The Star Fraction

2

Pleistocene People

I remember him leaning his elbow on the bar in the Queen Margaret Union, waiting for our pints, and saying: ‘We’ll be there, Wilde! We’ll see it! One fucking computer, that’s all it’ll take, one machine that’s smarter than us and away they’ll go.’

Reid’s eyes were shining, his voice happy. He was like that when an idea took hold of him, and he prophesied. It sounds prophetic enough now, but it wasn’t an original idea even then, in December 1975. (That’s AD, by the way.) He’d got it from a book.

‘How d’you mean, “away”?’ I asked.

‘If we,’ he said, slowing down, ‘can make a machine that’s smarter than us, it can make another machine that’s smarter than the first. And so on, faster and faster. Runaway evolution, man.’

‘And where does that leave us?’

Reid pushed a heavy mug of cider towards me.

‘Behind,’ he said happily. ‘Like apes in a city of people. Come on, let’s find a seat.’

Glasgow University’s original Students’ Union dated back to before women were accepted as students. It still hadn’t quite caught up. The female students had their own union building, the QM, which did allow students of both sexes. It was therefore the one in which the more radical and progressive male students hung out, and the better by far for picking up girls.

Which was what we had in mind: a few pints with our mates in the bar for the first part of the evening, and then down to the disco about ten o’clock and see if anybody fancied a dance. The reason for getting in as much drinking as you could beforehand was that diving into the queue in front of the disco bar was best reserved for when you had to buy a round for your companions or – better – a drink for a girl who’d just danced with you.

The bar – the union bar rather than the disco bar – was fairly quiet at this time in the evening. So we got a good seat in the place, the one that ran most of the way around the back wall, from which we could see everybody who came in and – just by getting up slightly and turning around – could check out the state of play on the dance-floor below.

I rolled a skinny Golden Virginia cigarette and raised my pint of Strong-bow.

‘Cheers,’ Reid said.

‘Slainte,’ I said.

We grinned at our respective manglings of each other’s national toast – to my ear, Reid had said something like ‘Cheeurrsh’, and to his I’d said ‘Slendge.’ Reid was from the Isle of Skye, where his great-grandfather had come to work as a shepherd after the Clearances. I was from North London, and we were both somewhat out of place in Central Scotland. We hadn’t known each other very long, having met a month earlier at a seminar on War Communism. The seminar was sponsored by Critique, a left-wing offshoot of the Institute for Soviet Studies, where I was doing a one-year $.Sc. course in the Economics of Socialism.

I didn’t agree with their ideas, but I’d found the Critique clique (as I privately called them) congenial, and stimulating. They were the Institute’s Young Turks, Left Opposition, Shadow Cabinet and Government-In-Exile. They regarded both mainstream and Marxist critical theories of the Soviet Union as all of a piece with the most starry-eyed, fellow-travelling naivety in their assumption that it was at least a new system, when it was hardly even a society.

The seminar was a lunchtime session. As always, it was crowded, not so much because of its popularity but because of a shrewd tactic of always booking a room just a little smaller than the expected attendance. In that ill-assorted congregation of exiles – from America, from Chile, from South Africa and from the Other Side itself – Reid, hunched in a new denim jacket, constantly relighting, puffing and forgetting his roll-up, his lank black hair falling around his young and good-looking but somehow weathered face, seemed entirely at home, and the question he’d asked the speaker afterwards showed at least that he knew what he was asking about. But none of us had seen him before, and in the pub later (these seminars had several features in common with socialist meetings, especially the pub afterwards) he’d admitted to being a Trotskyist, which was not surprising, and a computer science student, which was.

The woman sitting next to me was American and also a Trotskyist. Reid was getting up to buy a round and asked her, ‘What will you be having?’

‘Tomato juice,’ she said. He nodded, frowning.

