GLASGOW

The birthday dinner is a smokescreen. With much tutting and straightening of ties, my mum bundles us into a taxi and directs the driver to Kessington Hall, on the road out to Milngavie. Not the Italian restaurant on Byres Road.

By the time the heavy doors are swung open and the lights are flicked on, the shouted ‘Surprise!’ is a little redundant. Sure, I stare as if I’ve been caught unaware by a flashbulb and I shake my head in amazement, but by that stage it’s about assessing who’s bothered to turn up for my joint eighteenth/leaving-do.

There’s a table of relatives, including Uncle Brendan and his lot of children and grandchildren; then a group of dad’s work colleagues, all carefully inspecting the labels on their beer bottles as if expecting to unearth previously undiscovered ingredients; and a clutch of my mum’s gathered gossipers, mostly neighbours and old dears she’s adopted on her daily rounds of the supermarket aisles. All these partygoers are to be expected – they’re duty-bound, by the blank squares on their calendars, to accept any invitation – but I’m surprised to see the table of my mates over by the raised platform of the stage. Gemma is not a shock, nor Teagan at a push, but the sight of Ewan and Cammy causes me to take a step back towards the door. It takes a moment to realise that I can’t be intruding, can’t be an unwelcome guest, at my own surprise party.

All in all there are probably a couple of dozen folk. They don’t really seem to be mingling, but their paths are at least crossing en route to the bottle bar over by the back wall. As my dad comes back from his own trip, and places a beer in my hand, I scan the room for Maddie. She doesn’t fit neatly into any of the tabled groups, but I’m hoping that I might have missed her standing over in a shadowy corner or hiding by the coat racks. ‘No Maddie, Dad?’ I ask.

‘Could Maddie not make it?’

‘You’d have to ask your mother.’

I could make my way over to where Mum is talking to the bloke who comes fortnightly to clean our windows, but I shrug instead. After all, Maddie already cried off from the cover story – saying she thought it was better, in the circumstances, if she didn’t come out for the meal – so it’s foolish to think she’d be crouched in a cardboard cake or seated in front of a bulb-framed mirror preparing for a sultry rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’.

We formalised the break-up two days ago, on the afternoon after the 3.17am phone call. She formalised the break-up. In Kelvingrove Park, with a picnic suitable for my hangover – two bags of crisps and a can of Irn-Bru. Nothing wrong with keeping in touch, she said, but better for the two of us to do what we want to do, where we want to do it, instead of building up resentment – and debt – by trying to stay together through it. She’s as practical as an asset-stripper, is Maddie, underneath it all.

It’s not that I wanted tears or a full-scale breakdown, but a snivel would have been gratifying. It was the clear eyes and calm tone that hurt me most, I think. She began by saying ‘I love you, but…’, then listed the reasons we should split up. I should have pointed out that if you love someone you don’t make lists. Not of their faults and limitations, at least. A shopping list is fine – practical. A wedding list – somewhere down the line, maybe. Not a break-up list, though.

People talk about their heart breaking, but that’s wrong. It’s more like a collapsing of all the arteries and valves, so that it feels as if it’s no longer pulsing in the centre of your chest but is twitching in the corner instead. And your lungs deflate along with it, your stomach slips and all of a sudden there’s this void in the centre of your body where, it feels like, all of your hopes and plans – expectations, even – used to be stored.

Still, I thought there’d be enough sentiment there for her to turn up for the party. So that, when my mum climbs up on to the stage and invites me to play a few songs, I wouldn’t have to look down at the mistimed toe-tapping of my dad’s co-workers or the sullen faces of Ewan and Cammy. Instead, I could have played her one final love song. To make her change her mind.

‘We’re very proud of Robert,’ Mum says, smiling down at me. ‘For following his dreams and making a success of himself…’ She pauses. If she clicks her tongue as punctuation, I’m too far away to hear it. ‘But we know that London is an expensive city – we all know that – so we were hoping that you’d all contribute something to help him out, if we “pass-the-hat” while he plays us a few of his songs. Brendan, I think, wouldn’t mind lending a hand.’

Uncle Brendan rises from his seat and, with a flourish, pulls a flat cap from his pocket. Showing a ten-pound note to the room, he stuffs the money into the hat as if he’s performing some reverse magic-trick. Then he sets off around the tables with the hat held out in front of him.

‘Just before I invite Rab to play, though,’ Mum continues, ‘his father and I would like to give him a small gift of our own. Rab, if you’d come up here, please.’

