‘Nothing at all,’ I say, surprised at my own boldness. ‘Not even a book review.’
‘Well, the book reviews aren’t down to me. Not my responsibility – not my direct responsibility.’
‘It wasn’t just book reviews. You were quite adamant that you’d be wanting me to write for the paper.’
‘Adamant?’
‘You said you’d definitely be calling on me for one-off features, opinion pieces, that kind of thing.’
‘Did I say that? “Definitely”?’
I sound a little desperate, and I’m not sure that he did definitely use the word ‘definitely’, but when am I going to get another chance like this?
‘I’m not expecting anything regular, but I had a clear understanding that there would be a role for me.’
‘A role?’
‘I emailed you about it, but you never replied.’
We have reached the start of the lane. Liffield comes to a halt and so do I. We are a little island around which the crowd continues to flow, but I don’t think he notices that.
‘We’re on a very tight budget, as you know, Douglas. I don’t think we nailed a role down exactly. There’s nothing about a role specifically written into the terms of your redundancy, is there?’
I very much doubt he knows the answer to this question, but I do: there isn’t.
‘Eh, not specifically.’
‘Well, there you are. It’s always tricky, trying to tidy this stuff up afterwards. Different recollections, different interpretations of what was said, that kind of thing. I heard a good phrase for it the other day. You know what it was?’
He waits until I have confirmed my mystification by means of a shrug.
‘Late Expectations. It’s a pun on a novel by Charles Dickens.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah. Neat, isn’t it?’
‘Pithy.’
‘Yeah, well, don’t be too despondent,’ he says.
‘I said “Pithy”, not “Pity”.’
He frowns, then brightens. ‘Oh, another pun? Good man. Douglas, I must go, but let’s continue this conversation. Why don’t I give you a call?’
‘Will you?’
For the first time he looks me straight in the eye. ‘No, probably not. It’ll slip my mind. Come in and see me. I’ll have a better sense of what’s what after this management meeting. Today’s Tuesday. Come in on Thursday.’
‘Right, I’ll do that.’ In a vague attempt to seal the deal I extend my hand, but already he is moving away, as if his metallic parts are being drawn towards a magnet operated by the London bigwigs. He is prevaricating, of course, as who wouldn’t in his position? Whatever else is to be discussed this afternoon, one item that will not be on the agenda is whether or not the Spear can afford to pay Douglas Findhorn Elder a few quid for the occasional article.
I turn and walk back to rejoin my Erstwhile Colleagues. And very glad I am that everybody else has gone, for the three of them are in a row behind the horizontal gravestone, playing at charades: Grant is strutting on the spot like a camp pheasant, Roy is simulating being sick and Ollie is miming giving a lingual wash-and-wax to Roy’s backside. It is only what I deserve, I suppose, for chasing after John Liffield, but for a moment I feel a kind of sympathy for him, as might one rat watching another in a trap.
I am not trapped, needless to say. I am on the outside, looking in. For I have liberated myself.
If I repeat this often enough, I might even come to believe it.
DINOSAURS
‘Fifty? Sweet Jesus, Dougie!’ Ollie, two large whiskies inside him, collar unbuttoned and black tie wrenched to one side, is all fake shock and commiseration. ‘It’s over. You’re finished, washed up. Driftwood. And only today? God, I feel for you.’ He makes a play of seizing my wrist. ‘See, this is me feeling for you. Bloody hell, no pulse! Will I call an ambulance? Do you need to lie down? Or’ – leering from under his brow like a gross goblin – ‘can I get you a stiff one?’
‘I shouldn’t have mentioned it.’ But I did. It slipped out when we were discussing Ronald’s early exit from the stage-set of life and establishing, if we were to go in chronological order, which one of us would be next. (Roy, as it happens, followed by Ollie, then me, leaving Grant to switch off the lights and close the doors behind us all.)
‘But you have, Dougie boy, you have. It’s all over the airwaves now. Headline news. We should sing “Happy Birthday” to you. I’m in the mood for a pagan song after all those hymns.’
‘On you go.’ Experience has taught me that this is the right approach with Ollie: if you want him not to do something, don’t tell him not to do it. Act as if you couldn’t care less. Pleading merely encourages him. Condemnation goads him to greater excess.
