12.

'Call me James,' said the man in black.

He waved a card to pay, and took his turn with the glass jug of water, tipping a careful quarter measure into the double. Then he fingered a cigarette packet from his pocket and nodded towards the door to the patio.

'Shall we?'

'I'll just get my bag,' I said.

I stuffed the books into the backpack, feeling his eye on me as if he could see every scornful, sceptical scribble in the margins of my King James.

The patio was below ground level, a long draughty roofless room furnished with rough, weather-greyed wooden benches, rougher tables, rusty umbrella poles and dusty saplings. Tiny camcopters hovered and darted like unseasonal wasps. I followed Baxter to a vacant table and sat down opposite him, taking care to be on the side of the exit steps in the far corner.

He raised his glass. 'Slainte.'

'Slainte.' I sipped.

He lit up, keeping his gaze fixed on me through the Zippo flare and the first puff.

'I reckon I owe you an apology,' he said.

'What for?'

'The last time I met you,' he said, meditatively blowing smoke in my general direction, 'I was extraordinarily rude and gauche, even for a newly ordained minister.'

'Were you really a minister?' I asked.

He raised his eyebrows.

'Indeed I was,' he said, with a sort of forced joviality that in itself almost vouched for his claim, 'and I still am, despite having got rid of the dog-collar, for which relief much thanks! That's because, in fact, I'm the Church of Scotland chaplain here. Why do you ask?'

'Because the local churches had no trace of you, and neither did the Church of Scotland.'

'You checked up on me?' He sounded amused, as well as bemused.

'Yes,' I said. 'As soon as you were out the door.'

He waved a hand. 'Go ahead then a check up on me again.'

I did. I went to the university website on my phone, and there he was.

'This isn't what happened last time,' I said, looking up.

'Oh dear,' he said. 'I can see how that might have been a bit disturbing, especially in the, ah, troubled conditions of three years ago. I can only assume there was some problem with the Church's websites a apart from the revolutionaries and all their monkey business back then, I know for a fact that our IT was, and still is come to think of it ... well, pretty much what you'd expect from an outdated institution in terminal decline.'

'That's what you think the Church is?'

'Oh yes,' he said. 'It's dying on its feet. That's not just my opinion a it's the conclusion of the Church and Society Council's report to this year's General Assembly.' He gestured vaguely over his shoulder, I guessed towards the Mound about half a mile away, where the Church held its annual synod. 'Plenty more where that came from. Anyway, that's what I wanted to talk to you about.'

'Talk to me?'

'Yes,' he said, stubbing out his cigarette and lighting another. 'In fact, I came into the bar especially to have a word with you half an hour ago, but you seemed to be deep in conversation, so I bought myself a pint and waited.' He smiled knowingly. 'I thought it best not to interrupt. Nice girl, by the looks of her. Close friend of yours?'

'I knew her at school,' I said, irritated. 'Have you been keeping an eye on me, or what?'

He waved his hands cross-wise. 'Not at all, not at all. Your name came back to me, from an argument you had with a student who later came to me in some confusion. And of course I remembered you from Greenock. You were such an intense young man that you were hard to forget, especially since the recollection was so embarrassing to me. Smoking in the sitting room, accepting a cup of instant coffee as if I didn't have a clue what it cost in those days. And now, here on campus ...' He shrugged. 'You've built up quite the reputation a pillar of the Humanist Society, eloquent debater, fire-breathing rationalist, scourge of the fundamentalists.'

'Really?' I said. 'I'm flattered.'

'Yes, really,' he said. 'And I'm delighted. Those fundamentalist dingbats are the absolute bane of my life, let me tell you. Most of them are engineers, you know. Have you seen the posters they stick up? A picture of a Bible with "When all else fails, read the instructions". One of them even ran off copies of the same poster with "RTFM".'

I'd seen the first, but not the second.

'What does that mean?' I asked.

Baxter leaned forward a little, and spoke in a low but vehement voice: 'It's an old programmer joke. Stands for "Read the Fucking Manual". God help them if that's how they see the Bible! Nit-picking, pluke-faced, world-building nerds a they'd be better off in the SF Soc, if you ask me, applying their exegetical skills to the Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. If you can prise them out of their literal-minded stupidity you'd be doing their souls a service.'

I had to demur. 'The only people I've had any effect on with that sort of thing, and it's only been one or two, have ended up becoming atheists. Surely not what you want, is it?'

'Obviously I'd prefer that they didn't, but they do a lot less harm as atheists than as supposed Christians. And in any case, who am I to say? Atheism may be part of their spiritual journey.'

I laughed. 'That's what my mother tells me!'

'A wise woman, indeed.' Baxter leaned back, regarding me with lowered eyelids. 'Have you ever considered studying for the ministry?'

'What?' I nearly splashed my whisky.

