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a crumbly sandstone cross into a section marked Kingdom of the Scots. She turned back, beamed that smile at him and waved her hand in encouragement.
    David wasn’t hot on museums. He didn’t really see the point in all that ancient history, and the exhibits always seemed so dry, dusty and disconnected with anything remotely like a real life that someone might actually have lived. Maybe he just didn’t have the leap of imagination necessary to fully appreciate what all this old crap was meant to signify. But for the sake of hanging out with Nicola he could easily stomach a few lumps of old rock and metal, the odd statue or bit of broken pottery. He could see her at the first spotlit display. My god, she was beautiful. He walked into the first room keeping his eyes on her all the way.
    Nicola was studiously examining a tiny metallic trinket box in the display cabinet, but she was thinking about David. She knew he was watching her. When you were a woman with years of experience of catching men’s eyes, you knew when someone was watching you, you could just sense it. She didn’t often appreciate it, but she liked the feeling today because she knew that he was comparing her school self with herself now, and she reckoned that modern Nicola won hands down. She couldn’t figure out why exactly, but she just felt like more of a human being than that awkward, gawky kid she had been all those years before.
    She’d made a joke about it, but David really hadn’t changed. Well, OK, physically he had filled out a little, she could see that around his face, but that really was a good thing in her book; she’d always thought he had a kind of haunted look about him when he was younger, like there wasn’t quite enough flesh under the skin stretched tight across his cheeks. He had shorter hair and it was a mess, but it was a cool mess. He was dressing younger than his age, a T-shirt over a long-sleeved top, skater-boy jeans and trainers, but then there was nothing wrong with that as long as you didn’t look ridiculous. And David didn’t look ridiculous. Far from it. He looked pretty damn cute. She wasn’t getting carried away or anything. But he was cute.
    ‘The Monymusk reliquary,’ said David, reading the blurb. ‘Associated with St Columba and Robert the Bruce. It’s tiny. What does it do?’
    ‘You keep ancient relics in it.’
    ‘Relics?’
    ‘Bones. Of saints. This one was small so they could wear it round their necks. They paraded it in front of the troops at Bannockburn, so they say.’
    ‘Who says?’
    ‘Historians.’
    ‘Ah, them.’
    ‘It sounds like you don’t hold much truck with the word of historians. And before you say anything, bear in mind that I’ve got an honours degree in history and archaeology from Glasgow Uni.’
    ‘I was just about to say that historians are great, and always right.’
    ‘Nah, you’re right, they’re a bunch of speculative bastards. Especially all the high-profile television ones.’ She looked away from the strange shiny box in front of them and around the room. ‘Recognize anything in here?’
    David looked around. In front of them was a small sign which said ‘Scotland Defined’. That seemed like quite a claim, he thought, but he let it pass. On either side the walls were covered in large quotations, done in fancy script, and he realized straight away that they were quotations from the Declaration of Arbroath. They had, of course, done it to fucking death at school, seeing as how it was the town’s main claim to fame. The Scottish nobility’s letter to the Pope backing Robert the Bruce as king, asking the Pope to recognize Scotland as an independent nation and asking if he’d mind having a go at the English for hammering the crap out of us. Written, signed and sealed in Arbroath Abbey in 1320. The primary school history lessons were trickling back now. He read the two inscriptions, one about not cowing down to the English while a hundred of us are still kicking