They were passing the queue for The Viper Club now. Murray recognised a girl from his third-year tutorial group. She’d caught her long, straight hair back in an Alice band. Her dress was short, her white boots high. She made him think of the test-card girl, all grown up and gone kinky.
‘Hello, Dr Watson.’
He nodded, trying not to stagger. Ah, what the fuck? He was allowed a private life, wasn’t he?
Rab echoed his thoughts.
‘Sometimes you need to cut loose, connect with the elemental, remind yourself of the beauty of your own existence.’
Lyle scrunched the kebab’s wrapping into a ball and tossed it into a bin already brimming with rubbish.
‘For tomorrow we may die.’
The paper trembled on the peak of the pile, and then tumbled to the ground. Rab bent over, picked up the wrapping and stuffed it carefully back into the bucket. A look of satisfaction at a job well done settled on his face.
‘Right, what den of iniquity are we headed to next?’
* * *
The thin man with the long hair and the bandanna wanted a pound before he would let them in. Rab dropped three coins into the old ice-cream tub that acted as a till and they went up the stairs and into the electric brightness of the pool hall.
‘I should head back.’ It had been Lyle Joff’s mantra since he’d phoned his wife two hours ago, but he joined the queue for the bar with the others and accepted his pint. ‘Just the one, thanks. I’ll need to be thinking about getting home.’
The room was busy with the quiet clack of billiard balls and the low murmur of conversation. They were in the first wave of pub exiles and serious pool players still outnumbered those for whom the hall was just another stop on the night’s drunken highway. It was about a year since Murray had been here, a night on the town with his brother Jack, but it was as if he’d just stepped out to take a piss. There were the same faces, the same closed looks and poker expressions. The same mix of scruff and cowboy-cool, the lavvy-brush beards, arse-hugging jeans, Cuban heels and tight-fitting waistcoats. Fuck, you’d have to be hard to wear that gear in Glasgow.
Rab lowered himself behind a free table.
‘Welcome to Indian country. What time does this place stay open till?’
‘Three.’
Rab’s sigh was contented, nothing to worry about for two hours.
Lyle stared silently at his pint, as if it might hold the possibility of enlightenment. Slowly his head sank onto his chest and his eyes closed.
A woman bent across the baize, lining up her options. Murray found himself following the seams of her jeans, up the inside of her raised thigh to the point where they met in a cross. He looked away. Would the tyranny of sex never stop?
He nodded towards Lyle.
‘Is he all right?’
The woman telescoped her cue back towards their table and Rab shifted his drink beyond its reach.
‘He’s fine, he’ll wake up in a moment.’ Rab indicated a pair of women sitting near the back of the room. ‘Why don’t you go over there and ask them if they want a drink?’
The women might have been sisters, or maybe it was simply that their style was the same. Strappy tops and short feathery hair whose copper highlights glinted under the bright lights. They were grown-up versions of the girls he’d gone to school with. They’d never have looked at him then, but now?
It was stupid. He didn’t fancy either of them, and besides, he wasn’t up to the aggressive dance of tease and semi-insults that constituted a chat-up.
‘They’ve got drinks.’
‘Well, get up, pretend you’re going to the gents’ and offer them another one en route.’
‘Is that how James Bond does it? Hello, ladies, I was on my way for a pish and wondered if I could bring you anything back? Ever wondered why it’s going to say “confirmed bachelor” on your obituary?’
‘It must be better than mooning over Ms Houghton.’
Lyle Joff awakened slowly, like an ugly toy twitching into life in a deserted nursery. The flesh beneath his eyes trembled and then the eyes themselves opened. He blinked and turned his fuzzy gaze on Murray.
‘Rachel Houghton.’ He smiled dreamily. ‘Good arse. Good everything else too.’
‘Lyle.’ Rab’s voice was warning. ‘We’re talking about a colleague.’
Lyle’s brief sleep seemed to have refreshed him. He wiped away the glue of saliva that had formed at the corners of his mouth and took a sip of his pint. ‘Listen to Professor PC. ’
Rab said, ‘Shut up, Lyle, you’re drunk.’
A couple of the pool players looked over. Murray raised his beer to his lips. It tasted of nothing.
‘We’re all drunk. Say what you were going to say, Lyle.’
‘Lyle, I’m warning you.’
Rab’s tone was low and commanding, but Lyle was too far gone to notice. He patted Rab’s shoulder.
‘Murray’s one of us, the three mouseketeers.’ He giggled. ‘It’s top secret. Rab said Fergus would have his balls strung up and made into an executive toy for his desk if he found out.’
‘The three musketeers, great swordsmen.’ Murray turned to Rab. ‘What’s the big secret?’
‘Nothing, Lyle’s just being provocative, aren’t you, Lyle?’
‘Not as provocative as Rachel.’ Lyle put an arm around Rab. ‘I wouldn’t have thought you had it in you.’
Rab lifted the arm from his shoulder. His eyes met Murray’s and all of the ruined adventure was in them. There was no need to ask what had happened, but Murray said, ‘Tell me.’
Lyle looked from one to the other, wary as a barroom dog whose master is on his fourth drink.
Rab sighed wearily.
‘What’s the point? She’s a free spirit, Murray, a generous woman.’
‘I want to know.’
A little beer had slopped onto the table. Rab dipped his finger in it and drew a damp circle on the Formica. He looked his age.
‘A one-off mercy fuck, that’s all there is to it.’
‘When?’
‘The end of last term. You remember all that hoo-ha about my introduction to the new Scottish poetry anthology?’
Murray did. Rab had been forthright in his assessment that a new wave of Scottish poets were throwing off the class-consciousness, self-obsession and non-poetic subject matter of the previous generation and ushering in a golden age. The new wave had leapt to the defence of their predecessors while balking at Rab’s description of them as non-political. The elder statesmen had been vitriolic in their assessment of academics in general, and Rab in particular. It must have been a week when war and disaster had slipped from the news because the row had hit the broadsheets. Rab had been derided by academics and pundits north of the border and a source of amusement to those south of it.
‘It all blew up in my face a bit. Some people thrive on controversy, Fergus for example, but I don’t. It got me down. Rachel dropped into my office one afternoon to commiserate and we went for a few drinks, quite a few drinks. Then when the pub closed I remembered that there was another bottle at my place. There’s always another bottle at my place.’ He gave a sad smile. ‘I didn’t expect her to come and then when she did I didn’t expect anything more than a drink. I was going to tell you.’ He laughed almost shyly. ‘But a gentleman doesn’t talk