One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night Read online

  As the Islay nights became ever more frequently lit up by small-arms fire and, on several spectacular occasions, exploding boats, it became inescapably apparent that some kind of territorial battle was being bloodily fought, with McGregor handed the blue helmet and the role of useless UN peacekeeper. Of course, it wasn’t long before Strathclyde sent reinforcements, followed by cops from London and Amsterdam, plus a small army of customs officials. But his Edinburgh fireside fantasies of being a one-man police force with nothing to do evaporated into a blurred haze of gunplay and politics as his poky wee station became the hub of an international narcotics investigation.

  McGinty hadn’t bought a holiday home on Islay simply because he liked the place. The knuckle-dragging bampot was hardly the scholarly type, but had evidently been a keen student of local history, and of that subject’s incorrigible tendency to repeat itself.

  Think Islay, think whisky. Rich, dark, peaty stuff. The place was hoaching with distilleries, and once upon a time there’d been even more. The reason for this was not the excellent quality of its fresh water, the aforementioned peat or any other factor conducive to fine malt-making. It was that for a period during the nineteenth century, there wasn’t an exciseman posted there, so every bugger had started his own still.

  In more recent times, the customs men’s numbers had been slashed back to save money, with attention centred on certain high-profile airports and harbours, ‘intelligence’ rather than diligence relied upon to thwart the smugglers. McGinty had reasoned that nobody would be paying much attention to Strathclyde’s most westward point, and had cultivated links with European exporters to land heroin at a wee jetty just north of Portnahaven. From there the gear was transported to Port Ellen for the ferry to Kennacraig, then driven off the boat, uninspected, on to mainland British soil.

  It had been the key to McGinty’s bludgeoning progress through the Scottish drugs underworld, and his local power was such that it turned out the battles on Islay hadn’t been instigated by any native rivals but by a major European firm who fancied making use of his trade route and wanted both ends of the incumbent arrangement out of the way. Hence the small-arms fire. And the exploding boats. And the mortar attack on McGregor’s polis station, forcing him to work out of a Portakabin for the rest of his attachment.

  But that was over now. It was all over now. Edinburgh was behind him. Islay was behind him. The future was the undisturbed tranquillity of the Cromarty Firth, and it had only just begun.

  He took another satisfied breath and resumed walking. The sound of gunfire erupted suddenly from somewhere beyond the cover of the trees. One shot, then, moments later, a few more. Then a lot more. He caught himself panicking, peering nervously into the woods, then stopped, remembering both his geographical location and the date. It was August the 12th – the glorious 12th – and here he was in the highlands. The grouse season started today. He laughed aloud, relishing the moment for its timely symbolism. From now on, shooting meant sport. Loud bangs meant hunting. And none of it was his problem.

  He strode contentedly down the path for another quarter mile or so, following the trail until it passed close to a couple of rather run-down farm outbuildings, occasionally visible through breaks in the trees. Another glance at his watch told him he was still officially less than half an hour into his retirement, and it just seemed to be getting better and better.

  A few seconds later, barely preceded by the startling blast of an explosion, a severed arm came hurtling down upon him from the sky, its clenched fist knocking him unconscious with a solid blow to the side of his head.

  09:17 auchenlea the start of a great

  adventure

  Dear Alastair McQuade,

  ‘Let’s meet up in the year 2000!’

  Your former classmate Gavin Hutchison cordially invites you to an unmissable reunion event. Join your fellow ex-pupils from St Michael’s Auchenlea in the incomparably luxurious surroundings of Delta LeisureTM’s Floating Island Paradise Resort on Saturday, August 12th, for an evening of food, drink, dancing, reacquaintance, reminiscence and nostalgia …

  August 12th. Today. Now. Annette pulled the Audi over about a hundred yards from the entrance to the school car park, where the coach would pick everyone up. She was seriously taking no chances about being seen as she dropped him off. He looked across at her and they both laughed.

