internal music of the young that promises so much. The moment passed and he was left feeling like the boy with the limp the Pied Piper left behind. In place of that lost elation all he had was self-awareness. He understood afresh how the responsibility of status could cripple your enjoyment. He was reminded of the price he paid for career and respectability, a constant drain on his spontaneity he hardly noticed any more, like the tax on tobacco. He saw himself as someone waving to life as it passed by. But if all he could do was wave, he would wave nice. He wasn’t so far gone that he would be giving it the V-sign.
‘Duncan,’ he said. ‘If you’re going, you’re going. Your job’ll be here for you when you get back. If you get back. You relax on that score. That’s all I can promise. About the money. Let me think about it. No promises there, mind.’
But he was already making a promise to himself. He would be taking a collection for Duncan. He couldn’t think of anybody who wouldn’t want to give, especially among the women. And he would top it up himself and make sure it was respectable. Marie wouldn’t even know about it.
‘Mr Watson,’ Duncan said. He was shaking his head, the blue eyes even wider. ‘That’s just great. That is just great. Ah mean . . .’
Duncan stood with his hands out, waiting for the words to arrive that would match his gratitude. His eyes gave out their innocent incandescence, unaware of what an affront they were to Bert Watson’s sense of his own life.
‘Duncan. I’m busy, right? We’ll talk more about this in a day or two.’
Duncan smiled and nodded and turned away vaguely, trying to work out where the door was.
‘And Duncan. Don’t go on the bevvy tonight to celebrate. You’re saving up. Remember?’
Duncan gave the thumbs up and went out. Bert Watson sat down behind his desk. He stared at the door. He remembered an evening with Marie before they were engaged. They had been walking near the Bringan and it started to rain. Sheltering among some trees, they kissed and found lust waiting for them as if by appointment. They got down to it there and then, churning the loam with their bodies, writhing on tree roots and wet leaves, gasping among sensations of dark sky and scuttering noises of animal life and nervously interrupted birdsong. Finished, they waited to come back inside their bodies, their bare thighs frosting in the evening air. The rain had stopped sometime. As they picked the residue of their passion from each other like monkeys grooming, twigs from Marie’s hair, small balls of impacted mud from his knees, Bert noticed the ingrained dirt on Marie’s thighs and the embedded imprint of a root. The sight thrilled him. It was as if he had won her from the earth itself. His trousers had been ruined with mud, he remembered.
He would have settled for having his trousers in that state now, no matter how much they cost. He wondered what Marie thought of that moment, if she ever thought about it. Perhaps she saw it as the kind of holiday from common sense you could have when you were young and daft, but not any more. Certainly, he couldn’t imagine her enjoying the dirt. She had turned herself into a Geiger counter for dust and seemed able to hear a glass making a ring-mark on a table from the next room.
Never mind a blood test before marriage, Bert thought. They should invent a machine that, when you stepped into it, projected your nature into the future so that the other person could see which characteristics would survive, which aspects of your character would wither and which get more pronounced. Then maybe you could tell which randy teenager was destined to become a pillar of the Women’s Guild, which demure young woman would learn how to keep a tiger in the bedroom, and which girl who could bare herself beautifully among the trees would, in middle age, wear a nightdress like a cotton chastity belt.
Bert Watson sighed. He sat in his expensive suit, successful, longing for mud. What was the exact miscalculation with the dresses?
‘Who gives a monkey’s fart?’ he said aloud and looked at Samantha and wondered if Sally had left the office yet.
2
Performance
Fast Frankie White didn’t go into a bar. He entered. He felt his name precede him like a fanfare he had to live up to. As with a lot of small criminals, he had no house of his own, no money in the bank, no deposit account of social status to draw on. He had no fixed place in the scheme of things that could feed back a clear sense of himself, be a mirror. His only collateral was his reputation, a whiff of mild scandal that clung round him like eau-de-Cologne.
Being an actor, he needed applause. His took the form of mutterings of ‘Fast Frankie White’ most places he went because he chose to go places where they would mutter it. Without that reminder of who he was, he might forget his lines. His favourite lines were cryptic throwaways that reverberated in the minds of the gullible with vaguely dark potential.
‘Been doin’ a wee job,’ he said.
‘Checkin’ out a couple of things,’ he said.
‘A good thing I don’t pay income tax.’
‘This round’s on the Bank of Scotland.’
‘He’s got his own style, Frankie,’ some people said. But that was a less than astutely critical observation. It was really a lot of other people’s styles observed from the back row of the pictures, a kind of West of Scotland American. Once, when he was twenty, he had seen a Robert Taylor film about New York where some people were wearing white suits. He had snapped his fingers and said, ‘I’m for there!’ A few weeks later, by a never-explained financial alchemy, he was. A few weeks later, he was back but he liked to talk about New York. ‘There’s half-a-million people in the Bronx,’ he would say. ‘And most of them’s bandits.’ It wasn’t Fodor’s Guide to the USA but it sounded impressive, said quickly. And Frankie said everything quickly.
‘The Akimbo Arms’ was one of the pubs where he liked to make his entrance. He was originally from Thornbank, a village near Graithnock, but he lived in Glasgow now, people said. Frankie didn’t say where he lived. He would simply appear in a Graithnock bar, dressed, it seemed, in items auctioned off from the wardrobe department of some bankrupt Hollywood studio and produce a wad of notes.
This time he was wearing a light blue suit, pink shirt, white tie and grey shoes. He looked as if he had stepped out of a detergent advert.
‘Where’s ma sunglasses?’ somebody said.
But Frankie was already flicking a casual hand in acknowledgement of people who didn’t know who he was. He walked round to the end of the bar where he could have his back against the wall, presumably in case the G-men burst in on him, and he prepared to give his performance.
It was a poor house. Matinees usually were. Mick Haggerty was standing along the bar from him, in earnest debate with an unsuspecting stranger, who probably hadn’t realised Mick’s obsession until it was too late.
‘Give me,’ Mick was saying, ‘the four men that’ve played for Scotland an’ their names’ve only got three letters in them.’
Frankie hoped for the stranger’s sake that he didn’t get the answer right. Doing well in one of Mick’s casual football quizzes was a doubtful honour, earning you the right to face more and more obscure questions the relevance of which to football wasn’t easy to see. ‘Tell me,’ Frankie had once said to Mick by way of parody. ‘In what Scotland–England game did it rain for four-and-a-half minutes at half-time? And how wet was the rain?’
Over in the usual corner Gus McPhater was sitting with two cronies. Frankie hated the big words Gus used. That left Big Harry behind the bar, besides three others Frankie didn’t know. Big Harry had finally noticed him and was approaching with the speed of a mirage.
‘Frankie,’ Big Harry said.
‘Harry. I’ll have a drop of the wine of the country.’
‘Whit?’
‘A whisky, Harry. Grouse. And what you’re havin’ yourself?’
Big Harry turned