuart the Sixth of Scotland! He came after Elizabeth the First of England. In 1707 a German dynasty with Stuart blood in its veins was put on the British throne, blood of which Queen Victoria was rightly proud. And now Prince Charlie has extirpated his German taint by fully identifying with his Stuart ancestry. All Scotland must now arise to make him rightful King of Scotland, England, Ireland, Poland and North America!” “If you asylum seekers had more sense you would keep your mouths shut,” says the regular customer.

“Asylum seeker!” asks the Gael in a dangerously quiet voice. “Does that epithet refer to my complexion?”

“It stands out a mile.”

In dignified speech that grows increasingly passionate the Gael announces, “I will have you know that I was born a subject of the British Empire. My father fought for it in two World Wars. In 1944, inside Buckingham Palace, King George pinned a medal to my father’s chest in recognition of his conspicuous bravery. At the same ceremony he met my mother, a MacTavish of Jura, a nurse being honoured for her services to our troops in Malaysia. They married a week later and I was born twenty years after, since when I have farmed my people’s ancestral croft with my own two hands. And now you — a Lowland Sassenach without land or ancestry — have the gall to call me an asylum seeker!”

“I’m glad the British Empire gave you a chance in life,” says the regular customer, “but frankly, since the year dot, your sort have been diluting the purity of Scottish culture and enough is enough.”

“What Scottish culture?” ask the Gael and barmaid simultaneously. The regular customer starts talking didactically but he too grows passionate as he tells them, “Scotland gave the world the Protestant Bible, steam engines, gas lighting, the bicycle, Tar Macadam, Macintosh raincoats, the electric telegraph, television, penicillin, Campbell’s Soup, and McDonald’s Burger King. Asylum seekers have been diluting that proud culture ever since 1890 when the Eye-Ties came here with their decadent ice-cream parlours, their corrupting fish-and-chips shops. Then came the Jews, Indians, Pakis, Chinks, Serbs and Croats. Every stupid nation we’ve helped by invading has brought us a new wave of asylum seekers destroying our native culture with filthy foreign cuisine until now…” (he chokes and sobs) “… now Scottish salmon, Highland venison, Aberdeen Angus beef, Forfar bridies, Finnan haddies, haggis, black pudding, shortbread and even my old granny’s tablet is for export only.”

By a strong effort he pulls himself together and announces, “Let us now change the subject.”

The Gael, eager to speak, raises his hand but again finds himself neglected as the regular customer tells the barmaid, “The wife phoned me again last night.”

“Mhm?”

“Said she still passionately loved me. She doesn’t know what passion is. She’s frigid. Never had an orgasm in her life. She was drunk of course. Alcoholic.”

The barmaid says non-commitally, “I heard she’d sorted that out.”

“Alcoholics never change. She sits at home seeing nobody, just boozing and making up her face and polishing her piano.”

“She sees Senga Spotiswood.”

“God knows why. What the hell’s happening out there?” From a great distance but growing swiftly louder and nearer is the sound of a big pipe band playing Wha Daur Meddle Wi’Me? The Gael seizes his claymore crying, “I told you! The Prince has landed!”

The regular customer raises his voice above the music of the pipes to ask, “Why should anyone pipe up for a second-rate no-user like the Prince of Wales?”

“Excuse me!” cries the barmaid. “That language is wholly out of order.”

The Gael brandishes his weapon shouting, “You have been brainwashed, my friend, by the capitalist press which derides a man for loving trees, old architecture and a woman as unglamorous as himself — the only man fit to lead a second-rate nation like modern Britain! Come with me and help the last of the Stuarts redeem his nation!”

He departs, slamming the door behind him as the pipe music is suddenly quenched by torrential gurglings, but these are not loud enough to drown splashes that suggest the Gael is leaving the pub by wading upstream.

The two left behind watch a damp stain in the carpet advance slowly toward them from the foot of the door. The barmaid says sadly, “We’ll have to leave soon.”

“Mhm,” says her last customer, “half the Scottish Lowland will soon be submarine. But let’s have a whisky before our feet get wet. I’ll pay.”

The barmaid fills two tumblers saying, “These are on the house. Will you be moving to the Highlands?”

He says, “If there’s room. The English have been buying houses there for years. I admire them. They’re always a jump or two ahead of us.”

She drinks deeply, choking sometimes but emptying the glass before giggling and saying, “You know, that is the first whisky I ever tasted. Why did our government not build dykes? The Dutch have had dry houses under sea level for centuries and Holland is still” — she hiccups — “safe.”

“Dearie, the Scottish coast,” he explains, distinctly pronouncing each word, to counteract a tendency to slur, “is so intricate that we have a longer coastline than most continents. And for centuries our taxes had to pay for us being the world’s policemen. We could not afford to embank our coasts. Then the Yanks started policing the world and needed our armed forces to help save democracy from terrorists who do not share our values. So less, no I mean let us fish, no I mean finish, yes finish the blot, blot, blottle.”

The lights go out. In total darkness comes a prolonged crash of falling masonry, then nothing is heard but rushing water.

MAISIE AND HENRY

MY PRIMARY SCHOOL TEACHER made every girl in her class knit the same size of socks and when I told her they were far too big for me said sharply, “You’ll grow into them.”

I never caused her trouble but she did not like me, perhaps because I questioned her occasional daftness. In my last primary year I was surprised and embarrassed to be the only one given navy blue wool to knit again more socks that would never fit me. Blue was the colour of the local academy uniform. Girls bound for junior secondary school were given maroon wool, those the teachers were unsure of received grey, so I was certainly going to the academy. This delighted my dad, a Communist shop-steward in the shipyards. He said, “Nowadays only an education for the professions leads to financial independence. Marriage won’t give it.”

Mum, a dependent housewife ever since marriage, agreed with him, so I despised girls who thought attracting men was life’s main aim. Passing exams was more important. I was not very intellectual, so in my first university year missed parties to order to study harder than students who were, yet failed my first German literature test. I wrote that Die Leiden des jungen Werthers was not really tragic, that Der zerbrochene Krug was not much of a comedy. My tutor declared sternly, “These are German classics!” I replied that her exam paper had asked my opinion of these, so I had written what I thought.

“Are you here on an education grant?” she asked, though she knew I was. In those days even children of rich families got education grants, which was supposed to show Britain was now a classless society. The tutor said, “Students of your sort should know you are here to learn, not think.”

This shocked me until I saw that I need not study original texts if I regurgitated what tutors said about them. After that I easily passed exams and had time for parties. Some affairs before graduation taught me that lovemaking is enjoyable but not good for lasting partnerships, and that I could live without. Before the age of thirty I was managing the supplies department of a firm with bookshops in several universities. This meant interviewing folk who applied for jobs, which is how I met Henry.

He was young, tall and bony, thin yet not weak, polite and shy but not nervous, and he usually looked mildly amused. His voice was soft yet deep, his accent (like mine) academy-trained working class. His application form showed he had taught Maths for four years in a secondary school so I asked why he had left. He said, “I don’t hate children but whole classes of them are too many for me. I want an easier job.”

“You won’t get one here,” I told him. “You’ll be constantly unpacking books from big boxes, then repacking them in smaller boxes. You’ll be paid less than half what you earned as a teacher despite your first-class honours in Philosophy. That’s a far better degree than I ever got.”

He shrugged and said, “A philosopher who cannot teach may as well supply people with books.”

“But a first-class degree from a good university should get you something better!”

He said he had been offered an Oxford scholarship but had to stay in Glasgow — his invalid mother needed him to look after her. That was why he had taught for so long, though hating it. He said, “She died last month so here I am. Please employ me.”

He was obviously conscientious and truthful, so I did.

He arrived for work each morning before 8.30 a.m. when our place opened. It was my job to know he was punctual, though I arrived after 10 a.m. because new orders seldom came earlier. To process them properly I worked later than everyone else, being able to concentrate better when my clerical staff were not pestering me with their problems. One evening when nights were growing darker, thinking myself as usual alone in the building, I went to the exit through the loading bay and saw Henry standing beside the door in his overcoat.

“Why are you still here?” I asked and he said, “There was still a lot of tidying to be done.”

“You’re not paid to work overtime,” I pointed out.

“Neither are you.”

“I’m paid a helluva lot more than you are, so it’s worth my while.”

He sighed then spoke slowly as if explaining something obvious to a child or an idiot: “This door leads into a very dark lane. This is a rough neighbourhood after most workers leave. The only people around are from council houses, many of them unemployed, so it is not safe for a woman to be alone here at night. Staying late doesn’t bother me and my workmates leave the place in a disgusting mess. I hate messes and like tidying them up.” I said, “In that case I’ll buy you a drink.”

Neither of us had a car. I led him to a nearby pub where I often relaxed over a pint of lager after working late. Neither of us wished to seduce the other. I am a good judge of character, knew Henry was unselfish, knew he would have stayed late for any woman, old or young, married or single. Nor would he have made a pass at them. In such circumstances I think any single woman could have got him to marry her, for he thought it right to give women what they wanted if it would not hurt them. I had a proposal for him that was not romantic.

Over the lager I said, “If you insist on working late you can do better than tidy the basement.”

The basement staff sent big consignments to shops all over Scotland. They also sent single books ordered by customers up to my department, a smaller but equally important job that was not done regularly. The single books accumulated on a basement trolley for a day or more and often came up with invoices missing, causing me endless trouble. I had asked the basement foreman to send the trolley up twice a day. He grudgingly said he would, but never did as he hated taking orders from a woman. Our managing directors also disliked taking orders from women so would not speak to the foreman on my behalf, saying I should deal with him. I asked Henry to look out for the single books and bring them upstairs whenever he could. If this was not possible during normal working hours he could bring them to me after his workmates left. I said, “Manage that and I’ll try getting you paid overtime, though the directors will likely say the firm can’t afford it. They’re very stingy with everyone who is not upper management and I’m only head of middle management.”

“No matter!” said Henry cheerily. “Every business should be efficient.”

From then on he made my life easier, and his only reward was the pint of lager I bought him afterward.

When the rest of my staff learned of this arrangement they decided we were lovers. The women all thought Henry “a heart-throb” because of his deep soft voice, and one said, “I honestly don’t know what he sees in you.”

Women who are not wee and chubby often wonder why men like me. At university one such man told me loftily, “Compact, manageable female bodies always appeal to the average male sensualist,” though I never let him manage mine. My deputy (another heart-throbbist) said bitterly, “Henry knows which side his bread is buttered. Guess who will be promoted when the next vacancy occurs.”

She was promoted when the next vacancy occurred. The directors employed whoever I thought fit but never promoted those I recommended, and certainly not Henry. They called him “over-qualified”. Six months passed before he and I knew each other well enough to be lovers, another month before we married, yet in all his time with the firm he was one of the worst paid despite (unlike some with four times his salary) keeping an essential part running smoothly.

We honeymooned on a Mediterranean coast where we did not know the language of the natives, so I forget if they were Spanish or Italian. We mostly met English holiday makers who seemed just as foreign, often dining with a couple from Felixstowe who seemed to like us. I once heard the husband say, not knowing he was overheard, “They’re terribly Scotch, aren’t they dear?”

“Very!” said his wife. “But quaintly entertaining.”

He said, “You find them that, but I prefer the company of normal people.”

We enjoyed the local food but never got used to the unrelenting sunshine. That was our first and last trip abroad. Since then Millport and Lamlash on the Firth of Clyde have been our holiday resorts.

The pattern of our evenings had changed long before our marriage. Henry still worked for almost eleven hours a day and I for over nine, so instead of visiting the pub we dined in Chinese or Indian restaurants. I hate making meals and other housework because Mum did these chores for me before I left home, and after moving to my own house I paid an agency to clean it, and for weekends bought meals that could be simply heated and tipped onto a plate. Henry preferred shopping for the ingredients of meals he cooked, having done that for his mum, so at weekends he did so for us, though I felt slightly guilty about that. But the real test of a partnership is how a couple manage together when not doing much. I am a television addict, Henry a thinker. After work and at weekends I relaxed watching a soap opera or reality show and he sat with me reading or thinking. The TV’s noise did not disturb him because, he said, his parents had been television addicts in a two-room flat. The kitchen was the only room with steady heating so at first, when doing homework at night, he had shut out noise by putting fingers in his ears. But this annoyed his dad and Henry had learned to ignore noise by concentrating harder. When Dad died his mum offered (as I did) to listen to the TV on earphones, but he said there was now no need — he could ignore any amount of noise by concentrating.

“Concentrating on what? You’ve no school homework nowadays,” I said, never having seen him read a book. Neither did I, partly because my university tutors had made them boring, partly because I worked all day with books. Henry said he needed no books now because he remembered enough of them, and the Times Literary Supplement told him how things were going.

“What things?” I asked and he said, “Things in general — things Victorians used to call The March of the Mind.” “How is it marching?”

“Badly. New discoveries in physics and biology are always happening but only do good to corporations who finance them. Humane sciences are at a standstill since Marx and Freud stopped being thought important, while linguistic philosophy — the watchdog of speech — is also out of date. So is Existentialism, the last school of philosophy relevant to human action. But I enjoy seeing how academics keep carving cosy niches for themselves and their friends.”

That was not a conversation I could continue. Normally after discussing the daily events we shared he would start reading the T.L.S., underline a word or two in an article, then sit looking into space for a long time with the unread journal open on his lap. When I asked what he was thinking once he jerked slightly as if waking from a dream then said, “Numbers.”

“Mathematics?” I asked and he replied, “Not exactly. I ought to have said quantities — not quantities of things, just quantities in general. Even when very different — even when seemingly contradictory — they still harmonise. Is this a law of nature? Or the result of quantities being human constructs, like language? I can’t decide which.” “Neither can I. It’s totally above my head,” I confessed. “You would understand me better if you were a musician,” he said. Not being musical I returned to watching EastEnders while he resumed thinking about quantities or music with the little smile that some wives might have found annoyingly secretive. Not me. It showed my company was enough for him.

