The Importance of Being Seven by Alexander McCall Smith

Nobody had ever said to him that anything looked good on him; nobody.
    ‘So you like them?’ he said, smoothing down the side of the jeans with his open palms.
    Elspeth nodded. ‘I like you,’ she said. ‘That’s what I like.’
    He blushed again, but felt grateful, too, for what she bestowed on him, this gift of love, that had been so unexpected.
    He was not thinking of her, though, as he began his cautious journey down Big Lou’s steps; he was thinking, rather, of what these steps had seen. He had heard from Big Lou, who had in turn learned it from people who knew the coffee bar in the days when it was still a second-hand bookshop, that it was down these very steps that the poet, Hugh MacDiarmid, had stumbled one day; stumbled, but recovered his footing and made it to the bottom alive and in a position to write more poetry – whereas poor Lard O’Connor, that well-known Glasgow informal businessman, had failed to recover and had toppled, as a great Norwegian pine might in its native forest fall to the axe. Matthew remembered the sense of sudden loss as the ambulance men shook their heads; and he remembered how they had asked him whether Lard was his friend and he had hesitated – just momentarily, and shamefully, before he had replied that he was.
    That was some time ago – last summer – and he had almost forgotten about Lard O’Connor, although presumably there were people in Glasgow who remembered him – his victims, certainly, Matthew thought grimly; those people with scars and scowls, like the mourners at Lard’s funeral in that soft West of Scotland rain.
    Now, as Matthew entered the coffee bar, Big Lou looked up from her task of polishing the counter and moved over to her coffee machine.
    ‘The usual?’ she asked over her shoulder. She required no reply; Matthew always had the usual, and even if he had wanted something different, there was very little choice in Big Lou’s coffee bar, with or without milk being the only options.
    Matthew picked up a newspaper from the table near the door; a ten-day-old copy of the
Dundee Courier
, the paper that kept Big Lou informed about events at home. The articles and photographs in these stale papers, posted down to Lou from Arbroath, wereannotated by an ancient relative with little observations and reminders. ‘Remember him? The loon with glasses?’ Or, ‘He tells terrible lies. He always has.’ Or, ‘No surprise: he had it coming to him after what he did to Maggie’s tractor.’
    The events of small-town Scotland, seemingly so local and irrelevant in the greater scheme of things, were in fact ciphers for the life of all humanity. These marginalia, penned in a crabbit hand, had an irrefutable profundity to them: so many people did indeed tell terrible lies, always had – and always will. So many people, in all sorts of places, have it coming to them, and fuel the Schadenfreude of the rest of us, who are secretly relieved that it is they, rather than we, to whom what was coming came.
    Matthew glanced at the newspaper in his hand. Big Lou’s relative had underlined a sentence in an article and written beside it, in blue ink:
I kent his faither!
    He looked at the subject of the article:
Local man comes second in national competition
. He smiled, and was seen by Big Lou as she poured her coffee grounds.
    ‘Something amusing you?’ asked Big Lou. She was sensitive about urban condescension in all its forms.
    ‘No,’ said Matthew. As he spoke, he imagined the unseen hand of an Arbroath body inscribing shaky letters in the air beside him:
liar
.

18. Ten Years with the Pygmies
     
    Barely had Big Lou served Matthew with his coffee when Angus Lordie and Cyril arrived. They had walked in a leisurely way from Drummond Place, stopping here and there for Cyril to investigate some intriguing scent either on the ground or in the air. His nose told him that a lot had been happening in Abercromby Place, where a farmer, having driven in from Kelso earlier that