‘How come you’ve not met him, Myra?’ I asked as he slouched off to the bar. ‘Aren’t you in the IMG too?’ I’d picked this up while chatting to her occasionally over coffee in the Institute – almost chatting her up, to be honest, because I was rather taken with her. She was tall and incredibly slim, with a blonde bob and a perky, peaky face, the concavities of her orbits and cheeks looking like they’d been delicately, lovingly smoothed into shape with broad thumbs, her grey eyes bright behind huge round glasses.

‘I don’t go much to meetings,’ she admitted with a shake of her head. ‘Like I got pissed with comrades urging me to do more in the fight against the fucking Leninist-Trotskyist Faction? I mean, what do these guys think I came to England to get away from?’

‘You mean Scotland, England?’ I drawled derisively, unable to comment on her – to me – utterly incomprehensible remark.

Myra laughed. ‘Go give the guy a hand. He seems to be having a problem.’

Reid turned to me with relief. ‘I’ve got everybody’s except Myra’s. What the hell are “tamadages”?’

‘And one tomato juice!’ I said to the bar-tender.

‘Oh, thanks,’ Reid said. He looked up at me. (He’d unconsciously pulled himself up to his full height, something folk often did around me, but he was still looking up.) ‘What you were saying back there about the market, that was interesting. The millions of equations stuff.’

‘Yeah,’ I said, gathering up some of the drinks. ‘The millions of equations. And that’s not the half of it.’ I knew what was coming next, having been around the block several times already on this one.

‘Why can’t we just use computers?’

‘Because,’ I said over my shoulder as I threaded my way back to the table, ‘without a market, you won’t have the fucking computers!’

Myra was laughing as I put down the drinks. ‘Don’t worry about Jon’s bourgeois economics,’ she said to Dave Reid as we sat down. ‘Even the Soviet Union has computers.’ She waited for some sign of reassurance in his honestly puzzled face, and added: ‘The biggest in the world!’

Reid smiled but went on doggedly: ‘Look at IBM. Do they bother about market forces? Do they fuck! Friend of mine worked at their factory in Inverkip one summer. He said they supply spare parts anywhere in the world within forty-eight hours, even if it means taking an axe to a mainframe that’s already built – and pulling the parts out!’

‘Yeah, that sounds just like the Soviet Union,’ I said, to general laughter. ‘And you sound just like my old man.’

‘Is he a socialist?’ Reid asked. He sounded incredulous.

‘Lifelong SPGB member,’ I said.

‘SPGB? Oh, brilliant!’ Reid said.

‘What’s the SPGB?’ Myra asked. Reid and I both began to say something, then Reid smiled, shrugged and deferred.

I took a long swallow, but it wasn’t the beer that I smelt but some strange remembered whiff of mown grass, dog-shit, and vanilla: Speaker’s Corner. ‘The Socialist Party of Great Britain,’ I explained, falling almost automatically into the soapbox cadence of the autodidact agitator, ‘set out in 1904, with less than a hundred members, to win a majority of the workers of the world. They already have 800, so they’re well on their way. At that rate, the best projections put them on course for a clear majority by the twenty-fifth century.’

‘You gotta be kidding,’ Myra said.

‘He is,’ Reid said sternly. ‘It’s, well, not a bad caricature, I’ll give you that. But I’ve read some of their stuff, and I’ve never seen that calculation.’

‘OK,’ I admitted. ‘I made that part up. Well actually, my dad made it up. He’s a true believer, but he does have a sense of humour and he once wrote a wee program based on population growth and the Party’s growth, and ran it on a computer at work.’

‘He’s a programmer as well, is he?’

‘Oh yes. For the London Electricity Board. When he started, debugging meant cleaning the moths off the valves, and I am not making that up!’

Reid and Myra and several of the others around the table laughed. I’d never really held forth like this before, and I had the feeling that I’d made some kind of good impression on the clique.

‘The point being,’ I added, while everyone was still listening, ‘that I’ve heard all these arguments about how computers will make economic planning a doddle, and I don’t buy ’em.’

‘You’re missing several points here,’ Myra interjected, and went on to make them, her moral passion a mirror-image of mine. So I shifted my ground to another passion.

