Halting State

ass.

Maybe it could have gone the other way in the boardroom if the Polis hadn’t uncovered a network of Little League serial killer wannabes who were using STEAMING to rehearse next Saturday’s riot over on Easter Road: But that was the final nail in the coffin. All the suit-wearing world loves a geeky scapegoat, and you boys were going down in flames. So there was only one thing to do: fly out to Amsterdam and get absolutely steaming drunk for the weekend, not to mention so stoned you’re having auditory hallucinations to the sound of the tram bells.

“Excuse me, sir, but you cannot sleep here.”

You open your eyes. The auditory hallucination is peering at you through her surveillance goggles as if she’s never seen a stoned tourist before. She’s been so polite that for a moment you feel a flash of perverse gratitude until the weed clears enough for you to realize that she is a member of the Politie and quite capable of summoning a vanful of black-clad accomplices who will vanish you into some concrete custody cell faster than you can snap your fingers if she chooses officially to notice that you are not terribly conscious.

You try to say, “Please don’t arrest me, I’m just a sleepy tourist, I won’t be any trouble,” but it all runs together at the back of your tongue and comes out as something like “nnnghk.” You tense your arms and prepare to lift yourself out of the armchair—standing up would seem like the right thing to do at that point—but that’s when you realize the armchair is situated adjacent to a street sign on a pole, to which your friends have kindly handcuffed your left wrist. And that goddamn ringing noise won’t stop—it’s not in your ears at all, is it?

“Um?” you say, dully staring past the cop in the direction of the antique shop on the other side of the pavement. There’s something odd about the window, the pattern the lights make as they reflect off it—or don’t, as the case may be. Broken, you tell yourself sagely. Someone has broken the antique shop window and dragged this annoyingly gezellig armchair out onto the pavement for you to sit in. Talk about game scenarios gone wrong: It’s like something you might end up dumped into in STAG NIGHT: THE PURSUIT if you started griefing the bridesmaids.

“Does this chair belong to you, sir?”

Sometimes when you laugh you come out with a burbling, hiccuping sound, like a hyena that’s choking to death on its food. You can hear it right now, welling up out of your shirt pocket, tinny and repetitive. It’s the ultimate custom ring-tone, as annoying as a very annoying thing indeed, except this particular piece of intellectual property isn’t owned by a bunch of gouging cunts.

“’Scushe me, tha’s my phone…” Your right hand is free, so you try and insert your fingers in your shirt pocket and play chase the mobie. Somehow in the past hour your hand has grown cold and numb, and your digits feel like frankfurters as the handset slips past them, giggling maniacally.

“Pay attention, sir. Did you take that chair from the shop? Who handcuffed you to the NO PARKING sign? I think you’d better blow into this meter, sir.”

She’s a sight easier to understand than the local Edinburgh Polis, which is no bad thing because the voice at the end of the line is anything but. “Jack? Hi, it’s Sophie! Are you alright? Are you busy right now?”

“No, not now—”

“Oh that’s a shame, I’m really sorry, but can you do me a favour? It’s Elsie’s birthday the Tuesday after next, and I was wondering—”

You breathe on the end of the cop’s torch as she holds it under your mouth, then swallow. Your sister is tweeting on the end of the line, oblivious, and you really need to get her off the phone fast. You force unwilling lips to frame words in an alien language: “Email me. Later…”

“But it’s important!” Sophie insists. “Are you alright Jack? Jack?” The plangent chords of her West Midlands accent form brassy patterns of light on the end of the torch, where an LED is glowing red, like the call disconnect button on your phone.

“I think you’d better come with me, sir.” She has a key to the handcuffs, for which you are duly grateful, but she wants you to put your phone away, and that’s surprisingly difficult, because Sophie keeps going on about something to do with your oldest niece’s birthday and Confirmation—hubby Bill wants Elsie and Mary to have a traditional upbringing—and you keep agreeing with her because will you please put the phone down, a Dutch cop is trying to arrest me isn’t a standard way to break off this kind of scenario. (If only families came with safewords, like any other kind of augmented-reality game.) Things are stuck at this point for a tense few seconds as you mug furiously at the officer, until she raises one index finger, then unlocks the handcuff from around the pole, twists your arm around the small of your back, wheechs the mobie out of your grasp, and has your wrists pinioned before you can say “hasta la vista.”

It’s shaping up to be a great weekend, make no mistake. And there’s always Monday to look forward to!

INTERLUDE: CIA World Factbook, 2017

SCOTLAND:

Location: 54 38 N, 1 46 W—Western Europe, occupying the northern two-fifths of the island of Great Britain.

FLAG:

Description: Sky-blue background with a white Cross of St. Andrew (diagonal) superimposed. As a member state of the EU, the EU flag may also be flown.

NAME OF COUNTRY:

Conventional long form: Republic of Scotland

Conventional short form: Scotland

Data code: SCO

Type of government: republic, EU core member state

Capital: Edinburgh

Independence: 1 January 2012

Constitution: 13 March 2011; adopted 1 January 2012 at formal independence

Legal system: based on Roman law and traditional Scottish law, substantially modified by indigenous concepts; compliant with EU corpus juris; compliant with EU

ECONOMY:

Economic overview: The economy is small and trade dependent. Offshore oil and gas, once the most important sector, is now dwarfed by industry, which accounts for 32% of GDP and 46% of export and employs 25% of the labor force. The financial sector is still large, and accounts for 24% of GDP and 40% of exports; Scotland is home to a disproportionate percentage of the former United Kingdom’s banks and insurance companies. Since independence and EU membership, the country has benefited from substantial EU assistance in developing its poorest regions. Inflation is low and there is a regular annual trade surplus. Unemployment remains a serious problem in regions formerly dominated by smokestack industry, and is a major focus of government policy.

Politics: Scotland is noted for its ingrained left-wing political bias and rejection of the liberal economic and conservative social policies encouraged south of the border—this tendency contributed to the breakup of the former United Kingdom. The ruling Scottish National Party is nevertheless providing aggressive assistance to inward-investing companies and has established an industrial development office to encourage small indigenous firms. The model pursued has been described as “following Ireland and Norway,” and Scotland is widely viewed as being one of the “Atlantic Tiger” group of small but healthy economies on the western rim of the EU…