The Star Fraction

8

Capitalist Realism

An aeroplane or a helicopter comes towards you on a rising note that climaxes, then dies away; but when you hear the sound of an aero-engine and it maintains the same flat tone for minutes on end, you look up, irritated by that anomalously steady buzz, and see an airship.

I stood on Waverley Bridge in the cool dusk and looked up and saw an airship, low in the sky, creeping up behind me like a shiver on my neck, a blue blimp with ‘MAZDA’ in white capitals on the side. It was the same airship as I’d seen two hours or so earlier, in Glasgow. Almost weirder than a UFO, something that shouldn’t be there, a machine from an alternate reality where the Hindenburg or the Dow Jones hadn’t crashed or the Germans had won the Great War. As I watched it move away like a cloud with an outboard motor, I had a momentary sense of dissociation, as if I shouldn’t be there either. What was I doing here, watching an airship from a windy bridge when I could be on a train to London?

It must have been the heat. The heat in London that summer had been like nothing since the summer of ’76, when I’d spent weeks going from interview to interview, crashing out with pals or in my parents’ home, worrying about the rash of hateful Union Jack stickers plastered everywhere by the National Front. (And meanwhile, in another hot city, Polish workers pulled up railway lines and pulled down meat prices, and almost the state, almost…) And coming back to Glasgow and a drier heat, grateful, walking into Annette’s lab where dissected locusts were pinned in foil dishes of black wax and the smell of evaporating ethanol rushed to my sinuses as I grabbed her and said, ‘I got a job!’

Nineteen years later and still the same job. Different employers, a different college, the students ever younger and more unsure about their presence, let alone their futures. But at least now I had a business on the side, which in good months brought in as much as or more than the job. My polemics in obscure newsletters and journals, and later on obscure Internet newsgroups as well, had – according to my plan, but still to my surprise – resulted in some mainstream attention. A few think-tank commissions, one or two academic journal articles, a chapter in a forthcoming intermediate economics textbook…Annette and Eleanor had, or at least showed, more confidence in my eventually hitting the big time than I did. Sometimes I felt guilty about that.

I’d been online at my desk at home, setting up Web pages for the business, when Reid had called the previous week. After we’d exchanged pleasantries he’d said, ‘You coming up to this science fiction convention thingie in Glasgow?’

‘Yes! I’ve booked a stall there. Space Merchants. You coming?’

‘’Fraid not,’ he’d said regretfully. ‘Can’t manage the time off work. But – I’d like to meet you after it, in Edinburgh.’

‘That’s a nice idea, but…’

‘No, no, wait. It’s not just to see you socially. I’ve got a…a business proposition for you. Something you might be really interested in.’

‘Oh well, that’s different. What is it?’

‘Um, I’d rather not say at the moment. Sorry to be so cagey, but honestly this is serious and it could be well worth your while. We’ll just go out for a few drinks and talk it over. You can crash out with me, or in a hotel if you like – I can pick up the tab, and the fares –’

‘No, there’s no need –’

‘Really. You’ll understand when we’ve talked about it, OK?’

Intrigued at the thought of him offering me a job in insurance, I agreed to meet him. It must have been the heat.

Reid sauntered up from the Princes Street end of the bridge, for some reason the opposite direction from the one I’d expected him to.

‘Hi man, glad you made it.’

‘Good to see ya.’

His hair had grown long again. His clothes were casual but refined: soft black chinos, blue button-down shirt, silk tie, dark linen jacket. I felt a bit of a scruff in my denims and trainers and astronaut cut.

‘You’re looking smart.’

‘Thanks.’ We’d started walking in the same direction Reid had been taking, towards the Rock. ‘You’re looking…well.’

We both laughed.

‘It’s an illusion,’ I said. ‘Actually I feel a bit wrecked. Too many hangovers in the past four days.’

‘Ah, you’ll soon drink it off,’ he said. ‘But first – have you eaten?’

