GLASGOW

Maddie comes in and orders a chai tea. At the sink, I hear her voice and fumble as I lift a soapy coffee cup. It falls and chimes out, calling attention to my cheeks, reddened with embarrassment, and my half-apron, browned with coffee stains.

‘Hi, Rab,’ Maddie calls.

I wave awkwardly, the broken handle of the cup in my hand.

‘I thought you were singing tonight?’ she asks.

‘I do… I am,’ I say, avoiding the eye of Cesare, my boss. Cesare lets me play two or three songs at the end of my shift as long as the shop isn’t busy and provided the sweeping and mopping has been done to his satisfaction. He’s a stickler for details, is Cesare, and I’m worried that the broken cup might see the last-minute cancellation of the evening set.

‘I’ll see you in a bit, then,’ Maddie says, and takes her tea over to the sofas. The shop is small and full of corners, so she is not in my eyeline, but I can picture her slumping down in the sag of the leather sofa and casting a disappointed eye over the paperback books on the shelf, the gramophone in the corner and the film posters from the 1950s and ’60s that line the walls. Retro chic. I can hear her sigh in the steam from the coffee machine, and the impatient tapping of her fingers in the water drip-dripping into the sink. I look up at the clock: twenty-five minutes until the end of my shift.

‘She is your girlfriend, yes?’ Cesare says, coming over. He stands uncomfortably close. His breath smells of biscotti, sweet and stale.

‘Just a friend.’

‘You are trying to impress her, though?’

I nod, then put my hands into the lukewarm water to rummage around for the broken pieces of the cup.

‘She is pretty,’ Cesare says, not in his usual tone. There is a gentleness to it, almost a wistfulness, so that the word is nearly drowned out by the rasp of the coffee grinder from behind. ‘You must not keep the lady waiting,’ he says. ‘Finish the dishes in the sink and then go and play your guitar.’

‘Th-thank you,’ I manage.

‘And you will pay for the cup from your wages, yes?’

I rush the rest of the washing-up, barely grazing the cups with my sponge before setting them up on the draining board. It takes me only a matter of minutes, then I unknot my apron and lift my guitar. There is a chair set out, in front of an oriental rug that hangs over the rising damp. I do not tune up, or introduce myself. Instead I sit and launch straight into some Leonard Cohen. My fingers, either from sweat or soap, slip and slide from the strings, and my voice creaks and cracks on the high notes.

‘Thank you,’ I say once I’ve finished, in response to the polite scattering of applause. I look over to the sofas and Maddie leans forward to flash me a smile and a thumbs-up. Dragging my hands across the knees of my jeans, I take a minute to tune my guitar and settle myself.

She came to see me play, I think. She came and she didn’t bring Ewan. At that moment, with the knowledge that I have her full and undivided attention, I desperately want to play her something special, something from the heart. I can think of nothing, though. All the covers speak of other people, and all my own songs have echoes of my friendship with Ewan.

I play a King Creosote cover, then decide to play some Dylan. My nerve fails me, though, when I consider playing ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie’ and changing the name. The lyrics might needle some guilt from her about coming to see me without Ewan. I settle on ‘Buckets of Rain’ instead. Then, happy with the borrowed sentiment in my set, I leave my guitar propped up against the chair and make my way over to where Maddie sits.

‘That was great,’ she says, rising. I feel the button on her coat sleeve catching my cheek as I lean in to give her a hug. She smells faintly of sweat. Among the familiar aromas of the shop – the cloying sweetness of vanilla, cinnamon and sugar, and the bitterness of coffee – the sourness of it is not unpleasant.

‘What did you think?’ I ask, as I take a seat beside her, even though she’s already answered that. Then, catching sight of her tea on the table, ‘Was there something wrong with your chai?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘You didn’t drink much of it.’

‘I don’t really do hot drinks.’ She shrugs. ‘Coffee shops aren’t about the drinks anyway. You’re just paying for time. Time to sit and chat, or read, or write… or listen to music.’

‘Right.’ I’m confused for a second, unsure whether to be insulted by her scorn of my workplace or flattered that she’s come in in spite of it, to hear me play.

‘Are you done?’ she asks.

‘Will you walk me home?’

‘Of course.’ I rise to collect my guitar. As I zip up the case, I glance up at the clock and realise that there are still ten minutes of my shift left. I have taken the last fifteen minutes at fast-forward, and now I need to pause and look across to Cesare.

