Christine gazed at me levelly, blue eyes, honey skin, long blonde hair all tangled. 'Wow,' she said.
'We play on that; we have you crucified on stage!' 'Oh, thanks.' She nodded.
'I know!' I laughed. 'We have you on a giant guitar; you lie on the neck, and it has a sort of cross-brace ... no, there are two ordinary sized guitars forming the cross-piece of the cross. That's it! You start out on that, lying down on it, in the dark, and then you're levered up to vertical, as the lights come up, and you're hanging there on the cross, crucified, then you jump down, taking one of the cross-piece guitars with you, and you launch into the first song!'
Christine snorted, threw herself down on her back, hands behind her head, staring up at the brightly grey plaster of the long, high-ceilinged room. 'Yeah, that would offend a few people,' she agreed. 'Still a bit subtle, all the same.'
I shrugged. 'Images stick. It would work. I'd suggest we actually try it, but they'd lynch us.' I came down beside her, put my arms round her, cradled her.
'Well, they might lynch me,' Christine said. She arched her back; my fingers fell into the muscular hollow her spine left as she flexed herself towards me.
'Aye, well; we cannae be havin that noo, can we, lassie?' I laughed. Still cradling her, I shook her, carefully, always fearful of hurting her.
'No, indeed.' She brought her arms up to my neck. Her entangled blonde hair slid across the white pillow like gold chains over snow (and for a fleeting instant, I thought Suzanne takes you down...), before we kissed.
She got in touch, four years later, to ask me whether I'd mind her using the idea in her stage act; she was in the process of forming her own band, La Rif, and was getting ideas for the stage show together too. I told her she was welcome to use it. I wish I could say I also told her to be careful, to think twice, that it was a silly idea, not serious... but I didn't. I was chuffed; I thought how wonderful it was to have such extensive influence, to have old throwaway ideas fall on fertile ground and bring forth fruit. And I was gleeful, thinking how it would outrage those I despised.
At the time Christine got in touch, Davey had been dead for a couple of years; I had only just started work again, on my own album, after nearly eighteen months of doing not very much of anything at all; it never crossed my mind that Christine would be in any real danger from the stage act. I don't know why, because it should have; maybe Davey's death was still too fresh and I just didn't want to think about anything like that. So I encouraged her.
The reaction was pretty much what you'd expect. Incredible publicity, of course, but mouth-foaming vilification from the moral majority and the megabuck TV evangelists; some southern states wouldn't let Christine appear at all, others would only let her play if she didn't do the guitar-Christ act. Death threats, too, of course.
So who's a guilty boy, then?
Ah, bugger it aw; Ah'm awa tae dae awa wi masel.
Jesus, what else was there for me? I'd been saddled with my great, hulking, graceless body and a face fit for pantomime, I'd been born poor and clumsy and too nice or too weak to be a businessman or a successful crook, so that I could have been forgiven for giving in then, and accepting the type-cast role life seemed to have waiting for me; local freak, somebody people threatened their children with; I could have done my best in a proper job and spent the rest of my days getting nowhere but being a great help to my mates and being called the Big Yin and never scowling when people asked me, What was the weather like up there? or, What cathedral had I fallen off? and maybe I'd have found somebody who loved me and I could love or maybe not, and fathered lots of little ugly kids, but I didn't.
I'd tried to do something more impressive, more memorable, and for a good few years there I thought I'd been doing all right. I'd clawed my way out of being an ugly nonentity and established myself as an unhandsome star; I'd made money, I'd been places and done things and amazed people and pleased them, and I'd scandalised a few too. I could do good things, I could be something else than what seemed to be inevitable. I could create grace, I could compose grace, even if I couldn't be graceful myself.
But every time I thought I'd proved that, something happened to wipe it all out, and I was left in the wreckage, surrounded by the dead and broken dreams, and staring, appalled and confounded, at the proof of my own infectious, terminal, clumsiness. I was the ghost at the feast, the angel of destruction, the kiss of extinction. Marked out for bad luck, like some poisonous insect which advertises its lethal chemistry to potential predators with bright, outrageous colours. I'd cheated; I'd made my own good luck, overpowered that natural signal, ignored that uniform... and unknowingly had shifted the bad luck on to others, so that they suffered in my place.
I walked through the city to Great Western Road, and took a bus there for Old Kilpatrick. It seemed important to walk, or catch buses, or try to hitch a lift; I didn't want to take a train or hire a tax-i; I wanted to start then and there, walking, and just keep going, my journey unplanned but determined, only my destination set and definite.
Maybe it was just a sort of hopeless nostalgia, remembering the time, in my early teens, when a gang of us from Ferguslie had bussed and hitched this way, heading for... Crianlarich, Oban, Mull; however far we could get before our money ran out. We ended up camped on the banks of Loch Lomond, shivering in the rain with our good shoes caked with mud, wondering if there was a hotel bar nearby which wouldn't throw us out.
Whatever. The wet pavements, the north wind, the palely gleaming buildings and the bright, busy sky took me to the great broad road which led over the hills and down the banks of the river and far away. I sat on the bus, not really thinking, but feeling frozen, stuck, rusted up inside.
I watched the faces of the people in the bus, and I listened to their talk. They seemed like real, proper, normal folk and I was the weird one all right, I was the freak. Their lives, with all their diversity and complexities, for all their sudden changes and surprising additions and omissions, must have been of the ordinary stuff, the standard fare.
Mine seemed then to have been even more grotesque and deformed than I'd feared in my darkest moments. The world belonged to these people. I had had colossal effrontery contaminating it with my presence for this long; now was time to pay, now it was time to admit life had been right and I'd been wrong all the time, and dispose of this mutant frame, put to rest this twisted, alien monstrosity.
I felt tired, as the bus moved through the suburbs and the people got on and got off and the day moved from fair to showery and back again. At Old Kilpatrick I must have been dozing; the bus stopped, jerking me awake, and I found myself there, almost in the thin shadow of the Erskine Bridge, by the side of the river. There were low hills and trees on the south bank, and higher steps of grass and stone scarps beyond the houses of the town and the road I was heading for, on the north side.
Hitch-hiking has a lot in common with fishing. I'd forgotten just how brain-numbing hitching could be; any other time I might have been exasperated. Right then, the very zombifying tediousness of it came as a relief. I stood, I watched the cars and vans and trucks join the boulevard heading west; I kept my arm out and thumb up, and tried to look as sane, unmenacing and non-homicidal as I could. So I must have amused a fair few drivers even if, over the course of a couple of hours, none of them stopped.
I left the roadside for the leaky cover of a tree when a shower came on, shivering a little in my great dark coat and thinking in a vague, distant sort of way how ironic it was, to be sheltering from a little drizzle, when I was intending to drown myself in the sea just as soon as I got there. The shower passed, the traffic went on, the cloud-tangled sun fell gradually across the sky towards the firth and the mountains of Argyll.