Then said Mercie the Wife of Mathew to Christiana her Mother, Mother, I would, if it might be, see the Hole in the Hill; or that, commonly called, the By-way to Hell.

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress

part one

dundee

SOME TIME AROUND the middle of the morning, Alan was wakened by the noise of someone banging somewhere, though he couldn’t tell where the noise was coming from, whether it was outside, or in one of the other flats. It must have been around ten, maybe earlier, maybe a little bit later; he’d lost his watch, so he couldn’t tell what time it was, but there was a cool gold light flickering on the ceiling over his bed, and it was quiet, like that hour-long quiet of mid-morning when people are away at work or the shops. It was usually a good time, this hour when he struggled awake and found the world again, like some toy or game he had abandoned the night before, endlessly puzzling, yet strangely beautiful and, in his half-waking state, the moment would have been perfect, with the warm thrill of the alcohol still ringing in his blood and the watery light of Magdalen Green playing across the wall and ceiling – perfect, except for the noise, a loud banging that he’d thought at first was only a part of his dream. He must have been hearing it in his sleep – that was what happened sometimes, when there were noises outside, or when he turned awkwardly in the night, so his arm would be trapped and aching, and his mind would build the noise or the pain into whatever he was dreaming. Once he’d had a nightmare where someone had come up to him out of nowhere and stabbed him through the shoulder with a sword – the long steel blade passing right through the flesh – and when he woke up the pain was still there. It had taken him a while to realise where he was. He’d even put his hand up, to feel if there was blood. He could still see the stranger’s face: the gleeful look in his eyes, the almost friendly smile as he raised the sword – like the sword Errol Flynn used at the pictures – then thrust it into Alan’s body with all his strength. He’d had dreams like that more than once – dreams where someone came and tried to kill him, with a gun or a knife, and the strangest thing, what disturbed him most and stayed with him afterwards, when he started awake, was the way the killer would always be smiling, as if he thought he was doing him a kindness.

He didn’t want to get up. He wanted to kick off the covers and lie on the bed, with his arms and legs straight out, letting the hangover-feeling seep away, bleeding by degrees out of his body and into the cool air. Most of the time – when there wasn’t any noise – he didn’t really mind the hangovers. He was used to them by now – and besides, it seemed right, somehow, to lie in the warm, alone, acutely aware of his body, of the exchanges of heat and cold that were happening all the time, without his noticing, the tiny movements and perturbations of blood in the inner ear, the ripples of acid or bile in his stomach. To begin with, when he’d first started having these vivid hangovers, he would get desperate and panicky; he would even feel suicidal sometimes, with the ache of shame and fear in his whole body, like a huge, invisible bruise. It was as if he had been held down and crushed, like that king in the play he’d read about in school, the one who had been trampled under a door, so that no wounds would show. It wasn’t so much a pain as an ache, a dullness in which tiny, electrical sensations sparked and crackled across his skin, like cellophane when you crumple it up in a ball and it unfolds again by itself, in tiny shuddering movements. That had bothered him for a long time, but he didn’t mind it now. He knew what was happening, and how long it would last, and it was a good feeling, sometimes, to shift very slightly, or push back the covers, and feel the long rippling shivers running up along his spine. If he could just lie still, in the quiet, he was fine. Maybe it would bother him, that he couldn’t remember much of what had happened the night before, or how he’d got home, and sometimes he had a vague feeling of guilt, with half-memories of something terrible that had happened in the night. Sometimes he woke with the conviction that he had committed some terrible act, an assault, or a murder. It was a ridiculous idea – one part of his mind knew that – but it wouldn’t go away, and he kept seeing flashes of violence in his mind’s eye, things that he had done and blanked out, so he wouldn’t have to face his crimes. Usually, though, he put everything out of his mind and lay still, with his eyes half-closed, listening to the quiet, or the sparrows yammering in the bushes outside his window. Usually he could lie like that for what felt like hours and when he looked over at his watch maybe only two or three minutes had passed. That was the best of it, the way time stretched or folded in on itself. Sometimes it would come to a halt altogether, and that was the best feeling of all, to imagine his life had been suspended, not finished, but held in abeyance, kept in reserve forever, like a soul in limbo. But now, he had lost his watch, and he didn’t know what time it was. It made him feel strangely uncomfortable, as if, by losing the watch, he had lost some sense of himself, some notion of how things were.

