The Quaker. Liam McIlvanney

It was barely three weeks since he’d moved to this district. They kept knocking bits of it down. Every time you went out there was another gap-site, another missing street, you never knew where you were.

      Across the street was a block of empty tenements. It struck Kilgour that there was another dead street beyond this and then maybe the main road. Buses, bars, shops. People. Places to hide.

      He took a breath, closed his eyes for a second, tugged his sweat-soaked shirt away from his chest. Then he left the closemouth at a sprint, running low with his hands up around his head, as though fearful of falling debris. Without looking he knew the car had stopped. There was a hollow crunch as the driver found reverse and a veering screech as the car swung round. Kilgour made it into the building across the street, feet slapping through the echoey close and he heard the engine’s angry rasp as the driver found first and ramped up through the gears.

      Emerging into the dark backcourt Kilgour heard the car suddenly louder, the engine’s whine stretching as the car took the corner and gunned down the straight.

      He’d been heading straight across the backcourt but now he sheered off to the left, nearly slamming into a metal clothes-pole. The hard-packed earth was strewn with bricks and rubble and his ankles flexed and buckled as he ran. He ran with his hands out in front of him, feeling for clotheslines and other impediments in the gathering dark and soon a black wall reared up in front of him. He scrambled on to the roof of a midden, hauled himself on to the wall and dropped down into the next backcourt.

      He kept running, weaving from side to side like a man dodging bullets. He couldn’t hear the car, the only sound now was Kilgour’s own breathing and then his running foot kicked something, a tin can that sparked and rattled over the broken ground, splitting the night like a burst of gunfire. When he reached the next wall and struggled on to the midden he was losing heart, his legs were heavy, the fight was draining out of him.

      Before him was a big patch of waste ground: bricks and rubble, puddles catching the last of the light. He raised his eyes and saw the squat low outline, a building shaped like a shoebox.

      Kilgour slipped over the wall. He drew his sleeve across his brow and picked his way through the rubble. His knees almost gave way as he pushed through the double doors.

      ‘Did you win?’ The barman was smiling as he passed him his change.

      Kilgour stared at the red stupid face.

      ‘What?’

      ‘The race you were in, did you win it?’

      Sweat was dripping from Kilgour’s brow on to the bar-top, spotting a beermat. McEwan’s Export: the Laughing Cavalier, with his foaming tankard of ale. Kilgour shook his head and slipped the change into his pocket and tried to still the tremor in his leg.

      He was sick of running. He’d been running – one way or another – for over two years, since he’d walked out of Peterhead on a wet spring morning with his worldly goods in a black BOAC flight bag. He was sick of moving, changing flat every couple of months. But what could you do? It followed a pattern. For a while things would go well in a new flat. Then someone would place him, make the connection. And then it would start. Dogshit through the letter box. Catcalls from the local kids. Crude words scrawled on his door. Rocks through the windows. Getting jostled in the street. That’s when he’d look for another place.

      You could change your name, but why give them the satisfaction if you hadn’t done anything wrong?

      He heard the pub doors rattle. He didn’t look round. He stared down at the bar-top and in the vertical black groove of a cigarette burn he saw the gable end of a building, a dark street. He saw a woman on the pavement, sitting up now, clutching her throat, choking, retching, her torn blouse hanging open, her skirt shucked up around her waist. Her face was pink and gorged, her eyes bulging and bloodshot, swimming in tears. A rope of snot and saliva swung from her upper lip. He remembered the burst of pain in his head and the ground swinging up to smack him, and a dead weight on his back, a man sitting astride him, forcing his arm up his back. He’d lain there, oddly placid, with his face pressed to the gritty street and the weight on his back until the siren drew closer and gulped to a stop and a pair of black boots filled his line of vision.

      Now he watched in the whisky mirror as the burly man shooed the barman away and the thin man shook his head.

      Kilgour wiped a hand down his face. The same hand reached for the whisky and then pulled back. He reached into his jacket pocket for his smokes and then changed his mind. The cops watched him. He could see his own face in the gantry mirror, sick and scared, the features obscured by the ‘FIN’ of ‘FINEST SCOTCH WHISKY’. He looked bad, he was sweating, the hair at his temples in damp little spikes.

      Then his leg started again, his right leg shaking, the knee joint flexing. He reached out for a drink and his hand knocked the glass, whisky pooling on the sticky bar-top. When he bolted to the Gents he could sense them coming after.

      ‘Robert Kilgour?’

      Piss and carbolic. The bare lightbulb flaring in the scuffed steel of the trough.

      ‘Kilgour,’ he said. The cop had pronounced it to rhyme with ‘power’: Kilgour rhymed it with ‘poor’.

      ‘Why did you run?’

      The fat cop had backed him up to the trough.

      ‘Why did you run, Kilgour?’

      Kilgour glanced at the other cop, the tall one. He was still looking at the tall one when the fat one kicked his legs from under him and Kilgour slammed on to the dark concrete, his elbow cracking on the floor, the back of his head catching the lip of the trough. Then the fat one reached down and hauled him up like a bag of chaff and dumped him into the trough. Kilgour waggled his arms for balance, his hands paddling in the piss and running water, he felt the cold wet soaking into the arse of his trousers. He struggled to his feet, wiping his hands on the front of his jacket.

      ‘How did you know it was you we were looking for?’ The tall one had a different voice, softer, not a city accent. Kilgour felt the old injustice welling up again and fought to keep the tremor from his voice.

      ‘It’s always me. Ever since that lassie on the south side. The Keevins lassie. It’s always me you’re looking for.’

      Kilgour’s hand was in his pocket again. The fat one leaned forward and Kilgour flinched but the man gripped Kilgour’s wrist and yanked his hand from his pocket. The cigarette packet flipped out and landed on the tiled floor. The two-tone red stripe: Embassy Filter. The cops exchanged a look.

      ‘Smile.’

      Kilgour looked up, uncertain. His eyes slid to the tall one, Who is this lunatic? and the fat one stepped forward and gripped Kilgour’s jaw in the V of his right hand, thumb and fingers compressing the flesh. ‘I told you to smile. You fucking nonce. Don’t you know how to smile?’

      He released his grip. Kilgour’s lips drew back, exposing his teeth in a queasy sneer. They were ordinary teeth, nicotine-brown, averagely crooked.

      ‘Good enough.’ The fat one tugged the cuffs from his jacket pocket. ‘Turn round.’

      The cuffs went on. As they frogmarched Kilgour through the pub they passed a table of four men, near the door. Dominoes. Boiler-makers. Metal ashtray needing emptied.

      ‘Hey!’ One of the men was on his feet, a stocky man in a grey suit jacket. Pocked face. Rangers scarf. ‘Hey! What’s the score here? Ah’m talking to you. Hi! Fuckin’ Zed Cars.’

      The cops stopped. The fat one nodded for the other to take charge of Kilgour and rocked unhurriedly up to the table. He had two or three inches on the man with the scarf.

      ‘You’ve got something to say?’

      ‘The boy done nothin’,’ the man was saying. ‘Mindin’ his own fuckin’ business. You think we didnae see that?’

      ‘Just like you, eh? Mindin’ your business.’

      The man snorted.