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My mouth tasted foul, cloying and sticky.  Had my tongue swollen?  There didn't seem to be quite enough room in there to keep it out of the way off my teeth.  I could only imagine what used cat litter tasted like but I imagined it tasted much like my mouth.  My head didn't hurt so much as felt delicate, fragile, prone to breakage.  I didn't want to move it, even the slight disruption caused by my shifting to become more comfortable produced waves of bright sparkling agony.  I didn't want to open my eyes again.  The first time I had opened them the dull grey light in the room had been way too much, from the brief glimps I had I was in bed, in a smallish bedroom, there was some kind of picture pinned to the wall above me.  I shifted again, I was still fully clothed unless denim and heavy cotton had become the norm for PJs without me noticing.  Something smelled bad, I was fairly convinced it was me.  I wanted to go back to sleep, wake up when all this was less painfull and could be coped with.  That wasn't a possibility.  Wherever I was it wasn't the scene I had closed my eyes on last night, I assumed last night, it could have been this morning, yesterday morning?  I would have closed my eyes and moaned, as it was my eyes were already closed and the best my throat could come up with was a preemptive croak.  I couldn't hear anything, total muffled silence.  I mustered as much courage as I could and sat up and opened my eyes.  My own head screamed at me, endless streams of serious discomfort washed through me, I hated being hung over.  I felt sick to my stomach.  I could feel my arms and legs but only in a detached, remote way.

The bedroom was probably pink, the light filtering through the thin blue curtains though gave it a grey lifeless cast.  It obviously blonged to a woman, there were several articles of clothing discarded on the floor of a female variety and a bedsite table held a motley collection of makeup and perfume.  I didn't think I had been that drunk, drunk enough to have a sexual encounter and have no memory of it whatsoever.  I held my head.  No, nothing came back to me, I couldn't pin together the timeline after the toilet at the Masonic.  Oh, I'd been sick.  There was a slight crusty stain on my shirt, black and stinky.  I assumed it was guiness sick.  Guiness, I didn't drink Guiness, I diliked stout intensly.  Perhaps someone had been sick on me.  Thinking about it I thought that was unlikely and I did have a dim recolection of drinking a glass of stout, shamrock and all.  I took off the soiled shirt and looked around for my bag which I knew contained my clean clothes.  Shit.  It wasn't here.  I tried to think, to remember where I had last seen it but it wouldn't come.  Bugger.  I could do without this.  I checked my pockets, I still had my wallet, my return train tickets and various scraps of paper.  I didn't seem to have a whole lot of cash left but I was fairly confident I knew what had happened to that.  The way I felt right now it might have been wiser just to have torn it up and flushed it down the toilet, cut out the middle man altogether.  I cracked the curtains and peered out, squinting against the unatural light outside.  There was a thick layer of snow over a small back garden.  There was a slide, obvious despite it's broken fleese covering and a vague lump that could have been a snowman before the latest fall but could as easily been some other playground style toy.  It was way too bright for my sesitive eyes and I let the curtain fall shut.  I looked around the room again, the poster above the small single bed where I had slept was a group of young smiling boys, I recognised them though I couldn't recall their name.  The latest in a long line of popular but short lived manufactured boy bands that appealed to young girls and I suposed young boys of suspect sexuality.  How old was the normal occupant of that bed?  The clothes appeared to follow the fashion trends that might be comfortable to someone in their late teens.  Oh no.  I couldn't have.  I patted myself down, although my belt and top button had been undone I felt fairly confident I had not been any more naked than this.  It would have been rape if I had had sex, I certainly couldn't have consented to anything.  Despite the fact that I obviously hadn't done anything untoward, I felt embarasment and shame.  I checked the bed, mainly to assertain whether I had been sick on it but also to see if anything interesting had fallen out of my pockets as I slept.  No I hadn't embarrased myself that way.  I wondered where I was.  Who's house was this?  It wasn't Andrew's anyway, he didn't have children and when I had looked outside we were definatly in a suburban area, the garden overlooked by many small houses.  Andrew had said he lived out in the sticks, remote was the term he had used.  I wondered where he had got to.

