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approached and touched them, awestruck, as if he had found the holy grail twice. They embraced and fell in luxurious slow motion on to the bed, Sally on top. A part of his mind, like an accountant at an orgy, carefully recorded that she must have had the electric blanket on for some time. It was like making love in hot sand.
    Everything went right. In the arrogance of his formidable erection, John knew that he was the scriptwriter for this scene. They passed through their initial clumsiness into a sweet harmony of movements, hands, mouths, legs moving as if they were part of the same being. When he went into her, she smiled with her mouth wide open and said, ‘Oh yes, yes, yes’. He was above her now and they were moving towards a meeting he knew he could arrange to the moment.
    Then there was a hammering at the outside door, rather as if a yeti were paying a call. With a hand on either sideof her head, John paused and looked down at her and shook his head masterfully. He was renewing his purpose when the hammering came again and he heard the letter-box being lifted.
    â€˜Sally!’
    It sounded as if a Friesian bull had been taking a language course.
    â€˜Sally! Ah know ye’re in there!’
    The expression on Sally’s face was like an ice-pack applied to John’s scrotum. It was the kind of look the heroine gives in a horror film when she knows the monster has her trapped.
    â€˜Oh shite!’ Sally said.
    â€˜Sally! Open this door! If ye don’t want it landin’ in the middle of yer loabby.’
    â€˜Ignore him,’ John suggested unconvincingly.
    â€˜I can’t, I can’t,’ Sally said.
    John could see her point. It would have been like trying to ignore a hurricane as it blew you away. They had pulled apart from each other now and his penis, treacherous comrade, was already going into hiding. No fun, no me, it seemed to be saying. Suddenly, the atmosphere was that of an air-raid. They stared at each other, paralysed. When they spoke, they found they were whispering.
    â€˜Who is he?’ John mouthed, as if they had time for biographical notes.
    â€˜Sally!’
    â€˜Alec Manson. He’s stone mad.’
    The news didn’t encourage John in the plan he had been vaguely forming – to pull on his trousers and go to the door. It occurred to him that if Alec Manson happened to be shouting through the letter-box at the time John would probably be blown back along the hall. His nakedness felt very naked.
    â€˜What does he do !’ John whispered, not sure himself why he was asking. Was he thinking of pulling rank?
    â€˜He’s a bouncer in “The Barley Bree Bar”.’
    John’s eyes disappeared briefly under his eyelids. It was roughly equivalent to being told that Alec Manson charged a pack of dingoes protection money. John had only been in ‘The Barley Bree’ twice in his life and he tended to talk of the occasions the way an explorer might talk about the Amazon Basin. It was regarded as being the roughest pub in Graithnock and that made it very rough. ‘If you don’t have ten previous convictions, ye’re barred,’ someone had once told him. But, he told himself, a man’s got to offer to do what a man’s terrified to do.
    â€˜You want me to see about this?’ he quavered quietly.
    â€˜Ah can see a light in there!’ the voice was announcing to the immediate neighbourhood. ‘There’s somebody in there.’
    â€˜Oh my God, no!’
    The panic the thought had engendered in Sally would have been unflattering in another situation. Here, with the guardian of ‘The Barley Bree’ sending his voice along the hall like a flame-thrower, it seemed no more than a perfectly reasonable response, confirmation of the obvious.
    â€˜Right! We can do it the easy way or the hard way! With a handle or without a handle! Ah’m countin tae ten! One!’
    It wasn’t the kind of accomplishment