Our lives flowed very smoothly then because (I thought) we enjoyed safety and comfort that would last until retirement and beyond. Children do not guarantee future comfort, so though never discussing them we did without. One day I told my main assistant of our good time together and she said, “I suppose you get on well with him because he does everything you want.”

“Perhaps,” I said, “but I never want anything stupid or difficult.”

“Good for you!” said she. “But I could never respect a man without initiative.”

Almost angrily I said, “He has plenty of initiative! He keeps it for his hobby.”

“He has a hobby?” she asked, incredulous. With hardly a pause I said, “Yes — quantity surveying.”

“What on earth is that?”

Not knowing, I said, “I’ve no time to explain. Look it up.”

Henry and I might have continued comfortably like that for years had I not hit him with a new idea.

One night I asked, “Have you noticed that the cost of dining out, plus paying the agency to clean this house, comes to more than your wage?”

“Yes,” said he.

“So we would save money if you left the firm and did the… I mean became a…”

I hesitated before saying househusband because the word might offend him, and was still hesitating when he said, “Househusband. I wondered when you would think of that. But how will you manage at work without me?”

“As badly as I did before you came. But I would be used to it, and I hate you wasting your life emptying and filling boxes.”

He sat silent and frowning for so long that I grew worried and asked, “Are you annoyed?”

Said he, “No. I was thinking that before financiers and politicians grabbed our economy it derived from a Greek word for housekeeping. So does ecology. Thucydides said the most satisfying economy was seen in rows of full pots arranged cleanly on shelves. Your idea is excellent. I will be a good housekeeper.”

He was. After leaving the firm he rose each day at his usual 7 a.m., made breakfast for us both, and would have brought it to me in bed had not guilt made me rise an hour before my usual time and leave earlier for work. I never asked about his routines but the house was spotless when I returned. He put away clean clothes so neatly that I knew they had been ironed and told him housewives nowadays never bothered with ironing. He said, “They should. Clothes are better for it.”

I had never much noticed what I ate but our meals now tasted so nice that I asked if he bought special ingredients. No, said he, the ingredients were cheap and local, but he was learning to properly cook them. He began baking bread and brewing ale. On a patio off the kitchen, in warm days of the brighter months, we enjoyed the ale while overlooking the back garden. My neighbours paid gardeners to keep their lawns and flowerbeds pretty, and had given me dark looks because I had left mine to the weeds. Henry planted our back with neat plots of potato and other root vegetables, built a glasshouse for tomatoes, dug a pit for compost and surrounded it with gooseberry bushes. On what had been the front lawn he planted a herb garden with blackcurrant hedges. One evening at dinner he produced a bottle of wine saying the French believed that a meal without wine is not a meal.

“Is that why France has an alcohol problem?” I asked.

“Scottish alcoholism is worse than French,” he said, “and French alcoholism is only rife among those who drink the worst and cheapest wines.”

“So we are drinking expensive wine?”

“Just expensive enough to be good,” he said, “and one glass each with a dinner won’t impoverish us.”

I enjoyed that dinner so much that I stopped arguing. Not since early childhood had home been pleasanter than my time at work. Work was getting more difficult, and not just because Henry had left.

The firm had been founded by a man who sold first editions of Burns’ poetry, and had prospered and expanded until the late 20th century when I joined it. The owner was now someone I will call Sanker, who treated the business as a hobby he could leave to underlings. I thought him charming and aristocratic, partly because he made me boss of the orders department, partly from his eccentric terminology — he called me Mistress Maisie and pronounced John, Shon. Then he made someone I will call McGeeky the firm’s general manager. McGeeky had been a good manager of our biggest shop but knew and cared nothing about ordering books, and was put in charge of the firm because he always told Sanker it was doing wonderfully. Since McGeeky was now in charge of promotion all the senior managers became folk who saw nothing wrong with the firm. McGeeky imitated Sanker’s speech eccentricities, they imitated McGeeky’s, and at meetings I was the only one who did not, and was the only woman. I privately called them The Smug because they tolerated me as a joke — a grumbler whose words could be ignored. Without consulting me The Smug began telling members of my staff to do small jobs for them immediately, then complained to me when this slowed delivery of big jobs. Once I had overcome such problems by working overtime, but now the problems threatened to overcome me. New problems arose. The manager of technical book sales was put in charge of computerizing the firm and several hitches followed. He asked for and got two young assistants, each one of whom (I discovered) knew enough about computing to alone modernize the firm. That would have made their manager unnecessary, so he needed two assistants to play against each other, and the hitches continued. Then our works manager, though needed for heating maintenance, could seldom be found in his office or any of our shops. I suspected that, while paid by the firm, he was supervising the repair of Sanker and McGeeky’s private properties. All this was reducing our profits so The Smug sent the rest of the staff on expensive re-education courses which improved nothing. Then from my office invoices for large sums began mysteriously vanishing. Nobody in our building, or even out of it (I thought), had anything to gain by these thefts which caused nothing but pointless delay. Continual frustration sometimes made me weep because I loved my work.

One night I was later than usual in the building and heard someone enter from the lane. That did not worry me because only members of The Smug had keys, but I was surprised when Sanker opened my office door. He paused, obviously surprised by the sight of me, though I was delighted by the sight of him. For years I had never had a chance to tell him what was going wrong with us, and now the chance was here! For maybe a whole minute he listened then in a wonderful, condescending tone interrupted with, “What you should do, Mistress Maisie, is see more of Shon McGeeky. If you acquired some of Shon’s élan you would be a much happier woman. Goodnight Mistress Maisie.”

With wide open mouth and eyes I stared at his back as he left the office, then realised why he had come. It was he who had been furtively destroying invoices that would let me quickly pay what the firm owed. I was now working for a collusion of liars. I did not run after Sanker and resign my job then and there, because I had served the firm for twenty-five years — my whole working life — and could not imagine doing anything else.

Three days later, on Friday at half past four, a heavy cardboard box was carried in by the basement foreman and dumped on the floor by my desk. It held books flung in mixter-maxter, like a heap of bricks. I said, “Where’s the trolley?”

He said, “How should I know? That ****ing works manager took every trolley away in a van ten minutes ago.”

“Why?”

“For some ****ing reason that is not my business. My job is just to go on working in ****ing impossible conditions,” he said and left before I could ask him to place the box on a table. Instead of asking for help I tried to lift it alone. A sudden dreadful pain made me drop it and fall on top, unable to move or feel anything but pain. Assistants sent for an ambulance that took me to hospital, and I slept after an injection that made cessation of pain the loveliest thing in the universe. Henry was at the bedside when I wakened, holding my hand and looking so afraid I grew terrified. Then a doctor arrived who told us not to worry — I had burst a disc in my spine, and for a few days would be practically paralyzed, but would completely recover if I lay still in bed for a couple of months, or perhaps three or four. Recovery would be complete if I never again tried to lift big weights without assistance. There was no reason to expect complications.

“Bed sores?” asked Henry, and was told I need not stay so still that those developed. Hating hospitals I asked when I could get home. The doctor said, “Probably the day after tomorrow, if you have someone dependable to nurse you.”

“She has,” said Henry.

That ended my last day with the firm, which survived my departure by not much more than a year. I doubt if Sanker or McGeeky tried to visit me in hospital, and I have since only seen them in bad dreams. Some correspondence must have ensured the pension due me so Henry must have seen to my side.

Our bedroom and bathroom had been upstairs so he bought and put into the kitchen (luckily a big room) a hospital bed with mattress that could be raised or lowered by pressing a switch. Each night before joining me in it he gave me a bed-bath which I enjoyed, for his handling was so gentle that even relieving myself in a bed-pan became pleasant. It was reassuring to have him working near me in the house or garden all day and I needed reassurance. The relief of freedom from an impossible job was mixed with rage that my whole working life had ended in wasted time. Nightmares in which I still grappled with McGeeky and The Smug bothered even my waking hours. Henry placed the TV set where I could see it but now what I saw on it enraged me. Presenters, newscasters and celebrities all seemed versions of The Smug or women they promoted for flattering them. To end my nightmares of the whole world being ruled by Sanker and his parasites Henry finally got rid of the set and I began reading the novels of Agatha Christie. She had written so many that at last I found myself halfway through one I had read a fortnight earlier. I switched to the less repetitive thrillers of Ian Rankin, Val McDermid and Louise Welsh, finally gorging on the anodyne novels of Alexander McCall Smith, who seemed able to write them faster than I could read. But the only really good times were after dinner when Henry, after spending half an hour with a computer in our old bedroom, sat beside me pondering over magazines with such names as The Allotment Holder.

Noticing one night that he hardly ever smiled in his old sly way, I asked, “Are you tired of the T.L.S. and The March of the Mind?”

Again he jerked as if wakened from a dream and said, “Not exactly. I was thinking about shit. Ours, and where it went.”

“Do you mean sewage?”

“Yes.”

“Why should I know where it goes?”

“Everybody should. Do you remember sewage farms? Big open circular tanks with sprinklers revolving above? I haven’t seen one for years. They used to supply farmers with manure. Farmers nowadays use artificial fertilisers, a bad idea. When you started using the bed-pan I fitted a chantie into the lavatory pan so none of ours is wasted.” “You are spreading our shit in the garden? Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” I cried.

“I knew you would need time to get used to that wise and ancient practice,” he said soothingly. “Chinese and Italian peasants have been doing it for thousands of years.”

“Haven’t the neighbours complained about our stinky garden?”

“Have you ever smelled it?” he asked, and I did not answer. On sunny days when he wheeled my bed out onto the patio I had smelled nothing odd. However, I promised that when fit to walk upstairs I would remove his chantie and shit straight into my own flush lavatory pan.

“A pity,” he said musingly, then added in a voice that seemed to be quoting: “Soil should be dunged and dunged and dunged until it is the colour of my trousers.”He had recently given up blue jeans for black corduroys. This was a conversation I neither could nor wished to continue, but he wanted to and said, “You enjoy the meals I make but don’t seem to notice they are vegetarian. With a bit more land I could make us self-supporting in the way of food.”

“Henry,” I told him, “I am still not well, and don’t think I will ever be well enough to discuss expensive new notions.”

On that day he said no more.

I have never liked large breakfasts. Each day began with Henry bringing a cup of tea and saucer of fruit cut into thin little slices and arranged in patterns that became more and more fancy. “Why waste time making it fancy?” I asked. “Just tip the stuff onto the plate and I’ll enjoy it just as much.”

“I like making patterns and thought they would please you,” he said.

“They don’t. They’re unnecessary — a waste of your time.” He shrugged his shoulders and said, “I’ll stop making them.”

“Good!” said I.

But next morning the fruit was arranged as fancy as ever. I stared at him. In a miserable voice he said, “I couldn’t stop doing it. I tipped what you call the stuff onto the plate and the result affronted my sense of decency. I had to make a pattern of it.”

“You did it to please yourself, not me!”

“Yes,” he admitted, “but why let it bother you? Why resent patterns you destroy as soon as you start eating them? I expect you to destroy them. I want you to.”

“I hate them because they show you are acting like a fool! Like a, like a, like a … like an artist!” I concluded, glad to have found the right word.

“O no!” he said, shocked, then added thoughtfully after a pause, “You’re right. As a chef and gardener, yes, I am becoming an artist. Luckily. I used to be very miserable most of the time.”

Hardly believing my ears I wept and wept and wept. He embraced me, said he was sorry, swore that before becoming a househusband he had never thought our marriage miserable because like me he thought it was normal, but now he had useful things to do and saw the past differently. He ended by saying with a touch of disgust, “I used to be completely selfish.”

“Nonsense!” I cried. “You were the most unselfish man I ever met.”

“You’re wrong. I tried to be kind to everyone but apart from that I just hung about feeling superior to them. I had no initiative.”

“You think being unkind to me shows initiative?”

“I am not unkind! I am only telling the truth! And it is you who changed me! And I am grateful! Can you not see how much better we both are and be glad?”

“I am still very sick,” I said, weeping, “ and I wish you had stayed as you were.”

He stared at me, then began trembling and shaking his head from side to side, then jumped up yelling, “This is impossible! You are making me impossible! Can I not be allowed to love you AND domestic economy?”

With clenched fists he began punching his head from side to side as hard as he could. In our four years together he had never raised his voice or acted madly. I screamed at him to stop, tried leaving the bed to stop him. He stopped at once, joined me in bed and we wept together. I promised I was sorry for having made a stupid fuss about the fruit breakfast, he said he was sorry for explaining things tactlessly. We became lovers and friends again. That was our first and worst quarrel and probably our last. I knew he would never be unfaithful to me, but I still worried about the future.

A week later he started talking as if in the middle of an argument with a beginning I had missed: “You see, the county of Fife was once a separate Scottish kingdom. Some Fifers have noticed it could be made economically self-supporting. So could Orkney. And Shetland. So could Aberdeenshire, if the farmers stopped turning fertile earth into beef for export by passing grass through cattle. Kitchen gardens are the most productive and sustainable way of turning soil into food. Factory farming is the worst way.”

“Henry, I am not arguing with you,” I said, but he continued vehemently as if I was: “I am all for Scottish independence but if people and governments keep depending on the Global Bosses’ Federation things will go on getting worse.”

“What is the Global Bosses’ Federation?” I asked, exasperated.

“It prefers to be called the World Trade Organization. It rules the strongest nations and is out to grab all the resources of smaller ones. That is why Britain and the U.S.A. keep shooting and bombing folk in Islamic countries and why an Islamic clique destroyed the New York World Trade Centre. Global bosses don’t need a single centre now, so their opponents are plotting to attack stock exchanges. A stupid idea. The bosses are financially insured against every kind of damage, and the plots only strengthen global armies and police forces they control. Global bosses can only be fought by taking Voltaire’s advice at the end of Candide.”

“Henry!” I cried, horrified. “Don’t go into politics!”