I pulled on my socks and boots without doing up the laces, some kind soul had left them by the bed, I had sniffed the socks and decided I would get away with them.  I cracked the bedroom door and eased it open.  I was making a reasonable effort to stay quiet.  Much as I wasn't deliberatly avoiding anyone I would rather just get my stuff and leave rather than have anything I had done last night brought up to me by other hung over persons.  I was in a short corridor let into it three other doors led to what I imagined where bedrooms, perhaps the bathroom.  I walked slowly up the stairs, partly with a view to not waking anyone unnecicarily but mainly to prevent jarring my head.  I passed the front door on the first landing but decided to have a quick peek into the living room upstairs to see if my bag was there.  The curtains in the living room where shut also, the gloom made it iposible to see if my bag was here or not.  I fiked on the light, there was a groan from the area of floor in front of the couch.  Someone probably feeling almost as bad as me muttered some curses and turned over.  It wasn't Andrew and my bag didn't seem to be anywhere obvious.  I sighed and walked back downstairs to the front door, sitting on the bottom step for a minute to fasten my laces before heading out into the snow.  It was a crisp bright New Year's morning, I looked at my watch, only just morning.  I looked around trying to get my bearings.  The houses were all Identical, lying close to the hill side overlooking a shallow vally.  Along the bottom ran a road and possibly a river from what I could see.  I crunched through the fresh snowfall enjoying the friable squeak beneath my boots.  The cold air at first stung but then cleared by nose and by inches my head.  I would have to retrace my steps, visit the various pubs and bars we were in last night until I found my bag, assuming I hadn't just put it down outside somewhere or if someone hadn't taken it home with them.  Perhaps I was still a little drunk but I couldn't realy bring myself to be anoyed about it.  The search was just something to do, a distraction until the rest of my brain woke up and remembered what else I should be doing.

I didn't find the bag.  I tried the Masonic where I discovered I had been barred for vomiting all over their plush toilet and saying something inapropriate about my sexual relationship to the bar staff's mother.  I tried several other pubs I thought I recognised but they had no recolection of the bag or me.  I tried working mens club we had been in to begin with and the pub by the station where Andy and myself had started out but I was seriously out of luck.  Standing on the sea front looking over to the inner hebridies I realised I was slightly stuck.  Andrew had my phone number so could call me at home but I wasn't in.  He didn't have or hadn't had a phone in his new house so I just didn't know how to get in touch with him, I had never even been to his new house and he hadn't exactly told me where it was.  I looked at the few brave people who had felt able to drive carefuly picking their way down the street on the slipery layer of dirty snow.  I didn't even know what he was driving.  This was a bit of a pain.  There didn't seem to be a whole lot open today so getting breakfast might be a problem I decided I might as well go back to the station.  Funny, I'd had a realy good time last night but in common with every other New Year in living memory I was walking home in the cold with a good reason to be down.  I hadn't lost  whole lot I supose, just some clothes.

There wasn't another train for an hour so I walked along the pier, enjoying the cold hard sunshine that didn't warm me.  The gulls were the only things busy today.  No boats went out or came in, just rested, bobing gently against the pilings.  The cars accross on the main street were few.  I enjoyed the silence and peace.  It was a nice little harbour town, gateway to the isles or some such it was styled.  From here on a working day you could catch a ferry to the Hebridies, inner and outer.  Weekly in the summer there were cruises I think that would take you all over.  Seal watching trips and visits to Fingal's cave.  Looking down on the town and harbour is McCaigs tower.  A folly?  The story runs that he had it constructed to provide employment for the locals, how very public spirited of him.  It looks reminicant of a Roman relic, A minature version of the colusium or a circular aqueduct.  I know from being up there that the perspective is false, exagerated, designed to make the structure look bigger and more imposing from down here.  I couldn't tell if it worked or not, well not without having a simetrical one to compare it to.  Still it looked pretty imposing if slightly softened by the trees.  I looked back at the water, picked up something from the wooden floor by my feet.  A rusty bolt, no longer suitable for it's orgional purpose.  I thought about throwing it out as far as I could into the water, I heard the faint pop it would make as it hit, the ripples of its passing iperceptable amoung the wavlets.  I dropped it back to the peir and kicked it up against the edge.  I went to catch my train, time to go home.

