And the Land Lay Still by James Robertson

in the SNP,’ Duffelcoat said.
    ‘What’s wrong with being a communist?’ Greatcoat said. ‘
I’m
a communist. I’m a Trotskyist actually – a
true
communist.’
    ‘Nobody’s what they seem,’ the biker said. And he glanced over at Mike again.
    ‘Plenty of nutters in the SNP, eh?’ Duffelcoat said. He’d clocked the biker’s glance and followed it. Mike felt he was being assessed in two different ways. There was something about the way Duffelcoat watched everybody.
    ‘Oh, don’t let me get started on them,’ Greatcoat said.
    ‘No, don’t,’ the big man next to Mike said under his breath.
    ‘The Scottish Nutter Party,’ the biker said.
    ‘Tartan Tories,’ Greatcoat said. ‘What’s the difference between a London capitalist and a Scottish capitalist? Four hundred miles and a kilt. The SNP are a bunch of wankers.’
    ‘That’s not what they seem to think in Govan,’ Mike said, surprising himself as much as the others. The previous week the SNP had triumphed over Labour in a by-election in Glasgow Govan. It was a depressed, deprived, overwhelmingly working-class constituency and it should have been rock-solid for Labour. But a feisty young woman called Margo MacDonald had snatched the seat for the SNP with a 26 per cent swing.
    Greatcoat seemed to welcome somebody new to argue with. ‘A one-off,’ he said. ‘If you ask me, they were voting with their dicks. They were mesmerised by the blonde bombshell.’
    ‘Even the women?’ Mike said.
    ‘Very funny,’ Greatcoat said. ‘Listen, it was a by-election, a flash in the pan. They’ll come to their senses. The last thing the Scottish worker needs is to be diverted from the class struggle by pipe dreams about independence.’
    ‘What about Vietnam?’ Mike said. ‘Or Ireland? I take it you’re not opposed to them being independent countries?’
    Greatcoat rolled his eyes at the biker. ‘Listen to Robert the Bruce,’ he said. ‘That’s totally fucking different. I mean, come
on
, man!’
    The biker seemed in two minds about whose view to favour. Duffelcoat was staring at the smoke-yellowed ceiling.
    ‘It’s just that I’ve noticed,’ Mike said, ‘that there’s always one rule for Scotland when it comes to independence, and another rule for everyone else.’
    He was aware that the big man had turned slightly and was listening to what he was saying. It made him nervous.
    ‘In Vietnam,’ Greatcoat said, with the patience he might show a small child, ‘the class struggle and the anti-imperialist struggle are the same thing. The SNP isn’t a working-class movement, it’s a bourgeois pressure group.’
    ‘Oh,’ Mike said. ‘My mistake then. I hadn’t realised.’ He was trying to be ironic, but Greatcoat seemed to take it as an admission of ideological backsliding and gave him a patronising smile. Greatcoat and the biker moved on to some new subject. Mike stepped away.
    The big man had ordered himself another pint. As the barman was pouring it the man nudged Mike and nodded towards the singer, who was retuning his guitar between songs.
    ‘This guy, he’s aw right, ye ken, he’s got a no bad voice and he kens some good songs, but they’re no really inside him, he disna sing them frae his guts.’
    The man’s eyes, which had seemed narrow with menace, widened now as if he had merely been half-asleep. Altogether friendlier.
    ‘I wouldn’t know,’ Mike said.
    ‘He’s had to learn them aw and it shows in the way he sings them.’
    As if he was saying,
D
on’t you worry about that tosser.
    ‘But surely everybody has to do that?’ Mike said. ‘Learn them?’
    ‘Aye, that’s right,’ the man said. ‘But wi some folk a song gets right deep doon inside and then when it comes back oot ye can tell that’s where it’s been. And wi other folk it just gets skin-deep and nae mair.’
    There was a quiet intensity about the way he spoke, the look in his eyes, which suggested he knew what he was talking about. It didn’t sound like