He didn’t want to even move, never mind get up, but the banging kept on and on, insistent and dull, somewhere above him. Somebody hammering was what it sounded like. He couldn’t understand why there was always noise around him, in a place like this. There was always somebody hammering, or people shouting, or traffic noise, and it seemed so ridiculous, so absurd, somehow, a whole lot of fuss about nothing, as his mother used to say. He didn’t see the point. People had to keep themselves busy, for no good reason, doing, doing, doing, as if their lives depended on it. Alan swung out of bed and set his feet on the cool floor. He could feel all the bones in his feet, and he was aware of how fragile they were, like fine splints of polished chalk, or bone china. He stood up. He felt light-headed, and it was as if he would never stop rising, as if he was growing taller and taller, into something light, something almost gaseous. Immediately, as if it was connected in some way with his movement, a knock came at the door.

‘Alan?’

He stood very still and listened. It was a woman’s voice, a voice he knew, but he couldn’t place it. It sounded middle-aged, and he had an idea that the woman who owned it was tall and heavy, a little overweight, but good-natured, and pretty in her way, with dark curly hair and tiny dimples when she smiled. The knock came again, longer and louder this time.

‘Alan? Are you there, Alan?’

He lay down and pulled the covers over his face. If he waited, she would go away, and then he could work out who she was. There was a long pause, and he was sure he could hear her listening, even though there was no sound. He could tell that she knew he was in. He could feel her thinking it through, whether to knock again or go away, or maybe just stand there and wait, to see what happened. He tried thinking about something else. He thought, if he forgot about her, if he could prevent himself from thinking about her standing there at his door, she would disappear. He thought about the dream he had had: how he had been walking on Magdalen Green, only it wasn’t really Magdalen Green, because there were tall trees all along one side, and he couldn’t see Riverside, just the light off the firth, and green fields all around him for miles. He had been much younger in the dream, maybe twelve or thirteen. The grass had been very green, with little pockets of blackness here and there, like the darkness of fairy rings. He had been looking for something in the dream: he had his head down, and he was walking slowly, turning from side to side, scanning the ground. He had the idea that it was a key, or maybe some money, definitely something small and hard and metallic, but what he found was nothing like that. When he saw it first, it was just a white shape lying in the shadow of the trees, at the far end of the green. At first it looked like a bird, but after a moment, he realised it was an angel. It was very small, not life-sized at all, like the ones you see in picture books; its wings were spread out on the grass and the feathers were damaged or missing in places. It had little pearl-white hands, with surprisingly long fingernails, more talons than nails, really, like the long nails threaded with blood he remembered from his little brother’s budgerigar. When he saw the hands, he remembered what the teacher had said in class once, how you couldn’t clip a bird’s nails, because there was blood flowing through them, right to the tips. The angel’s hands were like that, soft and white and delicate and full of blood. He couldn’t see the feet, but he imagined they were the same.

The face was half-concealed but he could see enough to know that the angel was unconscious. The face was simple and flat, like the faces of the spirits carved on the gravestones in churchyards. Its mouth looked hungry, the way a new baby looks hungry, and it was making small sucking motions in its sleep. It looked cold, too. He was afraid to pick it up – it bothered him that it was naked – but eventually he summoned his courage and half-carried, half-dragged the fallen body out of the shadow of the tree and into the sunlight. It looked even stranger in the full light. It looked so white and smooth, it reminded him of the time they’d gone to a mushroom farm, on a school visit. He had thought the mushrooms were some kind of trick: they looked too clean, too white to exist, but that was just how the angel looked. Now, in the broad daylight, it seemed unbearably vulnerable, and he knew, if he left it there, it wouldn’t be long before a cat or a dog would get it. He winced at the thought of the claws tearing its soft, lightly fledged skin. He decided he had no choice but to take it home and find somewhere safe to hide it. Then, if it woke up, he could talk to it, and find out where it came from, and maybe it would tell him things, like the future, or what God was like. It was about then the banging had started, and he had looked up, across the green, to see what the noise was. There was nobody there. He had the idea that the noise was coming from the sky, and it had something to do with the angel, and then he thought, if the banging continued, the angel would die. That was the last thought he’d had before he woke: that, and the knowledge that the banging wouldn’t end, and a feeling of helplessness, that he couldn’t do anything about it. As he thought back over the dream, he began to drift. He noticed the banging outside had stopped. Then he was dreaming again and the woman at the door went away, in the dream and in real life, and when he woke up again it was the afternoon.

