All the Colours of the Town by Liam McIlvanney Page B

poking me in the belly with a rolled-up Times .
    ‘Phone Bryce. And Gerry? See it gets a good show.’
    He was off down Argyle Street, heading for Queen Street Station. He walked on, slapping his leg with the Times , then turned to wave, his hand cresting a sun-shot fug of blue cigar smoke.
    I turned back towards the East End. At the Cross, I turned down the Saltmarket, keeping to the shady side. I could feel the notebook in my pocket as I walked, its discrete weight, as if the MacLaren story was rippling its pages, the kinetic gravity of news. It felt good to have a story again – not a sloppy wodge of comment but a hard bright newsy nugget. A scoop. I could see their faces already – Rix and Moir and Fiona Maguire; the spreading smiles as I broke the news.
    I passed the High Court with its sinister columns. Banker Bill MacLaren was jacking it in: that in itself was a splash. But the real news, the big, billowing indistinct story, was just edging into view. Lyons as First Minister: I had backed the right horse there. But then Lyons as Loyalist conspirator. The First Minister-in-Waiting and a nest of paramilitaries. Who were the New Covenanters? A complete run of Rathlin had told me precious little. I knew who old ones were, the martyrs and saints of the Covenant: hardline Presbyterians who fought the British state. They wouldn’t have bishops. They worshipped in the open air, on rough bits of moorland, with armed sentries guarding the faithful. The redcoats chased them through barren glens, coursed them like deer in the late sixteen-hundreds. They were shot and hanged in the ‘Killing Time’. But who were their namesakes, the New Covenanters? I would have to turn redcoat myself – Trooper Conway – and run them to earth.
    The sun hammered down on the High Court steps. On Glasgow Green the grass was thick with bodies, couples reclining on jackets, clerks and junior counsels with their Marks and Spencer sandwiches. Two boys with squeezy bottles were chasing in and out of the bushes. Their laughter issued in fluent spurts. As they passed me, the boy in front turned and planted his feet, squaring off to his onrushing foe. But his bottle was empty; it wheezed hoarsely as he pumped it with both thumbs. His laughter scaled up to a choking joyful shriek as the other kid drenched him, waving his bottle from side to side, the water fizzing on the laughing boy’s chest. Then the victor turned his bottle skywards, and sent a thick jet skooshing high in the air, a glistering arch that hung a moment in the sun. 

Chapter Four
     
     
    Two days later I was on the train to Irvine. The carriage was almost empty. Then, two minutes before departure, in they pushed, seven flushed roustabouts, heading home from Aberdeen, wedging holdalls into the luggage racks and squeezing round adjacent tables, bursting the cellophane on a slab of lager, seven ring-pulls hissing in gaseous syncopation. I closed my paperback, slipped it in the seat pocket.
    You had to wonder how much Lyons knew. Should I have sprung it on him, I wondered, back in Ferrante’s? Pulled the photo from my briefcase and slapped it on the table? That had been the plan. But every moment, as we talked, I was sure he was about to spill. He had to know; that was why he called me, that was why he was acting how he was; that strange excitement, a kind of girlish tizz. But then he mentioned MacLaren and I knew he wasn’t spooked at all, he was high, exultant at the top job suddenly swinging into reach. By then, of course, the moment had passed. And anyway, the MacLaren angle altered things. Lyons as First Minister? This was a whole new scale of story now. I would have to think it through, decide how to play it. So the briefcase stayed shut.
    A station flashed past, too fast for me to read the sign. The oilmen were quieter now, their cropped heads swaying above the sports reports. A kid had started babbling at the far end of the carriage, a forthright, oriental-sounding harangue