One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night Read Online Free PDF

reception. Her failure, once again, to cool her interest upon the revelation that his invite was a courtesy after rewiring the place, suggested he might be the one carrying the misconceptions.
    He’d admit that a small, sour part of himself was disappointed by her reactions. Both when he told her the St Mick’s link and when he told her he was a spark, the inverted snob in him was looking forward to seeing her embarrassment, her discomfiture, as a confirmation that as well as retaining her looks, she had held on to the other aspect he well remembered her for. Annette Strachan had, throughout her schooldays, been somewhat aloof in the company of her peers, or in the local parlance, ‘a fuckin’ snooty bitch’. She’d lived in one of the big ‘bought hooses’ up on the Springwell Road, and neither her socio‐
economic status nor the benefits of her physical attributes had made her particularly disposed towards sharing much time with the likes of Ally.
    It was, Ally grew to learn, nothing personal. Annette had simply hated being at school and spent the whole time counting the days to when she could spread her wings. She detested the miniature totalitarianism enforced by the staff, the mentality that punished the whole class if one culprit wouldn’t own up. She found the curriculum frustratingly restrictive as well, with everything so geared towards exam syllabuses and exam technique that learning for its own sake seemed a decadent luxury. But mostly she hated the junior fascism among the pupils, the way the wee buggers mercilessly cracked down on every minuscule transgression of a social code that only its adherents knew. From the make of your schoolbag to the colour of your lunchbox to the type of wallpaper covering your workbook, you never knew what might mark you out as a leper tomorrow. (Ally didn’t remember Annette ever having to ring a bell herself, but then you didn’t have to be on the receiving end to abhor it.)
    She knuckled under big‐
time in fifth year, making sure she got the Highers she needed to access Glasgow Uni, the West End and as much student bohemia as she could lay hands on. After that she ‘did the London thing’, and sought work as a journalist. She started off on one of the temps’ weekly giveaway mags, writing features and advertorials, as well as laying out ads and even selling space when things got tight. In time she made it up to the glossies, got the big‐
city lifestyle she’d long aspired to, and after a few years a bidey‐
in ‘partner’ to share it all with. He was handsome, ambitious, sophisticated, connected, the works. He was also, she inevitably discovered, just about the most shallow human being ever to exist in the three‐
dimensional world. Annette made it a considerate policy not to talk to Ally about him, but he still picked up the gen here and there: the lying, the backstabbing, the mistrust and, of course, the cheating. This last Ally had some difficulty getting his head around: previously he’d thought the male tendency to stray was symptomatic of a fundamental dissatisfaction caused by not sleeping with someone like Annette Strachan.
    The break‐
up was very messy, and her work was contaminated by the fall‐
out. This precipitated ‘the life‐
crisis thing’, which in turn gave way to a year or so doing ‘the travel thing’, at the end of which she decided she was utterly scunnered with London. In defiance of Dr Johnson, she was not correspondingly tired of life, but she did feel she needed to scale things down a little, so opted to move back to the West End, somewhere she’d often returned to for weekends even during the height of her metropolitan phase. She’d been living back there a wee bit less than a year, working freelance, when she went to that art gallery, ran into Ally, and commenced their unlikely but confoundingly successful relationship.
    Ally hadn’t lacked for female company before that. The cheeky wee bastard of youth had evolved to