‘And not all of them as public as Mr Calloway,’ Gissing agreed. ‘You say you were at school with him, Mike?’
‘Same year,’ Mike answered, nodding slowly. ‘He was the kid everyone wanted to know.’
‘To know or to be?’
Mike looked at Allan. ‘Maybe you’re right. Be nice to feel that sense of power.’
‘Power through fear isn’t worth the candle,’ Gissing grumbled. As the waitress swapped his glass for its replacement, he asked her if Calloway was a regular.
‘Now and then,’ she said. She sounded South African to Mike.
‘Big tipper?’ he asked her.
She didn’t like the question. ‘Look, I just work here…’
‘We’re not cops or anything,’ Mike assured her. ‘Just curious.’
‘Pays not to be,’ she confided, turning on her heel.
‘Tidy body,’ Allan said appraisingly, once she was out of earshot.
‘Almost as tidy as our own dear Laura Stanton,’ Gissing added, winking in Mike’s direction. By way of response, Mike said he was heading outside for a cigarette.
‘Can I bum one off you?’ Allan asked as usual.
‘And leave an old man on his own?’ Gissing pretended to complain, opening the catalogue at its first page. ‘Go on then, off with the pair of you – see if I care…’
Mike and Allan pushed open the door and climbed the five steps leading from the basement bar to the pavement. It had only just grown dark, and the roadway was busy with midweek taxis seeking work.
‘Pound to a penny,’ Allan said, ‘when we go back inside he’ll be bending someone’s ear.’
Mike lit both their cigarettes and inhaled deeply. He was down to four or five a day, but couldn’t quite give them up completely. As far as he knew, Allan only smoked when around smokers – obliging smokers. Looking up and down the street, Mike saw no sign of Calloway and his cohorts. Plenty of other bars they could be in. He remembered the bike sheds at school – there really had been bike sheds, though they were only used for improvised kickabouts. Behind them, the smokers gathered at break and lunchtime, Chib – having earned the nickname even at that early stage in his career – chief among them, breaking open a pack of ten or twenty and selling singles at inflated prices, plus another few pence for a light. Mike hadn’t smoked back then. Instead, he would hang around on the periphery, hoping for some sort of welcome into the brotherhood – an invitation that had never come.
‘Town’s quiet tonight,’ Allan said, flicking ash into the air. ‘Tourists must be lying low. I always wonder what they think of the place. I mean, it’s home to us; hard to see it with anyone else’s perspective.’
‘Thing is, Allan, it’s home to the likes of Chib Calloway, too. Two Edinburghs sharing a single nervous system.’
Allan wagged a finger. ‘You’re thinking of that programme on Channel 4 last night… the Siamese twins.’
‘I caught a bit of it.’
‘You’re like me – too much TV. We’ll be in our dotage and wondering why we didn’t do more with our lives.’
‘Thanks for that.’
‘You know what I mean, though – if I had your money I’d be helming a yacht in the Caribbean, landing my helicopter on the roof of that hotel in Dubai…’
‘You’re saying I’m wasting away?’ Mike was thinking of Gerry Pearson, of emails with embedded photos of speedboats and jet skis…
‘I’m saying you should grab what you can with both hands – and that includes the blessed Laura. If you nip back to the auction house, she’ll still be there. Ask her out on a date.’
‘Another date,’ Mike corrected him. ‘And look what happened last time.’
‘You give up too easily.’ Allan was shaking his head slowly. ‘It amazes me you ever made any money in business.’
‘I did, though, didn’t I?’
‘No doubt about it. But…’
‘But what?’
‘I just get the feeling you’re still not comfortable with it.’
‘I don’t like flaunting it, if that’s what you mean. Rubbing my success in other people’s faces.’
Allan looked as though he had more to say, but natural caution won him over and he only nodded. Their attention was distracted by sudden music, pulsing from a car as it cruised towards them. It was a gloss-black BMW, looked like an M5. Thin Lizzy on the hi-fi – ‘The Boys are Back in Town’ – and Chib Calloway in the passenger seat, singing along. The window was down, and his eyes met Mike’s again. He made the shape of a pistol with his fingers, thumb curving itself into a trigger, drawing a bead on the two smokers. And then he was gone. Mike noticed that Allan had been watching.
‘Still reckon we could’ve taken them?’ he asked.
‘No bother,’ Allan replied, flicking the unsmoked half of his cigarette into the road.
That night, Mike ate alone.
Gissing had suggested dinner, but Allan had said there was work waiting at home. Mike, too, made his excuses, then hoped he wouldn’t bump into the professor later on in the restaurant. Thing was, he quite liked eating without company. He’d picked up a paper from a late-opening newsagent’s. Walking towards Haymarket, he’d decided on Indian. Restaurants didn’t much cater for readers – the lights were usually too low – but he was able to find a table with a wall lamp behind it. In the paper, he read that it was crunch time for Indian restaurants – rice shortages leading to price hikes; tighter immigration meaning fewer chefs were entering the country. When he mentioned this to the waiter, the young man just smiled and shrugged.
The restaurant was pretty full, and Mike’s table was too close to a party of five drunks. Their suit jackets were draped over the backs of their chairs. Ties had been loosened or undone altogether. An office night out, Mike guessed, maybe celebrating a satisfactory deal. He knew how those nights could go. People he’d worked with, they’d often commented on how he never seemed to get quite drunk enough, never seemed completely elated whenever a major contract was concluded. He could have told them: I like to stay in control. Could have added a postscript; these days. The men were on to coffee and brandies by the time his food arrived, meaning that they were getting ready to leave as he asked for his bill. Rising to his feet, he saw that one of the men was losing his balance as he shrugged his arms into his coat. With the diner threatening to back into Mike’s table, Mike held a hand out to steady him. The bleary head turned towards him.
‘What you up to then?’ the man slurred.
‘Just stopping you falling over.’
Another of the group had decided to step in. ‘Did you touch him?’ he asked Mike. Then, to his friend: ‘He lay a finger on you, Rab?’
But Rab was concentrating on staying upright, and had nothing further to say on the subject.
‘I was trying to help,’ Mike argued. The men were gathering round him in a semicircle. He knew how easily these things could turn tribal – five against the world.
‘Well, help yourself right now and piss off,’ Rab’s friend snapped.
‘Before you find your face on the wrong end of a bottling,’ one of the others piped up. The waiters were looking on anxiously. One had pushed open the nearby swing door to alert the kitchen.
‘Fine.’ With his hands held up in a conciliatory gesture, Mike headed for the street. Once outside, he moved briskly along the pavement, glancing back. If they were going to come after him, he wanted a bit of distance. Distance meant time to think, to assess the situation. Risk versus return. He was fifty yards away before the men emerged. They were arm in arm, pointing across the street towards their next destination: another pub.
Probably forgotten about you already, Mike told himself. He knew that he would remember the encounter in the restaurant. In the next few weeks and months there’d be flashbacks, and he would consider alternative scenarios that would leave him the last man standing, the drunks sprawled at his feet. Aged thirteen, he’d got into a fight with a kid in his class and come off second best. For the rest of his school career, he had plotted elaborate revenge scenarios – without ever carrying them out.