• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

‘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,