– Aye Ray, that’s the way it goes, we nod. This is what it’s about. This is what Gus’s message was about.

Lennox’s face is set in an evaluating smile, tight round the mouth, eyes searching but strangely dead and mechanical, the polis way. – Ken what your problem is, he laughs coldly, – ye dinnae practise what ye preach.

We can say nothing.

Lennox is talking to us in the manner that pretends it’s all for our welfare, rather than his gloating benefit. – You telt me Bruce. Mind what you says: You need to suss out what the party line was and then spiel out the script.

– Aye, I mind, we tell him.

– You see though Bruce, you have tae learn a new script. It’s like all that equal opps bullshit: just spout that at the cunts and do it with conviction. It’s just another wee code you rely on. That’s why the likes of Gillman . . . he shakes his head in a condescending smile. He’s rehearsed this speech alright. – Your behaviour has to be non-racist and non-sexist. You ken the score; all this equal opps stuff started when mass unemployment took its toll. You couldn’t have upwardly mobile schemies taking jobs from the sons and daughters of the rich! So you bring in a handful of overprivileged coons as a Trojan horse sop to equal opps, while making sure you keep the good salaried jobs for the educated bourgeoisie. You start to introduce minimum qualifications, make a uni degree essential where it had never been needed in the past. That way you weed out people that cannae bullshit your script. Of course, fuck all changes. In London coons just get to be truncheoned by a member of their own race once in a blue moon. You know the score.

Lennox gives me an I’ve-got-it-sussed wink.

– Yeah. This is true Ray.

– I’m no saying you’re a dinosaur Bruce, but you’ve allowed these cunts to paint you that way. Keep the cards close to yir chest mate.

– Close to the chest Ray, like I always told you.

– That’s what you told me, he says cheerfully. He looks around the room and he can’t hide his distaste. He stands to his feet. Lennox the victor, Robertson the vanquished.

Who would have thought it. Lennox perhaps.

– Anyway, Bruce, got to nash. There is just one thing, and I suppose it’s something that everybody feels when they get a promotion, you know, how to relate to the old mates and all of that.

He looks closely at us to see as if we understand. We are looking at him blankly. We have nothing to say.

– I can say this because we’re both law enforcement professionals Bruce, but your methods and mines are very different. Now I ken that we’ve pulled some shit in the past, but that’s finito now, all the coke and that shit. He looks hard and searchingly at me with an authority he’s never shown before. The authority of the man who knows he has the state queueing up behind him, on his side. – Savvy?

– Sure Ray, we say.

– Just as long as you realise how the old song goes: ‘These days are gone now, and in the past they must remain’, okay?

– Okay . . .

– And Bruce, nae hard feelings, eh mate?

– Naw Ray, you know me, I’m not one for living in the past. I’m sure you’ll do a great job as inspector.

Ray grips our shoulder harshly. – Thanks mate. Right, I’d better nash. See ye. Things to dae, people tae see.

– Aye. Cheerio Ray.

– Cheery bye bye Bruce . . . oh . . . Bruce, I saw that Bladesey the other day, doon the club at Shrubhill. We all gave him the cold-shoulder treatment. He looked a bit sheepish. Then Gillman went up and put him in the picture, in Dougie’s own inimitable style. So I doubt whether our Mister Blades will be showing his face in the craft again. Cheers then, Ray winks, making a clicking noise from the side of his mouth as he departs.

Click click click

Channel hopping.

I’m hearing the voices and I’m pressing the buttons on the handset to change the channels but it’s the voice in my head. That same, insistent soft voice, eating me up from the inside . . .

. . . I change channels . . .

. . . I change channels . . . a Bond film. This time it’s Roger Moore . . .

I change channels . . . cartoons . . . Walt Disney. Beauty and the Beast . . .

I change channels . . . adverts . . . real Scots read the Record . . .

I change channels: repeats of Please, Sir.

The telly goes off.

I don’t know whether it’s day or night. Some empty purple tins lie in front of me. The fire still flickers. A welfare woman called at some point. I can’t remember what she said. I need to do something.

I pull on some clothes and go outside, making my way towards Colinton Village. The only person I can think of visiting is my physician, Dr Rossi.

The waiting room is full of smelly old cunts, but I’ve got the upper hand on them now. I’m minging in this old coat! Take some of that ya snobby auld cunts. I produce a purple tin from my coat pocket.

– You can’t drink in here, the receptionist tells me. I flash my ID at her. – Police, I tell her. – Working undercover, I explain to the old wifies. One makes a twisted girn with those old, dried-out lips. I want to grab a syringe and fill it up with the contents of the old purple tin and shoot it right into those old lips, rehydrating them instantly! – Plastic surgery, I tell her, – modern techniques. Everybody can afford it, I raise my can to toast technology.

The receptionist calls me and I go in and see Rossi. His jaw drops as I enter, and if I gave a Luke and Matt Goss, I’d say his lack of bedside manner is unprofessional.

He’s the McDonald’s of medicine, and it takes him a shorter time to come to a diagnosis than it does for them to serve up a Big Mac.

– You’re depressed Mr Robertson. I don’t do this lightly, but I’m going to prescribe Prozac.

– Fine, we tell this physician.

Rossi though: something is different about him. It’s as if it’s just dawned on him that he’s approaching middle age and he’s never going to reach surgical greatness. This, prescribing pills to sad old cunts and being a glorified clerk, like polis, teachers, social workers all are nowadays, this is as good as it gets. Our normally buoyant physician is giving off the defeated, depressive stink of a man whose own limitations have caught up with him. It’s a smell we’ve grown accustomed to lately. It oozes from every sick pore in my own body, as surely as the stale whisky sweat which accompanies it.

When we, I, we are leaving his surgery and walking through the village we screw the prescription into a ball and sling it in the Water of Leith at Colinton Dell. Then we go to the Royal Scot for a pint. This is the only fuckin drug we need: peeve. It was that fuckin coke that fucked us up, that cunt Lennox. Brought us down to his level then nipped in and stole the job that was ours. We should have picked that up, should have seen the signs. But we were weak.

We must now be strong.

Sleep fails to take us during the night. Thoughts are flying through our head like an endless merry-go-round. We can see the merry-go-round, our wife and child waving to us from the stupid horses as we sit and drink our tea in the Piazza of Princes Street Gardens, always distracted, lost in our own thoughts, our dreams of revenge against those who transgress the laws of the state.