'I'm quite serious.'

'So am I,' I said. 'And I'm an atheist.'

'Well, that needn't stop you taking a degree in Divinity. And your study might give you some grounds to reconsider. It's merely your current opinion, after all. You were baptised, were you not? As far as the Church is concerned, you're still in the fold, albeit as an Anglican.'

I laughed. 'I can see how that would be more of a problem!'

Baxter acknowledged the jest with a tight smile, and then frowned. 'What I see in you, Ryan, is a young man who takes these matters seriously. From what I hear, you evidently know the Bible very well; you've obviously read up on apologetics, theology, biblical criticism, history, archaeology, philosophy ... you'd be off to a flying start at New College, ahead of most of the actual candidates for the ministry, frankly. And what's more, you're genuinely interested in these subjects.'

I shook my head. 'I'm flabbergasted.'

'You should be flattered.'

In a way, I was. Having just lost my main ambition, inchoate though it was, the prospect Baxter dangled before me was oddly tempting. A postgraduate degree from the theological college could open up a wide variety of academic careers, quite aside from any question of belief. And I knew, from my mother's way of thinking as well as from the occasional liberal Christian I ran into in my sceptical evangelising, even belief could be nuanced and finessed.

'No,' I said. 'Well, let me think about it. Let me get a round in.'

'No, let me,' said Baxter, rising. 'Now, now, I still owe you for using that ashtray, as well as for the coffee. Same again?'

'A beer this time, I think. Whatever the guest beer is.'

'Good idea.'

He disappeared inside. While he was gone I found myself wondering if he was the same man as I'd met at home a couple of years earlier. He was so much more relaxed, fluent and assured than his younger version that he might almost be that Baxter's not-so-evil twin. More probably, I thought with a wry smile at this lapse into paranoid thinking, he'd just matured. People could. I knew I had.

'Took the liberty of ordering a plate of nachos,' said Baxter, as he sat down with the pints. 'Ah, here they are.'

'Thanks,' I said, to him and to the waitress, as the smell of hot melted cheese took over my brain.

There was a minute or two of silence as we noshed in.

Baxter wiped the back of his wrist across his mouth.

'By the way,' he said, 'when you checked and couldn't find me, back in Greenock a what did you think I was? I mean, I can see the point of a bogus meter reader, or a bogus social worker a but a bogus minister? What on earth did you think I was up to?'

I looked away for a moment, then sighed. 'This is so stupid,' I said. 'I thought you were a Man in Black.'

'But I was a man in-Oh, I see!' He laughed. 'Like Will Smith in the movie? Good grief. What gave you that idea? Had you recently seen a UFO, or something?'

'Well, as it happens, I had,' I said. 'Oh, don't get me wrong, I didn't think it was an alien spaceship or anything. Just something weird. A light that fell from the sky and knocked me out, one day when I was up in the hills. At the time I thought it was ball lightning, maybe, but, well, you know how it goes.'

'Oh, I know how it goes,' said Baxter. 'The brain does play tricks on us sometimes, eh? This ball lightning a did it leave any physical traces?'

'Burned a neat circle in the grass, which-'

'Let me guess,' said Baxter. 'Was dug up the following day, quite coincidentally?'

'Yes!' I said. 'How did you know?'

He put his elbow on the table and leaned forward and raked his fingers through his hair, then propped his chin on his hand and gave me a weary look.

'How do you think?' He straightened a little, running thumb and forefinger up and down his larynx, as if confirming with relief the absence of the dog-collar. 'We men in black, ha-ha, that is to say men of the cloth, and women too, of course ... we hear stories. We're told stories. People come to us with their problems, even non-religious people, as if we were some kind of spiritual Members of Parliament a and about as much use, come to think of it! I've heard everything a if not personally, then from older colleagues. I myself was once asked to perform an exorcism. An exorcism! Imagine. I've heard tell of ghosts, angels, saints, the Blessed Virgin Mary a that was from a nice old Catholic lady in the street who thought I was a priest of her confession a and, oh yes, grey aliens and flying saucers and all the rest of it. And you know what, the physical evidence always, always is missing or ambiguous when you go back and check. The picture was overexposed, the footprints have melted, the claw marks in the wallpaper were ...'

He shook his head, or perhaps shuddered. 'Anyway, I wouldn't worry about it, whatever you saw. And I don't want to know any more about it. Just put it out of your mind, Ryan. Rest assured, it's a more common experience than you'd think.'

'Yes,' I said. 'That's pretty much how I see it.'

And at that point, I think, it was. And I'll say this for him, and for Sophie a that night, and many hundreds of nights after it, the dreams didn't come back.

We seemed to have finished our pints.

'Another?' I said.

Baxter stood up, rubbing the palms of his hands together, with a 'the night is young' gleam in his eye.

