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A lot of eyes are on me; eyes I was vaguely aware of but had blanked out on my way to the toilet. One hard-looking girl with black hair, cut short, has an overtly hostile gaze. I see Terry raise his eyes in my peripheral vision and he signals to a woman behind the bar. The place is half empty but I’m keeping Terry in my sights.

— Get them in then, Birrell ya cunt, he says to Rab, but not averting his eyes from me. — So, Nikki, you’re at college wi Rab. That must be . . . Terry gropes for a word, seems to select then spit one out, then another, before concluding, — Naw, some things are jist better no thinkin aboot.

I laugh at his performance. He’s fun. There’s no need to burst his balls straight away, that can be done later on. — Yeah, I’m at uni. We’re on the same film studies course.

— Ah’ll show ye some film tae study awright! C’mon, sit beside me, he says, pointing at a seat in the corner, like an eager primary-age pupil anxious to show off what he’s done at school. — They goat any mair like you up at that college? he asks, though it seems as if it’s for Rab’s benefit. I’ve already found that Terry and myself both enjoy making Rab feel uncomfortable. Something shared.

We sit in a corner near two youngish women, a couple and the barmaid.

Terry is wearing an old Paul and Shark black zipper fleece over a V-necked T-shirt. He has a pair of Levi’s and some Adidas trainers. On his finger he has a gold ring and a chain hangs from his neck. — So you’re the famous Terry then, I enquire, hoping to get a reaction.

— Aye, Terry says matter-of-factly, as if this éclat is both widely known and uncontentious, — Juice Terry, he repeats. — We’re just aboot tae show the yin we did the other night thaire.

A gang of old guys and not so old guys come in and sit down, many of them on seats pulled out and lined up under the screen. It has the atmosphere of a football match. There’s acknowledgement and jokes and drinks, and that hostile-looking girl is collecting money from them. Terry shouts to this stocky, vaguely threatening presence: — Gina, goan draw they curtains, hen.

She looks quite sourly at him, goes to say something and thinks better of it.

The show starts up, and the picture was obviously shot on a cheap digital video; one camera, no edit, just the solitary lens pulling out and in. It’s from a tripod cause the image is steady, but it’s a one-take of people shagging, rather than any real attempt to craft a film. The quality of picture’s okay, you can tell that Terry is shagging that Gina across the very bar that they’re serving the drinks from.

— Aye, ah’ve loast a bit ay weight this last year, he whispers to me, evidently quite pleased about it, patting his sides to show what must be his now-diminished love handles. I turn to look, but I can hardly keep my eyes from the screen, as a young girl, — Melanie, Terry whispers, comes into the picture. He nods to the bar and I recognise her now as the same girl that was standing there earlier. She looks different, really sexy on the screen. Now Gina is performing cunnilingus on her. Somebody makes a comment and there’s a bit of laughter and the Melanie girl smiles in coy embarrassment, but it’s followed by silencing shushes. There’s barely any sound quality now, I can just about make out a few gasps and comments and Terry faintly saying things like ‘come on’, ‘yes’ and ‘that’s the game, doll’. On the picture a blonde girl comes in and he’s frigging her and she’s sucking him off. Then he bends her over a couch and starts fucking her from behind. Her face looks right into the camera and her large breasts dangle. Then we see Terry’s head over her shoulder, looking right into the lens, winking at us, and saying something which sounds like ‘spice of life’. — Ursula, Swedish lassie, he explains to me in a stage whisper, — or is it Danish . . . anywey, au pair girl, hings aroond the Grassmarket. Game as fuck, he explains. As the other players enter the fray, Terry’s occasional commentary flits into my head: — . . . Craig . . . good mate ay mine. Top shagger. No exactly well-hung, bit a total sex case. Kin eh find wid but . . . Ronnie . . . could pump fir Scotland that boy . . .

The show ends up in a free-for-all and the camera work deteriorates. At times all you can see is a pink blur. Then it pulls out and in the background you see the Gina girl chopping out some lines of coke, as if bored by the sex. It badly needs editing and I’m tempted to share this thought with Terry, but he senses the audience’s growing boredom and switches it off from the handset. — That’s aboot us, folks, he smiles.

After the show, I’m having a chat at the bar with Rab, asking him how long this has been going on for. He’s about to reply, when Terry sidles up to me and asks: — What did ye think ay that then?

