Fractions (47 page)

 

At the same time as Myra and I were carefully, and in her case successfully, not falling for each other, I'd fallen for Reid. There's the love that (no thanks to God) now dares to shout its name, and there's another love that doesn't know what its name bloody
is
, and this was it. Our minds came together like magnets, with a clash.

Reid was stocky and dark, with well-proportioned Celtic features; I was tall and wiry, with hair I kept cropped to disguise its thinness even then, and a nose that had always had me cast as a Red Indian when I was a kid. Reid was gauche, I was suave; but Reid's awkwardness was something he shrugged off, and rose above with a kind of grace, whereas I felt every social occasion a constant test of wits. Reid's parents were religious – Free Kirk – and had done their best to inculcate the same principles in him; mine were staunch Marxist materialists, but had taken a laissez-faire attitude to my philosophical education. At times, for all Reid's accounts of questions answered by clips around the head or floods of tears, I felt that his parents' firm line had shown the deeper concern for his welfare.

Reid was a communist, I a libertarian; but he had a prickly independence of mind, a dogged tendency to worry at difficulties in the doctrines his sect espoused. I sometimes suspected I had too easy a scepticism, too catholic a confidence that my shaky pile of books by Proudhon and Tucker, Herbert and Spencer, Robert Heinlein and Robert Anton Wilson was building up to a reliable launch-tower of the mind.

Another thing I liked about Reid was that I got drunk faster with him than with anyone else; hence, the Friday evenings.

 

Reid and I talked some more about ‘the computers taking over' (which was how people talked back then about the Singularity), then moved on to the current
New Scientist
article on catastrophe theory, about which Reid was sceptical (‘like a bourgeois version of dialectics', was how he put it). After science, politics: the hot topic was Portugal, where the far left had just over-reached itself in what looked like a cack-handed attempt at a military coup.

‘There's a good article here about it,' Reid said, digging out from inside his jacket a copy of
Red Weekly
, the newspaper of the International Marxist Group. ‘Slagging off what
Socialist Worker
has to say. Well, I haven't read it myself yet, but it looks good.'

‘OK, OK,' I said. ‘I'll buy it. Sectarian polemic is one thing you guys are good at.'

‘We'll get you in the end,' Reid grinned as I bought the paper.

‘Or I'll get you,' I said.

Reid shrugged. ‘That's not how it works,' he said. He started rolling a cigarette, talking in a tired voice. ‘People don't stop being socialists and become something else. They just become
nothing
, or join the Labour Party – same difference.'

‘
I
stopped being a socialist,' I pointed out.

‘Yeah, but that's different, come on. It'd be like me saying I stopped being a Christian. It was just something I was brought up to, and as soon as I started thinking for myself I dropped it. Same with you, right?'

‘Maybe,' I said. ‘Mind you, it was never shoved down my throat every Sunday.' But I uneasily remembered how little it had taken – some anarchist summary of Tucker, I think – to precipitate every doubt I'd ever had about my inherited faith.

‘I hope I always understand things the way I do now,' Reid went on, ‘because it makes sense, it's ahead of anything else on offer. But if I ever forget, or you know, lose the place –'

‘Or realise you've been wrong all along.'

‘– all right, that's how it'll seem, that's what I'll tell myself –'

He grinned sourly, his tongue out to lick his Rizla, giving himself a momentary diabolic, gargoyle appearance. ‘But if that ever happens,' he finished, rolling the cigarette up and lighting it, ‘I'll be damned if I become an idealistic fighter for the other side. I'll just look out for myself, one way or another.'

‘But that's what I believe in right now!' I said cheerfully. ‘Look out for number one. I'm not an idealistic fighter for anything.'

‘That's what you think,' Reid said. ‘You're an anarchist out of pure, innocent self-interest? Oh, sure. Face it, man, you
care.
You're a socialist at heart.'

I liked him enough, and he said it lightly enough, for me not to be offended.

‘Nah, that's not how it is at all,' I said. ‘I really do have a selfish reason for wanting a world without states: I want to live forever. Seriously. I want to make it to the ships. A planet occupied by organised gangs of nuclear-armed nutters is not my idea of a safe environment.'

