“Heh.” Tam left it at a grunt, for which Davy was grateful. It wasn’t that he thought Morag would ever come back to him, but he was sick to the back teeth of people who thought they were his friends telling him that she wouldn’t, not unless he did this or did that.
“Ah could pay for the bairns tae go east. They’re young enough.” He glanced at the doorway. “It’s no right, throwin’ snowba’s in May.”
“That’s global warmin’.” Tam shrugged with elaborate irony, then changed the subject. “Where d’ye think they’d go? The Ukraine? New ’Beria?”
“Somewhaur there’s grass and nae glaciers.” Pause. “An’ real beaches wi’ sand an’ a’.” He frowned and hastily added: “Dinnae get me wrong, Ah ken how likely that is.” The collapse of the West Antarctic ice shelf two decades ago had inundated every established coastline; it had also stuck the last nail in the coffin of the Gulf stream, plunging the British Isles into a sub-Arctic deep freeze. Then the Americans had made it worse—at least for Scotland—by putting a giant parasol into orbit to stop the rest of the planet roasting like a chicken on a spit. Davy had learned all about global warming in Geography classes at school—back when it hadn’t happened—in the rare intervals when he wasn’t dozing in the back row or staring at Yasmin MacConnell’s hair. It wasn’t until he was already paying a mortgage and the second kid was on his way that what it meant really sank in. Cold. Eternal cold, deep in your bones.
“Ah’d like tae see a real beach again, some day before Ah die.”
“Ye could save for a train ticket.”
“Away wi’ ye! Where’d Ah go tae?” Davy snorted, darkly amused. Flying was for the hyper-rich these days, and anyway, the nearest beaches with sand and sun were in the Caliphate, a long day’s TGV ride south through the Channel Tunnel and across the Gibraltar Bridge, in what had once been the Northern Sahara Desert. As a tourist destination, the Caliphate had certain drawbacks, a lack of topless sunbathing beauties being only the first on the list. “It’s a’ just as bad whauriver ye go. At least here ye can still get pork scratchings.”
“Aye, weel.” Tam raised his glass, just as a stranger appeared in the doorway.
“An’ then there’s some that dinnae feel the cauld.” Davy glanced round to follow the direction of his gaze. The stranger was oddly attired in a lightweight suit and tie, as if he’d stepped out of the middle of the previous century, although his neat goatee beard and the two small brass horns implanted on his forehead were a more contemporary touch. He noticed Davy staring and nodded, politely enough, then broke eye contact and ambled over to the bar. Davy turned back to Tam, who responded to his wink. “Take care noo, Davy. Ye’ve got ma number.” With that, he stood up, put his glass down, and shambled unsteadily towards the toilets.
This put Davy on his lonesome next to the stranger, who leaned on the bar and glanced at him sideways with an expression of amusement. Davy’s forehead wrinkled as he stared in the direction of Katie the barwoman, who was just now coming back up the cellar steps with an empty coal powder cartridge in one hand. “My round?” asked the stranger, raising an eyebrow.
“Aye. Mine’s a Deuchars if yer buyin’…” Davy, while not always quick on the uptake, was never slow on the barrel: if this underdressed southerner could afford a heated taxi, he could certainly afford to buy Davy some beer. Katie nodded and rinsed her hands under the sink—however well-sealed they left the factory, coal cartridges always leaked like printer toner had once done—and picked up two glasses.
“New roond aboot here?” Davy asked after a moment.
The stranger smiled: “Just passing through—I visit Edinburgh every few years.”
“Aye.” Davy could relate to that.
“And yourself?”
“Ah’m frae Pilton.” Which was true enough; that was where he’d bought the house with Morag all those years ago, back when folks actually wanted to buy houses in Edinburgh. Back before the pack ice closed the Firth for six months in every year, back before the rising sea level drowned Leith and Ingliston, and turned Arthur’s Seat into a frigid coastal headland looming grey and stark above the permafrost. “Whereaboots d’ye come frae?”
The stranger’s smile widened as Katie parked a half-litre on the bar top before him and bent down to pull the next: “I think you