We have commandeered a small, dark table in a small, dark drinking establishment a stone’s throw from Tollcross. Although I can’t see a sign actually forbidding celebratory song, it doesn’t look like the kind of place where it would be welcomed. Ollie hailed a cab on Morningside Road to get us here. ‘The Spear will gladly pay,’ he declared. ‘The sooner we get to a pub the sooner we’ll leave and go to work.’ In twenty minutes, while the rest of us are still on our first drinks (courtesy of Roy), Ollie has downed those two doubles (the second courtesy of himself) and appears to be just warming up. Since we have missed out on the purvey he has bought up the remaining pies and sausage rolls in the hot cabinet and deposited this healthful feast in the middle of the table. We are supposed to be demolishing it together but so far Ollie has put a good deal more effort into this than anybody else. In the two or three months since I last saw him, he seems to have gone up a couple of shirt sizes.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘maybe I’ll save my voice till later. But I insist on buying you a drink. A big fat whisky, how does that grab you? I need another myself.’
‘Just a single for me, Ollie. I don’t have your capacity.’
‘You’re right there. My capacity is unique. Roy?’
‘Pint of lager, please, Ollie.’
‘Same for me,’ Grant says. ‘Want a hand?’
‘I seem to have two on me,’ Ollie says, heaving himself up. ‘Tell you what, I’ll use them to carry a tray. Don’t you trouble yourselves.’
He rolls to the bar like a giant medicine ball. Grant sighs as we all watch him go. I know what that sigh signifies: a certain tenderness, a mutual affection that men of our vintage seldom put into words. When you have just attended one funeral, you can’t help thinking of the others yet to come.
‘He’s not mellowed much, has he?’ I remark.
‘He may have yellowed a bit,’ Roy says. ‘But mellowed? No.’
‘Must be hard to live with.’
‘Luckily we don’t have tae,’ Grant says. ‘Mhairi’s a tough cookie. She manages him fine. She loves him, daft besom. So do his kids.’
I have never been in this bar before. There are not many other customers. The scattering of old men who constitute the clientele could easily be the remnants of another funeral, possibly one from days ago. They seem to make a virtue of not speaking. Perhaps they’re in a competition: who can refrain from cracking a joke the longest? If they regard us at all, it is with indifference.
‘So, Dougie,’ Grant says. ‘Fifty, eh? How does that feel?’
‘Bit of a milestone, I suppose. I’m still processing the information.’
Grant is only forty-five. He’s looking anxious. ‘Fifty,’ he says, as if it symbolises a point of no return. Which of course it does. I decide to put him at ease by articulating to him what I already tried to articulate to myself. ‘Listen, it’s easy to get depressed by this birthday business, especially at a funeral. What’s fifty? It’s a number. It’s nothing special.’
‘Fifty’s quite special, surely?’ Grant insists.
‘It’s just a number.’
‘It’s not just a number,’ Roy interjects. ‘Numbers matter. That’s all we are, numbers. That’s all everything is. Calculations of light and mass and energy. Mathematic
al equations. Chemical formulae.’
‘You’re talking tripe,’ says Grant.
‘I am not,’ Roy says. ‘It’s just over your head, my son. Listen, let’s keep it simple. I’m fifty-three, all right? I’ve got a three-year-old Jack Russell. My third. I’ve always had Jack Russells – since I was in my mid-twenties anyway. Love ’em. Smart, snappy little bastards. Keep you on your toes. Eat your toes if you don’t look lively. Dogs – Jack Russells especially, but all dogs – are life coaches. They remind you of the priorities of life: food, sleep, exercise, loyalty and companionship. They get you out the house in all weathers. First thing in the morning, last thing at night and at least one other excursion in between. They give you a routine, dogs. And here’s the thing. This is what truly horrifies me. Assuming average lifespan on my part, which is a big assumption if I eat this pie, I mean look at the grease on it, I could be on my penultimate Jack Russell. Do you hear what I’m saying? My penultimate Jack Russell!’
Roy laughs. Grant and I laugh. Short, throaty laughs. We are amused, in a serious, Queen Victoria kind of way.
