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By Root 966 0

a Thursday afternoon, and you’re out of your weekly probation interview early. You’ve got no job to go to, unless you count the skooshy piecework you’ve been doing on your cousin Tariq’s dating website—using his spare pad and paid for in cash, which you are careful to forget about when discussing income opportunities with Mr. Webber and his colleagues—and you’ve not got the guts to go home to Bibi and the weans in midafternoon and hang around while she cooks dinner in that eloquently expressive silence she’s so good at, which translates as When are you going to get a real job? It’s not like you’ve been out of Saughton long enough to get your legs back under the table anyway; and on top of that, you’re not supposed to use a network device without filling out a bunch of forms and letting Mr. Webber’s nice technical-support people bug it (which would tend to rule out your usual forms of employment, at least for the nonce).

Which can mean only one thing: It’s pub time.

To be a Muslim living in Scotland is to be confronted by an existential paradox, insofar as Scotland has pubs the way Alabama has Baptist churches. Everyone worships at the house of the tall fount, and it’s not just about drinking (although a lot of that goes on). Most of the best jobs you’ve ever had came from a late-night encounter at the pub—and paid work, too, for that matter. You’re not a good Muslim—in fact you’re a piss-poor one, as your criminal record can attest—but some residual sense of shame prompts you to try to keep the bad bits of your life well away from the family home. Compartmentalization, Mr. Webber would call it. Anyway, you figure that as long as you avoid the fermented fruit of the vine, you’re not entirely doing it wrong: The Prophet said nothing against Deuchars IPA, did he?

The more devout and twitchy-curtained neighbours don’t know anything about your private life, and you want to keep it that way: Our neighbour Anwar, he’s a good family man, they say. And if you want the free baby-sitters and community bennies, you’d better keep it that way. So you are discreet: You avoid the local boozers and are at pains never to go home with beer or worse on your breath. Which is why you go about your business in a snug little pub that sits uphill from the top of Easter Road, close by the Royal Terrace Gardens, for a wee outing afterwards.

Of course, going to the pub is not wholly risk-free. For starters there’s your phone, set to snitch on your location to the Polis—and if they call, you’d better be there to give them a voiceprint. (It’s not like you can leave it at home: You’ve done the custodial part of your sentence, but you’re still under a supervision order, and carrying a phone is part of the terms and conditions, just like wearing a leg tag used to be.)

Your phone copies them on everything you text or read online, and you heard rumours when you were inside—that the Polis spyware could recognize keywords like “hash” or “dosh.” You figure that’s just the kind of stupid shite paranoid jakies make up to explain why they got huckled for shoplifting on their second day out of prison—but you can’t prove it isn’t so, which is why you keep a dirty sock rolled over the phone’s lower half. (And your real phone is a pay-as-you-go you got Bibi to buy you “for the job hunting.”)

But anyway: pub time.

You’re in the back room, surfing on a pad borrowed from the bar as you work your way down your second pint, when the Gnome materializes at your left elbow with a pot of wheat beer and a gleam in his eye. “Good afternoon to you, Master Hussein! Mind if I join you?” The Gnome is a vernacular chameleon: Going by his current assumed accent—plummy upper-class twit—you figure he’s in an expansive mood.

You nod warily. The Gnome is not your friend—he’s nobody’s friend but his own—but you understand him well enough, and he’s interesting company. You’ve even spent a couple of relaxing afternoons in his bed, although he’s not really your type. “Bent as a seven-bob note,” the Cardinal pronounced him when the subject of trust came up in conversation: “Yes, but