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‘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