Her hair was loose (and bouncy, and shiny, and just washed). She wore a mid-calf denim skirt and a black silk blouse under a puffy jacket which she unzipped and shrugged out of as she walked up. I bought her a lager-and-lime and we found a table by the wall.
‘Smoke?’
‘Yes, thanks.’
I lit her cigarette and we looked at each other for a moment. Annette laughed suddenly.
‘This is silly,’ she said. ‘We know each other just enough to skip the ice-breaking chit-chat, but not well enough to know what to say next.’
Sharp mind alright.
‘That’s a good point,’ I said, treading water. ‘Actually I don’t know anything about you, apart from having seen you across a table or a room a few times.’
‘Didn’t Dave talk about me?’ There was an undertone of curiosity to her pretended pique.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Mind you, he did tell me one very important thing about you…’
‘Oh yes?’
‘That you’re not interested in politics.’
‘Is that all? Huh, and there was me thinking he’d be telling you as much about me as I’ve told Sheena about him.’
‘That must be a relief.’
‘Sure is…And he’s wrong about that, too!’ she added.
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Well, it’s not that I’m not interested. I just don’t like talking about it.’
‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘But why?’
‘I grew up in Belfast,’ she said. ‘Left when I was about ten. There’s a saying over there: “Whatever you say, say nothing.” I still have family over there, still visit. The habit sticks.’
‘Even here?’ I glanced around. ‘What’s the problem?’
She leaned forward and spoke in a lowered voice. ‘Half the people in this city have some Irish connection, and a good few of them have very decided views. So it doesn’t do to shoot your mouth off, especially in pubs.’
As Dave tended to do, I thought. Interesting.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’m not curious. I can’t even tell what I’m sure anybody from around here could: whether you’re a Catholic or a Protestant. Me, I don’t have a religion and I don’t care what flag flies over me or what politicians do so long as they leave me alone.’
‘Which they won’t.’
‘Aye, there’s the rub!’
We both laughed. ‘So,’ I said, ‘what are you interested in?’
She thought about it for a moment. ‘I like my work,’ she said.
‘So tell me about it.’
And she did, explaining how she didn’t just do the technical stuff but tried to find out about the science behind it. She talked about evolution and population and the future of both, and that got me on to talking about SF, and she admitted to having read some dozens of Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion novels when she was younger (or ‘young’, as she charmingly put it). Before we knew it the bell had rung for last orders.
‘There’s a disco at Joanne’s,’ Annette said. ‘Shall we go there?’
‘Good idea,’ I said.
It wasn’t. We hadn’t been there half an hour when the music stopped and the DJ told everyone to pick up their things and leave quietly. We all knew what that meant: a bomb scare. Annette grabbed my hand with surprising force and hauled me through the crowd, with a ruthless disregard for others that I’d hitherto only seen in the QM bar crush.
We spilled into the street just as somebody authoritative shouted ‘False alarm!’ and the surge moved the other way. Annette stood fast against it. I looked down at her with surprise and saw it wasn’t just the drizzle that was wetting her face. Holding her parka around her shoulders she looked miserable and vulnerable.
‘Don’t you want to go back in?’ I asked.
‘I want to go home,’ she said. I held her parka while she struggled to get it on properly. She grabbed my hand again and started walking fast.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Oh, God. I just remembered the first time I was in a bomb.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, trying to be reassuring, ‘it’s crazy how we’ve got used to bomb scares.’
She glanced up at me with something like pity.
‘I wasn’t in a bomb scare,’ she said witheringly. ‘I was in the blast radius of a bomb. Loyalists hit a loyalist bar. Christ. I could see people screaming, and I couldn’t hear them.’
I didn’t think it would be a good move to ask if many people were hurt.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I squeezed her hand. ‘I didn’t know.’
She stopped, throwing me off-balance. I turned, tottering, to face her. She held her balled fists in front of her as if grasping and shaking by the lapels someone much smaller than myself.
‘Christ!’ she spat. ‘I hate this shit! I hate it so much! We were just going to enjoy ourselves, we all were, and some fucking swine has to ruin it! I blame them for all of it! For the bomb scares and the false alarms and the hoaxes – they wouldn’t happen if it wasn’t for the bastards who do the real thing. Ears and feet all over the pavement!’ She closed her eyes, then opened them as if she couldn’t bear what she saw. ‘And Dave used to say we had to listen to the oppressed. Nobody listens to me because I’m not an “oppressed”. I’m a focking prodistant!’ Her voice dropped to a harsh whisper, remnant of a caution otherwise thrown to the sodium sky. ‘Fuck them all! Fuck the Pope! Fuck the Queen! Fuck Ireland!’
As suddenly as her outburst had started, it stopped. She rested her fists on my shoulders and looked up at me, dry-eyed. She sniffed.
‘God, you must think I’m crazy,’ she said. ‘You didn’t deserve that.’
I wrapped my arms around her and held her close, taking the opportunity to look around. It must have looked like we we’d been having some kind of fight. This being Glasgow, and she not having used a bottle, nobody was paying us more than the idlest flicker of attention.
‘I’d prefer that to “whatever you say, say nothing”,’ I said. ‘Especially as I agree with what you just said.’
‘You do?’ She pulled back and frowned at me. ‘You mean you don’t believe in anything?’ Her voice was incredulous, hopeful.
Myra’s taunt came back to me: Ey’m en individualist enarchist, eckchelly. No point going into it that way, with a string of isms. I believe in you, I thought of trying, but that wouldn’t do, either. She looked so desperately serious!
I swallowed. ‘No God, no country, no “society”. Just people and things, and people one by one.’
‘Just us?’
I considered it, tempted. It would be a good line to hug her closer with.
‘No us either, unless each of us chooses, and only as long as each of us chooses.’
‘I don’t know if I could live with that.’
‘Better than dying with something else.’
She gave that glib response a more welcoming smile than it deserved.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I can see you’re not just trying to chat me up.’ She caught my hand again and shoved it, with hers, into her parka pocket. ‘Come on, see me home.’
We walked through the wet streets as if we were joined at the hip, stopping every couple of hundred metres for a clinch and a kiss. Neither of us talked very much. At her flat a faint glow and giggles came from Sheena’s small room. We had the front room, and the couch, to ourselves. We did a lot of hugging and kissing and groping and rolling, but when it became obvious that I wanted to go further she pushed me away.
‘Not ready yet,’ she said.
‘That’s all right,’ I said.
‘Maybe you should go now. Some of us have to get up in the morning.’