‘When is your next shift, Rab?’ he calls.

‘Tuesday evening.’

‘See you then.’ He winks and clinks a cup on to the top of the coffee machine. ‘Have a nice night, yes?’

As we walk home, Maddie leans towards me and I feel her coat brush up against my jumper. I feel it as keenly as the touch of skin against skin. I am alert and aware of her every movement.

‘Ewan’s a dick,’ is her opening line. ‘Simple as.’

I’m not too sure how to respond. Without speaking, I watch Maddie as she takes out a cigarette. Using her teeth, she delicately tears a strip from around the tip before lighting it. The spare paper is rolled into a tight ball and thrown down to settle against the concrete like a single stray hailstone.

‘Why did you do that?’ I ask.

‘With the cigarette.’

‘Oh, I read somewhere that it makes for a smoother smoke.’ She smiles. ‘You don’t get any paper with the first drag, you see.’

I nod, then look down at the pavement. It’s been raining and there is a reflective sheen to the streets and a freshness to the air. It is a Saturday night and the pubs are casting light, laughter and shouted conversation out on to Great Western Road.

‘Force of habit, really,’ Maddie says.

‘Why is he a dick?’ I ask.

‘He’s just a child…’ She drags on her cigarette. ‘Like, if we’re going to the cinema and I ask him what he wants to see, he’ll just shrug. But then, once we’ve seen what I want to see, he’ll fucking complain about it, you know?’

‘Is that not him complaining about the film rather than about you, though?’

‘Maybe, aye. But there are other things, more intimate things, and he’ll just go silent. And – ’

‘Are you boyfriend and girlfriend?’ I ask, my voice catching.

She shrugs, then goes silent.

‘He’s a good mate, and a good lad,’ I say, aware that I’m trying to convince myself as much as her. I’ve known Ewan since we were five years old. I can’t remember the first time we met, but my mum has a picture of it somewhere: our first day of school. Me in my uniform, grinning, and Ewan in the background, with his bowl cut squint across the fringe, making a pretend camera with his fingers.

‘He’s a good mate,’ I repeat. ‘But, if you’re not happy with him, then… as in, there’s nothing stopping you from…’

‘I don’t think he’d even be upset,’ she says. ‘He’s one of those guys who doesn’t even break stride. Like, there’s this cat who hangs around my mum’s house, right, and he’s only got three legs but he goes off stalking the birds like he’s got all four, and with every step he hobbles and half-falls, but then he forgets again and keeps on going towards the birds with this awkward fucking limp.’

‘What’s the fourth leg in that analogy?’

Maddie looks across at me, then flicks her cigarette down to the concrete. ‘If you don’t know, Rab, then I’m not telling you,’ she says.

I feel as if I haven’t drawn breath, not properly, since I asked the boyfriend/girlfriend question. Maddie is giving me clues, but not enough to work out the puzzle. Soon we will be at her house, up beside Westbourne Gardens, so the next question is crucial.

‘Are you with him?’ I ask.

‘Like, do you mean, have I been with him?’

I shrug. ‘Yes.’

‘I’ve tried,’ she says. No more than that.

‘Right.’ My thoughts are drawn to the evenings spent in my attic bedroom, up at my parents’ house, writing lyrics with Ewan – spliffs and songs – and I remember the reaction of my best friend to the porn hidden among the folders on my computer. The single shake of the head, the lack of a laugh as I made the awkward joke about needing, every once in a while, to strum myself rather than my guitar.

Ewan has an odd attitude towards girls. A mixture of confidence and indifference – the exact opposite of me. On a night out it’s Ewan who’ll chat away – hand on arm, eye-contact – while I stare at the floor. When they show interest in him, though, he tends to go wandering off and leave them with me. He’d make the perfect wingman, really, if I could only get my eyes off the ground.

‘I like him,’ Maddie says. ‘But he’s closed-off.’

‘Not like you,’ she adds, softly.

We are outside her house now, and I wonder what to do next. We have already hugged, so it’s the safe option, but I’m thinking of going for the kiss on the cheek, unusual in Glasgow, just to let her know – without saying it – that I’m… well, that if she –

‘Thanks for listening, Rab,’ she says. ‘And congratulations on tonight. It was great, really.’

She steps towards me, but her face is bowed down towards the ground. She is a foot shorter than me, so her forehead nestles in at the crook of my neck and I feel her breath on the collar of my jumper. The fabric seems to rise to her lips as she breathes in and fall as she breathes out.