Ollie returns with a tray of refreshments. ‘Unless it was funny, I don’t want to hear it,’ he says, passing out the glasses. Raising his own aloft, he says, ‘Happy birthday, Douglas,’ and dashes through a very rapid, not too strident rendition of the appropriate song. This earns him some disapproving looks from the auld yins. Fortunately he has his back to them. If he saw the looks he’d sing it again, fortississimo.
‘Happy birthday,’ Grant and Roy say.
‘No cake,’ Ollie says, lifting a sausage roll. ‘We’ll have to improvise.’
Before the glasses go back on the table, I add a second toast: ‘And here’s to Ronald, wherever he is and whoever he was.’
‘To Ronald.’
‘One of the last of the dinosaurs,’ says Roy. ‘Speaking as one myself.’
‘Ah now,’ Ollie says, ‘don’t be going down that old road again.’
‘Well, it’s true. We’re dinosaurs, turning out a dinosaur product in a dinosaur industry, and like dinosaurs we’re doomed to extinction.’
‘Bollocks,’ says Ollie. ‘We’re artisans, craftsmen. And stop knocking the dinosaurs. They were brilliant survivors. They were around for a hundred and thirty million years.’
‘Deny it if you like, but the sooner the final blow falls the sooner we’ll be put out of our misery.’
‘Who’s miserable? I’m not miserable. Dougie’s not miserable. It’s his birthday.’
‘Dougie doesn’t count.’
‘Thank you for that, Roy.’
‘I mean, you don’t work at the Spear any more. You’re not a dinosaur.’
‘Grant works at the Spear,’ Ollie continues, selecting a pie, ‘and he’s not miserable. Are you, Grant?’
‘Well, I’m not too happy a lot of the time.’
‘For fuck’s sake!’ The pie begins to disappear into Ollie’s mouth in chunks. Between chunks he develops his theme.
‘I refuse to be consigned to the dustbin of history, and I refuse to be depressed. Just because Grigsy was only sixty-two and the Spear’s circulation is about a quarter of what it was twenty years ago doesn’t mean we’re about to become extinct. We’re between eras, that’s all. Our skills are still required. If you think yourself into the past, that’s where you’ll end up – and faster than you expect.’
‘I liked the past,’ says Roy.
‘Not me,’ Ollie says. ‘I hated history at school. Who did this and who did that – who fucking cares? Keep moving forward, that’s my motto. I’m for the future. I’m more modern than any of you. I am modernity.’
The pie is now gone. Another sausage roll is next in line for treatment.
‘Look at this.’ He extracts his mobile phone, an even slimmer and blacker model than John Liffield’s. With his cheeks crammed with pastry and grey meat he has both hands free to operate the phone. When he speaks wee flakes of pastry escape back out. ‘Wait now, is there a signal in this place? Yes there is! Here we go. See the way that dickhead summoned a taxi out of nowhere? And knew it was coming? You were looking like a lost soul, Dougie. Was it magic? No. Here’s how it was done. The Spear’s got an account with the taxi firm, Liffield’s got an app on his phone, and the app locates him and finds the nearest available taxi and brings them together. I’ve got the very same app here but I’m not linked to the paper’s account so I don’t use it – hence the receipt acquired from the fellow that stopped for us. However, this sliver of techno-wizardry enables me to manage just about everything else in my life.’ His thumbs and fingers fly like fat wee ballet dancers across the keypad as he opens a succession of doors into the many and various worlds of Oliver Brendan Buckthorn. ‘Diary here, photo album here, entire music collection here, a library I’ll never read one per cent of here, access to all known news media here, entertainment palace in here, porn shop here, only joking, banking, bus timetables, holiday planning, healthcare – but you lads have got all this stuff too, haven’t you?’
‘Cannae be ersed,’ says Grant.
‘I’ve got it, but I don’t flaunt it,’ says Roy. ‘Don’t use it much, actually.’
‘Dougie?’
‘I have a mobile phone, but it’s an early model. Clockwork, I think.’
‘Well, to hell with you all then. If the world is presented to you on a plate and you choose not to partake of the feast, then I can do nothing for you. Maybe I’m the dinosaur that turned into a bird,’ Ollie says. ‘Maybe I’m a golden eagle and you really are pea-brained reptiles thrashing about in a swamp and choking on poisonous vegetation. It may not look like it, but appearances, as we know, can be deceptive. John Liffield appears to be in charge of the paper, for example.’
