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said the driver, looking at the people going by. ‘D’you know what I mean?’

      ‘Aye,’ said Vinnie.

      He thought he knew what the driver meant, but then the driver gave him a look in the mirror that made Vinnie think that he didn’t know.

      Vinnie asked ‘For sightseeing?’

      ‘Yeah,’ said the driver. ‘If you know what I mean.’

      Vinnie didn’t know what he meant, and it must have shown, because the driver looked at him again and said, ‘The women.’

      Vinnie got it now.

      ‘Oh, right, right, aye,’ said Vinnie. ‘The lassies. The women. Aye.’

      What the driver meant was the women. What he meant was, because it was a nice day, because it was lovely and warm, women were wearing less clothes. Instead of getting all wrapped up in big coats and pairs of tights, they were stripping down to keep cool. They were out in their bare legs or wearing thin clothes that let you see their bodies.

      Vinnie got it. He looked out the window at them, and after a while, he started getting hard.

      He was going to cover it up. He reached over for his bag, which was lying next to him on the back seat. He was going to pick it up and cover his bulge. But then he realised that it didn’t matter, when he thought about it.

      He left his bag where it was. Because when he actually thought about it, it was all right, when he thought about what the driver said.

      He’d said it was a good day for sightseeing, a good day to look at women. To look at them and get turned on by them.

      He wanted Vinnie to know that he fancied women, and he wanted to know if Vinnie fancied women as well, and the driver would like it if Vinnie did. For some reason.

      Vinnie didn’t know why the driver wanted any of that, but it didn’t matter. Vinnie was fine with it, because he fancied women as well.

      ‘Look,’ said Vinnie.

      The driver looked out the window to the side, to see what lassie Vinnie was talking about.

      ‘Who?’ said the driver, looking at Vinnie in the mirror, then he looked out the side window again.

      ‘No,’ said Vinnie. ‘Look here.’

      The driver looked in the mirror, down to where Vinnie’s hands were, and saw that Vinnie had a hard-on. It was bulging underneath his tracksuit bottoms.

      Vinnie saw the look on the driver’s face, and it was like the driver didn’t know what Vinnie was meaning. Vinnie thought that maybe the driver just thought his trackie bottoms were baggy and what he was looking at was just a big baggy bit raised in the air.

      So Vinnie pulled the trackie leg tight to show the shape of his hard-on, so that the driver knew what it was and what Vinnie was talking about. But the driver still had that same look.

      The driver even turned his head around to see it with his own eyes, in case he couldn’t see it properly in the mirror, but he still had that same look. Vinnie smiled at him, but the driver looked away and didn’t say anything.

      What had happened?

      Why did the driver act funny when Vinnie showed him his hard-on?

      Was he gay?

      Maybe that was it.

      Maybe the driver was doing that thing that people do in taxis, the thing where the driver and the passenger say things that they’re not really interested in, things like when you ask the driver what time he started and what time he finishes, or when the driver asks you if that’s you on your way home now after a night out.

      You know, taxi patter.

      Vinnie had seen that being talked about on a stand-up comedy thing on the telly. Maybe the driver was just pretending to be into women, because that’s just what you do. Vinnie sometimes pretended to be into football if the driver had football on the radio. He’d ask the driver who was playing and what the score was, even though he didn’t care.

      It’s just taxi patter. It’s just people pretending, but the driver got caught out. He fucked it up.

      Vinnie sympathised, because he himself knew all about fucking things up. Just look at how he fucked up going to the concert, coming all the way down here when he could have went to the concert back in Glasgow.

      He looked at the driver, and he could see that the guy looked ashamed. He felt for him, so he decided to change the subject.

      He leaned forward and put his hand on the driver’s shoulder to let him know it was all right.

      ‘Do you like Art Garfunkel?’

       Grammar

      Donnie started a new job, at an office. When he got there, he sent a group email to all the staff, introducing himself. It was a short and informal thing, nothing more than a few sentences. Most people replied saying hello back, putting in smileys or saying funny things in return. Some people didn’t reply, but then they said hello in person later.

      But this one person, called Toby, only replied to correct his grammar.

      There was a bit in Donnie’s email where he said ‘should of’ instead of ‘should have’.

      Toby had replied to it, copying everybody else in, to say: ‘should *have*’.

      Donnie thought of replying with something a bit cheeky, a bit funny, because he hoped that’s how Toby meant it as well. He hoped Toby didn’t mean it the way it came across, because the way it came across made Toby look a grumpy cunt that enjoyed embarrassing Donnie on his first day. And Donnie didn’t want to work with somebody like that.

      In the end, Donnie just replied with ‘Oops. Thanks!’

      He hoped for a jokey reply, something where Toby would say he was only joking, or maybe having a bad day. But he didn’t get a reply.

      Donnie wondered who Toby was, and he walked around the office until he heard somebody mentioning Toby’s name. Donnie turned around and expected to see some kind of Oscar the Grouch, or some kind of anti-social Mr Bean. But Toby looked all right. He looked about 40, just an average sort of guy in a suit. He didn’t look grumpy either. He was chatting to another member of staff, smiling away. And that made Donnie feel a bit better somehow.

      A few days later, Donnie had to send another email around, this time something to do with work rather than introducing himself. This email wasn’t for everybody in the office, but it was for a good number of them, and one of the people in the list was Toby.

      Everybody replied normally, saying things like ‘Good idea’ or ‘I think we should discuss this further.’ But Toby replied again, simply to criticise Donnie’s grasp of the English language.

      Donnie had accidentally typed ‘there’ instead of ‘their’.

      The full sentence was ‘We could cut the cost of printing their brochures if we print it at the same time as we print there pamphlets.’

      And it was an accident.

      Donnie knew the difference between ‘there’ and ‘their’, it was just a slip-up. He got the first ‘their’ right, so it was obviously just a slip-up, just a normal mistake that anybody could make. But there was Toby on it again, making Donnie look incompetent for the second time in his first week on the job.

      Donnie just replied with ‘Thank you, wordsmith.’

      By replying with that, he wanted to gently suggest that Toby was being a smart arse, without it looking too sarcastic. It was Donnie’s first week, after all. He didn’t want to go in hard with the cheek when he’d barely got his feet under the table. But he also didn’t want to be picked on. He wanted his reply to be just enough

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