‘I don’t want a planned society anyway,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t fit in with my plans.’

That got a cheap laugh.

‘So what are you?’ Reid asked. ‘A right-winger?’

I sighed. ‘I’m an individualist anarchist, actually.’

‘“Ey’m en individualist enerchist, eckchelly”,’ Myra mimicked. ‘More like an anachronism. It’s a tragedy,’ she added with a flourish to the gallery. ‘The kid learns some kinda Marxism at his daddy’s knee, and he ends up a goddam Proudhonist!’

‘Yup,’ I said. ‘Though it’s your compatriot Tucker that I think got it all together.’

‘So who’s Tucker?’ somebody asked.

‘Well…’ I began.

We hadn’t got any work done that afternoon, but – looking back at it in an economic, calculating kind of way – it was worth it. Most of us ended up drinking cans and coffees back in a basement room of the Institute. Reid and I sat at opposite sides of Myra at the corner of the big table. Sometimes she talked to both of us, sometimes to other people, and again to one of us or the other. When she talked to Reid it was like overhearing the gossip of an extended family quarrel, and I tuned out or turned to other conversations. But she always brought me back into it, with some remark about Vietnam or Portugal or Angola: the real wars and revolutions over which the factions waged their intercontinental fight.

After some time I became aware that there were only the three of us left in the room. I remember Myra’s face, her elbows on the table, her thin hands moving as she talked about New York. I was thinking that it sounded just the place I wanted to go, when Reid’s chair scraped on the floorboards and he stood up.

‘I’ll have to be off,’ he said. He smiled at Myra for a moment then looked at me and said: ‘See you around then, Jon.’

‘Yeah, looks like we hang out in the same places,’ I said with a grin. ‘If I don’t bump into you in the next day or two I’ll probably see you in the QM on Friday.’

‘Don’t you disappear on us, Dave,’ Myra said. ‘Make sure you come to the next seminar, yeah? We need guys like you around Critique. You know, like not just academic?’

Reid flushed slightly and then laughed and said, ‘Aye, that’s what I was thinking myself!’ He slung a duffel bag over his shoulder and with a wiping motion of his spread hand waved goodbye.

We heard his desert-boots padding up the stair, the outer door’s Yale click shut. It came to me for the first time that he and I had spent the afternoon competing for Myra’s regard – or she had spent it testing us. (That was how it started: with Myra. And not, as I thought long afterwards, with Annette. For if Myra had gone with Reid from the first, and I with Annette…)

Myra settled her chin in her hands, jiggled her specs and looked at me through them.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘An interesting guy, huh?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Very serious.’

‘I’m not in the mood for serious, right now.’

She looked at me steadily for a moment and smiled and said: ‘Do you want to burn some grass?’

I thought this was some obscure Americanism for sex, and only realised my mistake when she started building an elaborate joint back at her bedsit; but as it turned out I was not that mistaken, after all.

Myra and I didn’t have an affair, more a succession of one-night stands. Ten days that shook the world. Neither of us pretended, but I like to think both of us hoped, that more might come of it. But publicly, to each other, we were being very sophisticated, very cool, very liberated about it.

Then she fell for a Chilean resistance hero with a black moustache, and I was astonished at how angry and jealous and possessive I felt. There was a moment, around three in the morning after the evening that Myra told me how, you know, it was very nice, and she really liked me, but she had quite unexpectedly found her feelings for this Latin Leninist just so powerful, so unlike anything she’d ever experienced before, that, well for a start she was seeing him in, like, five minutes…there was a moment of drinking black coffee from a grubby mug and looking with unbelieving loathing at the ashtray spilling tarry twists of paper while my fingers rolled yet another just to feel the burn on my tongue, when all my circadian rythms troughed at once in an ebb of the blood, a bleeding of the body’s heat, when I felt I never wanted to go again to a bed that didn’t enfold the promise of Myra’s pelvic bones rocking on mine.