“I will not, except at the grassroots level. Grass is an essential crop and should be properly cultivated, as I have been trying to explain.”

After many of such complicated lectures full of irrelevant details I realised he wanted to start a vegetarian restaurant on land cultivated to supply it. I said I would never leave the home I loved and whose mortgage I had paid off years before meeting him.

“You will not need to leave it,” he said. “When your health recovers I can commute.”

“To Fife?” I yelled. He said he wanted to buy a patch of land within or near the Glasgow boundaries, perhaps one of those sharp triangles of ground that nobody wants because they are between intersecting motorways or railway lines. Before Old Kilpatrick there was a neglected strip of ground between the railway and the Clyde from which oil tanks had been removed. The ground was probably polluted so would be cheaper to buy or lease, and making it fertile by right cultivation would set a splendid example.

“What a crazy notion,” I said. “But in the mouth of such a completely impractical man it should not surprise me.” “Why am I impractical?” said he. “What have I ever done that I did not do well?”

“You may have done things well but you’ve never been paid for them,” I said.

“I had nothing better to do than tidy that basement,” he said sternly, “and if I have not drawn a wage for being your househusband I have been sufficiently paid by your love.”

It was hard not to laugh at that but I said, “But Henry you’ll need a lot of money for a scheme like this, you’ve never handled any and you’re getting none of mine.”

“I neither want or need yours,” said he, “and you are wrong to say I have not handled money. I have handled it by saving what I earned as a teacher, added to what my parents left.”

I knew that was quite a lot. His parents, like mine, had been very thrifty in the twenty years of full employment after the second World War when the British working classes were better paid for their labour than before or since. He went on to say that through the Internet he had contacted folk interested in his scheme and willing to put money into it — architects, lawyers, civil servants, even a banker, all keen on gardening, all knowing that if our governments continued ignoring the Kyoto Protocol our children would either starve or be nourished by plankton from Scottish sea lochs, if not worms grown in bottles.

“We have no children!” I told him.

“Stop being selfish.”

“Are you really planning to set up a commune?” I demanded. “They never work. They were tried in the 1960s and hardly outlasted them.”

“Certainly not a commune. I am starting my own company and will be in charge of it at every level.”

“If people invest in it your company will be a limited liability one — you will be a capitalist! Your investors will expect return for their money, shares of the profits.”

“The return for their share, like ours, will be food or good meals.”

“And how will I fit into this world-saving scheme? Remember the state of my back. I will never grub up weeds in your organic kitchen garden or chop onions in your kitchen.”

“Clerical help will be needed when we get under way.” Once again I almost laughed aloud, seeing for the first time after four married years that Henry has no sense of humour and that mine, though a quiet one, would be needed in times to come.

My back has healed as the doctor foretold. Once again I flush my bodily wastes into the public sewage system, and have started applying for jobs in libraries and bookshops. All my applications have so far failed because I am (as they say) “over-qualified”. My best chance of a job seems to be behind a supermarket counter and I have almost resigned myself to that. Henry’s plan to reform the world by setting it a good example is not yet under way. He still runs what he calls “our domestic economy” perfectly, while spending more time on the Internet investigating land acquisition. He also talks to teachers and officials about his self-sustaining garden-restaurant giving work experience to local school children, though the locality is not yet decided. He works so hard over details of his scheme that sometimes I think it may work. If not, Henry will remain nothing but my dependable househusband. I do not know which outcome I most fear.

GUMBLER’S SHEAF

AND,” SAYS HARRY GUMBLER. His secretary types that then waits for some minutes until he says, “Delete that Sarah. No! Do not type delete that, delete And. I can dictate nothing more intelligent today so we’ll tackle something else.”

From a filing cabinet he removes a folder labelled NOT URGENT and from the folder takes a sheaf of letters. After gloomily examining the first he dictates the following.

“Provisioning Visa

Customer Experience Manager

Dear Mr Carter,

How dare you compliment me — a man you have never met — because your company’s advertising campaign has chosen me to receive a card which will guarantee me no interest on any purchases I make for the next three months. Why should I or anyone expect interest on anything they buy in a shop?… Can you explain why, Sarah?”

His secretary explains that many people without money use credit cards as a means of payment. Gumbler groans and says, “Delete the last two sentences, replace by: Why should I or anyone not desperately poor be tempted by an offer which is nothing but a bait designed to lure me into getting indebted to Barclay’s Bank? A bait disguised as a compliment! Were I not professionally articulate your impertinent arrogance would reduce me to inarticulate rage. You should be ashamed of yourself. Yours truly etcetera. Now the next.

“Excelsior Promotions

Youth Encouragement Agency

Dear Egragio Heron,

I refuse to fill in and return your impertinent questionnaire, but will have the courtesy to explain why. Your pompous letter heading does not tell me if your organisation is a publishing house, a branch of a government education department, or a Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisation (QUANGO for short) which is a hybrid of two or all three of these. But your purpose is clearly stated: you are asking celebrities to explain the reasons for their success in a survey whose results will be used to encourage school children in their efforts to succeed in life. Let me ask you some questions.

1. Why do you think me a celebrity? Is it because some of my writing is in university textbooks and translated into Chinese?

2. Am I therefore fit to be among the rich usurers, politicians, research chemists, footballers, actors and popular entertainers who are 95 % of the other celebrities your QUANGO is approaching? Are a few disinterested writers and artists needed to give other worshipers of the Bitch Goddess respectable company?

3. Are you prepared to tell the school children you seek to indoctrinate that many of the world’s greatest people have died — like the majority of the world’s poorest — in a state of miserable neglect? Jesus is the most famous example, tortured to death as a criminal by the Romans, his last words a despairing cry at his abandonment by the God of Love he had wished for all mankind. Herman Melville’s first two books brought him early money and fame, but when writing Moby Dick — America’s greatest novel — he told his wife’s parents that this book would NOT succeed, and wrote into it that, It is failure, not success, that tests the truly great hearts. Melville died neglected and forgotten by all but a few, not knowing that his last great work Billy Bud would ever be published. I will not add John Clare, Van Gogh and countless others who were treated as failures in their own lifetimes. Before he died even Leonardo da Vinci despaired of having finished anything worthwhile.

I make your firm a free present of this letter. If school children read it along with the other results of your celebrity questionnaire, I may not have written in vain.

“Yours truly etcetera. Email it Sarah. Here comes another.

“To the Manager of the Co-Operative Bank,

Mingulay Street Branch, Glasgow

Dear Sir or Madam,

I opened an account with your bank in 1952 on receiving my first education grant through your Sauchiehall Street branch, a service I expected to enjoy for the rest of my life. I wish now to transfer my account to the Airdrie Savings Bank for two reasons, both connected with my hatred of banks and lawyers who advertise and tout for business like car salesmen, travel agencies and other greedy huxters who nowadays pollute radio, television, film theatres, street hoardings and every other means of communication. In my youth British bankers and lawyers did not do such things. I liked the Co-Op Bank because it was then part of a marketing scheme for the working classes created by nineteenth century socialists. And I liked you declaring an ethical investment policy that would stop the Co-Op Bank profiting from weapon and torture-instrument making, and from support of undemocratic governments. Here is why I have changed my mind.

1. You started sending me leaflets illustrated with the faces of handsome young men and women looking full of happy wonder and astonishment by the easy terms on which you were prepared to lend them money. I come from respectable working class people who believed that getting into debt was a crime that would lead to eternal damnation. I no longer share my parents’ religious faith, but still share their attitude to debt.

2. At the same time other leaflets came from you without pictures, but in sober, even stately prose it suggested I invested my money in close consultation with a Close Brothers Group of Wealth Managers in the city of London money market, Close Brothers who promised to increase my money by investing it in safe ways not run by your less wealthy savers. I know as well as you and these Close Brothers that the only safe money market is managed by bastards who depend on warfare and drug dealing, and have invested the pension funds of our university teachers and probably most other institutions in them.

3. Moreover,” says Gumbler, and falls silent. His secretary types that. After a while he says, “Delete marginal numbers and Moreover. Last paragraph coming up.

“I am therefore transferring my money to the Airdrie Savings Bank, founded in 1835 the only independent savings bank left in our disUnited Kingdom. When every other Scottish bank united with the Trustee Savings Bank and then floated on the London Stock Exchange, Airdrie did not. It survived obscure and local until 2010 when six merchant bankers each put a million pounds in it. They must have thought that a way to protect their money when the present capitalist system collapses in the near future. Yours truly, etcetera. Check these details with Wikipedia before sending it off, Sarah. Next letter.”

“To the Rates Department

Glasgow City Council

Dear Sirs and /or Madams,

I have received your annual rates demand along with a leaflet headed Pay Up For Glasgow, which is quite unnecessary since for many years I have paid automatically by standing order. I write to complain about an even more useless pamphlet with a beautiful scenic view of a Scottish loch which turns out to be an advertisement for a private company now owning the Scottish water supply and which, through an international grid, also supplies England with water and, less directly, France. Glasgow civil servants (like our ruling Labour Party councillors) are likely too young and ignorant to know the history of our municipal water supply, which was once an inspiration to every intelligent citizen.

“Loch Katrine in the lonely heart of the Trossachs mountains became Scotland’s main tourist after Walter Scott made it the setting of his poem The Lady of the Lake. In 1859 Queen Victoria crossed it by the steamer Rob Roy to the mouth of a tunnel where she turned a handle. Water started flowing through seventeen miles of tunnel past Ben Venue and Ben Lomond to the great reservoir above Milngavie from which it descended to the whole city of Glasgow. This steady supply of pure water had been achieved by a Liberal local government against three sorts of Tory opponents.

1. Share holders of private water companies who said a single municipal water supply would undermine their profits and the principle of free competition.

2. Prosperous citizens who found it cheaper to rent pure water privately than pay rates to a municipality that would supply everyone cheaply.

3. The British Admiralty who, because Loch Katrine’s overspill was a source of the River Forth, feared the Firth of Forth might silt up, thus depriving the Royal Navy of its most important dock and harbour north of the Humber.

On the other side the Liberals argued that:

1. The steam engines Glasgow exported needed more pure water than private companies could supply. Muddy water in a workman’s tubes might kill him, but labour was cheap. Muddy water in an engine’s tubes could break it down, and machines were dear.

2. Typhus, typhoid and cholera epidemics began among the overcrowded and poor who could seldom pay for good water, so maybe God was punishing them for that, but the diseases often spread to respectable householders.

3. The Admiralty was wrong.

So Glasgow became the industrial city with the best municipal water supply in the United Kingdom and escaped the 1866 cholera epidemic that attacked the rest of the country. For decades a local Liberal government made Glasgow the world’s foremost city in public water supplies, public lighting, transport, libraries, hospitals, almost everything except housing. Only when the Scottish Independent Labour Party got a place in the London parliament while also taking over Glasgow were the first and best local housing schemes created.

“You have grown up in a completely privatised world, but as public servants you have no right to be distributing an advertising brochure for a private company that has grabbed all of Scotland’s great municipal heritage. Your only job now is to police it and ensure it is providing the public service you have relinquished. Do you really think the brochure proves the company is doing its job well? Are you fools who don’t know that EVERY private company pays smart agencies of copywriters and artists to persuade most of us of its wonderful achievements, while blinding us to its crimes and failures? Or are you scoundrels with shares in Scottish Water? I am eager to be informed. Yours etcetera.

“Do you think that letter will have more impact, Sarah, if I address it to Glasgow’s Lord Provost instead of the rates department?”

She says, “I think it will all come to the same thing Harry.” “In that case leave it. Fifth letter. You will have to consult the internet to find the address of this firm which is either in Austria or Germany.”

The Business Manager

Rotring Pen Company

“Dear Sir,

Since my days as an art student I have used, and come to depend upon the use, of your once excellent pens, which for I was delighted to see never changed their style of manufacture for over half a century. Twenty five years ago you made pre-filled ink cartridges available, but I ignored these, finding it both cheaper and more convenient to fill the interior reservoir by hand. Whenever a pen was lost or a nib damaged I had no trouble replacing these from one of Glasgow’s two main artist supply shops — until recently, when the shopkeepers started spending more and more time searching through drawers for what I needed. I attributed this to modern shop servants knowing almost nothing about what they sell.

“Recently I bought an 0.5 nib which stopped working after my first session of using it. Neither weak solvent (hot soapy water) or stronger (refined spirits of turpentine) unclogged it so I bought another, which seems to be the last in Glasgow. It too stopped working. I feel bereft of an old and useful friend. Can you advise me on this matter? Yours truly etcetera. Please find the maker’s address. I think it is in Germany.”

After some Googling his secretary pointed to the screen and asked, “Is that the pen you like using?”

He peered at an image and said “Yes indeed.”

“They’re still making it. Perhaps the last two you bought had been lying a long time at the back of a drawer. I can order some more online.”

“But where would I pick them up?”

“They would be delivered by post.

After a long pause Gumbler said gloomily, “Abort that letter. Please order three Rotring Isographs with 0.3, 0.5 and 0.8 nibs. Last letter.

“The Sales Manager

Serious Reading Lamps

Dear Madam,

I was pleased by your reaction to my phone call last week when I explained that the standard lamp I had been using for a great many years had failed for no explicable reason, since the bulb lit up when transferred to other lamps. You told me your firm would replace it with a new one, if I returned it to the courier in the box wherein the new was delivered. On receiving the new lamp yesterday I was delighted, had the old lamp removed, as agreed, so was flabbergasted last night to discover the plug would fit no standard socket in my house! The prongs are far too large, and instead of being metallic, seem composed of a thick white plastic. I find it almost impossible to believe that your firm expects every user of your most recent lamps to have the electric sockets of their homes renewed to fit. Such a requirement is commercialism gone mad and cutting its own throat…”

“Excuse me Harry, but could you show me that plug?” said his secretary.