Maddie raises her head; I peer down. Maddie on her toes; me bending my knees. Then we are nose-to-nose, eye-to-eye. She tilts her head and I place a hand on her back to draw her closer.

At first, the kiss is dry and tastes of tobacco. I focus on the twitch of her mouth as she smiles, the flick of her tongue. My hand comes up to the nape of her neck, to the shortest strands of her tomboy haircut, and I move my fingers up towards the crown, savouring not only the feel of it but also the sound, a rustling as soft as stirring in the night-time.

The next day, Ewan and Cammy come over to my house. It’s our usual Sunday routine, hanging out in my attic bedroom, listening to music and playing football games on the PS3. All my thoughts are maddeningly, madly Maddie.

When Ewan arrives, I sit and whisper-wish that we will steer clear of the subject, that no mention will be made. Lately he’s been bringing over the early Karine Polwart albums, which is an improvement on the Fairport Convention phase he went through. We listen to ‘Scribbled in Chalk’, then he puts on a Burns Unit album which has Polwart singing alongside King Creosote and others.

After Cammy arrives and we’ve played four or five matches on the PS3 I begin to grow annoyed by the fact that Ewan is still talking about the collaborative nature of Scottish folk music and asking me whether I think it would be worth listening to Joni Mitchell’s back catalogue.

‘You and Maddie, then?’ I say, after scoring against the run-of-play.

‘What about us?’ Ewan replies. His tongue is sticking out from the corner of his mouth, as he frowns in concentration and twists his controller this way and that to get his virtual players to run in the right direction. ‘What the fuck is that? How did you get past him there? It’s fucking cheating; the game’s fucking decided I’m going to lose.’

‘Are you going steady?’

‘Going steady? What is this, ’50s America?’

I think of the movie posters Maddie sat beneath last night: the swooning leading ladies and the moustachioed men supporting them around the waist. I try to imagine Maddie filling the first role then, briefly, wonder what I’d look like with a moustache. It wouldn’t work, I’ve tried it before: it came in thin and blond, and when I tried to darken the hairs with shoe polish I was called ‘smudge’ for a week and then ‘Adolf’ for months.

‘Fine, then,’ I say. ‘Are you going out with each other?’

‘We’re having a good time, just,’ Ewan replies. ‘She’s a real live wire, is Maddie, I’m a big fan of her work.’

‘Has she given you a blowie yet?’ Cammy pipes up.

‘Jesus, Cammy, you’re obsessed…’ I shake my head. ‘Has she, though?’

‘We’ve done some stuff,’ Ewan says. ‘I’ll say no more than that.’

Have you like fuck, I think. You’ve thrown a pebble in the water, mate, and you’re trying to convince us it’s a tsunami.

‘And are you boyfriend and girlfriend?’ Cammy asks.

The question, with its echoes of the night before, makes me wince, but Ewan doesn’t notice because he’s doing some wincing of his own. I’ve just run through to score my second and Ewan responds by throwing his controller across the room and rising to his feet.

‘Let’s get stoned,’ he says. ‘Fuck this game; it’s decided I’m going to lose anyway.’

Ewan is generally a laid-back guy, but he sometimes shows his temper. Like the time, when we were seven, that he thought I was cheating at Monopoly so he launched a terrorist attack against the high-end hotels of London and tore up the financial system. Or when he got so frustrated with Subbuteo – that game where you flick plastic footballers around a felt pitch – that he kneecapped both his centre-forwards and left his goalkeeper’s arm dangling by a thread. We call them his ‘limit-breaks’, these fits of rage, and try to avoid them, or at least tiptoe past them.

We turn off the console and roll a joint. I feel the acrid smoke scour at the inside of my throat as I inhale. I splutter it back out, thinking of the time my mum climbed the ladder and knocked on the hatch door just seconds after I’d taken a bong. As I opened the hatch, my mum sniffed questioningly at the fug of smoke and asked what it was. ‘Erm… um…’ I replied, my thoughts slow. ‘It’s the smell from the computer monitor overheating: the dust burning in the vents.’ She accepted it without further comment.

‘Did I ever tell you – ’ I begin.

‘The story about the computer monitor overheating,’ Ewan finishes the sentence. ‘Yes.’

Cammy laughs. ‘It’s like your go-to story, Dildo, every fucking time.’

‘Right.’ I smile, but I’m wary now of saying anything else in case it is just a repetition, in case everything is unoriginal. I’m paranoid I’ll get pelters for whatever I come out with. So, instead of speaking, I switch off the music and lift my guitar.