And all the time another part of my mind was working away, analysing how absurd it was that this jealousy should be a surprise, and yet another level of my awareness was congratulating myself on being sufficiently stoical and self-understanding to understand that, and to know that this as a straightforward primate emotion which could be borne, and would pass.

I picked up a Pentel and scrawled on a pad: Pleistocene people with looking-glass eyes, so I wouldn’t forget this cloth-eared insight in the morning, and crashed out. Still aching, but suddenly confident I had the measure of jealousy and unexpected, unrequited love.

At the same time as Myra and I were carefully, and in her case successfully, not falling for each other, I’d fallen for Reid. There’s the love that (no thanks to God) now dares to shout its name, and there’s another love that doesn’t know what its name bloody is, and this was it. Our minds came together like magnets, with a clash.

Reid was stocky and dark, with well-proportioned Celtic features; I was tall and wiry, with hair I kept cropped to disguise its thinness even then, and a nose that had always had me cast as a Red Indian when I was a kid. Reid was gauche, I was suave; but Reid’s awkwardness was something he shrugged off, and rose above with a kind of grace, whereas I felt every social occasion a constant test of wits. Reid’s parents were religious – Free Kirk – and had done their best to inculcate the same principles in him; mine were staunch Marxist materialists, but had taken a laissez-faire attitude to my philosophical education. At times, for all Reid’s accounts of questions answered by clips around the head or floods of tears, I felt that his parents’ firm line had shown the deeper concern for his welfare.

Reid was a communist, I a libertarian; but he had a prickly independence of mind, a dogged tendency to worry at difficulties in the doctrines his sect espoused. I sometimes suspected I had too easy a scepticism, too catholic a confidence that my shaky pile of books by Proudhon and Tucker, Herbert and Spencer, Robert Heinlein and Robert Anton Wilson was building up to a reliable launch-tower of the mind.

Another thing I liked about Reid was that I got drunk faster with him than with anyone else; hence, the Friday evenings.

Reid and I talked some more about ‘the computers taking over’ (which was how people talked back then about the Singularity), then moved on to the current New Scientist article on catastrophe theory, about which Reid was sceptical (‘like a bourgeois version of dialectics’, was how he put it). After science, politics: the hot topic was Portugal, where the far left had just over-reached itself in what looked like a cack-handed attempt at a military coup.

‘There’s a good article here about it,’ Reid said, digging out from inside his jacket a copy of Red Weekly, the newspaper of the International Marxist Group. ‘Slagging off what Socialist Worker has to say. Well, I haven’t read it myself yet, but it looks good.’

‘OK, OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll buy it. Sectarian polemic is one thing you guys are good at.’

‘We’ll get you in the end,’ Reid grinned as I bought the paper.

‘Or I’ll get you,’ I said.

Reid shrugged. ‘That’s not how it works,’ he said. He started rolling a cigarette, talking in a tired voice. ‘People don’t stop being socialists and become something else. They just become nothing, or join the Labour Party – same difference.’

‘I stopped being a socialist,’ I pointed out.

‘Yeah, but that’s different, come on. It’d be like me saying I stopped being a Christian. It was just something I was brought up to, and as soon as I started thinking for myself I dropped it. Same with you, right?’

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Mind you, it was never shoved down my throat every Sunday.’ But I uneasily remembered how little it had taken – some anarchist summary of Tucker, I think – to precipitate every doubt I’d ever had about my inherited faith.

‘I hope I always understand things the way I do now,’ Reid went on, ‘because it makes sense, it’s ahead of anything else on offer. But if I ever forget, or you know, lose the place –’

‘Or realise you’ve been wrong all along.’

‘– all right, that’s how it’ll seem, that’s what I’ll tell myself –’

He grinned sourly, his tongue out to lick his Rizla, giving himself a momentary diabolic, gargoyle appearance. ‘But if that ever happens,’ he finished, rolling the cigarette up and lighting it, ‘I’ll be damned if I become an idealistic fighter for the other side. I’ll just look out for myself, one way or another.’

‘But that’s what I believe in right now!’ I said cheerfully. ‘Look out for number one. I’m not an idealistic fighter for anything.’