'I was wondering,' he said, 'if you wouldn't like to have a pint or two with some New College students. See what they're like, maybe get an idea of the sort of courses on offer, you know?'

'Hmm,' I said. 'I'm not sure. I mean ... aren't theology students likely to be a bit ... quiet?'

Later that evening, standing under a fine drizzle on the tiny, crowded, raucous patio of the Jolly Judge, a pub down some steps from the Royal Mile, I found myself clutching my eighth pint and shouting something about Karen Armstrong's misreading of Karl Barth's introduction to Feuerbach into the ear of a biker in black leathers who in turn was trying to make herself heard above the voice and through the pipe smoke of a bearded American Calvinist in a red T-shirt displaying a Guevara-style portrait of the famous Belgian Marxist economist, Ernest Mandel.

'Total depravity,' the American kept saying. 'Total fucking depravity. You gotta hang onto that, man.'

'Will you fucking shut the fuck up about that,' said the biker, as if tested beyond endurance, 'or I'll stick a fucking tulip up your arse, and that stinking pipe of yours after it. Now,' she went on, turning to face me and lighting one cigarette with the end of another, 'what you atheist fuckwits don't get about the apophatic tradition, see, is that it's not some kind of ad hoc rescue hypothesis, like some kind of fucking Thomas Kuhn epicycle thing, no that's not right but you know what I mean, right? But is in fact, in fact, completely in line with ...'

I forget what it was in line with. I do remember that later still, sitting inside and stuffing my face with crisps to try and give the alcohol something more to soak into than the now distant memory of half a plate of nachos, I mumbled to the biker that I really owed James Baxter for introducing me to such a brilliantly entertaining crowd.

'Who?' she said, swaying slightly over a glass of red wine.

'Baxter,' I said. 'You know a the Church of Scotland chaplain. He was here earlier.'

She was experimentally making sucking noises by placing the heel of her hand across her eye socket and jerking it away. With the other eye a what would later be known as 'her good eye', if she made a habit of this tic a she gave me a funny look.

'No, he's not,' she said. 'The chaplain.' She carefully removed the end of a fall of her hair from the glass and sucked the wine off the tips, then tucked the hair behind her ear, from where it fell again. 'I am.'

I checked on my phone. She was.

'Fooled again,' I said. 'Fuck me.'

'Is that an invitation?' she said, tossing back her hair and striking a pose, then falling off her chair. She climbed back and added, 'Then you're out of luck. My wife wouldn't stand for it.'

'Total depravity,' said the American, loftily passing by, somehow carrying five pints in two hands. 'Total fucking depravity.'

'Irresistible grace!' the biker shouted back, over her shoulder. 'Perseverance of saints!'

She fell off the chair again.

13.

I stood on the steps in front of the Scottish Parliament and looked out over a sea (well, a loch) of marquees, tents, booths, bothies and benders that spread from the plaza across the green and, to my right, over the other side of the road, lapped against the first steep slopes of Holyrood Park. Above it floated banners, blimps and balloons, amid a thin haze of smoke from fast-food stalls, communal braziers and individual sticks of weed. Camcopters of various sizes buzzed and darted, making wireless connections to similar encampments in the Meadows and St Andrews Square and to other venues across town, and then onward and outward to the phones and screens of a million or so remote participants. My ear-phones skipped through a spectrum of hot-spot music channels, from which I selected a faint fiddle sound as a suitable backing track to my wait for Calum.

The late-July sky was blue, the morning heat already rising. The Scottish Futures Forum was well into its first full day, a Saturday. The theme for the week-long event a a Scottish Government initiative, projected as a creative mash-up of corporate trade and recruitment fair, social forum and nostalgic Occupy re-enactment a was The New Improvement. Its end would segue into August and the Edinburgh Festival kick-off, in the hope of pulling and retaining international visitors. Judging by the numbers of Asian, South American and African delegates and tourists I'd seen going in and out of the Parliament, the languages in conversations I'd overheard, and the colours of the crowds below, this was working.

With my third-year exam passes and distinctions under my belt, I was in a hopeful mood and frame of mind, looking forward to checking out future employment or postgraduate funding opportunities. Relieved (in every sense) of my aspirations to be a humanist philosopher, I'd decided on English Literature as my final-year subject. I hadn't decided what to do after that. I vaguely contemplated getting funding for a PhD, or taking a journalism course where I could leverage my interest in and knowledge of science (not a strong point with journalists, in my view) into some preparation for a career in reporting and commenting on all the exciting developments that already accompanied the economic recovery and that were further projected under the Forum's rubric of a new Improvement. The first Improvement, harked back to here, was the transformation of Scottish agriculture and industry in the eighteenth century in the course of Scotland's original passive revolution, an apt and curious template for the slow upheaval that the Big Deal had enabled.