45

She left her room in Langlands Road shortly after 2 p.m. She hadn’t slept all night – mind meandering, thoughts tumbling, memories of Perlman flitting through her head – but she felt alert. She’d cut her hair even shorter than before and rinsed the blonde out of it, and now her style was that of a very young schoolboy, side-parted. She wore a pair of granny glasses, baggy old jeans with holes in the knees, tan trainers, a brown wool jacket and a dark paisley scarf. The charity-shop eclectic look, a kind of downmarket fusion, the style – or lack of it – that might be adopted by an impoverished student finishing her thesis on some arcane aspect of Elizabethan theatre.

She walked to Govan Underground station. She passed a veiled woman selling copies of the Big Issue, and a couple of beggars she’d seen a few times before, shivering young dopers in balaclavas, chalk-coloured hands held out for alms. The board of a newspaper stand read: White Rage Killings: More Fears

She went inside the station and down to the platform and heard the rumble of an incoming train approach from the black of the tunnel. She boarded, avoided the faces of her fellow passengers, rode to Buchanan Street, exited, walked to Killermont Street. She’d given up her usual long stride; the clothes she wore somehow imposed a slight shuffling mode of walk, modest, less self-assured.

I fucked up, she thought. I missed an open goal.

She passed the bus station and moved along Hanover Street.

She’d look for a cab. She was forever looking for cabs. Sometimes she felt she lived her life in the back of black taxis. She coughed in the polluted air. The stench of diesel from the bus station was overpowering.

She saw a taxi, raised a hand, watched the cab come swooping in to the kerb. She climbed in the back and the driver swivelled his red razor-nicked neck and said, ‘Let me take you away from all this, sweetheart.’

‘Any time,’ she said.

‘My wife’s an awfy jealous woman,’ he said. ‘She’d have a fit.’ He laughed at his own banter. Running off with a woman half his age, leaving a scandal in his slipstream after a life of respectability and fidelity, fancy that.

She settled back in the seat and took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. She had a single lash turned inward against the eyeball and it pricked her. She pushed it aside with a fingertip.

She’d say, I screwed it up. I need another chance.

She pulled her scarf around her head and looked from the window. The city was washed in yellow light, and indifferent.