  ‘Last chance,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  The invite had arrived about three weeks back, which at the time had seemed indecently short notice. Not in terms of clearing a space in his social diary, which generally worked on a free-form improvisational basis, but in terms of growing up, which was something Ally felt you were optimally supposed to have achieved before attending a fifteen-year school reunion. Even if you hadn’t achieved it, you were at least supposed to have given it a shot.

  It was Annette’s fault, really. They’d been living together for nearly two years now, throughout which she had been neglectfully remiss about her duty to nag him incessantly on the subject. No whining about his immaturity, no accusations of childish self-indulgence, no tutting disapproval of his alcohol and fast-food consumption, no arguments about the part his disposable income was playing in propping up the Hollywood studio system, not even a tantrum when her mother had to be rescued by helicopter from the foothills of his sell-through video collection. And this woman expected him to marry her?

  Still, give the lassie her due, after this growing-up deadline came through the letterbox last month, she had done her belated best to assist him by declaring herself irrevocably up the jaggy. That the announcement should have come as a complete surprise had ramifications for his otherwise reliable powers of observation and deduction: Annette drinking Virgin Marys on a Friday night was barely less ambiguous than if she had come home with a Silver Cross pram.

  It would be inaccurate to say it wasn’t planned: that would give the impression that it had actually been discussed. They hadn’t even talked about the possibility in a yes/no/don’t know/let’s-have-this-conversation-in-six-months kind of way. That was entirely symptomatic of their relationship to date, right enough. They weren’t much given to state-of-the-union summits, in keeping with the ‘pleasantly winging it’ philosophy that characterised what they had between them. The upside of this was that it always felt new, it always felt like they hadn’t been together long, despite the calendar stating its regular, irrefutable objections. The downside was that Ally occasionally entertained a fear that Annette would wake up one morning with a sudden clarity of vision, take a deck at what was around her, scream ‘Jesus Christ, I’m living with Ally McQuade!’ and run directly for the street in her goonie and slippers, never to return.

  Admittedly, this wasn’t exactly the manifestation of a crippling inferiority complex that stood in the way of their mutual emotional development. And that. It was just a thought Ally had from time to time, to remind himself of his status on the shortlist of the world’s jammiest men. All the reasons and all the scenarios by which it would become obvious why the two of them could not possibly work out had serially presented themselves and inexplicably failed to produce the logical result. Even at the beginning, their relationship had been founded on enough misunderstandings, misconceptions and misapprehensions to fuel a dozen ugly break-ups and as many straight-to-video Jennifer Aniston vehicles.

  They met at the opening ‘reception’ for a new art gallery just off Great Western Road. It was a champagne and canapés affair, attended by local journos, PR smile-a-whiles and a populous delegation of the effetely pretentious goatee-and-navel-ring types who gave rise to an indigenously Glaswegian application of the word ‘poof’ that was entirely indifferent towards sexual orientation. Ally was standing before (according to the card) a ‘post-cubist’ triptych entitled Love, Honour and Obey, which he decided had less to say to him about marriage than it had about the artist’s unspoken sufferings at the hands of a deranged geometrist. He was bursting to say something crude, ignorant and un
informed, but he didn’t know the gallery owner well enough for it to be worth embarrassing him.

  That was when Annette appeared at his elbow, attracting his attention with a wave of her fingers and saying: ‘I’m sorry, I can’t remember your name, but we’ve met before, haven’t we?’

  Recognising her now that she was separate from the throng, Ally put her unguardedly warm approach down to her inability to recollect also where they had met before, which was St Michael’s RC Secondary, Auchenlea, Renfrewshire. Geographically, it was only a few miles from an art gallery on Great Western Road, but sociologically, it was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

  Her name was Annette Strachan. Ally could have rhymed off the names of everyone who was ever in one of his classes, but even had he not been what Annette referred to as ‘the human database’, it was unlikely he’d have forgotten hers. Every year-group had its beauties, and in his, Annette Strachan and a girl called Catherine O’Rourke walked head and shoulders above female-kind. Not that thoughts of them kept Ally awake at night in those days: Annette and Catherine existed in a different dimension, so the notion of a crush on either was as hopelessly abstract as fancying Phoebe Cates or Victoria Principal.