My stomach sharply confirmed that I hadn’t. ‘Not for ages,’ I said. We paused at a junction where the traffic came four ways. Reid glanced around, and behind him.

‘OK,’ he said, ‘Viva Mexico!’ This turned out to be a Mexican restaurant halfway up Cockburn Street and down some steps. It was quiet. Reid nodded at the waiter. ‘Table for three, please.’

The waiter guided us to a table well clear of anyone else and we sat down. Reid ordered three tall lagers. I looked around while he studied the menu. The faces of men with wide hats and long rifles glowered back at me from brown-and-white photographs of executions, funerals, weddings, train wrecks…I was scanning the wall idly for any photos of heavily armed christenings or graduations when the lagers arrived and Reid looked up.

‘How did the Worldcon go?’

‘Brilliant,’ I said. ‘So I’m told. I was in the dealers’ room most of the time. Space Merchants did well, though.’

‘That’s your business?’

‘Yes.’ I took out my wallet and passed him one of my remaining cards, with email address, Web site, phone number and PO Box. ‘A coupla years ago I was looking for space memorabilia, videos of Earth from orbit, stuff like that, and I was surprised how hard it was to find. Especially all in one place. So I thought, hey, business opportunity! Started with mail order ads in SF magazines, then hawking stuff around conventions. Seems to have taken off now.’

Reid smiled. ‘Lifted off! Good. Cheers.’

‘Slainte.’

I glanced at the third glass fizzing quietly by itself.

‘Who’s your absent friend?’

‘Along any minute. Relax. Still smoking?’

‘Back on them, I’m afraid.’ Thanks to you, I didn’t say.

He passed me a cigarette.

‘How’s Annette?’

‘Fine. Sends her love.’ He didn’t blink.

‘And Eleanor?’

I couldn’t help grinning all over my face. ‘Oh, she’s great. Sulks in her room listening to CDs and reading trash, most of the time, but basically she’s a fine young lass.’

‘Didn’t she want to go to the convention?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘She sort of shrugged when I asked her. Annette wanted to save up holiday time for later in the year, and I think in the end Eleanor preferred to stay with her Mum. I didn’t want to risk taking her along and finding she didn’t really want to go and put her off for life.’

‘Like those demos, eh?’ Reid indulged a reminiscent smile.

I grimaced. ‘Tell me about it…Annette and her “peace-fighting”! When Eleanor was thirteen she tried to join the friggin’ Air Cadets!’

‘What stopped her?’

‘Not us,’ I assured him. ‘Defence cuts.’

The chair to our left was suddenly occupied by a slim middle-aged man, dressed similarly to Reid, with thinning black hair combed back. He briskly picked up the menu and nodded to us both. The contact-lenses in his brown eyes made him blink a lot, as if the air were smoky. I stubbed out my cigarette.

‘Evening, gentlemen.’ He raised his pint and sipped.

‘This is Ian Cochrane,’ Reid said. ‘Works in our legal department. Ian, this is Jonathan Wilde.’

‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Wilde.’ His grip was clammy, perhaps from the condensation on the glass, but his thumb pressure was firm.

‘Jon,’ I said, nodding and wondering abstractedly if the handshake I’d just received was Masonic.

‘I’ve heard a good deal about you, Jon,’ said Cochrane. ‘Most impressed by your article on Brent Spar.’ He caught a waiter’s eye. ‘Shall we order?’

His accent and manner had that Scottish upper-middle-class tone which sounds more British than the English. He ate selectively and talked trivially while Reid and I satisfied our hunger. His second drink was mineral water. At that point his talk ceased to be trivial.

‘“It’s time somebody hammered home to people the difference between the bottom of the North Sea and the bottom of the North Atlantic,”’ he began, quoting my article – a short column in a Sunday paper’s ‘Dissenting Voices’ corner – from memory. ‘“One’s the floor of a seriously polluted larder, which should be cleaned up. The other’s Davy Jones’ Locker…” But nobody’s hammering it home, that’s your point, eh?’

