bag of cement on the muddy pavement. Then, a few steps later, she saw gulls, circling above roofs, looking for a place to nest. The gulls were considered pests in the neighbourhood—large, mewing birds that swooped down on those who came too close to their nesting places—but we humans built too, and left cement and stones and litter, and were as aggressively territorial. The review was planning an environmental ethics issue the following year and Isabel had been soliciting papers. Perhaps somebody would write about the ethics of litter. Not that there was much to say about that: litter was unquestionably bad and surely nobody would make a case in its favour. And yet why was it wrong to drop litter? Was it purely an aesthetic objection, based on the notion that the superficial pol- lution of the environment was unattractive? Or was the aesthetic impact linked to some notion of the distress which others felt in the face of litter? If that was the case, then we might even have a duty to look attractive to others, in order to minimise their distress. There were interesting implications to that.
And one of these implications presented itself to Isabel a mere fifty paces later, outside the post office, from which emerged 1 9 4
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h a young man in his mid-twenties—Jamie’s age, perhaps—with several sharp metal spikes inserted into his lower lip and chin. The sharp metal points jutted out jauntily, like tiny sharpened phal-luses, which made Isabel reflect on how uncomfortable it must have been to kiss a man like that. Beards were one thing—and there were women who complained vigorously about the reaction of their skins to contact with bearded men—but how much more unpleasant it would be to feel these metal spikes up against one’s lips and cheeks. Cold, perhaps; sharp, certainly; but then, who would wish to kiss this young man, with his scowl and his discouraging look? Isabel asked herself the question and answered it immediately: of course numerous girls would wish to kiss him, and probably did; girls who had rings in their belly buttons and their noses, and who wore studded collars. Spikes and rings were complementary; after all. All this young man would have to do was look for the corresponding plumage.
As she crossed the road to Cat’s delicatessen, Isabel saw the spiky young man dart across the road ahead of her and suddenly stumble at the edge of the pavement. He tripped and fell, landing on a knee on the concrete paving stone. Isabel, a few steps behind him, hastened to his side and reached out to him, helping him to his feet. He stood up, and looked down at the ripped knee of his discoloured denim jeans. Then he looked up at her and smiled.
“Thank you.” His voice was soft, with a hint of Belfast in it.
“It’s so easy to stumble,” said Isabel. “Are you all right?”
“I think so. I’ve torn my jeans, that’s all. Still, you pay for ripped jeans these days. I got mine free.”
Isabel smiled, and suddenly the words came out of her, unbidden, unanticipated. “Why have you got those spikes in your face?”
T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B
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He did not look annoyed. “My face? These piercings?” He fingered at the spike which projected from his lower lip. “It’s my jewellery, I suppose.”
“Your jewellery?” Isabel stared at him, noticing the tiny golden ring which he had inserted into an eyebrow.
“Yes,” said the young man. “You wear jewellery. I wear jewellery. I like it. And it shows that I don’t care.”
“Don’t care about what?”
“About what people think. It shows that I have my own style.
This is me. I’m not in anybody’s uniform.”
Isabel smiled at him. She appreciated his directness, and she liked his voice with its definite cadences. “Good for you,” she said. “Uniforms are not a good idea.” She paused. The sun was glinting off one of the spikes, casting a tiny, bobbing reflection onto his upper lip. “Unless, of course, you have donned another uniform in your eagerness to avoid uniforms. That’s a possibility, isn’t it?”
The young man tossed his head backwards. “Okay,” he said, laughing. “I’m the same as everybody else with piercings. So?”
I S A B E L L OO K E D AT H I M . This was a strange conversation, and she would have liked to prolong it. But she reminded herself that she had to see Cat and that she could not spend the morning standing there with that young man discussing facial piercing. So they said good-bye to each other, and she made her way into the delicatessen, where Eddie, standing beside a shelf on which he was stacking Portuguese sardines, glanced at her and then looked back, with some intensity, at the sardines.
She found Cat in her office, finishing off a telephone call.
Her niece replaced the receiver and looked at her. Isabel noticed, 1 9 6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h with relief, that there seemed to be no resentment in her expression. The card she received had reflected what Cat really felt.
Good.
“You got my card?”
“Yes, I did. And I’m still very sorry that I upset you. I take no pleasure in hearing about it.” She knew, as she said this, that it was not true, and faltered at the last words.
Cat smiled. “Maybe. Maybe not. But let’s not talk about it if you don’t mind.”
They drank a cup of coffee together and then Isabel returned home. There was work to do—a new crop of articles had arrived for the review—but she found that she could not settle to it. She wondered when she would hear from Johnny Sanderson, if he would call back at all.
H E D I D T E L E P H O N E Isabel, as he had said he would, a few days after the Really Terrible Orchestra concert. He could meet her, he said, at the Scotch Malt Whisky Society rooms in Leith that Friday evening at six. There was a whisky nosing, and she could sample the whisky—if she had the stomach for it. He had information for her, which he could pass on at the event itself. There would be opportunities to talk.
Isabel knew very little about whisky, and rarely drank it. But she knew that it had much the same apparatus of sampling as did wine, even if the language was very different. Whisky nosers, as they called themselves, eschewed what they saw as the preten-tiousness of wine vocabulary. While oenophiles resorted to re-condite adjectives,