FROM WHERE HE was lying on the floor, Rob could see the legs of the television stand. They were black, with chips here and there in the paint showing the metal underneath, and they were very thin – too thin, Rob thought, to support the weight of the TV. Slowly, tenderly, aware of his body as a mass of pain and fatigue, he pulled himself up into a sitting position. He didn’t know how he had come to be lying on the floor – he must have fallen asleep there last night, when he came in from the Mercy, so that meant Cathy would have walked around him as she was getting ready for work, and she hadn’t even tried to get him up, or made him a cup of tea, or even bothered to check to see if he was all right before she’d gone out. She would have seen the half-empty whisky bottle and the glass on the floor beside him, the ash-tray full of crushed cigarette butts, his shoes at the other side of the room, where he’d kicked them off, and she had just left him there, as if he was just a piece of the furniture. Which, of course, he was, as far as she was concerned.

After a moment’s pause, and with some difficulty, he stood up. He felt a bit dizzy – he’d felt like that the day before, he remembered – and he went out into the kitchen to see if there was anything to drink. There wasn’t. Outside, Malcolm’s dogs were barking and it felt like the noise was inside him, inside his brain, pushing against his skull, trying to break out. He felt a slight panic, then a stillness at the back of his head that, for a moment, he thought was just another blackout waiting to happen. He needed something. He needed energy. He got a glass out of the cupboard, then turned on the cold water tap and let it run. He still felt dizzy, and there was an empty feeling in his stomach, a kind of butterflies thing, from no food, maybe, and he looked at the clock on the cooker to see what time it was. Twenty past twelve: no wonder he was hungry. He put the glass under the tap, so it filled quickly and flowed down over the sides, then he drank it, gulping it down like a baby. The water was cold and unimaginably soothing, a miracle in his mouth and throat, and he didn’t stop drinking till the glass was empty. He could feel himself thinking, turning things over in his mind, trying to get a hold on his situation. He was grasping at something, trying to recapture a sense of himself as an orderly being, but whatever it was that joined one moment to the next, whatever it was that created the illusion of a logical, manageable existence, was missing. He tried to remember the night before: he had no memory of coming in, or of lying or falling down on the floor; he didn’t even remember leaving the pub. He didn’t remember if Cathy was there when he got in; now, as he looked around him, he was beginning to notice what a mess the place was – things lying on the kitchen floor, knives and spoons and pieces of a broken cup, bits of food and little spillages of whisky and water, dirty dishes scattered all over the units; even the plant pot from the window-sill, Cathy’s sick little spider plant, had toppled over, leaving a heap of dry compost at the rim of the sink – and he couldn’t remember any of it.

As soon as it hit his stomach, the water set off the usual chain reaction: a small tightness, then a ripple of cramps, like tiny waves of teeth, gnawing at the inner tube of his gut. It wasn’t the first time – Rob was almost used to it by now – but the pain was sharper than usual, and that cold feeling came in his head again, till he was scared he would pass out. He walked through to the bathroom quickly and got there just in time: dropping to his knees, he gripped hold of the sides of the bowl and threw up – not food, not even last night’s beer, just a bitter, watery fluid, with tiny, bright spots of red in it, like blood. It didn’t last more than a couple of seconds, and then he was breathing, his eyes closed, fighting off the dizziness and panic. It was strange how this worked now: there were phases in the day, times like this, when he could barely stand, and he vomited bile and blood, or whatever that red stuff was, and then, just half an hour later, he would be okay, sitting in the Mercy, getting down his first nip. He wouldn’t feel great, but he’d be calm, and he’d know things would be better, with the second, or the third drink. That was how it was now. When he was younger, he’d never had any problem: no hangover, never sick, nothing like that. Now, though, what with everything, what with money and Malcolm’s dogs and Cathy nagging at him all the time, he wasn’t as resilient as he used to be.

