I barely remember the rest of the night to be honest with you. The concert was good, they came up with this song where Lucas enumerated, is that a word, e-num-er-ated all of the subjects of songs, I can’t remember exactly how many there were but there were songs about falling in love and songs about being pure enamoured and songs about meeting and songs about falling out of love and songs about being all tore up and then there were songs about despair, complete despair (I may be making that one up myself, I can’t remember), songs about God, songs about existential lifestyles, songs about the seasons, about autumn leaves and flowers in the springtime, songs about animals, about wanting to be an animal or acting like one, songs that were more like social commentary, trivial songs, songs about memory, songs about the past and about the future and songs that would bring the two together, songs that were written out of guilt alone, songs that were meant to salvage guilty feelings or salve guilty feelings, one or the other, the PA was cheap, who knows, songs about time, like when will you or what have you or if you or now you or can’t you, songs about songs, singing about singing, which isn’t singing at all if you ask me, singing about plants growing up or the vagaries of weather, is that a word, vague-ar-ies, and there were more songs, for sure, he listed them all, or it seemed as if he did, and then he had this whole thing where he acted as if he had exhausted songs, he shrugged and he shivered and he cried – it was like rockabilly to me – and then he went into this thing where he started spouting nonsense, like he was having a conversation with himself and talking rubbish, just crazy stuff that made no sense and that’s when it struck me. He’s singing about nothing. Fuck me. He’s writing a song about nothing. It’s the only thing that songs haven’t been written about. D’you get me? And it was like a love song, it was like he was singing a song to something that was so lacking in love that even the mention of its name would bring it back to life and we would all notice it and fall in love with it like a prom queen or a movie star. Oh god every bit of nonsense was like a poem to nothing from the depths of his heart to the depths of his heart. It’s all nonsense, I said to myself, it’s all bollocks, then I imagined Lucas lifting me up in his arms, I imagined the pure freezing rivers running through his veins, I thought of his feet, pure writhing like fish out of water.

I’ve fallen in love, he told me. We met for a Chinese at the weekend; we used to order from the Lucky Star in Forrest Street in Airdrie and then take it to a park further along the road where no one ever went and where I still return to in my dreams, even though it doesn’t exist any more, and in the summer we would lie in the grass and eat our meals with chopsticks out of foil containers and drink cans of beer and debate the future and novels. We set ourselves courses, we had our own club, like, you know, for instance we would listen to all of John Coltrane’s albums in order, one a day, until we had gone right through his catalogue, or we would assign ourselves novels, say all Russian novels, Gogol and Turgenev and Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and Bulgakov (The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov is my favourite book of all time but just so you know you have to read it in the Michael Karpelson translation never the one that Diana Burgin and Katherine O’Connor did where it was like they were making things up for a modern audience really it was sacrilege I couldn’t believe it so the message is: avoid) and Chekhov and Pushkin and Lermontov, and then we would discuss them on our Saturday afternoons, which would inevitably turn to evenings and late nights and sleeping in the park. His wife was a real bitch, she didn’t care, though she was good-looking, I’ll give her that, which was odd, you know, as in what on earth were they doing with each other, and this particular Saturday we had been reading Chekhov, inevitably, and that’s when he told me that he wanted to stop reading, that he had no further need of reading, in fact. I’ve stepped into a novel, he said. I might as well be Rimbaud going off to Palestine. Are you really going to go? I asked him. I want to be adventurous, he said. I want to live. Books aren’t living, he said. Music isn’t living. Staying alive isn’t living. Chasing a twenty-year-old-girl halfway round the world and setting up shop in a war zone: that might be living. It was hard to argue with him, even though I knew full well that books were alive and music was alive. [...]

When the rest of the group heard about it, well, at first there was a big hoo-ha but when Remy suggested getting Mary Hanna in they started coming round to the idea. Patty said, yes, let’s continue, but with no drums, that way when they ask us what happened to our drummer we’ll just say he ran away to Palestine, he left his wife for a twenty-year-old and now he’s somewhere on the West Bank, precise location unknown, and he’s a better drummer for it. It beats dying or going off the ball or being told to pack it in by your wife. He remains a member, Patty said. In fact he’s more important than ever.

It was an early-morning flight. Lubby had arranged everything. They were to stay with a friend who lived in a suite in a hotel on the shore at Tel Aviv and from there they would make contact with a humanitarian organisation and relocate to a distribution hub on the Gaza Strip; though when I looked at them both in the rear-view mirror they looked more like Jackie O and JFK on their way to Dallas. She was wearing these big dark glasses and a floppy hat so you couldn’t really see her face, which was a blessing, in a way, because it was true that she had the kind of dark eyes that would bring out the high diver in everyone and who knows I might have ended up in Israel myself.

