Soul Street

He had a face like a bruised, squashy pear. Yeah, and the brains of one.

‘And make sure ye don’t come back,’ he said. ‘I’m watching ye, mind.’

Security guys. Don’t you just love them? Hired from the loneliest depths of unemployment for the minimum wage. Yet so many of them seem to enjoy what they’re doing.

‘I won’t be back, pal,’ I told him, ‘Try to get yourself a proper job, huh?’

‘Aye, right. Away back hame tae America.’ He even had the quality of repartee you’d expect from a piece of fresh fruit.

Yeah, I’m American, from Los Angeles. Or a little place not far from it, up a canyon my folks hit on a hundred years ago and couldn’t seem to find their way out of. But my family haven’t really achieved much since we founded that small town. Me? I worked as a cop in LA until I had to leave the force…

But never mind why I had to leave and came to Scotland, OK? I chose Scotland because my name’s McClain, which somebody told me used to be Scottish, and also I’d seen a rerun of Brigadoon on TV not long before things got too hot for me. So I flew off, my head full of Brigadoon, mist and heather and then I landed up in Glasgow.

If you don’t know Glasgow you might try thinking of it as a small, grubby, no-good town trying hard to be tough and cool like LA. Not long after I arrived, on a February morning with gales tugging along dirty grey clouds, just above the roofs of the city, I took myself for a walk. Weather this dismal is a novelty for LAers, in case you’re wondering why I bothered. I went up the Cathkin Braes, a kind of low-rent Hollywood Hills south of the city, and disappeared into thick, grey, living cloud that tore past me like New Yorkers racing for the subway. I couldn’t see more than ten yards through that dense, scudding mass of grey: the wind sent the tails of my overcoat flying and whistled as it tangled with the thorn bushes. It was wild, unstoppably wild, more untameable than anything I’d ever tangled with on LAPD business.