He threw up again, and this time it was just that bitter fluid, a froth of gas and acid from his empty stomach. He waited a while, but it seemed to be over and, after a minute or two, he walked back through to the kitchen, filled the glass again, and drank more water, taking it in slow sips this time, and pausing between each mouthful, to breathe. That was what it was all about, he thought. It was all in the breathing. He finished the glass and, suddenly, all he wanted was to be out of there, out of the house and into the light of day, to go somewhere and be alone, where nobody could find him. Or he could go to the Mercy. The boys would probably be there by now, wondering what had happened to him. He noticed the sugar bowl, sitting there amongst the plates and cups, and he scooped up a handful of the sticky white cubes, and ate them, washing them down with more water. He was feeling better now. All he really needed was a drink and a cigarette, and maybe some fresh air to clear his head. He walked through to the hall quickly and put on his jacket.

As soon as he got outside and tasted the cool air, he felt dizzy again, and he stood for a moment, leaning against the door-frame, while his head cleared. Some kids were playing up along the street, a couple of girls with a rope, and one fat, sad-looking boy, sitting on the edge of the kerb, watching them. The girls were singing an old-fashioned skipping song – he didn’t think they did that any more, for some reason – a sweet, slightly plaintive song that made him feel sad all of a sudden, though it was a pleasant sadness, like the sadness of summer nights, when you had nowhere to go and you sat out by the river, with a couple of cans of beer, watching the water flow. Like when he’d been with Helen. For the time being, at least, Malcolm’s dogs had stopped barking next door. Rob looked up at the sky; it was a soft grey, like smoky gauze, or the beginning of a mist.

He was closing the door behind him, taking care to turn the key in the lock so it clicked shut properly, when the boy who stayed at Malcolm’s came out, banging the door behind him and setting the dogs off again – a hard, insistent noise that he felt as soft steady blows beneath the skin, definitely beneath the scalp, a physical sensation against the skull. The boy looked at him as he went past, but he didn’t say anything; then, a few yards further on, as he passed the wall of the flats, he stopped, hawked up some phlegm, and spat it out, spattering the wall with a thick, dark line of slime, a knot of mucus, wet and grey, with a life of its own, almost, like the slow creeping life of some mollusc out of the sea, some mussel, or water-snail. The kids all stopped playing to watch the boy pass, but he didn’t take any notice of them. He crossed the road at an angle, then moved up the path to the Perth Road, lighting a cigarette as he went, on his way to the bookies, or the pub. Rob wondered where Malcolm found them all. For as long as he had been living in this house, there had been boys like this one coming and going, boys almost identical to Malcolm, in their black waxed jackets and motorcycle boots, (they never had bikes, they just had the clothes, and the hair), coming in and out at all hours, tormenting the dogs in the night till Rob got up and banged on the walls, shrieking threats at them, while Cathy lay in bed, not saying a word. Malcolm was supposed to be her cousin, though it was a bit of a mystery what side of the family he was on. But then, everything was a mystery as far as Malcolm was concerned. Where his money came from, for example. Some people thought he was dealing drugs, or receiving stolen goods, but Rob figured he didn’t have the basic intelligence even for that.