‘Yup,’ I said, scooping up guacamole with a taco fragment. ‘So Greenpeace gets away with murder.’

‘Murder indeed,’ said Cochrane. ‘But who’s going to take the word of an oil company against a bunch of selfless idealists?’

‘Me,’ Reid said.

‘Ah, but you’re not typical, you see,’ Cochrane reminded him. He turned and blinked thoughtfully at me. ‘David, as you probably know, is our IT manager.’ I nodded; I hadn’t known. ‘He attended a meeting of a policy committee where these matters were addressed. We weren’t involved in this Shell fiasco, thank God, but as an insurance company we’re potentially rather exposed to similar situations. One of our senior managers remarked, in passing, that it would be very…conducive to a balanced public debate, if there were a grassroots organisation campaigning for industrial development, instead of against – “A Greenpeace for the good guys”, I think he called it. And the possibility was raised of, ah, materially encouraging an initiative in this direction.’

Reid leaned forward. ‘Hope you don’t mind, Jon, but I said I knew just the man for the job.’ He leaned back. ‘You.’

‘To start an anti-environmentalist organisation?’ I shook my head. ‘They have ’em in the States. “Wise use” and all that. They’re seen as mouthpieces for big business. Sorry, chaps. Not interested.’

Reid’s face showed nothing but polite curiosity.

‘Why not?’ he asked.

‘Ruin my street-cred.’

‘We wouldn’t want you to say anything different from what you’ve said already,’ Cochrane interjected.

‘That’s not the point,’ I said. ‘You could get all the independent scientists you want, even relatively sane environmentalists on board. All that anyone would have to do to discredit it is remind people where the money was coming from.’ I checked that we’d all abandoned our plates, and lit a cigarette. ‘Look at FOREST.’

The skin around Cochrane’s eyes creased and he nodded, as if to hold the place. He gestured to the waiter and ordered coffee and cigarillos. I tried to decline the cigarillo, but he insisted that I at least keep it for later. He stripped the cellophane from his own, lit up, and savoured his first few puffs with a lot more apparent appreciation than I did.

‘The Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco,’ he said, ‘has a good deal more media-credibility than the Tobacco Advisory Council. We’ve checked. They’re quite up-front about where they get a lot of their money from. They don’t dispute the health risks, just the use of them to justify all kinds of intrusive restrictions and invasive propaganda. That doesn’t strike me as a bad example.’

He stubbed out his cigarillo and fanned away the vile clouds with his hand. ‘Feelthy habit,’ he remarked, blinking furiously. ‘Matter of principle.’

I shrugged. ‘OK, if that’s how you see it go ahead. But you won’t do much to change public opinion, at least in the present climate.’

‘Mister Wilde,’ Cochrane said in a disappointed tone, ‘We aren’t talking about the present climate. We’re talking about changing the climate.’

‘You want to take the rap for global warming?’

Cochrane indulged a brief laugh. ‘Touché…but seriously, we stand to lose a great deal if the dire predictions turn out to be true, so no, we have no interest in minimising that. We’d like a clearer public perception of the issues, that’s all. As to the climate of opinion…North British Mutual Assurance has existed in one form or another since before the Revolution.’ (Before the what?) ‘If truth be told, its predecessor companies had not a little to do with the fact that the Revolution was Peaceful, and Glorious, and all those other fine words that history has applied to the distinctly businesslike takeover of 1688.’ (At this point my brain caught up with him.) ‘So let me put a proposition to you, on the basis that – should the lady at the nearest table happen to be, let’s say, a journalist for The Scotsman – this conversation will have undeniably happened, and otherwise…perhaps not.’

He chuckled darkly, and despite misgivings I felt drawn in, part of his plot.

‘As insurers,’ he went on, in a lower voice, ‘we have no interest whatsoever in backing polluters, because – as the asbestos companies have shown – they’re a bad risk. We most emphatically do have an interest in prosperity, and growth, and clients who pay in their premiums through long and healthy lives. So if someone were to set up an organisation such as we’ve discussed, our interest could be quite open, and quite defensible by both sides.’