  It was a slight relief, if hardly a surprise, that she did not so vividly remember him, as his distinguishing characteristics throughout the awkward age had amounted to little more than a smart mouth and a weak stomach. Memories of an irritating wee bastard who puked when he got nervous would hardly have proven an enticement to the sort of informal approach she had just made.

  He came clean on their previous connection, which had roughly the opposite effect to the undignified retreat he’d anticipated. Maybe that was actually what hooked them together: if you did traverse the galaxy and you met someone from your home town, you were likely to find them twice as fascinating as all the punters with three heads and eight tits, if only because they’d made the same epic journey. Arthur Dent travelled not just the universe but to either end of time, and three books on he was still fixated by Tricia McMillan – but then Londoners always were very parochial that way.

  They got blethering, small-talk and smiles, with maybe even a hint of mutual flirting, and soon blew the gallery for a pub round the corner. Ally was just placing the first round of drinks on the table when Annette casually asked what he was doing at the reception. Her failure, once again, to cool her interest upon the revelation that his invite was a courtesy after rewiring the place, suggested he might be the one carrying the misconceptions.

  He’d admit that a small, sour part of himself was disappointed by her reactions. Both when he told her the St Mick’s link and when he told her he was a spark, the inverted snob in him was looking forward to seeing her embarrassment, her discomfiture, as a confirmation that as well as retaining her looks, she had held on to the other aspect he well remembered her for. Annette Strachan had, throughout her schooldays, been somewhat aloof in the company of her peers, or in the local parlance, ‘a fuckin’ snooty bitch’. She’d lived in one of the big ‘bought hooses’ up on the Springwell Road, and neither her socio-economic status nor the benefits of her physical attributes had made her particularly disposed towards sharing much time with the likes of Ally.

  It was, Ally grew to learn, nothing personal. Annette had simply hated being at school and spent the whole time counting the days to when she could spread her wings. She detested the miniature totalitarianism enforced by the staff, the mentality that punished the whole class if one culprit wouldn’t own up. She found the curriculum frustratingly restrictive as well, with everything so geared towards exam syllabuses and exam technique that learning for its own sake seemed a decadent luxury. But mostly she hated the junior fascism among the pupils, the way the wee buggers mercilessly cracked down on every minuscule transgression of a social code that only its adherents knew. From the make of your schoolbag to the colour of your lunchbox to the type of wallpaper covering your workbook, you never knew what might mark you out as a leper tomorrow. (Ally didn’t remember Annette ever having to ring a bell herself, but then you didn’t have to be on the receiving end to abhor it.)

  She knuckled under big-time in fifth year, making sure she got the Highers she needed to access Glasgow Uni, the West End and as much student bohemia as she could lay hands on. After that she ‘did the London thing’, and sought work as a journalist. She started off on one of the temps’ weekly giveaway mags, writing features and advertorials,as well as laying out ads and even selling space when things got tight. In time she made it up to the glossies, got the big-city lifestyle she’d long aspired to, and after a few years a bidey-in ‘partner’ to share it all with. He was handsome, ambitious, sophisticated, connected, the works. He was also, she inevitably discovered, just about the most shallow human being ever to exist in the three-dimensional world. Annette made it a considerate policy not to talk to Ally about him, but he still picked up the gen here and there: the lying, the backstabbing, the mistrust and, of course, the cheating. This last Ally had some difficulty getting his head around: previously he’d thought the male tendency to stray was symptomatic of a fundamental dissatisfaction caused by not sleeping with someone like Annette Strachan.

