Ian McDonald - River of Gods

You know your stuff. You can do this material forwards and backwards, in English, in Hindi, on your head, dressed as a lettuce. You know the hook points and the builds, you’ve got your three topical referents, you know where you can improv and then on-ramp without shifting gear. You can take out a heckler with a single shot. They’d laugh at a cat up behind the mike tonight so why do you feel like there’s a fist up your ass slowly hauling your guts out? Home crowds are always hardest and tonight they have the power. Thumbs-up, thumbs down, vote with your throat in the Glasgow region heat of the Funny Ha-Ha contest. It’s the first hurdle to Edinburgh and a Perrier Award, but it’s the first one trips you up.

Compere is doing the slow build up now. People on the right put your hands together. People on the left do the really penetrating two-finger whistles. People in the balcony start a titanic roar. For. Mr. Vishram! Raaaaayyyl And he’s out of the blocks, running for the bright stage lights, the roar of the audience and his metal mistress, the slim, steel torso of the lone microphone.

With his party eye he glimpses her leave her coat at the club check and decides, I’ll have a crack at that. Meerkatting. Head up high, looking left right, all over. She heads for the bar clockwise around the room. He heads widdershins, tracking her through the jungle of bodies. She has the gang of friends, the scary professional one, the one who’s into her body but you try touching, the dumpy one who’ll go with anything. He can cut her out, round her up. Vishram times his run and gets to the bar that split second before she does. The bar girl does a double take, left, right.

“Oh, sorry, go ahead there,” Vishram yells.

“No, you were here.”

“No no, you go on.”

Glasgow accent. Always good to go native. She wears a strap-back V-top and hipsters so low cut he sees the twin curves of her fit nates as she bends over the bar to roar an order at the bar gi rL

“Here I’ll get this.” To the bar girl: “Throw in a vodka black dog.”

“We should be buying you.” she shouts in his ear. He shakes his head, chancing a glance round to see if his mates are looking. They are.

“My shout. I’m feeling flush.”

The bottles come. She hands them round to her mates, arrayed behind her, and clinks with him.

“Congratulations. So, is that you through?”

“To the Edinburgh final, yes. After that, fame, fortune, my own sitcom.” Time for manoeuvre one. “Listen, I can’t hear myself think, let alone attempt witty and scintillating conversation. Can we move away from the speakers?”

The corner by the cigarette machine under the balcony is not signifiantly quieter than anywhere else at the party, but it’s away from her friends and dark.

She says, “You got my vote.”

“Thank you. I owe you that drink then. Sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

“I didn’t throw it,” she says. “Anye.”

“Anye, good.”

“Gallic.”

“Yeah, Gallic name. Good Gallic solidity.”

“Thank my parents for that. Good solid Galls, the pair of them. You know, I think Bharat and Scotland have a lot in common. New nations, all that.”

“I still think we’ve got you beat when it come to good old-fashioned religious violence.”

“You clearly haven’t seen an Old Firm game.”

While Anye talks Vishram has been moving his body around, closing off her access to the dance floor, her friends. Manoeuvre two— the isolation—complete, he moves on to manoeuvre three. He pretends to recognise the music.

“I like this one.” He detests it but it’s a good solid 115. “You fancy a wee boogie?”

“I fancy a wee boogie very much,” she says, coming out of the corner at him with a low light in her eyes. The regulation five dances later, he’s found out that she’s a Law Major at Glasgow U, an SNP party worker and likes mountains, new nations, going out with her mates, and coming home without them. This sounds flawless to Vishram Ray, so he buys her another— her friends have receded into a glum huddle at the end of the bar nearest the women’s toilets—necks it quick and dirty and hauls her out for another couple on the floor. She dances heavy but enthusiastic, all limbs. He likes them meaty. Halfway through the mid-tempo shift-of-pace number his hip pocket starts calling his name. He ignores it.

“Aren’t you going to answer that?”

He hauls out the palmer hoping it’ll be someone wanting to talk to him about comedy. It’s not. Vishram, it’s Shastri . Not now, old servant. Absolutely not now.

But he’s getting bored with the party. Cut to manoeuvre four.

“Do you want to stay here, or shall we go on somewhere else?”

“I’m easy,” she says.

Right answer.

“Do you fancy coming back to mine, wee coffee?”

“Aye,” she says. “I would.”

Outside on Byres Road there’s still lingering magic hour blue over the rooftops. The car lights look unnatural, theatrical, a scene shot day for night. The taxi slo-mos through a midnight twilight. Anye sits close on the big leather seat. Vishrani slips the hand. She slides back on the seat to open up the front of her hipsters. He hooks panty elastic. Manoeuvre five.

“Funny man,” she says, guiding his fingers.

The golden stone of the tenements seem to glow in the half dark. Vishram can feel the stored warmth from the stonework on his face. There’s still a smell of cut grass from the park.

“This is nice,” Anye says. “Expensive.”

Vishram still has his hand down her pants, guiding her up the steps with his hot finger. His groin, his breathing, his belly muscles all tell him he’s going to have her big and heavy and naked on his floor. He’s going to find out the noises she makes. He’s going to see the dirt in her head, the things she wants another body to do to her. Vishram almost tumbles through the door in a rush of want. His foot sends the thing waiting for him skittering across the lobby. He thinks about leaving it. The automatic lights pick out the green and silver logo of The Company.

“Just a wee second.”

Already his proto-stiffie is subsiding.

The plastic priority mail wallet is addressed to Vishram Ray, Apartment 1a, 22 Kelvingrove Terrace, Glasgow, Scotland. Sick, sober and de-aroused, Vishram opens the envelope. Inside, two items: a letter from Shastri the wrinkled retainer and a ticket from Glasgow via LHR to Varanasi, first class, one way.

He began the thing with the woman in the very good suit in the BharatAir Raja Class lounge because he’s still glowing on the winning high and the booze but mostly frustrated libido.

He had the zip just pulled on his jam of travel essentials when the limo arrived. He’d offered Anye a ride back to hers. She’d given him a freezing, solid Gallic SNP-activist look.

“I’m sorry, it’s family.”

She looked very cold, in those pants, that much bare skin, hurrying through the early August Glasgow predawn. Vishram made it to check-in with ten minutes to spare. He was the sole occupant of the sharp end of the short shuttle flight to Londlon. He came down the airbridge slightly vertiginous from the velocity of it all and headed straight to the first-class lounge with a determination for vodka. The shower, the shave, the change of clothes, and a shot of Polish restored his Vishram Ray-ness. He felt good enough about himself to try to hook the woman in the comfortable-for-flying suit into casual chat. Just to pass the time. Lounge reptile.

Her name is Marianna Fusco. She is a corporate lawyer. She has been summoned to Varanasi to attend to a complex trusteeship issue.

“Me, I’m just the black sheep, the court jester. The youngest brother sent to England to study law at some ’bridge university; except he ends up in Scotland aspiring to stand-up. The highest human art form, incidentally. And not all that different from law, I suspect. We’re both creatures of the arena.”