‘If presented in the right way,’ Reid said. ‘I think it’s within your capabilities.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘It could look no more sinister than giving money to the Tory Party. Probably less.’

Cochrane coughed. ‘As it happens, our political donations this year –’

He was interupted by the cynical cackles of Reid and myself. After a moment he joined in.

‘Yes, well, we are in the business of spreading the risk!’

‘It’s quite something,’ I said, ‘to see the smart money changing sides, almost before your very eyes.’

‘Indeed,’ Cochrane said. ‘And you could look on our proposal as something similar, if on a longer time-scale.’

I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t see your point.’ I thought I did, but I hardly dared believe it.

Cochrane raised an eyebrow to Reid, who nodded slightly.

‘I’ve glanced over some of the literature that you’ve sent to Dave over the years,’ Cochrane said. ‘Among all the dross it contains rather stimulating ideas about a possible role for insurance companies in supplying security to their clients. Now, as a political ideal –’ An airy flick of the hand. ‘However, as a market strategy for dealing with, ah, a certain absconding of the state from what have hitherto been its responsibilities, it has definite attractions. To say nothing of…’

And he said nothing of it. His eyes had lost the blinking tic, and gazed steadily back at me.

‘Another little interruption in the smooth course of British history?’ I asked.

He nodded soberly. ‘Speculative, of course. But we may some day have to consider our position in relation to what the erudite Mr Ascherson delights in calling the Hanoverian regime. Think of it as…’

‘Insurance,’ Reid said gleefully.

I looked from one to the other and lit a cigarette, moving my hands very carefully to keep them steady.

Until that moment I’d thought myself immune to the glamour of power, in exactly the way that a eunuch might be to the glamour of women. I’d never stood up for an anthem or straightened for a flag, never fumblingly inserted anything in a ballot-box. The attitude that made my parents’ sect reclaim the taunting nickname of ‘impossibilists’ had, I fancied, been inherited in my own anti-political stance. Oh, I’d wanted to have influence, to change the way people thought, just as my parents did; but – again like them – I’d never seriously expected the opportunity to actually get my hands on power’s inviting flesh.

In short, I’d been a complete wanker, until that moment when I learned what I’d been missing. And you know, what I felt then was almost sexual; it’s something in the wiring of the male primate brain.

The big thrill wasn’t that they were offering me power – they were offering me a bit more influence, that was all. No, what made the hairs on my neck prickle was that they thought I might – any decade now – have power; that I might represent something that it was a smart move to get on the right side of well in advance; that somewhere down the line might be my Finland Station.

‘Just one question,’ I said. ‘There are plenty of better-known and better-connected people with views similar to mine, so why me?’

Reid looked as if he were about to say something, but Cochrane cut him off.

‘It’s because you don’t have connections with any part of the present establishment, and we wouldn’t wish you to cultivate any. Your views on the land question and the banking system are dismissed as thoroughly unsound by every free-market think-tank I’ve consulted. Your political connections are such that your MI5 and Special Branch files are, I understand, commendably thick. Your Internet articles on the recent Oklahoma outrage, on Chechnya, on Bosnia, have added the FBI and the CIA and FIS to your attentive readership. So, you see –’

‘I see, all right,’ I said. ‘You want to buy someone who looks like he’s not been bought.’

‘Christ, man –!’ Reid began, but again Cochrane interrupted.

‘Excuse me, chaps,’ he said, dusting grains of chilli from his fingers. ‘I’ve never had a radical conscience to wrestle with, and quite frankly I’d be a liability to my own case in the kind of discussion I can foresee developing.’ He smiled wryly, almost regretfully, at us. ‘So if you don’t mind, I’ll leave you to it.’

He stood up, held out his hand, and I rose to shake it, mischievously returning his peculiar grip. ‘Good evening, Jon, and I hope I see you again.’

‘Well, likewise, Ian.’

He nodded to Dave, and departed.