“Why not?” says Gumbler grumpily. Leaving his chair he brings the lamp over from a corner and hands her the plug. She removes the white plastic sheath that covering the metallic prongs, drops the sheath in a wastepaper basket and hands the plug back. Gumbler sighed deeply three or four times then said, “I see. I see. Thank you. My problem is being too old. There is no point in sending the other letters either.”

LATE DINNER

SHORTLY BEFORE MIDNIGHT only two tables are still occupied in this small expensive restaurant. At one table a couple sip coffee and liqueurs and the man says, “It will be a stormy meeting tomorrow. All kinds of people will be trying to wriggle off hooks.”

“That won’t be our problem,” says the woman, and he agrees with her.

At a nearby table set for two, a woman with a glass of wine beside her is reading a magazine. A waitress tells her, “I’m sorry, but the chef will be closing the kitchen in ten minutes if not told to start the meal you ordered. Surely you’ve waited long enough?”

“I certainly have,” says the woman, closing the magazine. “My friend has never been as late as this before so tell the chef to — no — wait a bit, Mr Big is finally arriving.”

A quiet, penetrating voice reaches them before the speaker saying, “And Starky was hanging about your office today. Why? Sorry I’m late Proody. That last remark was not for you, Mrs Russell. You want to get to bed as it is near midnight. I am about to order a late dinner, first tell me why you let Starky natter to MacLeod for nearly twenty minutes.”

Mr Big is over six feet high, handsome, middle-aged, with a convincingly young manner. He sits opposite the woman he calls Proody, listens to his phone then says, “I see. You did not like to interrupt Starky and MacLeod because they are old friends. That’s bad, Mrs Russell. MacLeod is useful, Starky a waste of time which is why I fired him. When you don’t interrupt a chat like that you too are wasting my time. From now on I’ll be watching you. This is a friendly warning. Go to bed and sleep on it. Goodnight.”

He pockets the phone and murmurs across the table, “Sorry Proody. Tough days don’t bother me but this one has been very tough. I must shut my eyes for a bit.”

He leans back in the chair and does so. The waitress, interested by his performance, looks questioningly at Proody who begins to say that the kitchen is soon closing, but he interrupts her without opening his eyes: “Tell them I want the main course you’re having, with absolutely no starters.”

“Certainly sir,” says the waitress. “Another risotto of summer greens, Grana Padano, truffle oil. Anything to drink?”

“Tell her,” he murmurs to Proody. “Give her the recipe.” She tells the waitress, “A black velvet please — half pint of Guinness with an equal measure of champagne in a tankard or tall glass.”

“But that means opening a bottle of champagne!”

“He’ll pay for it and may drink the rest later,” says Proody, exchanging an O these men look with the waitress, who leaves. Proody reads her magazine again.

Voices at the other table become audible. The man says, “There is no real backlash against audit. The backlash is against terms that audit employs.”

“Yes,” says his companion, “but there must be such a thing as real information about issues that need to be addressed. Am I wrong?”

“Not wrong, but how can you get the right people to address issues on a local level when they are fed nothing but fashionable trends from the upper level?”

“Who are the right people?”

“Those who have most impact on the public services.”

They are startled by a groan from Mr Big, but resume their conversation more quietly after staring at him, for his laid-back figure gives no sign of having heard them. A distant cork pops. Soon after the waitress arrives with a tray and places the contents on the table saying, “Your black velvet, sir. The amuse bouche tonight are smoked salmon with crème fraiche and lemon puree.”

“I distinctly said I want no starters!” says Big, sitting up and glaring.

“Amuse bouche are not hors d’oeuvres sir. They are a free gift from the management for which customers are not charged.”

“Don’t try to blind me with your French,” says Big, “there is no such thing in the world as a free gift. This unasked-for rubbish will not con me into thinking I am getting something for nothing. The management makes customers pay for it by increasing the price of what they really want. Remove this trash.”

“I’ll keep mine thank you,” says Proody, closing her magazine and taking a fork to a small plate as the waitress removes the other. Big tastes his black velvet, looking brighter and more wide-awake for his outburst. “Are you always rude to underlings?” asks Proody in a pleasant way. He answers pleasantly, “Only when they don’t give me what I expect. I’m not rude to people I trust.”

“Were bosses rude to you when you were an underling?” “The efficient ones were, at first. As I climbed the company ladder they saw it wasn’t necessary.”

“I’ve decided to leave you,” she says.

He murmurs, “Ah.”

They are silent for a long time. The main course is served and they start eating.

At the next table the woman says, “There is surely such a thing as real information, information on a national basis.”

“I don’t deny it,” says the man, his voice growing loud again, “but we are not really making things change because we have not pulled the right levers. What we do in a detailed way should depend on a better understanding of topic selection. Until you have the right concept in place you are basically incapable of setting up an effective hub.”

“So where, practically speaking, are we coming from?”

“Hard to say. We used to have the Institute for Improvement and Development behind us, but it was disbanded a month ago.”

“But somebody must be responsible for improving things, surely?”

“Yes. Us.”

“Us? That’s a terrifying idea.”

“Because we lack a concept of a new hub of values that will respond to levers we can actually, basically, handle.”

“Bullshit!” says Big loudly for the first time. “They’re drowning us in the stuff.”

“Are you talking about us?” the other man demands fiercely.

“No. Only about you,” says Big. “After a hard day’s work your drivel (which I could not help hearing) is intolerable. In my business words have precise meanings. Your jargon is more destructive of sensible thought than the noise of a pneumatic drill or a modern pop group.”

“You know nothing about my business,” cries the other, “nothing about what we were discussing.”

“You are obviously something in local government,” says Big, “someone with no real power nowadays, so you try to hide the fact with meaningless speeches. You can’t admit that the levers controlling Britain are handled by real businessmen like me. Every year we buy hundreds of you. M.P.s and local councillors and the police cost most. The rest of you are comparatively cheap.

“Are you suggesting that I and my friend are corrupt?” demands his victim. “Certainly not!” says Big with a sudden cheerful grin. “Your jargon makes it clear you have so little power that you aren’t worth bribing. I am sorry to hurt your companion’s feelings, because she seems keen to understand things …” (the woman at the other table seems near to tears) “… so let us all talk more quietly now.”

“Bring me the bill!” the other man tells the waitress. “I will never set foot in this restaurant again, and will make sure none of my friends do either.”

He pays. The couple leave. Before reaching the door the man tells Big, “You are a right bastard.”

Big chuckles and resumes his meal.

Without obvious blame Proody says, “You enjoyed humiliating that man.”

“It relieved my feelings,” says Big pleasantly. “You must admit that he talked a lot of shit.”

“Did you hear me say I was going to leave you?”

“Yes.”

“Anything to say about that?”

“No. I knew you were going to leave me.”

“Since when?”

“Since we became lovers.”

She stares at him until Big feels an explanation is due.

“You’re very attractive Proody,” he says, “attractive and intelligent. I find it easy to charm women like you at first and can keep doing it if they don’t see much of me. But when the sex thing starts they do see more of me, and start not liking what they often see.”

“A bully,” she tells him.

“If you say so,” he answers humbly.

They stop eating. After a while she almost begs, “Since you know yourself so well, can you not change?”

“I’ve tried. I was married you know, with kids and apologies for not remembering anniversaries and politeness to in-laws who bored me stiff. I kept forgetting how much hypocrisy marriage needs to keep it going. I employ more than forty people, some of them with smart ideas of their own. I can only control them by being what you call an bully. I am not a Mr Hyde or Ebenezer Scrooge at work who could completely become Dr Jekyll or Mr Pickwick in the bosom of my family. Maybe that was possible in pre-mobile phone days, but now folk with thriving businesses can never lose touch with them. My wives couldn’t understand that. Luckily I can afford to support them, being one of those fat cats people complain about.”

They are silent for a whole minute then she says, “So from the start you knew our affair was an episode? An emotional dead end?”

“That’s an ugly way to describe some very nice times we’ve had, Proody.”

“From now on my name is Prue or Prudence.”

They are speaking too quietly for the waitress to hear. She comes to remove the plates, saying that the kitchen is closed but she can serve coffee or anything else they wish to drink. Big says, “Bring me — ” but Prue or Prudence interrupts saying, “Nothing for me. I’m leaving. Make out a bill for the risotto and my glass of wine.”

“Please don’t leave like this dear!” he begs. “Can’t we part like friends?”

“No. I will lose all self-respect if I stay with you another minute.”

She follows the waitress to the bar, pays and receives her coat. He stares forlornly after her, but she leaves the restaurant without a backward glance.

Putting an elbow on the tabletop he rests his chin on the palm of the hand, sighs deeply and groans quietly. Seeing the waitress approach he groans more theatrically and announces, “I may not seem a tragic figure to you, but once again a good woman has rejected, dumped and done with me, having discovered what a selfish, exploitive bastard I am. I have never got used to this, no matter how often it happens.”

Unimpressed, she asks, “Do you want the rest of your champagne?”

“You are a clever girl, Maggie. I must indeed soothe myself with plonk before leaving, but not with the plonk in my black velvet which, though tolerable mixed with Guinness, was obviously your cheapest. Bring me a bottle of your most expensive.”

“My name is not Maggie.”

“You astonish me. What is it?”

Almost surprised into smiling she says, “None of your business. We have Moet et Chandon 2003, seventy-three pounds.”

He pleads pathetically, “Please don’t leave me to drink it alone. For a short time before leaving here I need a good-looking, intelligent woman to sit here pretending my company is bearable. I will not try to make you drunk. Please invite the chef to drink with us too.”

“He’s gone home,” says the waitress, looking at him thoughtfully.

There is no record of how their conversation ends.

THE PATIENT

WITH NO MEMORY OF ANYTHING PREVIOUS he found himself sitting up in a hospital bed wearing a hospital nightgown while a young woman checked his pulse, temperature, tested his reflexes then asked, “How do you feel now?”

“Perfectly all right,” he said because that was exactly how he felt. She made notes on a clipboard while he wondered if she was a doctor, a highly-trained nurse or something between the two. His main experience of hospitals had been half a century earlier, when everyone’s rank in a hospital was shown in the clothing. Doctors had white coats, usually open to show suits worn by most professional people then. Ward matrons and the nurses they commanded wore crisp linen aprons over blue dresses, with the matrons’ superiority asserted by a linen head-dress rather like the wig of a sphinx. He thought about changes that had altered most things he once took for granted until a young man in a green t-shirt and trousers came and began checking his pulse, temperature etc. The patient said, “This has been done already.”

“Yes,” said the man, “but we like to make sure.”

The patient thought about asking what was wrong with him, and how he had come there, but felt that admission of ignorance would demean him. Instead he asked (for the thought had suddenly occurred) “Where is my wife?” “She’s staying overnight in a hotel. We’ll probably let you out tomorrow, but had better keep you here till then in case complications develop.”

The man went away and the patient took stock of his situation.

His clothes, neatly folded, were on a chair beside the bed with his shoes on the floor beneath. A window behind showed total darkness outside so the hour was very late or very early in the morning. He was in a square ward with a bed in each corner. The bed facing him was empty. The other two beds, on each side of the ward’s entrance, had curtains pulled round them with two or three people inside talking in low voices. This was certainly an Accident and Emergency ward, but what had been the accident and where was the hospital? There was no ache in any part of his body and no stiffness in any joint, but on top of his skull where hardly any hair now grew he felt a mound like half a hard-boiled egg without the shell, sore when pressed, and with what seemed a gritty groove across it. How had that happened? Margaret and he had gone to a conference at Edinburgh University. His speech had received the usual friendly applause, and in a staff room afterwards they had stood eating wee sandwiches and sausage rolls and from cardboard plates, gossiping and sipping wine. Or was it whisky? Or both? Both were possible. Had this led to him falling down? But he had no hangover. He really did feel perfectly well and (he suddenly noticed) hungry.

After a while he got out of bed and went between the curtained beds to the entrance. Here he met the young man in green clothes coming in with a piece of medical equipment and asked him, “Can I have something to eat?” “Certainly. Soon. Soon.” said the man, going behind the curtains around a bed. The patient went back, lay down and after a while decided that the Emergency staff had more important things to do than feed him, so he would go out and buy a supper from the nearest fish and chip shop. Without removing the hospital nightshirt he tucked it into his trousers, put jersey and jacket on top, strapped on his sandals and went out into the corridor. Following EXIT signs with pointing arrows he passed through several corridors without passing anyone who noticed him, then arrived at a big doorway and went through. There was no street outside, only an acre of tarmac with a few parked cars and on the far side the black silhouettes of treetops against the slightly less black night sky. Then he remembered that Edinburgh City Hospital was no longer beside the University with nearby shops and pubs. This modern hospital was obviously miles from a fish and chip shop. With a sigh he went back inside. Seeing some seated men who seemed to be ambulance drivers he asked if there was a place where food could be got.

“You’ll find a vending machine through there,” said one of them, pointing. He found a big waiting room with nobody but himself there, and beside an empty reception desk a big glass-fronted cupboard containing many shelves. On the upper shelves packets of differently flavoured potato crisps were displayed, on the lower shelves those sweets that Americans call candy bars. Each was identified by a number and a letter of the alphabet beneath it on the shelf. A bar of chocolate interested him but could only be acquired by pressing buttons on a small switchboard at the side and putting money into a slot. He had not used a slot machine for years so had not realized they had become as bafflingly intricate as modern telephones, wireless sets and the latest models of probably everything else. He went back to the Emergency ward, again without anybody appearing to notice.

On the locker by the bed was a sandwich in a plastic wrapper and a cup of tea that was still warm enough to drink. Whoever left it there had perhaps assumed he was in the ward’s lavatory. It was a cheese and tomato sandwich. He ate it and drank the tea with great pleasure while sitting on the bed, then removed his sandals, stood up to undress, then saw that what had been the empty bed opposite had now a woman in it who was much younger than he. She was watching him with an absence of expression that somehow made him feel apologetic. Before pulling the curtains around his own bed he told her, “I’m doing this because I’m going to get undressed.” She said, “Don’t worry — I won’t jump on you.”

