‘You seem quite drunk, Bill.’
Watt is embarrassed by that and laughs. He can’t think of anything to say. John says he has to finish up and why don’t they go over to the Gleniffer Bar and he’ll be over in half an hour.
William cringes. ‘We’re slightly hiding,’ he says.
‘Who from?’
William doesn’t want to say Dandy McKay. That would make it seem very serious. John would make a big deal out of that.
‘Disreputable fellows, a rough crowd.’
‘Well, you’ll be all right in the Gleniffer. It’s just locals in there.’
‘They found us in the Steps but we got away.’
John thinks he has misheard. ‘They met you in the Steps?’
‘No, they found us there.’
‘They were looking for you and found you there?’
William nods. No one important ever goes into the Steps. It already sounds serious, ‘We just need to hear his story.’
John doesn’t know what William wants him to do. He glances to the back office, reminding William that the day’s takings from all five of their shops are sitting on a table in there, being counted. He needs them to leave. John shrugs.
‘You’ll be all right for twenty minutes.’
There is nothing else to do. William nods at Manuel and they turn to the door. Watt opens it and holds it and Manuel bowls under his arm, out to the street.
William looks back at his sensible brother. John waves him out, rolling his eyes, but William nods, insisting: Go along with me, John, he is saying, this is a good plan. William is all plans. Most of them are good.
The door shuts behind them and the frosty night air envelops them. William can tell John is sceptical about the plan. William is too but less so. Manuel can get them the gun and he’s an author. He’ll tell them a good story, a credible story.
He looks down at his salvation. He sees Manuel through John’s eyes for a moment: cheap shoes, threadbare jacket, baring his bad teeth. Manuel looks small and desperate and dishonest as he takes the cigarette from behind his ear and lights it. He glances down the road for the Gleniffer Bar.
Watt points across the road and they go over. He glances back at his shop. The window glows warm, the paintwork and glass are clean. It pleases him.
Watt has five shops now. The shops are very successful because their cakes are bigger than everyone else’s. Rationing ended three years ago but women shoppers are trained to count every ounce. They know they are getting a good deal here, their eyes tell them that. They queue out of the door to buy in Watt’s shops.
The shops are clean but the bakery house itself is in a vermin-infested shed in the backcourt. They have to put buckets out when it rains, which is nearly always. The war is over and new laws have just been passed to stop factories being run in unsanitary lean-tos. It is under this premise that William is buying land. Ostensibly to build factories on, he tells John and their company accountant. He has been helped to buy land. He buys bits of land other people don’t even know are for sale, bits of Townhead and Cowcaddens that the council will be forced to buy to complete their Comprehensive Redevelopment Plan. Those strips of land will be priceless soon. It’s all set: soon he will have a lot of money, but not respectability. He looks at Peter walking next to him. That depends on him.
They walk through the door and into the Gleniffer.
The floor is coated in swirled sawdust, put there to soak up spills. Ashtrays get emptied onto the floor because they’ll sweep up at the end of the night anyway. There’s a spittoon in the corner with a big sign warning patrons not to spit on the floor and spread diseases. The lights are bright and harsh. There’s no toilet but the place still smells of piss. It is not a nice pub.
The woman serving has two scarves wrapped around her head like a gypsy. She’s wearing several bangles and too much make-up for a woman in her thirties. Both Watt and Manuel avoid her eye.
They buy warm bottled beers and whisky that tastes a bit watery. Neither of them likes who they are in this pub. There are a few locals drinking together in moderation but mostly it’s bitter lone drinkers swaying on their feet.
‘So,’ says Watt, trying to get them back to the point of the night when they were winners, ‘will you write more?’
Peter smiles and looks around the bar. He stands taller in the compromising pub. He can comfortably be here now because Watt has asked that.
Peter Manuel is telling the truth about writing. He has written long-form fiction, ideas, short stories, precis of stories. He sends them off to well-known magazines. He has no success but he has fallen in love with the waiting. The waiting makes all of the indignities of his life tolerable because after that envelope slips his fingers into the postbox he feels reborn. In these glorious waiting times he imagines himself anew.
During these times Peter is going about, drinking in pubs, being barked at by dogs, sitting in the pictures, breaking into houses for meagre prizes, but simultaneously he is also being Peter Manuel Before-He-Was-A-Writer. The future crackles with possibility. Detached from the humdrum everyday, he begins to think of himself in the third person, to see himself through the prism of history.
There is the dog that barked at Peter Manuel.
Peter Manuel sat in this very seat at the pictures.
Peter Manuel drank just here, in this chair.
He loves this other Peter Manuel. This astonishing man, who moved among us, just as if he was nothing special.
He wants these pockets of wonder to go on forever. But they don’t. Time ticks by and there is a gradual realisation that the magazine is not going to respond. The luminescent pride fades, as it dawns on him that weeks have passed and the Rolls-Royce hasn’t arrived to whisk him off to magazine headquarters (he doesn’t understand the economics of magazines).
The first time he posts a story it takes two months for the glow to dull. The second time it lasts for a month. The third time the hope dissipates after less than a fortnight, because he really tried that time, rewrote the story over and over, used his best handwriting.
Finally, one day, he holds an envelope on the lip of the postbox. He stares at the blackness inside. He can’t drop the story in. He keeps it in his hand and walks to a field and sits on a hill and smokes a cigarette. Then he burns his story in the envelope. He tries to forget that feeling, the yearning for the man he might have been. But he can’t forget it. It felt too good, this Other Possible Peter.
‘You will help each other.’
The woman with the scarves and make-up is staring at them, her bangled hand dangling over the bar.
‘Ah,’ says Watt. ‘Really?’