Dave remained silent until Cochrane was out of the door. Then he put his elbows on the table and his fingers to his cheeks, the heels of his hands almost meeting in front of his mouth.

‘What the bloody hell are you playing at?’ he demanded.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I meant it. You didn’t expect me to jump at the chance of being the radical front-man for some bunch of suits worried about what happens when their present cosy arrangement goes down the tubes?’

‘What a fucking idiot,’ Dave said, not unkindly. ‘You’re the last person I’d have expected…ah, the hell with it. Let’s hit the pubs.’

In the conveniently close Malt Shovel, he let me get him a pint of Caffrey’s and told me of his plan for the rest of the evening.

‘I want to show you some of my favourite pubs,’ he explained. ‘Only one way to do that – a pub-crawl by public transport. Here, the Café Royal, a quick snifter in the station bar, on to Haymarket, next train to Dalmeny, along the front at South Queensferry then the last bus over the bridge to Dunfermline.’

Dunfermline. I’d addressed many packages to his place there, but had vaguely thought it was a suburb of Edinburgh. Wrong: over the Forth, apparently. My mental picture changed to Highland mountain ranges.

‘You sure we have time?’

He set down an empty glass. ‘See how far we go.’

We almost ran down Cockburn Street, across the Waverley Bridge again then up around the back of a Waterstone’s and a Burger King to a large pub that seemed to have only a side entrance. High ceiling, tiled walls, murals, leather seats, marble, polished brass and hardwood.

‘A veritable people’s palace,’ I observed as we sat down. ‘It’s like something from one of your degenerated workers’ states.’

Reid grinned. ‘The beer would be cheaper.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘See what they did to Budweiser?’

‘Shocking,’ Reid said. ‘There ought to be a law.’

I nodded at the murals. ‘Heroes of the Industrial Revolution…is that Watt? Stevenson?…they should have one of Adam Smith seeing the invisible hand.’

‘Capitalist realism,’ Reid said.

‘Something you’ve got into, apparently.’

‘Yes, I’m glad to say.’ Reid leaned back, stretching out in his seat. ‘It’s the only game in town.’

‘Yeah, well, you should know.’

‘Damn’ right I do!’ he said forcefully. ‘I haven’t changed my ideas, long-term – but I know a defeat when I see one. Getting over the end of the Second World will take generations, and it won’t be our generations. The last time I hung out with the left was during the Gulf War. The kids don’t know shit, and the older guys –’ he grinned suddenly like the Dave I knew better ‘– that is, the ones older than us, they look like men who’ve been told they have cancer.’

‘And can’t stop smoking, eh?’

‘Ha! OK, Jon, we still have a bit of business to settle.’

‘Fire away.’

‘The brutal honest truth is you’re not likely to get a better offer. Face it, man. You’re forty, you’re nobody, and you’re getting nowhere. The chances are you’ll end up hawking space junk around SF conventions and forgotten ideas around fringe organisations for the rest of your life.’

I shrugged. ‘There are worse ways to live.’

Dave leaned towards me, almost jabbing his cigarette in my face with his emphasis. ‘And there are better, dammit!’

‘I know, I know. But I’ll get there my own way. The whole free-market thing still has a long way to run, and even space is becoming fashionable again. People are going to see that new movie, what is it? – Apollo 13, and think, “Hey, we did that way back then! Why can’t we do it now?” The West will get back into space fast enough when they have the Chinese on their ass. Or somebody’ll give us a Sputnik-style shock. And look, even Cochrane seems to think I’m onto something.’

‘Aach!’ Dave’s inarticulate sound conveyed a weight of Highland scepticism. ‘That was ninety-nine percent bullshit and flattery. Maybe one percent keeping a weather-eye on the contingencies.’

‘Sure, but I’d rather have that one percent than sell out.’

‘Stop bloody thinking about this as selling out! Christ, I’d take money from Nirex or Rio Tinto Zinc if they gave me a free hand with it. This is getting there your own way. This is all legit. On the square and on the level –’

He realised what he was saying and laughed. ‘OK, old Ian is in the Craft but that’s got nothing to do with it!’