They had been living next to Malcolm for over two years. According to Cathy, they had been lucky to get the place – she went on about that all the time, how they had been lucky to get it, and how they wouldn’t have done, if Malcolm hadn’t helped out – but Rob didn’t think much of it, especially when Malcolm and his latest wee pal came home late from the pub and sat next door, playing crap music and watching television till the small hours, while the dogs went berserk outside. Of course, even though she went on and on about how nice this place was, and how they could do a lot with it, if they only put a bit of money and time in, Cathy still wasn’t satisfied. What she really wanted was a flat of their own; that was why she kept going on at him to get a regular job, so they could start a mortgage – as if any bank manager was going to give him a mortgage – and buy a nice wee flat, and do it up really neat, with new furniture and pictures on the walls, and nice matching colour schemes, paint work and fabric and carpets, all in soft peach tones, and maybe blues and sea-greens in the bathroom, only not too cold, even if it was the bathroom, you’d still want the colours to be warm, with a bit of red in them. Though as far as mortgages were concerned, she had another think coming. Rob wasn’t about to get trapped in that kind of debt, and he wasn’t going to spend half his life doing up some flat, so she could nag him about keeping it clean and tidy. She wasn’t going to get him into any of that. Anyway, if their current accommodation wasn’t too wonderful, it was only because of the dogs. As he’d reminded himself a thousand times, if Malcolm’s dogs were gone, his problems would all be over. The only problem was getting rid of them. That, and the fact that, if anything happened to these mutts, Malcolm would just go out and get another two.

The dogs were only puppies, according to Malcolm. They were Rottweilers, naturally. Malcolm wouldn’t have been seen dead with anything normal, like a golden retriever, or a Labrador, or something like that – not that it was normal keeping any dog in the town, where it wouldn’t get any proper exercise and would just sit around barking all day. The thing was with Malcolm, he had those dogs because they were the biggest, ugliest breed he could think of – it was a surprise he hadn’t got pit bulls – but whenever he talked about them, he would go on about how gentle they really were, how they used to be sheep-dogs in the mountains somewhere, and how they were great with kids. From time to time, usually when Rob was out, he would come over and see Cathy, and they’d sit there talking about animals and cars, which was all either of them was really interested in. Sometimes Rob would come back for his tea about five o’clock and find Malcolm there, sitting over a cup of coffee and a plate of biscuits like some old wifie, telling Cathy she should really get herself a dog, and how he knew some boy whose bitch just had puppies, or he would be encouraging her to go out and buy a car, as if they had that kind of money, saying he knew somebody who would give her a good deal, if she wanted him to enquire. A couple of times Rob had been on the point of telling Malcolm to keep his nose where it belonged, and out of their business. But he hadn’t said anything, out of consideration for the fact that the boy was Cathy’s cousin. All he wanted, really, was a bit peace.

He waited till the boy from Malcolm’s got to the top of the street and disappeared then, slowly, he made his way up the road, past the kids, who stopped to watch him pass, but didn’t say anything, past the row of tiny gardens, with their patio roses in pots and clumps of lupins, past the piece of waste ground where they were supposed to be developing some new flats. By the time he got to the Mercy, he’d stopped feeling sick, and it was showing signs of rain.