‘What happens if you lose your phone? Or drop it in the bath?’
‘I get a replacement, Douglas. I can lose it once and I’m covered by the deal I’m on. Twice and I pay a penalty. But meanwhile no data is lost. Everything is safe. Everything is stored – up there.’ He indicates the ceiling, which looks like it hasn’t been painted since the smoking ban came into force. ‘In the Cloud. We used to believe in God. Now we believe in the fucking Cloud.’
The whisky is very pleasant. It tastes like a single malt, and I could do with another. I would ask Ollie what he bought us, but he’s charging on and now is not the time to interrupt.
‘But the thing is, the really amazing thing is, everything I’m telling you, everything I’ve shown you on this device, isn’t the future. It’s not even the present. Already it’s old-hat. Even I’m not keeping abreast of developments, let alone you lot. My kids laugh at me when I say how fantastic it all is. They go, “Yeah, Dad.” They are so connected to this stuff they don’t even notice. My kids and their friends speak, act and think differently from me and Mhairi. And they’re not the aliens in this brave new universe. We are.’
‘So you are a dinosaur!’ Roy says triumphantly.
‘Can I buy you all another drink?’ I ask.
Grant and Roy check their watches.
‘No, I’m all right, thanks, Dougie.’
‘Better not.’
‘Ollie?’
‘Go on then.’
‘What was it?’
‘Glen Gloming.’
‘Glen what?’
‘Gloming.’
‘There’s no such brand.’
‘There is too. At the end of the gantry. Ask your man.’
‘If you say so. Sure, lads?’
‘Aye, thanks.’
So I go to the bar and right enough there is the bottle and the name on it is ‘Glen Gloming’, with a stag bellowing at a rising moon on its label. I order a couple of large ones because I am in the mood for it now.
By way of being friendly, I remark that I have never heard of that whisky before.
A grunt is the barman’s only response.
‘Who makes it?’
The barman is a shifty, hair-creamed character with deep corries under his eyes an
d a piercing stare within them. He pauses in the act of pouring the drams.
‘What kind of question is that?’
‘I was just wondering.’
‘A distillery makes it. D’ye want it or no?’
I gesture in the affirmative.
He measures out two doubles and places them defiantly on the dark-stained bar. ‘Five pound,’ he says, daring me to make something of it.
‘That’s a good price.’
‘Is it.’ Note the absence of a question mark. ‘There’s water.’ He thumps the jug down beside the glasses.
‘Thanks. Can I see the bottle?’
‘What?’
‘Can I see the bottle? I’m interested.’
‘Whit?’ I seem to have crossed a line. The barman turns to a man I’ve not even noticed until now, sitting alone in a corner reading a paper. ‘Mister G?’
‘What?’
‘Customer here wants to see the bottle.’
Mister G barely glances up. Maybe he’s concentrating on a difficult crossword clue. ‘What bottle?’
‘The Glen Gloming. Says he’s interested in it.’
Mister G puts his paper down. He stands up, revealing himself to be about six times the size he was sitting down. He has dark glasses on even though the corner he occupies is as black as a witch’s hat. How he can read the paper at all is anybody’s guess, but maybe he doesn’t bother, maybe he just stares at it and broods on the wickedness of the world its mere existence represents. He takes a few paces towards the bar. Mister G has sharp hair and a scar indicative of his cheek having been opened up once by a sharp blade. I don’t really like to think about what happened to whoever did that to him, but I very much doubt Mr G let bygones be bygones.
‘That’s good whisky, that,’ Mister G tells me.
‘Right,’ I reply, resisting the urge to inquire what qualifications he has for saying so.
‘D’ye mean, “Right, thank you for telling me” or “Right, I don’t believe you”?’
‘The former.’
‘Whit?’ (There is a pattern emerging here.)
‘Believe me, I believe you. I was interested, that’s all.’
‘Don’t be interested,’ Mister G says. ‘Just fucking drink it. That’s what it’s for. Got that?’
To Be Continued Page 4