‘Yeah, well, I’m kind of holding out for the Illuminati…So that’s the deal, is it? They put up the money and I do what I like with it?’

‘No hassles so long as you get results.’

‘Measured how?’

‘Oh, rebuttals, airtime, exposés of where the environmentalists get their bloody money from. Parents making a fuss about Green propaganda in schools.’ He shifted into a semblance of an English working-class accent, or at least a permanently aggrieved tone. “In my day we didn’t call it destroying rainforest, we called it clearing the jungle, and I think there should be a bit of balance, know what I mean?”’

It was beginning to sound quite attractive. That and the thought of no more basic economics lectures. Get on my own demand curve instead of…

‘The rainforests belong to their inhabitants,’ I said. ‘Scrap environmental legislation, yes, but only if polluters have to pay for the damage, strict liability. That’s my agenda. Think they’d buy that?’

Reid shrugged. ‘You could try.’

‘OK,’ I said, my mind suddenly made up. ‘Show me the details, and if it’s all as straight as you say, I’ll go for it.’

‘You will?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, thank fuck for that. I thought it’d take all night to batter some sense into you.’

At the station we had a few minutes to spare, even with a gulp of whisky in the Wayfarer’s Bar, so I phoned home.

‘Hi darlin’.’

‘Hello, love. Where are you?’

‘Waverley Station. Reid’s got me on a pub-crawl by train.’

‘Well, you take care. Looking forward to tomorrow night.’

‘Me too!’ Electric smooch. Some chit-chat about the Worldcon, and Eleanor’s school exams, then she asked:

‘Did you sell much?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve sold a lot.’

I picked up my bag from the left luggage (the remaining stock from my stall was at that moment heading down the motorway in a van belonging to a friendly SF bookshop in London). We got on the train for one stop, downed a couple of pints at the Caledonian Ale House in Haymarket and caught the next train onwards.

Dalmeny was a pair of deserted platforms with a startling end-on view of the Forth Bridge, its lights sending ghostly pillars into the darkening sky. The Road Bridge straddled the backlit cirrus of the sunset. Dave led me along a narrow, bramble-whipping path between fields and the railway embankment, over a rise and a wooden bridge and down a long flight of wooden steps to the shore of the Firth. A sharp left at the bottom took us to the Hawes Inn, a pub whose charms were only slightly diminished by several games machines and many inapt quotations from Robert Louis Stevenson on the walls.

We found a seat by a window, in a corner with the games machines. Space battles roared beside us.

‘This is where Rome stopped,’ Reid remarked in a tone of oddly personal satisfaction as he gazed out over the Firth.

‘Can’t be,’ I said. ‘Weren’t the Highlands Catholic –’

‘The Roman Empire,’ Reid explained. ‘This was the farthest north they got: the limes. Massacred the natives at Cramond, apparently. Beyond the Firth they did nothing but lose legions all over the map, that’s about it.’

‘Heh!’ I raised my pint of Arrol’s. ‘Here’s to the end of empires.’

‘Cheers,’ Reid nodded. ‘Still, it’s impressive in a way. All the land from here to the far side of the Med under one government.’

‘Hmm…somebody warn the Euro-sceptics: it’s been done and it lasted for a thousand years!’ – this in a comic-German screech that distracted one push-button space warrior enough to glance at me and lose a few ships to the invading evil empire on the screen. I think I was a little drunk by this point.

Our progress continued through The Two Bridges, The Anchor, and The Ferry Tap. Outside the Queensferry Arms Reid hesitated, then said, ‘Skip this one. Got a better idea.’ He led me a few steps along the narrow High Street to a Chinese take-away where he promised me the best delicacy on the menu.

‘Two portions of curried chips, please.’

‘Curried chips?’ I asked incredulously.

‘Just what you need after a few pints.’