He pulled the curtains round his bed, undressed, got in and slept.

And awoke to a new day because there was a bright sky outside the window. He got up and dressed. The bed opposite was empty again. The two beds beside the entrance were now uncurtained. One was empty, the other contained a body he did not look at closely because of the low distressing sounds it made and the many tubes running into it. A clock on the wall showed the time was 8.20 a.m. National Health Hospitals had certainly changed a lot. Until the 1970s or perhaps later he remembered all patients being wakened soon after 7 a.m. by nurses serving breakfast. Then he heard a familiar voice from the corridor saying a sentence ending with the words, “… my husband.”

He stood up and went to her saying, “Here I am.”

“So he’s all right? I can take him home?” she asked the man in green who was obviously still on duty.

“Yes, take him home. If any of the symptoms described on this sheet occur, send for your GP at once, but if he takes things easy for a few weeks and avoids booze for a fortnight, I think he’ll be fine.”

As they walked hand-in-hand to the exit he asked, “What happened? How did I get here?”

“We were going down some steep steps into the Old Quadrangle. I needed help and got it. You thought you didn’t, and tripped, and would have fallen on your face had you not twisted sideways and banged your head instead. I thought you were dead — it was a nightmare. The ambulance came quite quick and the doctors here said it was a simple case of concussion, and I needn’t worry, but how did I know they weren’t saying that just to calm me? We are not going back to Glasgow by train. We’re going by taxi the whole way, no matter what it costs.” And they did.

BILLY SEMPLE

LEANING HEAVILY ON A STICK and walking with great difficulty, a man came into the pub where I usually drank a few years ago. The pub has since been gentrified out of existence. I did not think the man leaning on the stick was drunk, but the barman refused to serve him. The man said, “I’m Billy Semple, I used to play for Rangers.

My legs are all shattered.”

“You still have to leave here.”

“How?”

“The way you came.”

Both were silent for a while, then the barman asked if he should phone for a taxi. Semple nodded.

While the barman phoned I helped Semple to the door and stood outside with him, though standing seemed as hard for him as walking. I also noticed he was, in a quiet way, very drunk indeed. I know nothing about football, so to make conversation said, “Not easy, eh?”

He muttered something like, “You never know how things will end.”

The taxi arrived, but when the driver saw Semple he said, “Not in my cab,” and drove off. I returned into the pub and asked the barman to phone for an ambulance. He did, then came outside. The three of us waited, and when the ambulance came the ambulance men also refused to take Semple. I had not realised that our public health service now rejects helpless invalids for being drunk, but of course the world keeps changing all the time.

“Nothing for it but the police,” said the barman going back inside.

When the police came they lifted Semple into their van and drove off.

End of story. Maybe they charged him with being drunk and disorderly, maybe they took him to where he lived, or maybe both. I asked a football enthusiast if he had heard of Billy Semple. He said, “Yes. Used to play for Rangers. Definitely a name to conjure with.” Maybe the man was lying about his name but he convinced me.

ENDING

HAVING BEGUILED WITH FICTION until I had none left I resorted to facts, which also ran out.

AT THE MOMENT OF HIS GREATEST TRIUMPH Captain Hook falls into a melancholy that is perhaps familiar to many old Etonians. He then and there decides to give his dying speech, in case the inevitable tick-tocking crocodile leaves him no time for it later. The same vanity has made these endnotes tell more about my life as a fiction writer than I first intended. An astute critic said my last book would bore many readers by its repetition of passages printed elsewhere. Many sentences that follow have also been printed before.

INTRODUCTION

Wordsworth is right to say the younger we are the brighter our world appears. I was born in a pleasant home, a flat in a newly built Glasgow housing scheme with gardens, trees and skies as good as anywhere else, but when these had grown familiar by the age of two I wanted extravagantly different experiences. My parents satisfied this want. I cannot remember not knowing Cinderella, Aladdin and the adventures of other weak or exploited folk helped to happiness and wealth by magic gifts. I then came to enjoy the cosy fantasy of Pooh Corner with its soft toy inhabitants, and the dangerous, more challenging worlds of Hans Anderson. From him I learned that even in magical lands people like me could come to grief and die, and I felt like the main character in every interesting tale, even the Little Match Girl. Fabulous tales free us from immediate, everyday suffering but also prepare us for it. The talking animals known to Dr Dolittle and Toad of Toad Hall are not more fabulous than Aesop’s, but Aesop’s fables (like Beatrix Potter’s) promote common sense, undeluded, Stoical views of life. I was not such a stoic as The Brave Tin Soldier, much as I pitied him. I preferred the unemployed soldier of The Tinder Box who murdered an old woman then became a spendthrift, an abductor of a princess and at last a king.

It is a small step from feeling like heroes or heroines of other peoples’ stories to swaggering through stories of our own imagining. Most children take that step, instinctively editing what they hear, read and enjoy in films and comics into daydreams of the sort Doctor Freud called (when sleepers had them) wish-fulfillment dreams. Experience mostly changes our childish daydreams into what we adults hope and fear for our future. My serial daydream of having a magic gift granting extraordinary power is the basic plot of Superman and must have inspired several presidents of the USA. Most American comics came to Britain at the end of World War Two, fascinating me by their competent outlines, lavish colour and pictures of damsels in distress, but my serial fantasy was active before that war started, and was so satisfying that I sometimes resented its interruption by adults, but not often. Mum, Dad, my sister and me were close together most evenings of the year because only our living room usually had a warm fire. Mum had given me fairytales. Dad showed me The Harmsworth Encyclopaedia, The Miracle of Life and other books with pictures proving there were, or had been, or could be, wonderful realities outside our douce housing scheme that also fed my fantasies. To make these more real I needed an audience and sister Mora became that. I told her my fanciful adventures as we walked to school, then later as we lay in adjacent bedrooms with the doors between open. Like most parents Mum and Dad put us to bed earlier than we thought right because (they said) we needed a good night’s sleep. They may also have wanted more time to themselves. They never interrupted my serial story by shutting the bedroom doors. Mora did not interest me as a person, being two years younger and a girl, but until I was thirteen or more I needed her as much as I have since needed a public for my books.

The world outside my fantasies imposed itself. The 1939 war evacuated us from Glasgow. For a few years I enjoyed a privileged childhood in Wetherby, a Yorkshire market town where I explored the countryside, climbed trees and played with other boys. Our main game was finding or making dens — secret places in bushes, up trees or in odd huts or buildings where none suspected us. I recall nothing remarkable done in our dens or even stories associated with them, apart from one. I discovered a den by myself in an isolated outhouse, one of several in the munition workers’ hostel where Dad was manager. It must have been an auxiliary furnace room, to be used if one of the hostel’s other power sources was damaged. I could not open the door or window but found at ground level a low shutter and slid it up far enough to let me crawl under — a hatch through which fuel could be raked from an outside heap of coke. Within was a cement floor, bare brick walls, the cold furnace and a secrecy I much appreciated, for I had a notebook in which I meant to write a story of my own. It was inspired by a booklet in a series, Tales for the Young Folk, each of which cost thruppence, and were often so puerile that I easily imagined improving on them. Why did I want secrecy to write this one? To discourage exhibitionism my parents never praised my writings and drawings, but I knew they approved of them — Dad had typed silly verses I had written under the inspiration of A.A. Milne. I suspect my version of this tale gave it a cruel twist Mum and Dad would dislike. I now recall nothing of the story I attempted, but in that outhouse came a glorious conviction that one day I would write a book that many would read. After that I think every interesting story or experience was regarded, often consciously, as potential material for fiction. This happened when I was eight or nine, because for what seemed years after I meant to astonish the world with a book completed when I was twelve — the first of my many failed literary projects.

Life seemed more confined when we returned to Glasgow after the war. Dens could not be made in our back green or the nearby public park. My schoolmates’ outdoor games were kicking balls about, which I did not enjoy. Riddrie Public Library became my second home, visited at least four times a week as I often read a book in a few hours. Many males graduate to maturer fiction through tales about sportsmen, detectives, cowboys, soldiers or spies licensed to kill. I could not imagine dominating events by violent action so kept to tales of magic most children lose interest in earlier, finding slightly more adult forms in Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Rider Haggard’s She, novels by H.G. Wells. His early science fiction shows impossible worlds in such intelligently imagined detail that they are excellent social criticism, no more escapist than Gulliver’s Travels, Brave New World or 1984. One summer morning when ten or eleven I stood in a shop among a crowd waiting for a delivery of morning papers to Millport on the Firth of Clyde island where my family was on holiday. On the counter I saw a little paperback book with no author’s name or picture on the cover. In 1945 such booklets were the only non-periodical literature sold in newspaper and tobacconist shops, the contents always being highly sensational, popular, out of copyright stuff. Nearly all the tales I had so far enjoyed had been illustrated, so only boredom led me to open this booklet and start reading The Pit and the Pendulum. With the first few sentences the surrounding friendly crowd seemed cut off from me. I believe my pulse and skin temperature changed. The adjacent talk seemed a distant hum or buzzing, as the voices of the inquisitors sounded in the ears of the narrator condemned to die by torture. This was my first experience of being badly frightened by a story, if I ignore a few chilling episodes in Disney’s Snow White and Pinocchio. It was not my last. Back at home in Riddrie I found my parents had a little set of books, one of them Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, one of them Kipling’s From Sea to Sea and one of them Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Alone in our comfortable home one sunny evening after returning from school I read The Fall of the House of Usher, and for a while grew afraid to look behind any familiar article of furniture, from fear of seeing something dreadful.

Which shows I was in tune with Edgar Allan’s weird verbal magic — and was a good reader. Though keen to be an author I gladly submitted to the power of others, which is how best to learn authorship. Milton describes the process in rhyming epitaph to Shakespeare, where he tells the playwright that his impressive lines: … our fancy of it self bereaving

dost make us Marble with too much conceiving

— meaning Shakespeare’s words can make us briefly more like statues of Hamlet, Falstaff or Cleopatra than like ourselves. This loss of our person in another author’s character strengthens our critical power if we read closely and widely. For years my critical powers stopped me writing every fiction I started after two or three pages. Despite good marks for school essays, despite filling notebooks with details and ideas, I saw that each false start was obviously in the voice of a child or (later) of a self-obsessed adolescent. But before leaving secondary school I started identifying most strongly with potential writers or artists in fictional worlds more like mine — David Copperfield’s Victorian England, Paul Morel’s Nottingham, Stephen Dedalus’s Dublin, and the 1938 Bankside, London, of Gulley Jimson, the disreputable old mural painter in Joyce Carey’s The Horse’s Mouth.

UNLIKELY STORIES, MOSTLY

The first story in this book was written in the last summer holiday with both my parents on the island of Arran. This has been called Scotland in miniature, having a jaggedly mountainous north and to the south lower hills, some farms and sheltered woody hollows. The villages and houses nearly all face the sea across a coastal road. For two or three years our holiday home was the last house in Pirnmill, a row of houses with primary school and post office on the quietest side of Arran. In long summer holidays there I often regretted having no friend of my own age and sex, yet enjoyed long walks accompanied by my imagination. On the three or four miles of road between Pirnmill and Lochranza the only houses are a low white terrace nicknamed the Twelve Apostles on Catacol Bay. Just before Catacol the coast road is pinched between the sea cliff and a boulder bigger than a house, steep sided but easily climbable by any boy who likes feeling king of a castle. The top had bushes and turf where I lay one sunny afternoon feeling elevated and private, and here I imagined The Star in a gust of what seemed inspiration.

The critic Leavis suggests that inspiration is unconscious memory, because well made phrases only come without effort when authors intuitively adapt words by earlier writers. At least twenty years passed before I noticed that The Star was inspired by H.G. Wells’ story The Crystal Egg, in which the hen-pecked owner of a grubby curio shop finds consolation in a lens through which he glimpses life on another planet. He dies while hiding it from a potential customer and his rapacious wife. The Crystal Egg is about a dozen pages long; my tale of a young boy dying to keep a magic gift is barely two. I did not know the end before describing the teacher demanding the gift, which resembled one of those coloured glass balls Scots children call bools, jorries or jinkies — English children call them marbles. I did not want the reader to think it was just a cheap glass toy made magic by the fancy of a deluded child. I disliked stories equating imaginary worlds with delusion, which the Alice books miraculously avoid, despite their stories being dreams. I was pleased and astonished at finding three last sentences that left the star a reality.

Four years or more passed before I wrote four stories following The Star. The Spread of Ian Nicol and The Cause of Recent Changes were stimulated by a chance of publication in Ygorra, a facetious magazine published annually by Glasgow University students and sold for charity. For two years the editor was Alan Fletcher, a Glasgow School of Art student whose talent and intelligence led him to design the covers, give it cartoons, print articles and work by Frank Bowles, Reid Moffat, Malcolm Hood and me, his fellow art students. My illustrations to two stories, slightly improved, are now on pages 10–11 and 17 of this book. I also wrote The Comedy of the White Dog at art school, but the climax is bestial sex so could not be published before the permissive 1960s. A Unique Case was written for Cleg, an art school magazine of which the only edition was conceived and edited by my friend James Spence.

I was a student supported by my parents and the British Welfare State education grants when I wrote these early fables. Then came two years of part time uncertificated teaching, as little of it as possible while I tried and failed to earn money by my visual arts. With another education grant I then trained as a full time teacher; the only short story written in this glum period was The Answer, a likely story which, though told in the third person, tells how another trainee teacher, without fuss or harsh words, showed she was tired of me. James Joyce had shown me how everyday happenings could be as much the stuff of fiction as miraculous fables. For many years after that I was too busy combining the familiar and fabulous in a novel to write anything shorter, apart from a spoof lecture, The Crank that Made the Revolution. To tell how more unlikely stories came to be written I must speak of that novel, Lanark.

