It's Odd how they Match Your Own

I’ve been seeing the dead-eyed men everywhere recently. Switch on the television and there they are standing behind Alex Salmond on the six o’clock news. Go into town and they’re staring at Stephen House’s window at Pitt Street. Go home to my west end flat for a quick wank over my Martin O’Neil scrapbook and they’re sitting in my bedroom looking glum. It’s got so bad that even Professor Tom Devine came to me one night to confide in me about them.

He broke into my flat late on the Sunday after the first old firm game of the season and he was sitting in the dark sobbing on my sofa so I just assumed he’d been in the Chip crying into his pint with the rest of the Scottish media and had popped over looking for my wife who had gone missing in the summer. I reminded him that she hasn’t lived here for a while and I’m damned glad after she shot me in the belly in Lawwell’s mountain lair last season but he snorted and looked up and said, ‘I’m haunted, Spiers. Haunted I tell ye. Everywhere I go, I’m followed by two men only they’re not men, they flit in and out of sight like spooks and once I even threw a bottle of sherry at one but it passed straight through him, damn his eyes!’
‘Oh you mean Janowitz and Mayer?’ I asked, surprising him and for once I knew something he didn’t while he was in the dark. Literally. Crying.

I told him what Albertz had told me and he sniffed, said something about a self fulfilling prophecy and shuffled off but by the time he had gone I’d been completely put off having that wank I’d promised myself.