Espedair Street

poor exploitit lassie forced tae dress up like half a fush tae earn a crust, dae ye?'

'Hmm,' I said. 'No, I suppose not.' In fact I wasn't sure about this at all, but I couldn't be bothered arguing. Apart from anything else, the mermaid looked quite happy in her job. She didn't look cold, none of the fish in there with her appeared hungry, and she was smiling in a non-air-stewardesslike way when she dived down from the unseen surface, waving at people at nearby tables. Also, she wasn't likely to be molested by the customers unless they'd brought along a frogman's outfit, or a sufficiently large explosive charge to breach the tank's glass. As for being exploited ... who wasn't? Would McCann have been happier if she'd been working at a supermarket checkout, or clattering away at a typewriter in some office?

I've known people who dressed in Savile Row suits and Gucci shoes and were still complete bastards, so what in hell's wrong with looking like half a fish? Dammit, we'd dressed up to come here; McCann and I had had to conform to some sort of code, to have any chance of getting into a place with bouncers on the door .

Even when I was Weird, when I was The Man In The Black Coat With The Greased Back Hair And The Beard And The Mirror-Shades, I was dressing up; that was still a sort of uniform, because it became expected of me, and that's what makes the difference, that's what makes a uniform a uniform, not official rules and regulations... jeez, the number of kids I've seen dressed exactly the same as each other who've said they dress the way they do to be 'different'.

Ho ho.

'Ma roon, want anothir wan?' McCann said suddenly. I looked at my glass. My God, that had gone down quickly. I was comfortably settled in a large leatherish easy chair. We'd agreed just to call in here for one drink and then go somewhere else, but it was cold and sleety outside, and... what the hell. I had enough cash. I could always lend McCann some if he ran short. Probably end up going for a curry later, I shouldn't be surprised.

'Aye' I said. 'Same again. Easy on the ice.'

We had a few more drinks. McCann became convinced the mermaid was looking at him when she smiled and waved, but then just as he was talking himself into going up to the glass and waving back — maybe holding up his address or a note asking what the girl was doing after work when she'd found her land-legs again, or asking her if she needed help out of those wet things the mermaid left the pool; McCann watched with dismay as her scaly blue plastic tail disappeared through the mirror surface of the pool.

'She's gone,' he said.

'She can't,' I told him, 'stand being apart from you any longer and she's gone to get dressed to come round and ask you what a nice Marxist like you's doing in a capitalist clip-joint like this.'

'Aw, shit,' McCann said, ignoring me and dipping his head down to the table top to look up through the glass to the surface of the pool.

'Still after a piece of tail,' I said, shaking my head.

'Aw, come back, hen,' McCann groaned from the table top.

Hen? I thought. From fish to fowl in less than a minute. God, that was fast evolution. I looked round the busy bar. Actually, I knew how McCann felt. There were some good-looking women in the place, and I was lusting after several of them at once. One, standing at the bar, one foot on the brass rail, reminded me a lot of Inez. The same hair, roguishly tangled and perfectly kempt at once; the same long back and easy stance; definitely the same backside. The woman at the bar was wearing light-brown trousers. Inez wore jeans and trousers a lot, too. There was nothing wrong with her legs (though she thought there was), but her bum was just fabulous.

I signalled to one of the waitresses, stared at the woman at the bar, and thought about Inez. Ah Jayzuz, Inez, Inez; my bitch in britches, my salop in salopettes. I think she was the only one who ever really hurt me, just because I eventually did believe that it might last. It never crossed my mind, before or after, that a relationship I might have with a woman would prove permanent; I always assumed they were either taking pity on me, were merely satisfying their curiosity, or had made some uncharacteristic mistake in a moment of weakness.