When half finished in 1970 an excellent English literary agent, Frances Head, showed Lanark to three London publishers who agreed it might become something saleable, but as it would be very long, and eccentric, and the author was unknown, it might be a very expensive flop. Each was willing to publish it as two books of average length, which could easily have been done because it combined two narratives — one of them fabulous, a modern Pilgrim’s Progress greatly influenced by Kafka, one a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man set in Glasgow instead of Dublin. I refused that offer but one of these publishers, Quartet Books, offered £90 for the right to accept or refuse it on completion. I gladly accepted that money from Quartet, which was then worth at least five times what £90 buys now, forty-two years later. I continued writing the novel, confident that Frances Head would find a good publisher for it on completion, even if it was finally rejected by Quartet. But Frances Head died of lung cancer shortly before the novel was completed in 1977, and Quartet Books rejected it because of the length. Without much hope I sent it off to Canongate Books in Edinburgh, a Scottish publishing house so small that I doubted if Lanark would ever be published. My income had largely come from television plays commissioned through Frances. These stopped. I failed in a miserable effort to teach again. Thoroughly depressed, I decided to waste my talent by writing a book that would make money, a pornographic novel full of fantasies I had been suppressing since the age of four or five. But despite trying to write it for weeks, I was so unlike the Marquis de Sade that I kept losing interest.

Very few authors, even good ones, can live by their writing, a fact that has driven some to suicide. B.S. Johnson was infuriated by publishers earning good money by selling the work of authors who had to feed themselves by teaching or some other distraction. The British Welfare State tackled that problem by creating Arts Councils, and the Councils made life easier for some authors by paying universities to take them as Writers in Residence. University literature departments in those days taught nothing but criticism. For two years a resident author could receive a good salary to help the few students trying to write fiction, poems or plays for themselves. The authors chose their hours for this work and otherwise did as they pleased. I applied to become Glasgow University’s third resident writer, on the basis of my radio and television plays. The selection committee was headed by Professor Peter Butter, a Shelley specialist. When he asked what I would write if I got the job, I said a modern version of Prometheus Unbound, the lost play by Aeschylus that Shelley had attempted, unsuccessfully, I thought. With time for research I hoped to do better. That my friend Philip Hobsbaum was also on the selection committee may also have helped me get the job.

From 1977 to 1979 I earned my first steady wage for enjoyable work. My office, in the top-floor south-west corner of Glasgow University, had a big desk, two padded chairs, a bookcase and, through the window, a downward view through treetops of the river Kelvin and beyond them the towers of our art galleries and museum beyond. Here for two and a half days a week I easily helped willing people with their writings in one-to-one tutorials, and otherwise was my own master. Prometheus Unbound proved an impossible play to finish. I had no ideas for writing anything else. Deciding to further my education by more reading I bought The Road to Xanadu by Livingston Lowes, and a thick book of all Ezra Pound’s Cantos.

The Road to Xanadu surveys the old travel and history books that inspired Coleridge’s fragmentary Kubla Khan poem and his Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. It excited me by recalling every book about lost or hidden worlds I had enjoyed in adolescence. Ezra Pound’s verses about good and bad monetary states confused me with their farfetched, detailed quotations until an unexpected line from his Chinese Cantos made excellent sense:

Moping around the Emperor’s court, waiting for the order-to-write.

Order-to-write was hyphenated because (I thought) it translated one ideogram — one Chinese letter that was also one word. I suddenly imagined a man being trained from infancy to be a great poet, yet prevented from writing anything until the government told him what it wanted. Thinking this travesty of my university job might fill an amusing page or two I wrote –

Dear mother, dear father, I like the new palace. It is all squares like a chessboard. The red squares are buildings, the white squares are gardens…

— and started inventing a world of my own. Livingston Lowes’ account of what went into Coleridge’s Kubla Khan — the artificial paradise of assassins in the Atlas Mountains, the happy valley where Abyssinian kings grew up, a source of the Nile described by the Scots explorer James Bruce — went into Five Letters from an Eastern Empire, my best and longest short story, quickly written in two or three weeks. Years later an Irish friend told me he had heard a Chinese and a Japanese scholar discuss which of their nations my empire most resembled. Some hints of the real Orient may have come from my early reading of a Chinese anthology and the comic Monkey epic in Arthur Waley translations, but I think my empire resembles Britain today as much as any other land.

Several months had passed since I posted my novel to Canongate. Shortly after writing the Five Letters from

an Eastern Empire a letter came from Canongate’s reader, Charles Wilde, saying he was only partly through reading Lanark but was already determined to see it published, despite its great length. He thought the Scottish Arts Council would help Canongate by subsidizing the printing. This greatly revived my confidence and an old plan for a second book containing all the short prose I had written, both fabulous and realistic. Apart from the Five Letters my fables were short and few, but for years I had scribbled down ideas for others and now had time to write them.

The Axletree tales were inspired by a reproduction of Bruegel’s great Tower of Babel painting in the head art teacher’s room of Whitehill School 25 years earlier. It had looked so capable of reaching heaven that God’s desire to prevent that by disuniting the human race seemed quite natural. Like other trainee teachers at Jordanhill College I had been told to deliver a monologue, and gave a spoof lecture suggesting the Tower of Babel provoked the Deluge. In Genesis Babel was built after, not before Noah’s flood, but I did not mind revising Genesis. My lecture had none of the political and historical details that came to me when a Resident Writer. I had also imagined inventing the diary of an aristocratic scholar who never doubts the eccentric theories he promotes, and which might be made entertaining for their own sake, like de Selby’s theories in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman. In Glasgow University Library I found Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty’s pamphlets reprinted by the Roxburgh Society and knew HE was the aristocrat I wanted. I invented his diary by rewriting much of the story in his own words, edited with additions of my own. I used my failure to write a modern Prometheus Unbound by giving the poetic fragments I had achieved to a highly intellectual French dwarf. He too (I imagined) could not complete them, being frustrated by his inability to seduce a woman activist during the 1968 failure of the student revolt. This story drew much from my own failure to seduce (by letter!! by letter!) a feminist met only once through my friend Joan Ure. Altogether I now had five new fables: The Start of the Axletree about civilization’s imperial and religious origins.

Five Letters from an Eastern Empire about the poet as totalitarian state bureaucrat.

Logopandocy about the poet as Scots Renaissance aristocrat.

Prometheus about the poet as French 1960s democrat.

The End of the Axletree about the downfall of greedy civilizations.

Canongate had arranged to publish Lanark jointly in the USA with Lipincot, an old, well established American firm. But before publication Lipincot was swallowed by Harper and Roe, an equally old well established firm, which slowed publication. Lanark was printed in 1981 after a four-year delay enabling me to enlarge the Epilogue, add a verse to the end, and design the book jacket and five interior title pages. It sold so well that Canongate gladly agreed to publish my second book, Unlikely Stories, Mostly. This would also contain: A Report to the Trustees, a true account of how I had used a travelling scholarship between the years 1957 and 1958; Portrait of a Painter, about my friend Alasdair Taylor; Portrait of a Playwright, about my friend Joan Ure; and The Story of a Recluse, a speculative completion of a story Robert Louis Stevenson left unfinished. In 1982 all these had been written. I had only one more story to add, a realistic one.

I scribbled the opening and closing sentences when, as a University extra-mural lecturer, I had often visited Paisley, Dumfries and Moffat. The tale would be the monologue of a tradesman whose job took him all over Scotland, working automatically in an almost continual alcoholic stupor because he hated himself. The main inspiration was the story by Dostoevsky whose title in one translation is Notes From Underground, and in another Confessions of a Cellar Rat. I first happened upon this story on a ship going to Gibraltar in 1958, and found it so upsetting that I never read it to the end nor looked into it since. I knew such men existed because I was sometimes one, and thought I could make this unattractive chap interesting for a page or two. But on setting out to complete this tale I had postponed writing for nearly twenty years I saw my man’s sex life must have shrunk to mere masturbatory fantasies, and decided to spice his tale with bits of my failed pornographic novel of four years earlier. James Joyce wrote that a true work of art makes in the reader or viewer an attentive trance — makes us conceive it so completely that (as Milton said of Shakespeare’s plays) it bereaves our fancy. Only improper arts, pornography and propaganda, excite movement in beholders, said Joyce. I agreed with him, and was astonished to find my imagination accelerating and expanding a story containing not just pornography but also my outrage at the way Britain is now governed. It also used many real and moving events that had befallen me and folk I loved — materials which had not gone into Lanark. I had meant Lanark to be my only novel, and was now writing another! The story had to be divided into chapters and whenever one was finished I believed there was only one more to go, but found I was wrong. I had never written so quickly before, yet after ten chapters I ran out of money and had to stop, being no longer a writer-in-residence. But I was sure 1982 Janine (so called because it was begun and half written that year) would be in many ways a better novel than Lanark.

I gave a copy of the first half to Stephanie Wolfe Murray, owner and director of Canongate, asking if the firm could give me £1,000 advance against royalties to write the end, but Canongate was too poor to do that. She sent the copy to Harper and Roe in the United States hoping to raise money by selling the foreign rights but that firm’s reader rejected it. Meanwhile we worked to complete Unlikely Stories, Mostly.

Stephanie suggested that Unlikely Stories, Mostly would be more harmonious without the realistic prose which might become the nucleus of a later book. Agreeing to this I designed it as a compact pocketable volume with the print sufficiently big, with broad margins and many illustrations. Many were needed to make the book enjoyable throughout, since the contortuplicate 16th-century prose of Sir Thomas Urquhart would bore most readers unless the appearance of the pages amused them. To make pictures and text fit each other perfectly, I worked for many days with Jim Hutcheson, excellent typographer and designer, in his Edinburgh office. Relaxing one afternoon with our work almost finished, I lamented that Unlikely Stories, Mostly must now lose its third word, leaving the first two lame and alone. We then talked of personal matters. Jim mentioned that a woman he loved had recently rejected him in a perfectly friendly way, answering his plea that their relationship should continue by saying, “Jings, you take everything very seriously”. This gave me the idea for two last realistic stories, each five lines of dialogue long, with a picture to preserve the book’s original name.

Unlikely Stories, Mostly was as successful a book as Lanark, having been translated into almost as many foreign languages. A Unique Case and The Answer were not in earlier editions because I had forgotten writing the first, and had excluded the second for its realism. I remembered the first when a friend found Cleg (that rarest of magazines) in a second hand book stall. By including them here, all my short fictions from 1951–1983 are now printed in their order of writing, with the exception of The Problem. Its short length made it fit better among the shortest early stories.

WHEN AND WHERE FIRST PRINTED

The Star in the May edition of Collins Magazine for Boys and Girls, 1951.

The Spread of Ian Nichol — Ygorra, 1956.

The Cause of Recent Changes — Ygorra, 1957.

An Exceptional Case — Glasgow Art School magazine, Cleg, 1957.

The Comedy of the White Dog had the first half in Scottish International, 1969, the whole of it in Glasgow University Magazine, 1970.

The Crank That Made the Revolution — The Scottish Field, 1971.

The Origin of the Axeltree — Collins Scottish Short Stories, 1979.

Five Letters From an Eastern Empire — Words Magazine, 1979.

The Answer — Words Magazine, 1980.

LEAN TALES

In 1983 Liz Calder of Jonathan Cape advanced the £1,000 I needed to finish writing 1982 Janine. Before publication in 1984 I gave a reading to students of St. Andrews University, staying overnight in the home of the lecturer who had invited me. I thus met his wife, Jennie Erdal, who worked for Quartet Books. She said that since the success of Lanark Quartet regretted having refused it, and asked if I had ideas for another book. I told her of the writings Stephanie Wolfe Murray had thought might be the nucleus of a new book, but I was sure could never be, as I had no ideas for more stories so I could never fill another book. She asked if I would consider putting what I had into a collection with other writers. “Certainly!” said I, expecting her to suggest the others, but she asked what other writers I would like. “James Kelman and Agnes Owens,” I said, these being excellent Scottish authors and friends of mine, whose first novels had just appeared. That is how Lean Tales came to be published in 1985, though not by Quartet.

My third of this book contained the writings excluded from Unlikely Stories, Mostly, plus a new a six-page story, The Grumbler, suggested by a manic phase following the publication of Lanark; also a three-page story I Own Nothing, I Owe Nothing, given me in a dream; and a one-page story, Decision, about a girl discovering too late the connection between sexual intercourse and pregnancy — a true tale told me by my lawyer friend, Angela Mullane. By adding a handful of tales that were even shorter I nearly made my number of pages close to those of Jim and Agnes. The last one, Ending, was a single sentence. I have now made this the last story in this book. The Quartet editor dealing with Lean Tales was not Jennie Erdal. She liked all my co-authors’ stories and most of mine, but thought Portrait of a Painter and Portrait of a Playwright unsuitable because they could not be read as fiction. I understood why she did not want them, but having nothing to replace them with I asked Liz Calder if Cape would publish Lean Tales as I wished. Cape did. Here is the blurb I wrote for it.

The three writers of this book live in a British region containing the world’s largest number of unemployed Scots, the biggest store of nuclear weapons in Europe, and lovely great tracts of depopulated wilderness. Lean Tales brings together a fine selection of short stories by James Kelman, Agnes Owens and Alasdair Gray who all write as if poverty is normal, but poverty is no more their theme than a fixed income is Jane Austen’s. What else they have in common readers may discover and enjoy for themselves.

Lean Tales sold well enough to be reissued twice as a paperback, and I think would have stayed in print and been popular if ordered for use in Scottish secondary schools. The stories of Jim and Agnes are not in this book, being reprinted a few years ago in other collections of their tales. I have removed the two Portrait appreciations and my Report to the Trustees because they will be better in a book of essays. To stop this Lean Tales section being absurdly thin I have fattened it with four stories from a book that is wholly out of print (Mavis Belfrage, A Romantic Novel with Shorter Tales, Bloomsbury 1996). I have also added four tales from later collections in this book whose absence will not be noticed. I will only comment on two of them here. The Marriage Feast was written as a counterblast to Kingsley Amis’ unfairly dismissive remarks about Dylan Thomas. A Reality Show is also a tribute to Danish democracy, because the Royal Family there supports public education by sending their children to state schools instead of those rich private ones falsely called Public in Britain.