While I make my way up to the stage, my mum reaches down for her handbag. From it she pulls a long, thin case. Shit, I think, she’s only gone and got me a bloody spoon. Maybe a fiddle thread one, with a stem that looks like a fret. As if my own spoon, in its own fucking carry-case, will keep me from poverty in London – ‘Please, sir, can I have some more? I brought my own spoon.’

‘Thanks, Mum,’ I say, with an edge of sarcasm, as I take it from her. I snap the case open and feel my frown lifting. The case doesn’t contain a spoon at all, but a metal tuning-fork in a velvet inset. I lift it to show the room and then reach down to strike it against the edge of the stage. A single note – a pitch-perfect A – rings through the room.

‘Thank you, Mum,’ I say again. My voice holds a quaver. I play a chord through it, on Uncle Brendan’s guitar. The one I learnt on. ‘Any requests?’ I ask.

‘“Streets of London”,’ one of the old dears says.

‘Dougie MacLean,’ someone calls. ‘The one from that advert.’

‘No,’ Cammy shouts, with an edge to his voice. ‘Play your own stuff.’

‘I’ll have to charge you, then,’ I joke. But I move the capo down the fret and then pick out the intro to the song I was working on yesterday. It’s untitled. About folk settling for the safe option rather than taking a risk. The chorus rhymes ‘armchair resistance’ with ‘insistence’ and ‘persistence’ and, half, with ‘commitments’. There are rough edges, certainly, because I’m not sure what the main focus of it is yet. Scottish independence, maybe. Or the austerity cuts. It might even be a more general anti-capitalist anthem. I can fill it out later. Once I get down to London.

After three songs I clamber off the stage, waving away the calls for more. Three is enough of a set. I want to save my voice. Besides, the hat filled with notes and loose change has already done a full circuit of the room and a second pass would be mortifying. I’m not a bloody busker, you know; I’ve got a recording contract.

Uncle Brendan plugs his laptop into some portable speakers and we get a mixture of wedding music and old ballads – Phil Ochs, Pete Seeger, John Martyn, some early Billy Bragg – from the treasured collection that he finally transferred from vinyl to digital after his youngest grandkid left his Joan Baez record to melt on top of the radiator.

People keep on getting up to dance, midway through a track, and then having to sit down again when the next protest song comes on. After a few rounds of this game of musical chairs, my mum fusses Brendan into making a politically neutral playlist and folk begin to settle into that self-conscious dancing you get when there’s too much by way of light and not enough by way of drink or drugs.

Gemma and Teagan are straight up on to the dance floor and Cammy, as he tends to do, has gone off wandering, so I take two bottles of beer and go to sit next to Ewan. He keeps his eyes on the girls, but accepts the beer with a nod.

‘We split up,’ I say.

‘You and Maddie?’

I frown and pick at the label on the bottle with my fingernail. How has he heard already? We only broke up, properly, the day before yesterday. So unless my mum or dad had a word with him, then…

‘I leave for London a week on Monday,’ I say.

‘Where are you staying?’

‘A hotel, for the first while at least.’

He whistles softly. ‘Big time, eh?’

I don’t know how to answer that, so I stay silent. Out on the dance floor, Teagan turns as if to make her way back to the table. Gemma, looking across at us, catches her by the arm and pulls her away in the other direction.

‘I’ve done a wee bit of research,’ Ewan says.

‘Yeah? On what?’

‘Call it my last act as your manager…’ He looks at the back of his hand, as if to check crib-notes. There’s nothing there, though, except for a bit of dry skin. ‘It’s rare for a debut album to earn out its advance. In fact, only, like, two per cent of albums released sell more than five thousand copies. And if you’re only making, what, ten to fifteen per cent? Plus you’ll need to pay back production costs and session musicians and – ’

‘I’ve read my contract, Ewan. More to the point, I’ve been through it with a lawyer, you know?’

‘Yeah. All I’m saying is, you need to be realistic with it. Like, even if you have a best-selling album, it’s unlikely that you’ll make more than, say, a schoolteacher in the first year.’

‘Nothing wrong with a schoolteacher’s wage.’

There’s another gap in our conversation. The girls are back to dancing. They keep glancing over to us, though. Even from a distance, they can probably see the tight grip I’ve got on my beer bottle, can probably hear my teeth grinding.

Why does everyone keep telling me I’m going to fail? Congratulations, kid, you’ll never make it. Great opportunity, lad, you’re sure to blow it. Never mind the bastards, Rab, you’ll grind yourself down.