  The break-up was very messy, and her work was contaminated by the fall-out. This precipitated ‘the life-crisis thing’, which in turn gave way to a year or so doing ‘the travel thing’, at the end of which she decided she was utterly scunnered with London. In defiance of Dr Johnson, she was not correspondingly tired of life, but she did feel she needed to scale things down a little, so opted to move back to the West End, somewhere she’d often returned to for weekends even during the height of her metropolitan phase. She’d been living back there a wee bit less than a year, working freelance, when she went to that art gallery, ran into Ally, and commenced their unlikely but confoundingly successful relationship.

  Ally hadn’t lacked for female company before that. The cheeky wee bastard of youth had evolved to be a charming wee bastard when appropriate; and the evidence suggested that women actually found him either quite cute or at the least too short to be threatening. However, it still required a steeply descending lack of subtlety in Annette’s overtures for him to grasp that she didn’t want them to be just good friends.

  The morning after they first slept together, she said that she had been one date away from asking if he was gay, as he had set a new heterosexual record time for not making a pass at her. He confessed he’d been slightly intimidated because of how inaccessible he’d regarded her in their youth. Fortunately, he drew short of sharing the Phoebe Cates and Victoria Principal comparisons, as Annette was finding it hilarious enough already. He decided then that their relationship might just have a chance, provided, of course, she at some point stopped laughing at him.

  Ally knew what her friends thought of the situation, mainly because early on he’d been wary of it himself: she was on the rebound. Not from her ex-partner, but from her ex-life, so Mr Down-Home Spark – the genial skilled tradesman who could read books and knew who Krzysztof Kieslowski was – would be both lap-dog and bit of rough until she’d sorted herself out; upon which he’d be humanely put down to make way for someone who read books and actually liked Krzysztof Kieslowski.

  There were some who still thought that way, or at least, in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence, adapted to discreetly sympathise for poor Annette’s downfall. These tended to be – ironically or significantly, according to your individual regional prejudices – her Glasgow friends rather than those she knew from her London days. Perhaps this was because the former, being closer to the reality, were that bit more afraid of a similar disastrous fate befalling themselves.

  The others’ sympathies were often surrogately lavished upon Ally. They tended to be so pleasantly surprised by his literacy that they were always trying to suggest ways to unshackle his gifts from the chains of his workaday existence as an electrical contractor. The notions that he quite liked what he did and that he might be making more money t
han any of them were thoughts that he patiently resisted sharing. This was only fair, as he knew he was occasionally guilty of encouraging them. It hadn’t escaped Annette’s notice that company from the big smoke often provoked in him the familiar Scottish working-class ostentation of wearing your esoteric intellectualism on your sleeve. This worked best in conjunction with an uncompromising refusal to refine your accent for mainstream consumption, and often piqued an entertaining reaction in those who’d never heard the names Plato or Aristotle pronounced with a glottal stop.

  Not much escaped Annette’s notice, right enough. For instance, in company, Ally could no longer get away with showing off his encyclopedic knowledge of Woody Allen scripts or De Niro’s oeuvre, because she knew he also had an encyclopedic knowledge of South Park scripts and Van Damme’s oeuvre. That she didn’t consider either of these reason enough to dump him was, he considered, a true miracle of modern living.

  And in return for this saintly degree of tolerance, Ally provided … well, he wasn’t sure. He had to be doing something right, he knew, but he wasn’t aware of it being anything he consciously went out of his way to achieve. He would occasionally reason to himself that he must, on the whole, be a pleasant and considerate guy to have around, but this always led inevitably to the question of why none of his previous girlfriends had noticed this. One of his more observant (if admittedly unreconstructed) pals had reasoned back then that his girlfriends did find Ally pleasant and considerate: the problem was that having landed such a rare specimen, they very quickly decided he would do as a husband, then became frustrated when he didn’t, with reciprocal haste, advance matters along those lines. This in turn, Jake reasoned, had Ally reaching for the ejector seat.