‘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.’