‘It seems like you’ll make the most money from live gigs,’ Ewan says. ‘And from selling merchandise like T-shirts and that. But you need to make sure the label don’t get their hands on a percentage of that – ’

‘No offence, but I’ve been through all this.’

‘Sure.’ He takes a swig of beer. ‘It’s just easy to get stung. They’ve got these things called 360-degree contracts, where they take a slice of everything. And this is London we’re talking about. Up here, at least, you’ve got some knowledge of the scene, but – ’

‘Have you been talking to Maddie, is that it?’

‘Is that where this whole pissing-on-my-parade bit is coming from? You and the ex recon-fucking-ciling over a shared desire to see me fail?’

‘I don’t want to see you fail, Rab.’

My phone sounds as I stare him out. It’s the opening to ‘Maggie May’ by Rod Stewart. I used to sing the first line to Maddie, substituting her name, in the mornings after I stayed over. I’ve not had the chance to change it yet. Fumbling the phone free from my pocket, I open her text message.

‘Right on cue,’ I mutter. ‘Probably just finishing your sentence, eh?’

‘What’s with the paranoia, Rab? Remember, it was me she left to go out with you. So this jilted lover act doesn’t really fly, does it?’

‘It’s just a bit of a coincidence…’

I trail off, because I’m concentrating on the message. It’s an apology for not turning up. Half-arsed. At the end she asks me to come round to her mum’s house tomorrow so she can give me my birthday present. Probably another lecture. An echo of this one from Ewan.

The message causes me to tense, to tighten further. She should have come tonight. She should be here and she should have had the confidence in me – in us – to move down to London. She’s allowed second thoughts, of course she is, but they should have faded by now. She should be bursting through the door of the hall, bags packed, laden with regret – not sending text messages.

‘Nothing,’ I say to Ewan, eventually. ‘Never mind.’

‘Ewan, be careful with that olive branch, mate,’ Cammy’s back, to interrupt. ‘He’ll only end up shafting you with it.’

‘Fuck off, Cammy. What do you know?’ I say.

He snorts. Ewan holds out a hand to quieten him.

‘Singers are sold this dream and then it’s hard work and the rewards aren’t really…’ Ewan begins. ‘Like, most folk would love to play a gig in a stadium. But playing a six-week tour in small venues like this, with most of the money going back to the label to pay recording costs or… there’s a high suicide rate; lots of instances of breakdowns or rehab because of the pressure.’

‘I won’t do a Kurt Cobain on you, don’t worry,’ I say.

‘Which part?’ Cammy asks. ‘The shotgun or the sell-out?’

‘Cammy,’ Ewan says. ‘Seriously, ease off.’

‘I’m not going to fucking fail, OK?’ I say. ‘Next time you see me, lads, I’ll be on a stage ten times as big as that one – ’ I point to the platform ‘ – playing to a crowd a hundred times bigger than this – ’ I wave an arm at the room ‘ – and my bank balance, my fucking earnings, won’t only be a thousand times bigger. They’ll be tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands – ’

I stop there. I should go on; I should round on Ewan. I have the right of reply. You’ve questioned me, ballbag, now here’s yours. Why didn’t you find me a recording contract, eh? Too busy selling shoelaces? And why didn’t you fight to represent me? Was our friendship brittle enough to be broken by Maddie, is that it? For fuck’s sake. If it was, why didn’t you fight for her, at least? You’ve bent over to be buggered every time, mate, yet you have the cunting nerve to lecture me about getting screwed. Well, here’s yours – you think I’ve sold my soul, but all you’ll ever sell is fucking insoles, maggot, because you don’t have the stones, the fucking strength of character, to take a leap of faith.

‘I hope you’re right, Rab,’ Ewan says.

‘You can fucking count on it.’

I’ve never been beyond the front door of her mum’s house. All through our relationship, when we were looking for a place to ‘watch a film’ or ‘practise guitar’ or ‘revise’, we would always end up either at her dad’s flat or in my attic bedroom – where we could place inverted commas around our activities without being disturbed.

Maddie’s mum is, similarly, a mystery to me. I’ve only ever caught sight of her in a picture posted online, from some family occasion. She’s hiding her face from the camera. I know her only as bleached blonde hair, cut in a bob, and an outfit that’s all cardigan and cleavage.

‘Right on time,’ Maddie says, as she opens the door.

‘How are you?’ I ask.

‘Fine, fine. Come on in.’

The blue shirt I settled on is buttoned right to the top, so that it scratches at my Adam’s apple. I hook a finger in to pull at the collar. In the hallway, I pause, wondering if I should kiss Maddie – on the cheek, maybe – or lean in for a hug. I’m halfway to offering a handshake, but then decide against it and cover by smoothing my palms against the legs of my jeans.

