Free Be Near Me by Andrew O’Hagan

just a bunch a people no' worthy ae the same kinna respect these people take for granted when it comes tae themselves.'
    'Well argued,' said the bald man, his eyes wide, his moustache soaking wet and his face seal-like in its beseeching dumbness.
    'Respect isn't a thing you just get,' I said, 'like free school milk. People earn respect by their actions. And sometimes by their words.'
    'And what, Mr Perhaps,' said Nolan, 'if yer actions are limited by yer circumstances? What if yer thoughts urnay really yer ane? What happens if the state is organised tae undermine yer language?'
    'That's paranoid,' I said. 'You've made a silk purse out of your grievances, Mr Nolan.'
    'Now we're talking,' said his friend. 'You people come up here and buy houses and land. Not you. It's no' you I'm talking aboot. You're just a priest. But people like you. English people. Or else people from fucked-up places who turn up here without as much as a working radio. They want the world.'
    'You're no' being very consistent, Dom,' said the friend. 'Either you don't like rich folk or you don't like poor folk. Make up your mind. Sounds to me like you just don't like anybody very much.'
    'Inverted snobbery,' I said.
    'I don't like people very much,' said Nolan. 'That's part of my charm. It's part of the national charm, is that not right, Father? You must have discovered that by now.'
    'Whatever you say, Mr Nolan. It's your day.'
    'That's right,' he said.
    'It's your daughter's day.'
    'Uh-huh.'
    'And it's your country.'
    'Ye better believe it.'
    Nolan drained his glass and gasped as if to recognise that the taste was refreshingly horrible. He stroked his chin, looking around at the others in the room with a softening contempt. One could have sworn Nolan felt sorry for people who had the misfortune not to be in his shoes. He played the part of the dyspeptic father, the cynical husband, but I'd bet you anything he enjoyed the spectacle of his life in that town, the constant drama of his dislikes, his role as a man coming down hard on strangers and phoniness, all the while, I suspect, more strange and more phoney to himself than he ever thought possible. Such men have pride in their roles, yet they also hate the way things have gone, forever conjuring former worlds in which individual performance ceded to the collective habits of the community. That world had disappeared. Nolan knew it had disappeared and he didn't seriously mourn it. He liked to cast a cold eye on the present, though he, in fact, was the present, the coldness beholding itself.
    'Our Lisa said you help her and her pals,' he said. 'Up at the school. She said you go places and that. Good for you. But jeest watch that lot. Oor Lisa could run rings round a matador.'
    'She's very sweet,' I said. He looked at me with pale pink eyes. I thought we might be friends in a different world.
    'Perhaps,' he said.
    The man with the wet moustache leaned against the bar and exhaled his warm breath in my face. The women were still up on a dance floor entirely free of men. 'So, you'll no' be doing the Slosh then, Father?' he said, smirking at his watch.
    'I'm still not sure what it is,' I said. 'An American-style barn dance for west coast of Scotland people who hate having Trident submarines nearby and aren't hairy-arsed warriors or haggis-eaters but who hate the English middle classes? Sounds fun.'
    'Get lost,' said Mr Nolan.

    The people who worked the shore were employed to tear out the mussels, leaving the petroleum-coloured shells in a mound against the seaward side of a low granite wall. The beach was strewn with rubbish of every description: one could see glass twinkling in the moonlight and hear the faint rustle of bags at the edge of the sea. The smell was so high it reminded me of the French poet's lily that soaks up blue antipathies. I looked behind me at the hotel, the disco lights, the sound of people becoming themselves again. Two young girls were lying on the bonnet of a car, drinking and talking.