‘That’s what you think,’ Reid said. ‘You’re an anarchist out of pure, innocent self-interest? Oh, sure. Face it, man, you care. You’re a socialist at heart.’

I liked him enough, and he said it lightly enough, for me not to be offended.

‘Nah, that’s not how it is at all,’ I said. ‘I really do have a selfish reason for wanting a world without states: I want to live forever. Seriously. I want to make it to the ships. A planet occupied by organised gangs of nuclear-armed nutters is not my idea of a safe environment.’

Most people laughed at me when I said this, but Reid didn’t. One of the things we had in common was an interest in science fiction and technological possibilities, which fitted right in with the rest of what I believed. In theory it fitted in with Marxism too, but I knew that Reid’s comrades regarded it as ideologically unsound, as if the only far-out futuristic speculation allowed was the IMG’s latest perspectives document. His stacks of Galaxy and Analog were stashed in a cupboard of his bedsit, like pornography.

‘It seems a bit much to expect,’ Reid said. ‘We picked the wrong century to be born in. I reckon we’ll just have to take our chances like the rest of the poor sods.’

I held my cigarette at arm’s length and looked at it. ‘And we’re not doing much for our chances.’

‘I see it as a race with medical science,’ Reid said. ‘Mine’s a pint of Export, by the way.’

I noticed our empty glasses and jumped up, contrite at not noticing sooner. When I came back Reid was deep in the paper he’d sold me, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to push the conversation farther at the moment, so I leaned back and let my mind drift for a bit. The place was filling up. The juke-box was playing Rod Stewart’s ‘Sailing’, a song which always incited in me a maudlin exile patriotism for a country which had never existed, as if I’d been a citizen of Atlantis in a previous life. When it finished I flipped out of the mood and looked around again, and I noticed that Reid’s paper had another reader, who was sitting beside him and leaning forward, her head tilted to read the back page. Her curly black hair was tumbled sideways around her face. Black eyebrows, eyelashes, large green eyes moving (slowly, I noticed) as she read, small neat nose, wide cheekbones from which her cheeks, neither thin nor plump, curved smoothly past either side of full (and unconsciously, minutely moving) lips, to a small firm chin.

Her gaze flicked from the page and met mine with an unembarrassed smile. I felt a jolt so physical that I didn’t even associate it with an emotion. And then Reid lowered his paper and looked at her. She sat back up, and now she did look slightly embarrassed. She was with a bevy of other girls who’d commandeered the next table along, and the rest were talking amongst themselves.

‘Well hello,’ Reid said. ‘Are you finding it interesting?’

‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand how anyone would want to support strikes.’ She had a west coast accent, but – like Reid – she was speaking an accented English, not Scots like the native Glaswegians did. Probably from down the Clyde somewhere then, Irish or Highland: ESL a generation or two back.

‘It’s a socialist paper,’ Reid said. He glanced at me, as if for support. ‘We support the workers, you know?’

‘But the government is socialist,’ she said, sounding indignant. ‘And they don’t want strikes, do they?’

‘We don’t think the Labour government is socialist at all,’ Reid explained.

‘But isn’t it bad for the country, when people can go on strike and go straight on social security?’

‘In a way, yes,’ said Reid, who would normally have lost patience at this point. ‘But if what you mean by “the country” is most people living in it, right, then the problems we have don’t come from workers going on strike, they come from the bosses and bankers doin’ business as usual. They’re the ones who’re really costing the country.’

‘You have a funny way of looking at things,’ she said, as an explanation, not a question. She dismissed the matter and switched her attention to more important concerns. ‘Are you going down to the disco later?’

‘Yes,’ I said, before Reid could make another attempt at political education. ‘Are you?’

‘Oh aye,’ she said. ‘Maybe I’ll see you down there.’ She flashed us a quick smile before being tugged back into the conversation with her friends. I stared for a moment at where her hair fell over the shoulders of her plain white shirt. The shirt was tucked into tight blue jeans, and her feet into high-heeled shoes. Her clothes and, now I came to think of it, her make-up looked too neat and normal for a student’s. Same went for her friends, some of whom were dressed similarly, some in posh frocks.