The girl behind the counter served us these with what I dimly thought a patronising smile. Eating the steaming, sticky, greasy messes with little plastic forks, we made our way past a police-station and what Reid described as a Jacobite church, and on up to the last pub, pausing only to dispose of our litter thoughtfully behind a front gate.

We lurched in to The Moorings with breath like dragons’. The girl behind the bar actually averted her face as she pulled our pints. I followed Reid away from the bar into a rear area where wide windows presented a fine view of the Bridge.

The pub was new, fake-old; nautical gear and framed drawings of battleships on the walls. In the course of our travels Reid’s opening shot about the Roman Empire had turned into a long and involved argument about empires generally, with Reid firmly in their favour. He loathed the usual default option for disillusioned socialists, nationalism.

‘See these,’ he said, opening his third pack of cigarettes and pointing at the naval engravings. ‘See them. They, they saved us, right? From the German fascist barbarians. And from good old Uncle Joe, if truth be told.’

‘That,’ I said, trying to steady him in my ‘scope, ‘is a bit of an over-simplified few. View. I’m surprised at you.’

‘So’m I,’ he said. ‘A few years back, there was a display out there, Harriers flying backwards and Sea Kings looping the loop and all that, and I realised I was proud of those guys. Just like I used to be about the heroic Red Army and the Vietcong.’

‘Jesus.’ I was shocked into a passing fit of sobriety. ‘You’re telling me the armed forces of the British state are freedom fighters? I’m sure the Irish have a different story, for starters.’

‘Ah, fuck the Irish,’ Reid said, fortunately not too loudly. ‘I must admit I did have a hang-up about the bold IRA for years. And then they went and turned up their toes, just jacked it in like the fucking Stalinists.’

‘But you always wanted something better than that –’

He glared into his Caledonian Eighty. ‘Even so, I stuck up for the workers’ states. And then they all went down like – like dominoes! I’m not the one who deserted. I mean, my side surrendered, right? So I can do whatever the fuck I like.’

The bell rang for last orders. Reid laughed and drained his glass. ‘Same again?’

‘Yes please.’

He returned with two pints and two shots of whisky. The whisky may have had some responsibility for what happened later.

‘So what do you have to say to that?’ he asked.

‘Schlanzhe…OK, OK. You’re saying you used to admire the other side’s armies, right? So what about all the peace-fighting, eh? What about CND?’

Peace-fighting, CND…something was bugging me.

‘Tactics. The Communists were probably sincere, funnily enough, but as far as we were concerned we saw CND work as running interference for the Russkies.’

‘No shit?’

‘No shit.’

‘Well,’ I said, taken aback at this brazen admission, ‘I must say your new-found patriotism has a suspiciously damascene curve about it, as in going from one misguided view to what seems to be the complete opposite but is actually the same place –’

‘Bullshit. I’m not patriotic. All I’m saying is, we live in a dangerous world and I’m not going to pretend I don’t know whose guns keep me safe.’

‘What about the people on the other side of the guns?’

‘Tough. I’m just lucky I’m on this side. Compared to anything else out there, it’s the side of progress. We’re the camp of the revolution.’

‘Explain yourself.’

‘Because your Yank dingbat libertarian pals are right – the Western democracies are socialist! Big public sectors, big companies that plan production while officially everything’s on the market…sort of black planning, like the East had a black market. Marx said universal suffrage was the rule of the working class, and he was right. The West is Red!’

I had to laugh, not just at the audacity of Reid’s rationalisation but at the grain of awkward truth in it. We explored this theory as we were cleared from the pub and made our way up on to the Road Bridge.

‘Shit,’ Reid said, scrutinising the bus timetable, ‘we’ve missed it. Fucking private companies keep changing the services.’

‘Goddamn capitalist roaders. Let’s get a taxi.’

‘From here? Nah. There’s a hotel on the other side. Let’s phone from there.’

I looked along the bridge’s bright kilometre.

‘Bit of a walk.’

‘Might even be a bar open,’ Reid said cunningly.

‘I’m game.’