I saw myself as the sort of guy who gets women on the rebound, if he happens to be in the right place at the right time; it was close to inconceivable that I might form a relationship entirely on my own merits. Even when sheer weight of numbers seemed to disprove this theory, I just assumed that a proportion of the women who'd thrown themselves at me, or hadn't run off screaming when I threw myself at them, were only doing it because I was famous, a Rock Star. So I never did expect too much, and thus was never grossly disappointed. Maybe I was trying not to get into something that might remind me of my parents' God-awful running-battle of a marriage, but if so, it wasn't deliberate. I just always assumed that I was an unattractive git who'd be picked only once all the nice guys had been spoken for .

But Inez slipped in under my guard. I don't know if she had her own assumptions — about permanence and making a home, maybe — and these assumptions were somehow stronger than my rather casual, unfounded premises, so that I absorbed hers, and was slowly, osmotically, virally, taken over... but however the hell it worked, however she became part of me, it hurt when she tore herself away.

Hell, I didn't really mind that she'd been screwing Davey (but was that why I later went with Christine, to avenge myself?); what annoyed me was that they'd been doing it so long and hidden it so carefully. And it stopped, after that night when they were caught in the strobe lights. That was, crazily enough, even more worrymg.

I wouldn't have minded having a good excuse to diversify myself a little bit, with Inez there to come back to, and I'd have been equally happy for her to have the same freedom. Ah, those wonderful days when the worst you had to worry about was VD, or, in my case, a paternity suit. Inez and Davey could have gone on if they liked; I wouldn't have sulked. I could have handled it, I swear. But instead they both vowed never to do it again, and I was left with a nagging sense that it shouldn't have mattered that much in the first place.

Actually, to this day I think we were largely right about relationships, and I still think there's far too much of a fuss made about both sex itself and any fidelity associated with it... but these are not the times to shout about that too much, I guess.

'Same again?' I nudged McCann. He drained his glass, nodding. I looked around for the waitress I'd signalled earlier. I couldn't see her. I caught the eye of a waiter cruising nearby, and ordered a double round. This seemed like a wise precaution if the waiting staff were becoming as lackadaisical as the continuing absence of the waitress suggested. I considered whether perhaps she'd thought we'd had enough to drink already and had deliberately avoided us, but this was quite out of the question as we were both still fairly sober.

'Ah'm away fur a pee,' McCann told me. I nodded. He seemed to have a little difficulty standing up, but he does have a bad leg from an accident in the yards when he was an apprentice, so that wasn't really surprising. I went back to contemplating the girl with the fabulous bum. She really was like Inez. I'd seen her face by now, which was quite different from Inez', but everything else about her was right.

Maybe I should go up and see if she'd ever been a fan of Frozen Gold; she was talking to a couple of guys, but neither of them seemed to be all that close to her; I might — what was I thinking of? I put my glass down, frowning at it. Perhaps I had had quite a lot to drink. I usually only started thinking about accosting women and telling them I had been a famous rock star right at the end of an evening, mercifully shortly before the stage of total oblivion.

Dammit, I felt pretty good. It wasn't fair of God or evolution or whatever to make drink so pleasant when it does you so much harm. I decided to slow down a bit; cocktails can be misleading.

McCann came back to find me staring, mystified, at six large glasses full of drink. 'Did ye get some fur me too?' he said, sitting.

'Ordered twice,' I explained.

'Ah know that; ye ordered two roons; but ye've got three.' I scratched my head.

'Waitress,' I said. Apparently I had ordered another round from that waitress, after all. I couldn't remember this, but it was the same waitress, and the right drinks, and she insisted I had ordered it, so...

'Ye daft bugger,' McCann said, and attacked the first of the waiting triad of Killer Zombies. I shrugged and sighed, then launched into a Manhattan, vaguely wondering whether some cider ought to be included in the recipe, to make the connection with the Big Apple more obvious.

Maybe not.

The woman I'd seen at the bar was still there. Other foot on the brass rail now. Bum still glorious. Soft curvings. Peaches and apples and buns and bums, I thought, wandering. God almighty, women look so good. How do they do that?