WHEN AND WHERE FIRST PRINTED

The Grumbler — The Fiction Magazine, 1984.

The Marriage Feast (entitled Jesus Christ) — The Sunday Independent, 1991.

Fictional Exits — Ten Tales Tall and True, 1993.

Money — Scotlands, 1994.

Edison’s Tractatus — New Novel Review, 1995.

Mister Goodchild — Mavis Belfrage with Five Shorter Tales, 1996.

The Shortest Tale — Madam X, 1996

Inches In a Column — Unlikely Stories, Mostly, Canongate Classics Edition, 2001.

Moral Philosophy Exam — The Ends of Our Tethers, 2003.

GLASWEGIANS

Between the publication of 1982 Janine and Lean Tales Scottish newspapers occasionally mentioned that Alasdair Gray had abandoned Canongate, the small Scottish firm that had made him famous by publishing his first two books, and was now enriching by his talents Jonathan Cape of London. That was not the exact truth but it seemed true enough to worry me. Having no ideas for another novel I thought of turning my first television play into one and giving that to Stephanie Wolfe Murray. I did so and Canongate published The Fall of Kelvin Walker in 1985. This example was useful to me later.

In 1986 I told the American author, Kathy Acker, that I was unlikely to write another story, because I had noticed that all mine described men who found life a task they never doubted until an unexpected collision opened their eyes and changed their habits. The collision was usually with a woman, involved swallowing alcohol or worse, and happened in the valley of the shadow of death. My novels and stories so far had been made in the faith that each was an adventurous new world. I now saw the same pattern in them all — Lanark used it thrice. Having discovered how my talent worked it was almost certainly defunct. Imagination will not employ whom it cannot surprise. Kathy Acker asked if I had thought of writing a story about a woman. No, I said, that was impossible, as I could not imagine how a woman felt when by herself.

The announcement that I did not expect to write more fiction was truthful but not wholly honest. I hoped my talent was only as dead as Finnegan, and would leap from the coffin and dance a new jig if the wake got loud enough. Meanwhile I arranged a show of paintings, began collection of English vernacular prologues, worked with Sandy Johnson to make a film script of Lanark (so ambitious that no financier would look at it) and came to owe my bank a sum oscillating between a few hundred and a few thousand pounds. This was not poverty. Most professional folk live in debt nowadays. Banks and building societies encourage it because debts make them richer. My state only depressed me because my parents had been working class folk who, though not religious, avoided debt like the devil. I too could have avoided it by renting a smaller flat, using public transport instead of taxis, eating at home instead of restaurants, drinking alcohol four or five times year instead of nearly every day. Alas, I felt nostalgia but no desire for the decent carefulness which had bred and educated me. I wanted to be middle-class waster, but a solvent one.

In Queen Street station one morning I glimpsed a girl stepping jauntily through the crowd in high heels and a leather suit which fitted her so snugly in some places, and left her so naked in others that it seemed a preliminary to lovemaking. Soon after or soon before I began imagining how a woman might feel when alone. This came from accompanying a friend on a shopping expedition. Some women — even women who know what looks best on them — enjoy a man’s company when buying clothes, though the man stops being a distinct character to them. He becomes an audience, or rather, a small part of a vaster, more satisfying audience in their heads. I penetrated What Every Woman Wants, The House of Fraser, and Chelsea Girl with the guilty reverence I would feel in a mosque, Catholic chapel or synagogue, yet the odour was familiar and friendly. I had sniffed it as a small boy in my mother’s wardrobe. I was fascinated by women pondering sombre or vivid or subtly pale colours, fingering husky or frail or soft or sleek fabrics, holding loosely or crisply or tightly tailored second skins to their bodies. I felt a long slow sexual ache in these shops, a sad ache because no earthly coitus could satisfy all the desires and possibilities suggested by the many garments. The ache, of course, was mine, but I was sure many women felt it too and perhaps felt it stronger. Most women have fewer devices than men to divert them from affection. I imagined a woman whose world was full of that ache, whose life was years of ordinary frustrations patiently endured before a chance suggestion led her further and further away from the familiar things she normally clung to. The woman need not have been beautiful or her adventure perverse, but these notions brought my imagination to life again. While writing the first chapter of this book I enjoyed a prolonged, cold-blooded sexual thrill of a sort common among some writers and (I suspect) all lizards.

At that time I thought One for the Album (then called Something Leather) a short story. On completing it I imagined more adventures for June, but the first episode had internal order and was a thriller of The Pit and the Pendulum sort, ending when the reader was likely to be most intrigued. Believing it could be popular I sent it to a famous London literary agency, suggesting they try selling it to an expensive glossy magazine with a transatlantic circulation: Vogue or Esquire or better still The New Yorker. After a few weeks I learned it had been sent to a couple of British literary magazines whose editors, though friendly acquaintances of mine, had not embraced it with cries of “yes please”.

In 1987 Tom Maschler, Chairman of Jonathan Cape Ltd, asked if I had ideas for a new novel, a question he had asked me more than once since Cape had published my second novel three years earlier. I was in danger of mounting a literary treadmill. Most writers of saleable books can get money from publishers to write another as an advance against future royalties. Years of reprinting in paperback and foreign translations may pass before writers get money from royalties. I had not yet received royalties for earlier books because, though critical successes, they were not bestsellers. Critical successes are reviewed at length in literary magazines and lectured upon in universities. This hardly ever happens to bestsellers. Conscious of the economic treadmill ahead I sent Tom Maschler my story, suggesting it might be the first chapter of a novel for which, had I been truthful, I would have said I had not enough ideas. He replied with the enthusiasm of a publisher who suspects he may be about to get a bestseller from a critically successful author. I had never haggled with a publisher for money and did not do so now. Publisher’s contracts usually offer the writer a third of the advance on signing the contract, a third on their receipt for the book and the last third on publication. I asked for an advance of £40,000, over four times any of my earlier advances. Some days earlier that sum had come up in a discussion of money worries with my friend Bernard MacLaverty, who said a good publishing house should give me £40,000 a year to write for them anything I liked. I asked Cape to give me £20,000 on signing the contract and the other half on receiving the full text, if they received it not later than two years after signature. This agreement gave me nearly three years of financial comfort with only one problem: making a lightly pornographic short story into a novel.

Lanark had been planned as an epic and written carefully over many years; 1982 Janine was a sudden inspiration, and if not delayed by poverty would have completed in 1982 when it was started. I easily imagined a lesbian pseudo-masochistic orgy following One for the Album — such fancies come easily to me, but I cannot take them seriously for long having employed so many in my second novel. The story had now three main characters — June, Senga and Donalda (Harry had not yet occurred to me). I imagined June’s seduction giving her an aggressive social confidence she had hitherto lacked, and using her work in a local government office to seduce, entangle and corrupt (with the help of Senga and Donalda) Scottish legislators. I wrote nearly a chapter along these lines but stopped on the verge of being unconvincing. Powerless to imagine a way of carrying the plot forward I thought of using that meaningless label, POST-MODERNISM, to enlarge the book in any way possible, and looked at old television and radio plays that had once been my livelihood. In the 1970’s Dialogue was a half hour play broadcast by Scottish BBC radio, then networked on television by Granada, then performed in theatres by the short-lived Scottish Stage Company. I prosed it into the present tense, called it A Free Man with a Pipe, and easily believed my free man was June’s unsatisfactory ex-husband, trying to forget her by failing to seduce someone else, with her voice on the telephone at the end finally demolishing him. This suggested a new form for the book.

Having shown Senga and Donalda seducing June in the late 1980s (the fashions in the streets give the date) each chapter would show in earlier years one of the women involved with men who failed them, starting with Senga’s schooldays. While recycling these past dramas I began wanting to show more than the local Scots who compose today’s Britain. My first and longest book had tried to do that, but lacking the knowledge to show (as Dickens had in Little Dorrit) Britain’s oligarchs in a plot involving slums and slum landlords, the jailors and the jailed, I had hidden my ignorance in Lanark with fabulous metaphors. But a book of episodes showing the lives of three women converging over twenty-five years might describe, without fantasy, shifts and dependencies between many believable people. How could I bring a representative English oligarch to Scotland? In 1990 it was the turn of a British city to be the culture capital of Europe. Margaret Thatcher’s government gave the job to Glasgow, which suggested a richer past for Harry.

I had invented her for the Class Party chapter, because a quartette allowed more permutations than a trio, but she said little because I had no idea where she came from or what job she did when not playing perverse games. I knew she was a rarer social type than my other women. It helped the plot for her to be rich, and it was a useful economy to make her almost speechless. I did not bother imagining a past for her, except to think she might have been made administrator of a large hospital with the job of closing it down. I had often thought about what makes rich people different from others, especially the rich whose wealth is a habit of mind due to a big unearned income. I had met a few and got on well with them because they had not been snobs — Francis Head had been one — but occasional remarks had astonished by showing how foreign to me they were. The owner of a big private garden told me how he had devoted it wholly to trees and shrubs because plots of flowers gave his gardener too much work. I asked if he grew vegetables. He said, “Once I did but it wasn’t worth the trouble. You can get them in a shop for a few shillings.”

I had also known a young woman who disliked everyone her parents knew, saying she preferred “ordinary people”. She sulked when expected to make a cup of Nescafé for herself, explaining that she could not possibly do that, and proved it by floating a spoonful of the powder in a mug of lukewarm water. These people were individuals, not types, but as Scott Fitzgerald said at the start of his story The Rich Boy, “Describe an individual and you may end with a type; describe a type and you are likely to end with — nothing.” It occurred to me that perhaps the very rich, after leaving boarding school, found it hard to take others seriously because they could easily replace or escape from whomever they did not like. That might explain why some were astonishingly unaffectionate towards their young. Brooding on this I suddenly imagined Harry’s mother saying at her birth, “Oh God a fucking little gel,” and began conceiving my distant cousin of a queen. The speech rhythms of this class (devoid of swearwords) had resounded through all the homes where I lived from babyhood. The BBC had been created by Lord Reith, a Glasgow minister’s son, but most broadcasters had the dialect of posh English boarding schools. I had also met that class in the pages of Wilde, Firbank, Hemingway’s Fiesta, Denton Welsh and Evelyn Waugh.

I did not expect to write much about Harry at first. I planned to shift her in one chapter from her nasty Scottish nanny and chilling mother to a boarding school, thence to the Warburg or Courtauld Institute, thence to being an arts administrator in Scotland. But the boarding school acquired a distinct geography where small details developed active bodies to support them. Amanda’s kid and new money had been phrases I invented to show what a snob Harry’s mother was. In the shrubbery the two phrases became Hjordis with The Fortress, Linda with the speech and character she is evicted from. I grew so attached to Harry that I made her an artist and took three chapters to move her north. From the gnat in Alice Through the Looking Glass I got the idea that the almost speechless Harry, after finding her voice in Glasgow, would talk in a smaller typeface than other people.

This list gives the dates of my women’s adventures between the early 1960s and 1990.

CHAPTERS

YEARS

HEROINES

One for the Album

1989

June, Senga, Donalda

A Distant Cousin etc

1963

Harry

The Proposal

1965

Senga

The Man Who Knew etc.

1967

Donalda

Mr Lang and Ms Tain

1973

June

In the Boiler Room

1977

Senga

Quiet People

1971

Donalda

The Bum Garden

1963–1989

Harry

A Free Man etc.

1989

June (off stage)

Culture Capitalism

1989

Harry, Senga

Dad’s Story

1989

Donalda, Harry

Class Party

1989

June, Donalda, Senga, Harry

New June

1989

June, Harry, Donalda, Senga

When June returned to the leatherwear shop where the novel started I realized my book had reached its natural conclusion, which is how I have left it in the foregoing short story collection.

It was published as a novel entitled Something Leather in 1990. Most blurbs I write for my books are tampered with by editors who believe that unstinting praise of their publications is needed to sell it. The following blurb I wrote for Something Leather was printed as I wished:

SOMETHING LEATHER is about the love lives of June, Senga, Donalda and a distant cousin of the queen from 1963 to 1990. Also in it are unhappy children, a dangerously liberal headmistress, a tobacconist’s family, a student, night watchman, pimp, businessman, boilerman, policeman, ex-serviceman, quiet couple, tinker, nurse, commercial traveller, arts administrator, former Lord Provast, Glasgow comedian, worried civil servant, brilliant but unstable politician. This is the first British fiction since THE CANTERBURY TALES to show such a wide social range in such embarrassing sexual detail, yet no characters are based on real people, not even the Glasgow comedian. The inefficient Scottish Office department in the Epilogue never existed — since 1967 its work has been efficiently done by the office of the ombudsman. The story starts near the end, has ten earlier starts, a crisis, a catastrophe and a moral. Unlike Alasdair Gray’s earlier books, SOMETHING LEATHER has no fantasy and combines the amenities of a novel with the varieties of a short-story collection.

The book was dedicated to Flo Allen, who had typed all my publications from the last chapters of Lanark onward. I knew she would not be shocked by my pornographic passages, of which I was slightly ashamed, with good reason. Most critics have agreed that Something Leather is my worst novel. Since chapters 1 and 12 are exploitive sex fantasy they have not noticed the very different writing between these. Despite exciting publicity this book did not become the bestseller Tom Maschler expected and Jonathan Cape never recovered my unusually big advance against royalties. I believe 9 to 11 inclusive are among my best stories in the realistic genre established by great German, Russian, Irish and American authors, French Maupassant, English Kipling and V.S. Pritchett, most of Chekhov and Joyce’s Dubliners. That is why Something Leather has here been retitled. Anyone curious to read the sexual fantasies removed from Class Party may buy a first-edition hardback of Something Leather (in which it is printed uncensored as Chapter 12) from Morag McAlpine’s online bookshop for £12.95. The rarity of this book is maintained by the only acceptable payment being in Sterling cheques.