We set off, past signs announcing that security cameras watched the bridge at all times. To the north and west there was still light in the sky. Cars and lorries thrummed past, every other minute. The section of the bridge before it reached the river made a slow ascent above streets and backyards and waste ground and the long arms of a marina. There was a high barrier on our left between the footway and the drop to the river, a lower but wider barrier between footway and road. Reid kept to a rapid pace, saying little. About halfway across I paused to light up a black cheroot which had (unaccountably, at that moment) turned up in my pocket.

Something on my mind. Peace-fighting, something to do with…ah!

Not a good time – but then, there never would be a good time.

I hurried to catch up with him.

‘Reid, old boy,’ I said, from behind his shoulder, ‘I have a bone to pick with you.’

His shoulder twitched up. He didn’t turn. ‘OK, man. Whatever.’

‘Well, the fact is, Annette told me about, you know, you. And her.’

‘Oh!’ He stopped and faced me.

I stopped, leaning against the railing. Hundreds of feet below, the water gleamed like hammered lead. Reid fumbled out a cigarette, dropped it, picked it up and lit it.

‘What can I say?’ he said. He spread his hands, swayed, and laid his right hand on the parapet. ‘It happened, what’s the use denying it, and it was my fault, and I’m sorry.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘That’s all you have to say.’

‘You’re…’ He drew hard on the cigarette, cupped glowing in his left hand. ‘You’re a good bloke, Jon. She deserves you. And you deserved better of me. I abused your…hospitality, man. No excuse, except it was just fucking…’

His voice trailed off and he looked away from me, out at the distance.

‘Just fucking?’

‘…obsession, man, that’s the word.’ He laughed harshly. ‘I wish I could say it was just fucking.’

He looked back at me. The smoke was suddenly foul in my mouth. I sent the red ember spinning over the side, and watched its long slow fall.

‘But I can’t,’ he went on. ‘I’m not saying that wasn’t wrong, but there was more than that. I once even tried to get her to leave you, if you can believe that. But she wouldn’t, and she was right, and that was the end of it. Over. And I got over her, and she got over me.’

From that moment I’ve known that I’m capable of murder. He had one hand on the parapet, one at his side still holding the cigarette. He was again gazing into the distance. A grab for the collar and the belt, one good heave, and he would be over. It would have been easy, and I could have done it.

He turned to me. ‘That was when she told you, right?’ There was something of admiration and cunning in his eyes. ‘I know, because that’s when all the right-wing shit started arriving, from the Contras and Renamo and East European emigrés and the KMT and the NTS. Mixing it in with the old commies and the libertarians was a neat trick, but I got the message all right. You know some heavy guys, and they know where I live.’ He laughed harshly. ‘I’ve got to hand it to you, Jon, you had me scared.’

I took a step towards him and punched straight for his mouth. It was a good punch – my childhood boxing-lessons hadn’t been wasted – and he reacted with a hopelessly slow, country-boy, haymaking swing.

But his connected, and mine didn’t. I was slammed against the railing. The top edge hit my lower ribcage and suddenly I was leaning away over it, looking straight down. Straight up, for an unreal moment, as my semi-circular canals turned over and the universe followed them round.

And then I was sick. A Mexican meal, a dozen pints, two whiskies, a portion of curried chips and the tar from a score of Silk Cut and one Mexican cigarillo poured through my mouth and nostrils in a cascade that spattered walkways and ladders and disturbed roosting birds before it fell, with literally sickening slowness, visible all the way, to the water.

‘Are you all right?’

I pushed myself away from the railing.

‘I’m all right,’ I said. I blew a fragment of taco and a gobbet of spicy slime from my left nostril onto my fingers, then balled my fist for another go at him.

His eyes widened, but he was looking past me. Brakes squealed. A van pulled up beside us, on the footpath, not on the road.

The door opened and a man in a boiler-suit leaned out.

‘Come on, lads,’ he said. ‘We’ve been keeping an eye on you two. You look like you could do with a lift.’