Espedair Street

have minded that much. And everything would have been a hell of a lot simpler.

So I tell myself, now.

Three twenty-five and a quarter. Dear God, it's slowing down. Check out the surroundings. A mostly clear sky; sharp little stars and a sliver of moOn.

Silence in the city and no one to talk to.

A car drones down St Vincent Street, stops at the Newton Street traffic lights, idling in the mixture of darkness and yellow sodium-vapour light. Its exhaust curls, the left indicator winks. The trough of the buried motorway, cut through the city like a deep scar, lies beyond, on the far side of the lights, beneath the St Vincent Street flyover. No traffic on the motorway. Little green men become little red men; the main lights change, the car moves off, quiet and alone.

Wish I could drive. I always meant to learn but — like a lot of things in my life — I never got round to it, and went too quickly from not being able to afford a car at all to having a chauffeuse for my Panther de Ville, and seriously thinking about going straight from pedestrianism to learning how to fly (a helicopter). Well, I never got around to that either.

Crazy Davey; he did all that. He had the fast cars and big bikes and the planes, and the mansion. And he was crazy.

I may be stupid but I'm not — I never was — crazy.

I left that to Balfour. Our Davey collected dangerously insane things to do. Like the Three Chimneys tour; a case in point. Mad bastard nearly killed me, and not for the first time. That was one of his more dramatic escapades. Made what eventually happened even more ironic. And hard to bear.

But then a lot of it seems hard to bear, at the time. You get good at it, though, with sufficient practice and the right attitude.

And Christine, shall I probe that wound? Angel, I thought when I first saw you, heard you. That mouth, those lips, the voice of silk and gold; I lost you too, I threw you away, turned my back and condemned you, worshipper from the first, Judas to the last.

I always knew it would amount to nothing. Somehow I expected that. Right from the start I accepted I was a misfit and I'd never really be comfortable anywhere, with anyone. I just decided that if that was the case then I might as well try to be as successful a misfit as possible, make as big a noise about it as I could; give the bastards a run for their money. I suppose every society has its escape routes, ways the not-normal can be themselves without hurting those around them, and (more importantly) without harming the fabric of that society. I was lucky that the time I was born into actually heaped riches on misfits who could more or less behave themselves... providing they had something to offer in return, of course.

Ah, Jesus... Davey, Christine, Inez, Jean... all of you; what did you see when you looked at me? Did I look as stupid and awkward to you as I looked to myself? Worse, maybe. Deep down I never did give a damn what other people thought of me, but somehow I still worried like hell about it. I never expected to be loved, but I never wanted to hurt anybody either and that meant trying to be nice and generous and kind and supportive and generally behaving as though I was desperate to be loved, and for myself, not for my work.

Here I am, one of the few people awake in Glasgow, sitting in Mr Wykes' absurd, blasphemous tower, looking out over a churchyard that is not a churchyard, full of gravestones that are not gravestones, staring at the sky and the ever-changing traffic lights that tick and change and cycle through their simple programme regardless of an audience or cars or anything else short of a power failure, and I'm waiting for a certain train and thinking about — very possibly — doing something really stupid.

Anna Karenina?

No. Though I may well go west.

My hands are shaking. I'd kill for a cigarette. Not a person, of course; I wouldn't kill a human for a cigarette. I'd kill... a minor plant maybe, or a flatworm perhaps; nothing with a proper central nervous system... no, come to think of it, I'd kill a woodlouse for a cigarette (not that many woodlice carry fags), but that's only because I hate the horrible little crawling bastards. Inez said that she always used to stamp on them too, but then one day she started to think of them as baby armadillos and found she could suffer them to live.

Baby armadillos; good grief.

Gave up smoking years ago but I'd love a fag now; maybe I should go out; find an all night petrol station and buy a packet of straights.

No; this is just nervousness. I suffer terrible guilt pangs after smoking. Better not to. God, I'd like a drink, though. That's a lot more tricky. Drink. Drink drink drink. Trying to keep my mind off it, trying to keep my hands off it. I have the continual temptation of knowing there are several dozen large wooden crates stacked on the ground floor here and crammed with drink; red and blue label Stolichnaya, Polish vodka, Hungarian brandy, white and red Georgian sparkling wine (methode champenoise), real Budweiser and East German schnapps. Cases of the stuff; gallons and gallons of commie booze; sufficient alcohol to provide a lethal dose for every stockbroker, judge and priest in Glasgow; a small swimming pool's worth of genuine Red Death. The ground floor of Mr Wykes' Folly — my home — also holds a Yugoslavian dumper truck, a Russian tractor and a Czechoslovak bulldozer, not to mention a quantity of other Eastern Bloc products sufficient to fill a small and probably rather unexciting department store.

There is a perfectly logical reason for me having all this.

... More words for the song. I scribble them down on the back of another man's card, like a thank you for information received. Just please let that news be true, let it not be false or wrong or incomplete. Let it be right if the song is right, and I'll try my hardest, honest.

Scribble scribble. There.

Another time-check. Three-thirty; thank goodness. An hour and fifty minutes left. Time to think clearly, time to review, reconsider.

Let's try and get all this into some sort of perspective; let's put it in context, shall we? Order it.

My name is WEIRD, my name is Dan or Danny or Daniel, my name is Frank X, Gerald Hlasgow, James Hay. I am thirty-one years old and old before my time and still just a daft wee boay; I am a brilliant failure and a dull success, I could buy a nearly-new Boeing 747 for cash if I wanted to but I don't own an intact pair of socks. I've made a lot of mistakes that paid off and a lot of smart moves that I'll regret forever. My friends all seem to be dead, fed up with me or just disgusted and on the whole I can't blame them; I'm an unholy innocent and wholly guilty.

So come on down, roll up, come along, come in, sit down and shut up, calm down and listen up... join me now (hey gang, let's do the show right here!) ... join me now as we journey into the past down the teeming thoroughfare that is... (you guessed)

TWO

Frozen Gold: I hated that name right from the start, but I was so damn sure of myself I was perfectly confident I'd persuade them to change it.

Wrong.

A wet Tuesday in November, in Paisley, in 1973. I was seventeen; I'd left school a year earlier and started work at Dinwoodie and Sons, a light engineering works carrying out component work for the big Chrysler car plant at Linwood (the Chrysler factory had been a Rootes factory, would later become a Talbot factory, and finally end up a Closed factory; a car plant that withered).

I spent most of my time collecting swarf from around the lathes, making up songs in my head and going to the toilet. In the toilet I smoked, read the papers and wanked. I was bursting with youth then; seething with semen and pus and ideas; bursting spots, pulling myself off, scribbling down tunes and words anq bad poetry, trying every form of dandruff control known to Man save cutting all my hair off, and wondering what it was like to get laid.

And feeling guilty. Never forget the feeling guilty; the constant bass line to my life. It was one of the first things I was ever aware of (I don't know what I'd done; peed on the carpet, thrown up over my da, hit one of my sisters, sworn ... doesn't matter. The crime, the misdeed, is the least important part of it; what counts is the guilt). 'You bad, bad boy!' 'You wicked child!' 'Ye wee