This excerpt is taken from: pp396-8 Penguin paperback edition (2005)

I got to my feet, rubbed my hands the gether, lifted the anorak from the back of the chair. I looked again for Sally and this time saw her, she was there alongside the manager guy. I pulled on the anorak. Men’s room, I said, that place is freezing; why dont they lay on some heaters in the back! I jerked my thumb in a northerly direction. Ye know the song, I said, if I had the wings of an eagle I’d fly o’er mountaintops, we would all do that. What is that for you Norman a beer?

You bet.

You want a wee uisghé?

No thanks.

And what is that you’re drinking Rita? is that a rum and sprite?

It’s a cointreau and soda. Some ice with it?

Okay, yeh. I walked to the bar. People were there. Plus the pentagon feller. Oh yeh. But mair besides him and the trucker guy, also the other yin.

I was gauny go straight to the lavatory. But thought to order the drinks first. I heard somebody mention snow. I was gauny comment but to hell with it. I kept to the side, no wanting to look like an eavesdropping bastard. Or else like I was trying to worm my way into their company or something in the name of fuck why anybody would want to do that I dont know. There was a vacant high stool. I settled myself onto that. It was a wobbly fucker. One of its lower rungs was missing. That made it difficult to perch. This is why it was vacant. Then too because it was high my feet couldnay rest on the floor, only the toe-tips of my shoes.

There was aye fucking something in this life. It doesnay matter where the fuck ye are or what the fuck ye are doing man there is aye fucking something. It brings ye down. I feel that myself. Ye try to kind of I dont know ye try to just – get ahead I suppose. I was never that bothered with the rags to riches scene, we can all be Andrew Carnegie. Who the fuck wants to be an inhumanoid multibillionaire strike-breaking cunt. I dont gie a fuck if he was Skarrisch. Gie us a real hero. Uhmerka’s full of them, ye just cannay talk about them. One of Yasmin’s neighbors was a New Yorker, an angry feller; him and his wife were right into social history and he says how New York had one of the all-time great radical traditions but the fucking Defense industry wiped it out man the soldiers and the cops, they done it for the men with money, them and the pentagon lickspittles, they destroyed it, all the welfare and human rights, infant mortality, the lot.

Agh fuck it, let us get hame.

The manager had his arm round Sally’s waist.

How come life is so consistent.

Nay doubt they were a happily merrit twosome. Unless she had lost her memory or else gone mad. Christ that also fitted, it fitted exactly. These small towns man fucking incestuous shite. People go mad and they become a slur on their community; rather than treat them properly as patients the town elders fling them to the wolves. Never darken wur doorstep again they cry! Thus the poor auld outcast must wander, the cauld wind a-blowing and the torrential rain a-falling and still the outcast wanders on and wanders alone, spurned and rejected by a so-called caring society of whom more anon.

The two were to the side of the bar. I could see how it was. Sally had moved so her heid was against his shoodir, classic female-to-male posture, it made me smile, she was just so relaxed with him. How could ye no applaud that? What else was there? Ye just wantit her to relax, yer woman. That was me, that was all I ever wantit.

I saw Rita and Norman, Rita was saying something to him, he was nodding. Ye wondered about their life. It was an ambiguous thing. But that applied to everybody.

Hey there.

It was the pentagon fucker.

Hey, he said.

Who ye talking to me? I said.

Yeh.

Hullo, I said.

You’re far from home.

Yeh. I glanced sideways. The other two guys in his company were listening to a woman calling to them from a nearby table.

Meanwhile Sally was serving booze. That was good. People go to bars they liked to get served booze. Scabby prick had strolled towards the band, he was talking as he went, talking to the saxophonist who was doing his best no to yawn. I recognized that yawn. But I couldnay recall its significance.

When I worked in the booze trade I made it a point of principle: serve the cunts! Back hame in dear auld bonné one experienced minor kerfuffles but one did get served. This place was a joke. If one failed to exercise caution one became psychologically damaged in the pursuance of the pettier experiential data i.e. mind-altering substances of a liquid substance. However, I was exercising caution. Caution and me were conmingled. Is that a word, conmingled?

So you’re Skarrisch?

Jeremiah Brown is a man of extremes. So when he nips out for a quick drink on the eve of returning to his native Scotland after twelve years in America, anything could happen. Anything at all. Just one quick drink to help him sleep but there’s something about this town and this bar that reminds him of his ex. Soon the memories are flooding in and as the night goes on and the decision to stop smoking looks increasingly ill-timed for a card-carrying alien of questionable politics, Jeremiah getting on that flight tomorrow starts to seem far from certain. Tonight, the only thing that’s certain is that you have to be very careful in the land of the free.