There was no recovery from that, Murdie said, because it was the truth. And now there was a poisonous atmosphere in the house, and Mrs Murdie was livid, and the cousin had got up ostentatiously early this morning and appeared grim-faced at breakfast with his hair all combed over to one side, and would only accept a cup of tea with a lightly buttered piece of toast before going out for the day.

I told Murdie he shouldn’t worry: ‘Maybe he’ll take his leave altogether now, and you’ll get a bit of quiet.’

Murdie was racked with guilt: ‘No, it’s not right, son. I shouldn’t have spoken like that to him, he was a guest in my house. And now he’ll go back to England and tell everybody there that Mrs Murdie is married to a madman.’

Then he said, ‘The joke of it is Mrs Murdie can’t stick him for long either. But she says I shouldn’t have insulted him: it’s the principle of the thing.’

He started laughing: ‘But it was true what I said about the sausages. That fella’s tighter than a fly’s arse.’

Consoled, he went back to checking the beer barrels, whistling a tricky little twirling melody.

Murdie told me about his wife’s cousin in the afternoon. It was the last afternoon I spent working in the Whistle.

I had set up everything ready for the evening rush, but it was a Wednesday night and we had no band booked to perform, so the customers were just trickling in. I was playing a few tapes of Big Jacky’s, soul music from the sixties, and was half listening to them and half thinking about other things.

And then, at about half past nine, a dark-haired girl came in who I remembered from school. She was good-looking enough, in tight jeans with teased hair and all the jewellery on, but there was something I never liked about her face, something almost birdy. She had a hard, thin mouth, and I remembered her always hanging around the corridors with three or four girls in her gang, shouting out raucous stuff to torment the quiet ones or embarrass the plain ones. But I couldn’t remember her name.

She remembered mine, though. It was all hair-tossing, and ‘Hiya Jacky, I haven’t seen you in ages’, and she perched herself up at the bar with her boyfriend on a bar stool beside her. He wasn’t best pleased by the whole scenario. He looked vaguely familiar, too, although I knew he hadn’t been at school with me: he was wiry, muscled but not overly tall, with a tattoo of a rose with a face in the middle of it bulging on his left arm. It didn’t look much like her face, but then maybe the tattoo artist’s hand was shaking when he did it.