I hoped there would be a paper left on the train, I just wanted to lose myself for a bit, catch some distraction.  There wasn't and I missed the book I had been intending to read still in my bag, wherever that might be now.  I looked out of the window and watched Oban roll away.  What was it about him that got in the way of forming friendships.  You would swear I can only run one relationship at once.  Other people seemed to have swarms of friends, going out as a group, talking, laughing, visiting one another.  They always had a shoulder to cry on, they were there when they were needed and they were, needed.  I've got, had short term aquaintances that seemed to be developing into close friendship but their seems to be a barrier round me.  No one gets closer than that, no one invites me closer. Mark was cool, Mark would be called my friend but he retains that status without getting too close, he doesn't ask the hard questions and doesn't come to me with his problems, his heartbreak.  He also puts up with my complete inability to maintain my friendships, doesn't seem to get anoyed with me when I don't contact for months on end.  Andrew looked like he might pan out the same way but he had fucked off and left me.  I know 'm a big boy now but I came up here as his guest, he invited me, I had no idea where we were and I was very drunk.  I didn't feel uncomfortable about being abandoned in itself but it did seem like a symptom of that failure to connect.  Failure to be close friends.  Felling sorry for myself I wondered if essentialy I would alone for ever, with no relationship ever touching me.  I wondered if any had.  Certainly not Mhairi.  Mhairi was good company certainly, she was a joy to spend time with when she could get her nose out of a book.  Attractive as well, I never had any problem in that department, caring, loving, tolerent.  Her good points were legion but for some reason I just never felt very close to her.  I didn't need her, it hadn't hurt when I left her.  It felt more painfull to be leaving Oban and the highlands again that it had leaving Mhairi.  I worried about her, she was intoverted and I worried how she would react to being on her own, but if I never saw her again, I probed, couldn't find anything, any feeling, if I never saw her again it just wouldn't matter.  Had any relationship ever mattered?  It was dificult to find a good example of one that mattered.  When I was still at school I had a girlfriend and she had broke my heart.  I think she broke my heart, I felt so cold and alone when she left me, I had thought about all the usual things young men with a broken heart think about but I was't the type to end my own life.  I had left, went wandering, run away in the words of my mum.  I hadn't known what to do with myself.  Was that a broken heart or just a disjointed nose.  I don't know, I was very young.  There were people from my past that I missed but they wern't old girlfriends, some of them wouldn't realy constitute friends.  But then did I have any freinds or where they all just aquaintances?  I shook my head.  This was all pretty pointless.  I doubted if anyone where significantly different.  Only those that were willing and able to count all their aquaintances as friends thought that they had lots of friends.  I was was normal, except for the fact that I thought I wasn't but then perhaps that too was normal.

The train got in to Queen Street late.  It was dark and frosty by the time I got off my local train and walked round to my house.  It wasn't much warmer inside, I stuck the heating on and stripped off my grubby clothes.  After a shower I collected my messages.  There was one from Andy wondering where I had got to, he had been round everywhere we'd been without trace of me though there was some talk about me sleeping in someones house.  He had found what he assumed was my bag, he would keep it for me and I was to give him a ring.  He didn't leave his number and if it was somehow stored in my voicemail it was beyond my abilities to retrieve it.  There was a message from Mark as well, would I like to come round for dinner, I did my maths, tomorrow night.  Bring wine.  Wine?  I remembered that Sam was back.  Dinner and wine wasn't entirly like the single Mark but when Sam was here he seemed to turn all civilised on me.  I would probably have to go as I didn't realy want to offend anyone but I needed sleep.  I would ring him tomorrow.  I ignored the other two messages and crawled into bed.

I felt great when I woke up.  I knew I wasn't in any particular hurry, I reached over and turned the radio on and just lay there coming round.  It was nearly 12, nearly afternoon but not quite, I wondered if I was getting into a bad ahbbit of this.  Had I adjusted my body clock to expect to be able to sleep till noon?  that wasn't good, I liked having my mornings, I could get things done.  Any hour of morning time is worth two hours or more of afternoon time.  I'd much rather get up early and go to bed early if I had something I expected to acomplish.  Today I didn't expect to accomplish anything in particular.  Damn, I remembered Mark's message about dinner, too late to cancel now I thought, best ring him though.  I groped about on the floor till I found the handset for my phone.  They weren't in, or at least no one was answering.  I left a message to the effect that if tonight was still on I would see them later, failing any further instructions I would aim for eight.  Mark had a cell phone but if they were in and otherwise engaged I realy didn't want to push the issue.  I dropped the hadset and lay back, I could just rest my eyes for a minute, I would be fine.