WHEN AND WHERE FIRST PRINTED

One for the Album appeared in The Fiction Magazine, a brave attempt at a new Scottish quarterly launched in 1988, which expired after two or three issues.

With slight changes it was printed with the others in Something Leather, 1990.

TEN TALES TALL AND TRUE

This collection of stories was printed in 1993 by Bloomsbury instead of Cape, for complicated reasons starting years earlier.

William Smellie was a publisher who belonged to what has since been called the Scottish Enlightenment. One of the first to print Robert Burns’ poetry, he also conceived and mainly collated the first edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica, which he called “a scissors and paste job”. He also wrote A Philosophy of Natural History, published in Edinburgh in 1790. Early in the 1980s a descendant of Smellie — the surgeon Campbell Semple — lent me that book. The preface to it began with these words: Every preface, beside occasional and explanatory remarks, should contain not only the general design of the work but the motives and circumstances which lead the author to write on that particular subject. If this plan had been universally observed, a collection of prefaces would have exhibited a short, but curious and useful history both of literature and authors. This suggested a history of literature made by arranging prefaces by their authors to great poems, plays, novels etc in chronological order. The result would be a history of English literature by those who had made it best, and seemed such a simple job that I was amazed to think nobody had yet done it, and I signed a contract for the book with Canongate. I started work on it and in less than a year had spent the publisher’s advance against royalties, and found the work looked like taking almost as long to write as Lanark. It would have to be subsidized by other writing.

In 1992 Xandra Hardie was my English literary agent. I sent her some short stories made by turning short plays not used in Something Leather — correction! In Glaswegians — suggesting these would be the core of a new short story book if she could get me an advance for it from Jonathan Cape. She was slow in doing so because Tom Maschler, whose enthusiasm had inspired my last book, had left Cape and been replaced by David Godwin. Then a number of English publishers came to Glasgow and gave a party for their Scottish authors, since they now had several of these. Here I met David Godwin. He said he believed his firm was considering a new book of my short stories. I told him I needed an advance on it as soon as possible in order to complete my Anthology of Prefaces. He asked about that book. I told him about it. He said, “Are we getting it?” meaning Cape. I explained that it was going to Canongate, because I had to alternate my books between my Edinburgh and London publishers, to not seem ungrateful to the Scottish firm that had made my first books well known, while keeping an English publisher that could pay me what I was owed. David Godwin seemed to accept that explanation.

Next day Xandra Hardie phoned and said brightly, “Alasdair, I think it would be a good idea if we offered your new book of stories to Bloomsbury. Liz Calder is in charge there now, and she likes your work.” I said that seemed a good idea, because I regarded Liz as a friend. Xandra said, “But please don’t tell Liz that you want the advance in order to finish your anthology for Canongate. I had David Godwin on the phone this morning saying he didn’t see why he should give a f****** advance for a book of stories to a f****** writer who needed the money to write another f****** book for a different f****** publisher.” I told her I was surprised at Godwin’s childish attitude, and knowing Liz Calder was thoroughly adult, amused her by telling her the whole story. Bloomsbury has been my London publisher from then onward. But I dedicated Ten Tales Tall and True to Tom Maschler, Xandra Hardie and Morag McAlpine (whom I had recently married) because I felt they were all partly responsible for the book.

Not all the tales derived from my early plays. You came from the anecdote told to me by Joe Mulholland, former journalist and antique dealer, about a late meal bought for him in Glasgow’s Central Station Hotel by a rich and powerful man, though I changed the sex of his guest. Internal Memorandum was based on an internal memorandum my wife sent to one of her bosses when she worked for a Glasgow bookselling firm, founded in the late 18th century, which mostly expired in the early 21st. Are You a Lesbian? derives from a question she was asked in a local pub, though the woman I describe reacting to that question — daughter of a Church of Scotland minister — is nothing like Morag, and the original question was “Are you a fucking dyke?” The Trendelenburg Position was first written for an English film-making firm who wanted a talking-head monologue of the sort Alan Bennett had written for the BBC. I had greatly admired a couple of these, not least because his speakers were talking to the world at large — to nobody in particular. Unable to imagine anyone like that, I thought of a garrulous dentist working on a helpless patient. My own dentist, Mr White, is not garrulous, but when asked for information to help my monologue, said dentists’ chairs were designed to support patients in the Trendelenburg position. Freidrich Trendelenburg, a German surgeon, had devised the position to support bodies with the least possible physical strain.

But when working on these stories I had a dream which I have spoken of so often, and written about at least once (though I forget where) that I will not describe it. Believing the strange atmosphere of the dream might be put into a story of two or three pages I started what once again grew quickly into a big novel, Poor Things, which some have found my most enjoyable. This is perhaps because the three main characters are all good natured without being bores. This novel grew so quickly that Liz Calder published it a year before Ten Tales Tall and True.

WHEN AND WHERE FIRST PRINTED

Homeward Bound — New Writing, Spring 1992.

Loss of the Golden Silence — Bete Noir, Christmas 1992.

You — Casablanca, May 1993.

Houses and Small Labour Parties — Living Issues, August 1993.

Time Travel — The Review of Contemporary Fiction, USA, 1993.

THE ENDS OF OUR TETHERS

The Book of Prefaces I had promised Canongate gained me an advance that was spent long before I completed the Chaucerian period of this History of the English Language by Those Who Wrote It Best. It was a complex editorial job that I could only do properly while sitting with the typesetter. My efforts to get the job done drew in my friend Angel Mullane. She financed Dog and Bone, a new wee Glasgow publishing house which would typeset the book for Canongate. Her husband Chris Boyce supplied the laptop technology and a friend was our typesetter. A good start was made. The typesetter left us without warning. Dog and Bone became impossible. I offered Canongate a new novel if they would release me from my Book of Prefaces contract. They thankfully agreed. I gave them The History Maker, a futuristic science fiction tale made from a rejected 1960s television play. I then signed a contract with Bloomsbury for an advance of £1,000 a month for three years, and a different monthly payment to my part-time secretary and eventual typesetter. The complete text was to be delivered in 1998, with illustrations. I delivered it in1999. This did not surprise the editor, Liz Calder, who said it had been worth waiting for.

On publication in 2000 it was splendidly reviewed. By this time royalties for two of my early books that were still in print had overcome their original advances. Some were occasionally translated into other languages, so once a year I received cheques from Canongate and Bloomsbury. This steady income was not enough to stop my wife Morag (no longer a wage earner) fearing she might have to save us from poverty by selling her home (which was now mine) if I fell ill. Luckily my friend Bernard MacLaverty suggested I apply for a Royal Literary Fund pension. I did, and was granted it. A year later I got a steady income from being Professor of Creative Writing at Glasgow University, a job shared with Tom Leonard and James Kelman. The three of us resigned from it in 2003 for academic reasons too complex to mention here, but during that time most of the stories in this collection occurred to me, nearly all of them about folk with not much left to live for. This had increasingly been the theme of earlier stories, yet I was not miserable when writing them. Tragedies would not be popular if there was no exhilaration in facing the worst.

No Bluebeard sprang from ideas about marriage derived from women I have known, but none I ever married. The non Bluebeard who tells it, like all my narrators, is a form of myself but in many ways different, I hope. The story Aiblins was certainly suggested by being a creative writing teacher, though I met nobody like Aiblins when I was a professor. I gave him three of my own poems. Proem and Outing were written in my teens and luckily never published before I saw how bad they were. My Ex Husband, Sinkings and Property are based on real occurrences told to me by friends, and which nagged me ever since until I made short fictions from them. Job’s Skin Game was conceived as a monologue when eczema recurred to me after an abeyance of nearly forty years. I connected that with the Book of Job when Lu Kemp, a Scottish BBC radio director, commissioned a story from me derived from a book in the Bible. It was broadcast in January 2003. Well Being derives from a nightmare I had about the future of Scotland when writing a pamphlet.

WHEN AND WHERE FIRST PRINTED

Well Being — Why Scots Should Rule Scotland (a political pamphlet), 1997.

Big Pockets with Buttoned Flaps — New Writings 9, 2000.

Job’s Skin Game — Prospect Magazine, 2003.

TALES DROLL AND PLAUSIBLE

Once again after completing a book — The Ends of Our Tethers — I had no intention of writing more fiction and felt another publisher’s advance need never again attract me. In 2003 I began a job I had wanted since my art school days: painting the ceiling and walls of a great building with no deadlines and sufficient payment. The job would last for years (it is not finished yet) but while working on it I would always earn a good weekly wage. Colin Beattie, the Glasgow pub owner, was converting the former Kelvin and Botanic Free Church (derelict for years) into an arts and entertainment centre called the Óran Mór — Gaelic words meaning the Great Music. I decorated the ceiling of the auditorium before the Óran Mór opened to the public, then decorated lower auditorium walls when this did not interrupt the concerts, banquets and conferences which were the hall’s main source of income.

In the autumn of 2004 the Óran Mór’s lunch hour theatre, A Play, A Pie and A Pint, occupied the auditorium floor on most days between 12.30 and 2 p.m. I was then painting walls of the gallery behind and above the audience’s back, so had no need to stop work, and thus heard several times several performances of new one-act plays commissioned from Scottish authors by Dave McLennan. With no funding but Colin Beattie’s support, Dave still directs this small, successful theatre. Eight years later, in 2012, he has commissioned 38 new plays, thus encouraging more new authors in a year than any other theatre, even those with the support of Creative Scotland (formerly the Scottish Arts Council) and more than all of Scotland’s broadcasting networks joined together. A Play, A Pie, A Pint revived my interest in playwriting, as it also offered a chance of production. From 2006 to 2008 it staged: Goodbye Jimmy, Midgieburgers, The Pipes! The Pipes! and Voices in the Dark. I gave these a longer life by turning them into stories, only changing the title of The Pipes! The Pipes! to Whisky and Water. I then added them to other new stories that had accumulated when I was not painting. The Offer, Misogynist and The Third Mr Glasgow were written as entries for competitions suggested by Canongate Books or my London agent (they did not win.) The Magic Terminus was commissioned by Tot Taylor of London’s Riflemaker Gallery, Soho, to accompany his show of Francesca Lowe’s richly fanciful paintings. Six stories were written in the year it was published.

Gumbler’s Sheaf came from a folder of annoying letters received over several years but never before got round to counterblasting. Eustace happened because in April 2012 Dan Kitts MBE sent me a copy of his new publication, Military, Naval and Civil Airships Since 1783. Here I read that in October 1916 the last Zeppelin destroyed over England had been shot down by Second Flight Lieutenant Wulfstan Tempest. He at once joined two splendid names I had been unable to forget or use for years: Knatchbull Hugeson, an obscure Victorian literary gent, and the sculptor Scipio Tadolini. I invented a vaunting speech to combine that trio, and a love of anticlimax led to the sad state of Eustace McNulty. I thought that a good way to start these late tales. Working with Giants came from words I heard — or misheard — spoken by a man opposite me on a London underground train when I visited that city to see the big Hockney exhibition in May. Late Dinner also came from eavesdropping on a train, sometime in 2011. I heard a man pontificate about his work in such empty clichés, that I had to invent bullying Mr Big and to give his vacant words a context. Maisie and Henry used some of my wife Morag’s experiences when young, with later memories that we now hold in common. The longer we live together the more her past haunts me. Maisie is therefore slightly like Morag, but also as different as I am from Henry, that efficient gardener. The Patient, however is almost purely autobiographical.

The four drollest tales near the end of this book derive from four short plays I wrote this century; but droll or plausible all of them are class bound. Though not about comfortable folk, they are nearly all folk with enough money. So Billy Semple is my concluding tale, if not the ending. I had met him in Studio One, a mildly sleazy local pub in the early 21st century, since gentrified out of existence. I described that meeting soon after it happened because (A) it reminded me that nobody can be sure of their end and (B) it mentioned social changes for the worse that surprised me when they happened, and which many younger folk take for granted. This I now see is the theme of all my later tales.

WHEN AND WHERE FIRST PRINTED

The Third Mr Glasgow — Prospect, 2007.

Magic Terminus — Riflemaker Gallery Catalogue, 2010.

Midgieburgers — New Writing Scotland 30, 2012.

Billy Semple — The One O’Clock Gun, 2012.

THE ILLUSTRATIONS

Pictures in Unlikely Stories, Mostly had some details copied from work by Paul Klee, Michelangelo, Raphael, Piranesi, G. Glover, W. Blake, E.H. Shepherd and a Japanese artist whose name has no phonetic equivalent in Roman type I am aware of. Drawing is a way of keeping the appearance of folk I know. The last page of my first Unlikely Story shows the face of my son in his teens and the last two Likely Stories show Doreen and Russell Logan when I first knew them. I will not name other friends used in that book. The original Lean Tales by James Kelman, Agnes Owens and me had a picture of each author before their part of the book, so now it has only mine as I was in 1985. The vignettes of merry or glum horned heads are a recent addition. In Glaswegians the initial capitals contain portrait drawings (not wholly in the following order) of May Hooper, Morag McAlpine, John Purser, Eddie Linden, Agnes Owens, Bethsy Gray and Carole Rhodes. A childish pun suggested the illustrative scheme in Ten Tales Tall and True. The frontispiece to The Ends of Our Tethers is based on its 2003 jacket design. The horned skulls were also in that. Other work left me no time to illustrate Tales Droll and Plausible so I enriched them with vignettes scanned from a book of plays by Philip Massinger published by Ernest Benn Ltd, London, and Charles Scribner, New York. Though undated it is obviously late Victorian, and though the artist who designed the vignettes is not named, their style belongs to an even earlier century. Most surviving art is by forgotten artists.