‘Well,’ I said as Reid caught my eye, ‘as chat-up lines go I think that one needs working on.’

‘You could say that,’ he admitted. ‘Still, she didn’t give me much of a chance.’

‘You shouldn’t have had your nose in the damn’ paper in the first place,’ I told him.

Just after ten o’clock, we both moved fast as the girls left, lost them in the queue but managed to grab the table nearest to theirs.

‘Do you want to dance?’ I shouted. UV light caught the nylon stitching in her shirt, a visible-spectrum strobe caught her nod. That dance was fast, the next slow. We had our hands lightly on each other’s shoulders at the end. I looked down at her. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

There was a thing she did with her eyes: the green coronae streaming, the irises opening into black pools you could drown in.

All I could think of to say was, ‘What’s your name?’

‘Annette.’

‘Jon Wilde,’ I said. ‘Do you want a drink?’ I had drowned, but my mouth was still moving.

‘Pint of lager, thanks.’ She smiled and turned to the table. When I got back Reid was shouting and handwaving something to her over the music and lights. She listened, head tilted, chin on hand. The music changed again, and Reid stood up and held out a hand to Annette. She nodded, downed a gulp of the lager with a quick smile of thanks to me, and away they danced.

‘Somebody seems tae hiv got aff on the wrang fit,’ an amused but sympathetic female voice said in my ear. I turned to find myself looking at a girl with long bangs of red-brown hair out of which her face peeped like a small mammal from underbrush. She was wearing a blouse with drawstrings at the neck and cuffs, a long blue skirt over long boots.

‘Yes,’ I said with a backwards nod. ‘He’s a terrible dancer.’

She laughed. ‘Ah wis talkin aboot you,’ she said. ‘Ah widnae worry. Annette’s a wee bit i a flirt.’

‘She can flirt with me any time,’ I said. ‘Meanwhile, let’s get acquainted, if only to give her something to think about.’

‘This’ll gie her something tae think aboot,’ she said, and astonished me with a kiss, followed by a snuggle up, which with some shifting of chairs and careful pitching of voices enabled us to have a conversation audible only to us. Now and again we heard ourselves shouting as the music stopped while somebody changed discs (not disks, they came later).

Her name was Sheena. Short for Oceania, I later learned.

‘How do you know Annette?’

Sheena grimaced at my choice of topic. ‘Live wi her,’ she yelled confidentially. ‘Work wi her, tae. Wir lab technicians. In the Zoology Department. Whit dae yee dae?’

I told her, and before long was shouting and waving my hands, just like a real scientist. But if the intent was to provoke Annette into showing more interest in me, the experiment failed.

Chill night, no frost, dead leaves skeletal on the pavements like fossil fish. Dave and Annette and Sheena and I paused at the bridge, stared over the parapet at the Kelvin’s peaceful roar.

‘Must be the only feature named after a unit of measurement,’ Reid said. I laughed at that and the girls laughed too.

‘There should be more!’ I said. ‘The Joules Burn! The Ampere Current!’

‘Loch Litre!’

‘Ben Metre!’

‘Or computer languages,’ Reid said as we walked on, the BBC Scotland building on our left, on our right the Botanic Garden with its vast circular greenhouse, a flying saucer from some nineteenth-century Mars. ‘Fortran Steps. Basic Blocks…’

‘Ada Mansions!’

‘Stras Cobol!’

By the time we reached the girls’ flat we’d scraped up Newton Heights and Candela Beach, and I was trying to persuade everybody that all the units were the names of people; for example Jean-Baptiste de Metre, the noted Encyclopaedist, Girondist, and dwarf.

‘Of course after the Revolution he dropped the “de”,’ I explained as Annette jingled for keys. ‘But that didn’t save him, he got –’

‘Shortened,’ said Reid.

‘By a foot.’

‘No, stupid, a head.’