The next day we visited Goosey in the hospital. It’ll be wigs from here on out, lads, he told us, that’s what they’re saying, and secretly I thought at last we can have some coherence in this band but then I felt bad, his head was mangled, he looked like a skinned beetroot. We’ve located Mad Mary, I told him, we’re meeting them down the glen for vengeance and for a handover. Don’t do it, he said, don’t get involved. Let’s just call the police, we did nothing wrong. You’re forgetting something, I said. I may have killed someone. None of us have any idea if the guy I stabbed is dead or alive.

[...] He was wearing a pair of jeans and a black V-neck T-shirt and one of those checked seventies lumberjack jackets and a pair of baseball boots, I think, and I sat down next to him and asked him about music. He went on about Wire, Pink Flag, which was fine with me, but then he had this thing about Neil Young, he kept going on about Neil Young, about how his Harvest album was like the true country, none of this Acuff and Rose bullshit, he kept saying, which meant nothing to me at the time, and he had this weird thing that he would do with his eyebrow where he would just raise his right eyebrow for a millisecond and it was like a bird shrugging, a bird flying away and shrugging and saying, you know, what do you expect, it’s what I do, something like that, and I was impressed, this guy is living it, I thought to my teenage self, living what, I don’t know, but then the thing that compounded it was when my sister told me that when he took his jeans off the night before he had no scants on, no underwear whatsoever, just his naked balls underneath the denim. It blew my mind, just naked balls, I thought, what an idea. I had been brought up on things like combs and toothpaste and socks and vests and underwear. It was crazy to me. I asked her, doesn’t it stink, I said, doesn’t it leave a stain? He said he washed his jeans when they got dirty, she said. Besides, she said, he doesn’t care about stinks or stuff like that. Then she smirked and said that she thought it was sexy, this penis so near the surface, just ready to strike, not caged up or anything. I admit I was a convert. From that day on I threw all of my scants in the bin and just walked about with my bollocks hanging carefree. After that it was every man for himself.

SH: I worked in a shoe shop in Coatbridge for one day and got fired. I couldn’t be arsed going into the stock room and finding different sizes so I would just automatically tell people that everything was out of stock. You genuinely can’t be arsed, the manager said to me, can you? He seemed kind of impressed, in a way. That’s well observed, I said, and after that it was all over. Of course I had a paper round, my dad was always putting my name down for paper rounds. Everyone in Airdrie had a paper round at some point. That’s a real job right there, he would say, and of course I would just go dump all of the papers behind a fucking hedge at Easter Moffat Golf Club and be done with it.

[...] What the hell (I was in Paris). Afterwards I walked along the Seine in the early evening where groups of friends and lovers were drinking wine and picnicking on coats spread out on the grass (as the sun was going down). I sat on the grass (a couple with bare feet were sleeping on a blanket right next to me) until nearly ten o’clock when I guessed my friend would probably be home by now (either that or I would be sleeping on the grass next to them for the night, which actually appealed to me, in a way) but even so I went to one more bar but looking at all the unattainable women drinking on the pavement (with beautiful heels on and nylons and with handbags overflowing with personal stuff and their own lives that had nothing to do with mine) made me melancholy for the first time and I felt old, somehow (or too young), and wanted to go home.

[...] There was a pair of thick floor-length brown velvet curtains (that were pulled shut) and some candles burning (and some lamps) and on the couch there was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, done up with dark hair and red lips and oversized glasses (her hair like a dark silent river, a river that was moving in complete silence, that’s what it seemed like the first time I saw her) and her ears (don’t even ask me about her ears), I can’t even describe her ears, she had hair pulled back over one of them and it was like seeing the earth from space, the hollow earth (or seeing yourself as a foetus, in the womb of your mother), and she was smoking a cigarette, her arm at a perfect angle (taut, not without effort, but still somehow easy, relaxed), and she was so slim (barely budding) yet (still) she seemed sophisticated and mysterious and old. This relationship is ass-backwards, I said to myself. Her name was Valentine (how could it have been anything else?). This is Valentine, Patty said, my paramour (that’s how he introduced her). I felt unsophisticated (and poor). Valentine stood up and offered me her cheek. I forgot that in France you are supposed to kiss both cheeks so I did it all over again and she laughed but when I looked into her eyes they were like marbles. Let’s get something to eat, Patty said, grabbing his coat, and although I had already eaten I decided to go with the flow.

I began to think of people not as individuals but as destinations, as map points across this inhospitable desert, like an oasis of flesh, a port of spit and smell, and sometimes I would breathe it in, you know, with my legs spread in the back seat of a car or in a nightclub or in some bushes next to a train station and it would smell so bad that I would say to myself give me my own rotting corpse over the death in life of a suburban marriage, stick a glass bottle up my ass before you slide a ring onto my finger.