There was a thing she did with her eyes: the green coronae streaming, the irises opening into black pools you could drown in.
All I could think of to say was, ‘What’s your name?’
‘Annette.’
‘Jon Wilde,’ I said. ‘Do you want a drink?’ I had drowned, but my mouth was still moving.
‘Pint of lager, thanks.’ She smiled and turned to the table. When I got back Reid was shouting and handwaving something to her over the music and lights. She listened, head tilted, chin on hand. The music changed again, and Reid stood up and held out a hand to Annette. She nodded, downed a gulp of the lager with a quick smile of thanks to me, and away they danced.
‘Somebody seems tae hiv got aff on the wrang fit,’ an amused but sympathetic female voice said in my ear. I turned to find myself looking at a girl with long bangs of red-brown hair out of which her face peeped like a small mammal from underbrush. She was wearing a blouse with drawstrings at the neck and cuffs, a long blue skirt over long boots.
‘Yes,’ I said with a backwards nod. ‘He’s a terrible dancer.’
She laughed. ‘Ah wis talkin aboot you,’ she said. ‘Ah widnae worry. Annette’s a wee bit i a flirt.’
‘She can flirt with me any time,’ I said. ‘Meanwhile, let’s get acquainted, if only to give her something to think about.’
‘This’ll gie her something tae think aboot,’ she said, and astonished me with a kiss, followed by a snuggle up, which with some shifting of chairs and careful pitching of voices enabled us to have a conversation audible only to us. Now and again we heard ourselves shouting as the music stopped while somebody changed discs (not disks, they came later).
Her name was Sheena. Short for Oceania, I later learned.
‘How do you know Annette?’
Sheena grimaced at my choice of topic. ‘Live wi her,’ she yelled confidentially. ‘Work wi her, tae. Wir lab technicians. In the Zoology Department. Whit dae yee dae?’
I told her, and before long was shouting and waving my hands, just like a real scientist. But if the intent was to provoke Annette into showing more interest in me, the experiment failed.
Chill night, no frost, dead leaves skeletal on the pavements like fossil fish. Dave and Annette and Sheena and I paused at the bridge, stared over the parapet at the Kelvin’s peaceful roar.
‘Must be the only feature named after a unit of measurement,’ Reid said. I laughed at that and the girls laughed too.
‘There should be more!’ I said. ‘The Joules Burn! The Ampere Current!’
‘Loch Litre!’
‘Ben Metre!’
‘Or computer languages,’ Reid said as we walked on, the BBC Scotland building on our left, on our right the Botanic Garden with its vast circular greenhouse, a flying saucer from some nineteenth-century Mars. ‘Fortran Steps. Basic Blocks…’
‘Ada Mansions!’
‘Stras Cobol!’
By the time we reached the girls’ flat we’d scraped up Newton Heights and Candela Beach, and I was trying to persuade everybody that all the units were the names of people; for example Jean-Baptiste de Metre, the noted Encyclopaedist, Girondist, and dwarf.
‘Of course after the Revolution he dropped the “de”,’ I explained as Annette jingled for keys. ‘But that didn’t save him, he got –’
‘Shortened,’ said Reid.
‘By a foot.’
‘No, stupid, a head.’
‘Are youse goin tae stand there all night?’
‘Only for a second.’
‘Named of course after…’ I searched for inspiration.
Reid gave me a shove. ‘Come on.’
I went in. Basement flat, big front room, bed, sofa-bed, fake fireplace. Snoopy posters, stuffed toys, girly clutter. Tiny kitchen where Annette was plugging in an electric kettle.
We talked, we drank coffee which only made us feel wilder, Sheena skinned up a joint. Later…later I was in the kitchen, half-sitting on the edge of the sink, while Sheena took charge of another round of Nescafé and the remains of a roach. The door was almost closed, Dave’s and Annette’s voices a steady murmur.
She put milk back in the fridge, leaned on my thigh. I leaned over and parted her fronds and looked at her.
‘Do you want me to stay?’
‘Aye, well, no.’ She passed me the charred cardboard; I sipped, winced and held it under the tap. ‘Ah mean, Ah wid, but Ah c’n see ye fancy Annette.’
‘Wish she could. Wish I’d told her.’
‘Och, she knows. Ah think she’s feart. Yir so – intense.’
‘Intense? Moi? You mean, not like my pal Dave Fight-The-Good-Fight Reid? Likes his easy charm with the labour theory of value, is that it?’
Sheena grinned. ‘Yir no far wrong. See, if he cares enough whit she thinks tae argue wi her, he cannae jist be interested in gettin aff wi her.’
The kettle sang. I gazed at the fluorescent strip above the worktop and squeezed my eyes. Sheena’s weight shifted away and she busied herself with the mugs. I sighed in the sudden aroma.
‘So what am I doing that makes you think I’m coming on too strong? I’ve hardly had a chance to say a word to her all bloody evening.’
‘Dead right,’ Sheena said. ‘Ye talk tae me, and ye say things tae Dave, and aw the time ye look at Annette and smile at whitever she says.’
‘I do not!’
She looked me in the eye.
‘All right,’ I admitted. ‘Maybe I do. I’m sorry. Must seem a bit rude.’
‘It does an aw,’ she said. ‘Still, I’m no blamin you. I started the whole wee game. C’me oan, see’s a hand wi they mugs.’
When I’d finished the coffee I stood up. Dave and Annette were sitting on the floor, leaning against the side of the bed. Dave’s arm was across Annette’s shoulders.
‘See you, guys.’
‘See ya,’ Dave said.
‘Goodnight,’ Annette said. I tried to read her narrowed eyes, to gloss a twinkle or a wink. She looked down.
Sheena kissed me goodnight at the door, with a warmth as sudden and unexpected as her kissed hello.
‘Sure?’ I tried to curve my lips to a mischievous grin.
‘Sure.’ She pushed my shoulders, holding. ‘Yir a nice man, but let’s no make our lives any mair complicated than they are.’
‘Okay, Sheena. Goodnight. See you again.’
‘Scram!’ she smiled, and closed the door.
Tiles to chest-level, whitewash, polished balustrade. Glasgow working-class tenement respectability, not like the student slum I inhabited. I remembered something. I turned back to the door and squatted in front of it, pushed back the sprung brass flap of the letter-box.
‘Dave!’ I shouted.
‘What?’ came faint and distant.
‘After Charles the Second!’ I yelled. ‘Patron of the Royal Society!’
A cloud had descended on the city while I’d been in the flat. At the junction of Great Western Road and Byres Road I waited at a crossing. Heels clicked up behind me, stopped beside me. A girl in a fur coat. She turned, smiling, and asked, ‘How do the lights –? Oh, I see.’ Voice like a warm hand, English upper-class accent. The fur and her hair glittered with beads of moisture. She was going somewhere she wanted to be, confident no-one would dare lay a finger on her: a beautiful animal, perfectly adapted, feral.
‘Terrible fog, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Never seen one like it in Glasgow.’
The lights changed. We crossed, our paths diverging. She went down Byres Road, to that place where she wanted to be, and I walked along Great Western Road, back to my room.
3
The Terminal Kid
It’s raining on New Mars. This is a machine-made miracle, the work of rare devices far away, and of the insensate, botanic power of their countless offspring which turn metal petals to focus faint solar radiation on chunks of dirty ice, flaring their surface volatiles to send them tumbling sunwards, nudged and guided in a precisely calculated trajectory that years later takes them into an atmosphere just thick enough to catch them and carry them down; where with luck they fall as rain and not as fire, and which in any case each bolide’s passage leaves marginally better fitted to catch and contain the next.