‘Are youse goin tae stand there all night?’

‘Only for a second.’

‘Named of course after…’ I searched for inspiration.

Reid gave me a shove. ‘Come on.’

I went in. Basement flat, big front room, bed, sofa-bed, fake fireplace. Snoopy posters, stuffed toys, girly clutter. Tiny kitchen where Annette was plugging in an electric kettle.

We talked, we drank coffee which only made us feel wilder, Sheena skinned up a joint. Later…later I was in the kitchen, half-sitting on the edge of the sink, while Sheena took charge of another round of Nescafé and the remains of a roach. The door was almost closed, Dave’s and Annette’s voices a steady murmur.

She put milk back in the fridge, leaned on my thigh. I leaned over and parted her fronds and looked at her.

‘Do you want me to stay?’

‘Aye, well, no.’ She passed me the charred cardboard; I sipped, winced and held it under the tap. ‘Ah mean, Ah wid, but Ah c’n see ye fancy Annette.’

‘Wish she could. Wish I’d told her.’

‘Och, she knows. Ah think she’s feart. Yir so – intense.’

‘Intense? Moi? You mean, not like my pal Dave Fight-The-Good-Fight Reid? Likes his easy charm with the labour theory of value, is that it?’

Sheena grinned. ‘Yir no far wrong. See, if he cares enough whit she thinks tae argue wi her, he cannae jist be interested in gettin aff wi her.’

The kettle sang. I gazed at the fluorescent strip above the worktop and squeezed my eyes. Sheena’s weight shifted away and she busied herself with the mugs. I sighed in the sudden aroma.

‘So what am I doing that makes you think I’m coming on too strong? I’ve hardly had a chance to say a word to her all bloody evening.’

‘Dead right,’ Sheena said. ‘Ye talk tae me, and ye say things tae Dave, and aw the time ye look at Annette and smile at whitever she says.’

‘I do not!’

She looked me in the eye.

‘All right,’ I admitted. ‘Maybe I do. I’m sorry. Must seem a bit rude.’

‘It does an aw,’ she said. ‘Still, I’m no blamin you. I started the whole wee game. C’me oan, see’s a hand wi they mugs.’

When I’d finished the coffee I stood up. Dave and Annette were sitting on the floor, leaning against the side of the bed. Dave’s arm was across Annette’s shoulders.

‘See you, guys.’

‘See ya,’ Dave said.

‘Goodnight,’ Annette said. I tried to read her narrowed eyes, to gloss a twinkle or a wink. She looked down.

Sheena kissed me goodnight at the door, with a warmth as sudden and unexpected as her kissed hello.

‘Sure?’ I tried to curve my lips to a mischievous grin.

‘Sure.’ She pushed my shoulders, holding. ‘Yir a nice man, but let’s no make our lives any mair complicated than they are.’

‘Okay, Sheena. Goodnight. See you again.’

‘Scram!’ she smiled, and closed the door.

Tiles to chest-level, whitewash, polished balustrade. Glasgow working-class tenement respectability, not like the student slum I inhabited. I remembered something. I turned back to the door and squatted in front of it, pushed back the sprung brass flap of the letter-box.

‘Dave!’ I shouted.

‘What?’ came faint and distant.

‘After Charles the Second!’ I yelled. ‘Patron of the Royal Society!’

A cloud had descended on the city while I’d been in the flat. At the junction of Great Western Road and Byres Road I waited at a crossing. Heels clicked up behind me, stopped beside me. A girl in a fur coat. She turned, smiling, and asked, ‘How do the lights –? Oh, I see.’ Voice like a warm hand, English upper-class accent. The fur and her hair glittered with beads of moisture. She was going somewhere she wanted to be, confident no-one would dare lay a finger on her: a beautiful animal, perfectly adapted, feral.

‘Terrible fog, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Never seen one like it in Glasgow.’

The lights changed. We crossed, our paths diverging. She went down Byres Road, to that place where she wanted to be, and I walked along Great Western Road, back to my room.