I woke with a start.  Bugger, an hour gone.  Had that been the phone?  I needed to pee and didn't feel quite so good anymore, this was the disadvantage of waisting the day in bed.  I got up, scratched and wadered to the toilet in semi Zombie mode.  I would need to get moving now, pah.  I tidied up a bit and searched for clothes that were reasonably respectable, unsuccessfully.  I had taken far to much with me for just a night anyway and that meant that anything I had that wasn't seriously dated or indeed downright rude was in that bag.  I stuck on a pair of jeans that didn't actually expose my dangly bits and a T shirt that read "If you dont want to fuck me baby then baby fuck off" and went out.  Officialy it was still a bank holiday but I reckoned that a few shops on Vicky road would be open.  I was right, most everything was open.  The pubs and offlicences because, well because it was still new year and that's what new year is realy all about; the paper shops because that's how they make there money on tight profit margins, by being open all the time; everything else because it was sale time.  The windows were full of bright dayglo signs advertising the fact that it was sale time and proclaiming the fantastic bargains to be found inside.  Near park was a clothes shop.  Not you're trendy high street chain style clothes shop filled with the latest fashions, here today gone tomorrow but a proper clothes shop.  The Ladies, mens and childrens departments were on diferent floors, up stairs was the kind of old woman's cafe where you could get the most vile frothy coffee available.  It was like something out of another age, even the decor stood out as being of a certain aged style reminisant of the fifties and sixties, in a grown up rather than a Carneby St way.  I found some trousers that weren't quite Jeans and yet were not quite slacks, tastefull in green.  I bought a couple of shirts and a sweater top type thing.  I wasn't going to wow anyone with my finger on the pulse understanding of men's fashion but then I believed there was a diference between style and fashion.  I could get away with calling my purchases stylish as long as no one was too picky.  Any way they were on sale, I liked getting a bargain.  I looked at my boots, I looked at my clothes, they would have to do I wasn't about to go and buy new shoes, anyway DMs where allways going to be stylish, I didn't even have to pretend.

When I got to the front door I realised I had forgotton the wine.  I would have to pick it up on my way, I could walk back up Vicky road to get to Mark's.  It was about four so I stuck the shower on and emptyed my purchases onto the bed, I was happy with the shirts, one blue and one bright orange, the orange one was perhaps a bit much, it had a fait check but I had just liked the colour.  The blue one felt nice, cool and slipery to the touch, no pocket and hidden buttons gave it a clean look from the front.  I stopped fussing and got in the shower.  I stayed in the steamy stream of water as long as I could bear, long after I had washed every possible bit of me within an inch of it's life.  I turned the water off and let myself drip for a moment before toweling my hair and half drying.  Standing naked I inspected my face in the small mirror above the sink, pcked at some blemishes, I needed a shave.  I felt my denuded skin, chasing down the bit's I missed.  I liked the feel of my hairless chin but I hated the thought of actually shaving, it was a pain.  I plucked out a couple of stragling eyebrow hairs.  When did my eyebrow hairs get so big, like a couple of hairy catapillars squaring up for a fight on my brow.  Did men pluck their eyebrows?  Should I?  I had no idea.  I looked up, my hair was a mess but then it allways had been.  Thick and black with a slight curl it defied my attempts to control it.  I had given up on using various gells and mooses and now just ran a brush through it.  I flicked at it, hoping to produce a look I could be happy with.  Not a hope, if it wasn't too long then it was too short.  I left it.  I got dressed and made a coffee but still had several hours to spare.  Eight o'clock seemed a long way off.  I twidled my thumbs and kicked my heels, feeling like an idiot for getting ready so early.  Christ it was dinner with some friends, I had had dinner with Sam and Mark before.  We had had dinner with Sam and Mark before, I was no longer a we.  Perhaps that was all I was freaked by, this would be the first time I had to cope with the Sam/Mark couple thing without being part of a couple myself.  I would survive.

