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Square sausage? She was frowning, but not unkindly, not hostilely, not at all, this lass of not quite tender years.

It’s a delicacy of Scotland.

You what. .

It’s actually a delicacy, a flat slice of sausagemeat approximately 2 inches by 3, the thickness varying between an eighth of an inch and an inch. . making the movements with both my hands to display the idea more substantially.

The girl thinking I am mad or else kidding her on in some unfathomable but essentially snobby and elitist way. It’s fine, I said, just give me one of your English efforts, these long fat things you stuff full of bread and water — gaolmeat we call them back where I come from!

She was still bewildered but now slightly impatient.

Glasgow sausage manufacturers could earn themselves a fortune down here eh! Ha ha.

Yeh, she said, and walked off to the kitchen to pass in my order.

But at least she had answered when spoken to and not left me high and dry. When you think about it, imagine having to take part in such a ridiculous conversation! And yet this is how so many parties have to earn a living. One time I was aboard a public omnibus and dozing; it was a nice afternoon and the rays from the good old sun streaming in the window there. An elderly chap of some seventy or so summers sat nearby. The bus was fairly empty. The driver, a rather brusque sort of bloke I have to confess, and taking it slowly in an obvious attempt at not gaining time. At one point he stopped altogether and applied the handbrake and he sat there gazing ahead, his elbows resting on the steering wheel. Suddenly the elderly chap turns at me and he has to lean threequartersway across the damn aisle so you thought he was going to fall off his seat! He gesticulates out the window in the direction of a grocer cum newsagent shop. You see that there, he says, that shop there, he says, you see it?

Yep.

Well there used to be a cigarette machine stood there, right outside the door.

Is that right?

Aye. He nodded, giving a loud sniff of the nose, then sat back again without further ado. From the way he had performed the whole thing he was obviously a nonsmoker. But even this deduction is a boring try at producing something not so boring from something that is utterly beyond the defining pale even as a straight piece of abject boredom. If the old fellow had simply leaned over the aisle and whispered: Cigarette machines. . just starkly and in a low growling voice and left it at that, well, I would still at this very moment in my life be incredibly interested in just what precisely the full set of implications

The lass returns the lass returns!

Tea or coffee?

Tea please; and make it two thanks, one just now and one during. Mirs, the age of sauce the age of sauce!

She did not reply to that last bit though, mainly because I managed to stop myself saying it out loud thank the Lord.

A player

He didnt want to start in on something else; he didnt; and it was very important that he didnt; it was in the nature of things, being quite close to dying, which was what he was wanting, he was wanting to die, quite soon, he didnt want to wait too long. It was not something he was taking pains to conceal either. How the hell should he? Let it out into the open air, right into the atmosphere and let them see; let it all out and just let them see and then they could know and maybe understand, if that was ever possible but he doubted it. It made his breathing come shallower and it rasped, thinking about how they took it. All of them. So let them just know about it. Not to hide any of it. Nothing.

It was maybe something in the way he had been living since old Fiona died, but that wasnt long ago and he had been operating like that in the playing days anyway, all these last years. He was sick of it, he was right sick of it, sick to death of it. He was good. He was. He didnt need no cunt to tell him. Good or bad. He didnt need it, he didnt fucking care — never had and never would. So he was no about to start in on something else either neither he was, no now. Nothing like that at all. God sake. How the hell should he?

It could have been a thing other folk saw as a character trait maybe, some sort of integral bit of his character or something but he couldnt care bloody less. He just felt himself he was himself, his own man, and that was that, that was bloody that. It made him angry, just to think about it.

The bloke sitting at the table behind him with the plate of egg and chips. Then the old Chinese woman who served, waiting for him to order his whatever it was — Spanish omelette, egg-and-noodle roll — but he wasnt going to order nothing. Nothing. The very idea made him sick. And them two wee girls that lived round the street were up at the counter buying chocolate to take back to school. Old Fiona had been good with them. All kinds of weans. She had been good with them, she would have made a nurse, or a teacher in the primary schools or if she had had kids herself, grandchildren, she would have been good with them, reading them stories and being patient with them when they done their mischief, no getting ratty the way he would have if it had been him, if he had been a grandfather — which maybe he was because there had been other women besides old Fiona; there still was, there was Maggie. The bloke sitting behind looked at him out the corner of his eye. Because he was talking to himself. His lips not just moving but the vocal chords as well. It was like all of him was moving now out in the world, nothing being concealed any more, out it all went with a snap of the fingers. This was him close to dying at long last bring out the trumpets he felt like bashing it out. But he knew it, he knew it, he bloody knew it. It made him feel good. He didnt fucking give a fuck.

Also the newspaper the bloke had noticed and was gesturing at wanting to borrow, from him, his newspaper, that was what it was. He smiled a polite smile and wet his lips and the sores inside his mouth, his gums perhaps got some disease the way he was always getting them sores, like wee volcano mouths, what was it, he was wanting, the bloke, the newspaper, he was wanting the newspaper off him. It was about something he was being asked also, he was being asked something, what the hell, and he said yes to it, whatever it was, he was asked, maybe no even asked, maybe saying yes and no even getting asked. It was about the horse racing, the newspaper for the horse racing. The bloke was asking him about the horse racing, horses that he was betting.

The wee lassies had went away back to school with their chocolate, wee Pakistani lassies, what was it he was wanting to know, the bloke, it was about a horse he was doing and was asking him about, he didnt know, didnt know about them, not the first thing, horses, he never had the interest, it didnt was something he did at all, it was politics as well, the horses and the betting, the maharajahs and the billionaires, he couldnt be bothered with it, lot of shite, the way it stopped folk from using their loafs

like in the early days when the promise was there and the whole bloody world would have heard about them except they were just young, just so young, behind the ears, what could they do, getting ripped off, nothing, they couldnt do nothing, not properly, not just by theirselves, if they had had somebody, somebody just to let them know the way things were, somebody that could have showed them how to use their loaf, that would have done them, if they had had that.

He glowered at the bloke, steady, studying him, the way he was reading the newspaper and at the racing page, just the way he was looking at the racing page, reading it while he was digging a chip into the yolk of the egg: he was comfy, he was sitting there comfy. This is what it was. Just sitting there comfy. A lot of blokes as well, young yins especially, that was like what they did, they took things, your newspaper, anything, they took it — they took your stuff, the arrangements, the way you did things, when you did things they took it, you had to learn how no to bother, if they took it and made it for theirselves. You learnt that. He never minded it it was the way of the world, that was the way things were so why worry, young folk and old folk how they watched and just watched, so that you were best laying everything out, getting it all out and in the open and let them see, just let them see, without having secrets, like Bill Broonzy telling Guthrie just to Steal it, Steal it. Because he wasnt going to give it but you could just take it. No time no time, no time, for that kind of thing.