The Long Glasgow Kiss

‘You’ll be lucky. I get the feeling she’s keeping a low profile.’

‘You okay?’

May looked at me for a moment, sighed then smiled. ‘I’m fine. It’s just she was very … agitated. I thought she was going to go for me.’

‘Sorry. I didn’t think …’

‘Forget it … it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle.’ Suddenly, May’s attention was drawn to something through the windscreen.

‘Look …’ she said.

‘Is that her?’

I followed May’s eyes to the junction about two hundred yards ahead, to where a young woman in her early twenties was hurrying across the street, coming from the direction of Craithie Court. From this distance she appeared to be quite attractive. My experience of Glaswegian women was that they were usually only ever attractive from a distance, or through bourbon-tinted glasses. The woman up ahead was not quite slim with a slight heaviness around the waist and ankles. She had a pale grey jacket draped over one blue-bloused arm and everything about her movements suggested urgency.

‘You haven’t seen her before?’ May seemed surprised. ‘Yes, that’s her.’

We watched as she made her way along the street towards the corner.

‘Can you drive, May?’ I asked. It was odd, but it was one of the thousands of things about May that I didn’t know.

She shook her head. I took out my wallet and handed her everything I had in it apart from a couple of one-pound notes. It amounted to just over thirty pounds and I thrust it into her hands.

‘That’s for helping me out tonight. I’ve got to go after her so that’s to cover your taxi fare home too. Thanks, May.’

‘That’s far too much, Lennox.’

‘Consider it a wedding gift,’ I said. I got out of the car and May followed. ‘I’m sorry that you have to get a cab home.’

‘That’s okay,’ she said.

I looked impatiently up the road to the corner around which Claire Skinner had just disappeared from view. I turned back to May. It was as if she was trying to frame a thought, put something into words.

‘It’s okay, May,’ I said. ‘See you around.’

She nodded in an odd way, her eyes avoiding mine, said ‘Thanks’ and ‘Bye’, turned abruptly, and walked briskly back down Thornwood Road towards Dumbarton Road and out of my life.

I jumped back into the Atlantic. The chances were that Claire Skinner hadn’t spotted my car outside the hostel. And my face was totally unknown to her. My fond farewell to May had cost me too much time to follow Claire on foot: I had too much distance to cover. And once I had covered it, things would get tricky: it’s never easy to follow by car someone who is on foot, without being detected. But I guessed that Claire would jump onto a bus or tram, or hail a taxi. I had no idea where she was going, but I was pretty sure whom she was going to see. I picked her up again when I turned the corner. Her trot had slowed to a brisk walk, still a determined effort on a muggy summer’s evening in Glasgow. I saw her check her watch, but I was pretty sure this was no prearranged appointment: she had been spurred into action by May’s unwelcome intervention.

I caught up with her and had to drive past her at normal speed. I decided to pull over farther up the street, dump the car, and hoof it. A car travelling at walking pace would be far too conspicuous. I pulled over to the kerb and did a quick check of where I was. Fairlie Park Drive. I was about to get out of my car when she walked briskly past without looking in my direction. There was a telephone booth at the corner with Crow Road and Claire stepped into it. She made a short call before stepping back out and waiting outside the ’phone box. I noticed her feet, small beneath the slightly too thick ankles and doing a little side to side dance step. I decided to sit tight. The mountain was maybe on its way to Mohammed. After about ten minutes, I saw her wave furiously at something. A black taxi pulled over and she jumped in. I waited until the cab passed me and put another car between us before I pulled out.

The taxi headed south out of the city. We passed through Pollokshields, reminding me that I’d have to return there later, then Pollokshaws, Giffnock and Newton Mearns. One of the things I could never get used to about Glasgow was the way it was this concentrated, dense knot of stone, brick and steel, factories and furnaces, tenements and bristling cranes; and then suddenly you were in open, almost empty countryside. We were on the main road south, a grey-black scar on a wrinkled blanket of green that stretched as far as I could see on either side. This was the main Carlisle road and it meant I was able to conceal myself in traffic: something that became more difficult when the taxi pulled off onto a B-road. Another turn took the cab onto an even narrower country road. This was a road to nowhere else and you needed a reason to have made that turning. I held back, allowing a gap to open up between the Atlantic and the cab. The road traced the edge of a flooded quarry that looked up at the sun like a mud-brown eye.