— Amateurs, I reply, more loudly and pompously in drink than I intended, as I whisk my hair back. My blood chills a little, because I think that Gina girl heard me and I caught a cold, razor glint in her eye.

— N you could dae better? he asks, his eyes hooding and brows arching.

I look him steadily in the eye. — Yeah, I tell him.

He rolls his eyes and eagerly scribbles a number down on a beer mat. — Any time, doll. Any time, he says softly.

— I’ll hold you to that, I say, to the distaste of Rab.

I notice for the first time the two other guys in the film, Craig and Ronnie. Craig is a thin, nervous-looking, chain-smoker with a modish mop of light-brown hair, Ronnie a relaxed guy with thin fair hair and the same idiot grin that he wears on the screen, although he seems podgier in the flesh.

Shortly afterwards, the Scandinavian girl, Ursula, comes in, and Terry introduces us. Her initial glance at me is polar, though she greets me with over-the-top warmth. Ursula doesn’t look as good in the flesh as she does on screen; her features are slightly pudgy, troll-like even. She offers to get me a drink and the party looks like it’s going to continue but I make my apologies and head home. Something interesting might be about to happen but that look in Terry’s eye tells me that it’s wrong to play all my cards at once. He’ll wait. They all will. And besides, I’ve an essay to finish.

When I get back home I find that Lauren’s still up, and she’s with Dianne, who’s moved her stuff in. Lauren seems to be really in the huff with me for going out, for not being here to help, or to welcome Dianne or whatever. The fact is, though, that she’s pissed off with me for going along to this stag-video show, but you can also tell that she’s desperate to ask me about it.

— Hi, Dianne! Sorry, I had to go out, I tell her.

Dianne doesn’t seem to mind. She’s a very cool, pretty woman, who must be ages with me; she has thick, luxuriant, black shoulder-length hair, in which she wears a blue band. Her eyes are busy and full of life and she has quite thin, rather sly lips which pull open to expose large, white teeth, completely changing her expression. She’s wearing a blue sweatshirt, blue jeans and trainers. — Anywhere fun? she asks in a local accent.

— I went to a stag-video show in a pub, I tell her.

I watch Lauren redden with embarrassment, and when she says, — That’s a little more information than we needed, Nikki, it sounds pathetic, like an adolescent trying to be grown up but only making herself seem more childlike in the process.

— Any good? Dianne asks, and to Lauren’s horror, totally unfazed.

— Not bad. It was Lauren’s friend I went along with, I tell her.

— No he’s not! He’s your friend as well! she says too loudly, then realising this, trails off. — It’s just a guy on the course.

— That’s very interesting, Dianne says, — because I’m doing research for my MPhil in psychology on workers in the sex industry. You know, prostitutes, lap dancers, strippers, call-centre operators, massage-parlour people, escort girls, all that stuff.

— How’s it going?

— It’s hard to find people who want to talk about it, she tells me.

I smile at her. — I just might be able to help you there.

— Brilliant, she says and we make an arrangement to have a natter about my work in the sauna, the next shift of which starts tomorrow evening. I go to my room, half drunk, and try to read my essay for McClymont on the word processor. After a couple of pages my eyes nip and I laugh at the stupid sentence: ‘It is impossible to escape the contention that migratory Scots enriched every society they came into contact with.’ This is for McClymont’s benefit. Of course, I won’t mention their role in slavery, racism or the formation of the Ku Klux Klan. After a while my eyes grow heavy and I feel myself drifting back onto my bed and easing slowly into a hot, nomadic trek and then I’m somewhere else . . .

It was a bruising, unsatisfactory, alcoholic sleep. I sit up and my head pounds, and an urge to vomit grips me, then passes, leaving me with a thumping heart and a toxic sweat on my face and under my armpits.

The computer was left on dozing, and as I brush the mouse, the power surge kicks McClymont’s essay back onto the screen, like it was issuing a challenge. I have to get it in. Noting that Dianne and Lauren have gone, I make a quick coffee, then read the essay, tinker a bit, check the word count, put it through the spell check and click ‘Print’. I need to get this essay in at the uni by noon; as it raps out the three thousand required words I head to the bathroom and shower away yesterday’s alcohol, sweat and grimy cigarette smoke, giving my hair a good wash.

