Robert Parker - Snow Storm

After that everything went a bit jumpy memory-wise. He remembered The Central, someone singing Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler” and Jimmy Walker eating a pint glass. Why did he always feel the need to do that? Then some boys from Whithorn had offered to fight everyone, just because they’d decided amongst themselves that they could.

Saturday was a write off. This was what happened when the parents went away on holiday and left him in charge.

They’d headed up to Stranraer. They’d trudged the mean streets of this insular tribute to a certain style of seventies architecture looking for some kind of adventure and accidentally found it in The Royal after stepping on someone’s toes, quite literally.

He’d been trying to get the barmaid’s attention. It wasn’t working but he wasn’t a man to give in easily. As she passed by he tried to make eye contact, a bit the worse for wear. He was over enthusiastic and despite only trying to follow her with his eyes he’d ended up doing so with his entire body as his feet tagged along for the ride.

He walked straight across the feet of a mean looking skin headed type who seemed to take exception. The guy’s face was distinctly bulldog-like. His nose had seen better days and his slow movements made him look punch drunk more than traditionally hammered.

Before Andy could say anything by way of an apology the other man lashed out, slamming him up against the bar. His movements were so subdued the way he swung almost looked camp. The man’s head shot forward without warning, driven by some unforeseen force, rattling his teeth off the bar. His shoulders slumped down as his body seemed to give in briefly before jerking fitfully back to life.

Andy looked up and saw the grinning face of Davie, who as it turned out was blissfully unaware of the bottle headed straight for the back of his head.

Everything happened so quickly; that was what people always said and it kind of did but at the same time everything was in slow motion. He heard the bottle holding guy say something in what he thought must have been an Eastern European language, probably Polish. He looked a lot like the bulldog but was distinguishable by an unusual tattoo sticking through the top of his shirt. He could remember thinking all of this just as the heavy duty bar stool came into contact with the guy’s jaw and everything underneath that point just seemed to collapse.

The bulldog guy seemed to find his balance again. He opened his mouth to speak but his words were slurred as the air and blood vapour breezed through the gap where his teeth had been. He rubbed his face, looked down at his hand and frowned before heading for the nearest exit as though on autopilot.

His friend lay on the ground dazed while people crowded around, partly trying to be good Samaritans partly wishing to be bit players in the action.

After that everything died down pretty quickly. It amazed him how that could happen. One minute you were having a quiet pint on a Saturday night, the next it had all gone tits up and you were dazed, spitting blood and wondering where the fuck your incisors had gone. Meanwhile, everyone went back to normal rules of engagement as the music kicked off again and you were left to pick up the pieces.

Sunday night they decided it was far safer just downing a few cans in front of Call of Duty.

The consequences of all of this caught up some time around Monday morning and now he was paying his debt to the party gods in full.

As he headed down the track the low hanging branches bounced off the tractors cab jarring his nerves more than they needed. The flat expanse of Baldoon opened up before him stretching off into the distance to be interrupted by Wig Bay, going south to the Solway Firth. Beyond, the Galloway Hills looking glacial at this time of year, having received their seasonal dusting of snow, dominated the north and east of the horizon.

The airfield had been built in the war, this being a suitably out of the way place to hide trainees for the RAF’s finest. A good few pilots had ended their days on those hills due to errors of judgement or just plain bad luck. Air strips ran east to west and north to south intersecting each other and the shells of what had once been the base’s buildings lay like the skeletal remains of what must have been a much more dramatic world.

To the south of The Machars, nearer the bottom of the peninsula at Garlieston they’d built the Mulberry Harbour; a top secret floating construction used for the D-Day landings and to the west at Knockienam Churchill and Eisenhower met to formulate plans.

It seemed strange to think so much had gone on here. Now they didn’t even have a railway. The creamery had gone years ago and farming had changed altogether. Now the first thing many people did when they were old enough was get out. There was a bit of a brain drain going on. University or college in one of the big cities gave people a taste for the bright lights and life in the big smoke. Many didn’t return. It could get lonely if you stayed.

Not that Andy was worried. He was getting out. That was for sure. He was on a gap year; that was all. A gap yaaah, Davie had called it in his best scarf wearing toff accent before asking if he shouldn’t be somewhere more exotic, volunteering and teaching people the error of their ways, to which he’d replied he was.

He’d done it to help the old man out. He knew his dad would never ask him to stay, although deep down he knew he wanted him to. As a way to cut down on his guilt he’d decided to stick around for a year, remind the old boy how nuts they drove each other, chill out and earn some coin before heading for the bright lights, a place at uni and whatever the future might hold. The truth was he had no clue what he wanted. He just knew there was stuff out there. He wasn’t even sure what stuff, just stuff you could get your teeth into; conversations that didn’t involve cattle, cars or casual gossip.

He rounded the airfield and approached the entrance to the feed store. Some of the old buildings had evolved over time into a mini industrial complex that now contained a saw-mill and an agricultural supply store along with some offices and warehouses. Recently the whole lot had been bought over by a big company and it looked like security had been beefed up as he drew up to a full-on looking galvanised gate.

Andy had an uncomfortable feeling in his bones as he leaned down out of the cab to speak to the only worker by the gate, a man he now realised had a familiar toothless grin.

The two officers from the SCDEA had arrived around half past nine, conspicuously better turned out than their Edinburgh CID counterparts. It looked like they spent most of their wages in Urban Outfitters and probably the rest being seen in the flashiest bars in the Merchant City. Burke had always been more of a west end man where Glasgow was concerned, although even that was filling up with hipsters these days by all accounts.

They could have passed for students if you dropped them into another context he thought, before rebuking himself for the kind of lazy thinking he hated seeing in anyone else. Sometimes he felt he was engaged in a constant battle to see off the thought processes that signalled the start of the inevitable decline. Fair play, he was half way to seventy this year.

The guy, who introduced himself as DC Black, seemed almost shy, and yet there was something about his manner, something just the wrong side of assertive; probably just a sense of entitlement bestowed upon him by virtue of the fact he was a member of the SCDEA, the institution the media had taken great pains to describe as a Scottish equivalent of the FBI. Or maybe it was the fact he was a small man with big hair, as so many weegies seemed to be.

He wore a wedding ring which seemed out of place, given his age and wore a leather bomber jacket, which Burke suspected was less ironic fashion sense, more playing at being the big movie cop. He wondered how long he’d spent practising the iron grip handshake: probably bullied at school.