IT WAS LATE in the afternoon, almost evening. The window was still open; Alan could see the sky, pale-blue and grey, with streaks of ivory in places, like the sky in a Chinese painting, half-present, half-erased. The air was cool and soft and damp, pressed against the window, and seeping through the gap, a cool, sweet grass smell, mingled with the coming night, with its dark thread of water and charcoal. He had just come out of the shower, with only a towel around his waist, and he could smell himself, warm and damp, with the hint of Old Spice deodorant and that after-scent everywhere of Imperial Leather soap, and all of a sudden, he was staring it in the face: the cold line of the horizon, the darkening sky, the quiet, banal certainty of death that came from time to time, on evenings like this. It was absurd. He pictured himself, dead; he thought of his body, perfumed with soap and Old Spice, carried into an ambulance, or laid out on an autopsy table, and he saw the utter absurdity of his existence. It was something that happened from time to time, but it didn’t bother him, now. He was almost used to it. As long as it wasn’t too painful, he wanted to know he was dying, when the time came, so he could pay attention, and know what it was like. There was that book he had read, about how it was never easy to die, there was always going to be some pain, unless maybe you died in a coma, or in your sleep, so you didn’t know about it. Yet he had a faint suspicion that, at the last moment, the pain wouldn’t matter, and it would be good, to feel yourself dissolve and slip away. He didn’t believe in life after death. He’d read all those books in the library, about how people came out of their bodies, and maybe walked into a cool, pleasing light, or maybe had visions of Jesus, or their Auntie Jessie, coming to meet them. He was pretty certain it was just like dreaming, that last moment, and maybe people saw those things because that was what they expected to see. Still, it happened, one way or another: you saw something. Or maybe your whole life flashed before you – your whole life, including that last moment, when your whole life flashed in front of you, so everything was repeated, again and again, in miniature, into eternity, like the tiny images in facing mirrors. Maybe there was an afterlife of a kind, but it wouldn’t be what the teachers had told him in school. For one thing, they had always said that animals don’t have souls. That seemed funny to him, because most of his teachers had pets: middle-aged women who had lived all their lives with sly cats, or bristling, affectionate terriers, would deny them a full existence in eternity because of what the man in Rome said. It had been one of the surprising moments of his school years, to recognise this small triumph of dogma over love. According to the Church, the afterlife was for humans: no dogs, no monkeys, no geese, no hedgehogs. It didn’t matter that some people – plenty of people – liked animals more than humans, or that humans were as much animals as anything else. He could imagine old Joe Muir, who had a smallholding at the edge of one of the towns where Alan had gone to one of his many schools, asking for some time off from heaven so he could go back for a day’s work on his land, just to stand amongst his chickens, or step out of the lambing shed at first light, and breathe the cold March air. Old Joe only ever really talked to his animals; whenever he met another human, he clammed up and got all shamefaced. At school, the teachers said heaven would be a place of eternal bliss, because the souls would know God, for all eternity, which made it sound a bit boring, to say the least, and Alan couldn’t help thinking he’d want to smuggle in a coyote, or an armadillo, or even just a couple of goldfish. And when they said there would be no animals in heaven, he wanted to ask if there would be plants, or wire fences, or turnip crops, or weather. Would there be rain, or first snow, or that moment when you came home from the baths and sat down at the table, and your mum dished you up leek and potato soup, and asked you how hungry you were? For years, he could only imagine the afterlife as an infinite cool fog, with islands of thought and movement here and there, where the glad souls shivered with the knowing of God, enduring all eternity like patient jellyfish floating in a lukewarm ocean. Finally he decided, if that was all there was, they could forget it. Maybe there was life after death, but he didn’t see why you had to be the same as you were before. If there really was an afterlife, he thought, let it be the curve of a dry-stane wall as it crosses a field and rises to the summit of a hill, or the smell and feel of a cinema, when the last of the audience has left, and the dust settles in the pale glow of the house lights. Better still, if the soul moves on, let it be reborn, as an armadillo, or a snow bunting, or a pond in the public park, thick with water weeds and frogs’ spawn.

He couldn’t see it though. The only life after death he could imagine was someone else’s life, or maybe a kind of limbo, where some remnant of the soul, a thin tatter of being, persisted, like a difficult stain, or the smell of garlic. He remembered one afternoon, in chemistry, when he was supposed to be investigating the properties of water glass. He was dropping pieces of cobalt and copper salts into the mixture, and watching those wet, animate strings of crystal climb towards the surface when, all of a sudden, he came to a dead stop, and sat down by the window, in the bright sunshine, while Mr Kennedy, the demented science teacher, had descended upon him. For a moment, he had just felt dizzy, sick to his gut; then, while Kennedy stood over him, asking him what was wrong, he felt he’d just caught a glimpse of something, Hell maybe, or eternity, or the ghostly other-world he’d been reading about, in Tales of Mystery and Imagination. It wasn’t the phantom of Ligeia that had crossed his mind, though. It wasn’t that tangible; it wasn’t that susceptible to exorcism. Instead, he had a vague sense of himself as lost – not yet, not then, but eternally, and inevitably, wandering the streets, a danger to himself and others, abandoned by everyone, even his mother, and left to wander the streets, damned to spend his summers camping out along the railway lines, to walk up and down those arteries of grass and buddleia, through cities and junctions, hunting for small animals or picnic scraps thrown from passing cars and trains. And all the time Kennedy was talking: first he’d been annoyed, but now he was really worried – maybe he thought Alan had eaten or drunk something poisonous, or inhaled some dangerous gas, because he took him by the arm and started walking him over to the door. Alan didn’t really know what was going on: he remembered sitting down, in the cool darkness of the corridor now, and the feeling began to go. Mr Kennedy was still standing over him, looking properly concerned, and for a moment Alan felt sorry for him – he didn’t know why, he just felt sorry, for Mr Kennedy, for the whole class, for his mother, for everyone. Somebody came with a glass of water – he seemed to remember it was Theresa McDermott – and he drank it quickly, tasting the hint of something mineral, a hint of iron or copper, mixed with the cold. For a moment, he knew something – even now, years later, he felt that – though, try as he might, he couldn’t remember what it was. Maybe – probably – it was something you couldn’t say in words, so it couldn’t be remembered either, and somewhere in that memory there was a sense that anything that mattered, anything that really mattered, couldn’t be talked about in words, or told to someone else, or even remembered. It was beautiful and sad at the same time. Everybody was going around talking to each other, and maybe even loving each other, and wanting to say how life really felt to them, and they couldn’t, even though they could see and smell and taste it. It was like that, too, with moments like this, when he thought about death, and it didn’t really bother him, he just wanted to know about it, when it came, and have no expectations of heaven or hell, or any kind of afterlife. Other people had those moments too, moments of sudden foreknowledge or insight, but they never talked about them, and Alan felt cheated somehow, because he couldn’t talk about them either. For some reason, he didn’t know why, it wasn’t done. So much wasn’t done, and he had no idea why, and he felt sorry for people, because they decided on this, and they probably didn’t even know why themselves.

