This was the first night of his fourteen days.

They passed slowly at first, then more quickly towards the end, until you were left wondering why you hadn’t done more with your time. This, the first night, this was the longest. This was the one you had to get through.

They moved on to another bar. One of his new friends was carrying an old-style Adidas bag, red plastic with a side pocket and a broken strap. He’d had one just like it at school, back when he was fourteen, fifteen.

‘What have you got in there,’ he joked, ‘your games kit?’

They laughed and slapped him on the back.

At the new place, they moved to shorts. The pub was heaving, wall-to-wall minge.

‘You must think about it all the time,’ one of his friends said, ‘on the rigs. Me, I’d go off my head.’

‘Or blind,’ said the other.

He grinned. ‘I get my share.’ Downed another Black Heart. He didn’t used to drink dark rum. A fisherman in Stonehaven had introduced him to the stuff. OVD or Black Heart, but he liked Black Heart best. He liked the name.

They needed a carry-out, keep the party going. He was tired. The train from Aberdeen had taken three hours, and there’d been the paraffin budgie before that. His friends were ordering over the bar: a bottle of Bell’s and one of Black Heart, a dozen cans, crisps and smokes. It cost a fortune, buying that way. They split it three ways even, so they weren’t after his cash.

Outside, there was trouble finding a taxi. Plenty about, but already taken. They had to pull him out of the road when he tried to flag one down. He stumbled a bit and went down on one knee. They helped him back up.

‘So what do you do exactly on the rigs?’ one of them asked.

‘Try to stop them falling down.’

A taxi had stopped to let a couple out.

‘Is that your mother or are you just desperate?’ he asked the male passenger. His friends told him to shut up, and pushed him into the back. ‘Did you see her?’ he asked them. ‘Face like a bag of marbles.’ They weren’t going to his flat, there was nothing there.

‘We’ll go back to our place,’ his friends had said. So there was nothing to do but sit back and watch all the lights. Edinburgh was like Aberdeen – small cities, not like Glasgow or London. Aberdeen had more money than style, and it was scary, too. Scarier than Edinburgh. The trip seemed to take for ever.

‘Where are we?’

‘Niddrie,’ someone said. He couldn’t remember their names, and was too embarrassed to ask. Eventually the taxi stopped. Outside, the street was dark, looked like the whole fucking estate had welshed on the lecky bill. He said as much.

More laughter, tears, hands on his back.

Three-storey tenements, pebble-dashed. Most of the windows were blocked with steel plates or had been infilled with breeze blocks.