I futzed about till about twenty past seven, tidying and realising that half the things I thought I had in the flat were realy back in Galloway with Mhairi.  It had been my decsision to leave it, walk away without sorting everything out.  I didn't feel that I would be at all justified in asking for any of it back now, I had let the whole thing go on too long now.  I looked at the few books and CDs I had aquired since being here, I could try and replace what I could.  It might be fun.  I went out into the cold yellow night.  The sky didn't realy start, it was curtailed just above the streetlamps and buildings, a dark grey yellow.  It might snow some more but it felt a bit cold for that.  Thinking about it I didn'y know what that meant, too cold to snow.  Didn't it snow in the artic, the antartic?  Surely it was much colder there and the snow managed to find it's way to the ground.  I walked accross Victoria Road to the offlicence there.  It was a brightly lit streak compared to the dull darkness around it.  Cars jostled between the evenly spaced traffic lights, most of the shops had close but the exterior lights stayed on.  The glass door swung shut behind me switching off the noise.  I browsed the wines through the security glass.  As the customer I was restricted to a a glass box about 8 feet wide by 20 feet long in the middle of the shop.  The goods, the wine, beer, bottles of fizzy drink, spirits etc was all the other side of the glass.  It was arranged properly to display the goods to best advantage, pyramids of cans occupied the right had side near the front of the shop, each with its large price ticket or massive reduction stuck to it.  On the left with the wines they seemd to have a wicker motif going on.  Baskets stuffed with shredded crepe held bottles of white and red.  Behind them lay the standard shelving you would expect to see.  I peered through, I resented getting treated like this, locked into our glass cage.  You could look at the other way, you could try and imagine that the beer and the employees were in the cage with the cash.  I had come in from the outside, walked in here of my own free will while they were trapped by the constraints of employment and fear.  But they had carpet and heating and soft lights and lets face it all the beer and cash.  We, the customer, had a hard vinyl floor for those hard to remove blood and vomit stains, it was cold with the door being opened and closed all the time and the heater being through the toughened glass from us and in order to get any of their beer we would have to shout through the little hatch at the end and try and carry out some kind of semi normal transaction.  On top of that, I knew from having worked in an almost identical off licence that there was a little button up there by the till.  If the girl back there got too jumpy she could press it and what felt like a prison would become one.  The outside door would lock and everyone would stay put until the police arrived and sorted the good guys from the bad.  I didn't loiter steaming up the glass too long, I knew what I wanted and joined the short queue.  I recognised the hair before the face.  I knew the girl serving, I had worked with her.  You would think after all this time she might have moved on from serving at the counter here but then I was in no position to throw stones.  I looked about again.  I looked at her open face, her tired eyes as she gave the woman in fron of me some fags.  There had been more than a colegue relationship.  There had been some embarasment.  Had I caught her and someone else?  No, it had been me and her, very drunk and my flat mate had walked in.  Good grief.  I looked her in the eyes and smiled, told her what I wanted.  I had to tell her agien before she moved, was she doing the same as I had just done?  Tracing though the memory until she found all the pertinant details?  I watched her pick her way through the shop to the wine, She picked up two out of three and then looked confused.  She shouted something which I missed because of the glass and I followed her over.  Did I want the the white off the shelf or out of the fridge because they didn't have what I wanted in the fridge.  She looked at me again, full in the eyes this time, her lids have closed and a serious smile bolted on her lips.  I grinned and flashed her my teeth.  Whatever she had dredged from that drunken night long past seemed to have pleased her, I pointed to a bottle in the fridge and keeping eye contact till the last, turned back towards the hatch.  I didn't watch her return.  I handed over my cash and said "Thanks Polly, take care."  and walked.  She's been a psycho.  It had been her that didn't want to see me in the end though, I had a soft spot for psychos, or I used to have.

I didn't want to walk through the park in the dark carrying alchohol, they could smell it.  I skirted round the outside and walked down to Marks's block.  There were plenty of folk about, last day of the holdiay and everyone was out wringing the last dregs out of the new year.  People carrying bags identical to mine hurried past, others who had obviously been at it for some time made there way carefully from pub to pub.  The cold didn't seem much of a discouragement.  Mark opened the door and ushered me inside.  I gave him the wine and hung my coat up on the back of the door.  I could smell dinner cooking.  I followed my nose through to the kitchen where Mark had his head in the fridge.  "Drink?" he said, his voice slightly muffled.  I asked for a larger, bad habit I know, mixing the grain and the grape but a habit I had none the less.  There was a tall steamer bubbling on the stove top and something in the oven.  I asked what we were having.  Mark claimed it was chicken in filo parcels.  I bent and looked in, tinfoil packages glittered within.  It sounded more than a little ambitious for Mark and I was honestly disapointed there wasn't anything interesting to tast.  I asked him where Sam was, in the shower he told me.  I tried not to think about it.  I started telling him of my idiocy of the previous night.  He had done the usual drinking in town, bells in George Square, desperate crush to try and get it somewhere and a long wait on an expensive taxi.  Taxi's where allways on a premium after 12 but on new year I imagined they stuck extras on for a laugh.  I heard movement through the wall.  Where are we eating I asked?  Here or next door? I clarified for his puzzled expression.  Realising I was diging a hole of confusion I added "The living room?".  "yea, give us a hand then" Mark said handing me cutlery and glasses.  We wandered through.  I liked Mark's living room with it's polished floor and modern wooden furnishings.  We laid the table and I went to find my beer.  I almost knocked Sam over in the door.

She was wearing a tight black pencil skirt that gave her legs an impressive inverted tulip shape.  Over her black top she had a loose slightly transparent linen shirt.  Her long dark hair hung over one shoulder the light showing the faint copper highlights.  The contour of her collar bone was visible above the neckline of her top and flowed oh so sweetly into the soft flesh of her neck.  I looked into those deep brown eyes all thoughts fled, my hand, suspended in the process of reaching for her to catch a fall that never happened stuck out in front of me at an odd angle that couldn't quite be interprited as a hand shake.  She took it anyway, lightly gripping my first two fingers and smiled, her nose crinkled slightly.  "How are you Lachlan?  So very sorry to hear about you and Mhairi, I thought you where wonderful together"  I blinked slowly and tried to regain control of my motor functions.  "These things happen" I said weakly.

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