I apply moisturiser to my face, a little make-up, and throw on my clothes, taking the stuff for my shift at the sauna out with me in a holdall. I’m heading across the Meadows at speed, only occasionally aware of the cold, stiff wind as it bends back the essay paper I’m trying to read. I realise that the American word-processing-package spell check has corrected in American English: ‘z’s’ everywhere and ‘u’s’ thrown away, something that inordinately irritates McClymont and will probably negate the gains made by the sychophantic comments. If this is a pass, then it’s a bare one.

I hand it in to the departmental secretary’s office at 11.47 a.m. and after a coffee and a sandwich I head for the library where I spend the afternoon reading film texts before getting down to the sauna round teatime.

The sauna is on a dirty, narrow, gloomy main road which serves traffic coming into town. The smell of the hops from the nearby brewery is seedy if you’ve been drinking, like the dregs of last night thrown back in your face. The grime from the buses and lorries blackens most of the shopfronts permanently and the ‘Miss Argentina Latin Sauna and Massage Parlour’ is no exception. Inside, however, everything is pristine. — Mind n wipe up, Bobby Keats, the proprietor, always tells us with great urgency. There are more cleaning fluids than massage oils and we’re all urged to use them as liberally. The laundry bill for the fresh towels alone must be astronomical.

There’s a permanent, synthetic scent in the air. Yet the soaps, mouthwashes, lotions, oils, talcs and fragrances, unsparingly applied to cover the trail of stale cum and sweat, oddly just seem to complement the rank atmosphere outside.

We have to look and act like air hostesses. In keeping with the theme of the sauna, Bobby employs girls he considers have Latin looks. Professionalism is the name of the game. My first client is a small, grey-haired man called Alfred. After I give him a deep aromatherapy massage using copious amounts of lavender oil on his tight, knotted back, he nervously asks for ‘extras’ and I offer him a ‘special massage’.

I get a hold of his penis under the towel and begin to stroke him slowly, conscious of my poor wanking skills. I only hold down this job because Bobby fancies me. I’m thinking back to de Sade’s writings where the young kidnapped girls are trained in the art of male masturbation by old men. But I think about my own experiences, and I’ve only ever wanked off my first two boyfriends, Jon and Richard, whom I didn’t fuck. Since then I associated wanking a boy with not fucking him, and it sort of slipped off my sexual menu before it properly went on.

Sometimes clients do complain and I get the odd threat of dismissal. After a while though, I discovered Bobby was all mouth and no trousers on this issue. He regularly invites me out to various events: parties, casinos, big football games, cinema premieres, boxing matches, the races, the dog track or simply ‘a drink’ or ‘a bite to eat’ at a ‘smart restaurant run by a good friend’. I always make an excuse or politely decline.

Fortunately, Alfred is too ecstatic to even notice, let alone complain. Any sexual contact is enough to send him off and he spurts his load in no time, paying me with gratitude. Many of the other girls, who do blow jobs and full sex, they don’t make as much as me, a bad wanker, I know that for a fact. My pal Jayne, who’s been here a lot longer than I have, smugly says that I’ll go all the way before long. I rap back ‘no chance’ but there’s some days when I feel that she’s right, that it’s inevitable, just a matter of time.

When I finish my shift, I check the message service on my mobile. Lauren tells me that they’re out drinking so I bell her back and meet them in a Cowgate pub. Along with Lauren is Dianne and also Lynda and Coral, two girls from the uni. The Bacardi Breezers flow and pretty soon we’re all quite pissed again. At closing time Dianne, Lauren and I head back to our Tollcross flat. — Are you seeing anybody, Dianne? I ask as we walk up towards Chambers Street.

— No, I’m finishing my dissertation before I get into that, she says quite primly, and Lauren’s nodding in approbation only to be cut to the quick when Dianne adds, — then I’ll be shagging anything that’s got a cock, because celibacy’s fuckin well killing me! I snigger, and she throws her head back in laughter. — Cocks! Big cocks, small cocks, thick cocks, thin cocks. Circumcised, uncircumcised! White, black, yellow, red. When I hand that dissertation in it’ll be a new dawn and heralded by COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO! She cups her hands and crows into the night air outside the museum as Lauren wilts and I laugh. I’m going to enjoy living with this girl.