Most people laughed at me when I said this, but Reid didn't. One of the things we had in common was an interest in science fiction and technological possibilities, which fitted right in with the rest of what I believed. In theory it fitted in with Marxism too, but I knew that Reid's comrades regarded it as ideologically unsound, as if the only far-out futuristic speculation allowed was the IMG's latest perspectives document. His stacks of
Galaxy
and
Analog
were stashed in a cupboard of his bedsit, like pornography.

‘It seems a bit much to expect,' Reid said. ‘We picked the wrong century to be born in. I reckon we'll just have to take our chances like the rest of the poor sods.'

I held my cigarette at arm's length and looked at it. ‘And we're not doing much for our chances.'

‘I see it as a race with medical science,' Reid said. ‘Mine's a pint of Export, by the way.'

I noticed our empty glasses and jumped up, contrite at not noticing sooner. When I came back Reid was deep in the paper he'd sold me, and I wasn't sure I wanted to push the conversation farther at the moment, so I leaned back and let my mind drift for a bit. The place was filling up. The juke-box was playing Rod Stewart's ‘Sailing', a song which always incited in me a maudlin exile patriotism for a country which had never existed, as if I'd been a citizen of Atlantis in a previous life. When it finished I flipped out of the mood and looked around again, and I noticed that Reid's paper had another reader, who was sitting beside him and leaning forward, her head tilted to read the back page. Her curly black hair was tumbled sideways around her face. Black eyebrows, eyelashes, large green eyes moving (slowly, I noticed) as she read, small neat nose, wide cheekbones from which her cheeks, neither thin nor plump, curved smoothly past either side of full (and unconsciously, minutely moving) lips, to a small firm chin.

Her gaze flicked from the page and met mine with an unembarrassed smile. I felt a jolt so physical that I didn't even associate it with an emotion. And then Reid lowered his paper and looked at her. She sat back up, and now she did look slightly embarrassed. She was with a bevy of other girls who'd commandeered the next table along, and the rest were talking amongst themselves.

‘Well hello,' Reid said. ‘Are you finding it interesting?'

‘I've never seen anything like it,' she said. ‘I don't understand how anyone would want to support strikes.' She had a west coast accent, but – like Reid – she was speaking an accented English, not Scots like the native Glaswegians did. Probably from down the Clyde somewhere then, Irish or Highland: ESL a generation or two back.

‘It's a socialist paper,' Reid said. He glanced at me, as if for support. ‘We support the workers, you know?'

‘But the
government
is socialist,' she said, sounding indignant. ‘And they don't want strikes, do they?'

‘We don't think the Labour government is socialist at all,' Reid explained.

‘But isn't it bad for the country, when people can go on strike and go straight on social security?'

‘In a way, yes,' said Reid, who would normally have lost patience at this point. ‘But if what you mean by “the country” is most people living in it, right, then the problems we have don't come from workers going on strike, they come from the bosses and bankers doin' business as usual. They're the ones who're really
costing the country.
'

‘You have a funny way of looking at things,' she said, as an explanation, not a question. She dismissed the matter and switched her attention to more important concerns. ‘Are you going down to the disco later?'

‘Yes,' I said, before Reid could make another attempt at political education. ‘Are you?'

‘Oh aye,' she said. ‘Maybe I'll see you down there.' She flashed us a quick smile before being tugged back into the conversation with her friends. I stared for a moment at where her hair fell over the shoulders of her plain white shirt. The shirt was tucked into tight blue jeans, and her feet into high-heeled shoes. Her clothes and, now I came to think of it, her make-up looked too neat and normal for a student's. Same went for her friends, some of whom were dressed similarly, some in posh frocks.

‘Well,' I said as Reid caught my eye, ‘as chat-up lines go I think that one needs working on.'

‘You could say that,' he admitted. ‘Still, she didn't give me much of a chance.'

‘You shouldn't have had your nose in the damn' paper in the first place,' I told him.

Just after ten o'clock, we both moved fast as the girls left, lost them in the queue but managed to grab the table nearest to theirs.

 

‘Do you want to dance?' I shouted. UV light caught the nylon stitching in her shirt, a visible-spectrum strobe caught her nod. That dance was fast, the next slow. We had our hands lightly on each other's shoulders at the end. I looked down at her. ‘Thank you,' I said.

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.