It was later than he’d thought. Out on the street, a gang of boys were going by, talking loudly, probably students on their way to the pub. Alan remembered he had told Rob he would be in the Mercy by the afternoon. He knew why Rob had asked him, checking a dozen times in the course of the evening, to make sure he’d got it right – no doubt about it, he would want to borrow some money again. Still, Alan didn’t really mind. You had to help your friends, was how he saw it, just like you had to be loyal to your family, and look after people who couldn’t look after themselves. That was what his mother always said. Only now he was late, and Rob would be sitting there, too ashamed to ask for a sub from Sconnie or Junior, and waiting for Alan to show, so he could get a round in. Quickly, Alan finished drying himself; then he put on a clean white shirt and black Levis. The shirt was a bit creased, but the jeans were all right. He pulled at his collar a couple of times, in front of the bathroom mirror: a surprise, as always, when he looked at himself and saw how thin his face was, how dark around the eyes he looked, how strangely red his lips were against the pale skin. He’d wet his hair in the shower and combed it, but it had already started to spike up, and he ran his hand over the top of his head in a vain attempt to flatten it. He looked like the nervy boy in the children’s story, the boy with the scissors. Struwelpeter. Yet whenever he was away from a mirror, he forgot how he looked; he just thought of himself as being like the others. He stared at himself and the thought passed through his mind that this wasn’t really him. You could never see yourself as you looked to others, or as you really were, in a mirror, because you always put on a face, you always adopted a pose. He kept the stare up for a while, half-smiling at the absurdity of it all, then he turned away, slipped on his shoes and walked out, through the close, to the dark, grass-scented street. He was in such a hurry, now, that he didn’t even look to see if Jennifer was there.

This was the point where the evening started – when the grass on Magdalen Green began to soften and melt into the dusk. Alan liked walking around then – being the outsider, catching glimpses through the windows of people at their tea, or sitting in their front rooms, watching television, or listening to music. His neighbours were strangers to him: in all the time he had lived on Magdalen Yard Road, he had never understood how they existed, what it was they wanted from life, why they would put such an effort into raising their kids and getting on at work. He would watch them, on winter mornings, going outside and starting their cars to warm them up, then going back in, while the exhaust fumes darkened the air, and he wondered what it was that kept them going. There was no feeling of superiority in any of this – if anything, he felt a soft, detached pity for them, and for himself, and a sense of the coldness, the neutrality of the world they inhabited. He remembered reading, once, how some philosopher would take his afternoon walk every day at exactly three o’clock, so regular in his habits that the townspeople would set their clocks by him. It was an interesting idea: to reduce life to the barest routine, to do the same thing, day after day, with no real purpose other than to neutralise the power of chance, or fear, or whatever capacity for damage lived inside his soul. It would have been the habit that mattered, to begin with, the fact of acceding to the monotony of life that he must have felt would somehow protect him; but then, gradually, things would have altered. Instead of a dull ramble around the usual streets, he would have found that every walk was different. Every day, there would be some change in the quality of the light, some new colour, the smell of fresh bread from the bakery, or a gust of wind from the river. Naturally, his route would never have varied. Nor would his pace. Alan admired that: a life full of landmarks, a life of endless detail. It was something to believe in, this life of observed moments – an escape, somehow, from time.