I’ve only had one joint, just a thin trail of resin, so the clamminess is only nerves. The tightness to my throat is just because I know that this is my final chance to convince her.

‘Come into the living room,’ Maddie says. ‘Would you like a mug of tea or something?’

I shake my head and follow her into a room to the right.

‘My mum has gone out to the shops. To give us a chance to talk.’

‘OK,’ I say, trying to keep the relief from my voice. ‘It’s a nice place, this.’

The living room is typical of Glasgow’s West End, with a high corniced ceiling and bright bay windows. Among all the antique lamps, framed prints and carefully ordered bookshelves, though, are cluttered heaps of play-mats, stuffed animals, changing bags and the like. There’s a cot in the corner. My first – frantic – thought is that Maddie has had a baby and that fatherhood is going to be my birthday surprise. Then I do the maths. I choke back a laugh, a chortle.

‘I’m going to get myself a beer, I think,’ Maddie says. ‘You sure you wouldn’t like something?’

‘Well, if there’s a beer going…’

‘Back in a second.’

I ease myself down on to the sofa. The cushions, plumped up, seem to want to bounce me back to my feet. It takes two or three sittings before there’s a comfortable indent. Once I’m settled, I look around the room again. There really is a lot of baby stuff. The thought flickers again, then catches: maybe she had the baby before she met me – before she met Ewan even – and she’s never found the right moment to tell. She didn’t want to scare me off. So she left it with its grandma and carried on as normal. And, of course, she didn’t want to move to London without the wee blighter. Is that so far-fetched? Is it?

‘Thanks for coming over.’ Maddie comes back in and hands me a bottle. ‘I wanted to do this in person.’

She nods. ‘I feel like we didn’t leave it on the best of terms the other day, so I wanted to make friends again, you know?’

I gulp at the beer, swallowing down the idea of Maddie being a teenage mother. There’s nothing going on here except a clear-the-air meeting. I’m just being paranoid, looking for a reason why she’s been a bit off with me these past weeks, why she backed out of moving away. Shit, I’m just looking for a way of softening the brutal break-up.

‘I don’t want you to think that I’m a bitch,’ she says, seating herself on the sofa opposite. ‘It’s not that I don’t care or that I don’t think you’ll do well for yourself. It’s just that the timing’s not right for me.’

‘Maybe the timing will be right in the future,’ I say, softly.

‘Maybe.’ She smiles. ‘I’m still really young, you know. The year between us might not seem like a lot, Rab, but there’s a big difference between seventeen and eighteen, in terms of – ’

‘It’s not really to do with age, though, is it?’ I interrupt.

I can’t rid myself of the idea of this baby. From the corner of my eye I see the toys scattered across the carpet by the window. Maddie’s mum is too old to have a young child, surely? And Maddie doesn’t have any brothers or sisters who might be new parents. There’s more stuff, though, than for a passing visit from a niece or a family friend. This is a baby-in-residence, a critter who’s marking their territory.

‘Well…’ Maddie looks at me with narrowed eyes. ‘There’s also the university thing, and there’s the debt question attached to that. I don’t want to make the wrong decision there, really, because it feels like that’s what could set me up, one way or other, for the rest of my life.’

I don’t want to show myself up – act the arse – and question her about all the baby debris in the room, but maybe there’s a way of being subtle about it. Ask without asking. Just see if she flushes at the mention of the child – if she avoids the topic.

‘It’s a nice house,’ I say, breezily. ‘Nice room.’

‘Thanks,’ she says, and takes a gulp of her beer.

‘I’ve never been in here before.’

She nods, but her brow is furrowed into a frown. She catches her bottom lip in her teeth and chews at it while she watches me. Not a sign of a guilty conscience – not necessarily – but she doesn’t look comfortable.

‘Is there a reason for that, maybe?’ I ask.

‘A reason for what?’

‘For my… for you not inviting me in.’

‘Well, you’ve never even met my mum, have you?’

I shake my head, thinking about the line I could use – She’s not the only member of this family I haven’t met though, isn’t that true? – if only I were more confident about my Sherlocking skills.

‘Is there something going on with you?’ she asks.

‘How d’you mean?’

‘You’re acting odd.’

I shake my head again. ‘Is there something going on with you?’