Usually, over a weekend, I’d record at least one track to upload online. Just a cover. At first, it was all the old folk songs that my Uncle Brendan taught me. Scottish airs and American blues. Then, about a year ago, I played Bob Dylan’s ‘Masters of War’ and Ewan edited a video to go along with it that showed still images of the aftermath of drone strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It got close to seventy thousand views.

After that, I did a cover of Ewan MacColl’s ‘Dirty Old Town’, with some pictures of Glasgow that Cammy took, and a version of Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land Is Your Land’ with a still image of the Saltire flag. Ewan suggested we change the lyrics to Scottish place names and that, but I struggled to rework the later verses about dust and deserts so I kept to the original in the end. It still got a few thousand views.

Today, though, I don’t play protest songs. Instead, I start a succession of chords. It sounds good, so I play it again. And again. Again. And then Cammy begins drumming on the floor with a pen and Ewan picks up the old acoustic with the missing B string and plays the only two chords he knows – G and C major – over and over.

‘Someone fucking turn on the laptop and record this shit!’ Cammy says.

‘You do it,’ Ewan says.

‘I’m keeping the beat. You’re the one doing shite-all, you do it.’

‘No, I’m – ’

‘You do it, Ewan, quickly,’ I say, feeling as if there’s something momentous, some musical epiphany about to occur and that, if we don’t capture it, I’ll spend the rest of my days picking at my guitar trying to recreate it.

Ewan lays down the acoustic – ‘Fuck sake!’ – and makes his way over to the computer. The way he slams his fists down on the desk like a toddler having a tantrum causes Cammy to look at me and laugh, and we lose our rhythm for a moment, but we regain it by the time Ewan has everything set up and is ready to hit ‘record’.

‘Now,’ Cammy says, straight-faced, ‘you sure you can remember your chords, Ewan?’

‘Fuck you,’ Ewan says. ‘Fuck you. At least I’ve got an instrument; you’re drumming with a fucking pen, mate. The only thing you have is a bloody biro and you think you’re changing the world. Well, you’re not, OK? You’re fucking not.’

He’s started recording before he’s finished ranting, so the tail end of his outburst will be over the start of the track, but I decide that it’s easier to edit it out later than to get him to begin again. Besides, there’s a false start on ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’, so it might even be worth keeping in. Closing my eyes, I wait for the regular G-C-G-C plod from Ewan to start up again and then start singing. The lyrics come easily.

‘I spied you through the undergrowth… and you spied me… but it wasn’t for him, no, it wasn’t for him to see…’ I bite at my lip. ‘You came to find me, to hear me sing… and you stayed for tea… but it wasn’t for him, no, it wasn’t for him to see…’

‘It wasn’t for him to see,’ Cammy repeats, in falsetto. I ignore him.

‘I kissed you on the long walk home… and you, you kissed me… but it wasn’t for him, no, it wasn’t for him to see…’

The drumming has stopped. The G-C-G-C has stopped. I also trail off. I keep my eyes shut, though. I’ve gone too far. I’ve basically just confessed, in song, to kissing my best mate’s girlfriend. Fucking ridiculous thing to do, like something from a bloody opera, or one of those teen-shite movies set in an American high school.

I open one eye. I’m expecting to see an acoustic with a broken string flying towards me, or at least a fist. I’m expecting a limit-break from Ewan. There’s no acoustic, though – no fist. Instead, Ewan is spread out across the futon squirming and writhing as if in agony. He’s trying to laugh, but it’s coming out in gulps and dry heaves. Cammy watches him and alternates between frowning and bursting into these wee chuckles of bemused laughter.

‘I thought it sounded good, man,’ Cammy says to me. ‘Not bad at all.’

‘It’s not… it’s not…’ Ewan gasps. ‘It’s not the song… it was the fucking… the fucking falsetto… from that ballbag…’ He points at Cammy and drags in a deep breath. ‘What the fuck was that meant to be?’

I grin, then laugh. ‘The lyrics were good, though?’

‘They were fine.’ Ewan is gathering himself, wiping at his eyes. ‘They were fine. It was just that biro ballbag over there.’

Cammy opens his mouth, but I speak first.

‘We start again, then,’ I say. ‘With no backing vocals from Cammy and no laughter from Ewan, OK? Try to keep to the rhythm. I really feel like I might be on to something here.’