BY THE TIME he got to the Mercy, the others were already there. They were in their usual places, Sconnie and Junior sitting in close, leaning their elbows on the table, Rob set back slightly, looking uncomfortable and out of place. As soon as he saw him, Alan knew he’d guessed right: Rob was short of money and, eventually, would tap Alan for a sub – a tenner, or a twenty, maybe. He’d done it four or five times already and Alan had no expectation of seeing the money again. Someone had just got a round in, so Alan bought himself a pint and a wee one, and sat down.

Sconnie and Junior were in full flow. They had accumulated a whole flotilla of glasses on the table in front of them, and they were telling stories back and forth, while Rob sat listening, holding his pint glass in one hand and sipping at it, his chair pulled away from the table, as if he wanted to make it clear that, on this occasion, he was just the audience. At times like this, Sconnie and Junior had a way of talking as if they were repeating well-rehearsed lines; their stories had the sound of something that has been told a thousand times before – if not by the present teller, then by somebody – even when they were events that had only just happened, snippets of news from the television or the papers that they had gleaned during the course of the day. Alan could never tell what Sconnie or Junior felt about what they were saying – there was no trace of scepticism in their recitations, yet they didn’t seem to attach any significance, other than a vague curiosity value, to these bizarre tales. Nevertheless, telling stories was their favourite pastime – that, and arguing about country music, or playing word games with terms they had come across in newspapers, or specialist dictionaries – outmoded scientific terms, words from Scots, folk words, odd curiosities from Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, or Old Moore’s Almanac.

When Alan sat down, Sconnie was just beginning the recitation of a story he’d read in a magazine somewhere. It was always part of the routine that whoever was telling the story couldn’t – or pretended he couldn’t – remember where it was he had heard it. Sconnie’s story concerned a man who had come home and surprised his wife and her lover in bed; as far as Alan could make out, the events had happened in a foreign country, maybe Spain, or somewhere in South America. The man’s name was José, and the woman’s was Antonia; Sconnie didn’t seem to know what the lover was called. He sat there as he always did, self-aware, his heavy, plastic-framed glasses perched precariously halfway down his nose, as if they were about to fall off at any moment. It was part of the suspense – maybe the biggest part – whenever Sconnie was telling one of his stories. Meanwhile, Junior was listening with his usual bemused, half-incredulous look, smart as always in his pressed black jacket and white shirt, his hair neatly parted. Sconnie and Junior were the same age, and they liked much the same things, but they were as different to look at as you could imagine. It was odd to think of them as friends, but that was what they were – as much friends as any two men could be, who sat in the same pub every day and drank together for six or seven hours.

‘So in walks José,’ Sconnie was saying. ‘And he hears a noise, like somebody’s being murdered somewhere. It’s a couple of minutes before he realises this noise is coming from the bedroom – and then a bit more after that before he realises it’s his wife. Only she’s not being murdered.’

As always, in the course of one of his stories, Sconnie paused for effect, while he took a swig of beer and, as always, Junior pretended to get annoyed at this, shifting in his chair and telling him to get on with it.

‘So,’ Sconnie continued, wiping a smudge of foam from his upper lip, ‘he goes through. And there’s this boy with his wife, giving her a good seeing to. They’re completely away – they don’t even notice José to start with, not until he starts shouting at them to stop. It’s only then, when the other boy gets up that José sees he’s a big bastard, with a body like a weight-lifter, all hair and muscles, and balls the size of a bull.’

Junior snorted. Sconnie ignored him.