We’re reaching the reveal. The point at which Maddie makes her confession, thinking it’s a plot-twist worthy of the worst of those soaps my mum watches, and I respond by offering to support her and the baby. After some soul-searching, obviously. And only if I’m certain that Ewan isn’t the father.

‘Seriously, Rab,’ she says, ‘what is it?’

‘What’s what?’

‘Are you stoned, is that it?’

‘Drunk, then?’

‘No,’ I say, then let my gaze drift across the cot, the changing mat, the picture books piled on the coffee table. I search for the right phrase, the right line, but I’m mindful of giving myself an out in case I’m wrong. ‘You must have realised that I’d notice, Maddie.’

‘Notice what?’

‘All the baby stuff.’

‘Yeah.’ She shrugs. ‘So?’

There’s a moment, in which I raise my eyebrows to invite her to come clean, and then see her eyes widening. In horror.

I’ve made a mistake.

‘My mum’s a child-minder, you dick,’ she says.

It’s an understandable mistake, surely.

‘She’s a child-minder. For other people’s children.’

I didn’t actually say anything, did I? I never actually asked outright.

‘I mean, for fuck’s sake. How could you think…?’ She slams her beer bottle down on the table. ‘We don’t live in Victorian times, do we? Do you not think, if I had a baby, I’d bloody tell you about it?’

I try to laugh. It comes out half strangled. ‘I didn’t… think that – ’ I begin.

‘We’ve been seeing each other for, what, six or seven months, Rab.’

‘And you think I hid my baby away from the world for all that time, is that it? How fucking heartless d’you think I am?’

‘I wasn’t saying that,’ I say, more forcefully. ‘Any of that. I was just saying there was a lot of baby stuff, that’s all.’

She’s sitting perfectly still, but there’s a flush rising up her neck and her fists are buried into the cushions of the sofa. A mistimed memory: her rigidity in the moments before orgasm, tensing before the release.

‘It’s not…’ I take a breath, then launch into my defence. ‘You could have left the baby with your mum, maybe, while you were with me.’

‘Yeah, cause you’d have come first in that scenario, Rab, wouldn’t you?’

‘I didn’t actually think that, though. I was just wondering… about all the stuff.’

She goes quiet again. There’s an accusation in the silence – she’s judging me because she thinks I’ve judged her. Even though I didn’t actually say. It was just a theory, based on the available evidence. She’s the one that’s twisted it, blown it out of all fucking proportion.

‘How the fuck could you think that, Rab?’ she asks, quietly.

‘Well, you can’t blame me, can you?’ I spit back.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You invite me round for a birthday surprise and…’

‘What – surprise, I’m a teenage mum?’

‘Yeah, you’re right,’ I say, dropping my voice to match her sarcasm. ‘That wouldn’t be a surprise at all. I’ve always known you were a wee slapper anyway. Why wouldn’t you have some diseased bastard-child falling out of you?’

She stands. ‘Fuck you.’

‘Fuck everyone, isn’t that your motto?’

‘One minute the perfect girlfriend, the next a useless whore, is that it?’

‘Come on. We both know you only think with your cunt.’

She turns and walks out of the room. The sudden silence drains the blood from my face. I can feel it as a chill. As a realisation that I’ve gone too far. The bottle of beer sits sweating on the coffee table. I lift it and swallow a couple of mouthfuls.

Of course, it seems irretrievable. I’ve found myself up shit creek and I’ve decided to scuttle the fucking boat. And sure, you could argue that if I hadn’t had that wee joint before I got here – if I’d kept a clear head – then I might not have lost my paddle in the first place. But here’s my counter-argument – wait for it – all the things that happen in the world, good and bad, must happen to someone. Somewhere in the world, odds are a teenage mother hid her child from her boyfriend – why not here?

‘This is your birthday present,’ Maddie says, coming back in. Her eyes are black with smeared mascara, her cheeks wet with tears. ‘I saved for it. So that you’ll think of me – of us – when you’re playing all those gigs down there. When you’re famous.’

She half hands, half throws the guitar. The wood sounds out hollowly as it strikes my chest. It’s an acoustic, with red-hued wood and a white trim. Steel strings. Without thinking, without pausing for an apology or a word of thanks, I strum out a G-major. It’s a little out of tune, but the tone is deep and mellow.

‘You’re welcome,’ Maddie says.

‘Maddie…’ I look up. ‘I’m sorry, I – ’

‘You can see yourself out.’

‘Seriously – ’

‘Seriously just fuck off.’

She turns and leaves the room again. I hear her footsteps on the stairs.

I’m left holding the guitar. Across my lap, with the neck cradled against my shoulder.